Well, if they have the ability to pop open the case and pull the jumper that clears the CMOS settings...what's gonna stop them from plugging in a brand new 250Gb hard drive and taking everything? The assumption is that most people do not have the time or the technical know how to do these things. Hell, if someone really wants to circumvent this new security measure and steal sensitive data, they only need to burn a copy of knoppix and voila! USB thumb drives work again. This feature in Longhorn will be a solution to prevent the non-technical people from getting anything.
The fact of the matter is that if someone can get to the physical box, there is no security measure that can keep them out. It just requires a little knowledge to know how to get around something...
I see what you are saying, so let me show you another way to look at the situation.
Computers, for the most part, are considered a luxury for the majority of the population. People do not need computers, but they sure are nice to have.
If only one company made airplanes and I really liked to fly, I may be willing to buy an airplane from them. But if that company then decides to increase their prices way beyound my expenditure levels, I will not buy an airplane because I can not afford to. Yet this company would still be a monopoly if they were the only producers of airplanes and crushed out any other competition that arose by using the market leverage that they posses.
The only reason that M$ doesn't charge $100K is because they want to keep the price low enough that the general populous can still afford to pay, but high enough that they can make a ludicrious profit.
Rhetorical or not, that is the stupidest question I've ever heard. Monopoly or not, nobody would be willing to pay $100K for an OS.
The whole concept behind a monopoly is that they can increase their prices and people will have no choice but to pay them.
As numerous other people have stated perviously, Linux is not for everyone. Some people do not posses the technical know how to maintain a Linux distro as of now, and Linux is the only other viale OS for the x86 architecture.
Therefore, if someone wishes to stick with the x86 architecture and doesn't have the knowledge required to run Linux then they are forced to run Microsoft products. Alongside of that, if that same person wants to have the latest "bug free" OS from Microsoft, then they have to pay whatever high price M$ wants to charge them. That or pirate a copy of M$ which is illegal.
So tell me, other than Linux or sticking to an older version of windows which will lose it's support from M$, what other option does the consumer have but to pay whatever price M$ feels like charging them today?
This is all pointless anyway, it is more than obvious in the third movie that there were lightning strikes coming from the thick cloud cover. If the machines were really so smart, they would have simply set up a few lightning rods. Considering that the lightning never seemed to stop, so there would be an inexhaustable supply of energy.
And in keeping with the Back to the Future references, we all know that a single lightning strike produces 1.21 gigawatts of electricity.
Yeah there is a better and cheaper solution that will last a damn long time...DAT tapes. Or if you're willing to spend a little more money (depends on how much data you have) try a DLT tape...
Heh...until someone hacks your WEP key and gets access to your brain!
I can see it now, some guy is sitting at home and all of a sudden a script kiddie pulls up in front of his house with a laptop and his newly downloaded copy of Da' Chronic's Chronic Crip Controller and WEP Stealer. Suddenly Joe the Brain Chip tester starts running around bumping into the walls and doing backflips!
The next day he walks outside and sees on his sidewalk: 3\/|1 |-|4>0r $7r||3$ 4g4||\|!!! f33r |\/|y 1337|\|3$$!!!
I partially agree with what you are saying, but what I meant by testing was presenting the student with a random set of problems that focused on the material they should know. Therefore, the only way a teacher could only teach the material and not teach for a test. The system I suggest my not work for all classes, but for a math class, I see knowing the concept is the only way to answer the problem.
As for your sig, I fail to follow it. On the assumption that 10 bits = $.25, which is false...2 bits = $.25, how would 100 bits = $.50? Wouldn't 20 bits = $.50 since 2 x $.25 = $.50? You further compound this problem by then stating that 110 bits = $.75 which breaks your own model. The biggest problem is that you then state that 1000 bits = 1 byte. Um, AFAIK 8 bits = 1 byte.
Time to send you back to introduction to basic addition and multiplication! You obviously did not pass the test!
I suppose that this idea would only work in a utopian society, but I think we should do away with grade levels completely. Instead simply have a curriculum that students have to pass to get from grade school to high school and from high school to college if they wish to go.
I _always_ got bad grades in school because I would spend half the school day day-dreaming since I thought the material we were learning was boring. I, like the parent, was considered a high-performer. Unfortunately, I was in a grade of students who were not at the same skill level. So instead of learning new things, I would have to sit around in class and bore myself to death.
I seriously think the entire system should be changed so that each student had to pass a test showing that they have learned a preset amount of material. If halfway through any given year a student has demonstrated to the teacher that they were proficient at the level they are currently at, then the teacher could give the student a test and, upon completing the test, the student would be advanced to the next skill level.
I used to sit in my algebra classes and wonder why the teacher had to explain a topic in three different ways when I thought it was so obvious. My best friend and I would understand the topic in 5 minutes then program our calculators to do all the work fo us while the rest of our class had some dumb look of confusion on their faces. We would even get up and explain things to other students when they couldn't understand what the teacher was saying. Under the structure I propose, my friend and I would have had the option to continue on with the material and leave the slower students in the dust.
The current system that we have set in the United States is almost geared to slow down advanced students to the level that their age group is at. I say screw my age group and let me advance at my own pace.
"The future is now. Soon every American
home will integrate their television,
phone, and computer. You'll be able to
visit the Louvre on one channel, and
watch female mud wrestling on
another. You can do your shopping at
home, or play Mortal Kombat with a friend
in Vietnam. There's no end to the
possibilities."
8.1 - I forgot my root password, what do I do now?
A few steps to recovery
Boot into single user mode. For i386 arch type boot -s at the boot prompt.
mount the drives.
# fsck -p / && mount -uw /
If/usr is not the same partition that / is (and it shouldn't be) then you will need to mount it, also
# fsck -p/usr && mount/usr
run passwd(1)
boot into multiuser mode... and remember your password! ^-This is idiot proof and my mother could do it (and has done it).
You just lost all your securing time and welding time. Don't get me wrong I'm an avid Linux/BSD user, but if someone can get to the terminal of any computer...you have just lost every bit of security you implemented.
I realize that you were talking about securing a box against viruses, but I can see a case where a user wants root access and as a result starts running as root...
You all know how it goes from there. Education is the only cure to virus infection.
I agree that music reviews have their worth, but one mans trash is another mans treasure. I don't want to trust someone else's opinion of a CD and use that opinion to base my purchasing habits. I want to listen to the entire CD, as I do when I buy a new CD, and then decide if I want to pay for it.
Downloading mp3's allows me to do this, and I will most definately purchase a CD that I feel is good enough to buy. If it turns out that I only like 1 song, I'll just keep the copy I downloaded and delete the others.
Hopefully the music industry will realize that putting out 1 good song and 11 other crappy songs just doesn't work. I refuse to buy all that fodder to get one song.
"On no account will a Commie ever drink water, and not without good reason...Water is the source of all life. Seven tenths of this earth's surface is water. Why, you realize that seventy percent of you is water...And as human beings, you and I need fresh, pure water to replenish our precious bodily fluids... (Mandrake chuckles nervously) Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol?...Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?... fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face."
- Tim Dirks, transcription, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
you make an excellent point. Gentoo definately "hides" certain aspects of the linux OS. inet.d, rc.conf, and other very important aspects of the OS are hidden completely or used differently than would be considered standard.
You do have to keep in mind that I was a Red Hat user before and everything was hidden from me. Since then I've run Slackware, Debian(for a short time), then OpenBSD(still do on my firewall), and now back to linux with Gentoo. By using Gentoo, I've been forced to learn a lot more about how the kernel and modules work as well as several other things.
Mainly I would say that the greatest benefit I have recieved from running Gentoo thus far is that it has forced me to learn these things, whereas running RedHat/Fedora, Mandrake, and the like hide these things from me as they are designed to do.
So thank you for the Linux From Scratch suggestion. When I feel that I'm comfortable enough running Gentoo, I'll be sure to give that a try.
bah! 14 hours for glibc, gcc, and kernels from source?!!?!?!
I run gentoo on a PIII 733 and the bootstrap "only" took 4 hours and kernel compiles literally only take 10-12 minutes.
A fresh stage-1 install may take me a weekend, but that's mainly due to the comp sitting there waiting for my next command, as I don't hang out every minute and watch source compile. (it is fun to do though!)
I admit that compiling everything can be a pain in the butt sometimes, but I have no problem letting my computer start compiling the big meaty packages before I goto bed and let them have fun all day while I'm at work.
Still though, I use some of the bin packages for gentoo. OpenOffice would take 30+ hours to compile on my computer so I use the bin. But xfree only takes about 2 hours...and that's not so bad. Small price to pay for improved performance.
I have to agree completely. I've been using Linux on and off for about 6 years now. I started off by purchasing a copy of Red Hat v5.2. At the time Red Hat was perfect for me. I had no idea what "dude just read the man page" meant or even how to untar an archive. I've only started using Gentoo for about 3 months now and I feel as if my knowledge of Linux has grown exponentially. This is mainly attributed to the fact that I've never had to compile a kernel before and I've never had a distro that didn't install a ftp client by default. That seemed a little scary at first, but I was over-joyed when I ran top after my first boot and saw how little mem was in use (around 30Mb I think)
If you really want to get your hands dirty and figure out whats _really_ going on under the hood, I would use Gentoo because you really have to learn everything. There is no choice!
Disclaimer to all Linux beginners: If you have never used Linux before and aren't willing to spend hours of research time to get a seemingly simple thing to work, I would suggest using Red Hat Fedora or Mandrake. But if you've used those and want to take the next step, I say dive in all the way and give Gentoo a try.
No Things were quite figured out. I use Linux for a reason...I can put my patches on myself and when I wish to, to stick to my analogy. I was speaking in more of a hypothetical sense than in reality. I of course realize that M$ would never do any such thing as this.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if they have the ability to pop open the case and pull the jumper that clears the CMOS settings...what's gonna stop them from plugging in a brand new 250Gb hard drive and taking everything? The assumption is that most people do not have the time or the technical know how to do these things. Hell, if someone really wants to circumvent this new security measure and steal sensitive data, they only need to burn a copy of knoppix and voila! USB thumb drives work again. This feature in Longhorn will be a solution to prevent the non-technical people from getting anything.
The fact of the matter is that if someone can get to the physical box, there is no security measure that can keep them out. It just requires a little knowledge to know how to get around something...
I see what you are saying, so let me show you another way to look at the situation.
Computers, for the most part, are considered a luxury for the majority of the population. People do not need computers, but they sure are nice to have.
If only one company made airplanes and I really liked to fly, I may be willing to buy an airplane from them. But if that company then decides to increase their prices way beyound my expenditure levels, I will not buy an airplane because I can not afford to. Yet this company would still be a monopoly if they were the only producers of airplanes and crushed out any other competition that arose by using the market leverage that they posses.
The only reason that M$ doesn't charge $100K is because they want to keep the price low enough that the general populous can still afford to pay, but high enough that they can make a ludicrious profit.
Rhetorical or not, that is the stupidest question I've ever heard. Monopoly or not, nobody would be willing to pay $100K for an OS.
The whole concept behind a monopoly is that they can increase their prices and people will have no choice but to pay them.
As numerous other people have stated perviously, Linux is not for everyone. Some people do not posses the technical know how to maintain a Linux distro as of now, and Linux is the only other viale OS for the x86 architecture.
Therefore, if someone wishes to stick with the x86 architecture and doesn't have the knowledge required to run Linux then they are forced to run Microsoft products. Alongside of that, if that same person wants to have the latest "bug free" OS from Microsoft, then they have to pay whatever high price M$ wants to charge them. That or pirate a copy of M$ which is illegal.
So tell me, other than Linux or sticking to an older version of windows which will lose it's support from M$, what other option does the consumer have but to pay whatever price M$ feels like charging them today?
did you copy this post or did you both just copy from some other forum?
And only 55 people were needed to build it!
um, I think you need to finish the quote there....
downloading and properly installing spyware,to make their computer suck, making them feel right at home, Windows-style, etc.
it was a joke...get it?
This is all pointless anyway, it is more than obvious in the third movie that there were lightning strikes coming from the thick cloud cover. If the machines were really so smart, they would have simply set up a few lightning rods. Considering that the lightning never seemed to stop, so there would be an inexhaustable supply of energy.
And in keeping with the Back to the Future references, we all know that a single lightning strike produces 1.21 gigawatts of electricity.
Doh, not DAT tapes, they have a crappy shelf life, realized that a few seconds ago. DLT, OTOH, has a shelf life of about 30 years
Yeah there is a better and cheaper solution that will last a damn long time...DAT tapes. Or if you're willing to spend a little more money (depends on how much data you have) try a DLT tape...
Heh...until someone hacks your WEP key and gets access to your brain!
I can see it now, some guy is sitting at home and all of a sudden a script kiddie pulls up in front of his house with a laptop and his newly downloaded copy of Da' Chronic's Chronic Crip Controller and WEP Stealer. Suddenly Joe the Brain Chip tester starts running around bumping into the walls and doing backflips!
The next day he walks outside and sees on his sidewalk: 3\/|1 |-|4>0r $7r||3$ 4g4||\|!!! f33r |\/|y 1337|\|3$$!!!
I partially agree with what you are saying, but what I meant by testing was presenting the student with a random set of problems that focused on the material they should know. Therefore, the only way a teacher could only teach the material and not teach for a test. The system I suggest my not work for all classes, but for a math class, I see knowing the concept is the only way to answer the problem.
As for your sig, I fail to follow it. On the assumption that 10 bits = $.25, which is false...2 bits = $.25, how would 100 bits = $.50? Wouldn't 20 bits = $.50 since 2 x $.25 = $.50? You further compound this problem by then stating that 110 bits = $.75 which breaks your own model. The biggest problem is that you then state that 1000 bits = 1 byte. Um, AFAIK 8 bits = 1 byte.
Time to send you back to introduction to basic addition and multiplication! You obviously did not pass the test!
I suppose that this idea would only work in a utopian society, but I think we should do away with grade levels completely. Instead simply have a curriculum that students have to pass to get from grade school to high school and from high school to college if they wish to go.
I _always_ got bad grades in school because I would spend half the school day day-dreaming since I thought the material we were learning was boring. I, like the parent, was considered a high-performer. Unfortunately, I was in a grade of students who were not at the same skill level. So instead of learning new things, I would have to sit around in class and bore myself to death.
I seriously think the entire system should be changed so that each student had to pass a test showing that they have learned a preset amount of material. If halfway through any given year a student has demonstrated to the teacher that they were proficient at the level they are currently at, then the teacher could give the student a test and, upon completing the test, the student would be advanced to the next skill level.
I used to sit in my algebra classes and wonder why the teacher had to explain a topic in three different ways when I thought it was so obvious. My best friend and I would understand the topic in 5 minutes then program our calculators to do all the work fo us while the rest of our class had some dumb look of confusion on their faces. We would even get up and explain things to other students when they couldn't understand what the teacher was saying. Under the structure I propose, my friend and I would have had the option to continue on with the material and leave the slower students in the dust.
The current system that we have set in the United States is almost geared to slow down advanced students to the level that their age group is at. I say screw my age group and let me advance at my own pace.
When I was a kid we had to hike 50 miles in the snow to get to school and we liked it!
Not to knock OpenBSD, but your plan seems a little faulty.....
/usr is not the same partition that / is (and it shouldn't be) then you will need to mount it, also /usr && mount /usr
quote from OpenBSD FAQ:
8.1 - I forgot my root password, what do I do now?
A few steps to recovery
Boot into single user mode. For i386 arch type boot -s at the boot prompt.
mount the drives.
# fsck -p / && mount -uw /
If
# fsck -p
run passwd(1)
boot into multiuser mode... and remember your password!
^-This is idiot proof and my mother could do it (and has done it).
You just lost all your securing time and welding time. Don't get me wrong I'm an avid Linux/BSD user, but if someone can get to the terminal of any computer...you have just lost every bit of security you implemented.
I realize that you were talking about securing a box against viruses, but I can see a case where a user wants root access and as a result starts running as root...
You all know how it goes from there. Education is the only cure to virus infection.
I agree that music reviews have their worth, but one mans trash is another mans treasure. I don't want to trust someone else's opinion of a CD and use that opinion to base my purchasing habits. I want to listen to the entire CD, as I do when I buy a new CD, and then decide if I want to pay for it.
Downloading mp3's allows me to do this, and I will most definately purchase a CD that I feel is good enough to buy. If it turns out that I only like 1 song, I'll just keep the copy I downloaded and delete the others.
Hopefully the music industry will realize that putting out 1 good song and 11 other crappy songs just doesn't work. I refuse to buy all that fodder to get one song.
I know this might sound silly, but here's a really simple answer for you:
LOOK AT THE DATE YOU BUMBLING FOOL
Damn! and I really liked "leerin' at young lasses at ports of call"
"On no account will a Commie ever drink water, and not without good reason...Water is the source of all life. Seven tenths of this earth's surface is water. Why, you realize that seventy percent of you is water...And as human beings, you and I need fresh, pure water to replenish our precious bodily fluids... (Mandrake chuckles nervously) Mandrake, have you never wondered why I drink only distilled water, or rain water, and only pure grain alcohol?...Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation? Fluoridation of water?... fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face."
- Tim Dirks, transcription, Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove
Sounds strangely familiar
you make an excellent point. Gentoo definately "hides" certain aspects of the linux OS. inet.d, rc.conf, and other very important aspects of the OS are hidden completely or used differently than would be considered standard.
You do have to keep in mind that I was a Red Hat user before and everything was hidden from me. Since then I've run Slackware, Debian(for a short time), then OpenBSD(still do on my firewall), and now back to linux with Gentoo. By using Gentoo, I've been forced to learn a lot more about how the kernel and modules work as well as several other things.
Mainly I would say that the greatest benefit I have recieved from running Gentoo thus far is that it has forced me to learn these things, whereas running RedHat/Fedora, Mandrake, and the like hide these things from me as they are designed to do.
So thank you for the Linux From Scratch suggestion. When I feel that I'm comfortable enough running Gentoo, I'll be sure to give that a try.
bah! 14 hours for glibc, gcc, and kernels from source?!!?!?!
I run gentoo on a PIII 733 and the bootstrap "only" took 4 hours and kernel compiles literally only take 10-12 minutes.
A fresh stage-1 install may take me a weekend, but that's mainly due to the comp sitting there waiting for my next command, as I don't hang out every minute and watch source compile. (it is fun to do though!)
I admit that compiling everything can be a pain in the butt sometimes, but I have no problem letting my computer start compiling the big meaty packages before I goto bed and let them have fun all day while I'm at work.
Still though, I use some of the bin packages for gentoo. OpenOffice would take 30+ hours to compile on my computer so I use the bin. But xfree only takes about 2 hours...and that's not so bad. Small price to pay for improved performance.
It's rather good to install some old slackware (1998 with a book is nice), toy around a week, wreck it, reformat & install $distro{$deity}.
Ah yes, I did that exactly! it was so much fun to rm -Rfv / on slackware and watch it all just blow away.
I'm such a loser! I re-installed it and did it again! Weeeeeeeeeeee!
I have to agree completely. I've been using Linux on and off for about 6 years now. I started off by purchasing a copy of Red Hat v5.2. At the time Red Hat was perfect for me. I had no idea what "dude just read the man page" meant or even how to untar an archive. I've only started using Gentoo for about 3 months now and I feel as if my knowledge of Linux has grown exponentially. This is mainly attributed to the fact that I've never had to compile a kernel before and I've never had a distro that didn't install a ftp client by default.
That seemed a little scary at first, but I was over-joyed when I ran top after my first boot and saw how little mem was in use (around 30Mb I think)
If you really want to get your hands dirty and figure out whats _really_ going on under the hood, I would use Gentoo because you really have to learn everything. There is no choice!
Disclaimer to all Linux beginners: If you have never used Linux before and aren't willing to spend hours of research time to get a seemingly simple thing to work, I would suggest using Red Hat Fedora or Mandrake. But if you've used those and want to take the next step, I say dive in all the way and give Gentoo a try.
You really hadn't figured this out? :-)
No Things were quite figured out. I use Linux for a reason...I can put my patches on myself and when I wish to, to stick to my analogy. I was speaking in more of a hypothetical sense than in reality. I of course realize that M$ would never do any such thing as this.