The market they lose is so insignificant that it is arguable that the money saved in dev time and support costs means they actually come out ahead.
Yeah, I'll bet they are really killing those poor, dumb bastards at Blizzard. Err, oh wait no they aren't. If you code a game using best practices that will allow you to easily re-use the code porting platforms is very worth it. If, instead, you code to DirectX and lock yourself into a single vendor (who is also a competitor) then it will take significant effort to port a game. It is usually still profitable for big titles that are already popular, but many companies don't want to risk it.
Thus we can conclude that the coders for DDO are likely less competent and in addition someone in the decision making process is not confident that the game will do well. It sounds like a recipe for mediocrity.
you obviously haven't played DDO. DDo is the oposite of the grind mmorpg. There is no "time sink" at all.
It's true, I haven't played it. If you re-read my post, however, you will see why. The sales mechanism encourages it to be a time sink. That is to say, since they get paid every month I stick around they have a motivation to make things take as long as most people will put up with. Maybe this is not how it is implemented, but I'm not going to shell out money to a company I don't trust to find out and I'm not going to trust them to not change the game as they go along. Also, according to the review this game is a time sink. The reviewer notes several instances, like healing up after an adventure, where you basically have to sit around and wait.
Sadly, the majority of games developers dont seem to give half a shiznit about platforms other than WindowsXP (and vista soon).. im not saying they SHOULD care about porting thier game to a serious minority platform (such as mine), im just pointing out that they DONT.
True, but one of their major competitors and the game this will doubtless be measured against does. Hence, it is perfectly appropriate to point out that they will lose market because of this design decision. Maybe that will be insignificant, but it is one concrete way in which this game is inferior. Personally, I don't enjoy grinding games designed to take up as much time as possible. I'd rather go with a design that gives you as much fun in the smallest amount of time. This is why it is unlikely I would ever buy either WoW or DDO. When games sales methods provide a financial incentive to the developers for wasting your time and those companies have not built an extraordinary level of trust I'll always pass.
Are these Dimensions or Optiplexes? If you're buying 100 at a time, go with Optiplex! Much more stable than the "motherboard of the day" Dimensions.
I honestly don't remember what the model was at the time (this was 3 years ago at a previous job, although people still there complain about the problem persisting). All the machines did have the same motherboards and cases, it was just the rest of the parts that were inconsistent. Considering only some of those parts would work with the OS's we were deploying it was a real mess. The byword, however, was "cheap" as we were a small startup. It was pretty soon that those of us doing the work realized that cheap is not always cost effective.
All my rich uncles have either Alienware or Dell systems. These are users who need tons of support, and they are all equally happy. Also at the school district where I work we are 100% Dell. As long as the box is under warranty or service contract Dell is amazingly responsive to service and support needs.
I hope you are joking. Dell ranks no where near the top for support/customer satisfaction and their consumer hardware tends to be some of the least reliable. I've put in orders for 100 or so identical desktop towers more than once. The results were usually 5-10 DOA, 5-20 with some hardware problem, and about 30% would have any given set of hardware internally. Usually in a given lot of "identical" machines we'd get about 3 different manufacturers of network cards, two graphics cards, and several other inconsistencies that did not matter as much. It makes using them in a test lab pretty bloody annoying.
If you buy from Dell on a large scale you know to make sure to buy 15% extra hardware to swap out for the percentage of your hardware that is dead at any given point. Dell is fine about taking them back, but we never found that they were worth all the extra labor involved with keeping them running and shipping machines back and forth.
But don't take my word for it, Consumer reports does a write up every year with machines they buy with their own coin, without letting the vendors know who the customer is. Their assessments are impartial and a boon to anyone who is interested in making an informed decision rather than justifying whatever decision they have already made. There are quite a few choices for better hardware and support.
Wel... Games, for one, like you already said:) This is something that REALLY requires dual-booting. I mean, you're not going to run a game in VMWare or Virtual PC even if it did support OpenGL or DirectX. Just too slow.
I'm not sure that this is true. Plenty of people run games in WINE on Linux and the slowdown is pretty acceptable, and sometimes even outweighed by the better memory management. As for real emulators and VMs (rather than partial re-implementations of APIs) when it is running on hardware that is supported the biggest slowdowns are available RAM and sharing the CPU. With Intel's new hardware virtulaization the second problem goes away and you're left with pretty much just RAM. Given Mac user's propensity to avoid reboots (I reboot about once a month when updating the OS) and given the cost/convenience I know a lot of us might well do our gaming in a virtual machines in the future. I'd rather shell out $100-200 for an extra couple of gigs of RAM for my laptop than have to buy and use a whole extra machine. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the same boat.
The only big difference is the TPM chip. Shoot, with all the people booting Mac OS X natively on random PC hardware, it shouldn't be a big logical leap to grasping the concept that booting WinXP (or any Windows for that matter) on a Macintel is only a matter of time.
You seem a little confused. The "TPM chip" as you put it has nothing to do with stopping other OS's from booting on macs, it is just a way to harder to make OS X boot on a machine without the right one. The reason it is hard to get WinXP booting on an Intel mac is because Windows utilizes BIOS to boot on all 32 bit systems. Apple did not include BIOS, opting for the more advanced EFI. Windows does support EFI, but only on 64 bit chips. Apple is using 32 bit chips. Hence, the Apple machines are hardware Windows does not support.
You are likely right that Windows will eventually boot on Macs, just because eventually Apple will move to 64 bit Intel chips, which Windows does support, or MS may implement the ability to boot from 32 bit EFI systems. Yes Apple uses mostly commodity hardware, but it is usually newer hardware and they often don't bother implementing 20 year old legacy features like PS/2 ports, floppy drives, BIOS, etc. As a result, it is entirely possible that Apple machines may stay ahead of the curve of Windows support and thus Windows users will have a hard time using Apple hardware. This is mostly because Apple has such a limited hardware set it needs to support, it can adapt much more quickly to new hardware.
As a final point, with the new virtualization features in the newest Intel chips, I don't see many people dual booting macs anyway. When you can run multiple OS's hosted on top of OS X, at nearly the same speed as a fresh boot (RAM notwithstanding) I suspect most users will prefer that route. I know I will.
There's gotta be a way to blame this on Bush. Somehow he was responsible.
No problem. Bush was elected, then suddenly all the anti-trust remedies against MS were gutted. MS was not broken up into several competing companies and thus had no motivation to create a better product to compete against the other "baby-MS's." Since they had no such motivation they did not release a new version of their OS that was fairly secure by default and they did not sell it at a competitively low price. As a result more companies and individuals had to buy anti-virus add ons and were thus burned by this malfunction. See, that wasn't too hard.
Why *should* I take up ebooks? What is the compelling case?
E-books do have two real advantages. You can read them in the dark without a light source. You can, theoretically, bring your entire library with you rather than just one or two books. The second one is really the most compelling feature.
That said, I mainly agree with you. E-books and e-book readers are inferior to regular books in most other ways and the additional DRM hindrances sellers are adding are making them even less useful. I'd be willing to pay thousands of dollars for a really good e-book that worked as well as regular books for me, but let me carry a whole library with me. I haven't bought one because I haven't seen anything that even comes close to matching a regular book's features.
That's why I only listed some items that I know have had exploits written for them. If you want a list of vulnerabilities instead, you can look at Apple's big recent update.
Are you saying that you know there are exploits for these two eeye quicktime vulnerabilities, or that you know of the existence of vulnerabilities and also know of the existence of the exploits for the Safari and Bluetooth vulnerabilities everyone knows about. Your language is somewhat ambiguous.
That I read the first one, and knew from it that they attackers were given a shell.
But that article was "updated" to add that information after many, myself included, had already read it and after they have received a slew of complaints. The original article did not include that information.
I can't speak to how notable it is. But my name is Ryan Russell, I am sometimes more easily remembered as Blue Boar.
Well you certainly have written/edited a number of books on the subject which does lend you some credibility. I can't say that I have read any of them. The one real concern I have is you seem to use certain terms in unfamiliar ways and others (like vulnerability and exploit) somewhat interchangeably. It makes it hard to understand exactly what you are claiming.
The reasons I have not purchased and don't plan to purchase an e-book reader, despite the fact that I like the concept are as follows:
Price - for the reader. The devices are expensive, and thus must offer not just the same experience as a book, but better.
Inferior display - glare is a problem and reading on a device that emits light is nice in the dark, but bad all the rest of the time. The screens are harder on the eyes than paper.
Price - for the books. If I'm buying a book that I need a special reader for then I want it to be the same cost or cheaper than the book in a store. I have not found this to be the case in most instances. In those cases where it is the same, it is usually with a lot of restrictions.
DRM - I don't want the book for only a month. I don't want to pay a subscription. I want to be able to transfer the text to my laptop or a different reader. I want to be able to back up my books. Readers will break; books generally don't. I need assurances that it will be painless to access my books with a different reader.
Durability - Readers need to be very durable so I can toss them in a pocket or bag and go. I don't have any qualms about doing this with a book because they are durable and each book is much less expensive than a reader. Readers either need to be as cheap as a book, or even more durable than a book. The main advantage of a reader over traditional books is portable access to the whole library, but if it can't go where a book can, what is the advantage?
Battery - The battery needs to last 12 hours, minimum.
Ease of use - I can stick as many pieces of paper in my books as I want as bookmarks. I can jot notes in the margins. I should be able to do the same with an e-book.
Beat the competition, my laptop - I already bring a laptop a lot of places. E-books readers have to be good enough and cheap enough that it makes sense for me to have a separate device. If the screen and battery are no better than my laptop, why do I want a second device?
Loans - I loan my books to friends all the time. Many times this leads to a friend learning about an author and buying a lot of their books for their own collection. I need to be able to borrow and loan books and the local library needs to start carrying books in a loan-able e-book format.
Those are all the major areas where current e-books are deficient for me. I like the concept of an e-book and am willing to pay real money (up to maybe $4K for a really nice one) but until they are as functional as regular books in most respects they are just not worth it. Right now they have one real advantage for me (easy portability for many books) and the above laundry list of disadvantages. The fact that e-book creators/sellers think they can intentionally add even more handicaps and raise the price of the books themselves just speaks to their greed and lack of market research.
I have used my share of realtime collaborative environments. For some reason, someone is always immature enough to start drawing rude pictures or writing pointless statements.
I've also used collaborative environments. The most useful has been SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra). It is just a full featured text editor that auto-discovers documents on the same LAN and allows each user their own insertion point. These two features are really the key to its usefulness. It is a lot easier to collaborate when multiple people can be typing at once in the same document. Auto-discovery of shared files makes connecting user friendly. Google can replicate both of these features in a thin-client word processor and I hope they do. This sort of an easy setup is ideal for programmers, designers, collaborative fiction, and many other tasks and it has been too hard for the average user to achieve for too long. Google can bring this to the masses.
Will Google let people use their application logic without requiring we store our personal data on their servers
I'm guessing they will be using open standards like usual, so if you have your own server the answer is probably.
For that matter, how easy is it now to connect our own Jabber networks to Google's version?
If you have a Jabber account anywhere try sending a chat request to username@gmail.com and it should "just work." They are using the open federation standard for Jabber that lets it work with DNS to lookup servers the same as e-mail (except with a default whitelist, users have to approve receiving messages from you initially).
And does any of that somehow make it not a remote exploit?
No but it makes it a pretty useless and academic exploit in most instances. So that is one, and maybe the Safari one makes two. So yes you can say there are remote exploits, but just barely and it is really straining.
Listing potential vulnerabilities is not the issue. We're talking exploits, not vulnerabilities. To get back on the point, what makes you think the first article had information about the local accounts being given out and what makes you think the second challenge did not disprove the article's misleading depiction?
Since I don't know of any Ryan R. with a notable security reputation and you haven't exactly "wowed" me with you expertise yet, I'm still reserving judgement on whether or not you are on the level about having (access to/inside knowledge of) remote exploits. One thing I am convinced of is that you don't seem to want to talk about the original issue or provide support for your opinions about it.
I think it does affect the typical Mac user. One could easily use the recent Safari remote code execution bug to download and install this local privledge escalation bug and then use the resulting superuser privlidges to create a new superuser account on the system and shoot an email off to some hotmail address with the system's IP, the new login, and password.
You're missing the point. The Safari bug has been fixed and it was a remote exploit and it was news. Pretty much anyone capable of finding a remote vulnerability who did not get very lucky is also capable of finding a local escalation. Local escalations are common. Remote escalations are not. Which one do you think is news?
Local escalations only affect the average user when used in conjunction with a trojan, remote exploit, or local account. Remote exploits are found and fixed all the time. They are an added level of complexity for a working remote root exploit, but not the hard part. Sorry, but those are the facts of life for any normal desktop OS. If you believed otherwise, then you haven't been paying attention. What do you think those security updates have been doing?
The reason it's "funny" isn't that it's actually funny, it's that it's presented in a somewhat witty fashion
Allow me to retort. I don't believe either the graphic phrase "bruised and bloodied" nor "mouth wide open screaming" is particularly witty. I find it to be sadistic.
vengance is a very gratifying human impulse, it's one of the things that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom-- take that as good or bad as you wish
I'll not argue about whether or not animals feel a sense of vengeance instead I'd like to point out that a lot of things are human impulses, including most that lead to rape. That does not make them laudable nor appropriate topics for mocking jokes. Your attempts to excuse this are equally repugnant.
To address your numbered points:
(1) "threat of homosexual rape", jokes aside, isn't the primary deterrent of prison
I said it was one of the prime deterrents and given the number of times it is cited by police and the media I'd say that is a very valid opinion.
"Joked about cutting off the feet of slaves and torturing Jews". Probably so. But this really doesn't make them any worse than anyone else. Jokes are generally made about unpleasant situations, because that's what they're designed to help us deal with.
Jokes that help people continue to look the other way by ridiculing those suffering are part of the problem. They make it easier to accept a horrible thing and easier to do nothing about it. They let people who do approve of the horrible thing express that to one another with the "out" of "it's just a joke" if they are called to task. Anyone making jokes about others being raped is just helping to make a abhorrent thing more acceptable and if they don't want to be called to task for it, they should stop doing it. Just as jokes about torturing jews and maiming niggers have gone out of fashion as those practices became unacceptable to society it is past time for raping prisoners to be added to that list.
(3) The term "barbaric" stems from an old greek word meaning "people that don't speak my language". You might want to find a new bit of rhetoric to use, as that one too quickly exposes your lack of ability to cope with anything outside of your own narrow worldview.
I see, the word origins of "barbaric" are the best you can pull together for this ad hominem attack? Pathetic. I'm sorry my "narrow world view" does not approve of anal rape. If you want to compose an ad hominem attack you could at least make it a good one, like: maybe your world view finds anal rape to be more acceptable since you don't mind who takes you up your slovenly arse.
(4) And, in conclusion,:-P
Sorry, joking about the extreme mental and physical pain of others may be just fine by you, but it is not by me. It is a real and serious problem in this country and your making light of it is merely one more enabling factor to let our society ignore and tacitly approve of this sickening practice. It's not that I don't understand the joke, it's just that I find it as repulsive as the person who can laugh at it.
I've been posting on this forum for years but I don't think I have ever seen such rapid moderation. The score for my post went from 2 to 5 then down to zero then back up and is now back down to 1 I think. I find it interesting that not only are there a lot of people who agree how horrible rape is and think it is good that I called someone to task for such a posting, but that there are so many spending mod points and making comments defending the raping of prisoners. It is very sad in many ways, but I find that people often surprise me both by being more horrible than I expect and being more amazing. Thanks for the supportive comment.
There are a number of technical solutions that can help a lot. Video cameras whose records are reviewed by an impartial third party and an impartial system of review and complaint investigation are both common parts of such a solution. The real problem, however, is not in catching these crimes, it is interesting anyone in doing so. Many prison guards are sadists and people who have a strong desire to use violence and exert authority over others. Those are the kind of people who gravitate to the job. Most citizens don't care that prisoners are raped, even the religious right who opposes all other forms of homosexual relations. In order to have real and lasting change what is needed is a change in the attitudes of society. That is why I am so adamant in making sure I address these cruel remarks here. People need to think about the issue and they need to really consider it aside from "ha ha the botnet operator is gonna get it up the butt." Truly the solution is simply for people to address the issue, and make sure everyone knows it is wrong and must be stopped. Over time, this makes a difference and public attitudes change.
This is already happening in many places and there has been significant reform on this issue. People make it clear they have a position and politicians take action because they know it will get them votes. It is really hard to knock your opponent for stopping the homosexual prison rape without losing an election. The changing of opinions is simply a matter of enough people making themselves heard and speaking out against this crime when they hear it advocated or applauded.
On what grounds are you making the rash assumption that I'm not familiar with the defendent's side of the U.S. justice system? I can tell you from direct personal experience that it's no fun to get caught up in it.
I said nothing about being a defendant, I said put yourself in the shoes of someone convicted, beaten, and being raped. This is how we should judge the ethics of a situation. It is the golden rule you might remember for kindergarten. I entreat you, stop regarding rape as an acceptable evil and if you hear someone make a joke like this please speak out. It is only by confrontation and by showing others that it is not acceptable that we can actually change the attitudes and the reality.
So you think that disagreeing with an article constitutes some sort of useful infosec proof. I see.
No, I think recreating the conditions misleadingly portrayed by the article and demonstrating that despite being under attack the machine was not compromised in 30 minutes proves something. More importantly it demonstrates for the press something they can report in order to clear up the misinformation.
The recent worm, I believe it was dubbed Inqtana? Contains a remote bluetooth exploit.
Yes, but that was academic, not in the wild and it was intentionally limited to prevent it from spreading. It was made to be a non-functional exploit, just a proof of concept.
So, tell me something that would theoretically demonstrate credibility, then.
Show me an exploit or evidence of a box exploited. If you have an exploit that you have reported, tell me about the existence so I can confirm it in the next security update. I know maybe none of these is possible, but you'll forgive me for being skeptical especially given some of the other comments you have made here that don't speak to your credentials (like the shell comment).
I don't think that you'll find any court including sodomy as part of the sentencing. It's just a fact of life in U.S. prisons, much like the fact that he's going to get beat up.
No it isn't just a fact of life. It is an accepted and lauded fact of life, at least according to the parent poster. It is that acceptance and that willingness to enjoy and applaud these unethical acts that is as much a problem as the acts themselves. Slaves getting their feet cut off was a fact of life once too. It was cruel and unethical, but that did not stop it from happening. What stopped it from happening was people deciding that they would not put up with it and making an effort to stop it. And there were some people who made jokes about hopping and less things to wash. The fact that it was an accepted practice at the time did not make those people any more right then and it does not make the parent poster or your own acceptance any more right now. The first step towards stopping this appalling behavior is refusing to accept that it is normal and OK.
Here's a hint: he's locked up with a lot of bad people, so we can expect bad things will happen to him there. Nobody got to prison by being well behaved.
Given the number of people in jail for completely nonviolent crimes that hurt no one, I'd tend to disagree. Even assuming all the laws that put people in jail are ethical and the police and courts are perfect and never make any mistakes, people should still serve their sentence in a cell, not being raped and beaten. This is unethical and it should stop. It certainly should not be encouraged.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone convicted of a crime. You were falsely accused, or you bought a bunch of marijuana or you did not know you were breaking one of the millions of laws no one really knows about. Now you're in prison. Now you're being beaten and someone is taking you up the ass. Tell me, how do you feel about this "justice?" How do you feel about comments by people like the previous poster or yourself that this is "normal" and just the facts of life?
This is a discussion board and I'll certainly not sit here quietly while morons like yourself advocate physical abuse and rape as appropriate punishments for nonviolent crime. It is wholly unethical and I will not stand quietly by and listen to jackasses like you who probably don't know anything about real pain try to make it sound like a palatable idea.
People respond much better to the threat of pain and embarressment[sic] than they do to words like...blah blah blah
Yeah, if we just executed everyone who we suspected had broken any laws no one would commit any crimes, right. Why don't we rape people who get caught speeding? They are at least threatening the safety of others. It'll sure cut down on speeding too, right?
Have you not noticed that since "Political Correctness" grabbed the western world by the testicles, that life is going rapidly down the toilet ? It was only a few years ago that kids would not have even dreamt about knocking over a little old lady for her money. Now it happens.
Ahh yes, the "good ole days" fallacy. Here's a hint buster, the good old days were old, but they were never good. Every generation has bitched about how values are declining and violent crime increasing and the world coming to an end as the younger generation comes into power. Quit yer bellyaching. Violent crime is decreasing not increasing. Your argument is complete bunk unsupported by the facts.
Kids these days don't know what is right and wrong for the simple reason that wrong is no longer associated with pain or embarressment[sic].
Bullshit. Most of the time people have done things that are unethical they have been rewarded, not punished. Pain and embarrassment has always been more likely to be the lot of the "good." Rape is itself wholly unethical but the rapist is not the one suffering. Endorsing unethical practices in the hopes that they will scare people into behaving ethically is the pinnacle of stupidity.
What is your point? Do you think corporal punishment and rape is an appropriate punishment for a non-violent crime or not? Do you approve of this part of our culture or not? How does pointing out other atrocities that were and are being committed in any way mitigate someone here and now advocating and applauding rape?
Why shouldn't kids who damage thousands of computers be subject to the same penalties as the kids who burned down those churches recently?
Well, in the case of arson there is a serious threat to the lives of many people. Maybe someone was sleeping upstairs at one church. Maybe the fire will spread to neighboring buildings or trees and kill someone. In this way I think arson is somewhat more serious. Aside from that, however, I don't think I ever advocated that the kids who set those fires should be seriously beaten or raped and I certainly don't think that. What purpose would it serve?
What would you propose we do with him then? Allowing him to continue is a very bad option, possibly the worst of all available, and currently the accepted practice in the U.S. is incarceration.
While jail time is a valid option it should be jail time minus sexual assault. This may not be the reality in all cases, but rape and physical abuse should not be an accepted part of prison and anyone who accepts it as normal, or lauds it sickens me and just makes the problem worse. For a wholly non-violent offense like this, perhaps a long probation, confiscation of funds, and a few years of regular community service would be more appropriate.
I get the feeling from reading the posts here that almost everyone is interested in revenge against people who spam or run botnets or perform DoS attacks, and no one is interested in either rehabilitation or justice. Those advocating corporeal punishment, rape, death, and eternal damnation have no sense of a punishment fitting the scale of a crime and likely have no idea what it is like to truly suffer physical and mental pain. Gee a bunch of relatively wealthy computer geeks from the first world, what a surprise.
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The market they lose is so insignificant that it is arguable that the money saved in dev time and support costs means they actually come out ahead.
Yeah, I'll bet they are really killing those poor, dumb bastards at Blizzard. Err, oh wait no they aren't. If you code a game using best practices that will allow you to easily re-use the code porting platforms is very worth it. If, instead, you code to DirectX and lock yourself into a single vendor (who is also a competitor) then it will take significant effort to port a game. It is usually still profitable for big titles that are already popular, but many companies don't want to risk it.
Thus we can conclude that the coders for DDO are likely less competent and in addition someone in the decision making process is not confident that the game will do well. It sounds like a recipe for mediocrity.
you obviously haven't played DDO. DDo is the oposite of the grind mmorpg. There is no "time sink" at all.
It's true, I haven't played it. If you re-read my post, however, you will see why. The sales mechanism encourages it to be a time sink. That is to say, since they get paid every month I stick around they have a motivation to make things take as long as most people will put up with. Maybe this is not how it is implemented, but I'm not going to shell out money to a company I don't trust to find out and I'm not going to trust them to not change the game as they go along. Also, according to the review this game is a time sink. The reviewer notes several instances, like healing up after an adventure, where you basically have to sit around and wait.
Sadly, the majority of games developers dont seem to give half a shiznit about platforms other than WindowsXP (and vista soon) .. im not saying they SHOULD care about porting thier game to a serious minority platform (such as mine), im just pointing out that they DONT.
True, but one of their major competitors and the game this will doubtless be measured against does. Hence, it is perfectly appropriate to point out that they will lose market because of this design decision. Maybe that will be insignificant, but it is one concrete way in which this game is inferior. Personally, I don't enjoy grinding games designed to take up as much time as possible. I'd rather go with a design that gives you as much fun in the smallest amount of time. This is why it is unlikely I would ever buy either WoW or DDO. When games sales methods provide a financial incentive to the developers for wasting your time and those companies have not built an extraordinary level of trust I'll always pass.
Are these Dimensions or Optiplexes? If you're buying 100 at a time, go with Optiplex! Much more stable than the "motherboard of the day" Dimensions.
I honestly don't remember what the model was at the time (this was 3 years ago at a previous job, although people still there complain about the problem persisting). All the machines did have the same motherboards and cases, it was just the rest of the parts that were inconsistent. Considering only some of those parts would work with the OS's we were deploying it was a real mess. The byword, however, was "cheap" as we were a small startup. It was pretty soon that those of us doing the work realized that cheap is not always cost effective.
All my rich uncles have either Alienware or Dell systems. These are users who need tons of support, and they are all equally happy. Also at the school district where I work we are 100% Dell. As long as the box is under warranty or service contract Dell is amazingly responsive to service and support needs.
I hope you are joking. Dell ranks no where near the top for support/customer satisfaction and their consumer hardware tends to be some of the least reliable. I've put in orders for 100 or so identical desktop towers more than once. The results were usually 5-10 DOA, 5-20 with some hardware problem, and about 30% would have any given set of hardware internally. Usually in a given lot of "identical" machines we'd get about 3 different manufacturers of network cards, two graphics cards, and several other inconsistencies that did not matter as much. It makes using them in a test lab pretty bloody annoying.
If you buy from Dell on a large scale you know to make sure to buy 15% extra hardware to swap out for the percentage of your hardware that is dead at any given point. Dell is fine about taking them back, but we never found that they were worth all the extra labor involved with keeping them running and shipping machines back and forth.
But don't take my word for it, Consumer reports does a write up every year with machines they buy with their own coin, without letting the vendors know who the customer is. Their assessments are impartial and a boon to anyone who is interested in making an informed decision rather than justifying whatever decision they have already made. There are quite a few choices for better hardware and support.
Wel... Games, for one, like you already said :) This is something that REALLY requires dual-booting. I mean, you're not going to run a game in VMWare or Virtual PC even if it did support OpenGL or DirectX. Just too slow.
I'm not sure that this is true. Plenty of people run games in WINE on Linux and the slowdown is pretty acceptable, and sometimes even outweighed by the better memory management. As for real emulators and VMs (rather than partial re-implementations of APIs) when it is running on hardware that is supported the biggest slowdowns are available RAM and sharing the CPU. With Intel's new hardware virtulaization the second problem goes away and you're left with pretty much just RAM. Given Mac user's propensity to avoid reboots (I reboot about once a month when updating the OS) and given the cost/convenience I know a lot of us might well do our gaming in a virtual machines in the future. I'd rather shell out $100-200 for an extra couple of gigs of RAM for my laptop than have to buy and use a whole extra machine. I'm sure there are plenty of people in the same boat.
The only big difference is the TPM chip. Shoot, with all the people booting Mac OS X natively on random PC hardware, it shouldn't be a big logical leap to grasping the concept that booting WinXP (or any Windows for that matter) on a Macintel is only a matter of time.
You seem a little confused. The "TPM chip" as you put it has nothing to do with stopping other OS's from booting on macs, it is just a way to harder to make OS X boot on a machine without the right one. The reason it is hard to get WinXP booting on an Intel mac is because Windows utilizes BIOS to boot on all 32 bit systems. Apple did not include BIOS, opting for the more advanced EFI. Windows does support EFI, but only on 64 bit chips. Apple is using 32 bit chips. Hence, the Apple machines are hardware Windows does not support.
You are likely right that Windows will eventually boot on Macs, just because eventually Apple will move to 64 bit Intel chips, which Windows does support, or MS may implement the ability to boot from 32 bit EFI systems. Yes Apple uses mostly commodity hardware, but it is usually newer hardware and they often don't bother implementing 20 year old legacy features like PS/2 ports, floppy drives, BIOS, etc. As a result, it is entirely possible that Apple machines may stay ahead of the curve of Windows support and thus Windows users will have a hard time using Apple hardware. This is mostly because Apple has such a limited hardware set it needs to support, it can adapt much more quickly to new hardware.
As a final point, with the new virtualization features in the newest Intel chips, I don't see many people dual booting macs anyway. When you can run multiple OS's hosted on top of OS X, at nearly the same speed as a fresh boot (RAM notwithstanding) I suspect most users will prefer that route. I know I will.
There's gotta be a way to blame this on Bush. Somehow he was responsible.
No problem. Bush was elected, then suddenly all the anti-trust remedies against MS were gutted. MS was not broken up into several competing companies and thus had no motivation to create a better product to compete against the other "baby-MS's." Since they had no such motivation they did not release a new version of their OS that was fairly secure by default and they did not sell it at a competitively low price. As a result more companies and individuals had to buy anti-virus add ons and were thus burned by this malfunction. See, that wasn't too hard.
Why *should* I take up ebooks? What is the compelling case?
E-books do have two real advantages. You can read them in the dark without a light source. You can, theoretically, bring your entire library with you rather than just one or two books. The second one is really the most compelling feature.
That said, I mainly agree with you. E-books and e-book readers are inferior to regular books in most other ways and the additional DRM hindrances sellers are adding are making them even less useful. I'd be willing to pay thousands of dollars for a really good e-book that worked as well as regular books for me, but let me carry a whole library with me. I haven't bought one because I haven't seen anything that even comes close to matching a regular book's features.
That's why I only listed some items that I know have had exploits written for them. If you want a list of vulnerabilities instead, you can look at Apple's big recent update.
Are you saying that you know there are exploits for these two eeye quicktime vulnerabilities, or that you know of the existence of vulnerabilities and also know of the existence of the exploits for the Safari and Bluetooth vulnerabilities everyone knows about. Your language is somewhat ambiguous.
That I read the first one, and knew from it that they attackers were given a shell.
But that article was "updated" to add that information after many, myself included, had already read it and after they have received a slew of complaints. The original article did not include that information.
I can't speak to how notable it is. But my name is Ryan Russell, I am sometimes more easily remembered as Blue Boar.
Well you certainly have written/edited a number of books on the subject which does lend you some credibility. I can't say that I have read any of them. The one real concern I have is you seem to use certain terms in unfamiliar ways and others (like vulnerability and exploit) somewhat interchangeably. It makes it hard to understand exactly what you are claiming.
Those are all the major areas where current e-books are deficient for me. I like the concept of an e-book and am willing to pay real money (up to maybe $4K for a really nice one) but until they are as functional as regular books in most respects they are just not worth it. Right now they have one real advantage for me (easy portability for many books) and the above laundry list of disadvantages. The fact that e-book creators/sellers think they can intentionally add even more handicaps and raise the price of the books themselves just speaks to their greed and lack of market research.
I have used my share of realtime collaborative environments. For some reason, someone is always immature enough to start drawing rude pictures or writing pointless statements.
I've also used collaborative environments. The most useful has been SubEthaEdit (formerly Hydra). It is just a full featured text editor that auto-discovers documents on the same LAN and allows each user their own insertion point. These two features are really the key to its usefulness. It is a lot easier to collaborate when multiple people can be typing at once in the same document. Auto-discovery of shared files makes connecting user friendly. Google can replicate both of these features in a thin-client word processor and I hope they do. This sort of an easy setup is ideal for programmers, designers, collaborative fiction, and many other tasks and it has been too hard for the average user to achieve for too long. Google can bring this to the masses.
Will Google let people use their application logic without requiring we store our personal data on their servers
I'm guessing they will be using open standards like usual, so if you have your own server the answer is probably.
For that matter, how easy is it now to connect our own Jabber networks to Google's version?
If you have a Jabber account anywhere try sending a chat request to username@gmail.com and it should "just work." They are using the open federation standard for Jabber that lets it work with DNS to lookup servers the same as e-mail (except with a default whitelist, users have to approve receiving messages from you initially).
And does any of that somehow make it not a remote exploit?
No but it makes it a pretty useless and academic exploit in most instances. So that is one, and maybe the Safari one makes two. So yes you can say there are remote exploits, but just barely and it is really straining.
Listing potential vulnerabilities is not the issue. We're talking exploits, not vulnerabilities. To get back on the point, what makes you think the first article had information about the local accounts being given out and what makes you think the second challenge did not disprove the article's misleading depiction?
Since I don't know of any Ryan R. with a notable security reputation and you haven't exactly "wowed" me with you expertise yet, I'm still reserving judgement on whether or not you are on the level about having (access to/inside knowledge of) remote exploits. One thing I am convinced of is that you don't seem to want to talk about the original issue or provide support for your opinions about it.
I think it does affect the typical Mac user. One could easily use the recent Safari remote code execution bug to download and install this local privledge escalation bug and then use the resulting superuser privlidges to create a new superuser account on the system and shoot an email off to some hotmail address with the system's IP, the new login, and password.
You're missing the point. The Safari bug has been fixed and it was a remote exploit and it was news. Pretty much anyone capable of finding a remote vulnerability who did not get very lucky is also capable of finding a local escalation. Local escalations are common. Remote escalations are not. Which one do you think is news?
Local escalations only affect the average user when used in conjunction with a trojan, remote exploit, or local account. Remote exploits are found and fixed all the time. They are an added level of complexity for a working remote root exploit, but not the hard part. Sorry, but those are the facts of life for any normal desktop OS. If you believed otherwise, then you haven't been paying attention. What do you think those security updates have been doing?
The reason it's "funny" isn't that it's actually funny, it's that it's presented in a somewhat witty fashion
Allow me to retort. I don't believe either the graphic phrase "bruised and bloodied" nor "mouth wide open screaming" is particularly witty. I find it to be sadistic.
vengance is a very gratifying human impulse, it's one of the things that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom-- take that as good or bad as you wish
I'll not argue about whether or not animals feel a sense of vengeance instead I'd like to point out that a lot of things are human impulses, including most that lead to rape. That does not make them laudable nor appropriate topics for mocking jokes. Your attempts to excuse this are equally repugnant.
To address your numbered points:
(1) "threat of homosexual rape", jokes aside, isn't the primary deterrent of prison
I said it was one of the prime deterrents and given the number of times it is cited by police and the media I'd say that is a very valid opinion.
"Joked about cutting off the feet of slaves and torturing Jews". Probably so. But this really doesn't make them any worse than anyone else. Jokes are generally made about unpleasant situations, because that's what they're designed to help us deal with.
Jokes that help people continue to look the other way by ridiculing those suffering are part of the problem. They make it easier to accept a horrible thing and easier to do nothing about it. They let people who do approve of the horrible thing express that to one another with the "out" of "it's just a joke" if they are called to task. Anyone making jokes about others being raped is just helping to make a abhorrent thing more acceptable and if they don't want to be called to task for it, they should stop doing it. Just as jokes about torturing jews and maiming niggers have gone out of fashion as those practices became unacceptable to society it is past time for raping prisoners to be added to that list.
(3) The term "barbaric" stems from an old greek word meaning "people that don't speak my language". You might want to find a new bit of rhetoric to use, as that one too quickly exposes your lack of ability to cope with anything outside of your own narrow worldview.
I see, the word origins of "barbaric" are the best you can pull together for this ad hominem attack? Pathetic. I'm sorry my "narrow world view" does not approve of anal rape. If you want to compose an ad hominem attack you could at least make it a good one, like: maybe your world view finds anal rape to be more acceptable since you don't mind who takes you up your slovenly arse.
(4) And, in conclusion, :-P
Sorry, joking about the extreme mental and physical pain of others may be just fine by you, but it is not by me. It is a real and serious problem in this country and your making light of it is merely one more enabling factor to let our society ignore and tacitly approve of this sickening practice. It's not that I don't understand the joke, it's just that I find it as repulsive as the person who can laugh at it.
I've been posting on this forum for years but I don't think I have ever seen such rapid moderation. The score for my post went from 2 to 5 then down to zero then back up and is now back down to 1 I think. I find it interesting that not only are there a lot of people who agree how horrible rape is and think it is good that I called someone to task for such a posting, but that there are so many spending mod points and making comments defending the raping of prisoners. It is very sad in many ways, but I find that people often surprise me both by being more horrible than I expect and being more amazing. Thanks for the supportive comment.
What are real solutions that will work?
There are a number of technical solutions that can help a lot. Video cameras whose records are reviewed by an impartial third party and an impartial system of review and complaint investigation are both common parts of such a solution. The real problem, however, is not in catching these crimes, it is interesting anyone in doing so. Many prison guards are sadists and people who have a strong desire to use violence and exert authority over others. Those are the kind of people who gravitate to the job. Most citizens don't care that prisoners are raped, even the religious right who opposes all other forms of homosexual relations. In order to have real and lasting change what is needed is a change in the attitudes of society. That is why I am so adamant in making sure I address these cruel remarks here. People need to think about the issue and they need to really consider it aside from "ha ha the botnet operator is gonna get it up the butt." Truly the solution is simply for people to address the issue, and make sure everyone knows it is wrong and must be stopped. Over time, this makes a difference and public attitudes change.
This is already happening in many places and there has been significant reform on this issue. People make it clear they have a position and politicians take action because they know it will get them votes. It is really hard to knock your opponent for stopping the homosexual prison rape without losing an election. The changing of opinions is simply a matter of enough people making themselves heard and speaking out against this crime when they hear it advocated or applauded.
On what grounds are you making the rash assumption that I'm not familiar with the defendent's side of the U.S. justice system? I can tell you from direct personal experience that it's no fun to get caught up in it.
I said nothing about being a defendant, I said put yourself in the shoes of someone convicted, beaten, and being raped. This is how we should judge the ethics of a situation. It is the golden rule you might remember for kindergarten. I entreat you, stop regarding rape as an acceptable evil and if you hear someone make a joke like this please speak out. It is only by confrontation and by showing others that it is not acceptable that we can actually change the attitudes and the reality.
So you think that disagreeing with an article constitutes some sort of useful infosec proof. I see.
No, I think recreating the conditions misleadingly portrayed by the article and demonstrating that despite being under attack the machine was not compromised in 30 minutes proves something. More importantly it demonstrates for the press something they can report in order to clear up the misinformation.
The recent worm, I believe it was dubbed Inqtana? Contains a remote bluetooth exploit.
Yes, but that was academic, not in the wild and it was intentionally limited to prevent it from spreading. It was made to be a non-functional exploit, just a proof of concept.
So, tell me something that would theoretically demonstrate credibility, then.
Show me an exploit or evidence of a box exploited. If you have an exploit that you have reported, tell me about the existence so I can confirm it in the next security update. I know maybe none of these is possible, but you'll forgive me for being skeptical especially given some of the other comments you have made here that don't speak to your credentials (like the shell comment).
I don't think that you'll find any court including sodomy as part of the sentencing. It's just a fact of life in U.S. prisons, much like the fact that he's going to get beat up.
No it isn't just a fact of life. It is an accepted and lauded fact of life, at least according to the parent poster. It is that acceptance and that willingness to enjoy and applaud these unethical acts that is as much a problem as the acts themselves. Slaves getting their feet cut off was a fact of life once too. It was cruel and unethical, but that did not stop it from happening. What stopped it from happening was people deciding that they would not put up with it and making an effort to stop it. And there were some people who made jokes about hopping and less things to wash. The fact that it was an accepted practice at the time did not make those people any more right then and it does not make the parent poster or your own acceptance any more right now. The first step towards stopping this appalling behavior is refusing to accept that it is normal and OK.
Here's a hint: he's locked up with a lot of bad people, so we can expect bad things will happen to him there. Nobody got to prison by being well behaved.
Given the number of people in jail for completely nonviolent crimes that hurt no one, I'd tend to disagree. Even assuming all the laws that put people in jail are ethical and the police and courts are perfect and never make any mistakes, people should still serve their sentence in a cell, not being raped and beaten. This is unethical and it should stop. It certainly should not be encouraged.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone convicted of a crime. You were falsely accused, or you bought a bunch of marijuana or you did not know you were breaking one of the millions of laws no one really knows about. Now you're in prison. Now you're being beaten and someone is taking you up the ass. Tell me, how do you feel about this "justice?" How do you feel about comments by people like the previous poster or yourself that this is "normal" and just the facts of life?
Oh shut up you self righteous tit!
No.
This is a discussion board and I'll certainly not sit here quietly while morons like yourself advocate physical abuse and rape as appropriate punishments for nonviolent crime. It is wholly unethical and I will not stand quietly by and listen to jackasses like you who probably don't know anything about real pain try to make it sound like a palatable idea.
People respond much better to the threat of pain and embarressment[sic] than they do to words like...blah blah blah
Yeah, if we just executed everyone who we suspected had broken any laws no one would commit any crimes, right. Why don't we rape people who get caught speeding? They are at least threatening the safety of others. It'll sure cut down on speeding too, right?
Have you not noticed that since "Political Correctness" grabbed the western world by the testicles, that life is going rapidly down the toilet ? It was only a few years ago that kids would not have even dreamt about knocking over a little old lady for her money. Now it happens.
Ahh yes, the "good ole days" fallacy. Here's a hint buster, the good old days were old, but they were never good. Every generation has bitched about how values are declining and violent crime increasing and the world coming to an end as the younger generation comes into power. Quit yer bellyaching. Violent crime is decreasing not increasing. Your argument is complete bunk unsupported by the facts.
Kids these days don't know what is right and wrong for the simple reason that wrong is no longer associated with pain or embarressment[sic].
Bullshit. Most of the time people have done things that are unethical they have been rewarded, not punished. Pain and embarrassment has always been more likely to be the lot of the "good." Rape is itself wholly unethical but the rapist is not the one suffering. Endorsing unethical practices in the hopes that they will scare people into behaving ethically is the pinnacle of stupidity.
What is your point? Do you think corporal punishment and rape is an appropriate punishment for a non-violent crime or not? Do you approve of this part of our culture or not? How does pointing out other atrocities that were and are being committed in any way mitigate someone here and now advocating and applauding rape?
Why shouldn't kids who damage thousands of computers be subject to the same penalties as the kids who burned down those churches recently?
Well, in the case of arson there is a serious threat to the lives of many people. Maybe someone was sleeping upstairs at one church. Maybe the fire will spread to neighboring buildings or trees and kill someone. In this way I think arson is somewhat more serious. Aside from that, however, I don't think I ever advocated that the kids who set those fires should be seriously beaten or raped and I certainly don't think that. What purpose would it serve?
What would you propose we do with him then? Allowing him to continue is a very bad option, possibly the worst of all available, and currently the accepted practice in the U.S. is incarceration.
While jail time is a valid option it should be jail time minus sexual assault. This may not be the reality in all cases, but rape and physical abuse should not be an accepted part of prison and anyone who accepts it as normal, or lauds it sickens me and just makes the problem worse. For a wholly non-violent offense like this, perhaps a long probation, confiscation of funds, and a few years of regular community service would be more appropriate.
I get the feeling from reading the posts here that almost everyone is interested in revenge against people who spam or run botnets or perform DoS attacks, and no one is interested in either rehabilitation or justice. Those advocating corporeal punishment, rape, death, and eternal damnation have no sense of a punishment fitting the scale of a crime and likely have no idea what it is like to truly suffer physical and mental pain. Gee a bunch of relatively wealthy computer geeks from the first world, what a surprise.