By the way: There goes Slashdots anonymous features!
To be fair, Slashdot is hosted in the U.S., so any Australian laws wouldn't apply to it.
But it's also worth pointing out that there are plenty of organizations, corporations, and political figures in the U.S. that are actively trying to prohibit anonymous online speech, so the Anonymous Coward's days may yet be numbered.
That's a GOOD thing. It helps keep the guard alive in situations like this. A guard caught up in a robbery is FAR less likely to get shot when the attackers know that he's unarmed. Most thieves are not killers, even when hopped up on drugs or alcohol. You don't want to give the criminal any reason whatsoever to pull the trigger in a tense situation. The guard's life (even the lives of the thieves, despicable though they are) are more important than some merchandise. In a retail setting, the guard is basically a low-tech security system with a salary: he's only there to deter nonviolent opportunistic thieves, nothing more.
I mean, we're not exactly talking offensive linemen here...
Actually, I had a friend who's now an Apple store manager. He's big enough to be a linebacker, with the strength and attitude to match. His temper is so short, that if they would have robbed his store, he would have not only found the crooks by now, he would have them hog-tied and hand-delivered to the police in the trunk of his BMW.
Mod parent up. If you're going to commit a felony that will result in significant jail time, at least rob a bank or a high end jewelery store.
Banks are nearly impossible to rob and get away with (unless it's an inside job and then you can really only do it once).
Jewelry doesn't have that high a black-market or second-hand value. I don't know this from experience, but just look at craigslist and ebay. All the engagement rings that sold for thousands of dollars retail get pawned second-hand for an order of magnitude less. Plus jewelry stores are harder to rob since almost all of them are in well-secured shopping malls these days.
Second-hand Apple products on eBay, however, fetch almost what you'd pay retail for brand-new ones. Couple that with the incredibly weak physical security of most Apple stores and it's hard to think of a more tempting target.
No, they weren't masterminds but you don't need to be for this kind of robbery. The amazing part was that it only took them 31 seconds to clear out the store. Each of them knew their part, concealed their identities, arrived from different directions, and scattered off into different directions. Seriously, most criminals doing this kinds of ballsy thievery are incredibly stupid and more often than not, drunk or high. These guys plainly weren't. They knew what they were doing. You don't see that too often. We'll probably see some copycats over the next few weeks that don't succeed because these guys made it look too easy. I almost wonder if they practiced a bit first.
Although, their biggest downfall is the size of their team. Too many of them to keep it a secret for long. They'll get caught in the end because one of them snitched or bragged.
Also, if you're using this system as the lowest wrung sort of server, you might want to look into simply buying some Via Nano or Intel Atom hardware and just creating an ultra low-wattage server.
I did exactly this a few months ago and don't regret it one bit. These days, you can get an Intel Atom 330 (64-bit, dual core) motherboard + CPU, a low-power 1TB disk, memory, and case + power supply all for under $200 total. Works just dandy for a home/office file server. I replaced my old power-hungry second-hand desktop masquerading as a file server with one of these and went from over 100 watts of power consumption to less than 50. I did the math and it'll take at least two years for the machine to pay for itself, but I figure I can keep it in service for at least 10.
And to answer the submitter's question, the motherboard comes with everything you'd want onboard including video, networking, USB, and serial, so how to get at the console is rather a moot point.
Firefox is open source software, so congratulations! You are now a browser developer! We look forward to seeing your code contributions for text-to-speech, a new MDI model, stability improvements, and comprehensive development integration in time for Firefox 4.0 to ship 11 months from now. I'm sure you already understand that features like this normally take teams of developers years to get right, it's incredible that you're volunteering your time so generously to work on these projects yourself. Thanks so much for your help, it's very rare these days that someone stands up and commits themselves to this kind of enormous project instead of just whining about it on Slashdot.
I say they make sense because the address bar, back button, forward button, refresh/stop buttons, and home button are all part of the current tab, rather than the browser as a whole.
This is true, but you don't have to make the UI conform strictly to the functional model in order to make it easier to use. Anyone who has used Firefox figured out in the first 5 seconds that the navigation toolbar applies only to the currently-selected tab. The tab doesn't have to visually enclose the whole toolbar in order for this to make sense. Placing the tabs right above the content area is best (from my point of view) because a proficient user will create, select, and close tabs more often in the course of browsing than he or she will use the navigation toolbar.
It's a shady journalism tactic. If you want someone to read/watch/buy your otherwise boring article/show/tabloid, you ask your audience a question in the headline or at the end of the summary. The question is not designed to pique your curiosity, or (directly) provoke discussion, it's designed to evoke anger, fear, or shock. It's designed to manipulate you.
The best example I can think of is the typical mid-prime-time nightly news ad: "Are your children safe from Internet predators?" "Is your house killing you?" "Will tonight's full moon turn your dog turn into a werewolf who will disembowel you just after you've nodded off watching pathetic infomercials in the wee hours of the morning? Details at 11."
Now let's take the Slashdot one apart: "Could this spell the beginning of the end for IE?" The Slashdot editors know their audience: 20- or 30-something males. Almost all computer computer experts in some way. Most lean strongly to the left, politically speaking. A good majority are Linux users (who browse from work using IE) and a large percentage are into other hard sciences like aerospace, biotech, engineering, and so on. And we Slashdotters hate Microsoft. They laugh in the face of standards and defiantly write applications to be *deliberately* incompatible with existing standards, even when there is no reason to. Just to be jerks. Bullies. What infuriates us the most is that even when we Linux geeks have retreated completely into our Linux-only man caves, we continue to be confronted with websites that only work in IE, and nifty programs that only run on Windows.
We Slashdotters desperately want to see the Microsoft bully get his due. And boy howdy are we going to tell all the other Slashdotters about it after an obvious question like that.
One of my biggest fears as a relatively new father is that teenage cell phone use is going to be so prevalent by the time she's 13, all the other parents are going to think she's neglected or deprived because she doesn't have a cell phone strapped to her face all the time.
Flight simulators are good and all, but even the most expensive simulators are missing an important element -- gravity force feedback in some form or another. Not only do the controls need to feed back, but the cockpit should too. And when we are talking about military aircraft operations, that kind of simulation is quite likely impossible without putting the pilot into a centrifuge.
Military and commercial flight simulators do have gravity force feedback. They are mounted on a hydraulic platform so that when the pilot pitches or banks the simulator, the platform moves in accordance with the maneuver so that the pilot experiences a force on his/her body approximate to what they would feel in a real airplane. The computer takes all parameters into consideration so that a balanced turn, for example, would hold the platform perfectly vertical. But a slipping or sliding turn would bank the platform to one side or the other.
And when we are talking about military aircraft operations, that kind of simulation is quite likely impossible without putting the pilot into a centrifuge.
Well, this is a simulation after all. The hydraulic platforms can only approximate real G forces. To really experience flying, you have to take an actual plane up into the sky. And trust me, they do.
That said, simulators are an amazingly useful technology even if they don't recreate the entire experience with perfect precision. You can learn 90% or more of what you really need to know about flying without ever leaving the ground. That saves fuel, maintenance, the cost of a plane, and lives.
It's also hard for me to bitch out Microsoft while I am forced to tell people who actually want to use websites with flash (such as full screen youtube) that they can't use Linux.
Wait, why do you tell them that? Flash (fullscreen, even) works just fine on my 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu machines. No, it isn't open source, and no, it doesn't come pre-installed on many (any?) major distros, but there are plenty of essential applications and utilities that don't ship on Windows or OS X either.
I understand that there might be some concern with unleashing all these teenagers on the unsuspecting public
1. A LOT of parents treat school like a babysitting service and couldn't stand the thought of their precious little snowflake sitting around at home unsupervised. Something tells me there would be more than a few angry parents (and probably some lawsuits, unfortunately) if the students were sent back home without advance notice.
2. A LOT of public school administrators treat school like a prison and would much rather see thousands of students sitting around all day on a gymnasium floor than release them back to their comfortable homes while the administrators slaved away at fixing the scheduling problems. Also, sending them home would be like admitting there was a real mistake whereas making the students sit around idle is just a temporary setback.
I swear to FSM, my daughter will never see the inside walls of a public school.
Chavez promoted the use of traditional toys like the Yo-Yo and Trompo, and suggested that electronic toys like 'the Nintendo' be put aside because they promote 'egoism, individualism and violence.'
Yup, can't have people acting like individuals, now can we?
Even though they say that they can give you more perks, the call center jobs still sucks...
Why?
Because when a company is proud that it's turnover rate is only 45% (less than half the industry's average), it tells me that this job is something I would never want to touch with a five foot pole (as opposed to a ten foot one).
Don't judge a an entire industry by the majority of the businesses that comprise it. I work for a managed web hosting company that's doing splendidly even in the recession because we bend over backwards to please our customers. Even when it means that once in awhile we have to refund an entire month's bill to keep the account or dedicate a tech's shift to solving a particularly troublesome MySQL problem. Although there is much that I disagree with in terms of management decisions here, one thing that I stand behind is their commitment to treating every single employee like gold. The pay is not stellar, but we have full medical and dental; a theatre-style lounge complete with projectors, cable TV, Xbox, and PC gaming rigs; unlimited free soft drinks and the company pays for outings like trips to sports games, amusement parks, newly-released movies, paintball, you name it. Every job here is stressful but the perks and camaraderie make it all totally worthwhile and as a result, we have no problem going the extra mile on a daily basis for the customers.
'The car's engine burns liquid petroleum gas to heat water in 12 suitcase-sized boilers, creating steam heated to 400C. The steam then drives a two-stage turbine that spins at 13,000 revolutions per minute to power its wheels.
Cool, a hybrid! Where can I get the government coupon to purchase one?
According to the material, the correct response to an employee who is downloading music is to shout 'That's stealing!' No mention is made of more-free licenses, public domain works, or any other legitimate download.
When I was in the USAF, everyone in our squadron had to complete annual COMPUSEC training in order to retain their network account. Along with all of the other popular security myths, the training included a section where it instructed users to never, EVER install software from a file or disc that hadn't been approved by the network administrator. Now, this would make sense from a security point of view. We don't need bored airmen installing the Trojan Edition of Bejewelled on government computers. What killed me was that the ENTIRE justification for this rule was not to avoid a possible security issue, but rather that doing so might infringe on the software's copyright if a license to use it had not been properly purchased.
In other words, the U.S. military was more concerned about accidental piracy than actual computer security.
It should go without saying that there was never any mention of open source software, but I can sorta forgive them for that since this was a bit before open source became a common idea in I.T.
but the reality is that there is a risk some idiot out there is going to misuse this information.
There are a lot of idiots out there. There is a lot of information out there. I dare you to try to keep them separate.
Seriously, do we want open source malware?
Well, why not?
1. Having the malware open source means that everyone can study it. Not just script kiddies but also security researchers, software developers, and students.
2. If the malware exposes any vulnerabilities, they can be fixed a lot more readily than if an expert white hat reverse engineer had to step through the compiled version in a debugger to find out what was going on.
3. Obscurity is not security. Someone, somewhere, would have also figured out how to make a Skype wiretapping trojan and use it for nefarious purposes, if they haven't already.
#4, Why not use a USB stick as a complete Ubuntu workstation?
Where the OS is loaded from or where data gets saved is irrelevant. If the company's position is that it owns the laptop, and an employee uses it to create something, the company can reasonably argue in court that it owns the created work.
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, Slashdot is hosted in the U.S., so any Australian laws wouldn't apply to it.
But it's also worth pointing out that there are plenty of organizations, corporations, and political figures in the U.S. that are actively trying to prohibit anonymous online speech, so the Anonymous Coward's days may yet be numbered.
That's a GOOD thing. It helps keep the guard alive in situations like this. A guard caught up in a robbery is FAR less likely to get shot when the attackers know that he's unarmed. Most thieves are not killers, even when hopped up on drugs or alcohol. You don't want to give the criminal any reason whatsoever to pull the trigger in a tense situation. The guard's life (even the lives of the thieves, despicable though they are) are more important than some merchandise. In a retail setting, the guard is basically a low-tech security system with a salary: he's only there to deter nonviolent opportunistic thieves, nothing more.
Actually, I had a friend who's now an Apple store manager. He's big enough to be a linebacker, with the strength and attitude to match. His temper is so short, that if they would have robbed his store, he would have not only found the crooks by now, he would have them hog-tied and hand-delivered to the police in the trunk of his BMW.
I wish I were joking.
Banks are nearly impossible to rob and get away with (unless it's an inside job and then you can really only do it once).
Jewelry doesn't have that high a black-market or second-hand value. I don't know this from experience, but just look at craigslist and ebay. All the engagement rings that sold for thousands of dollars retail get pawned second-hand for an order of magnitude less. Plus jewelry stores are harder to rob since almost all of them are in well-secured shopping malls these days.
Second-hand Apple products on eBay, however, fetch almost what you'd pay retail for brand-new ones. Couple that with the incredibly weak physical security of most Apple stores and it's hard to think of a more tempting target.
The clip didn't say they had a gun, they only signaled that they had one. Dunno if that makes any difference in court, though.
Practice, maybe?
No, they weren't masterminds but you don't need to be for this kind of robbery. The amazing part was that it only took them 31 seconds to clear out the store. Each of them knew their part, concealed their identities, arrived from different directions, and scattered off into different directions. Seriously, most criminals doing this kinds of ballsy thievery are incredibly stupid and more often than not, drunk or high. These guys plainly weren't. They knew what they were doing. You don't see that too often. We'll probably see some copycats over the next few weeks that don't succeed because these guys made it look too easy. I almost wonder if they practiced a bit first.
Although, their biggest downfall is the size of their team. Too many of them to keep it a secret for long. They'll get caught in the end because one of them snitched or bragged.
I did exactly this a few months ago and don't regret it one bit. These days, you can get an Intel Atom 330 (64-bit, dual core) motherboard + CPU, a low-power 1TB disk, memory, and case + power supply all for under $200 total. Works just dandy for a home/office file server. I replaced my old power-hungry second-hand desktop masquerading as a file server with one of these and went from over 100 watts of power consumption to less than 50. I did the math and it'll take at least two years for the machine to pay for itself, but I figure I can keep it in service for at least 10.
And to answer the submitter's question, the motherboard comes with everything you'd want onboard including video, networking, USB, and serial, so how to get at the console is rather a moot point.
Yep, there's a difference between "unlimited" and "Internet unlimited". See every other Slashdot article about Comcast over the past decade.
Firefox is open source software, so congratulations! You are now a browser developer! We look forward to seeing your code contributions for text-to-speech, a new MDI model, stability improvements, and comprehensive development integration in time for Firefox 4.0 to ship 11 months from now. I'm sure you already understand that features like this normally take teams of developers years to get right, it's incredible that you're volunteering your time so generously to work on these projects yourself. Thanks so much for your help, it's very rare these days that someone stands up and commits themselves to this kind of enormous project instead of just whining about it on Slashdot.
This is true, but you don't have to make the UI conform strictly to the functional model in order to make it easier to use. Anyone who has used Firefox figured out in the first 5 seconds that the navigation toolbar applies only to the currently-selected tab. The tab doesn't have to visually enclose the whole toolbar in order for this to make sense. Placing the tabs right above the content area is best (from my point of view) because a proficient user will create, select, and close tabs more often in the course of browsing than he or she will use the navigation toolbar.
It's a shady journalism tactic. If you want someone to read/watch/buy your otherwise boring article/show/tabloid, you ask your audience a question in the headline or at the end of the summary. The question is not designed to pique your curiosity, or (directly) provoke discussion, it's designed to evoke anger, fear, or shock. It's designed to manipulate you.
The best example I can think of is the typical mid-prime-time nightly news ad: "Are your children safe from Internet predators?" "Is your house killing you?" "Will tonight's full moon turn your dog turn into a werewolf who will disembowel you just after you've nodded off watching pathetic infomercials in the wee hours of the morning? Details at 11."
Now let's take the Slashdot one apart: "Could this spell the beginning of the end for IE?" The Slashdot editors know their audience: 20- or 30-something males. Almost all computer computer experts in some way. Most lean strongly to the left, politically speaking. A good majority are Linux users (who browse from work using IE) and a large percentage are into other hard sciences like aerospace, biotech, engineering, and so on. And we Slashdotters hate Microsoft. They laugh in the face of standards and defiantly write applications to be *deliberately* incompatible with existing standards, even when there is no reason to. Just to be jerks. Bullies. What infuriates us the most is that even when we Linux geeks have retreated completely into our Linux-only man caves, we continue to be confronted with websites that only work in IE, and nifty programs that only run on Windows.
We Slashdotters desperately want to see the Microsoft bully get his due. And boy howdy are we going to tell all the other Slashdotters about it after an obvious question like that.
</armchair psychology>
And 99% of them are registered by spammers and professional cybersquatters. Thanks, ICANN and the domain name registrar industry.
So... it'll be only slightly better but far more fattening?
One of my biggest fears as a relatively new father is that teenage cell phone use is going to be so prevalent by the time she's 13, all the other parents are going to think she's neglected or deprived because she doesn't have a cell phone strapped to her face all the time.
Military and commercial flight simulators do have gravity force feedback. They are mounted on a hydraulic platform so that when the pilot pitches or banks the simulator, the platform moves in accordance with the maneuver so that the pilot experiences a force on his/her body approximate to what they would feel in a real airplane. The computer takes all parameters into consideration so that a balanced turn, for example, would hold the platform perfectly vertical. But a slipping or sliding turn would bank the platform to one side or the other.
Well, this is a simulation after all. The hydraulic platforms can only approximate real G forces. To really experience flying, you have to take an actual plane up into the sky. And trust me, they do.
That said, simulators are an amazingly useful technology even if they don't recreate the entire experience with perfect precision. You can learn 90% or more of what you really need to know about flying without ever leaving the ground. That saves fuel, maintenance, the cost of a plane, and lives.
Because it's damn cool, that's why.
Wait, why do you tell them that? Flash (fullscreen, even) works just fine on my 32-bit and 64-bit Ubuntu machines. No, it isn't open source, and no, it doesn't come pre-installed on many (any?) major distros, but there are plenty of essential applications and utilities that don't ship on Windows or OS X either.
1. A LOT of parents treat school like a babysitting service and couldn't stand the thought of their precious little snowflake sitting around at home unsupervised. Something tells me there would be more than a few angry parents (and probably some lawsuits, unfortunately) if the students were sent back home without advance notice.
2. A LOT of public school administrators treat school like a prison and would much rather see thousands of students sitting around all day on a gymnasium floor than release them back to their comfortable homes while the administrators slaved away at fixing the scheduling problems. Also, sending them home would be like admitting there was a real mistake whereas making the students sit around idle is just a temporary setback.
I swear to FSM, my daughter will never see the inside walls of a public school.
Yup, can't have people acting like individuals, now can we?
I'll agree that they could have toned it down a bit, but I'm curious, which parts of the site were incorrect?
"Delusional" is believing that Windows 7 will be any different than Vista in terms of anything but perhaps raw speed.
Don't judge a an entire industry by the majority of the businesses that comprise it. I work for a managed web hosting company that's doing splendidly even in the recession because we bend over backwards to please our customers. Even when it means that once in awhile we have to refund an entire month's bill to keep the account or dedicate a tech's shift to solving a particularly troublesome MySQL problem. Although there is much that I disagree with in terms of management decisions here, one thing that I stand behind is their commitment to treating every single employee like gold. The pay is not stellar, but we have full medical and dental; a theatre-style lounge complete with projectors, cable TV, Xbox, and PC gaming rigs; unlimited free soft drinks and the company pays for outings like trips to sports games, amusement parks, newly-released movies, paintball, you name it. Every job here is stressful but the perks and camaraderie make it all totally worthwhile and as a result, we have no problem going the extra mile on a daily basis for the customers.
Cool, a hybrid! Where can I get the government coupon to purchase one?
When I was in the USAF, everyone in our squadron had to complete annual COMPUSEC training in order to retain their network account. Along with all of the other popular security myths, the training included a section where it instructed users to never, EVER install software from a file or disc that hadn't been approved by the network administrator. Now, this would make sense from a security point of view. We don't need bored airmen installing the Trojan Edition of Bejewelled on government computers. What killed me was that the ENTIRE justification for this rule was not to avoid a possible security issue, but rather that doing so might infringe on the software's copyright if a license to use it had not been properly purchased.
In other words, the U.S. military was more concerned about accidental piracy than actual computer security.
It should go without saying that there was never any mention of open source software, but I can sorta forgive them for that since this was a bit before open source became a common idea in I.T.
There are a lot of idiots out there. There is a lot of information out there. I dare you to try to keep them separate.
Well, why not?
1. Having the malware open source means that everyone can study it. Not just script kiddies but also security researchers, software developers, and students.
2. If the malware exposes any vulnerabilities, they can be fixed a lot more readily than if an expert white hat reverse engineer had to step through the compiled version in a debugger to find out what was going on.
3. Obscurity is not security. Someone, somewhere, would have also figured out how to make a Skype wiretapping trojan and use it for nefarious purposes, if they haven't already.
Where the OS is loaded from or where data gets saved is irrelevant. If the company's position is that it owns the laptop, and an employee uses it to create something, the company can reasonably argue in court that it owns the created work.