No! Because the AI Moriarty still had morals and principles - as evidenced by his polite treatment of Dr. Pulaski and willingness to negotiate with Picard.
Only on/. would I have to do this. Excuse me while I go hide in shame.
When cats walk or climb on your keyboard, they can enter random commands and data, damage your files, and even crash your computer. This can happen whether you are near the computer or have suddenly been called away from it.
PawSense is a software utility that helps protect your computer from cats. It quickly detects and blocks cat typing, and also helps train your cat to stay off the computer keyboard.
Since I like history and dead-tree, anyone have a suggestion for a good book covering the history of these 1990s hacking/security/blackhat/whitehat/grayhat groups, and what you might call the fragmentation/dissolution of the underground? There's good material on the 80s, but much less on the 90s, it seems, despite a decade having passed.
The only one I know of with more than a passing mention is a 20-page overview in Ch. 3 ("Hacking in the 1990s") of the book Hacker Culture (2003). Others?
Not to mention that most of the people who purchase Windows boxed either A) build their own PCs, B) are a business C) are a computer enthusiast or D) are a MS developer. Charging this much for people who are high up on the technology chain is just insane, especially because these people know of alternatives and they see Apple with a cheap but better OS and Linux with a free OS. Plus, what is the point of ultimate?
The boxed price is high because if it were lower than say, OEM or volume licensing, the purpose of volume/OEM licensing would be completely defeated. I can businesses having their techs go out and buy boxed copies en masse, then ghost over images of the OS to OEM computers purchased without an OS preinstalled.
The home user is actually the LAST person Microsoft is interested in selling an OS to. Businesses doubtlessly make up a vast majority of their customer base, and since businesses make of most of their profit, secondary markets like retail will see copies of Windows that always cost more.
Also, few business give a shit about Apple computers or desktop PCs running Linux. Once you tell A PHB that certain software unique to the industry your business is in doesn't run on Mac OS/Linux, the conversation is over. And so the "alternatives" argument is effectively useless, at least for the time being.
Not disagreeing with you at all. However, it's a basic marketing strategy to lower prices to sell more units thereby increasing overall profits. My point is not that they shouldn't be making money off of it... it's that they would sell more units if they lowered the price.
...and its basic economics that when you have a practical monopoly on a given market, you can price gouge to your hearts content. Oh, sure, you'll eventually be tried in court for it, but court cases take years to complete, and will likely just result in a fiscal slap on the wrist.
Microsoft charges exorbitant fees for their OS. More at 11.
Not sure how much you use bookmarks, but I maintain a good archive of organized chaos myself. At one time, bookmarking a site was a pretty pointless endeavor, since I couldn't keep track of whether I had bookmarked it at work, on the bedroom computer, downstairs computer, laptop, etc.
So a while ago, I looked up a plug-in for Firefox called Xmarks (formerly FoxMarks) that was pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Very easy to set up and use, cross-platform, etc.
Just thought it was useful enough to mention here.
GetDataBack has worked perfectly for me many times. Very easy interface, works on deleted files as well as formatted disks (provided the data you want to recover hasn't been overwritten, of course). Worth the $79, IMO.
I own two Apple IIes that work perfectly (one complete with the boxes it came in!). Nothing like playing Oregon Trail the way God intended it...
I also have the original Compaq portable, which was arguably the first laptop computer. Sadly, one of my students smoked the power supply a couple years back, so it no longer works. I know that eliminates it from the category of "still working", but it did work for 26 years, which is fairly impressive. And its still fun to show people the design.
I actually submitted an article covering this a little over a year ago, when Schneier talked about it on his blog. It wasn't picked up, but then again, I quoted from the more embarrassing things said at the conference, so there is little surprise to that.
I actually used David Brin's quote in the article summary. Oops.
"David Brin, keeping on the topic of empowering citizens with mobile phone technology, delivered a self-described 'rant' on the lack of funds being spent to support citizen reservists to back up the military, homeland security officials and first responders in times of crisis. 'It is impossible for you to succeed without us!' he shouted at the assembled officials, while banging his fist on the table and at one point jumping off his chair to wave a mobile phone in their faces."
The original link from National Defense Magazine is dead, but you can see the comment thread on Schneier's blog here. Schneier's entire entry was just a link saying "This is embarrassing."
It was one of the first companies in the world to offer employee benefits to same-sex domestic partners and to include sexual orientation in its corporate nondiscrimination policy. Since 1989, Microsoft has supported and sponsored gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues at Microsoft. In 1993 an organized employee resource groupâ"Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Employees at Microsoft (GLEAM)â"was launched. GLEAM now has more than 700 members.
I think thats sort of a "duh" statement when you consider server usage as well as desktop usage.
Mac servers can't be much of the server market.
Re:In some ways it was much better in 1996
on
Jurassic Web
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Not only that, but I remember seeing a lot of personal web sites that actually looked really good. They weren't in the majority by any shot, but the creators were usually young teens who bent over backwards working with (what would now be considered archaic) HTML code to make a highly aesthetically pleasing way to provide content. Sure, it was usually bad poetry or a fan-site about some alternative band...but they really were very engaging to browse through.
These days, when most web sites are generating for you automatically or are taken from a pre-designed template, uniformity and rigidity are much more common. If you looked around back then, when there wasn't so much of a norm to adhere to, you'd regularly happen on a site that was, dare I say it, actually kind of artistic.
I sometimes think it'd be nice if more people today looked as web sites as a form of art, and not just a way of delivering content. Having seen some of the sites I did then, it's hard not to think that the web as an art form is more than just a latent possibility.
RE: Ah, the era of homepages
on
Jurassic Web
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· Score: 2, Interesting
With terrible blinking text and eyesore backgrounds.
They were all on geocities then. Now they're all on facebook/myspace.
If you ask me, the facebooks/myspaces of today are way worse aesthetically. The worst you had to fear in those days was an embedded MIDI; now I've got high-quality MP3s streaming themselves without asking and fucking up the music I'm already listening to.
Also, maybe they just didn't have the technology or bandwidth to piss away, but people didn't leave high-res 1562x968 pictures in comments sections (whose parallel I guess would be a "guest book", in 90's web terms).
I'll take blinking text, frames, and animated GIFs over that any day. (I know, I know...get off my lawn!)
It's 1996, and you're bored. What do you do? If you're one of the lucky people with an AOL account, you probably do the same thing you'd do in 2009: Go online. Crank up your modem, wait 20 seconds as you log in, and there you areâ""Welcome." You check your mail, then spend a few minutes chatting with your AOL buddies about which of you has the funniest screen name (you win, pimpodayear94).
I can't believe I read this and immediately thought "...but AOL didn't allow screen names over 10 characters until 1999..."
Many library systems run free-to-the-public classes in basic computer usage. From my experience, these tend to be geared toward the elderly and others on the other side of the learning curve who have fallen into possession of a PC and still aren't quite sure what they are doing. Volunteering to teach one of these courses at a local library might be a good place to start.
I should note that some library systems can afford to pay the instructors of these classes and some can't. In the case of where I live, some of the more rural libraries surrounding the city don't have budgets to afford being able to pay an instructor much to come in and teach some classes, so they operate on a largely volunteer basis.
I can't think of any way this could fail gracefully. If this system was compromised, it'd be a powerful way to disrupt network traffic and take down important systems that happen to run it.
"It depends on the number of events and the number of computers polled, but if there is a sufficient number of such samples, you can say with some degree of certainty that it is a worm,â Cheetancheri says. For that decision, the software uses a well-established statistical technique called sequential hypothesis testing, he says"
I'm also skeptical that you could rely on a vast network of machines that have presumably fallen prey to an attack to share information between each other fast enough to correctly diagnose an attack with the kind of results the researcher seems hopeful of.
Given that no method for correctly identifying "malicious" code 100% of the time currently exists, I don't think it's wise to allow a software program to run with the decision of shutting a machine down on notice of a perceived threat.
The concept seems like an interesting idea, but I doubt It could be terribly effective in practice.
no, I'm not mad at Nader - he is my candidate of choice. But I'll be voting for Obama just because I hate the thought of McCain (or possibly *shudder* Palin) in office.
I feel your fear, and I think Obama would make a far superior President, no doubt. I wouldn't dissuade you from voting for him by any means. But for me, personally, there's something just not cricket about voting for someone because the other guy is worse. It's a small thing, but it speaks volumes about who we are as a culture, and in a not-so-grandiose way, I'm deciding to make my small stand.
I'll appreciate anyone who takes the high road and doesn't bash my candidate because I won't vote for theirs.
If the roughly 2000 floridians who voted for nader in 2000 had voted for Gore, we wouldn't have had Bush (surely now in hindsight even the most ardent Nader supporter has to conceed that there WAS in fact a big difference), and it wouldn't have made any difference for Nader. He still would have lost.
Gore needed ~2000 votes, and Nader got 96,837. But Pat Buchannan got 17,356 as the Reform Party's candidate, Harry Browne got 18,856 as a Libertarian candidate, and two other independents also got more than 2000.
But it's easier to blame the other guy than accept a loss.
I think a lot of people here on slashdot would like to vot for a third party. It's just that if we act sincerely, we end up more fucked than if we act strategically. Nader got, what, half a million votes? If those votes had gone to Gore and then Kerry, we wouldn't have had 8 years of Bushy shitness. Sure, those people might have liked Nader better, but instead of their candidate, or even the next best candidate in their view, we get... dubya.
I think it is a logical fallacy (and not to mention a little arrogant) to assume that if Nader wasn't an option in those elections that all half million votes would have immediately defaulted to the nearest Democratic candidate. You're waxing over the fact that most Nader voters, content to vote for a third party candidate like Nader, would probably not think twice about voting for another third party candidate that more closely matched their ideals.
Let's also be clear that it's not a sin to vote for your ideals rather than for the compromise. Some people are simply tired of basing their vote on fear of the other guy and want to make an ideological stand, which is their right. Of course gets them demonized because there are plenty of people who get pissed off at the short-term consequences of this, but let's be clear - George W. Bush is what made the last eight years hell for a lot of people, not Ralph Nader. Direct your anger appropriately.
And if your candidate didn't win, it might be prudent to consider that it may have been a result of their own mismanagement. I don't see why its Nader's fault if Kerry or Gore couldn't score a win against Bush. Gore didn't even win the state he was a senator from, nor Clinton's home state...that is traditionally seen as a sign of poor campaigning.
According to Johansson, there appears to be two separate issues. One affects only AMD-equipped PCs sold by Hewlett-Packard Co. "The problem is that HP, apparently along with other OEMs, deploys the same image to Intel-based computers that they do to AMD-based computers," said Johansson. "Because the image for both Intel and AMD is the same, all have the intelppm.sys driver installed and running. That driver provides power management on Intel-based computers. On an AMD-based computer, amdk8.sys provides the same functionality."
Running the intelppm.sys driver on an AMD-powered PC isn't normally an issue, but on the first reboot after a service pack installation, it causes "a big problem," Johansson said. The machine either fails to boot or crashes and immediately reboots.
The other problem, according to Johansson, also seems to affect only AMD machines, and involves an error message indicating trouble with the PC's BIOS. Johansson said that the ensuing recommendation to update the BIOS is "most likely not your problem," but said that the problem may be isolated to a specific motherboard. "Possibly, it is related to computers with the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard in them," he said.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoosh
Only on /. would I have to do this. Excuse me while I go hide in shame.
When cats walk or climb on your keyboard, they can enter random commands and data, damage your files, and even crash your computer. This can happen whether you are near the computer or have suddenly been called away from it.
PawSense is a software utility that helps protect your computer from cats. It quickly detects and blocks cat typing, and also helps train your cat to stay off the computer keyboard.
Since I like history and dead-tree, anyone have a suggestion for a good book covering the history of these 1990s hacking/security/blackhat/whitehat/grayhat groups, and what you might call the fragmentation/dissolution of the underground? There's good material on the 80s, but much less on the 90s, it seems, despite a decade having passed.
The only one I know of with more than a passing mention is a 20-page overview in Ch. 3 ("Hacking in the 1990s") of the book Hacker Culture (2003). Others?
Masters of Deception: The Gang that Rules Cyberspace comes to mind.
Not to mention that most of the people who purchase Windows boxed either A) build their own PCs, B) are a business C) are a computer enthusiast or D) are a MS developer. Charging this much for people who are high up on the technology chain is just insane, especially because these people know of alternatives and they see Apple with a cheap but better OS and Linux with a free OS. Plus, what is the point of ultimate?
The boxed price is high because if it were lower than say, OEM or volume licensing, the purpose of volume/OEM licensing would be completely defeated. I can businesses having their techs go out and buy boxed copies en masse, then ghost over images of the OS to OEM computers purchased without an OS preinstalled.
The home user is actually the LAST person Microsoft is interested in selling an OS to. Businesses doubtlessly make up a vast majority of their customer base, and since businesses make of most of their profit, secondary markets like retail will see copies of Windows that always cost more.
Also, few business give a shit about Apple computers or desktop PCs running Linux. Once you tell A PHB that certain software unique to the industry your business is in doesn't run on Mac OS/Linux, the conversation is over. And so the "alternatives" argument is effectively useless, at least for the time being.
Not disagreeing with you at all. However, it's a basic marketing strategy to lower prices to sell more units thereby increasing overall profits. My point is not that they shouldn't be making money off of it... it's that they would sell more units if they lowered the price.
...and its basic economics that when you have a practical monopoly on a given market, you can price gouge to your hearts content. Oh, sure, you'll eventually be tried in court for it, but court cases take years to complete, and will likely just result in a fiscal slap on the wrist.
Microsoft charges exorbitant fees for their OS. More at 11.
You're forgetting that Apple makes most of its profits off it's hardware, not their operating system. Microsoft doesn't have that comfort.
Not sure how much you use bookmarks, but I maintain a good archive of organized chaos myself. At one time, bookmarking a site was a pretty pointless endeavor, since I couldn't keep track of whether I had bookmarked it at work, on the bedroom computer, downstairs computer, laptop, etc.
So a while ago, I looked up a plug-in for Firefox called Xmarks (formerly FoxMarks) that was pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Very easy to set up and use, cross-platform, etc.
Just thought it was useful enough to mention here.
GetDataBack has worked perfectly for me many times. Very easy interface, works on deleted files as well as formatted disks (provided the data you want to recover hasn't been overwritten, of course). Worth the $79, IMO.
I also have the original Compaq portable, which was arguably the first laptop computer. Sadly, one of my students smoked the power supply a couple years back, so it no longer works. I know that eliminates it from the category of "still working", but it did work for 26 years, which is fairly impressive. And its still fun to show people the design.
I actually used David Brin's quote in the article summary. Oops.
"David Brin, keeping on the topic of empowering citizens with mobile phone technology, delivered a self-described 'rant' on the lack of funds being spent to support citizen reservists to back up the military, homeland security officials and first responders in times of crisis. 'It is impossible for you to succeed without us!' he shouted at the assembled officials, while banging his fist on the table and at one point jumping off his chair to wave a mobile phone in their faces."
The original link from National Defense Magazine is dead, but you can see the comment thread on Schneier's blog here. Schneier's entire entry was just a link saying "This is embarrassing."
Or if it is, the Alternative Press, Reuters, and Wall Street Journal are all in on it.
This is unusual, since Microsoft is apparently considered one of the most gay friendly employers in the US.
From the site:
It was one of the first companies in the world to offer employee benefits to same-sex domestic partners and to include sexual orientation in its corporate nondiscrimination policy. Since 1989, Microsoft has supported and sponsored gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender issues at Microsoft. In 1993 an organized employee resource groupâ"Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Employees at Microsoft (GLEAM)â"was launched. GLEAM now has more than 700 members.
The group even has it's own Wikipedia entry (for what that's worth).
I think thats sort of a "duh" statement when you consider server usage as well as desktop usage.
Mac servers can't be much of the server market.
These days, when most web sites are generating for you automatically or are taken from a pre-designed template, uniformity and rigidity are much more common. If you looked around back then, when there wasn't so much of a norm to adhere to, you'd regularly happen on a site that was, dare I say it, actually kind of artistic.
I sometimes think it'd be nice if more people today looked as web sites as a form of art, and not just a way of delivering content. Having seen some of the sites I did then, it's hard not to think that the web as an art form is more than just a latent possibility.
If you ask me, the facebooks/myspaces of today are way worse aesthetically. The worst you had to fear in those days was an embedded MIDI; now I've got high-quality MP3s streaming themselves without asking and fucking up the music I'm already listening to.
Also, maybe they just didn't have the technology or bandwidth to piss away, but people didn't leave high-res 1562x968 pictures in comments sections (whose parallel I guess would be a "guest book", in 90's web terms).
I'll take blinking text, frames, and animated GIFs over that any day. (I know, I know...get off my lawn!)
I can't believe I read this and immediately thought "...but AOL didn't allow screen names over 10 characters until 1999..."
I'm a loser.
Many library systems run free-to-the-public classes in basic computer usage. From my experience, these tend to be geared toward the elderly and others on the other side of the learning curve who have fallen into possession of a PC and still aren't quite sure what they are doing. Volunteering to teach one of these courses at a local library might be a good place to start.
I should note that some library systems can afford to pay the instructors of these classes and some can't. In the case of where I live, some of the more rural libraries surrounding the city don't have budgets to afford being able to pay an instructor much to come in and teach some classes, so they operate on a largely volunteer basis.
"It depends on the number of events and the number of computers polled, but if there is a sufficient number of such samples, you can say with some degree of certainty that it is a worm,â Cheetancheri says. For that decision, the software uses a well-established statistical technique called sequential hypothesis testing, he says"
I'm also skeptical that you could rely on a vast network of machines that have presumably fallen prey to an attack to share information between each other fast enough to correctly diagnose an attack with the kind of results the researcher seems hopeful of.
Given that no method for correctly identifying "malicious" code 100% of the time currently exists, I don't think it's wise to allow a software program to run with the decision of shutting a machine down on notice of a perceived threat.
The concept seems like an interesting idea, but I doubt It could be terribly effective in practice.
I feel your fear, and I think Obama would make a far superior President, no doubt. I wouldn't dissuade you from voting for him by any means. But for me, personally, there's something just not cricket about voting for someone because the other guy is worse. It's a small thing, but it speaks volumes about who we are as a culture, and in a not-so-grandiose way, I'm deciding to make my small stand.
I'll appreciate anyone who takes the high road and doesn't bash my candidate because I won't vote for theirs.
Florida 2000 Election Results
Gore needed ~2000 votes, and Nader got 96,837. But Pat Buchannan got 17,356 as the Reform Party's candidate, Harry Browne got 18,856 as a Libertarian candidate, and two other independents also got more than 2000.
But it's easier to blame the other guy than accept a loss.
I think a lot of people here on slashdot would like to vot for a third party. It's just that if we act sincerely, we end up more fucked than if we act strategically. Nader got, what, half a million votes? If those votes had gone to Gore and then Kerry, we wouldn't have had 8 years of Bushy shitness. Sure, those people might have liked Nader better, but instead of their candidate, or even the next best candidate in their view, we get ... dubya.
I think it is a logical fallacy (and not to mention a little arrogant) to assume that if Nader wasn't an option in those elections that all half million votes would have immediately defaulted to the nearest Democratic candidate. You're waxing over the fact that most Nader voters, content to vote for a third party candidate like Nader, would probably not think twice about voting for another third party candidate that more closely matched their ideals.
Let's also be clear that it's not a sin to vote for your ideals rather than for the compromise. Some people are simply tired of basing their vote on fear of the other guy and want to make an ideological stand, which is their right. Of course gets them demonized because there are plenty of people who get pissed off at the short-term consequences of this, but let's be clear - George W. Bush is what made the last eight years hell for a lot of people, not Ralph Nader. Direct your anger appropriately.
And if your candidate didn't win, it might be prudent to consider that it may have been a result of their own mismanagement. I don't see why its Nader's fault if Kerry or Gore couldn't score a win against Bush. Gore didn't even win the state he was a senator from, nor Clinton's home state...that is traditionally seen as a sign of poor campaigning.
Schneier did a piece on this not too long ago. He included this handy link to a PDF with a good rundown of your legal rights when it comes to taking photographs (hint: you have more than you might think).
According to Johansson, there appears to be two separate issues. One affects only AMD-equipped PCs sold by Hewlett-Packard Co. "The problem is that HP, apparently along with other OEMs, deploys the same image to Intel-based computers that they do to AMD-based computers," said Johansson. "Because the image for both Intel and AMD is the same, all have the intelppm.sys driver installed and running. That driver provides power management on Intel-based computers. On an AMD-based computer, amdk8.sys provides the same functionality."
Running the intelppm.sys driver on an AMD-powered PC isn't normally an issue, but on the first reboot after a service pack installation, it causes "a big problem," Johansson said. The machine either fails to boot or crashes and immediately reboots.
The other problem, according to Johansson, also seems to affect only AMD machines, and involves an error message indicating trouble with the PC's BIOS. Johansson said that the ensuing recommendation to update the BIOS is "most likely not your problem," but said that the problem may be isolated to a specific motherboard. "Possibly, it is related to computers with the Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe motherboard in them," he said.