Half of the utility of a calculator is a decent keyboard and layout. Sorry, but an HP48 from 1993 or 41cx or even a 15c from the 1980s wipes the floor with all PDAs and phones.
Indeed, there is going to be a reissue of the 15c this June.
> Fascism is state capitalism, at least Mussolini's fascism (as opposed to Hitler's National Socialism). It's precisely what Mussolini wanted. He saw it as state merged with business through a regulatory apparatus (with state being the dominant partner in that marriage). Which is exactly what Russia has.
As if we don't have this here in the States.
You just proved that the US/is/, in fact, Fascist.
It's been that way for a while. It's only in the last 30 years that the fascists have declared war on the middle and lower classes.
No you don't. You have the right to ask to be made whole.
Asking for 75 trillion dollars like the MAFIAA does from time to time just makes you look like an ass and discredits you in front of the judge and everyone else.
This is unconscionable and should be laughed out of court by the judge and it should come with an attached letter from the judge saying "next time, don't use crayon to write motions."
It seems I can't get away from the pump-and-dump of bitcoin. It's all over the place on certain websites as a new form of spam. This is part of the pump.
The dump is when we get the first people selling into the bubble and then it's a race to the bottom as sellers can to try to beat everyone else. Those that didn't sell are known as bag holders.
I see all sorts of justification for the trading on the "exchange" which is entirely unregulated and full of wash trades and other manipulation nonsense. Why people even trust the market is beyond me. It's trades in a vacuum - based entirely on the greater fool theory of value. Just like tulips. But with tulips, if you are starving, at least you can eat them. You can't eat bitcoins.
The above doesn't even take into the account the fucked up economics of bitcoin. With built in deflation, if this was ever adopted as a real currency, the dumbest thing you could ever do is take out a mortgage in bitcoins for a house, even at a rate of 0 percent interest. Proof of built in deflation is that there are roughly 21 million bitcoins maximum, that if they become a valid currency, become fewer and fewer (they can be destroyed and gone forever) while chasing more actual goods and services as economies grow. This benefits hoarders and nobody else. Deflation is bad. It gums up the works of functioning economies, like sand in the gears of a transmission.
But that's if it ever becomes viable. There are no advantages to it at all beyond what we have right now for electronic transactions. Even the most credit-unworthy can waltz into a bank and get a secured credit card and be protected from online fraud in purchases or if the card is stolen. Bitcoins give you no such protection. If your bitcoins are stolen or you are defrauded, they are gone for good. It's as if you've used a debit card over the net.
I see no advantages. Only pitfalls.
This is so unworkable that it must be for another purpose entirely - money laundering. Make successive wash trades (illegal in real exchanges like NYSE, Chicago, NASDAQ, etc) in the market and voila, your formerly dirty money is now untraceable and "clean."
I can't wait until bank accounts are frozen and people go to jail over this. It will be delicious to watch.
Liberalism is a dirty word, don'tchaknow. It's been that way since 1980. Doing/anything/ that advances society overall and gets everyone a better standard of living instead of increasing the power of the ruling class is "bad." The oil companies/need/ that 20 billion dollar subsidy on top of their windfall profits. Because without it, the oil companies will stop delivering oil. Or something. Because the ruling class of the corporations knows better, for all of us.
We've even got an entire tv network spewing this garbage 24/7.
Fuck this country, for it is fucked.
The assholes at PNAC that got us into two wars should be swinging from nooses like the traitors they are.
>implying that repositories are the same as web pages
No, sir, they are not. You must actually make a decision to put a repository in your/etc/apt/sources.list. By the time you learn how to do this, you have learned not to download software from untrusted sources. Because you have asked around why you cannot simply go to a web page and click on an executable.
>ppa full of malware
You are really high on crack. Or a troll, or something. The effort in hunting down and adding a PPA means that if you have done this and you get infected with malware, you should take some galena, smelt the lead and make some balls, make gun powder, manufacture a gun (smoothbore will do. no need for rifling), load the gun, aim at temple, with the muzzle directly in contact with the skin just to make sure you don't miss, and pull the trigger, because you are that stupid.
I love how windows idiots try to equate Linux and Windows saying that all operating systems are created equal. They are not. Windows has "features" foisted upon it from the marketing department of Microsoft. Linux on the other hand, doesn't have much of a marketing department to throw its weight around.
Ah fuckit. The winidiot smoke is fucking thick in slashdot these days. fuck all of you. you're all fucking shills, just like zdnet.
Hey Lionhead: Provide more content that people are willing to shell out money for. Either that or close up shop and get the hell out of the market, because obviously you are a bunch of idiots.
Somehow the creators of content just want to create once and never work again. Sorry, but this is not how life works in the real world. Continued rent-seeking will make people avoid your new products, and with good reason.
There is nothing stopping you from adding third party repos.
This is how VirtualBox gets its software out there.
It's entirely possible to have a paid software repo. Payment by credit or debit card will get you a key for the software. VariCAD does this, except that they have you manually download a.deb instead of simply adding a repo to keep up to date.
2 is the gaping hole in all operating systems. Microsoft's signature system (screen, whatever the hell that is) will not stop determined dumb users from installing $INFECTION if the hook has the right bait.
You can't even stop it in NetBSD, because you can always install software as a regular user and run it from ~/bin/. The only way to get rid of such PEBCAK is to entirely give up any kind of freedom to install software on your own and go to a managed system with professional administrators. I could see it happening as a trade: Certified Public Computer Admins - you pay for your computer to be remotely administered even as a home user.
The App Store is the Linux repo model, but for money and no source code.
THIS IS A STORY? BASED ON 200 POSTS? THIS IS AN EXPLOSION?
This is fucking PEBCAK. There is absolutely no defense against PEBCAK except education. This is exactly like some derp-headed Windows user installing "Antivirus 2012" from some random web page and jumping thorugh ALL the hoops to do so. Except in Windows, the hoops are fewer.
I noticed Ed Bott in the threads to "back up" the article. He's one of the assholes (like Maureen O'Gara, Dan Lyons, et vomitus) that thought SCO had a case. Fuck him.
This is another Microsoft "paided" scare on ZDNet.
Microsoft, you are not invisible, but we can see right through you.
>Me defend windows? Are you fucking insane? My house has 0% Microsoft software.
Your argument from before resembles a lot of what I've seen from softies spinning things. They love to paint Linux and OSX and everything else as "It's just as insecure as Windows" which we both know is not true.
Apologies for mistaking your argument as one.
>You sir are deluded by fanboyism.
No, I'm not, and if you've read my first message on this, you can tell I'm not.
>Repos
But it takes a lot of effort to get something bad in the repos and have it stay there (it would have to be something commonly used to be effective). It would probably be detected pretty quickly because it would be commonly used.
To get to the level of 1 in 14 would have to take a monumental effort by someone with very deep pockets and a lot of resources and possibly someone running the repo. To date, I have only read one news story over the past 15 years of using Linux about a repo being compromised. (The Arch thing is separate. No signing at all! Whee!)
As far as i can tell from the effects of the Appstore is that it's a paid Linux repository where software is reviewed before it goes up and that it's extremely difficult for even software that violates policies, let alone malware, to pass inspection.
I do not own any Apple stuff. I'm strictly a Linux/Solaris/BSD guy.
>The problem is that if you throw all your samples into the autoclave you're now unable to develop a vaccine before an outbreak occurs
You're assuming that $FOE has the same strain as you do. Because if this was/really/ about eradicating smallpox and making vaccines, laboratories around the world would have all the same strains and share with each other.
No, the only reason to really keep these around is for offensive purposes.
>you can develop a vaccine preemptively and start vaccinating people the minute you are aware of the outbreak.
Think for a second. You can't preemptively create a vaccine because you don't know what strain $FOE has used until he's used it. And weaponized smallpox is not the same as smallpox from the 18'th century or Ghana or wherever.
Hanging on to a microorganism that can kill millions is about as evil as evil gets.
To the autoclave they should all go. Every last one of them. And anyone who defends the existence of smallpox as a weapon should have his head examined.
Please note I have no skin in this game except laughing at the Windows idiots trying to plug their ears and blind their eyes to the biggest problem in the Windows software universe - that of untrusted repositories.
Your post screams so much denial it's funny.
1 in 14. Not my statistic, Microsoft's. Almost 6 billion malware definitions.
Remove the fucking tree from your eye before pointing out the speck of lint in Apple's or Linux's. Only the most rabid and stupid softie would ignore these statistics and say "hurr everyone else is just as bad off." No, we're not as bad off as you. And we're laughing at you. Laughing as you try to spin this. And the more you spin, the more we laugh at the little retard.
>There have been stories when apps that did non-approved things made into into the apple appstore.
False. Every app in the Appstore has been approved. Approval has been rescinded, but in order for something to make it to the App store, it must be approved in the first place.
The fact that it makes news when approval is rescinded means that it's exceedingly rare. I can only think of a few notable incidences - the "I'm Rich" icon/app, a publisher gaming the ratings system, and something more recent that escapes me at the moment.
Not out-and-out malware and certainly not 1 in 14.
>That is a surprisingly high number, even after all these years of knowing about various rootkits, viruses, and other malware that have so persistently affected Windows. 1 in 14? That's... crazy.
It's not crazy when you see the number of malware definitions in your average malware detector. There are nearly 6 *million* definitions for Bit Defender. I have it installed in Linux for scanning Windows files. And thousands of malicious applications/infections are being made every day.
Windows users have been conditioned to go to $RANDOMWEBPAGE to download "free" software, or to pirate software from untrusted sites. They have never heard of trusted and signed repositories. The closest they get to that is download.com and tucows, and those are just horrific sites. Windows users get hosed every day because of this conditioning.
The best way to build a botnet is to put your bit of evil in a wanted application and upload it to a torrent site or stick it on rabidshare or whatever.
And then we have the gnutella network. Yes, limewire is no longer being made. That doesn't mean the network is down or that the last version of limewire no longer works or that frostwire is not available.. And people still get hosed downloading "Microsoft.office.installer.crack.exe" from there.
I believe that 1 out of 14 software downloads on Windows is a low number. I fully believe that it's half. Cracks and keygens are probably 90 percent infected. I'm not saying that the original authors of cracks and keygens put in the evil bits themselves. I am implying, however, that these cracks get spliced to malware and then hosted on more fake keygen sites and stuck in torrents and warez sites than you can shake a stick at.
It's not that Linux is more secure from this kind of shit. It's not, because natural stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time. We do, however, have various practices in place to put up a barrier between the hostile network and the dumb user, and these things teach the user it's better to go to the trusted repo first than to go somewhere down a dark alley on the interbutt.
Slashdot Mirror
Half of the utility of a calculator is a decent keyboard and layout. Sorry, but an HP48 from 1993 or 41cx or even a 15c from the 1980s wipes the floor with all PDAs and phones.
Indeed, there is going to be a reissue of the 15c this June.
--
BMO
The HP series of graphing calculators allow hacking and programming.
On the 50g, you can write in RPL, Saturn Assembly, C and ARM Assembly. It uses an ARM processor to emulate the Saturn processor that came in the 48.
While the 50g is not as nice physically as the 48gx in terms of keyboard, it's miles ahead of the 49. Stay away from the 49 and the 48gII.
--
BMO
... I'll let you come over and play with my Wii.
--
BMO
You joke, but I saw this on Reddit, posted it to my Facebook profile, and suddenly I saw it here.
Maybe they should do more (heh) viral marketing.
Excellent pun, btw. Fully cromulent.
--
BMO
You obviously didn't read the article.
It has some sensible disaster preparedness stuff in it. Just because it references popular culture doesn't mean it's a waste of money.
Government documents are boring enough as they are.
--
BMO
> Fascism is state capitalism, at least Mussolini's fascism (as opposed to Hitler's National Socialism). It's precisely what Mussolini wanted. He saw it as state merged with business through a regulatory apparatus (with state being the dominant partner in that marriage). Which is exactly what Russia has.
As if we don't have this here in the States.
You just proved that the US /is/, in fact, Fascist.
It's been that way for a while. It's only in the last 30 years that the fascists have declared war on the middle and lower classes.
--
BMO
No you don't. You have the right to ask to be made whole.
Asking for 75 trillion dollars like the MAFIAA does from time to time just makes you look like an ass and discredits you in front of the judge and everyone else.
This is unconscionable and should be laughed out of court by the judge and it should come with an attached letter from the judge saying "next time, don't use crayon to write motions."
--
BMO
It seems I can't get away from the pump-and-dump of bitcoin. It's all over the place on certain websites as a new form of spam. This is part of the pump.
The dump is when we get the first people selling into the bubble and then it's a race to the bottom as sellers can to try to beat everyone else. Those that didn't sell are known as bag holders.
I see all sorts of justification for the trading on the "exchange" which is entirely unregulated and full of wash trades and other manipulation nonsense. Why people even trust the market is beyond me. It's trades in a vacuum - based entirely on the greater fool theory of value. Just like tulips. But with tulips, if you are starving, at least you can eat them. You can't eat bitcoins.
The above doesn't even take into the account the fucked up economics of bitcoin. With built in deflation, if this was ever adopted as a real currency, the dumbest thing you could ever do is take out a mortgage in bitcoins for a house, even at a rate of 0 percent interest. Proof of built in deflation is that there are roughly 21 million bitcoins maximum, that if they become a valid currency, become fewer and fewer (they can be destroyed and gone forever) while chasing more actual goods and services as economies grow. This benefits hoarders and nobody else. Deflation is bad. It gums up the works of functioning economies, like sand in the gears of a transmission.
But that's if it ever becomes viable. There are no advantages to it at all beyond what we have right now for electronic transactions. Even the most credit-unworthy can waltz into a bank and get a secured credit card and be protected from online fraud in purchases or if the card is stolen. Bitcoins give you no such protection. If your bitcoins are stolen or you are defrauded, they are gone for good. It's as if you've used a debit card over the net.
I see no advantages. Only pitfalls.
This is so unworkable that it must be for another purpose entirely - money laundering. Make successive wash trades (illegal in real exchanges like NYSE, Chicago, NASDAQ, etc) in the market and voila, your formerly dirty money is now untraceable and "clean."
I can't wait until bank accounts are frozen and people go to jail over this. It will be delicious to watch.
I'm getting popcorn.
--
BMO
>liberal democracy
But that's not what we have.
We have capitalist oligarchy neo-fascism instead.
Liberalism is a dirty word, don'tchaknow. It's been that way since 1980. Doing /anything/ that advances society overall and gets everyone a better standard of living instead of increasing the power of the ruling class is "bad." The oil companies /need/ that 20 billion dollar subsidy on top of their windfall profits. Because without it, the oil companies will stop delivering oil. Or something. Because the ruling class of the corporations knows better, for all of us.
We've even got an entire tv network spewing this garbage 24/7.
Fuck this country, for it is fucked.
The assholes at PNAC that got us into two wars should be swinging from nooses like the traitors they are.
--
BMO
>implying that repositories are the same as web pages
No, sir, they are not. You must actually make a decision to put a repository in your /etc/apt/sources.list. By the time you learn how to do this, you have learned not to download software from untrusted sources. Because you have asked around why you cannot simply go to a web page and click on an executable.
>ppa full of malware
You are really high on crack. Or a troll, or something. The effort in hunting down and adding a PPA means that if you have done this and you get infected with malware, you should take some galena, smelt the lead and make some balls, make gun powder, manufacture a gun (smoothbore will do. no need for rifling), load the gun, aim at temple, with the muzzle directly in contact with the skin just to make sure you don't miss, and pull the trigger, because you are that stupid.
I love how windows idiots try to equate Linux and Windows saying that all operating systems are created equal. They are not. Windows has "features" foisted upon it from the marketing department of Microsoft. Linux on the other hand, doesn't have much of a marketing department to throw its weight around.
Ah fuckit. The winidiot smoke is fucking thick in slashdot these days. fuck all of you. you're all fucking shills, just like zdnet.
--
BMO
This is nothing more than rent-seeking.
Hey Lionhead: Provide more content that people are willing to shell out money for. Either that or close up shop and get the hell out of the market, because obviously you are a bunch of idiots.
Somehow the creators of content just want to create once and never work again. Sorry, but this is not how life works in the real world. Continued rent-seeking will make people avoid your new products, and with good reason.
What a bunch of whiny cunts.
--
BMO
There is nothing stopping you from adding third party repos.
This is how VirtualBox gets its software out there.
It's entirely possible to have a paid software repo. Payment by credit or debit card will get you a key for the software. VariCAD does this, except that they have you manually download a .deb instead of simply adding a repo to keep up to date.
Your lack of imagination is showing.
--
BMO
2 is the gaping hole in all operating systems. Microsoft's signature system (screen, whatever the hell that is) will not stop determined dumb users from installing $INFECTION if the hook has the right bait.
You can't even stop it in NetBSD, because you can always install software as a regular user and run it from ~/bin/. The only way to get rid of such PEBCAK is to entirely give up any kind of freedom to install software on your own and go to a managed system with professional administrators. I could see it happening as a trade: Certified Public Computer Admins - you pay for your computer to be remotely administered even as a home user.
The App Store is the Linux repo model, but for money and no source code.
--
BMO
THIS IS A STORY? BASED ON 200 POSTS? THIS IS AN EXPLOSION?
This is fucking PEBCAK. There is absolutely no defense against PEBCAK except education. This is exactly like some derp-headed Windows user installing "Antivirus 2012" from some random web page and jumping thorugh ALL the hoops to do so. Except in Windows, the hoops are fewer.
I noticed Ed Bott in the threads to "back up" the article. He's one of the assholes (like Maureen O'Gara, Dan Lyons, et vomitus) that thought SCO had a case. Fuck him.
This is another Microsoft "paided" scare on ZDNet.
Microsoft, you are not invisible, but we can see right through you.
--
BMO
>Me defend windows? Are you fucking insane? My house has 0% Microsoft software.
Your argument from before resembles a lot of what I've seen from softies spinning things. They love to paint Linux and OSX and everything else as "It's just as insecure as Windows" which we both know is not true.
Apologies for mistaking your argument as one.
>You sir are deluded by fanboyism.
No, I'm not, and if you've read my first message on this, you can tell I'm not.
>Repos
But it takes a lot of effort to get something bad in the repos and have it stay there (it would have to be something commonly used to be effective). It would probably be detected pretty quickly because it would be commonly used.
To get to the level of 1 in 14 would have to take a monumental effort by someone with very deep pockets and a lot of resources and possibly someone running the repo. To date, I have only read one news story over the past 15 years of using Linux about a repo being compromised. (The Arch thing is separate. No signing at all! Whee!)
As far as i can tell from the effects of the Appstore is that it's a paid Linux repository where software is reviewed before it goes up and that it's extremely difficult for even software that violates policies, let alone malware, to pass inspection.
I do not own any Apple stuff. I'm strictly a Linux/Solaris/BSD guy.
--
BMO
Someone mod this up informative if true.
Wait, it is.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccinia
--
BMO
>The problem is that if you throw all your samples into the autoclave you're now unable to develop a vaccine before an outbreak occurs
You're assuming that $FOE has the same strain as you do. Because if this was /really/ about eradicating smallpox and making vaccines, laboratories around the world would have all the same strains and share with each other.
No, the only reason to really keep these around is for offensive purposes.
>you can develop a vaccine preemptively and start vaccinating people the minute you are aware of the outbreak.
Think for a second. You can't preemptively create a vaccine because you don't know what strain $FOE has used until he's used it. And weaponized smallpox is not the same as smallpox from the 18'th century or Ghana or wherever.
--
BMO
You really believe that they are being held on to for vaccines and not weaponization?
One word.
Naive.
--
BMO
Hanging on to a microorganism that can kill millions is about as evil as evil gets.
To the autoclave they should all go. Every last one of them. And anyone who defends the existence of smallpox as a weapon should have his head examined.
Or locked up. Forever.
--
BMO
Correction, should have used preview.
billion should be million.
But at this point, 3 orders of magnitude doesn't make much difference, does it?
heh.
--
BMO
Name an actual malicious App from the app store.
Go ahead.
I'll wait right here.
These are all policy violations and nothing else.
Please note I have no skin in this game except laughing at the Windows idiots trying to plug their ears and blind their eyes to the biggest problem in the Windows software universe - that of untrusted repositories.
Your post screams so much denial it's funny.
1 in 14. Not my statistic, Microsoft's. Almost 6 billion malware definitions.
Remove the fucking tree from your eye before pointing out the speck of lint in Apple's or Linux's. Only the most rabid and stupid softie would ignore these statistics and say "hurr everyone else is just as bad off." No, we're not as bad off as you. And we're laughing at you. Laughing as you try to spin this. And the more you spin, the more we laugh at the little retard.
--
BMO
When I was a senior in HS, the price of the TI-99/4a dropped to 50 bucks. This happened just before the coupon for 50 bucks off was issued.
Free computers for everyone!
--
BMO
>false positives
Every single warez kiddie claims this.
How do you know the difference between a false positive and a real warning?
You can't.
You're infected, son.
--
BMO
>There have been stories when apps that did non-approved things made into into the apple appstore.
False. Every app in the Appstore has been approved. Approval has been rescinded, but in order for something to make it to the App store, it must be approved in the first place.
The fact that it makes news when approval is rescinded means that it's exceedingly rare. I can only think of a few notable incidences - the "I'm Rich" icon/app, a publisher gaming the ratings system, and something more recent that escapes me at the moment.
Not out-and-out malware and certainly not 1 in 14.
--
BMO
>That is a surprisingly high number, even after all these years of knowing about various rootkits, viruses, and other malware that have so persistently affected Windows. 1 in 14? That's... crazy.
It's not crazy when you see the number of malware definitions in your average malware detector. There are nearly 6 *million* definitions for Bit Defender. I have it installed in Linux for scanning Windows files. And thousands of malicious applications/infections are being made every day.
Windows users have been conditioned to go to $RANDOMWEBPAGE to download "free" software, or to pirate software from untrusted sites. They have never heard of trusted and signed repositories. The closest they get to that is download.com and tucows, and those are just horrific sites. Windows users get hosed every day because of this conditioning.
The best way to build a botnet is to put your bit of evil in a wanted application and upload it to a torrent site or stick it on rabidshare or whatever.
And then we have the gnutella network. Yes, limewire is no longer being made. That doesn't mean the network is down or that the last version of limewire no longer works or that frostwire is not available.. And people still get hosed downloading "Microsoft.office.installer.crack.exe" from there.
I believe that 1 out of 14 software downloads on Windows is a low number. I fully believe that it's half. Cracks and keygens are probably 90 percent infected. I'm not saying that the original authors of cracks and keygens put in the evil bits themselves. I am implying, however, that these cracks get spliced to malware and then hosted on more fake keygen sites and stuck in torrents and warez sites than you can shake a stick at.
It's not that Linux is more secure from this kind of shit. It's not, because natural stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time. We do, however, have various practices in place to put up a barrier between the hostile network and the dumb user, and these things teach the user it's better to go to the trusted repo first than to go somewhere down a dark alley on the interbutt.
--
BMO