Wouldn't it be more effective for Ireland to simply advertise the dangers of using MSIE?
The task sounds easy, but it isn't. Users are notoriously persistent in ignoring all but the most extreme measures.
"You shouldn't click YES on anything, you should read it" is usually interpreted as "click yes on anything without reading it". I'm not kidding, I have to do some end-user support from time to time, and it's horrific. I've told some people 10 times not to use their administrator account for day to day use, and they will still go right in or complain when you change the password.
So, as a matter of effectiveness, this is probably a good temporary solution.
I just wish people with that much determination would concentrate on fixing the bugs, instead of exploiting them... so much wasted talent.
Despite that some people tend to abuse these faults for bad things, I think it's a good thing that there are people out there finding holes in existing code. It can only result in better code, and better systems.
Then again, I may still believe that the human race is a species striving for self-improvement, rather than self-destruction.
we will get burned some more by processing untrusted data (stuff off the net) using any language that has unsafe memory operations
True, but that compiler/interpreter for your language with safe memory operations is no doubt written in one of the unsafe languages. It's true that you're limiting the possible exploits, but when an interpreter has a buffer overrun you're back where you started. There are also other problems than buffer overruns that affect security, that have very little to do with "pointer magic".
We're going to keep seeing these problems until we start handling all unsafe data as if it's got a contagious disease, which means handling it in an isolated environment like a VM.
And the VM will have an exploit that can be used to overwrite and address here, move some instructions there, and back to where we started. Again, we have limited the possibility but not eliminated it.
There are no fail-safe guarantees that something is going to be secure, no matter what language you're using, no matter what operating system, no matter how good a programmer the developer is. The problem is that we are only human, and no matter how good the API or the language, our own limited brain will make sure that we make mistakes.
We as humans are supposed to be evolved beyond animals.
Where did you get this idea? By every definition and concept, humans ARE animals.
If any creature in this universe were to evolve beyond animals that would mean that the entity leaves the realm of biological structures.
Surely you recoginize that we are biological creatures (animals), so what could you possibly mean?
Yes, we are still animals in the biological sence of the word. I was more referring to the filosophical (or biblical, if you rather, although I'm not too much a fan of that word) sence. We are the only animal species on this planet that has a/several code of laws, and several religions that should teach us the difference between right and wrong. Animals (in the filosophical/biblical sence) don't have that.
The fact is, the only way to battle child pornography is the old fashioned way: investigating, going to court, and locking away the people that made the wrong choice.
True, but unfortunatly with the current state of the internet it becomes all to easy for people to hide. Think about anonymous proxies in far away countries. Getting the necessary court orders will take weeks if not months, and then getting the cooperation will take an equally long time. By that time, the logs from the abused server have long disappeared.
AFAIK the best thing a government could do to prevent child abuse would be to get a stack of servers and a fat pipe and archive all the porn they could get their hands on.
Would this be child-porn or regular porn? I assume for a moment that this will be child pornography, as I doubt that they would be intrested in anything else. Isn't that sort of degrading to the people who fell victim to this sort of thing? Isn't it very disturbing for a child to realise as an adult that the traumatic experience of his/her childhood is currently for sale from the government?
As long as sickos are sitting at home wanking over their keyboards, they aren't stalking kids on their way home from school. Of course it's a different matter if they're actually paying for it, but censorship just encourages people to hand over money by increasing the value of the material.
So, you're saying that any pedophile who downloads pornography from the internet will not go out and abduct a child. I don't think that statement is completely correct. Whenever there is an arrest of a person who's abducted/abused a child, there usually is an entire library of DVDs/CDs/photoalbums found.
All this moral crap from politicians and the media is ignoring the actual problems of child abuse and making the world a more unpleasant and scary place for children, just because the politcians and journalists are themselves filled with hate and their cowardly minds filled with terror.
Yes, spreading panic through the general populace is the 21st century medias thing. But that's what gets the ratings. Which one of the following headlines would you read: "Man abuses child and gets caught" or "Vicious predator of children captured by police while hunting for prey".
We should not be making parents afraid to let their kids go and play in the park and telling them to stay at home and watch TV. We certainly shouldn't be suppressing freedom of speech because that makes the world a much worse place for ALL children to grow up in.
I understand what you're trying to say, and I agree. We should be able to let our children frolic in the park and not worry about the people who might take them. We shouldn't block 90% of the internet because 0.01% of the internet contains child pornography (pardon the made-up numbers).
A man from France recently confessed to the charges of sexual assault and murder of over 10 children. As a parent, I'd be worried too if that was on the news. The reason for that is, because this man went undetected for over 15 years, and most of these cases take this long to solve.
It is there because animals on earth needs this.. when an animal do this... we wont call this pron.... we humans are also animals.
We as humans are supposed to be evolved beyond animals. Normal humans do not hump their (or others) offsping. If animals could speak, do you think that the young ones would be happy about that?
In India older.. grand.. people used to kiss their grand childern(less than a year) on their genetals.. expressing the happnies.
And in some countries the age of consent is 14... Those are cultural differences, but that doesn't make rape any less rape. When in India you molest a 14 year old (or younger) you'll get the same treatment you'll get anywhere else.
Any restrictions imposed on human expression... will take an another form/means to express it.
You speak as if you're dealing with a form of art, or freedom of speech. We're talking about the abuse and rape of children and teenagers, and the fact that a medium is being used to distribute this kind of thing.
don't know what is child pron...
You're on slashdot and don't know what pornography is?
slashdot... any one of you, ever happend to speek to an Child porn producer? for that matter porn producer?
Yes, I've spoken to a porn producer. They're just people like everyone else, making money off of the desires and lusts of people. I've never spoken to a child porn producer, but I gather that they are just people like everyone else, only their lusts lie elsewhere and cater to a different audience.
Why those kids happend to be part of porn?
A better question perhaps is, what happens to these children after they've been part of porn? What is the psychological impact on these children?
Just like the idea of charging a fractional penny to send an email and collecting a fractional penny when you receive one, so that email costs and revenues are balanced for the average person, but costs are astronomical for the spammer. Interesting idea, now how do you convert the planet over?
Pay for e-mail? You mean like sort of a bit tax? I'd say be careful what you wish for, you may get it.
European governments have been tossing this idea around ever since internet became more than an ubergeek-toy. It's amazing how the legislative branch never seems to understand how internet works, so just tax the entire thing.
Re:Reading OpenGL tutorials is such a harsh remind
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OpenGL 2.0 Released
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· Score: 5, Funny
To a web/enterprise programmer like myself (who lately has been using Java), reading opengL tutorials kind of reminds me that no matter how good a programmer, learning an API extensively is most of the work.
APIs are indeed most of the work. Learning a language completely is simple (unless it's perl, and no, that's not a flamebait), but it's the APIs that make you an effective coder. When I first started web-coding, I knew next to nothing. It took me a while to find my way around things in perl (the Camel book helped). I'm pretty sure if tomorrow I need to do a Java Enterprise project, I'll be messing about for a couple of weeks in finding my way. Unfortunatly this is a fact that many managers seem to forget.
Fuck I'm just totally lost staring at openGL code:) Anyone else feel inadquate ?:)
When I first read the openGL API I wanted to run to the bookstore and get lots of books on the subject. When I thought about it for a while, I wanted to run to the bookstore and get lots of math books teaching me the skills I need to do things. When I got a girlfriend, I gave up on the "running to the bookstore for knowledge" and started thinking about other things. When said girlfriend and I broke up, I was preparing for endterms. When I got a job, I thought "I'll have time in the evenings to learn new stuff". When I was working for 3 months I discovered that I really didn't want to code at home anymore. When they fired me (yesterday) I thought "I wish I'd spent some time learning openGL."
Re:Star Trek is dead, has been for awhile
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Should Star Trek Die?
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· Score: 3, Funny
While most of my time I spend solving networking problems & coding webinterfaces I'd like to congratulate the parent poster on his keen remark. My rant isn't on the FOSS community, but the webdevelopment trend in general.
Why is that everyone in the FOSS community always wants EVERYTHING to be a web-based application.
I _REALLY_ don't know. I've been irritated by it as well as a developer. When I started out working for the company I currently work for I thought "OK, a few webbased projects every now and then, easy enough.". Three years later, most of the coding I do are still webbased projects.
Is it so hard to imagine that some people really want application state, a really responsive UI, the ability to work with data without many round-trips to the server, etc?
The funny thing about it is, most people don't care and don't know the difference between a browser and a client anyway. Of all the clients I've happily provided with a webinterface, there has been only one that said "This just isn't working for me".
Perhaps we are seeing so much webapps because they are so easy to develop compared to "classic" GUI apps. Even if we weren't to resort to using C, C++ or java, we'd still be dealing with event handlers, signal handlers or signals and slots (whatever rocks your world). Webapplications don't have that, and simply have input through parameters or STDIN, and output through STDOUT in a language that every geek and his trained monkey speak fluently.
By the time you've done this for a year, you've developed some sort of toolkit that allows you to easily make HTML tables from an SQL query, and webdevelopment just became 10 times faster. And that's the kind of thing the people upstairs like to see: a codemonkey that spits out code in days in a system nobody can migrate away from easily because the toolkit/perl-module/php-include is hidden safely on the machine where the customer can't access it.
Webmonkeys in the long run can be x times more efficient than real programmers, and not just because of the fact that it's easier and doesn't require the knowledge of pointers, but the fact that once you have the toolkit you will hardly ever have to write anything new. HTML 4.01 is still widely in use and that won't change very soon (but still, it's very little work to switch over if you use clean HTML), SQL won't change very soon either (but sometimes you have to use another DB and do some late night coding on your DBH-layer), and the rest is just a few lines of perl code (or PHP, or whatever...).
What the customer gets is an application that does what he needed (some addressbook, some view over statistical data, something or other), developed in a small amount of time, accessible over the internet (hopefully in a secure fashion), and the joy of it all (what interest them most) is that it is cheaper than the solution with the GUI client.
By all means, this is not a rant against the use of GUI applications. Sometimes I'd give real money to escape the boredom and lack of features of HTML and cousins. I'd love to spend some time hacking together something really nifty in C++ with QT, or whatever widget set I was in the mood for that day. But when I start thinking that I'm going to have to explain that the code for a GUI app is horribly more complex to maintain than the couple of SQL statements and HTML templates to my manager, I know I'll have to explain my toolkit to the poor sod who'll take over my work once I'm fired.
So, perhaps that is the reason why I have to do so many webprojects. Not because I'm good at it, but I've made a tool that only I and one other know the full internals of, and we both became fast developers because of it. Maybe it is because our customers can't afford to send me in to C/C++/Java heaven for the next 3 to 6 months, or maybe because the GUI development goes to all.NET programmers these days (which sa
Finally I could go install that central heating control system in hell since it had started freezing there, and then the lord of lies calls me to cancel the order
Shit, even seat belts aren't mandatory for insurance...
Nope, they're not, but guess what... Down here, it's illegal not to wear a seatbelt if you're in a car (you need a permit NOT to wear a seatbelt). The fines are pretty hefty.
But insurance companies really DO want to give you a discount for being a safe driver.
Insurance companies down here have another attitude. Anyone under the age of 26 pays nearly twice as much for their car insurance because they're a part of a "risk group". It used to be so that you could take "safe driving" courses, and if you passed their test you'd get a discount, but now they claim that most people under 26 use alcohol and drugs on weekends, so that again these people are a risk group, even with the course certificate (which didn't come cheap BTW).
shit, I have such a good record with my current insurer that I could wreck my car tomorrow and my insurance wouldn't go up a dime.
Try it, really, you'd be amazed how much insurance companies would rather give you the finger than simply pay their due. I've had some bad experiences with several insurance companies over the years, and I haven't even had a car accident yet. They 've screwed me over because I didn't have a drivers liscence for 3 years (which actually meant that I didn't have a drivers liscense AND insurance for 3 years). They've screwed me over with the fact that I was younger than 26, after which they screwed me over with their course and revoking the discount after 3 years. And that's just car insurance.
A couple of years ago, an electrical fire destroyed the building I lived in. The insurance claim went unprocessed for 9 months, and payment took another 6 months. When I got a new place to live in, I had to spend a serious amount of life savings just to have some furniture because the insurance company I had then was too busy counting the cash they earned.
This little ploy here, is just another thing for them to test and see how far they can push it. Big-brother issues aside, I wouldn't be amazed if this kind of thing becomes mandatory for full coverage car insurance in the next 10 years.
Currently, 86 percent of the total spam volume is coming from the States.
Time to start RBL'ing all of the US then, I guess.
Although I'm kidding, once upon a time simply ignoring incoming connection from Asia and Russia would effectively reduce spam for certain companies. Of course, they couldn't do business in those countries, but most of them never would.
Spammers migrated to the Netherlands for a while, and that's one of the countries most of the customers I work for happen to do business with, and now I need to rely on the "traditional" means (read: spamassassin, RBLs, etc).
Why don't we have a secure alternative for e-mail yet? *sigh*
After they build it, you keep them as your IT department to maintain everything. No service contracts...not even to Redhat or SUSE or anyone. Now, how is that more expensive than the MS solution?
Funny you should mention this. People generally use service contracts with 3rd party companies because it is more expensive to hire people to do a job, than it is to pay a yearly fee, and be covered X hours a month.
The country I live in, has a very agressive tax policy. For instance, when you work in my country, and your net wage is 1.250, the state adds 30% taxes to that for the individual, and an extra 7% for healthcare and wellfare (I hope I spelled this right). This means the company actually has to pay you 1.250*1.37.
Most Americans stare at you in disbelief when you tell them this, but this is only the beginning of the story. The company itself has to pay the goverment additional taxes (about 30% of your net income), and additional contributions to healthcare, welfare and pension funds.
Now, let's start talking benefits. Your employee will want a cellphone and a subscription if he has to call a lot for work and is on location. Wait a minute, did you just say "on location"? Hell, throw in a small car (nothing fancy) that needs to be leased every month. And then, you need to have a pensionfund and insurance for ALL of those employees, because once you decided it would be a good thing when the company was small.
These employees also want leave of abscense, certification (which the company needs from time to time), expenses (hey, those cars don't drive themselves you know). To top it all off, if you want to fire someone who is out of his trial time (which by standard is 30 days, but can be extended up to 90 days for high wages), you have to keep them in service for at least another 3 months to over 3 years (depending on how long they've worked for your company), or just get them out of the building and pay the equivalent sum (and let's not forget taxes).
Now look at the option of paying those 1500 a month for a company that has a multitude of people only a phonecall or e-mail away for that service contract. You'll get 20 hours of technical support for that price, and they are often more efficient than that staff of 10 people who are constantly nagging for more benefits. Instead, you hire one or two guys who do the grunt work, and the rest goes to a company who'll service you faster than you can walk to the IT department and shout at the nearest techie.
I obviously am out of my league here and have no idea how any of this works, I'm just wondering. Can anyone set me straight here?
I hope this was enlightening, when I first started counting how much I made I was disappointed, now I know why we're understaffed and pay so much money for those damned service contracts in the first place.
PS: I typed the € symbol everywhere, but I'm too lazy to type € everywhere now.
365 (or 366) days in a year is too close to 3 x 10 ^ 2, and dividing by 3s is just messy, so we'll say 1 000 days in a year. That gives us 1.46 x 10 ^ 39 years.
Now let's build a beowulf cluster and start mapping those hashes.;)
I also went to see this with my (now ex) girlfriend on our first date. She picked the movie and I thought to myself: "Kubric isn't that bad". Happily thinking about A Clockwork Orange (which is a must-see), and 2001 A Space Odyssey I purchased a ticket.
10 minutes into the movie I'm staring at Nicole Kidmans nipples, thinking to myself "My God, those things are huge on the big screen" trying to supress a chuckle at the thought. About an hour later Tom Cruise is walking around in a castle with people prancing around naked (amongst other things), and my first thought is "Is this like a subtle hint from her?".
On our second date she chose again, and this time she chose Cruel Intentions, which contains a scene where one of the main character performs cunnilingus using the alphabet. Again my first thought is "Subtle hint?"
When we were together for about a year, and went to see or rent several movies, it turned out that each movie she chose always had sex or explicit references to sex in it. She would just pick something at random, and about 10 or 20 minutes into the movie there would be a pair of breasts on the screen.
Here I was happily reading slashdot not being reminded of this dreadful piece of trash that I once rented. It's not just the fact that it's based on a computer game that makes this movie bad, it's the fact that the actors themselves are pulsating with an aura of lousy and the script was written with a lobotomized audience in mind. I usually make a point of it to watch every movie I rent, no matter how bad it is, but this one was the first (and currently only) exception.
Highlander 2
I'm a little biassed when it comes to highlander, because honestly I never got it. There's lots of people running around with swords in their pants/coats/undergarments (that happen to magically disappear smoothly into their clothing when they're not swinging them around no less), cutting off eachothers head with their credo : There can be only one. In the sequel however, it seems that we're doing timetravel or something icky like that, oh and let's not forget that Sean Connery comes back from the dead.
But please, let's not forget Mortal Kombat, the movie not the game. The original was bad taste in my opinion, but they've made several sequels.
Another good one is Resurrection which tries to be the next se7en, but fails to intrigue after Christopher Lambert utters "He's trying to rebuild the body of Christ".
Of course, RAID-10 would be better, but that would involve spending money...
The look on a managers face when you tell them both disks have become useless because one of them is dead is worth millions... That's not just spending, that's overspending:)
Intel still has a couple of advantages, and one of them is the heat problem that comes with AMDs. OK, in a normal case you'd never notice because you basicly have the room to fit in airconditioning if you wanted to. In a 1U case however, you have to stick to about 1cm (that's less than half an inch, for those who don't know the metric system) for a fan.
On a 1U with an intel on the motherboard, I've rarely had any cooling problems. On a 1U with an AMD I've on regular basis had problems. The money customers save on buying an AMD, they'll have to spend on buying a 2U instead of a 1U.
When it comes to desktop PCs I've found that home-consumers these days are sold a lot of AMD as well, although that may be because I know a lot of gamers. But the truth is that in local computer shops (which are horribly expensive, btw) I see a lot more AMD machines than I see intel. Of course, the brand machines will have an intel, but IMHO brand machines for home use are consumer-stupidity (unless it's warranty you're after).
I know that WEP isn't the most perfect solution there is, but it seems to me that it'll be more practical than redecorating the office/home.
OK, WEP can be hacked, but it really depends on the amount of traffic there is and the length of the key in question, and to be honest, if you'd really like to be secure you shouldn't use wireless anyway.
Wireless is convenient, and looks clean. That's why it is such a (moderate) success. Anyone with a laptop agrees that dragging around 100ft of cable from the room with the ethernet plug to the living room looks rather silly. A wireless network is much easier, and avoids having a spouse muttering underneath her breath or children tripping over the cable (and possibly janking a valueble piece of laptop from your lap).
Buying wifi-proof wallpaper just seems so over the top, even for government agencies, but everyone knows they just want to spend your hard earned taxes on something completely useless (there, I've said it, and I've been waiting to say that ever since I mailed my taxforms).
I've been using linux for almost 8 years now. I was introduced to it the usual way: a friend came over with a slackware CD saying that if I was really tired of Windows and wanted something I could do with as I pleased, I should try this.
We're 8 years later now, and a lot of things have changed for linux. It's stepped out of geekdom and entered the corporate world, taking small steps at a time and the occasional leap. From a relatively small group of technologically very adept people, it has grown to become the new pet-OS of wannabe-geeks and even for a while Linux threatened to become a buzz-word for certain companies to shamelessly promote themselves on an IT market that had suffered a damaging blow.
Three years ago I was at a school that gave introduction courses in linux as a member of a jury for (pardon my bad English) practical final. I was judging several projects that were made during the course of 9 weeks of internships in companies, and over half of them were made using linux. Of the 10 groups that presented a linux project, only two of them were capable of presenting a flawless project.
What really got me at that moment was, that even though linux had come so far in those 5 years, many last year students hadn't even the faintest idea how their OS really worked. The argument most used for the use of linux was that it was free (as in beer), and someone even managed to blurt out that linux was actually a product from Sun. After three days of judging, I came to a startling conclusion. Many of the linux projects I had seen were dodgy at best, the students had very little grasp on the tools they used, and many webprojects failed to provide even the simplest security to their database as I happely added SQL on their URL and displayed lists of unencrypted passwords.
The Windows projects I saw however were a lot more solid. SQL Insertion failed on nearly every project, and most students were up to speed on the technologies they had used. Most of the Windows projects were finished, or nearly finished, while the linux projects seemed to have a lot of rough edges (in fact a girl actually told me : "Don't do that, that corrupts our database and we don't know why").
What does this have to do with Linux on the desktop, you might ask. Well, if 4 years of training in programming and networking hasn't even thaught you the simplest of hacks (SQL Insertion), and you're practically lost without a GUI to configure your networkcard (but manage to boast about your networking project), there is either a fundamental problem with your education or your unwillingness to use google. The truth behind it is "ease of use". MS Visual Studio comes with a bunch of tools in one package, a graphical XML schema editor, a graphical database management system, click-n-paint GUI creation, and to top it off each of those students gets 4 years of excessive training in all of those tools.
Linux on the other hand, has most (if not all) of these things, but students don't know them. Those that do have knowledge of these tools are often complaining that they ran into problems (again because of lack of training, or googling). Many have spent two days finding out how to install a certain program, and most just give up asking their supervisors for aid (which they often can't provide).
This is the problem with linux, and this is why the linux desktop will never be as succesfull as we hope it will be: our diversity in tools and lack of proper bundling. Distributions do a good job at providing us with defaults, but provide too much goodness. Most linux machines have at least 7 compilers and interpreters installed by default, 6 MP3 players, 10 office suites, and horror of horrors 2 desktop environments.
Teaching students all these things is an impossible task, and that's why they aren't prepared for the choices they have to make when they are going to actively use linux. And educating users on using office package A, while there exists at least one package for every letter of the alphabet each wi
Maybe they are, but for the most part I've been ignoring Real Networks since 1999. Their players suck at stability, and for linux they are broken at best. If someone hands me over a.rm-file (or any of its variants) I usually end up saying "You've got to be kidding me, right?".
It's not so much the fact that I don't like the company, it's the fact that I dislike the way their software behaved at the time. It was constantly crashing, refused to play most of it's own files referring only to some cryptic error number nobody even bothered looking up. It was back to mpeg back then, and I didn't regret it really.
At the moment, I don't know how their software behaves, but from what I've heard things haven't changed that much. So I will happily lead an.rm-less existance, enjoying my xvid, divx and mpeg2.
Slashdot Mirror
How to write a slashdot comment 101: ;)
don't ever bother to check your spelling
The task sounds easy, but it isn't. Users are notoriously persistent in ignoring all but the most extreme measures.
"You shouldn't click YES on anything, you should read it" is usually interpreted as "click yes on anything without reading it". I'm not kidding, I have to do some end-user support from time to time, and it's horrific. I've told some people 10 times not to use their administrator account for day to day use, and they will still go right in or complain when you change the password.
So, as a matter of effectiveness, this is probably a good temporary solution.
Despite that some people tend to abuse these faults for bad things, I think it's a good thing that there are people out there finding holes in existing code. It can only result in better code, and better systems.
Then again, I may still believe that the human race is a species striving for self-improvement, rather than self-destruction.
Mod me down as flamebait for this one
True, but that compiler/interpreter for your language with safe memory operations is no doubt written in one of the unsafe languages. It's true that you're limiting the possible exploits, but when an interpreter has a buffer overrun you're back where you started. There are also other problems than buffer overruns that affect security, that have very little to do with "pointer magic".
And the VM will have an exploit that can be used to overwrite and address here, move some instructions there, and back to where we started. Again, we have limited the possibility but not eliminated it.
There are no fail-safe guarantees that something is going to be secure, no matter what language you're using, no matter what operating system, no matter how good a programmer the developer is. The problem is that we are only human, and no matter how good the API or the language, our own limited brain will make sure that we make mistakes.
Yes, we are still animals in the biological sence of the word. I was more referring to the filosophical (or biblical, if you rather, although I'm not too much a fan of that word) sence. We are the only animal species on this planet that has a/several code of laws, and several religions that should teach us the difference between right and wrong. Animals (in the filosophical/biblical sence) don't have that.
True, but unfortunatly with the current state of the internet it becomes all to easy for people to hide. Think about anonymous proxies in far away countries. Getting the necessary court orders will take weeks if not months, and then getting the cooperation will take an equally long time. By that time, the logs from the abused server have long disappeared.
Would this be child-porn or regular porn? I assume for a moment that this will be child pornography, as I doubt that they would be intrested in anything else. Isn't that sort of degrading to the people who fell victim to this sort of thing? Isn't it very disturbing for a child to realise as an adult that the traumatic experience of his/her childhood is currently for sale from the government?
So, you're saying that any pedophile who downloads pornography from the internet will not go out and abduct a child. I don't think that statement is completely correct. Whenever there is an arrest of a person who's abducted/abused a child, there usually is an entire library of DVDs/CDs/photoalbums found.
Yes, spreading panic through the general populace is the 21st century medias thing. But that's what gets the ratings. Which one of the following headlines would you read: "Man abuses child and gets caught" or "Vicious predator of children captured by police while hunting for prey".
I understand what you're trying to say, and I agree. We should be able to let our children frolic in the park and not worry about the people who might take them. We shouldn't block 90% of the internet because 0.01% of the internet contains child pornography (pardon the made-up numbers).
A man from France recently confessed to the charges of sexual assault and murder of over 10 children. As a parent, I'd be worried too if that was on the news. The reason for that is, because this man went undetected for over 15 years, and most of these cases take this long to solve.
We as humans are supposed to be evolved beyond animals. Normal humans do not hump their (or others) offsping. If animals could speak, do you think that the young ones would be happy about that?
And in some countries the age of consent is 14... Those are cultural differences, but that doesn't make rape any less rape. When in India you molest a 14 year old (or younger) you'll get the same treatment you'll get anywhere else.
You speak as if you're dealing with a form of art, or freedom of speech. We're talking about the abuse and rape of children and teenagers, and the fact that a medium is being used to distribute this kind of thing.
You're on slashdot and don't know what pornography is?
Yes, I've spoken to a porn producer. They're just people like everyone else, making money off of the desires and lusts of people. I've never spoken to a child porn producer, but I gather that they are just people like everyone else, only their lusts lie elsewhere and cater to a different audience.
A better question perhaps is, what happens to these children after they've been part of porn? What is the psychological impact on these children?
Pay for e-mail? You mean like sort of a bit tax? I'd say be careful what you wish for, you may get it.
European governments have been tossing this idea around ever since internet became more than an ubergeek-toy. It's amazing how the legislative branch never seems to understand how internet works, so just tax the entire thing.
APIs are indeed most of the work. Learning a language completely is simple (unless it's perl, and no, that's not a flamebait), but it's the APIs that make you an effective coder. When I first started web-coding, I knew next to nothing. It took me a while to find my way around things in perl (the Camel book helped). I'm pretty sure if tomorrow I need to do a Java Enterprise project, I'll be messing about for a couple of weeks in finding my way. Unfortunatly this is a fact that many managers seem to forget.
When I first read the openGL API I wanted to run to the bookstore and get lots of books on the subject.
When I thought about it for a while, I wanted to run to the bookstore and get lots of math books teaching me the skills I need to do things.
When I got a girlfriend, I gave up on the "running to the bookstore for knowledge" and started thinking about other things.
When said girlfriend and I broke up, I was preparing for endterms.
When I got a job, I thought "I'll have time in the evenings to learn new stuff".
When I was working for 3 months I discovered that I really didn't want to code at home anymore.
When they fired me (yesterday) I thought "I wish I'd spent some time learning openGL."
He isn't dead, Jim
While most of my time I spend solving networking problems & coding webinterfaces I'd like to congratulate the parent poster on his keen remark. My rant isn't on the FOSS community, but the webdevelopment trend in general.
I _REALLY_ don't know. I've been irritated by it as well as a developer. When I started out working for the company I currently work for I thought "OK, a few webbased projects every now and then, easy enough.". Three years later, most of the coding I do are still webbased projects.
The funny thing about it is, most people don't care and don't know the difference between a browser and a client anyway. Of all the clients I've happily provided with a webinterface, there has been only one that said "This just isn't working for me".
Perhaps we are seeing so much webapps because they are so easy to develop compared to "classic" GUI apps. Even if we weren't to resort to using C, C++ or java, we'd still be dealing with event handlers, signal handlers or signals and slots (whatever rocks your world). Webapplications don't have that, and simply have input through parameters or STDIN, and output through STDOUT in a language that every geek and his trained monkey speak fluently.
By the time you've done this for a year, you've developed some sort of toolkit that allows you to easily make HTML tables from an SQL query, and webdevelopment just became 10 times faster. And that's the kind of thing the people upstairs like to see: a codemonkey that spits out code in days in a system nobody can migrate away from easily because the toolkit/perl-module/php-include is hidden safely on the machine where the customer can't access it.
Webmonkeys in the long run can be x times more efficient than real programmers, and not just because of the fact that it's easier and doesn't require the knowledge of pointers, but the fact that once you have the toolkit you will hardly ever have to write anything new. HTML 4.01 is still widely in use and that won't change very soon (but still, it's very little work to switch over if you use clean HTML), SQL won't change very soon either (but sometimes you have to use another DB and do some late night coding on your DBH-layer), and the rest is just a few lines of perl code (or PHP, or whatever...).
What the customer gets is an application that does what he needed (some addressbook, some view over statistical data, something or other), developed in a small amount of time, accessible over the internet (hopefully in a secure fashion), and the joy of it all (what interest them most) is that it is cheaper than the solution with the GUI client.
By all means, this is not a rant against the use of GUI applications. Sometimes I'd give real money to escape the boredom and lack of features of HTML and cousins. I'd love to spend some time hacking together something really nifty in C++ with QT, or whatever widget set I was in the mood for that day. But when I start thinking that I'm going to have to explain that the code for a GUI app is horribly more complex to maintain than the couple of SQL statements and HTML templates to my manager, I know I'll have to explain my toolkit to the poor sod who'll take over my work once I'm fired.
So, perhaps that is the reason why I have to do so many webprojects. Not because I'm good at it, but I've made a tool that only I and one other know the full internals of, and we both became fast developers because of it. Maybe it is because our customers can't afford to send me in to C/C++/Java heaven for the next 3 to 6 months, or maybe because the GUI development goes to all .NET programmers these days (which sa
Finally I could go install that central heating control system in hell since it had started freezing there, and then the lord of lies calls me to cancel the order
Confucius say: "Man who write on slashdot about possibility of getting lucky, reduces chances to next to nothing"
Good thing we were talking about spelling ;)
Nope, they're not, but guess what... Down here, it's illegal not to wear a seatbelt if you're in a car (you need a permit NOT to wear a seatbelt). The fines are pretty hefty.
Insurance companies down here have another attitude. Anyone under the age of 26 pays nearly twice as much for their car insurance because they're a part of a "risk group". It used to be so that you could take "safe driving" courses, and if you passed their test you'd get a discount, but now they claim that most people under 26 use alcohol and drugs on weekends, so that again these people are a risk group, even with the course certificate (which didn't come cheap BTW).
Try it, really, you'd be amazed how much insurance companies would rather give you the finger than simply pay their due. I've had some bad experiences with several insurance companies over the years, and I haven't even had a car accident yet. They 've screwed me over because I didn't have a drivers liscence for 3 years (which actually meant that I didn't have a drivers liscense AND insurance for 3 years). They've screwed me over with the fact that I was younger than 26, after which they screwed me over with their course and revoking the discount after 3 years. And that's just car insurance.
A couple of years ago, an electrical fire destroyed the building I lived in. The insurance claim went unprocessed for 9 months, and payment took another 6 months. When I got a new place to live in, I had to spend a serious amount of life savings just to have some furniture because the insurance company I had then was too busy counting the cash they earned.
This little ploy here, is just another thing for them to test and see how far they can push it. Big-brother issues aside, I wouldn't be amazed if this kind of thing becomes mandatory for full coverage car insurance in the next 10 years.
Time to start RBL'ing all of the US then, I guess.
Although I'm kidding, once upon a time simply ignoring incoming connection from Asia and Russia would effectively reduce spam for certain companies. Of course, they couldn't do business in those countries, but most of them never would.
Spammers migrated to the Netherlands for a while, and that's one of the countries most of the customers I work for happen to do business with, and now I need to rely on the "traditional" means (read: spamassassin, RBLs, etc).
Why don't we have a secure alternative for e-mail yet? *sigh*
Funny you should mention this. People generally use service contracts with 3rd party companies because it is more expensive to hire people to do a job, than it is to pay a yearly fee, and be covered X hours a month.
The country I live in, has a very agressive tax policy. For instance, when you work in my country, and your net wage is 1.250, the state adds 30% taxes to that for the individual, and an extra 7% for healthcare and wellfare (I hope I spelled this right). This means the company actually has to pay you 1.250*1.37.
Most Americans stare at you in disbelief when you tell them this, but this is only the beginning of the story. The company itself has to pay the goverment additional taxes (about 30% of your net income), and additional contributions to healthcare, welfare and pension funds.
Now, let's start talking benefits. Your employee will want a cellphone and a subscription if he has to call a lot for work and is on location. Wait a minute, did you just say "on location"? Hell, throw in a small car (nothing fancy) that needs to be leased every month. And then, you need to have a pensionfund and insurance for ALL of those employees, because once you decided it would be a good thing when the company was small.
These employees also want leave of abscense, certification (which the company needs from time to time), expenses (hey, those cars don't drive themselves you know). To top it all off, if you want to fire someone who is out of his trial time (which by standard is 30 days, but can be extended up to 90 days for high wages), you have to keep them in service for at least another 3 months to over 3 years (depending on how long they've worked for your company), or just get them out of the building and pay the equivalent sum (and let's not forget taxes).
Now look at the option of paying those 1500 a month for a company that has a multitude of people only a phonecall or e-mail away for that service contract. You'll get 20 hours of technical support for that price, and they are often more efficient than that staff of 10 people who are constantly nagging for more benefits. Instead, you hire one or two guys who do the grunt work, and the rest goes to a company who'll service you faster than you can walk to the IT department and shout at the nearest techie.
I hope this was enlightening, when I first started counting how much I made I was disappointed, now I know why we're understaffed and pay so much money for those damned service contracts in the first place.
PS: I typed the € symbol everywhere, but I'm too lazy to type € everywhere now.
Now let's build a beowulf cluster and start mapping those hashes. ;)
I also went to see this with my (now ex) girlfriend on our first date. She picked the movie and I thought to myself: "Kubric isn't that bad". Happily thinking about A Clockwork Orange (which is a must-see), and 2001 A Space Odyssey I purchased a ticket.
10 minutes into the movie I'm staring at Nicole Kidmans nipples, thinking to myself "My God, those things are huge on the big screen" trying to supress a chuckle at the thought. About an hour later Tom Cruise is walking around in a castle with people prancing around naked (amongst other things), and my first thought is "Is this like a subtle hint from her?".
On our second date she chose again, and this time she chose Cruel Intentions, which contains a scene where one of the main character performs cunnilingus using the alphabet. Again my first thought is "Subtle hint?"
When we were together for about a year, and went to see or rent several movies, it turned out that each movie she chose always had sex or explicit references to sex in it. She would just pick something at random, and about 10 or 20 minutes into the movie there would be a pair of breasts on the screen.
I miss that girl...
Here I was happily reading slashdot not being reminded of this dreadful piece of trash that I once rented. It's not just the fact that it's based on a computer game that makes this movie bad, it's the fact that the actors themselves are pulsating with an aura of lousy and the script was written with a lobotomized audience in mind. I usually make a point of it to watch every movie I rent, no matter how bad it is, but this one was the first (and currently only) exception.
I'm a little biassed when it comes to highlander, because honestly I never got it. There's lots of people running around with swords in their pants/coats/undergarments (that happen to magically disappear smoothly into their clothing when they're not swinging them around no less), cutting off eachothers head with their credo : There can be only one. In the sequel however, it seems that we're doing timetravel or something icky like that, oh and let's not forget that Sean Connery comes back from the dead.
But please, let's not forget Mortal Kombat, the movie not the game. The original was bad taste in my opinion, but they've made several sequels.
Another good one is Resurrection which tries to be the next se7en, but fails to intrigue after Christopher Lambert utters "He's trying to rebuild the body of Christ".
The look on a managers face when you tell them both disks have become useless because one of them is dead is worth millions... That's not just spending, that's overspending :)
Intel still has a couple of advantages, and one of them is the heat problem that comes with AMDs. OK, in a normal case you'd never notice because you basicly have the room to fit in airconditioning if you wanted to. In a 1U case however, you have to stick to about 1cm (that's less than half an inch, for those who don't know the metric system) for a fan.
On a 1U with an intel on the motherboard, I've rarely had any cooling problems. On a 1U with an AMD I've on regular basis had problems. The money customers save on buying an AMD, they'll have to spend on buying a 2U instead of a 1U.
When it comes to desktop PCs I've found that home-consumers these days are sold a lot of AMD as well, although that may be because I know a lot of gamers. But the truth is that in local computer shops (which are horribly expensive, btw) I see a lot more AMD machines than I see intel. Of course, the brand machines will have an intel, but IMHO brand machines for home use are consumer-stupidity (unless it's warranty you're after).
I know that WEP isn't the most perfect solution there is, but it seems to me that it'll be more practical than redecorating the office/home.
OK, WEP can be hacked, but it really depends on the amount of traffic there is and the length of the key in question, and to be honest, if you'd really like to be secure you shouldn't use wireless anyway.
Wireless is convenient, and looks clean. That's why it is such a (moderate) success. Anyone with a laptop agrees that dragging around 100ft of cable from the room with the ethernet plug to the living room looks rather silly. A wireless network is much easier, and avoids having a spouse muttering underneath her breath or children tripping over the cable (and possibly janking a valueble piece of laptop from your lap).
Buying wifi-proof wallpaper just seems so over the top, even for government agencies, but everyone knows they just want to spend your hard earned taxes on something completely useless (there, I've said it, and I've been waiting to say that ever since I mailed my taxforms).
I've been using linux for almost 8 years now. I was introduced to it the usual way: a friend came over with a slackware CD saying that if I was really tired of Windows and wanted something I could do with as I pleased, I should try this.
We're 8 years later now, and a lot of things have changed for linux. It's stepped out of geekdom and entered the corporate world, taking small steps at a time and the occasional leap. From a relatively small group of technologically very adept people, it has grown to become the new pet-OS of wannabe-geeks and even for a while Linux threatened to become a buzz-word for certain companies to shamelessly promote themselves on an IT market that had suffered a damaging blow.
Three years ago I was at a school that gave introduction courses in linux as a member of a jury for (pardon my bad English) practical final. I was judging several projects that were made during the course of 9 weeks of internships in companies, and over half of them were made using linux. Of the 10 groups that presented a linux project, only two of them were capable of presenting a flawless project.
What really got me at that moment was, that even though linux had come so far in those 5 years, many last year students hadn't even the faintest idea how their OS really worked. The argument most used for the use of linux was that it was free (as in beer), and someone even managed to blurt out that linux was actually a product from Sun. After three days of judging, I came to a startling conclusion. Many of the linux projects I had seen were dodgy at best, the students had very little grasp on the tools they used, and many webprojects failed to provide even the simplest security to their database as I happely added SQL on their URL and displayed lists of unencrypted passwords.
The Windows projects I saw however were a lot more solid. SQL Insertion failed on nearly every project, and most students were up to speed on the technologies they had used. Most of the Windows projects were finished, or nearly finished, while the linux projects seemed to have a lot of rough edges (in fact a girl actually told me : "Don't do that, that corrupts our database and we don't know why").
What does this have to do with Linux on the desktop, you might ask. Well, if 4 years of training in programming and networking hasn't even thaught you the simplest of hacks (SQL Insertion), and you're practically lost without a GUI to configure your networkcard (but manage to boast about your networking project), there is either a fundamental problem with your education or your unwillingness to use google. The truth behind it is "ease of use". MS Visual Studio comes with a bunch of tools in one package, a graphical XML schema editor, a graphical database management system, click-n-paint GUI creation, and to top it off each of those students gets 4 years of excessive training in all of those tools.
Linux on the other hand, has most (if not all) of these things, but students don't know them. Those that do have knowledge of these tools are often complaining that they ran into problems (again because of lack of training, or googling). Many have spent two days finding out how to install a certain program, and most just give up asking their supervisors for aid (which they often can't provide).
This is the problem with linux, and this is why the linux desktop will never be as succesfull as we hope it will be: our diversity in tools and lack of proper bundling. Distributions do a good job at providing us with defaults, but provide too much goodness. Most linux machines have at least 7 compilers and interpreters installed by default, 6 MP3 players, 10 office suites, and horror of horrors 2 desktop environments.
Teaching students all these things is an impossible task, and that's why they aren't prepared for the choices they have to make when they are going to actively use linux. And educating users on using office package A, while there exists at least one package for every letter of the alphabet each wi
Maybe they are, but for the most part I've been ignoring Real Networks since 1999. Their players suck at stability, and for linux they are broken at best. If someone hands me over a .rm-file (or any of its variants) I usually end up saying "You've got to be kidding me, right?".
It's not so much the fact that I don't like the company, it's the fact that I dislike the way their software behaved at the time. It was constantly crashing, refused to play most of it's own files referring only to some cryptic error number nobody even bothered looking up. It was back to mpeg back then, and I didn't regret it really.
At the moment, I don't know how their software behaves, but from what I've heard things haven't changed that much. So I will happily lead an .rm-less existance, enjoying my xvid, divx and mpeg2.