Welcome to 2009... Every creditor everywhere offers choices which accomodate online security concerns. For example, one time use numbers for a transaction. There are other options also. Your fear is uninformed.
At what point does intimate knowledge of a game's mechanics make a player skilled?
I'd say that this is the definition of skill for an online game.
I'd mostly agree, although it takes a combination of intimate knowledge of ingame mechanics as well as ingame coordination. Accuracy and efficiency are attributes of ingame skill which could be reasonably considered ingame coordination and often take time to develop, hone, and ulimately perfect.
So the intimate knowledge alone isn't enough to excel, and the combination of ingame coordination is often what differentiates a good player from a great one, imo.
If someone made a larger, hi-res competitor to the DR-1000, and it cost maybe $500-$700, you might see more interest in larger readers. But right now, iRex has no competition.
I'd wager your the exception however and there isn't a critical mass of consumers looking for a product to meet the needs you have. iRex has no competition in this area, but yet their reader hasn't been much of a success. The lack of options is a symptom of demand, not supply in my opinion.
with screens roughly the size of a standard sheet of paper to present much of the editorial and advertising content of traditional periodicals in generally the same format as they appear in print.
Outside of those carrying briefcases or backpacks, who wants to carry around a papersized piece of equipment to read old-fashioned news. Shouldn't they be focusing on a cheaper kindle-like device, since that has shown some acceptance in the marketplace?
Theres a lot to be said for a newspaper which can be rolled up or folded to take with you. Size is important for this sort of media.
I'm not a troll, this is the same identity I use everywhere and your the one posting as anonymous coward. My opinion may not be popular on this note, but I have kharma to burn. I'm just a realist and not abnormally paranoid about edge cases. Those engaging in this thread of discussion and hardlining against my viewpoint hold different beliefs and think this whole scenario very real and catastrophic.
I'd recommend you not to sweat it. If I'm wrong... When the catastrophe happens I won't be around any longer. I'm willing to accept that - if I get caught by the miniscule chance of some solar storm killing me off because I have no power or basic necessities, thats just my time to go. I'm just not interested in spending my time imagining far fetched scenarious and role play my way thru it like some.
Nothing wrong with either approach. Its a value based difference of opinion.
Imagine massive, permanent, physical damage to the entire electrical grid.
That isn't a doomsday scenario? An event causing massive permanent damage to the entire electrical grid - thats an event of unheard of magnitude. Sounds like science fiction to me. *shrug*
12 months? I ignored that part because it was painfully naive.
If they have a 12 month production cycle, what do you think that factory is doing right now? Sitting empty waiting for a catastrophe to occur so that they can hire an entire staff to start their 12 month production cycle? Get a clue.
They are producing units right now, albeit well under max capacity. The units they produce are being sold across the global market, because thats the nature of big electrical infrastructure equipment. Whats not immediately sold is being warehoused until it will be sold. When the catastrophe hits in your imagination these warehouses will be depleted and production will ramp to max and the problem will solve itself.
Your also basing your argument on the assumption that nothing has occured since 1859 which makes our electrical grid more robust and resistant to such disturbances.
All in all, there are a lot of mitigating factors you have to ignore in order to expect that when an event like this occurs that entire regions of the US will be without power for months. Its a pipe dream.
They go boom, they get replaced or otherwise repaired. The situation if so drastic would right itself due to economic forces that encourage such. We have the technology and knowledge to fix these sorts of problems, which leaves the only other factor - money. It will always be more expensive to be without power than it is to restore power, hence a solution will be put into place, even in the worst case scenario.
I could imagine alongside you all day, but it won't ever come to pass. Have fun RTFA.
Like many others here, I don't prescribe to these doomsday scenarios that get rolled onto center stage every so often.
I remember when the northeast US had a power outage that lasted a few days just a few years back. It was no where near as dramatic or dire as this summary suggests the situation could be. I still had water and gas in Ohio.
The demo ran smoothly on a Windows machine, a PC running OpenBSD and another running VMware Player.
I was with the summary until that last part... A windows machine, I can accept that. An OpenBSD machine, I can accept that too. But another machine running VMware Player? Thats not an OS, so I don't even know what they were trying to say.
If you go thru the trouble of performing an SMM exploit you are already tailoring your attack to specific hardware. At that point, it would be silly not to also write your code to firmware so that its persistent.
So while theoretically you could find the bug by using a bootable CD and a scanning utility, that wouldn't be a likely situation in practice.
While you succeed at being snarky, you fail at being correct. Assuming the article is credible and accurate, it explains why booting from a CD won't save you:
By design, the operating system cannot override or disable System Management Interupt (SMI) calls. In practice, the only way for you to know what is running in SMM space is to physically disassemble the firmware of your computer. So, given that an SMI takes precedence over any OS call, the OS cannot control or read SMM, and the only way to read SMM is to disassemble the system makes an SMM rootkit incredibly stealthy!
Now with that said judging by the authors language at networkworld he likely doesn't fully understand whats going on - he uses words like "powned" and "the PC is living in the matrix", whatever the fuck that means! I'll reserve my judgement on this until I read more from someone that owns a clue.
And I find it really useful. I commonly have about 15 voicemails on average, and its really useful to see them all visually, what numbers they came in on, and skip thru the playback of the messages themselves.
The other feature that I like is that the caller has to state their name when they call. Grandcentral calls me, tells me the name the person stated, then I have these options:
1 Pick up the call 2 Send to voicemail 3 Send to voicemail and listen to the message as the caller leaves it
This call screening is really useful when I'm busy and need to prioritize my time.
How about their uncontrollability being down to the fact that they have been sentenced to a life behind bars when they are probably aware that they have committed no social crimes, precisely because they have that kind of intelligence?
Not exactly. While they are intelligent, we shouldn't personify their actions - they are still wild animals, just very smart ones. They don't know what social crimes are, and if you sat down to dinner with one and he didn't get enough to eat - he wouldn't hesitate to rip your face off in order to take your portion also. He wouldn't say that's probably not socially acceptable.
This is akin to saying your dog barks frantically at other dogs because he thinks he's a person. He doesn't think he's a person, he's just imbalanced in a way where he's not comfortable with his own kind. If he was socially balanced with his species, had more exposure in a "normal" dog environment interacting with his kind, he wouldn't respond frantically anymore.
On the other hand, I think Symantec Corporate is pretty decent A/V. When I got it free in grad school I was pretty happy with it anyway - in my experience it doesn't eat many CPU cycles, it has a low false rate, and lots of nice command line executables & options. According to the AV tests I've seen, it has a reasonable detection rate, not kapersky good, but a lot better than most alternatives (surprisingly - much better than Norton).
These sorts of comments intrigue me. Do you think Symantec develops 2 completely seperate AV engines with seperate definitions? The corporate version just enables centralized management of the AV clients and has a different interface.
I think its funny anytime people express their confidence in their AV products also. Its all selling snakeoil - theres no certainty that the definitions will be up to date when you need them to be.
A nuclear deterrent only needs to be large enough to completely and totally annihilate any country that may attack you. The British nuclear arsenal is big enough for that. The US has about an order of magnitude more.
Your assumption is that its a working arsenal. How reliable is this aging arsenal? Over time, how is that reliability further affected? If it came time to use them, how many would we be sending at a target? A few perhaps to make sure they go off? While the US probably has more than it "needs", having more than the next guy by a considerable amount is probably a good thing.
So to add to your arsenal design requirement, I would include the variable of time. The arsenal must be large enough that over time, thru uncertain times and policies where it may not be possible to build new ones, you want to make sure you have enough for as long as possible.
At the risk of asking a stupid question, I'm going to put this out there anyway... Whats so special/magical about a mainframe? I'm 26 and been an IT professional for 5 years, so I'm green when it comes to mainframe systems. I work for a fortune 500 with mainframes serving various business systems, but I always pictured them as old, clunky, dusty systems that were expensive and we're still milking them along.
Now a lot of people here are stating how a mainframe the size of a fridge can replace thousands of rackmount servers, and it doesn't jive with what I'm familiar with. Our mainframes serve ancient text based interfaces thru terminal emulator apps, and it doesn't look all that impressive either. What is it about a mainframe that enables such a large amount of computing power to be condensed into a refridgerator sized package? Or are some folks around here exagerrating considerably?
Microsoft might as well find themselves a black hole to go jump in, because Linux is becoming a viable alternative even for Joe Six-pack.
Linux has been a viable alternative for Joe Sixpack that does webbrowsing, email, and word processing for a long time. Plenty of techies have dropped their family/friends into an ubuntu install and not looked back. Linux is excellent for this sort of usage.
It's business apps and enterprise support, things outside the home, where Linux faces desktop viability challenges. There are many business specific apps which don't have suitable Linux alternatives.
The numbers agree with you - both the wii and the 360 are commercial successes (let's leave the ps3 out of this). The former strives on low-immersion gameplay, while the latter shines with immersive simulation gameplay. I'd agree that there's room for both, but I don't think that's at debate here.
The real headline is what the wii has achieved by bringing to market a relatively affordable, low power platform with mass market appeal. Not just mass market appeal even, but its managed to reach beyond barriers that the xbox and ps3 have not - the wii appeals to people who wouldn't call themselves "gamers" in the traditional "console gamer scene" sense of the word. Doing this while selling profitable hardware is a rather good position to be in.
Despite that contrast, at the sametime the wii reaffirms the power of a blockbuster title. Wii sports has been the main fuel behind the fire, catching interest and selling consoles. This is analagous to the power of the original halo on the xbox console. The wii just has hit a sweet spot in how nintendo managed to position and promote their product.
Once Windows update hoses your system, you'll realise that "mostly" isn't good enough.
I work with thousands of client machines in my environment - I've had experience with SUS hosing things up, but it still mostly gets things right for the updates it manages. Letting programs hose things up on their own is no better than letting windows update hose them up. In fact, judging by the way things work in Linux, I'd say managing updates centrally makes everything play better together on average. This part of your comment does not have any substance.
Of course not. The god awful program or OS should only check for updates when it's both launched and connected to the internet, and it should inform you and give you the choice of updating. And... why are you running god awful programs on your computer? Are you insane?
I disagree. The programs should be updated from an approved repository that has oversight. Letting every application developer out there decide what updates will be applied to machines they know nothing about is poor design. And I'm not running any god awful applications - I'm running Gentoo with VirtualBox for my Windows only management applications (check out the articles on my website). But my users do, and I do often consider many of them insane. Other IT folks who work in large environments they don't have complete authority over can sympathize I'm certain.
How is Windows Update supposed to help when it's Acrobat that has the vuln and patch?
Windows Update could be improved by making it easy for application updates to be approved and deployed thru windows update, and then perhaps applications like Acrobat would get onboard. This would be similar to the way in which microsoft works very hard to make it easy to develop for the windows platform. The whole point of my post was to describe what Windows Update could be but isn't, because of choices MS has made. Next question.
If you trust a program enough to install it in the first place, you shouold trust it to download its own patches from its own site. The program itself should check for updates, not the OS. Which division of Microsoft do you work for, anyway? I mean, nobody but Microsoft employees have Microsoft-only computers.
I disagree. Updates should be managed centrally. This would directly alleviate issues of having numerous update services running constantly in the background, which is a solution application developers resort to because they have no realistic better option on the Windows platform.
IE is at a disadvantage because it doesn't have a built in update mechanism? Seriously?
IE updates are managed thru a single interface, windows update, and windows update is actually one small thing windows gets mostly right. I don't want every god awful program under the sun phoning home ON ITS OWN to god knows where and updating itself without my knowledge.
However I do want a convenient method to make sure I'm getting updates I may need from a trusted source. Windows update is better than programs phoning home on their own. Short of having an update repository for 3rd party apps like Linux distros do things, thats about the best you can hope for...
That is, unless you like the google software updater, apple software updater, etc, running all the time soaking up resources and generally being non-value added.
Slashdot Mirror
Welcome to 2009... Every creditor everywhere offers choices which accomodate online security concerns. For example, one time use numbers for a transaction. There are other options also. Your fear is uninformed.
I'd mostly agree, although it takes a combination of intimate knowledge of ingame mechanics as well as ingame coordination. Accuracy and efficiency are attributes of ingame skill which could be reasonably considered ingame coordination and often take time to develop, hone, and ulimately perfect.
So the intimate knowledge alone isn't enough to excel, and the combination of ingame coordination is often what differentiates a good player from a great one, imo.
I'd wager your the exception however and there isn't a critical mass of consumers looking for a product to meet the needs you have. iRex has no competition in this area, but yet their reader hasn't been much of a success. The lack of options is a symptom of demand, not supply in my opinion.
Outside of those carrying briefcases or backpacks, who wants to carry around a papersized piece of equipment to read old-fashioned news. Shouldn't they be focusing on a cheaper kindle-like device, since that has shown some acceptance in the marketplace?
Theres a lot to be said for a newspaper which can be rolled up or folded to take with you. Size is important for this sort of media.
This was the first post at my viewing threshhold - hilarious! Mod it up!
I'm not a troll, this is the same identity I use everywhere and your the one posting as anonymous coward. My opinion may not be popular on this note, but I have kharma to burn. I'm just a realist and not abnormally paranoid about edge cases. Those engaging in this thread of discussion and hardlining against my viewpoint hold different beliefs and think this whole scenario very real and catastrophic.
I'd recommend you not to sweat it. If I'm wrong... When the catastrophe happens I won't be around any longer. I'm willing to accept that - if I get caught by the miniscule chance of some solar storm killing me off because I have no power or basic necessities, thats just my time to go. I'm just not interested in spending my time imagining far fetched scenarious and role play my way thru it like some.
Nothing wrong with either approach. Its a value based difference of opinion.
That isn't a doomsday scenario? An event causing massive permanent damage to the entire electrical grid - thats an event of unheard of magnitude. Sounds like science fiction to me. *shrug*
12 months? I ignored that part because it was painfully naive.
If they have a 12 month production cycle, what do you think that factory is doing right now? Sitting empty waiting for a catastrophe to occur so that they can hire an entire staff to start their 12 month production cycle? Get a clue.
They are producing units right now, albeit well under max capacity. The units they produce are being sold across the global market, because thats the nature of big electrical infrastructure equipment. Whats not immediately sold is being warehoused until it will be sold. When the catastrophe hits in your imagination these warehouses will be depleted and production will ramp to max and the problem will solve itself.
Your also basing your argument on the assumption that nothing has occured since 1859 which makes our electrical grid more robust and resistant to such disturbances.
All in all, there are a lot of mitigating factors you have to ignore in order to expect that when an event like this occurs that entire regions of the US will be without power for months. Its a pipe dream.
They go boom, they get replaced or otherwise repaired. The situation if so drastic would right itself due to economic forces that encourage such. We have the technology and knowledge to fix these sorts of problems, which leaves the only other factor - money. It will always be more expensive to be without power than it is to restore power, hence a solution will be put into place, even in the worst case scenario.
I could imagine alongside you all day, but it won't ever come to pass. Have fun RTFA.
Like many others here, I don't prescribe to these doomsday scenarios that get rolled onto center stage every so often.
I remember when the northeast US had a power outage that lasted a few days just a few years back. It was no where near as dramatic or dire as this summary suggests the situation could be. I still had water and gas in Ohio.
I was with the summary until that last part... A windows machine, I can accept that. An OpenBSD machine, I can accept that too. But another machine running VMware Player? Thats not an OS, so I don't even know what they were trying to say.
If you go thru the trouble of performing an SMM exploit you are already tailoring your attack to specific hardware. At that point, it would be silly not to also write your code to firmware so that its persistent.
So while theoretically you could find the bug by using a bootable CD and a scanning utility, that wouldn't be a likely situation in practice.
While you succeed at being snarky, you fail at being correct. Assuming the article is credible and accurate, it explains why booting from a CD won't save you:
Now with that said judging by the authors language at networkworld he likely doesn't fully understand whats going on - he uses words like "powned" and "the PC is living in the matrix", whatever the fuck that means! I'll reserve my judgement on this until I read more from someone that owns a clue.
And I find it really useful. I commonly have about 15 voicemails on average, and its really useful to see them all visually, what numbers they came in on, and skip thru the playback of the messages themselves.
The other feature that I like is that the caller has to state their name when they call. Grandcentral calls me, tells me the name the person stated, then I have these options:
1 Pick up the call
2 Send to voicemail
3 Send to voicemail and listen to the message as the caller leaves it
This call screening is really useful when I'm busy and need to prioritize my time.
Not exactly. While they are intelligent, we shouldn't personify their actions - they are still wild animals, just very smart ones. They don't know what social crimes are, and if you sat down to dinner with one and he didn't get enough to eat - he wouldn't hesitate to rip your face off in order to take your portion also. He wouldn't say that's probably not socially acceptable.
This is akin to saying your dog barks frantically at other dogs because he thinks he's a person. He doesn't think he's a person, he's just imbalanced in a way where he's not comfortable with his own kind. If he was socially balanced with his species, had more exposure in a "normal" dog environment interacting with his kind, he wouldn't respond frantically anymore.
Your assumption is that its a working arsenal. How reliable is this aging arsenal? Over time, how is that reliability further affected? If it came time to use them, how many would we be sending at a target? A few perhaps to make sure they go off? While the US probably has more than it "needs", having more than the next guy by a considerable amount is probably a good thing.
So to add to your arsenal design requirement, I would include the variable of time. The arsenal must be large enough that over time, thru uncertain times and policies where it may not be possible to build new ones, you want to make sure you have enough for as long as possible.
At the risk of asking a stupid question, I'm going to put this out there anyway... Whats so special/magical about a mainframe? I'm 26 and been an IT professional for 5 years, so I'm green when it comes to mainframe systems. I work for a fortune 500 with mainframes serving various business systems, but I always pictured them as old, clunky, dusty systems that were expensive and we're still milking them along.
Now a lot of people here are stating how a mainframe the size of a fridge can replace thousands of rackmount servers, and it doesn't jive with what I'm familiar with. Our mainframes serve ancient text based interfaces thru terminal emulator apps, and it doesn't look all that impressive either. What is it about a mainframe that enables such a large amount of computing power to be condensed into a refridgerator sized package? Or are some folks around here exagerrating considerably?
Let me guess... You liked playing whack-a-mole when you were a kid, right?
Linux has been a viable alternative for Joe Sixpack that does webbrowsing, email, and word processing for a long time. Plenty of techies have dropped their family/friends into an ubuntu install and not looked back. Linux is excellent for this sort of usage.
It's business apps and enterprise support, things outside the home, where Linux faces desktop viability challenges. There are many business specific apps which don't have suitable Linux alternatives.
The numbers agree with you - both the wii and the 360 are commercial successes (let's leave the ps3 out of this). The former strives on low-immersion gameplay, while the latter shines with immersive simulation gameplay. I'd agree that there's room for both, but I don't think that's at debate here.
The real headline is what the wii has achieved by bringing to market a relatively affordable, low power platform with mass market appeal. Not just mass market appeal even, but its managed to reach beyond barriers that the xbox and ps3 have not - the wii appeals to people who wouldn't call themselves "gamers" in the traditional "console gamer scene" sense of the word. Doing this while selling profitable hardware is a rather good position to be in.
Despite that contrast, at the sametime the wii reaffirms the power of a blockbuster title. Wii sports has been the main fuel behind the fire, catching interest and selling consoles. This is analagous to the power of the original halo on the xbox console. The wii just has hit a sweet spot in how nintendo managed to position and promote their product.
I'm 99% certain that the parent message was autogenerated text.
That, or the author is a schizophrenic. (IANAP) (I am not a psychiatrist)
Blame Timothy, he's the "editor" that frontpaged the garbage.
I work with thousands of client machines in my environment - I've had experience with SUS hosing things up, but it still mostly gets things right for the updates it manages. Letting programs hose things up on their own is no better than letting windows update hose them up. In fact, judging by the way things work in Linux, I'd say managing updates centrally makes everything play better together on average. This part of your comment does not have any substance.
I disagree. The programs should be updated from an approved repository that has oversight. Letting every application developer out there decide what updates will be applied to machines they know nothing about is poor design. And I'm not running any god awful applications - I'm running Gentoo with VirtualBox for my Windows only management applications (check out the articles on my website). But my users do, and I do often consider many of them insane. Other IT folks who work in large environments they don't have complete authority over can sympathize I'm certain.
Windows Update could be improved by making it easy for application updates to be approved and deployed thru windows update, and then perhaps applications like Acrobat would get onboard. This would be similar to the way in which microsoft works very hard to make it easy to develop for the windows platform. The whole point of my post was to describe what Windows Update could be but isn't, because of choices MS has made. Next question.
I disagree. Updates should be managed centrally. This would directly alleviate issues of having numerous update services running constantly in the background, which is a solution application developers resort to because they have no realistic better option on the Windows platform.
IE is at a disadvantage because it doesn't have a built in update mechanism? Seriously?
IE updates are managed thru a single interface, windows update, and windows update is actually one small thing windows gets mostly right. I don't want every god awful program under the sun phoning home ON ITS OWN to god knows where and updating itself without my knowledge.
However I do want a convenient method to make sure I'm getting updates I may need from a trusted source. Windows update is better than programs phoning home on their own. Short of having an update repository for 3rd party apps like Linux distros do things, thats about the best you can hope for...
That is, unless you like the google software updater, apple software updater, etc, running all the time soaking up resources and generally being non-value added.