Couldn't agree more, these workspaces are positively posh compared to what I had to work in as my first "real" I.T. job just a few years ago. The owner of the small company was a wide-eyed idealist. Which is good, except that he was also insanely cheap. In the year that I worked for him, he just couldn't see things from other people's point of view. He was mostly a nice guy, but he didn't understand that humans were more productive when allowed basic things like comfort and morale. Anyway, by the time I left we had a workspace of about 8 seats that was comprised as follows. (I'll use the present tense so you can get a feel for the kind of despair that I experienced every morning for almost a year. And no, none of this is exaggeration for dramatic effect. I'll be as truthful as possible.)
As you sit down, you say a short prayer that the chair won't collapse or splinter your ass today. All chairs in the "office" probably worked quite well in the 70's when they were new. 30 years later, they were literally salvaged from the local University thrift store by my boss to the tune of about $1 each.
In front of you, your "desk." And by "desk," I really mean wire shelving unit. Inbox and accessories on the top shelf, computer monitor on the second, keyboard on the third, feet on the fourth. A privileged few got keyboard trays.
On either side, plastic folding tables. If you occupied a workspace in between two other people, you had to share your tables with them. This was actually kind of cool when you happened to be working next to a project partner or a good friend. Miserable otherwise.
There are no drawers in any part of the workspace, except for a single filing cabinet. This is by design. Every time a new employee notices this, the boss's only and final response is, "drawers are only good for losing things in."
Our computers and peripherals were from the same college surplus store that the chairs came from. Mostly Pentium II's and aging 17" Dell CRTs that had scratches and various marks all over them. The only thing that made using them bearable was the fact that they were only thin clients connected to a terminal server. The keyboards and mice were well past their intended lifespan and it took me a solid 8 months of persuasion before I could get the boss to pony up $60 for a half-dozen new optical mice.
I wish I could say that the environment itself was any better. I would like to tell you that despite the lack of anything resembling real furniture, the facility was carpeted, cozy, and comfortable. Instead, I have to tell you that in reality, it was anything but. The "office" was really a part of what used to be (and still technically is) a very large warehouse.
Which meant that you could clearly hear conversations that were literally on the other side of the room, completely destroying your train of thought when coding or debugging a difficult problem. Harsh florescent lights made your eyes want to bleed well before it was even lunchtime.
The floor was cement, so dust went anywhere it wanted, which was usually everywhere. In the morning when you come in, there was a gritty dust on your keyboard, your monitor, and any papers you forgot to put in the binder. You usually couldn't see it, but you could always feel it. If there was a lot of foot-traffic that day or someone came through wielding a push-broom, there would be dust on your clothes and in your hair by the end of the day as well.
With brick walls and very high ceilings, it was literally impossible to keep the people on the floor warm in the winter. To make things worse, those of us within 15 feet of the exterior wall got a double-shot of it due to the cold air "falling" off the 25-foot wall. I would estimate that the warmest my "desk" got in January was 50 degrees. It was also the only time in my life I'v
I know the slashdot crowd is a big fan of free things, aren't we all, but when you sign on for internet you agree it's for your household, apartment, or whatever, not for you to provide publicly (even though many people inadvertently do with unsecured wireless networks).
There's a problem with this premise, though: Not all ISPs consider this a violation of their terms of service. My provider is a locally-owned and operated DSL outfit who leases CO space and last-mile copper from the incumbent Bell. When I questioned their sales team about their policies, their answer was along the lines of, "as long as it's not illegal or abusive to the network, you can do whatever you want with your DSL connection." Their written terms of service agree with this. The only things they prohibit are abuse of the network (e.g., spamming) and things which would get you arrested anyway (child pornography, fraud, etc).[1]
If you're the customer of a service provider that explicitly disallows many common uses of a broadband connection (having more than one computer online, peer-to-peer traffic, low-volume hosting, etc) then you need to start looking around for a _real_ provider.
Just like you can't steal cable or run a cable over to your neighbor's, you can't steal internet service either.
Offering to share a legally-acquired Internet connection is not at all stealing or akin to stealing. You can't be charged with "stealing" an Internet connection after you've already paid for it any more than you can be charged with "stealing" a car after you've signed the lease. It might be against the provider's terms of service to share your connection with someone not living in your household. But all the provider can do in retaliation is terminate your service because you haven't broken any laws.
Likewise, when someone pirates something using your network, the person getting sued will probably be the person that pays the bill--you. And just think what would happen if someone downloads child pornography on your connection...!
In general, courts have required that the prosecution be able to provide more evidence than a single IP address in some log in order to successfully accuse someone of piracy or child pornography. If the police can't find anything damning on your hard drives and you run an open-access wireless router, then any competent court is not going to find you guilty.
1. One other nice thing about this provider is that they let you grab multiple public IP addresses via DHCP. I've done this a few times to sort out issues with my VoIP equipment. I asked their support people if this was a problem and they said they don't mind as long as it's not abused. But it's obviously not something they advertise.
Domain squatters are by far one of the biggest things holding back the Internet. Squatting has gotten so bad that the name of your company has to be complete gibberish in order to match an available domain name. Just try coming up with a company name that has a similar domain name available. You'll find that most of the domains you try either have some sort of spam link portal or a "buy this domain for $200!" page. Only a few are actual web sites. If you don't believe me, try it.
This "domain tasting" thing is a very small problem in comparison.
I think that in order to retain a domain name, you should have to prove that you're using it in an ethical and legal manner. ARIN makes my web hosting company justify their usage of IP addresses, so ICANN should do the same for domain names. Of course, working out exactly how to define a web site that's "using" a domain name versus one that is not might be tricky, but there has got to be a way to curb 90% of the squatting that's going on and take back our Internet from the scammers.
I was in the exact same place as you and came to the same exact conclusions. Throughout my teen years I was a video game fiend. Not just casual gaming mind you, but the long RPGs that take 50+ hours to beat even if you're in a hurry. Video games were literally my entire life. I didn't have many friends, I didn't date, I didn't even get the chance to experiment with alcohol and drugs with my peers. I just played shitloads of games. When I wasn't playing them, I was reading about them. When I wasn't reading about them, I was thinking about them.
Fast forward to me at 20 years old. I was having some trouble getting past a difficult boss in Final Fantasy 9. It was late so I just gave it up and went to bed at some point. The next day, after I got home from work, I looked at the Playstation and somehow realized right then and there that battling imaginary monsters and exploring fictional worlds had absolutely no tangible impact on anything that really mattered in my life. So I simply went off to do something else instead.
I always had an interest in computers and open source and quitting video games let me focus on them nearly full-time. Looking back, it's almost creepy how quickly I went from around 35 hours of video games per week for over a decade to nothing literally overnight. These days I only play games casually. Once every couple months I'll pick up the GameBoy Advance and play Sonic for a half hour, or perhaps plug in the old Playstation and whiz through a few levels of Wipeout XL. I go on an emulator kick about once a year. Other than that, nada.
I'm not saying that quitting games turned me into a genius or a high-roller. In fact, my job bores me and the married life means that I have less time to myself than ever. But retiring the D-pad was possibly one of the best moves I have ever made and the timing couldn't have been better. Some people are in their 30's and don't realize how much of their lives they willingly forfeited to video games.
I remember having great fun in subspace a decade ago, but I don't think it qualifies as an MMORPG because the zones are neither massive nor is the game an RPG.
Some of the machines that said "vista capable" were, some were barely capable. But they've been downplaying the minimum requirements forever. If you had a system with the minimum requirements for XP, it ran like a dog. Did people expect that buying something with the minimum requirements for Vista would generate better results?
Okay, if someone goes out and buys Vista for their computer using only the listed system requirements as a guide instead of doing actual research to find out if Vista will work on their computer, that's one thing. I don't know that I would fault Microsoft too much here because lots of software vendors understate the system requirements (although Microsoft have historically been the worst).
Maybe this will run against popular opinion here, but I think this class-action suit against Microsoft is seriously misguided, frivolous, and ultimately pointless. I would be much more in favor of lawsuits against system manufacturers like Dell, Lenovo, and HP who knowingly switched almost their entire product line to an OS that couldn't run on any but the highest-end machines. And yes, I have first-hand knowledge of this because I installed XP for several people who bought a machine that was pre-installed with Vista. Out of the box, the Vista machines were considerably slower than the aged XP machines they were meant to replace. This was a really dumb move on the part of the manufacturers, but everyone seems to want to blame Microsoft.
I was initially opposed to widescreen displays when they first came out because I saw it as nothing more than a marketing gimmick. "Oooh look, you can watch your DVDs on it!"
But when it came time for a new laptop, I didn't really have any choice but to get a widescreen display. Having used one for awhile, I now think they should have put widescreen displays into laptops sooner for two reasons:
1) In contrast to many of the comments here, I find that having a wider screen is great for development because it means you can have a couple of terminal windows and a browser open with less (or no) overlapping. This means less time wasted in flipping between windows which means greater productivity. This is the same reason I have a dual-head workstation at home. Anyone with a dual-head display is already effectively using one extremely wide screen.
2) From an engineering and usability standpoint, it makes perfect sense to make laptops wider than longer when you're trying to fit in more into the machine, including screen real estate. A wider laptop is one that can more easily accommodate a full-size keyboard and bigger screen while still remaining relatively compact.
Oh man, not these tired old arguments again. I have mod points and I was going mod this down, but I'm in a charitable mood and feel like feeding some trolls today.
Want to use your favourite software (photoshop, dreamweaver, GTA 4 etc: nope, that's for windows and/or mac only.
The Linux software ecosystem is rife with applications that perform the same task as their popular proprietary counterparts. Some of them aren't quite up to par (Gimp), some are roughly equivalent (OpenOffice), and some are leagues better (Firefox). There are more and more proprietary applications being ported to Linux all the time.
If your argument is that there are specific software packages that can't run on Linux, well, the same is true for both Windows and Mac. There are many Mac applications that you simply can't buy for Windows and we all well know that the reverse is true.
Neither Mac or Windows come with a system where you can browse from a catalog of over 10,000 applications and install any one of them instantly, for free, with the click of a mouse button.
Want to buy new hardware... well you can if you scour the internet for days finding out if it's compatible; you can't just pop down pcworld one saturday afternoon and pick something up and know it'll work.
This hardware myth really needs to be put to rest. Linux supports a wider variety of hardware than any other operating system on the planet. True, there can be a delay between the time that a new device is released and the time that a common Linux distribution supports it. It's also true that some hardware vendors refuse to release their hardware specifications or even cooperate in any way with open source developers but these are very much the exception these days rather than the rule. If you think Windows supports hardware any better than Linux then you have either not used Vista yet or have somehow managed to be the only person on the planet who has never fought with Windows over printer, video, or wifi driver issues at some point.
Want to install some software... sure... if you broadband no problem...
Ubuntu and many of its derivatives will ship you a copy of their OS on CD at no charge. No media fees, no shipping and handling. Free. Most of the software that you can install afterward is not at all too large to pull down via a dialup modem. Windows and OS X cost hundreds of dollars each. I would say that I put my money where my mouth is, except that I don't have to spend any of it on Linux at all.
oh, but it might install the software anywhere on your system... good luck learning to grep it.
Not sure what you mean here. On KDE- and GNOME-based distributions, a shortcut to every installed application gets put into the applications menu. Which, by the way, is sorted by the software's function so everything is easy to find. Contrast with Windows where each application goes into its own folder or a folder named after the company that distributed it. Install enough applications and the Start menu becomes large and unusable. Contrast also with Mac, where you have to dig down into a special (and also unsorted) Applications folder to find newly-installed apps.
Fat chance if your friend has just given you a cdrom with software on it!
Why, you don't have any friends?
Okay, unprofessional personal attack aside, Linux-using friends are more likely to give you a URL than a CD-ROM. If someone's giving you a CD-ROM with Windows or Mac software on it, there's a good chance it's warez anyway unless they're in the habit of giving away their legitimate software.
want to play games.... err... well... no.. not really, but hey we've got solitaire!!!
There is, admittedly, a noted lack of high-profile games natively available for Linux. However, there are some good ones available. Recent versions of Quake and Unreal Tournament run fine natively.
I mean, if you're willing to shell out the dough for a T61, you might as well get a MacBook Pro and at least have the option to run MacOS X.
The T61 is much more affordable than the MacBook Pro. Go to store.apple.com and pick out the middle-of-the-road MacBook Pro. Now go to Lenovo.com and put together an equivalent Thinkpad. I just did exactly this and the price difference is $1000. There are a few tradeoffs both ways (for example the Thinkpad has VGA output rather than DVI while the MacBook doesn't have a Cardbus slot), but in my 5 months of owning a Thinkpad, I'd never choose a different notebook. Great price, great features, and sturdy as hell.
Exactly. More african-americans are poor, and video games are a very cheap form of entertainment.
Say what now? A current video game system is between $150-$300 brand-new. Each game ranges from $40-$60 and it's not cool any more to have just 4 or 5 games--upwards of one to two dozen seems to be the norm. Would you explain to me please how that's "very cheap" to a minimum wage single-parent family?
If you want to talk about race, talk about why more african-americans are poor. The games thing is just a symptom.
I think it has less to do with why many African-Americans are poor than it does with America's insatiable hunger for entertainment. It seems like the less money a family makes, the higher their percentage of their monthly income goes towards entertainment.
My wife and I used to be friends with a couple that is, shall we say, less than well-to-do. (And no, they're not African-Americans.) They moved into a house that was essentially given to them by a family member and what do you think was their first priority? Unpacking boxes? Getting the furniture arranged? Stocking the pantry? Nope. They pissed and moaned for _three whole days_ because it was taking _forever_ to get the cable TV hooked up.
If e-commerce continues to grow, and is not taxed equitably with other businesses, this becomes a tax break for the big internet based merchants, and they need it the least.
I think you're a bit confused here. When has a business ever beared the burden of sales tax? Yep, that's right, never. Per-item taxes and fees are always passed on to the consumer. Businesses do not ever absorb any cost if they can think they can get away with passing it onto consumers. And they almost always do.
It seems like anymore, the government and corporations treat Americans as if they were nothing more than millions of little bank accounts. Did anyone else notice that as soon as the federal government announced their little "economic stimulus package", states and local governments started proposing new taxes left and right? Or how the oil companies are posting record profits while gas prices are edging towards $4/gallon and the economy spirals toward recession?
I guess I better leave it at that before I _really_ launch into a rant...
I can't tell if you're trolling or not, but I'll bite anyway.
The truth is it is far too much work to write and maintain a linux driver.
Erm, "far too much work" compared to what? Compared to another Linux driver? Compared to a Windows driver? Lots of people maintain Linux device drivers either as their job or in their spare time or both.
Unless you've got huge resources (e.g. nVidia), the only option is to get it into the official kernel tree, which involves making your driver open source which very few companies are willing to do.
Huh? What does having corporate resources have to do with creating a binary driver? Anyone can do it, you just compile your driver into a binary and bundle a bit of source code to glue it into end-user's kernel. An open source driver is not "the only option".
You're also wrong in saying that very few companies are willing to open source their drivers. The Linux and BSD kernels are full of examples where companies have written open source drivers for their hardware and submitted them for inclusion in the project as a whole. RAID cards, motherboard chipsets, sound drivers, network drivers, USB devices, you name it.
Just look at the drivers for UniChrome graphics cards. The installation process requires you to recompile both X and the kernel.
This is the great thing about open source. If you see a problem with a piece of software that you're using, you can always help fix it yourself. If you were stuck on a proprietary closed-source system like Windows or OS X, your only course of action would be to hop onto a popular news blog and bitch about it.
I'm sorry but I bet if decent tools were provided for writing linux drivers
The Linux kernel is probably the most well-understood kernel on the planet. It is open source. The compiler is open source. The libraries are open source. You have thousands of text editors to choose from. The userland is conducive to development by design and there are many ways to sandbox your code as you test it. There's an extremely active development community and quite a lot of documentation.
What additional tools do you want exactly? Please provide specifics on what we can do better.
, and there was some sane way to distribute binary drivers (there really isn't a way at the moment) then I bet more companies would make them.
The reason that getting nVidia drivers onto a Linux distro is so hard is not because nVidia distributes binary drivers, it's because nVidia won't let anyone else redistribute them. Every Linux package manager is perfectly capable of dropping a couple of binaries onto the file system, so the problem here is not with Linux's technical limitations, it's with nVidia.
I know you all want open source drivers, but you can't say to companies "Your only option is to release open source drivers" and then wonder why they don't release decent drivers - closed or open source.
First of all, I never said that. Second, there are hundreds (possibly thousands) of examples of open source drivers that work just fine in the Linux, BSD, and Xorg code.
I'm trying to figure out how you justify painting the Linux community as the bad guy here. No Linux user ever went over to nVidia headquarters with a gun and said, "now look here, we want some drivers or else!" The bottom line here is that nVidia wants the small (but growing) Linux community to buy their graphics cards, but they only want to do the bare minimum necessary in order to say that they support Linux. The kicker is that they wouldn't even have to write or release a single line of code, the Linux community would do all the hard work for them if only nVidia would agree to let a few open source developers have access to the hardware specifications.
Since ATI has released the full specifications to their graphics hardware, it will be interesting to see if the open source community flocks to ATI once the drivers mature a bit. nVidia can certainly do the same thing, they just want to pretend that they can't.
One thing you have to understand about the military is that for every uniformed soldier, airman, sailor, or what-have-you, there are 3 more civilian government employees doing the routine stuff like keeping the base facilities repaired, managing the supply system, or (unfortunately) maintaining the base's entire I.T. infrastructure.
At every single Air Force base I was stationed, the network staff was entirely comprised of should-be retirees who had been working for the federal government since the stone ages and weren't knowledgeable about the systems they managed beyond whatever they had to cram for in order to keep their MCSE certificate current. Network outages several times a week were the norm. The security policies were effective at keeping Airmen from doing their work at the same time that they practically begged hackers to have a nice comfy visit.
One admin was so inept that he refused to install virus-scanning software on the Exchange server because "all packages that [he] tested caught false positives." So his Plan B was to forward every single email virus hoax message that he got to every single person in the wing. Each message of course carried the stern warning, "anyone who opens an email with the subject 'a postcard for you' will lose network privileges." Once in awhile I'd send him a link to a website disproving one of his forwarded hoaxes, but never got any replies.
Another time I stopped by the NOC office to have them repair a laptop that wouldn't boot because of some Windows driver issue. I could have fixed it myself, but mind you, this is the military and I wasn't "trained" to do that. The guy who worked on the machine seemed nice enough, so I mentioned jokingly that he should put Linux on it and it would work fine. Bad move: he didn't take it as a joke. I got to listen for a 45 minutes about how Linux wasn't a real OS and was developed by (or for) hackers for infiltrating classified networks, and about how Microsoft single-handedly invented computers, and about how they didn't even have punch-cards back in his day, etc, etc.
I dunno that I agree. I had an Iiyama 19" CRT with Trinitron tube for 7 years and it was the best damn monitor I ever had. When it was new, the sharpness honestly rivaled that of an LCD. Even in its later years, it still stood out amongst many newer tubes.
I don't get people who complain about the tension wires. Yes, you can see them. In fact, when I unpacked the Iiyama and turned it on for the first time, I was ready to send it back, thinking I had a defective tube. (The main reason I didn't was because I didn't exactly have any reserve cash for shipping the bastard back after paying $600 for it.) But honestly, the lines that the tension wires cast were extremely fine and after a minute or two you don't even notice them when going about your normal work. And I did it all: programming, gaming, light graphics design work. After the first day of owning it, I think I actually noticed the tension wires maybe 5 times in 7 years.
One peculiarity of this monitor is that it liked to scare me. Not Kidding. About once a month, at some random point (usually while I was reading slashdot, writing code, or otherwise lost in thought staring at the screen), the picture would zoom in suddenly while a relay in it made a loud click. Every single time that happened, I jumped a mile because in this split second, my lower brain functions interpreted this as, "MOVE FOOL, THE 75-POUND MONITOR IS COMING FOR YOUR HEAD!"
I served proudly as an active duty member of the United States Air Force for 4 years and then in the Reserves for another 4 years. Although the Air Force is generally regarded as the most "modern" of the U.S. military branches, I still found that the overall structure was too rigid to take me where I wanted to go, so I followed my inner geek and moved fully into the civilian sector.
You said, 'We have to change the way we think about warriors of the future.' At first, I guessed that you would hire these individuals into government contractor positions, but the Wired article implies otherwise. Many of the brightest security experts, by nature, are highly independent and have a noted distaste for many of the standards that being in the Air Force require, such as basic training, dress and appearance, and physical fitness. How far will the Cyber Command bend the traditional standards in order to persuade the best and brightest in the security field to sign up into a military career?
This is favoritism. Microsoft doesn't even have this ability to stop the resale of their software.
False.
A few months ago, I was given a bunch of old laptops that had Win2k licenses on them. The laptops weren't worth much because they had bad motherboards or smashed screens, but some of them were popular models back in the day so I was sure some computer repair shops would buy them for the miscellaneous parts (LCD inverters, weird cables, brackets, an so forth). As a selling point, I mentioned that each laptop came with a Win2K certificate of authenticity affixed to it. About $50 in listing fees and a week's worth of work later, I put them up on eBay. After 5 days, the laptops were doing quite well in terms of bids.
On the 6th day (one day before the auctions end), I get an email from eBay saying that Microsoft merely asked them to remove the auctions of the laptops. And they did, apparently without even checking into anything. eBay's message to me vaguely hinted at copyright violation, yet I violated NO laws, I infringed on NOBODY'S copyright. According to the 3 (!) cease-and-desist letters that Microsoft sent to me a week later, I was subject to some kind of legal action because I was trying to sell Microsoft software but was not an authorized Microsoft dealer.
Yeah, I'm STILL trying to wrap my head around that. Even to this day, there are thousands of copies of Windows for sale on eBay and even more second-hand computers, broken or otherwise that come with Windows. But my auctions got shut down for the same thing and I got stuck with 2 dozen worthless laptops. The irony is that I used to report websites selling pirated copies of Windows, but obviously it's not in my interest to do so any longer. Unfortunately, I still have an eBay account because there are some odds and ends that I can only buy there affordably.
If I knew how to break into your house, then told you that I was able to but won't tell you how unless you paid up a fee?
I really like this analogy, because it helps prove my point in another point that you make...
Morally, a security researcher isn't supposed to hold information hostage and then credibly claim to be part of any ethical hacking community. At level best, they would be called grey hats; many would rightly call them black-hats.
I would call them black-hats because I have a hard time seeing how this can be anything but blackmail. I don't even care about the moral or ethical points of it, if somebody told me they could break into my house but wouldn't say how unless I paid them, well I would take that as a threat and would have them arrested and/or sued immediately. It's a good thing that these Gleg guys are in Russia (probably not coincidence?) or Real would already be throwing armies of lawyers at them because blackmail is highly illegal in most countries.
I'm glad Real isn't paying them a dime. Real has no way of knowing if the security company's claims are overstated or not. And if they did pay, that would set a horrible precedent. It would be like saying to the entire black-hat community, "hey guys, we'll throw money at you if you hold our vulnerabilities ransom!" It's almost akin to caving in to terrorist demands.
I understand that security companies want to make money, but this isn't how you go about it. A good security firm makes their money by establishing a reputation. They establish a reputation by demonstrating publicly that they're good at what they do.
I mean, I doubt there are people that know the kernel well enough to do such changes for their own systems, but really, what percentage of you guys honestly and confidently can say "Yeah, let me just fix that for us" knowing your job is on the line if your systems crash around you.
When going into system administration for mission-critical systems, you learn three things very quickly:
1) Back up everything
2) Test even the smallest change before putting it into production
3) Design everything to be as redundant as possible
You can never prevent failure, so a good admin makes sure that the systems continue to operate even with multiple failures.
What most departments will probably do is wait for the distribution developers to release a new kernel image (probably tomorrow if they haven't already) and assign someone to try it out on a testing machine. If that person is comfortable that the patch doesn't screw anything up (very likely since it's a pretty simple patch), they'll put on the production machines one at a time, starting with the least-critical working their way up to the most critical. It's really all about being cautious, exercising patience, and using common sense. All those people who've rushed to apply the patch have probably already caused more damage to their systems than the entire cracking community using this exploit in the wild.
I had a few vulnerable (tested) machines that I cannot reboot even if a patched kernel is released in the near future.
I'm a little confused by this statement. Do you mean to say that these machines are so mission-critical that they can't have a couple minutes downtime in the middle of the night? If this is true, and you have no failover or redundancy to keep the service itself online while one machine is down, then I think you have much bigger things to worry about than a little root exploit.
yet the screen hinge looks plastic instead of the heavy duty metal hinges that give thinkpads that smooth and secure feel while adjusting the screen you just don't see with most other laptops.
There really isn't a large enough picture of the X300 available to get a really good look at the hinges, but from the pictures that Gizmodo published, they look like metal to me. They will probably be smaller than what people are used to on the ThinkPad, but the whole machine is going to be smaller too.
Plus there's wear and tear to consider, I've noticed that the office computers that get turned off and on every day tend to fail and need replacing several times before mine (that stays on all the time) has a failure.
I've been hearing people say this for decades, but I don't yet think I buy it. To me, a statement like this is equivalent to someone espousing the wondrous virtues of their reliable car and then mentioning at the end that they can't shut it off or it won't start back up again.
There are usually one of two rationales behind the argument for leaving your computer on all the time:
1) Turning your computer off and on all the time induces thermal stress on the components because they heat up and cool down so often. Complete rubbish, I say. The components are built to operate whether completely cool or quite warm. They should have no problem with the gradual transition between. It takes at least 5 minutes for most machines to come up to full operating temperature. If your computer can't handle such a gradual temperature increase, then you bought a lemon.
2) When you turn the machine on, there's a brief power surge delivered to all parts of the machine that, over time, will electrically damage the components within. It may sound more plausible, but if this were really a known issue, every CPU, memory, and motherboard maker would be designing protection from this into their components to stem the flood of RMAs it would cause. Maybe they already have, and if so, then it's not a problem either way you look at it.
Since the 80's, I've powered down my personal workstations while I'm sleeping or at work and I haven't seen any difference in hardware failure rate compared to systems that stay online 24 hours a day. The workstation I'm on right now has been power cycled every day for almost eight years now. The only hardware failures it EVER saw were a couple of drive crashes a few months after it was first put into service. Oh, and a video card that overheated because the tiny fan got choked with dust. (I clean the machine more frequently now.) No problems at all since and it happens to be one of those early Athlon chips that gets *really* hot. I'm looking forward to replacing it soon so I can have even lower energy usage even when it's on.
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Couldn't agree more, these workspaces are positively posh compared to what I had to work in as my first "real" I.T. job just a few years ago. The owner of the small company was a wide-eyed idealist. Which is good, except that he was also insanely cheap. In the year that I worked for him, he just couldn't see things from other people's point of view. He was mostly a nice guy, but he didn't understand that humans were more productive when allowed basic things like comfort and morale. Anyway, by the time I left we had a workspace of about 8 seats that was comprised as follows. (I'll use the present tense so you can get a feel for the kind of despair that I experienced every morning for almost a year. And no, none of this is exaggeration for dramatic effect. I'll be as truthful as possible.)
As you sit down, you say a short prayer that the chair won't collapse or splinter your ass today. All chairs in the "office" probably worked quite well in the 70's when they were new. 30 years later, they were literally salvaged from the local University thrift store by my boss to the tune of about $1 each.
In front of you, your "desk." And by "desk," I really mean wire shelving unit. Inbox and accessories on the top shelf, computer monitor on the second, keyboard on the third, feet on the fourth. A privileged few got keyboard trays.
On either side, plastic folding tables. If you occupied a workspace in between two other people, you had to share your tables with them. This was actually kind of cool when you happened to be working next to a project partner or a good friend. Miserable otherwise.
There are no drawers in any part of the workspace, except for a single filing cabinet. This is by design. Every time a new employee notices this, the boss's only and final response is, "drawers are only good for losing things in."
Our computers and peripherals were from the same college surplus store that the chairs came from. Mostly Pentium II's and aging 17" Dell CRTs that had scratches and various marks all over them. The only thing that made using them bearable was the fact that they were only thin clients connected to a terminal server. The keyboards and mice were well past their intended lifespan and it took me a solid 8 months of persuasion before I could get the boss to pony up $60 for a half-dozen new optical mice.
I wish I could say that the environment itself was any better. I would like to tell you that despite the lack of anything resembling real furniture, the facility was carpeted, cozy, and comfortable. Instead, I have to tell you that in reality, it was anything but. The "office" was really a part of what used to be (and still technically is) a very large warehouse.
Which meant that you could clearly hear conversations that were literally on the other side of the room, completely destroying your train of thought when coding or debugging a difficult problem. Harsh florescent lights made your eyes want to bleed well before it was even lunchtime.
The floor was cement, so dust went anywhere it wanted, which was usually everywhere. In the morning when you come in, there was a gritty dust on your keyboard, your monitor, and any papers you forgot to put in the binder. You usually couldn't see it, but you could always feel it. If there was a lot of foot-traffic that day or someone came through wielding a push-broom, there would be dust on your clothes and in your hair by the end of the day as well.
With brick walls and very high ceilings, it was literally impossible to keep the people on the floor warm in the winter. To make things worse, those of us within 15 feet of the exterior wall got a double-shot of it due to the cold air "falling" off the 25-foot wall. I would estimate that the warmest my "desk" got in January was 50 degrees. It was also the only time in my life I'v
I know the slashdot crowd is a big fan of free things, aren't we all, but when you sign on for internet you agree it's for your household, apartment, or whatever, not for you to provide publicly (even though many people inadvertently do with unsecured wireless networks).
There's a problem with this premise, though: Not all ISPs consider this a violation of their terms of service. My provider is a locally-owned and operated DSL outfit who leases CO space and last-mile copper from the incumbent Bell. When I questioned their sales team about their policies, their answer was along the lines of, "as long as it's not illegal or abusive to the network, you can do whatever you want with your DSL connection." Their written terms of service agree with this. The only things they prohibit are abuse of the network (e.g., spamming) and things which would get you arrested anyway (child pornography, fraud, etc).[1]
If you're the customer of a service provider that explicitly disallows many common uses of a broadband connection (having more than one computer online, peer-to-peer traffic, low-volume hosting, etc) then you need to start looking around for a _real_ provider.
Just like you can't steal cable or run a cable over to your neighbor's, you can't steal internet service either.
Offering to share a legally-acquired Internet connection is not at all stealing or akin to stealing. You can't be charged with "stealing" an Internet connection after you've already paid for it any more than you can be charged with "stealing" a car after you've signed the lease. It might be against the provider's terms of service to share your connection with someone not living in your household. But all the provider can do in retaliation is terminate your service because you haven't broken any laws.
Likewise, when someone pirates something using your network, the person getting sued will probably be the person that pays the bill--you. And just think what would happen if someone downloads child pornography on your connection...!
In general, courts have required that the prosecution be able to provide more evidence than a single IP address in some log in order to successfully accuse someone of piracy or child pornography. If the police can't find anything damning on your hard drives and you run an open-access wireless router, then any competent court is not going to find you guilty.
1. One other nice thing about this provider is that they let you grab multiple public IP addresses via DHCP. I've done this a few times to sort out issues with my VoIP equipment. I asked their support people if this was a problem and they said they don't mind as long as it's not abused. But it's obviously not something they advertise.
Domain squatters are by far one of the biggest things holding back the Internet. Squatting has gotten so bad that the name of your company has to be complete gibberish in order to match an available domain name. Just try coming up with a company name that has a similar domain name available. You'll find that most of the domains you try either have some sort of spam link portal or a "buy this domain for $200!" page. Only a few are actual web sites. If you don't believe me, try it.
This "domain tasting" thing is a very small problem in comparison.
I think that in order to retain a domain name, you should have to prove that you're using it in an ethical and legal manner. ARIN makes my web hosting company justify their usage of IP addresses, so ICANN should do the same for domain names. Of course, working out exactly how to define a web site that's "using" a domain name versus one that is not might be tricky, but there has got to be a way to curb 90% of the squatting that's going on and take back our Internet from the scammers.
I was in the exact same place as you and came to the same exact conclusions. Throughout my teen years I was a video game fiend. Not just casual gaming mind you, but the long RPGs that take 50+ hours to beat even if you're in a hurry. Video games were literally my entire life. I didn't have many friends, I didn't date, I didn't even get the chance to experiment with alcohol and drugs with my peers. I just played shitloads of games. When I wasn't playing them, I was reading about them. When I wasn't reading about them, I was thinking about them.
Fast forward to me at 20 years old. I was having some trouble getting past a difficult boss in Final Fantasy 9. It was late so I just gave it up and went to bed at some point. The next day, after I got home from work, I looked at the Playstation and somehow realized right then and there that battling imaginary monsters and exploring fictional worlds had absolutely no tangible impact on anything that really mattered in my life. So I simply went off to do something else instead.
I always had an interest in computers and open source and quitting video games let me focus on them nearly full-time. Looking back, it's almost creepy how quickly I went from around 35 hours of video games per week for over a decade to nothing literally overnight. These days I only play games casually. Once every couple months I'll pick up the GameBoy Advance and play Sonic for a half hour, or perhaps plug in the old Playstation and whiz through a few levels of Wipeout XL. I go on an emulator kick about once a year. Other than that, nada.
I'm not saying that quitting games turned me into a genius or a high-roller. In fact, my job bores me and the married life means that I have less time to myself than ever. But retiring the D-pad was possibly one of the best moves I have ever made and the timing couldn't have been better. Some people are in their 30's and don't realize how much of their lives they willingly forfeited to video games.
I remember having great fun in subspace a decade ago, but I don't think it qualifies as an MMORPG because the zones are neither massive nor is the game an RPG.
Some of the machines that said "vista capable" were, some were barely capable. But they've been downplaying the minimum requirements forever. If you had a system with the minimum requirements for XP, it ran like a dog. Did people expect that buying something with the minimum requirements for Vista would generate better results?
Okay, if someone goes out and buys Vista for their computer using only the listed system requirements as a guide instead of doing actual research to find out if Vista will work on their computer, that's one thing. I don't know that I would fault Microsoft too much here because lots of software vendors understate the system requirements (although Microsoft have historically been the worst).
Maybe this will run against popular opinion here, but I think this class-action suit against Microsoft is seriously misguided, frivolous, and ultimately pointless. I would be much more in favor of lawsuits against system manufacturers like Dell, Lenovo, and HP who knowingly switched almost their entire product line to an OS that couldn't run on any but the highest-end machines. And yes, I have first-hand knowledge of this because I installed XP for several people who bought a machine that was pre-installed with Vista. Out of the box, the Vista machines were considerably slower than the aged XP machines they were meant to replace. This was a really dumb move on the part of the manufacturers, but everyone seems to want to blame Microsoft.
I was initially opposed to widescreen displays when they first came out because I saw it as nothing more than a marketing gimmick. "Oooh look, you can watch your DVDs on it!"
But when it came time for a new laptop, I didn't really have any choice but to get a widescreen display. Having used one for awhile, I now think they should have put widescreen displays into laptops sooner for two reasons:
1) In contrast to many of the comments here, I find that having a wider screen is great for development because it means you can have a couple of terminal windows and a browser open with less (or no) overlapping. This means less time wasted in flipping between windows which means greater productivity. This is the same reason I have a dual-head workstation at home. Anyone with a dual-head display is already effectively using one extremely wide screen.
2) From an engineering and usability standpoint, it makes perfect sense to make laptops wider than longer when you're trying to fit in more into the machine, including screen real estate. A wider laptop is one that can more easily accommodate a full-size keyboard and bigger screen while still remaining relatively compact.
Oh man, not these tired old arguments again. I have mod points and I was going mod this down, but I'm in a charitable mood and feel like feeding some trolls today.
Want to use your favourite software (photoshop, dreamweaver, GTA 4 etc: nope, that's for windows and/or mac only.
The Linux software ecosystem is rife with applications that perform the same task as their popular proprietary counterparts. Some of them aren't quite up to par (Gimp), some are roughly equivalent (OpenOffice), and some are leagues better (Firefox). There are more and more proprietary applications being ported to Linux all the time.
If your argument is that there are specific software packages that can't run on Linux, well, the same is true for both Windows and Mac. There are many Mac applications that you simply can't buy for Windows and we all well know that the reverse is true.
Neither Mac or Windows come with a system where you can browse from a catalog of over 10,000 applications and install any one of them instantly, for free, with the click of a mouse button.
Want to buy new hardware... well you can if you scour the internet for days finding out if it's compatible; you can't just pop down pcworld one saturday afternoon and pick something up and know it'll work.
This hardware myth really needs to be put to rest. Linux supports a wider variety of hardware than any other operating system on the planet. True, there can be a delay between the time that a new device is released and the time that a common Linux distribution supports it. It's also true that some hardware vendors refuse to release their hardware specifications or even cooperate in any way with open source developers but these are very much the exception these days rather than the rule. If you think Windows supports hardware any better than Linux then you have either not used Vista yet or have somehow managed to be the only person on the planet who has never fought with Windows over printer, video, or wifi driver issues at some point.
Want to install some software... sure... if you broadband no problem...
Ubuntu and many of its derivatives will ship you a copy of their OS on CD at no charge. No media fees, no shipping and handling. Free. Most of the software that you can install afterward is not at all too large to pull down via a dialup modem. Windows and OS X cost hundreds of dollars each. I would say that I put my money where my mouth is, except that I don't have to spend any of it on Linux at all.
oh, but it might install the software anywhere on your system... good luck learning to grep it.
Not sure what you mean here. On KDE- and GNOME-based distributions, a shortcut to every installed application gets put into the applications menu. Which, by the way, is sorted by the software's function so everything is easy to find. Contrast with Windows where each application goes into its own folder or a folder named after the company that distributed it. Install enough applications and the Start menu becomes large and unusable. Contrast also with Mac, where you have to dig down into a special (and also unsorted) Applications folder to find newly-installed apps.
Fat chance if your friend has just given you a cdrom with software on it!
Why, you don't have any friends?
Okay, unprofessional personal attack aside, Linux-using friends are more likely to give you a URL than a CD-ROM. If someone's giving you a CD-ROM with Windows or Mac software on it, there's a good chance it's warez anyway unless they're in the habit of giving away their legitimate software.
want to play games.... err... well... no.. not really, but hey we've got solitaire!!!
There is, admittedly, a noted lack of high-profile games natively available for Linux. However, there are some good ones available. Recent versions of Quake and Unreal Tournament run fine natively.
I mean, if you're willing to shell out the dough for a T61, you might as well get a MacBook Pro and at least have the option to run MacOS X.
The T61 is much more affordable than the MacBook Pro. Go to store.apple.com and pick out the middle-of-the-road MacBook Pro. Now go to Lenovo.com and put together an equivalent Thinkpad. I just did exactly this and the price difference is $1000. There are a few tradeoffs both ways (for example the Thinkpad has VGA output rather than DVI while the MacBook doesn't have a Cardbus slot), but in my 5 months of owning a Thinkpad, I'd never choose a different notebook. Great price, great features, and sturdy as hell.
Exactly. More african-americans are poor, and video games are a very cheap form of entertainment.
Say what now? A current video game system is between $150-$300 brand-new. Each game ranges from $40-$60 and it's not cool any more to have just 4 or 5 games--upwards of one to two dozen seems to be the norm. Would you explain to me please how that's "very cheap" to a minimum wage single-parent family?
If you want to talk about race, talk about why more african-americans are poor. The games thing is just a symptom.
I think it has less to do with why many African-Americans are poor than it does with America's insatiable hunger for entertainment. It seems like the less money a family makes, the higher their percentage of their monthly income goes towards entertainment.
My wife and I used to be friends with a couple that is, shall we say, less than well-to-do. (And no, they're not African-Americans.) They moved into a house that was essentially given to them by a family member and what do you think was their first priority? Unpacking boxes? Getting the furniture arranged? Stocking the pantry? Nope. They pissed and moaned for _three whole days_ because it was taking _forever_ to get the cable TV hooked up.
Yup, Slashdot links to yet another plagiarism blog.
1. Find interesting tech story
2. Copy pasta
3. Insert ads
4. Send to Slashdot/Digg
5. Profit!
If e-commerce continues to grow, and is not taxed equitably with other businesses, this becomes a tax break for the big internet based merchants, and they need it the least.
I think you're a bit confused here. When has a business ever beared the burden of sales tax? Yep, that's right, never. Per-item taxes and fees are always passed on to the consumer. Businesses do not ever absorb any cost if they can think they can get away with passing it onto consumers. And they almost always do.
It seems like anymore, the government and corporations treat Americans as if they were nothing more than millions of little bank accounts. Did anyone else notice that as soon as the federal government announced their little "economic stimulus package", states and local governments started proposing new taxes left and right? Or how the oil companies are posting record profits while gas prices are edging towards $4/gallon and the economy spirals toward recession?
I guess I better leave it at that before I _really_ launch into a rant...
the store's existing competence in the industry
C'mon, am I really going to be the first one to point out the hilarity of that phrase?
RTFA and ye shall receive:
http://katana.oooninja.com/w/openoffice.org/performance_improvements
Sorry I've got to call bullshit on this one.
I can't tell if you're trolling or not, but I'll bite anyway.
The truth is it is far too much work to write and maintain a linux driver.
Erm, "far too much work" compared to what? Compared to another Linux driver? Compared to a Windows driver? Lots of people maintain Linux device drivers either as their job or in their spare time or both.
Unless you've got huge resources (e.g. nVidia), the only option is to get it into the official kernel tree, which involves making your driver open source which very few companies are willing to do.
Huh? What does having corporate resources have to do with creating a binary driver? Anyone can do it, you just compile your driver into a binary and bundle a bit of source code to glue it into end-user's kernel. An open source driver is not "the only option".
You're also wrong in saying that very few companies are willing to open source their drivers. The Linux and BSD kernels are full of examples where companies have written open source drivers for their hardware and submitted them for inclusion in the project as a whole. RAID cards, motherboard chipsets, sound drivers, network drivers, USB devices, you name it.
Just look at the drivers for UniChrome graphics cards. The installation process requires you to recompile both X and the kernel.
This is the great thing about open source. If you see a problem with a piece of software that you're using, you can always help fix it yourself. If you were stuck on a proprietary closed-source system like Windows or OS X, your only course of action would be to hop onto a popular news blog and bitch about it.
I'm sorry but I bet if decent tools were provided for writing linux drivers
The Linux kernel is probably the most well-understood kernel on the planet. It is open source. The compiler is open source. The libraries are open source. You have thousands of text editors to choose from. The userland is conducive to development by design and there are many ways to sandbox your code as you test it. There's an extremely active development community and quite a lot of documentation.
What additional tools do you want exactly? Please provide specifics on what we can do better.
, and there was some sane way to distribute binary drivers (there really isn't a way at the moment) then I bet more companies would make them.
The reason that getting nVidia drivers onto a Linux distro is so hard is not because nVidia distributes binary drivers, it's because nVidia won't let anyone else redistribute them. Every Linux package manager is perfectly capable of dropping a couple of binaries onto the file system, so the problem here is not with Linux's technical limitations, it's with nVidia.
I know you all want open source drivers, but you can't say to companies "Your only option is to release open source drivers" and then wonder why they don't release decent drivers - closed or open source.
First of all, I never said that. Second, there are hundreds (possibly thousands) of examples of open source drivers that work just fine in the Linux, BSD, and Xorg code.
I'm trying to figure out how you justify painting the Linux community as the bad guy here. No Linux user ever went over to nVidia headquarters with a gun and said, "now look here, we want some drivers or else!" The bottom line here is that nVidia wants the small (but growing) Linux community to buy their graphics cards, but they only want to do the bare minimum necessary in order to say that they support Linux. The kicker is that they wouldn't even have to write or release a single line of code, the Linux community would do all the hard work for them if only nVidia would agree to let a few open source developers have access to the hardware specifications.
Since ATI has released the full specifications to their graphics hardware, it will be interesting to see if the open source community flocks to ATI once the drivers mature a bit. nVidia can certainly do the same thing, they just want to pretend that they can't.
One thing you have to understand about the military is that for every uniformed soldier, airman, sailor, or what-have-you, there are 3 more civilian government employees doing the routine stuff like keeping the base facilities repaired, managing the supply system, or (unfortunately) maintaining the base's entire I.T. infrastructure.
At every single Air Force base I was stationed, the network staff was entirely comprised of should-be retirees who had been working for the federal government since the stone ages and weren't knowledgeable about the systems they managed beyond whatever they had to cram for in order to keep their MCSE certificate current. Network outages several times a week were the norm. The security policies were effective at keeping Airmen from doing their work at the same time that they practically begged hackers to have a nice comfy visit.
One admin was so inept that he refused to install virus-scanning software on the Exchange server because "all packages that [he] tested caught false positives." So his Plan B was to forward every single email virus hoax message that he got to every single person in the wing. Each message of course carried the stern warning, "anyone who opens an email with the subject 'a postcard for you' will lose network privileges." Once in awhile I'd send him a link to a website disproving one of his forwarded hoaxes, but never got any replies.
Another time I stopped by the NOC office to have them repair a laptop that wouldn't boot because of some Windows driver issue. I could have fixed it myself, but mind you, this is the military and I wasn't "trained" to do that. The guy who worked on the machine seemed nice enough, so I mentioned jokingly that he should put Linux on it and it would work fine. Bad move: he didn't take it as a joke. I got to listen for a 45 minutes about how Linux wasn't a real OS and was developed by (or for) hackers for infiltrating classified networks, and about how Microsoft single-handedly invented computers, and about how they didn't even have punch-cards back in his day, etc, etc.
I dunno that I agree. I had an Iiyama 19" CRT with Trinitron tube for 7 years and it was the best damn monitor I ever had. When it was new, the sharpness honestly rivaled that of an LCD. Even in its later years, it still stood out amongst many newer tubes.
I don't get people who complain about the tension wires. Yes, you can see them. In fact, when I unpacked the Iiyama and turned it on for the first time, I was ready to send it back, thinking I had a defective tube. (The main reason I didn't was because I didn't exactly have any reserve cash for shipping the bastard back after paying $600 for it.) But honestly, the lines that the tension wires cast were extremely fine and after a minute or two you don't even notice them when going about your normal work. And I did it all: programming, gaming, light graphics design work. After the first day of owning it, I think I actually noticed the tension wires maybe 5 times in 7 years.
One peculiarity of this monitor is that it liked to scare me. Not Kidding. About once a month, at some random point (usually while I was reading slashdot, writing code, or otherwise lost in thought staring at the screen), the picture would zoom in suddenly while a relay in it made a loud click. Every single time that happened, I jumped a mile because in this split second, my lower brain functions interpreted this as, "MOVE FOOL, THE 75-POUND MONITOR IS COMING FOR YOUR HEAD!"
General Lord,
I served proudly as an active duty member of the United States Air Force for 4 years and then in the Reserves for another 4 years. Although the Air Force is generally regarded as the most "modern" of the U.S. military branches, I still found that the overall structure was too rigid to take me where I wanted to go, so I followed my inner geek and moved fully into the civilian sector.
You said, 'We have to change the way we think about warriors of the future.' At first, I guessed that you would hire these individuals into government contractor positions, but the Wired article implies otherwise. Many of the brightest security experts, by nature, are highly independent and have a noted distaste for many of the standards that being in the Air Force require, such as basic training, dress and appearance, and physical fitness. How far will the Cyber Command bend the traditional standards in order to persuade the best and brightest in the security field to sign up into a military career?
Here in Michigan, we have a term for things like this.
Yahoo just got "Detroited."
This is favoritism. Microsoft doesn't even have this ability to stop the resale of their software.
False.
A few months ago, I was given a bunch of old laptops that had Win2k licenses on them. The laptops weren't worth much because they had bad motherboards or smashed screens, but some of them were popular models back in the day so I was sure some computer repair shops would buy them for the miscellaneous parts (LCD inverters, weird cables, brackets, an so forth). As a selling point, I mentioned that each laptop came with a Win2K certificate of authenticity affixed to it. About $50 in listing fees and a week's worth of work later, I put them up on eBay. After 5 days, the laptops were doing quite well in terms of bids.
On the 6th day (one day before the auctions end), I get an email from eBay saying that Microsoft merely asked them to remove the auctions of the laptops. And they did, apparently without even checking into anything. eBay's message to me vaguely hinted at copyright violation, yet I violated NO laws, I infringed on NOBODY'S copyright. According to the 3 (!) cease-and-desist letters that Microsoft sent to me a week later, I was subject to some kind of legal action because I was trying to sell Microsoft software but was not an authorized Microsoft dealer.
Yeah, I'm STILL trying to wrap my head around that. Even to this day, there are thousands of copies of Windows for sale on eBay and even more second-hand computers, broken or otherwise that come with Windows. But my auctions got shut down for the same thing and I got stuck with 2 dozen worthless laptops. The irony is that I used to report websites selling pirated copies of Windows, but obviously it's not in my interest to do so any longer. Unfortunately, I still have an eBay account because there are some odds and ends that I can only buy there affordably.
If I knew how to break into your house, then told you that I was able to but won't tell you how unless you paid up a fee?
I really like this analogy, because it helps prove my point in another point that you make...
Morally, a security researcher isn't supposed to hold information hostage and then credibly claim to be part of any ethical hacking community. At level best, they would be called grey hats; many would rightly call them black-hats.
I would call them black-hats because I have a hard time seeing how this can be anything but blackmail. I don't even care about the moral or ethical points of it, if somebody told me they could break into my house but wouldn't say how unless I paid them, well I would take that as a threat and would have them arrested and/or sued immediately. It's a good thing that these Gleg guys are in Russia (probably not coincidence?) or Real would already be throwing armies of lawyers at them because blackmail is highly illegal in most countries.
I'm glad Real isn't paying them a dime. Real has no way of knowing if the security company's claims are overstated or not. And if they did pay, that would set a horrible precedent. It would be like saying to the entire black-hat community, "hey guys, we'll throw money at you if you hold our vulnerabilities ransom!" It's almost akin to caving in to terrorist demands.
I understand that security companies want to make money, but this isn't how you go about it. A good security firm makes their money by establishing a reputation. They establish a reputation by demonstrating publicly that they're good at what they do.
I mean, I doubt there are people that know the kernel well enough to do such changes for their own systems, but really, what percentage of you guys honestly and confidently can say "Yeah, let me just fix that for us" knowing your job is on the line if your systems crash around you.
When going into system administration for mission-critical systems, you learn three things very quickly:
1) Back up everything
2) Test even the smallest change before putting it into production
3) Design everything to be as redundant as possible
You can never prevent failure, so a good admin makes sure that the systems continue to operate even with multiple failures.
What most departments will probably do is wait for the distribution developers to release a new kernel image (probably tomorrow if they haven't already) and assign someone to try it out on a testing machine. If that person is comfortable that the patch doesn't screw anything up (very likely since it's a pretty simple patch), they'll put on the production machines one at a time, starting with the least-critical working their way up to the most critical. It's really all about being cautious, exercising patience, and using common sense. All those people who've rushed to apply the patch have probably already caused more damage to their systems than the entire cracking community using this exploit in the wild.
I had a few vulnerable (tested) machines that I cannot reboot even if a patched kernel is released in the near future.
I'm a little confused by this statement. Do you mean to say that these machines are so mission-critical that they can't have a couple minutes downtime in the middle of the night? If this is true, and you have no failover or redundancy to keep the service itself online while one machine is down, then I think you have much bigger things to worry about than a little root exploit.
yet the screen hinge looks plastic instead of the heavy duty metal hinges that give thinkpads that smooth and secure feel while adjusting the screen you just don't see with most other laptops.
There really isn't a large enough picture of the X300 available to get a really good look at the hinges, but from the pictures that Gizmodo published, they look like metal to me. They will probably be smaller than what people are used to on the ThinkPad, but the whole machine is going to be smaller too.
Plus there's wear and tear to consider, I've noticed that the office computers that get turned off and on every day tend to fail and need replacing several times before mine (that stays on all the time) has a failure.
I've been hearing people say this for decades, but I don't yet think I buy it. To me, a statement like this is equivalent to someone espousing the wondrous virtues of their reliable car and then mentioning at the end that they can't shut it off or it won't start back up again.
There are usually one of two rationales behind the argument for leaving your computer on all the time:
1) Turning your computer off and on all the time induces thermal stress on the components because they heat up and cool down so often. Complete rubbish, I say. The components are built to operate whether completely cool or quite warm. They should have no problem with the gradual transition between. It takes at least 5 minutes for most machines to come up to full operating temperature. If your computer can't handle such a gradual temperature increase, then you bought a lemon.
2) When you turn the machine on, there's a brief power surge delivered to all parts of the machine that, over time, will electrically damage the components within. It may sound more plausible, but if this were really a known issue, every CPU, memory, and motherboard maker would be designing protection from this into their components to stem the flood of RMAs it would cause. Maybe they already have, and if so, then it's not a problem either way you look at it.
Since the 80's, I've powered down my personal workstations while I'm sleeping or at work and I haven't seen any difference in hardware failure rate compared to systems that stay online 24 hours a day. The workstation I'm on right now has been power cycled every day for almost eight years now. The only hardware failures it EVER saw were a couple of drive crashes a few months after it was first put into service. Oh, and a video card that overheated because the tiny fan got choked with dust. (I clean the machine more frequently now.) No problems at all since and it happens to be one of those early Athlon chips that gets *really* hot. I'm looking forward to replacing it soon so I can have even lower energy usage even when it's on.