While the Linux "invulnerability" does tend to get overstated here on Slashdot, some of your points are incorrect. There really are inherent benefits to the Linux security model. I'll respond to a few parts of your post specifically:
The vector of attack for spyware/adware is through the uneducated/uninterested user downloading his latest fun program.
Unless it installs itself automatically through an ActiveX or a hole in IE, which many of them do. Certainly not all, and maybe not even a majority, but a significant number.
Therefore if you install it as the user, it will still be able to show ads, replace your mozilla start page, do popups, etc. The only difference is that it will be per-user rather than machine-wide. For most people that wouldn't matter as they are a single user on that machine and the difference between having it be user-process or admin-process really isn't large.
Except it becomes extremely easy to remove in comparison. "A tad simpler" doesn't begin to cover it:
If you become unable to safely boot as that user because it hijacks your startup and prevents its removal, you can boot into root or single-user mode (safety command-line) to remove it. Windows no longer has a backup command-line that avoids loading the graphical environment, although safe mode sometimes functions as an equivalent.
Linux doesn't have the Windows habit of locking down in-use libraries and executables, so you can actually delete the files to get rid of it without jumping through as many hoops.
User processes do not have the same permissions for listening on certain ports, inserting themselves into necessary system libraries, or hiding themselves rootkit style.
If all else fails, it is easy to wipe a user-profile and make a new uncontaminated one. If the spyware was confined properly to that user's home folder, it won't infect the other user accounts of that computer as well.
As you mention, there is the potential for local root exploits (or local password-sniffing or -phishing), but it is easier for Joe User to keep his box updated with apt-get or the equivalent than to accurately judge whether each random game he downloads is legitimate or not.
I'm not pretending that Linux is immune, because as you say, users will download Weatherbug and enter their password without a second thought, if the pop-up box tells them they need to do that for the intallation. However, you can tell someone "don't enter your password except in apt [or equivalent]" and they will be pretty well protected on Linux, even if they have to give up a few badly-behaved 3rd party apps which won't install in user mode. There is no equivalent advice for Windows users.
And Apple is a company, not a desktop... what the heck is your point? It's clear they meant "the Linux desktops" (such as Gnome and KDE) that come with the most common distributions. Nobody thinks you are cool for pointing out their technically-inaccurate shorthand, when it's clear what the intended meaning was.
The Boinc client seems to run at nice 19 (i.e. very low thread priority), and doesn't seem to be hogging memory or disk space. I haven't been running it long enough to see if either of those will build up over time. It's designed for you to run it in the background without noticing.
Falls Church, Virginia (PRWEB) November 3, 2005 -- Further to a policy of publishing patent applications eighteen months after filing, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is scheduled to publish history's first "storyline patent" application today. The publication will be based on a utility patent application filed by Andrew Knight in November, 2003, the first such application to claim a fictional storyline.
- In the future, what do you think video games will be like? - It's convenient to make games that are played on TVs. But I always wanted to have a custom-sized screen that wasn't the typical four-cornered cathode-ray-tube TV. I've always thought that games would eventually break free of the confines of a TV screen to fill an entire room. But I would rather not say anything more about that.
I don't know if I'd identify that with capitalism, exactly. Free market theory depends on perfect information, whereas he is trying to exploit people's *lack* of information to take money from them.
Since when does the price consumers are willing to pay for an item relate to its cost?
Car Salesman: This car is $20,000. Man: But I'm not planning on using it very often. It's only worth $15,000 to me. Car Salesman: But it cost a lot to make. Man:...
Also bear in mind that DVDs and CDs are essentially mini-monopolies: If you want to own a copy of Firefly, the only legal way to buy it is from one particular source, which can control the pricing. If you've taken Microeconomics, you know that monopolist pricing is based more on consumer demand than cost of production.
So now back to your question, which I will rephrase as: "Since when does the [price] of an item relate to how [useful the purchaser think it is]?" The answer is: Since monopoly forces came into effect. The only way to avoid this in the sale of media of DVDs and CDs is to repeal copyright protection, at which point the price would be somewhere slightly above the cost of media and reproduction.
"Or how about Aladdin? I can't be the only person who remembers the opening song's lyric containing a line about cutting off your hand for stealing a loaf of bread. But good luck proving that it ever even existed - to the best of my knowledge, that didn't even make into the first release of the movie to stores, much less subsequent ones."
You're right, that was only in the theatrical version... but perhaps the most telling piece of evidence is you don't even remember it correctly! "They cut off your ears if they don't like your face" was the actual line that offended many Arab-Americans, as I recall.
I hope you're lucky and don't have the world collapse around you - no amount of planning and preparation can spare you from everything.
Wow--given that this is slashdot, I expected you to finish off with a vitriolic "I hope you're unlucky and something terrible happens to you so you know what it's like!!!1!!1!"
Hats off to your compassion in the face of ignorance.
As long as I can call for special pickup and dump it on the curb like anything else then it could cost me $50 more for my state tax for all I care.
Why does everyone immediately try to use taxes? If they are already making some sort of individual contact with you (by coming to pick up the thing), you may as well pay them directly per-item. Even if it's state-mandated that you must get your old tech properly disposed of, user fees are perfectly suited to this type of problem. That way people would take the true cost of tech into account when deciding what to buy.
We techies should be responsible enough to shoulder the costs ourselves, instead of forcing everyone in the state to pay for disposal of technology that they might not use.
"Software emulation for compatibility has never been attempted professionally in the console arena"
This is actually not suite true. When Sega released the "Genesis Smash Packs" for the Dreamcast, which consisted of ~10 Genesis games, it turns out they actually coded a general emulator and included the ROMs for each of the games. They only fully debugged it for those particular games, but it worked pretty damn well on everything else too.
How do I know? Because some enterprising hackers (the Utopia group) ripped the emulator out, called it SegaGen, and let you burn CDs full of ROMs to use with it. Full-speed, with only occasional games having glitches with sound or graphics.
Of course, this also lagged 2 generations behind, just like the amateur attempts... but it was a professionally coded emulator.
In other words... Animal Crossing! I don't think there's any other game which fits your description more perfectly. In fact, you MUST play it over the course of at least "a friggin year" if you want to take part in all the cool holidays and special events.
"As you go down the road they spin but you are very familiar with the effect of them 'apparently' spinning backwards - again, the sample rate of your eyes is just slightly out of sync with the rotation speed (or harmonic of) causing the hubcap to appear to turn backwords."
The optical illusion of rapidly spinning objects "freezing" or starting to spin backwards when they hit a precise speed has nothing to do with the "sampling rate of your eyes," since there is no such thing.
Rather, it depends on the object being lit by a flickering source (roadside lights at night), or recorded on a flickering medium (movies with a certain number of frames per second). You will NOT be able to see the effect in-person under bright sunlight.
Also, people won't report differences in the effect, since it doesn't depend on their eyes. Anyone can see it, "gifted" or no. It is quite different from monitor flicker in that respect.
Washington University in St. Louis is starting a game dev class, also initiated by a game dev student group: the Wash U Game-dev Society. It's not a full curriculum yet, but members of the CS faculty have expressed enthusiasm for the project, and we hope to expand it.
Just because the probability keeps going up, it doesn't mean that we are getting increasingly sure that the asteroid will hit Earth.
Perhaps you should have thought that one through before posting it. In fact, that is exactly what it means. That's why it's the probability.
You are assuming that, within the "window" of possible trajectories, all paths have equal probability. A better assumption would be that it is closer to a bell-shaped distribution, where it is more likely to take the path that they predict, with less probability when the path deviates farther.
In that case, as the "window" shrinks with more accurate projections, the Earth also moves towards the edge of the window, resulting in a lower probability even though the overall probability window is denser due to its smaller size.
You are right that we might see this kind of scenario even with a normal probability distribution if the earth is very close to the actual path of the asteroid, but not right on top of it. But we'd see the same sort of increasing probabilities if the Earth IS in the path of the asteroid. So, to say that we should not worry about an increasing probability for the asteroid to hit out planet is a statistical misconception. I'm not sure how your post got modded up so high. (oh wait...)
Slashdot Mirror
The vector of attack for spyware/adware is through the uneducated/uninterested user downloading his latest fun program.
Unless it installs itself automatically through an ActiveX or a hole in IE, which many of them do. Certainly not all, and maybe not even a majority, but a significant number.
Therefore if you install it as the user, it will still be able to show ads, replace your mozilla start page, do popups, etc. The only difference is that it will be per-user rather than machine-wide. For most people that wouldn't matter as they are a single user on that machine and the difference between having it be user-process or admin-process really isn't large.
Except it becomes extremely easy to remove in comparison. "A tad simpler" doesn't begin to cover it:
As you mention, there is the potential for local root exploits (or local password-sniffing or -phishing), but it is easier for Joe User to keep his box updated with apt-get or the equivalent than to accurately judge whether each random game he downloads is legitimate or not.
I'm not pretending that Linux is immune, because as you say, users will download Weatherbug and enter their password without a second thought, if the pop-up box tells them they need to do that for the intallation. However, you can tell someone "don't enter your password except in apt [or equivalent]" and they will be pretty well protected on Linux, even if they have to give up a few badly-behaved 3rd party apps which won't install in user mode. There is no equivalent advice for Windows users.
I fixed the summary for ya:
"I would think this 'Smart Box' would get hacked way too easily, leaving car companies exactly where they are now."
Surely it's not like this box makes it *easier* for someone to stop paying?
I know you're only joking, but I hope you realize "PSFree" was pretty much staring you in the face.
And Apple is a company, not a desktop... what the heck is your point? It's clear they meant "the Linux desktops" (such as Gnome and KDE) that come with the most common distributions. Nobody thinks you are cool for pointing out their technically-inaccurate shorthand, when it's clear what the intended meaning was.
The Boinc client seems to run at nice 19 (i.e. very low thread priority), and doesn't seem to be hogging memory or disk space. I haven't been running it long enough to see if either of those will build up over time. It's designed for you to run it in the background without noticing.
s e/viewHpfFaq.do?shortName=hpf#folding.
As to your other question, this addresses a slightly different research topic than Folding@home. See their explanation of the differences at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showca
Interesting, thanks for that tidbit. Flippant as my comment was, I didn't really know whether there was a good reason for the apparent discrepancy.
Falls Church, Virginia (PRWEB) November 3, 2005 -- Further to a policy of publishing patent applications eighteen months after filing, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is scheduled to publish history's first "storyline patent" application today. The publication will be based on a utility patent application filed by Andrew Knight in November, 2003, the first such application to claim a fictional storyline.
Yup, that's the USPTO alright.
- In the future, what do you think video games will be like?
- It's convenient to make games that are played on TVs. But I always wanted to have a custom-sized screen that wasn't the typical four-cornered cathode-ray-tube TV. I've always thought that games would eventually break free of the confines of a TV screen to fill an entire room. But I would rather not say anything more about that.
Nintendo's next console: the holodeck!
I don't know if I'd identify that with capitalism, exactly. Free market theory depends on perfect information, whereas he is trying to exploit people's *lack* of information to take money from them.
"The Schrodinger Corp. makes special PC cases that can handle those requirements." (Score:3, Insightful)
Methinks the mods aren't paying too close attention today... Maybe they are both asleep and awake at the same time?
Since when does the price consumers are willing to pay for an item relate to its cost?
...
Car Salesman: This car is $20,000.
Man: But I'm not planning on using it very often. It's only worth $15,000 to me.
Car Salesman: But it cost a lot to make.
Man:
Also bear in mind that DVDs and CDs are essentially mini-monopolies: If you want to own a copy of Firefly, the only legal way to buy it is from one particular source, which can control the pricing. If you've taken Microeconomics, you know that monopolist pricing is based more on consumer demand than cost of production.
So now back to your question, which I will rephrase as: "Since when does the [price] of an item relate to how [useful the purchaser think it is]?" The answer is: Since monopoly forces came into effect. The only way to avoid this in the sale of media of DVDs and CDs is to repeal copyright protection, at which point the price would be somewhere slightly above the cost of media and reproduction.
"Or how about Aladdin? I can't be the only person who remembers the opening song's lyric containing a line about cutting off your hand for stealing a loaf of bread. But good luck proving that it ever even existed - to the best of my knowledge, that didn't even make into the first release of the movie to stores, much less subsequent ones."
You're right, that was only in the theatrical version... but perhaps the most telling piece of evidence is you don't even remember it correctly! "They cut off your ears if they don't like your face" was the actual line that offended many Arab-Americans, as I recall.
Not only can you have tea, but you can drink (eat?) it with chopsticks!
Re:Cemeteries (Score:3, Informative)
:-).
That was a little *too* informative... I guess there's no 'gross' mod
"By the way, did you know that one-knob faucets were originally designed for disabled persons?"
That explains how retarded they are.
I, for one, welcome our new CSS-wielding Slashdot webmaster overlords.
...
No, seriously, what took you so long? We've been waiting for you guys for, like, ever.
I hope you're lucky and don't have the world collapse around you - no amount of planning and preparation can spare you from everything.
Wow--given that this is slashdot, I expected you to finish off with a vitriolic "I hope you're unlucky and something terrible happens to you so you know what it's like!!!1!!1!"
Hats off to your compassion in the face of ignorance.
"Although the study was conducted with elderly patients, no reason to think it can't help most folks."
Hey, I thought of a reason:
"The benefits may have foundations in 'the principles of reflexology'"
As long as I can call for special pickup and dump it on the curb like anything else then it could cost me $50 more for my state tax for all I care.
Why does everyone immediately try to use taxes? If they are already making some sort of individual contact with you (by coming to pick up the thing), you may as well pay them directly per-item. Even if it's state-mandated that you must get your old tech properly disposed of, user fees are perfectly suited to this type of problem. That way people would take the true cost of tech into account when deciding what to buy.
We techies should be responsible enough to shoulder the costs ourselves, instead of forcing everyone in the state to pay for disposal of technology that they might not use.
"Software emulation for compatibility has never been attempted professionally in the console arena"
This is actually not suite true. When Sega released the "Genesis Smash Packs" for the Dreamcast, which consisted of ~10 Genesis games, it turns out they actually coded a general emulator and included the ROMs for each of the games. They only fully debugged it for those particular games, but it worked pretty damn well on everything else too.
How do I know? Because some enterprising hackers (the Utopia group) ripped the emulator out, called it SegaGen, and let you burn CDs full of ROMs to use with it. Full-speed, with only occasional games having glitches with sound or graphics.
Of course, this also lagged 2 generations behind, just like the amateur attempts... but it was a professionally coded emulator.
In other words... Animal Crossing! I don't think there's any other game which fits your description more perfectly. In fact, you MUST play it over the course of at least "a friggin year" if you want to take part in all the cool holidays and special events.
Of course, the story is a bit weak...
searching dictionary.com for yeilds yields:
No entry found for yeilds.
Did you mean irony?
"As you go down the road they spin but you are very familiar with the effect of them 'apparently' spinning backwards - again, the sample rate of your eyes is just slightly out of sync with the rotation speed (or harmonic of) causing the hubcap to appear to turn backwords."
The optical illusion of rapidly spinning objects "freezing" or starting to spin backwards when they hit a precise speed has nothing to do with the "sampling rate of your eyes," since there is no such thing.
Rather, it depends on the object being lit by a flickering source (roadside lights at night), or recorded on a flickering medium (movies with a certain number of frames per second). You will NOT be able to see the effect in-person under bright sunlight.
Also, people won't report differences in the effect, since it doesn't depend on their eyes. Anyone can see it, "gifted" or no. It is quite different from monitor flicker in that respect.
Washington University in St. Louis is starting a game dev class, also initiated by a game dev student group: the Wash U Game-dev Society. It's not a full curriculum yet, but members of the CS faculty have expressed enthusiasm for the project, and we hope to expand it.
Just because the probability keeps going up, it doesn't mean that we are getting increasingly sure that the asteroid will hit Earth.
Perhaps you should have thought that one through before posting it. In fact, that is exactly what it means. That's why it's the probability.
You are assuming that, within the "window" of possible trajectories, all paths have equal probability. A better assumption would be that it is closer to a bell-shaped distribution, where it is more likely to take the path that they predict, with less probability when the path deviates farther.
In that case, as the "window" shrinks with more accurate projections, the Earth also moves towards the edge of the window, resulting in a lower probability even though the overall probability window is denser due to its smaller size.
You are right that we might see this kind of scenario even with a normal probability distribution if the earth is very close to the actual path of the asteroid, but not right on top of it. But we'd see the same sort of increasing probabilities if the Earth IS in the path of the asteroid. So, to say that we should not worry about an increasing probability for the asteroid to hit out planet is a statistical misconception. I'm not sure how your post got modded up so high. (oh wait...)