Funk isn't something you admire while you're sitting alone in front of a computer, it's something you groove to with a scotch on the rocks in your hand while surrounded by a bunch of classy ladies who like to shake what their momma gave them. The band isn't there to perform something they conceived in a dark room, they're there to play the crowd, to react and interact with the people as they get excited, antsy, tired, etc.
If you believe that there's only one way that a particular type of music can be appreciated, then you understand neither funk nor art.
If Amazon would like to try this approach, that's fine. But our personal right to do what we will with our property trumps Amazon's business model. If Amazon's business model won't work in a free society, it has no business working at all.
I really wish that were the case, but the congress critters who passed the DMCA, and the president who signed it, didn't see it that way.
Just like you feel you have the right to do whatever you want to stuff you buy, businesses feel that they have the right to protect their business model. They expect to make money not just on the initial sale of the item, but on the ongoing support of the item (through games or ebook sales).
I understand both sides of the argument. It's a tough call.
Not really. It is (or should be) up to businesses to figure out a business model that is profitable without that model relying on laws that artificially force people to behave in a certain way.
DVRs are certainly becoming more popular, but they're not "mainstream" yet in the sense that a network can depend on 90% of their audience tivoing their shows instead of watching them on a regular schedule.
And besides, Fox's behavior in this regard goes back at least to the mid-90's.
Liskov, the first US woman to earn a PhD in computer science, was recognized for helping make software more reliable, consistent and resistant to errors and hacking.
Never said group policies in and of themselves were a bad thing. I was only harping on the tendency of I.T. managers in many organizations to go out of their way to block/disable things not because it makes the system more secure but because they get a kick out of inconveniencing people.
* Enabling auto-mounting of a network drive: smart. * Actively disabling solitaire: stupid. * Setting a default printer: smart. * Prohibiting access to all other printers: stupid.
The whole reason for centralized system administration is to make computing resources more secure, more standardized, and more convenient. Admins on a power trip restrict every little thing they possibly can in order to make other people's lives more difficult.
So what if it was an application that carried malware that you were blocking? Solitaire is a particularly silly example, but is representative of any application. It doesn't take much imagination to come up with an application that you might legitimately want to block. But you seem to be having such a good time, don't let me stop you...
Malware on Linux doesn't cause the entire system/network to go down unless you (foolishly) give root access to every user. Worst case, the user loses their home directory or starts sending mass quantities of spam from their account, both of which are easily detectable and fixable. Because of the superior security model, you don't have to explicitly spend time blocking every "BADPROGGY.EXE" that shows up on BuqTraq.
It's almost as easy as installing a distribution these days. The Edubuntu project did most of the hard work, so I'd recommend starting there.
Also see K12Linux, which is LTSP integrated with Fedora 10. Haven't tried it, but it's supposed to work well.
Both come with "kiddie" graphics and themes installed by default, but those are easy to change. The software underneath is still standard Linux desktop fare.
The only sure fire way is to have the OS integrity itself to be self verifying but too many people are afraid of loosing control over their system to some type of DRM'ed OS
And as well they should be. Don't confuse OS security systems with DRM. Although their methods can be similar, the primary difference between them is control. With a system like SELinux, the user (or admin) controls what is allowed and what is not on their systems. I *want* the fine-grained ability to control what goes on in my software environment, but I don't want a faceless company holding all of the keys and telling me what I can and cannot do with the hardware (and software) that I rightfully possess the license to use.
This should be built in, not an add-on after market chewing gum and bailing wire solution like virus scanners are. Time for Microsoft and/or Symantec to buy a clue. Rootkit or not, Symantec needs to get their act together.
Not to go all RMS, but until Microsoft and/or Symantec open source the entirety of their code, any security system that they introduce to their products cannot be trusted as it cannot be verified as secure by the people who want to use it.
You are looking at it from a system security perspective, not "IT Policies" perspective.
Most "I.T. Policies" are stupid and written by control freaks with no managerial sense.
force all connections through a proxy server for web filtering
The ridiculousness of web filtering aside, this is easily accomplished by pre-made config files in/etc/skel.
pass down 802.1x keys, force people to use a certain network printer,
Again,/etc/skel or something like Puppet works fine here.
He needs to be able to disallow solitare,
Oooh, this is by far my favorite, that's why I saved it for last. If you're to the point where you're seriously considering disabling solitaire, this reveals a number of things about the organization:
1) The I.T. staff and/or managers are unapologetic control freaks and perhaps even proud of it. 2) You don't trust your employees to actually be productive on their own. 3) Your hiring standards are probably pretty low. 4) You have unrealistic expectations of employee efficiency. 5) Morale must really be in the toilet already. 6) It's solitaire for fuck's sake, possibly the most boring game ever devised. If your employees are playing it instead of whatever they should be doing, that means they have no motivation to work, which means management should be the ones to get their lunchtime games taken away, not the employees.
'Zactly. The reason for locking down a Windows machine is to prevent the user from doing stupid things on the system level. On Unix, you just take away the root password.
Every year, I help set up a terminal server with 20-30 thin-client terminals running Ubuntu at a local open source convention. The terminals are completely open to the public and not once has anyone (intentionally or otherwise) been able to do anything harmful. We do absolutely nothing to lock them down, because even right out of the box, there's nothing to lock down.
If we can withstand J. Random Public having full access to a standard user desktop for a weekend, the average employee is going to be completely harmless.
That is, unless the submitter is one those power-hungry admins who has make users' lives as inconvenient has humanly possible. In which case, they should just deploy serial terminals to every desk and only give them command line access via rsh.
He and his fellow soldiers will figure out things to do during their downtime. Let him be immersed in his job without modern distractions. Let him get a taste of what it's like to be completely cut off from modern conveniences. When he's older, he'll look back on it and it will give him a sense of pride that he was able to survive in a hostile environment for months without all the luxury gizmos and gadgets that are currently so popular with his civilian peers.
While I was certainly no Marine, I did spend 8 years in the military and I can say that if I were in the little brother's place, all I would want is a couple of paperback books and a disposable camera. Anything expensive is either going to get broken or will be a liability in terms of distraction.
Right on. When you compare military pay to the salary of the average 19-year-old with only a high school diploma, the miliary pay wins out. And that's even before you consider that food, housing, health care, and education expenses are already paid for.
My first year in active duty left me with enough money to buy a new $4,000 computer and a slew of fun electronic gadgets. And I still had more left over that I honestly wasn't sure what to do with except save. Even though I wasn't rich, I sure felt rich because everyone in my life up until that point had told me about how difficult it was to pay bills and taxes when you're an adult.
Now, if I were smart, I would have invested it and kept saving. It's not a secret that if you invest a few hundred a month, every month, you can retire a millionaire by the age of 65.
(I threw that plan out the window when I got a girlfriend.)
It just seems to me that by now broadband is so popular that it would make more sense to leave the modem out and instead sell an optional external USB modem like Apple does. Hardly anyone would miss it and it would bump their profit margin up a bit. I could see the case for a dialup modem in a netbook or mid-range laptop but anyone lugging around this beast of a portable graphics workstation is not typically going to find themselves in some dusty back-country with only a phone line to the outside world.
IANAL....No matter how many forms you sign, you are legally protected from ever waiving your right to sue.
Bzzt. You can effectively sign away your right to sue and many people do, routinely, without realizing it. (The most common are cell phone, cable, and other service contracts.) The culprit is called a mandatory binding arbitration clause and when you try to sue the company, the court will require you submit to arbitration since that's what you and the other party agreed upon when you signed the contract.
Now, arbitration doesn't really sound all that bad, does it? It's just like court only less expensive and with fewer gavels, right? Well, yes. For the company you're in a dispute with. The average person would still need a lawyer to properly interpret the terms of the contract (let alone contract law itself). Oh and by the way, the company gets to pick the arbitration firm. And they get to decide where the arbitration is held. And if by some chance you can make it the arbitration location with lawyer in tow and make a convincing case, you still only have about a 5% chance of the arbitration firm ruling in your favor.
Okay, so appeal the arbiter's decision in court, right? Nice try, but unless you somehow got permission to record the arbitration proceedings (unlikely, since companies try to keep arbitrations strictly non-public), you've got no evidence to make a case with. And in any event, courts have historically said, "sorry buddy, you agreed to an arbitration in the contract so now you're stuck with it."
Arbitration clauses are another thing that need to be outlawed, IMO.
Nobody's banning free speech. Patients are within their rights to refuse to sign the contract and take their business elsewhere to another hospital or doctor. It's not like health care is that hard to find. (It's just hard to pay for thanks to the insurance industry.)
The very purpose of a contract is that it releases you from or binds you to certain obligations. If you sign a contract saying you won't post a review of your doctor on a website, you are bound by the contract to not post a review of your doctor on a website. If you post the review anyway, your doctor can sue for breach of contract. That's the way contract law works.
Now, do most people believe that they should have the right post a review of their doctor online, regardless of what's in their health care contract? Of course! And if your doctor did sue you for breach of contract, it's likely that the judge would rule against you and order you to remove the post because you did break the contract.
I know that every time someone says, "there ought to be a law," god kills a kitten, but in this case there really should be a law stating that businesses (which doctors and hospitals are) do not have the right to prevent you, via contract or other means, from writing a public statement of your experience with that business as long as that statement does not constitute libel.
Of course, IANAL, so I'm open to other suggestions but this seems to best way to go.
What sort of security depends on the secrecy of a helicopter's blueprints? Honestly.
A fair question. I used to work on Air Force avionics, but everything I touched (autopilot and instruments, basically) was decades-old technology that was designed to be simple, consistent, and reliable. In a word: boring.
However, there are parts of modern avionics packages that are indeed quite classified. The military doesn't like to have the specs for systems like FLIR (infrared sensors) or ECW (electronic countermeasures and weapons) out in the open because knowledge of those systems' limitations or abilities could prove useful to adversaries. For example, if an enemy were launching an operation against a specific model of aircraft, they might like to know where to concentrate their firing in order to disable as many critical systems as possible in the least amount of time.
Even knowing which parts of the aircraft are classified and which aren't could be valuable information to someone looking to gain knowledge for nefarious purposes. You have to remember that much of the military's equipment and procedures today were designed in response to the cold war, where espionage and information gathering were pretty much the biggest threat.
So the engineers at Lenovo have pretty much crammed more "computer" into this laptop than any laptop has had crammed so far. Two screens, nearly full keyboard, two pointing devices, a digitizer tablet, along with a metric crapload of CPU, video, disk, memory, along with the usual gamut of notebook options. It'll set you back between 3000 and 8000 cool US dollars.
And it still comes with a built-in dialup modem inside.
Slashdot Mirror
If you believe that there's only one way that a particular type of music can be appreciated, then you understand neither funk nor art.
I really wish that were the case, but the congress critters who passed the DMCA, and the president who signed it, didn't see it that way.
Not really. It is (or should be) up to businesses to figure out a business model that is profitable without that model relying on laws that artificially force people to behave in a certain way.
Also, I infringed on your copyright.
I think it's jive for "you gonna get sued, bro"
DVRs are certainly becoming more popular, but they're not "mainstream" yet in the sense that a network can depend on 90% of their audience tivoing their shows instead of watching them on a regular schedule.
And besides, Fox's behavior in this regard goes back at least to the mid-90's.
Even though this study raises a lot more questions than answers, I can still hear the horde of TV apologists starting their stampede now...
(Well, once the commercials come on, anyway.)
Liskov, the first US woman to earn a PhD in computer science, was recognized for helping make software more reliable, consistent and resistant to errors and hacking.
Clearly, she's never worked for Microsoft.
Zing!
Never said group policies in and of themselves were a bad thing. I was only harping on the tendency of I.T. managers in many organizations to go out of their way to block/disable things not because it makes the system more secure but because they get a kick out of inconveniencing people.
* Enabling auto-mounting of a network drive: smart.
* Actively disabling solitaire: stupid.
* Setting a default printer: smart.
* Prohibiting access to all other printers: stupid.
The whole reason for centralized system administration is to make computing resources more secure, more standardized, and more convenient. Admins on a power trip restrict every little thing they possibly can in order to make other people's lives more difficult.
Malware on Linux doesn't cause the entire system/network to go down unless you (foolishly) give root access to every user. Worst case, the user loses their home directory or starts sending mass quantities of spam from their account, both of which are easily detectable and fixable. Because of the superior security model, you don't have to explicitly spend time blocking every "BADPROGGY.EXE" that shows up on BuqTraq.
And yes, I am having a good time with this.
It's almost as easy as installing a distribution these days. The Edubuntu project did most of the hard work, so I'd recommend starting there.
Also see K12Linux, which is LTSP integrated with Fedora 10. Haven't tried it, but it's supposed to work well.
Both come with "kiddie" graphics and themes installed by default, but those are easy to change. The software underneath is still standard Linux desktop fare.
And as well they should be. Don't confuse OS security systems with DRM. Although their methods can be similar, the primary difference between them is control. With a system like SELinux, the user (or admin) controls what is allowed and what is not on their systems. I *want* the fine-grained ability to control what goes on in my software environment, but I don't want a faceless company holding all of the keys and telling me what I can and cannot do with the hardware (and software) that I rightfully possess the license to use.
Not to go all RMS, but until Microsoft and/or Symantec open source the entirety of their code, any security system that they introduce to their products cannot be trusted as it cannot be verified as secure by the people who want to use it.
Most "I.T. Policies" are stupid and written by control freaks with no managerial sense.
The ridiculousness of web filtering aside, this is easily accomplished by pre-made config files in /etc/skel.
Again, /etc/skel or something like Puppet works fine here.
Oooh, this is by far my favorite, that's why I saved it for last. If you're to the point where you're seriously considering disabling solitaire, this reveals a number of things about the organization:
1) The I.T. staff and/or managers are unapologetic control freaks and perhaps even proud of it.
2) You don't trust your employees to actually be productive on their own.
3) Your hiring standards are probably pretty low.
4) You have unrealistic expectations of employee efficiency.
5) Morale must really be in the toilet already.
6) It's solitaire for fuck's sake, possibly the most boring game ever devised. If your employees are playing it instead of whatever they should be doing, that means they have no motivation to work, which means management should be the ones to get their lunchtime games taken away, not the employees.
'Zactly. The reason for locking down a Windows machine is to prevent the user from doing stupid things on the system level. On Unix, you just take away the root password.
Every year, I help set up a terminal server with 20-30 thin-client terminals running Ubuntu at a local open source convention. The terminals are completely open to the public and not once has anyone (intentionally or otherwise) been able to do anything harmful. We do absolutely nothing to lock them down, because even right out of the box, there's nothing to lock down.
If we can withstand J. Random Public having full access to a standard user desktop for a weekend, the average employee is going to be completely harmless.
That is, unless the submitter is one those power-hungry admins who has make users' lives as inconvenient has humanly possible. In which case, they should just deploy serial terminals to every desk and only give them command line access via rsh.
You're correct, it doesn't matter. Because TFA was about a new quick-booting Linux distribution, not Ubuntu.
Can you post a link to this script instead? Pasting it into a comment mangled it horribly.
Don't get him any gadgets at all.
He and his fellow soldiers will figure out things to do during their downtime. Let him be immersed in his job without modern distractions. Let him get a taste of what it's like to be completely cut off from modern conveniences. When he's older, he'll look back on it and it will give him a sense of pride that he was able to survive in a hostile environment for months without all the luxury gizmos and gadgets that are currently so popular with his civilian peers.
While I was certainly no Marine, I did spend 8 years in the military and I can say that if I were in the little brother's place, all I would want is a couple of paperback books and a disposable camera. Anything expensive is either going to get broken or will be a liability in terms of distraction.
Right on. When you compare military pay to the salary of the average 19-year-old with only a high school diploma, the miliary pay wins out. And that's even before you consider that food, housing, health care, and education expenses are already paid for.
My first year in active duty left me with enough money to buy a new $4,000 computer and a slew of fun electronic gadgets. And I still had more left over that I honestly wasn't sure what to do with except save. Even though I wasn't rich, I sure felt rich because everyone in my life up until that point had told me about how difficult it was to pay bills and taxes when you're an adult.
Now, if I were smart, I would have invested it and kept saving. It's not a secret that if you invest a few hundred a month, every month, you can retire a millionaire by the age of 65.
(I threw that plan out the window when I got a girlfriend.)
I'm a big fan of Colbert, but some of the other write-in suggestions are even better:
* Buddy
* Synergy
* Vista (!)
* Social Vibe
I, for one, am writing in "Slashdot".
It just seems to me that by now broadband is so popular that it would make more sense to leave the modem out and instead sell an optional external USB modem like Apple does. Hardly anyone would miss it and it would bump their profit margin up a bit. I could see the case for a dialup modem in a netbook or mid-range laptop but anyone lugging around this beast of a portable graphics workstation is not typically going to find themselves in some dusty back-country with only a phone line to the outside world.
Bzzt. You can effectively sign away your right to sue and many people do, routinely, without realizing it. (The most common are cell phone, cable, and other service contracts.) The culprit is called a mandatory binding arbitration clause and when you try to sue the company, the court will require you submit to arbitration since that's what you and the other party agreed upon when you signed the contract.
Now, arbitration doesn't really sound all that bad, does it? It's just like court only less expensive and with fewer gavels, right? Well, yes. For the company you're in a dispute with. The average person would still need a lawyer to properly interpret the terms of the contract (let alone contract law itself). Oh and by the way, the company gets to pick the arbitration firm. And they get to decide where the arbitration is held. And if by some chance you can make it the arbitration location with lawyer in tow and make a convincing case, you still only have about a 5% chance of the arbitration firm ruling in your favor.
Okay, so appeal the arbiter's decision in court, right? Nice try, but unless you somehow got permission to record the arbitration proceedings (unlikely, since companies try to keep arbitrations strictly non-public), you've got no evidence to make a case with. And in any event, courts have historically said, "sorry buddy, you agreed to an arbitration in the contract so now you're stuck with it."
Arbitration clauses are another thing that need to be outlawed, IMO.
Nobody's banning free speech. Patients are within their rights to refuse to sign the contract and take their business elsewhere to another hospital or doctor. It's not like health care is that hard to find. (It's just hard to pay for thanks to the insurance industry.)
The very purpose of a contract is that it releases you from or binds you to certain obligations. If you sign a contract saying you won't post a review of your doctor on a website, you are bound by the contract to not post a review of your doctor on a website. If you post the review anyway, your doctor can sue for breach of contract. That's the way contract law works.
Now, do most people believe that they should have the right post a review of their doctor online, regardless of what's in their health care contract? Of course! And if your doctor did sue you for breach of contract, it's likely that the judge would rule against you and order you to remove the post because you did break the contract.
I know that every time someone says, "there ought to be a law," god kills a kitten, but in this case there really should be a law stating that businesses (which doctors and hospitals are) do not have the right to prevent you, via contract or other means, from writing a public statement of your experience with that business as long as that statement does not constitute libel.
Of course, IANAL, so I'm open to other suggestions but this seems to best way to go.
Get back on my lawn!
A fair question. I used to work on Air Force avionics, but everything I touched (autopilot and instruments, basically) was decades-old technology that was designed to be simple, consistent, and reliable. In a word: boring.
However, there are parts of modern avionics packages that are indeed quite classified. The military doesn't like to have the specs for systems like FLIR (infrared sensors) or ECW (electronic countermeasures and weapons) out in the open because knowledge of those systems' limitations or abilities could prove useful to adversaries. For example, if an enemy were launching an operation against a specific model of aircraft, they might like to know where to concentrate their firing in order to disable as many critical systems as possible in the least amount of time.
Even knowing which parts of the aircraft are classified and which aren't could be valuable information to someone looking to gain knowledge for nefarious purposes. You have to remember that much of the military's equipment and procedures today were designed in response to the cold war, where espionage and information gathering were pretty much the biggest threat.
So the engineers at Lenovo have pretty much crammed more "computer" into this laptop than any laptop has had crammed so far. Two screens, nearly full keyboard, two pointing devices, a digitizer tablet, along with a metric crapload of CPU, video, disk, memory, along with the usual gamut of notebook options. It'll set you back between 3000 and 8000 cool US dollars.
And it still comes with a built-in dialup modem inside.
What. The. Hell.
I have no mod points for this excellent comment so instead I'll pay you in Cheetos.