It's this kind of thinking that has set up an enviroment where my 1ghz+, 512mb computer can't do anything more than my 2mhz, 64kb computer could do in the 80's.
Moore's law : The complexity of integrated circuits (processing power) doubles every 18 months.
Corollary : The speed of software halves every 18 months.
I also like the idea of "You pay us money, we say your site is trusted!"
A certificate or a digital signature does not mean it's secure or trusted. All it does is certify that the server you're connected to does belong to a certain company, and it's up to you to decide if you trust that company.
Anyone with some money to spend can buy a certificate and digitally sign their code or set up a secure server, and use it to spread viruses. Verisign, Thatwe and the others will never check your intents, they'll just check to make sure you are who you say you are.
They do a little more work than that. When my company got a SSL certificate from Thawte, they requested legal documents for us to prove we owned the domain name that we wanted to protect, and that we also owned the registered name of the company. I think it's a good thing that they do that kind of check, otherwise anybody could claim a certificate in the name of Firefox and spoof their identity.
I haven't RTFA because it's slashdotted, but I sure hope that the free alternative would provide the same kind of check, else it won't be any more secure.
Unfortunately, it's only a detector and not a remover, so the best it can do is inform you that you have a rootkit installed and that you need to format and reinstall everything.
Now, I'm not blaming Sysinternals or anything, I don't suspect it's even possible to clean a system from rootkits other than reinstalling. It's still good to be informed if you're infected though.
Good idea, but i'm waiting for the first batch of viruses or whatever to disable this rootkit.
Other than nothing that RootkitRevealer is not a rootkit itself, it's also nice to see that Sysinternals knows the weakness of their products, how it can be exploited, and how it is very very unlikely that it will be.
It is theoretically possible for a rootkit to hide from RootkitRevealer. Doing so would require intercepting RootkitRevealer's reads of Registry hive data or file system data and changing the contents of the data such that the rootkit's Registry data or files are not present. However, this would require a level of sophistication not seen in rootkits to date. Changes to the data would require both an intimate knowledge of the NTFS, FAT and Registry hive formats, plus the ability to change data structures such that they hide the rootkit, but do not cause inconsistent or invalid structures or side-effect discrepancies that would be flagged by RootkitRevealer.
The complete opposite of security by obscurity. I like that.
It is very nice to hear a judge say "You can't rule the world.", after all those monopolies and lobbying... let's hope it sets a strong precedent and some more judges find the balls to say that to more corporations.
Or you can, y'know, wait 3-9 months and then buy them for roughly the same price as renting them twice. Then, it's almost exactly the same (to you) as if they'd released them later.
I *am* aware of that... the issue here is the massive crunch time and unrealistic deadlines in the game industry. If every single publisher didn't want to get all those games out at the same time in september, there wouldn't be such a need for massive crunch time.
In the real world, you miss the holiday season and you are screwed.
Year after year, the holiday season seems to comer earlier. Companies always want to get their product out before their competitor, so now, 'holiday season' begins in september.
What in the hell is wrong with the videogame industry? If they spread these games out over the course of a year I'd probably buy every one of them. As it stands now, I'll end up having to rent 90% of these.
In the movie industry you have a few big summer blockbusters, but decent movies come out year round. Imagine if every single movie worth watching came out in July. Imagine if you had to spend five hundred dollars in one month just to see the movies you were interested in. People wouldn't stand for that. Why is it that the videogame industry is able to get away with this bullshit?
I'm not even talking about October and November here. 99% of all the games worth playing in a given year come out in the space of three months. THAT IS F***ING RIDICULOUS!
Well, sure. When I like something a lot, I want to do it a lot. (see: sexual intercourse ) So, to some extent, everything fun has to be somewhat addictive.
From the FA (the one about the suicide), according to Dr. J. Michael Faragher, dean of the School of Professional Studies at the Metropolitan State College of Denver and co-director of the Center for Addiction Studies, an activity needs 3 characteristics to be considered addictive:
- It must by some reasonable definition be harmful
- the person's behavior is apparently out of control
- the addict expects the behavior will lead to feelings that are preferred to those felt before indulging in the activity.
The fun factor is only the third characteristic. If it's harmful, even if it's fun, then it's bad. And if you're out of control, it's even worse. From your example, someone who is addicted to sexual intercourse would simply keep pressuring everyone he meets to have some... that can't be good.
Games that are fun are ok, games (or anything) that are addictive are a problem.
I don't really care how much they spend on Linux, but it'd be nice if the spent in on what actually matters, which is educating the masses.
How about having an ad campaign on TV telling people that there *is* an alternative to Microsoft, and tell them what Linux is. Linux is underperforming because people don't know it's out there. But with ads aimed at the general public, next time Aunt Tillie complains because her computer keeps crashing, you can tell her "Remember that cool ad on TV, I can get you that Linux thing for free".
Uhm. And it never happened in your Windows instalaltion, right?
As far as I can remember, since Win95, I *always* had sound on first boot after installation. It might not have been optimized sound with the latest driver, but at least it had a generic driver.
If it would happen. What would you do?
I'd take the CD that came with the sound card and put it in the CD-ROM, and click on the big flashy "INSTALL DRIVER" button that pops on auto-run. I know it's not the OS there but the sound card company, but you asked me what made Linux not so easy to use.
What did you do when it did not work out of the box? Drop the ball?
I searched google, I read forums, I went to IRC channels. I got some pointers to an Alsa fix that didn't work (basically, it was "make sure Alsa doesn't mute the master channel"), and loads of RTFM. Having to RTFM isn't "easy to use", "Works out of the box" is.
What about purchasing RedHat and getting hotline support?
Ok... which one should I get now? The Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS, which is said to be for power users (I don't want to be a power-user, I just want to use my computer), or the Red Hat Desktop, which is designed for general users, but costs over $2000? Isn't the whole point here to save money? I know the difference between free as in speech and free as in beer, but Linux is being evangelized as being both. And even if it's only as in speech, I won't spend $2000 on an OS for my home desktop.
Now don't get me wrong. I am a power-user. I love Linux. I love open-source. Billy would say I'm a communist. I still use Linux every once in a while, and I'm always trying to convince my boss to switch the whole place to Linux (or at least Mac OSX). But even power-users don't always feel like reading through hundreds of pages just to get the sound working.
Doing good works is part of living a good life, you capitalist asshole. Not everything must be driven by the dollar.
I will always agree on helping someone who made a mistake because he didn't know better. We all do stupid mistakes in life. However, someone who refuses to learn and repeat the same mistakes over and over again doesn't deserve my time and effort. It's not because I'm a capitalist asshole, it's because I wouldn't even be helping him by just fixing his computer.
Would you mind to explain what makes you think that Linux is not easy to use and what _specific_ actions should be taken to make it more 'easier to use'?
I installed Fedora Core 3 lately. During the install process, it detected my hardware fine, even the sound card. There was a little button titled "Test Sound", I pressed it and a sound played, so the installer knew what my sound card was and where it was.
After the installation though, I never heard a single sound. I tried, in the administration panel, to fix the sound card thing. On the panel, it showed the card I had, which was correct (it's a SoundBlaster Audigy 2, there was an "auto-detect" button there, so I pressed it. It asked "Do you hear this sound?". I didn't hear it, so I said "No". Then it said "Auto-detect failed" and didn't try anything else.
I already accepted that I couldn't use my ATI All-in-Wonder card to watch TV on Linux, but now that I can't even listen to music either, I almost always boot my system in WinXP. It's not even worth trying to get a Linux-compatible TV-Tuner card, I won't even be able to hear the sound from the TV!.
I know you guys are desperate to dismiss anything anti-Linux and praise anything pro-Linux (like good little sheep), but at some point you need to accept that fact that your precious Lee-nux isn't perfect.
I didn't dismiss the results because it was anti-Linux, I dismissed it because it has useless data. I would have dismissed it just as much if the numbers were switched.
The people that do those reviews should know better than to compare platforms on a single criteria by now. Saying one is more vulnerable than the other only based on number of vulnerabilities or on number of days of risk is just as insignificant as saying that someone is more intelligent than someone else just because he's more educated. It takes more than one criteria to judge of one's intelligence, just like it takes more than one criteria to judge of a platform's security.
Oddly enough though... whenever a study says that Windows is more secure, conclusions are almost always drawn on a single meaningless criteria. Who's the biaised sheep here?
It said the criteria "included" the number of vulnerabilities. It didn't say that was the whole basis of the study; it was just one factor. Hardly a reason to dismiss the study.
From TFA: On average, the Windows setup had just over 30 days of risk versus 71 days for the Red Hat setup, their study found.
Even if they "included" the number of vulnerabilities and did not base their report on that, they drew their conclusions from the number of "days of risk"... ain't much better if you ask me... it's what? 71 days of risk of seeing a misconfigured page defaced for Red Hat versus 30 days of risk of having all your credit card information stolen on Windows?
Do you think Microsoft employees feel "exploited"? I mean, if you take that as an analogy, of course, which I'm assuming you probably do.
Wow... talk about over-simplification... I said "be exploited by EA". With the EA Spouse story and some leaked internal memos, I think it's common thought that EA exploits its employees (unpaid overtime, insane hours, etc.). I never even mentionned Microsoft. Nothing leads to believe Microsoft exploits its employees like EA does. Please explain to me how you got to think I thought Microsoft exploited its employees.
Just stop it. Really, just stop. Go focus on updating your latest insipid sports title.
Maybe this is the extra boost that is required for people that actually love to make video games to leave the big corps and start making really good games.
Microsoft tries to buy every competition, but they can't buy Linux. EA is buying every competition, will it take FOSS games to stop them?
There are other companies that are doing this... SCO tried to take the UNIX market by legal force, Microsoft is patenting everything in sight, and now EA is buying all the competition.
When that happens (not *if*, but *when*, because it will happen), then the game industry will be rotten to the core.
This is really sad. I used to work at Ubisoft Montréal, and I was given an offer for a decent programming job there. That was in january 2004. I refused it and decided to leave the game industry for a while, because of what it was becoming and because I didn't want to become a slave to the big corps. I am now developing office utilities application for a small business in downtown Montréal, in a much much better working environment (the complete opposite of the "EA Spouse" story), with a much higher salary. I decided I'd give the game industry 10 years to stabilize and give them a second chance in 2015, if it's worth it (that is, if something else than EA exists). In the meantime, I'll keep working on my GPL'd game(s) in my spare time. They won't be as good or as flashy as a commercial game (you can only get so much quality with a team of 3 people), but at least I'll have fun doing it (contrary to being whipped by EA while I have to code for 16 hours a day).
It is sad though for people who either didn't see it coming, or have no other skill and are "forced" to stay in the industry and be exploited by EA.
Perhaps 25 million can imply - 25 million computers.
Almost... I, for one, have 3 of them on my home machine... one in English, one in French and one in German. I'm developping extensions, and using the different languages to test the localization.
But then, there might not be a lot of people in my situation... we'd have way too many extensions if there were;-)
There are people in the world naive enough to believe that the government and the authorities in general always have humanity's best interests at the top of their priority list.
From my experience on/., I can say I have seen exactly 3 types of people in such discussions :
1- People that are "naive enough" to believe the government is nice
2- People that are paranoid freaks and see conspiracies everywhere
3- People that don't live in the US of A and look at your pathetic anti-government/pro-government paranoia.
You're supposed to be the richest-best-most-advanced country in the world, and capitalism is so good because communism is evil. Then, you complain when your elected representatives(*) don't work for the people. Capitalism is just about that, money. You're not money, you're flesh and bones.
I'm not saying communism is all good, but it can't be all bad, after all, free software is communism. Extreme capitalism is just as bad as extreme communism.
(*) To all those who say there ain't no elected people in the US and that Bush stole the election, he might have stolen a state or two, but there are 60 million people that did vote for him, whether you like it or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Moore's law : The complexity of integrated circuits (processing power) doubles every 18 months.
Corollary : The speed of software halves every 18 months.
A certificate or a digital signature does not mean it's secure or trusted. All it does is certify that the server you're connected to does belong to a certain company, and it's up to you to decide if you trust that company.
Anyone with some money to spend can buy a certificate and digitally sign their code or set up a secure server, and use it to spread viruses. Verisign, Thatwe and the others will never check your intents, they'll just check to make sure you are who you say you are.
I haven't RTFA because it's slashdotted, but I sure hope that the free alternative would provide the same kind of check, else it won't be any more secure.
Now, I'm not blaming Sysinternals or anything, I don't suspect it's even possible to clean a system from rootkits other than reinstalling. It's still good to be informed if you're infected though.
Other than nothing that RootkitRevealer is not a rootkit itself, it's also nice to see that Sysinternals knows the weakness of their products, how it can be exploited, and how it is very very unlikely that it will be.
The complete opposite of security by obscurity. I like that.
It is indeed a dupe, but the first article didn't mention washing machines... It is important to know that you can't regulate washing machines...
It is very nice to hear a judge say "You can't rule the world.", after all those monopolies and lobbying... let's hope it sets a strong precedent and some more judges find the balls to say that to more corporations.
(I already replied to that, see Comment #11754365)
I *am* aware of that... the issue here is the massive crunch time and unrealistic deadlines in the game industry. If every single publisher didn't want to get all those games out at the same time in september, there wouldn't be such a need for massive crunch time.
Year after year, the holiday season seems to comer earlier. Companies always want to get their product out before their competitor, so now, 'holiday season' begins in september.
Quoting Gabe from Penny Arcade :
From the FA (the one about the suicide), according to Dr. J. Michael Faragher, dean of the School of Professional Studies at the Metropolitan State College of Denver and co-director of the Center for Addiction Studies, an activity needs 3 characteristics to be considered addictive:
- It must by some reasonable definition be harmful
- the person's behavior is apparently out of control
- the addict expects the behavior will lead to feelings that are preferred to those felt before indulging in the activity.
The fun factor is only the third characteristic. If it's harmful, even if it's fun, then it's bad. And if you're out of control, it's even worse. From your example, someone who is addicted to sexual intercourse would simply keep pressuring everyone he meets to have some... that can't be good.
Games that are fun are ok, games (or anything) that are addictive are a problem.
How about having an ad campaign on TV telling people that there *is* an alternative to Microsoft, and tell them what Linux is. Linux is underperforming because people don't know it's out there. But with ads aimed at the general public, next time Aunt Tillie complains because her computer keeps crashing, you can tell her "Remember that cool ad on TV, I can get you that Linux thing for free".
As far as I can remember, since Win95, I *always* had sound on first boot after installation. It might not have been optimized sound with the latest driver, but at least it had a generic driver.
If it would happen. What would you do?
I'd take the CD that came with the sound card and put it in the CD-ROM, and click on the big flashy "INSTALL DRIVER" button that pops on auto-run. I know it's not the OS there but the sound card company, but you asked me what made Linux not so easy to use.
What did you do when it did not work out of the box? Drop the ball?
I searched google, I read forums, I went to IRC channels. I got some pointers to an Alsa fix that didn't work (basically, it was "make sure Alsa doesn't mute the master channel"), and loads of RTFM. Having to RTFM isn't "easy to use", "Works out of the box" is.
What about purchasing RedHat and getting hotline support?
Ok... which one should I get now? The Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS, which is said to be for power users (I don't want to be a power-user, I just want to use my computer), or the Red Hat Desktop, which is designed for general users, but costs over $2000? Isn't the whole point here to save money? I know the difference between free as in speech and free as in beer, but Linux is being evangelized as being both. And even if it's only as in speech, I won't spend $2000 on an OS for my home desktop.
Now don't get me wrong. I am a power-user. I love Linux. I love open-source. Billy would say I'm a communist. I still use Linux every once in a while, and I'm always trying to convince my boss to switch the whole place to Linux (or at least Mac OSX). But even power-users don't always feel like reading through hundreds of pages just to get the sound working.
It's also illegal to "import" cigarettes into Michigan without a licence, which is exactly what those customers have been doing...
FTA : It is illegal for anyone except licensed sellers to bring untaxed cigarettes into Michigan.
I will always agree on helping someone who made a mistake because he didn't know better. We all do stupid mistakes in life. However, someone who refuses to learn and repeat the same mistakes over and over again doesn't deserve my time and effort. It's not because I'm a capitalist asshole, it's because I wouldn't even be helping him by just fixing his computer.
I installed Fedora Core 3 lately. During the install process, it detected my hardware fine, even the sound card. There was a little button titled "Test Sound", I pressed it and a sound played, so the installer knew what my sound card was and where it was.
After the installation though, I never heard a single sound. I tried, in the administration panel, to fix the sound card thing. On the panel, it showed the card I had, which was correct (it's a SoundBlaster Audigy 2, there was an "auto-detect" button there, so I pressed it. It asked "Do you hear this sound?". I didn't hear it, so I said "No". Then it said "Auto-detect failed" and didn't try anything else.
I already accepted that I couldn't use my ATI All-in-Wonder card to watch TV on Linux, but now that I can't even listen to music either, I almost always boot my system in WinXP. It's not even worth trying to get a Linux-compatible TV-Tuner card, I won't even be able to hear the sound from the TV!.
Fix the sound, and it'll be easier to use.
I didn't dismiss the results because it was anti-Linux, I dismissed it because it has useless data. I would have dismissed it just as much if the numbers were switched.
The people that do those reviews should know better than to compare platforms on a single criteria by now. Saying one is more vulnerable than the other only based on number of vulnerabilities or on number of days of risk is just as insignificant as saying that someone is more intelligent than someone else just because he's more educated. It takes more than one criteria to judge of one's intelligence, just like it takes more than one criteria to judge of a platform's security.
Oddly enough though... whenever a study says that Windows is more secure, conclusions are almost always drawn on a single meaningless criteria. Who's the biaised sheep here?
From TFA :
On average, the Windows setup had just over 30 days of risk versus 71 days for the Red Hat setup, their study found.
Even if they "included" the number of vulnerabilities and did not base their report on that, they drew their conclusions from the number of "days of risk"... ain't much better if you ask me... it's what? 71 days of risk of seeing a misconfigured page defaced for Red Hat versus 30 days of risk of having all your credit card information stolen on Windows?
Wow... talk about over-simplification... I said "be exploited by EA". With the EA Spouse story and some leaked internal memos, I think it's common thought that EA exploits its employees (unpaid overtime, insane hours, etc.). I never even mentionned Microsoft. Nothing leads to believe Microsoft exploits its employees like EA does. Please explain to me how you got to think I thought Microsoft exploited its employees.
I'm lazy 'is all... felt easier to click three links from the same page ;-)
Maybe this is the extra boost that is required for people that actually love to make video games to leave the big corps and start making really good games.
Microsoft tries to buy every competition, but they can't buy Linux. EA is buying every competition, will it take FOSS games to stop them?
EA doesn't care about that. Whether they're a French, Canadian or African company, they'll screw them up just as bad.
When that happens (not *if*, but *when*, because it will happen), then the game industry will be rotten to the core.
This is really sad. I used to work at Ubisoft Montréal, and I was given an offer for a decent programming job there. That was in january 2004. I refused it and decided to leave the game industry for a while, because of what it was becoming and because I didn't want to become a slave to the big corps. I am now developing office utilities application for a small business in downtown Montréal, in a much much better working environment (the complete opposite of the "EA Spouse" story), with a much higher salary. I decided I'd give the game industry 10 years to stabilize and give them a second chance in 2015, if it's worth it (that is, if something else than EA exists). In the meantime, I'll keep working on my GPL'd game(s) in my spare time. They won't be as good or as flashy as a commercial game (you can only get so much quality with a team of 3 people), but at least I'll have fun doing it (contrary to being whipped by EA while I have to code for 16 hours a day).
It is sad though for people who either didn't see it coming, or have no other skill and are "forced" to stay in the industry and be exploited by EA.
Almost... I, for one, have 3 of them on my home machine... one in English, one in French and one in German. I'm developping extensions, and using the different languages to test the localization.
But then, there might not be a lot of people in my situation... we'd have way too many extensions if there were ;-)
From my experience on /., I can say I have seen exactly 3 types of people in such discussions :
1- People that are "naive enough" to believe the government is nice
2- People that are paranoid freaks and see conspiracies everywhere
3- People that don't live in the US of A and look at your pathetic anti-government/pro-government paranoia.
You're supposed to be the richest-best-most-advanced country in the world, and capitalism is so good because communism is evil. Then, you complain when your elected representatives(*) don't work for the people. Capitalism is just about that, money. You're not money, you're flesh and bones.
I'm not saying communism is all good, but it can't be all bad, after all, free software is communism. Extreme capitalism is just as bad as extreme communism.
(*) To all those who say there ain't no elected people in the US and that Bush stole the election, he might have stolen a state or two, but there are 60 million people that did vote for him, whether you like it or not.