Typical neocon bullshit... hell, it's not even neocon, it's right out of the reagan playbook.
"Look, I have to abridge everyone's rights, the ACLU made me do it. So strip, grandma, so we can all be safe."
You're either a cretinous Fox News slave or you're knowingly mendacious. Either way, fuck you. I've become a permanent member of the ACLU along with other whining pansies like Bob Barr and Dick Armey.
The entire second movie seemed to be gravitating to the revelation that zion was just another separate part of the matrix designed to keep the troublesome free willed people away from the rest.
Not so much that they were free willed, but that they didn't truly have any to begin with. But as another poster pointed out, it quickly degenerated into a simplistic "join us or die", when what I was hoping for was more exploration of "join us or everyone dies, because that's what you were designed for". I was convinced Neo was a program.
Then they decided that big clanky robots popping off ammo for an hour would make a better movie, so they handwaved it all away. I'll never watch another Wachowski brothers movie again.
> You must be completely delusional if you saw said "profound philosophical opinions" in the second or third movies.
The second one came close to it -- Colonel San--er, The Architect's speech was a lovely twist that touched on the notion of free will. Of course they did nothing to resolve the truth of it, the whole hobson's choice thing becomes a farce almost immediately and before the third movie's end, they more or less just tell you he's just lying and Neo has become a magical messiah type instead.
I don't know whether the Wachowski hacks can't write or can't edit. I guess both could be true.
I can't figure out why everyone dogpiles on Ishtar. It was a perfectly forgettable comedy, but could it possibly have been any worse than "Me, Myself and Irene" or "Dumb and Dumberer"?
You want to talk about bad science fiction, try Event Horizon.
Oddly, my problem is just the opposite of yours: I want to play PC games with console interfaces.
My gf loves The Sims on the PS2. Can't stand it on PC. She can sit on the couch with a wireless controller, the interface is legible and easy and doesn't require exact aim -- very much unlike the interface The Sims 2 gives you on PC, where you're constantly aiming at very small buttons, and you're chained to the desk to use the mouse and keyboard to do it. It's just not social, let alone comfortable.
I know the Half Life release on the PS2 let you use a keyboard and mouse. Of course it's superior on the PC, though as a port it was laudable. Any ol USB keyboard and mouse will do, there's two standard USB ports right in the front. Now if only it ever made use of that Firewire port. Getting back to the subject, the reason it doesn't get used, and the reason games never live up to the billing of the console makers, is because game developers don't want to take chances. It costs a lot to be a console developer, and there are no low-cost distribution channels, so the safe bets are the ones you stay alive with.
I used scare quotes for a reason. It puts all kinds of security bars and gates (har har) in your way, leading you to do most of your work on an account that ignores any security that is there. So even if MS fixed all of their security holes tomorrow, you wouldn't even know it unless they restricted Administrator access as well. At which point, everyone would start running everything as SYSTEM, which is what the account you use when you REALLY want to screw over a windows box.
I prefer the better explanation, that he was throwing out a bit of bafflegab to dazzle the kid. That would also explain the eye-rolling on Kenobi's part when he says it. And hell, the line in the script itself was probably as worse bafflegab than the average Treknobabble, just that Harrison Ford did a good job at making it sound like it.
I mean really, do you think they actually researched that sort of thing? Like Harrison Ford said to Mark Hamill, "this ain't that kind of movie, kid"
Far as I know, Reg E only applies to "recurring charges". The phrase is googlable, but I can't trace it back to the text. Do you know where I can find the text of Reg E online?
> I of course refer to the RPC endpoint mapper on 135 vulnerability that plagued windows a while ago.
Interestingly, the RPC portmapper was a notorious source of trouble for Unix networks as well, back in the day, for very similar reasons as Windows (security and stability). If it went belly-up, it would take a big chunk of the system with it -- you still need it for NFS if I recall correctly -- but since the OS isn't designed around RPC like NT is, it wouldn't take everything down, and could be gracefully restarted.
I actually like the RPC architecture, but gee wiz, you'd think that they'd harden the lynchpin of the entire operating system just a little, huh?
Create a group and give it exactly the permissions Power User has. If it doesn't work, then you have a supremely stupid application that actually checks that you're a member of a particular group. Start throwing heavy objects at your vendor. Otherwise, start removing permissions one by one.
The problem with windows is that it's too "secure", requiring you to have special access levels just to VIEW the calendar from the taskbar clock (because it can't distinguish the operation from "change the date and time"). On OSX and modern Linux distributions, restricted operations pop up a window where you can su or sudo and get it done. Windows just blows you a raspberry. People get tired of that, so they give themselves full admin access.
> I'm not enough into the finer points of 3D creation to say for sure what commercial tool Blender matches best
3dsmax, Maya, Softimage. Modellers, all. It lacks features all of them have, but it also has features that none of them have, like the best UV unwrapper in the industry which is getting even better next version. Its animation editing tools are not up to snuff, but they integrate very nicely. It uses an OpenGL toolkit far nicer than most of the other modellers (the ones that even use a gl toolkit that is). It's amazingly fast -- starts up instantly.
It also wasn't originally open source.
You're right though, those are some pretty pathetic examples. I'd argue that SQLite is actually quite innovative in its design -- it actually bases its database engine on a bytecode virtual machine for starters. And it's public domain.
What does McVoy have? A benchmarking suite and an SCM. Yippee. What a tosser.
I don't know of a single "real" database that doesn't have cursors in their high-level language and per-row callbacks in their C interface. You're dealing with an external system, get used to an event-driven interface. Otherwise, go and hack the source yourself.
What you're asking for exists and does not require reinventing the DB engine. And if you need a different type of engine, there are things like "tick databases" made for storing and fetching truly massive amounts of log-type data quickly (usually stock quotes). There are even SQL databases that are real time and used in industrial automation. Expand your horizons before judging the entire field.
> But it's really just that, why is none of the dbs letting us do our own execution plan (and do mutations on the intermediate sets)?
Well, there's only so much tuning you can actually do. Oracle will let you pick indexes to use, possibly the order (I'm really not sure), or whether to use them at all. Creating them "on the fly" is of course impossible, since creating an index in the first place requires a full scan. Temporary tables are for when you need to mutate the data "mid-stream", and many databases include a first-class table type to store resultsets in, without need to even use the temporary tablespace. Combined with the procedural languages that many databases offer, you really do have that sort of control if you want it -- sometimes it's just painfully verbose to express it.
Aside from the nasty verbosity, using a prepared query like "select blah from table where primarykey = ?" really is just like selecting from a hash db like sleepycat. It's probably not launching into some exhaustive grandiose search logic (though it does have to pass through some extra layers -- the price one pays for abstraction) unless the table was specifically set up to use such logic, since that table could be partitioned, it could be a view, but you don't have to know it. Databases like PostgreSQL have even more direct interfaces via the OID column, making them act very much like an OODB.
"show me a list of all customers who have each bought at least one of every product"
Congratulations, you've discovered that SQL does not express the full relational algebra. Here's your sticker and decoder ring showing you belong to the Captain Obvious Fan Club!
Speaking of obvious, I don't know how obvious that query is in relational algebra, and hell if I can remember how to express it in SQL. It is possible, but I do guarantee it will be an expensive query, since you'll hit every last row in your orders table to calculate that. A real-world solution would be to just sum up the number of distinct products each customer has ordered and compare that with the total number of products offered. If you haven't removed products, that number will give you an exact answer.
The real irksome thing is that most people wanting to throw out SQL are trying to replace it with something even less expressive.
> Just freaking program the database instead of waving chicken bones at it.
You go right ahead. You're such a real man, you go write your own execution plans for every query. I prefer a declarative language that does it for me, and no I don't have a problem with adding millions of rows. SQL doesn't even enter into it. You think it's parsing and interpreting SQL for every column of every row going into the database?
It's not even a very verbose language: 90% of SQL queries are names of tables and rows. So go turn SELECT, FROM, WHERE, and ORDER BY into one-character punctuation sigils, it won't exactly result in an explosion of productivity.
Golly. Try learning something about databases before you go off on a tirade.
Can you really not comprehend the notion that banks have customers, that they send marketing email to these existing customers, AND that these customers sometimes get phished?
Your opinions on marketing are irrelevant to the concept of brand damage.
The Konfabulator site needs more categorization. If I took out all the clocks, countdown timers, single-purpose RSS readers, and webcams, there'd be like six widgets left. I've never seen so much useless junk in my life. Well I suppose I have actually, but not in this particular fashion.
> 1. Most people wouldn't give out a credit card number randomly over the phone
You'd be very surprised. Phishing is a variation of a scam that has been around as long as the telephone. Ever heard of the "bank examiner scam"? Hell, some brave souls were probably even doing it door to door before then, though it's easier to do charity scams that way.
There was a fellow named Gully McLaren who was so credulous that his name became synonymous with his tendency to believe anything. That's where the word "gullible" comes from.
> Interesting you should mention that. I've been looking to open a new money market account. There are five banks within a few blocks of my house and I figured one of them would have decent online banking. Three of them will not even load the online banking in anything but IE
Then switch banks. Wamu, Wells, and Citi all have zero problems with firefox. Call the bank and tell them why. Don't come off like some smug platform evangelist, just say "your internet banking doesn't work with my computer and theirs does". Let them wonder why.
This is what the banks refer to as "brand damage". My bank would love to sell me a money market account and actually link to their own promotion. Maybe not right to my account page, but what stops a phisher from copying entire site structures?
I realize that you're one of the superior enlightened few that cannot be marketed to, but banks do have products to promote to the rest of the unwashed masses.
Good for you, you identified that there are stupid people in the world. Boy what an insightful analysis. The paper happens to do a wee bit more than say "we got some phishing messages, so heads up folks, phishing exists", it also offers some pretty good overview analysis (though short on raw source data) into the network structure of phishers.
Your non-solution leaves a whole lot to be desired if you're a bank. Do you suggest banks administer an I.Q. test before they allow people to open accounts? Do you suggest that banks just accept that phishers are out there somewhere and can't ever be tracked or caught or that their techniques can't be countered? I don't know what you suggest, because you don't want to "make it into brain surgery" by actually looking into the problem in any depth other than a dismissive "people are stupid".
Part of security is protecting institutions against their own stupid users. Get used to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still trying to explain to some of the people I have to support "LOGOFF" and "TURN OFF COMPUTER" are accessed by clicking the START button.
1995 called. No, they don't want their joke back, because it's been beaten to death. They're just asking that you please give it a decent burial.
notepad!
(hey where'd everybody go?)
> Altivec enables stuff like Expose.
See, this is precisely the sort of ignorance we were talking about.
sound of harps...
*prrring* It's Altivec! It's Perfect. It's Apple!.
Clasps hands together to chest, tilts head, smiles, sighs: Ahhhhhhltivec. Only from Apple!
Cut to...
Frowning: It's a god damned instruction set. Get a grip.
Typical neocon bullshit ... hell, it's not even neocon, it's right out of the reagan playbook.
"Look, I have to abridge everyone's rights, the ACLU made me do it. So strip, grandma, so we can all be safe."
You're either a cretinous Fox News slave or you're knowingly mendacious. Either way, fuck you. I've become a permanent member of the ACLU along with other whining pansies like Bob Barr and Dick Armey.
The entire second movie seemed to be gravitating to the revelation that zion was just another separate part of the matrix designed to keep the troublesome free willed people away from the rest.
Not so much that they were free willed, but that they didn't truly have any to begin with. But as another poster pointed out, it quickly degenerated into a simplistic "join us or die", when what I was hoping for was more exploration of "join us or everyone dies, because that's what you were designed for". I was convinced Neo was a program.
Then they decided that big clanky robots popping off ammo for an hour would make a better movie, so they handwaved it all away. I'll never watch another Wachowski brothers movie again.
> You must be completely delusional if you saw said "profound philosophical opinions" in the second or third movies.
The second one came close to it -- Colonel San--er, The Architect's speech was a lovely twist that touched on the notion of free will. Of course they did nothing to resolve the truth of it, the whole hobson's choice thing becomes a farce almost immediately and before the third movie's end, they more or less just tell you he's just lying and Neo has become a magical messiah type instead.
I don't know whether the Wachowski hacks can't write or can't edit. I guess both could be true.
I can't figure out why everyone dogpiles on Ishtar. It was a perfectly forgettable comedy, but could it possibly have been any worse than "Me, Myself and Irene" or "Dumb and Dumberer"?
You want to talk about bad science fiction, try Event Horizon.
Oddly, my problem is just the opposite of yours: I want to play PC games with console interfaces.
My gf loves The Sims on the PS2. Can't stand it on PC. She can sit on the couch with a wireless controller, the interface is legible and easy and doesn't require exact aim -- very much unlike the interface The Sims 2 gives you on PC, where you're constantly aiming at very small buttons, and you're chained to the desk to use the mouse and keyboard to do it. It's just not social, let alone comfortable.
I know the Half Life release on the PS2 let you use a keyboard and mouse. Of course it's superior on the PC, though as a port it was laudable. Any ol USB keyboard and mouse will do, there's two standard USB ports right in the front. Now if only it ever made use of that Firewire port. Getting back to the subject, the reason it doesn't get used, and the reason games never live up to the billing of the console makers, is because game developers don't want to take chances. It costs a lot to be a console developer, and there are no low-cost distribution channels, so the safe bets are the ones you stay alive with.
I used scare quotes for a reason. It puts all kinds of security bars and gates (har har) in your way, leading you to do most of your work on an account that ignores any security that is there. So even if MS fixed all of their security holes tomorrow, you wouldn't even know it unless they restricted Administrator access as well. At which point, everyone would start running everything as SYSTEM, which is what the account you use when you REALLY want to screw over a windows box.
I prefer the better explanation, that he was throwing out a bit of bafflegab to dazzle the kid. That would also explain the eye-rolling on Kenobi's part when he says it. And hell, the line in the script itself was probably as worse bafflegab than the average Treknobabble, just that Harrison Ford did a good job at making it sound like it.
I mean really, do you think they actually researched that sort of thing? Like Harrison Ford said to Mark Hamill, "this ain't that kind of movie, kid"
Far as I know, Reg E only applies to "recurring charges". The phrase is googlable, but I can't trace it back to the text. Do you know where I can find the text of Reg E online?
> I of course refer to the RPC endpoint mapper on 135 vulnerability that plagued windows a while ago.
Interestingly, the RPC portmapper was a notorious source of trouble for Unix networks as well, back in the day, for very similar reasons as Windows (security and stability). If it went belly-up, it would take a big chunk of the system with it -- you still need it for NFS if I recall correctly -- but since the OS isn't designed around RPC like NT is, it wouldn't take everything down, and could be gracefully restarted.
I actually like the RPC architecture, but gee wiz, you'd think that they'd harden the lynchpin of the entire operating system just a little, huh?
> Power user and above.
Create a group and give it exactly the permissions Power User has. If it doesn't work, then you have a supremely stupid application that actually checks that you're a member of a particular group. Start throwing heavy objects at your vendor. Otherwise, start removing permissions one by one.
The problem with windows is that it's too "secure", requiring you to have special access levels just to VIEW the calendar from the taskbar clock (because it can't distinguish the operation from "change the date and time"). On OSX and modern Linux distributions, restricted operations pop up a window where you can su or sudo and get it done. Windows just blows you a raspberry. People get tired of that, so they give themselves full admin access.
> I'm not enough into the finer points of 3D creation to say for sure what commercial tool Blender matches best
3dsmax, Maya, Softimage. Modellers, all. It lacks features all of them have, but it also has features that none of them have, like the best UV unwrapper in the industry which is getting even better next version. Its animation editing tools are not up to snuff, but they integrate very nicely. It uses an OpenGL toolkit far nicer than most of the other modellers (the ones that even use a gl toolkit that is). It's amazingly fast -- starts up instantly.
It also wasn't originally open source.
You're right though, those are some pretty pathetic examples. I'd argue that SQLite is actually quite innovative in its design -- it actually bases its database engine on a bytecode virtual machine for starters. And it's public domain.
What does McVoy have? A benchmarking suite and an SCM. Yippee. What a tosser.
I don't know of a single "real" database that doesn't have cursors in their high-level language and per-row callbacks in their C interface. You're dealing with an external system, get used to an event-driven interface. Otherwise, go and hack the source yourself.
What you're asking for exists and does not require reinventing the DB engine. And if you need a different type of engine, there are things like "tick databases" made for storing and fetching truly massive amounts of log-type data quickly (usually stock quotes). There are even SQL databases that are real time and used in industrial automation. Expand your horizons before judging the entire field.
> But it's really just that, why is none of the dbs letting us do our own execution plan (and do mutations on the intermediate sets)?
Well, there's only so much tuning you can actually do. Oracle will let you pick indexes to use, possibly the order (I'm really not sure), or whether to use them at all. Creating them "on the fly" is of course impossible, since creating an index in the first place requires a full scan. Temporary tables are for when you need to mutate the data "mid-stream", and many databases include a first-class table type to store resultsets in, without need to even use the temporary tablespace. Combined with the procedural languages that many databases offer, you really do have that sort of control if you want it -- sometimes it's just painfully verbose to express it.
Aside from the nasty verbosity, using a prepared query like "select blah from table where primarykey = ?" really is just like selecting from a hash db like sleepycat. It's probably not launching into some exhaustive grandiose search logic (though it does have to pass through some extra layers -- the price one pays for abstraction) unless the table was specifically set up to use such logic, since that table could be partitioned, it could be a view, but you don't have to know it. Databases like PostgreSQL have even more direct interfaces via the OID column, making them act very much like an OODB.
"show me a list of all customers who have each bought at least one of every product"
Congratulations, you've discovered that SQL does not express the full relational algebra. Here's your sticker and decoder ring showing you belong to the Captain Obvious Fan Club!
Speaking of obvious, I don't know how obvious that query is in relational algebra, and hell if I can remember how to express it in SQL. It is possible, but I do guarantee it will be an expensive query, since you'll hit every last row in your orders table to calculate that. A real-world solution would be to just sum up the number of distinct products each customer has ordered and compare that with the total number of products offered. If you haven't removed products, that number will give you an exact answer.
The real irksome thing is that most people wanting to throw out SQL are trying to replace it with something even less expressive.
> Just freaking program the database instead of waving chicken bones at it.
You go right ahead. You're such a real man, you go write your own execution plans for every query. I prefer a declarative language that does it for me, and no I don't have a problem with adding millions of rows. SQL doesn't even enter into it. You think it's parsing and interpreting SQL for every column of every row going into the database?
It's not even a very verbose language: 90% of SQL queries are names of tables and rows. So go turn SELECT, FROM, WHERE, and ORDER BY into one-character punctuation sigils, it won't exactly result in an explosion of productivity.
Golly. Try learning something about databases before you go off on a tirade.
Can you really not comprehend the notion that banks have customers, that they send marketing email to these existing customers, AND that these customers sometimes get phished?
Your opinions on marketing are irrelevant to the concept of brand damage.
The Konfabulator site needs more categorization. If I took out all the clocks, countdown timers, single-purpose RSS readers, and webcams, there'd be like six widgets left. I've never seen so much useless junk in my life. Well I suppose I have actually, but not in this particular fashion.
> 1. Most people wouldn't give out a credit card number randomly over the phone
You'd be very surprised. Phishing is a variation of a scam that has been around as long as the telephone. Ever heard of the "bank examiner scam"? Hell, some brave souls were probably even doing it door to door before then, though it's easier to do charity scams that way.
There was a fellow named Gully McLaren who was so credulous that his name became synonymous with his tendency to believe anything. That's where the word "gullible" comes from.
> Interesting you should mention that. I've been looking to open a new money market account. There are five banks within a few blocks of my house and I figured one of them would have decent online banking. Three of them will not even load the online banking in anything but IE
Then switch banks. Wamu, Wells, and Citi all have zero problems with firefox. Call the bank and tell them why. Don't come off like some smug platform evangelist, just say "your internet banking doesn't work with my computer and theirs does". Let them wonder why.
> 100%- Simply treat them ALL as phishes.
This is what the banks refer to as "brand damage". My bank would love to sell me a money market account and actually link to their own promotion. Maybe not right to my account page, but what stops a phisher from copying entire site structures?
I realize that you're one of the superior enlightened few that cannot be marketed to, but banks do have products to promote to the rest of the unwashed masses.
Good for you, you identified that there are stupid people in the world. Boy what an insightful analysis. The paper happens to do a wee bit more than say "we got some phishing messages, so heads up folks, phishing exists", it also offers some pretty good overview analysis (though short on raw source data) into the network structure of phishers.
Your non-solution leaves a whole lot to be desired if you're a bank. Do you suggest banks administer an I.Q. test before they allow people to open accounts? Do you suggest that banks just accept that phishers are out there somewhere and can't ever be tracked or caught or that their techniques can't be countered? I don't know what you suggest, because you don't want to "make it into brain surgery" by actually looking into the problem in any depth other than a dismissive "people are stupid".
Part of security is protecting institutions against their own stupid users. Get used to it.