I actually have decent gear (Nikon D300 + a couple of decent Nikkor lenses, not crappy kit lenses), I didn't just pop into Ritz and pick up the latest cheapo camera kit last week. I've been shooting for 20+ years, so I get know very well that the lens is the most critical piece (besides the photographers own vision and skills).
The point I was trying to make was that the camera manufacturers should focus on improving the sensor technology instead of the idiotic "megapixel" race.
Thanks, that was really helpful. I know how to properly expose an image, I've been shooting for 25+ years on film, slides, and digital. My comment was about the state of the technology and the sensitivity of current sensors. I'm was not looking for a beginners lesson in photography.
And a Canon 40D at ISO1600, even if properly exposed, is far too grainy for my taste.
For me the biggest problem in pt-and-shoots, and in DSLRs to a lesser extent, is not lack of megapixels, but the lack of performance in low-light. The latest D-SLRs from Canon and Nikon, the higher-end ones (not the entry level SLRs) are getting much better, but for the most part, low-light performance of the current CCDs sucks.
Good question.. JetBlue is nice, their seats are reasonably comfortable and they have live TV in all seats. I hear good things about Virgin America, but I have not flown them yet.
AA, UA, NWA, USAir, Delta, Southwest - they all suck as far as economy class treatment goes. Shitty seats, dirty cabins, nickel-and-diming you for a bag of chips or box of shitty food. All of the major carriers are pretty bad. The smaller carriers do a slightly better job.
747-400 still has slightly longer range than 777. The longest flights are still on 747s - Newark NJ -> Singapore (nonstop). Chicago - Hong Kong (nonstop), etc etc.
I prefer the 777 because they have more modern amenities in coach like seatback entertainment systems instead of a single giant screen for the whole cabin like its 1981 or something. *SOME* airlines (NOT UNITED) have actually upgraded their economy class on the widebodies in the past 20 years.
Toshiba chose to do it with Sun out of pity, not because they see a market for it or anything, right?
"GNU/Linux" isn't a product, its just a name that is associated with X number of distributions, only a handful of which have enough corporate muscle behind them to arrange a laptop deal with a vendor like Toshiba or Dell.
The simplistic view that "Ubunto works on Dell" doesn't mean much to the Toshiba or Sun executive who wants to take some of Dell's market share. OpenSolaris works on Dell, too. As do the dozens of other Linux distros and BSD variants.
I agree with almost all of your points except for ZFS. ZFS is truly revolutionary and amazing. XFS, Reiser FS (i.e. murder-your-wife-FS) pale in comparison. ZFS renders Veritas and NetApp moot and useless in one fell swoop. No wonder NetApp is suing.
However, unfortunately, I'm pretty sure Ponytail guy and the rest of the C-level nerds will f* things up as usual and fail to capitalize on the technology. Sun = great engineers, shitty management. Someone needs a haircut. Its 2008 for crissakes, get with the decade.
Uh, the fiscal year runs from July - July. Fiscal 2008 Q3 ended at the end of March. The numbers were reported at the end of April. They were horrible. Heads should roll from the top down, not the bottom as they appear to be scheduled. Head of sales left of his own accord, and got a nice payout from Sun and fat new paycheck from his new employer as a reward for the horrendous job he did growing sales over the past several years for Sun. Nice work when you can get it.
Oh, I'd say 2008 is shaping up quite nicely to be one of the worst years in their history. The huge revenue miss in Q3, combined with the total lack of organic revenue growth, the continued exodus of top execs, and the pending layoff of up to 3000 employees doesn't exactly bode well for the future of Sun.
Ponytail-guy and his pals have basically given away the crown jewels and have not been able to "monetize" any sort of decent return for their efforts. The company can't sell servers, gives away software, and keeps purging the budget of the services and marketing teams that are the only pathway left for revenue growth. Geniuses.
I love Sun, I love their software, and they even have some really impressive hardware, but the management team there is absolutely clueless about how or where to take the company. The bets they made on open source and other areas are clearly not paying off. The stock is as low as it has ever been over the past 8 years and is showing no signs of life.
It is utterly depressing to see such a great company go down like this.
Developing websites since the late 80's? Really? Is your real name Tim Berners-Lee, by chance?
Seriously. Just because you don't care for it doesn't mean others don't find it to be a very workable solution. And the # of "years" you have been designing websites has nothing to do with anything.
I've set up several Joomla websites starting back with the 1.0 release and my impression is that there is a steep learning curve for even an experienced web admin. The terminology is confusing, the layout controls are baroque, and it takes a little while to finally figure out where all the pieces are configured. That said, once I figured it out, it DOES work well, especially when you need your users to be able to post updates and add content themselves. There are a LOT of free extensions available that are easy to install and use.
I've even written some custom extensions (for 1.0 and 1.5 native) using the pretty limited examples on the website as guides. Mostly, I used existing code as a model and made modifications from there. The documentation is not great, but it is definitely getting better, especially for version 1.5.*
If doing e-commerce, can I program my computer to lie and send back a response saying it is not tampered with even when I have changed the software? If I cannot do this, then I no longer have control over the computer and it is no longer my computer.
If you *CAN* do what you describe, then your system cannot and should not be trusted in a trusted computing transaction. Providing a provable, secure chain of trust is the fundamental reason for having a TC base. If you can arbitrarily corrupt this chain by "programming your computer to lie", then all bets are off and the trust model is irrevocably broken.
Perhaps the e-commerce use case is not the best example. Perhaps TC will never be acceptable on personal computers for general purpose uses. However, there are business cases where neither party has reason to 100% trust the other without a verifiable chain of trust measurements from the other that can be validated. In those situations, a TC transaction is pefectly reasonable and highly desirable.
I would never say "never", but in general the security of TPMs, and HSMs in general, are resistant to attacks by even the most determined criminals. There will be bugs and there will be exceptions on rare occasion, but they are the best that the industry has to offer at this time. Assume that if they have passed the strict reviews required to be used by NSA, CIA, foreign governments, and the financial industries, that they are pretty fucking solid and tamper proof.
You do not understand trusted computing. It is not about locking down your system.
It is a common fallacy that the primary goal of trusted computing is to enable DRM so the movie studios/RIAA controls your computer. This is simply not true. Trusted computing provides methods by which you, the owner and administrator of your computer, can KNOW, by having a chain of trust that is anchored by keys securely stored on a TPM chip soldered to the motherboard, that the software and hardware in your system has not been tampered with. One *could* use this to enable DRM or other user-unfriendly schemes, but there are many other use cases for trusted computing. Think e-commerce where you can verify the other system and it can verify yours to make sure neither end has been compromised prior to making a transaction.
Policy decisions are made based on the measurements that are returned by the verification process. Trusted Computing does not dictate the policies. If someone (or some company) wants to abuse the system and lock people out of their systems, then that would be bad policy and a bad implementation of TC concepts, but it doesn't mean that all TC applications are bad or are designed to restrict the user's ability to manage their systems as they see fit.
You are indeed a slashtard. Kerberos is a mandatory-to-implement feature in the NFSv4 spec and has been part of NFSv3 (optional feature) for many years. Kerberos is hardly outdated. You are a clueless, naive waife who has no real idea what is going on in the world of computer security if you think it is outdated and dying.
How do you know what the "views and leanings" of the founders are - are you one of them or are you just assuming that they are open source zealots who are programmed to automatically hate all that does not agree with Richard Stallman's manifesto?
Why does supporting Open Source mean that you have to assume that the big corporations are somehow evil and out to corrupt? Are you even aware that the biggest contributors to open source are some of the biggest corporations - IBM, Sun, Apple, Intel, etc. ? It is not a black-and-white world out there, there are good ideas being advanced on both "sides", to ignore that fact and adopt an antagonistic stance towards all that don't agree with you is childish and ignorant.
The rest of your post really makes no sense - if you call FUD, be specific - what part is FUD and why do you think it is so?
Posting a comment like "Linux has failed on the desktop" here is bound to generate hundreds of responses saying "No it hasn't! It works just great for ME!". For the majority of/. users, Linux is a perfectly fine desktop.
However, the OP is correct, the Linux desktop is a failure insofar as it has not, and likely will not, ever make any real impact on the overall desktop market. There are many many of reasons for this - some technical (ex: no photoshop, no Exchange, no iTunes), some aesthetic (except for Mac, the *ix desktop themes and styles are just not very good or consistent when compared to the XP interface), some are economic (Microsoft has deals with every major computer manufacturer to pre-install their OS, Linux will NEVER EVER EVER get double-digit, or even high single-digit, penetration when just about every computer sold to the public has MS pre-installed and ready to go).
And, please, don't follow up with a reply about how you can run Wine or how you can get the photoshop-like plugins for the GIMP, etc etc. Those are fine solutions for the technically adept, but are complete non-starters when trying to attract a larger, more generic user-base. Linux will never ever ever make an impact as a viable, every-day desktop for the average (i.e. non-slashdot-reading user). Consider that Mac OS/X has the prettiest, friendliest interface around and they only get about 6% of the market.
No, Trusted Solaris and Solaris 10 with Trusted Extensions would not have been vulnerable to that vuln. And, did you know that MIT Kerberos distributions (which include a telnet daemon) also had a very similar hole ? So, basically ANY site that was running MIT kerberos with telnet enabled - Linux, BSD, etc) were also vulnerable to the same attack. MIT Kerberos is included in RH Linux and many other Linux distros as well.
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/220816
The "DownloadHelper" extension for Firefox already does this, without all
the bloat and adware that RealPlayer delivers.
It works great for downloading videos embedded in websites like YouTube,
etc.
Telecommuting does not work for programmers in any sort of team environment, which either is or should be most jobs.
Speak for yourself. I work for a BIG company that writes ALOT of open (and closed) source code and have been doing so for 7+ years. I am highly productive, I get top reviews every year, I make a nice 6-figure salary, and I get to work on tons of interesting projects developing operating system code both as a developer and a technical lead. The fact that it doesn't work for you means that either you or your company is not properly supporting you or does not fully grasp the telecommuting concept.
I do it every day, 5 days a week. Several times a year I fly out to visit the main office for a week and mingle with my coworkers and work on-site, but otherwise most of my communication is done via email and conference calls. It *can* work, but it really depends alot on the company, the culture, and the employee.
Slashdot Mirror
What happens on *nix versions of Adobe Reader - OS/X, Solaris, Linux, etc?
I want to super advance to tomorrow so I don't see any more April Fool stories.
It was a 1-for-4 split in November 2007. SUNW(JAVA) has never done a 1-6 split.
I actually have decent gear (Nikon D300 + a couple of decent Nikkor lenses, not crappy kit lenses), I didn't just pop into Ritz and pick up the latest cheapo camera kit last week. I've been shooting for 20+ years, so I get know very well that the lens is the most critical piece (besides the photographers own vision and skills). The point I was trying to make was that the camera manufacturers should focus on improving the sensor technology instead of the idiotic "megapixel" race.
Thanks, that was really helpful. I know how to properly expose an image, I've been shooting for 25+ years on film, slides, and digital. My comment was about the state of the technology and the sensitivity of current sensors. I'm was not looking for a beginners lesson in photography. And a Canon 40D at ISO1600, even if properly exposed, is far too grainy for my taste.
For me the biggest problem in pt-and-shoots, and in DSLRs to a lesser extent, is not lack of megapixels, but the lack of performance in low-light. The latest D-SLRs from Canon and Nikon, the higher-end ones (not the entry level SLRs) are getting much better, but for the most part, low-light performance of the current CCDs sucks.
You are correct, I forgot about the 340s.
AA, UA, NWA, USAir, Delta, Southwest - they all suck as far as economy class treatment goes. Shitty seats, dirty cabins, nickel-and-diming you for a bag of chips or box of shitty food. All of the major carriers are pretty bad. The smaller carriers do a slightly better job.
Yes, agreed. Some airlines do have some decent economy class seating. United is not one of them.
747-400 still has slightly longer range than 777. The longest flights are still on 747s - Newark NJ -> Singapore (nonstop). Chicago - Hong Kong (nonstop), etc etc. I prefer the 777 because they have more modern amenities in coach like seatback entertainment systems instead of a single giant screen for the whole cabin like its 1981 or something. *SOME* airlines (NOT UNITED) have actually upgraded their economy class on the widebodies in the past 20 years.
Toshiba chose to do it with Sun out of pity, not because they see a market for it or anything, right?
"GNU/Linux" isn't a product, its just a name that is associated with X number of distributions, only a handful of which have enough corporate muscle behind them to arrange a laptop deal with a vendor like Toshiba or Dell.
The simplistic view that "Ubunto works on Dell" doesn't mean much to the Toshiba or Sun executive who wants to take some of Dell's market share. OpenSolaris works on Dell, too. As do the dozens of other Linux distros and BSD variants.
I agree with almost all of your points except for ZFS. ZFS is truly revolutionary and amazing. XFS, Reiser FS (i.e. murder-your-wife-FS) pale in comparison. ZFS renders Veritas and NetApp moot and useless in one fell swoop. No wonder NetApp is suing.
However, unfortunately, I'm pretty sure Ponytail guy and the rest of the C-level nerds will f* things up as usual and fail to capitalize on the technology. Sun = great engineers, shitty management. Someone needs a haircut. Its 2008 for crissakes, get with the decade.
Uh, the fiscal year runs from July - July. Fiscal 2008 Q3 ended at the end of March. The numbers were reported at the end of April. They were horrible. Heads should roll from the top down, not the bottom as they appear to be scheduled. Head of sales left of his own accord, and got a nice payout from Sun and fat new paycheck from his new employer as a reward for the horrendous job he did growing sales over the past several years for Sun. Nice work when you can get it.
Yes, agreed. I think the clueless execs are a big part of the problem.
Oh, I'd say 2008 is shaping up quite nicely to be one of the worst years in their history. The huge revenue miss in Q3, combined with the total lack of organic revenue growth, the continued exodus of top execs, and the pending layoff of up to 3000 employees doesn't exactly bode well for the future of Sun.
Ponytail-guy and his pals have basically given away the crown jewels and have not been able to "monetize" any sort of decent return for their efforts. The company can't sell servers, gives away software, and keeps purging the budget of the services and marketing teams that are the only pathway left for revenue growth. Geniuses.
I love Sun, I love their software, and they even have some really impressive hardware, but the management team there is absolutely clueless about how or where to take the company. The bets they made on open source and other areas are clearly not paying off. The stock is as low as it has ever been over the past 8 years and is showing no signs of life.
It is utterly depressing to see such a great company go down like this.
Developing websites since the late 80's? Really? Is your real name Tim Berners-Lee, by chance? Seriously. Just because you don't care for it doesn't mean others don't find it to be a very workable solution. And the # of "years" you have been designing websites has nothing to do with anything.
I've set up several Joomla websites starting back with the 1.0 release and my impression is that there is a steep learning curve for even an experienced web admin. The terminology is confusing, the layout controls are baroque, and it takes a little while to finally figure out where all the pieces are configured. That said, once I figured it out, it DOES work well, especially when you need your users to be able to post updates and add content themselves. There are a LOT of free extensions available that are easy to install and use. I've even written some custom extensions (for 1.0 and 1.5 native) using the pretty limited examples on the website as guides. Mostly, I used existing code as a model and made modifications from there. The documentation is not great, but it is definitely getting better, especially for version 1.5.*
If you *CAN* do what you describe, then your system cannot and should not be trusted in a trusted computing transaction. Providing a provable, secure chain of trust is the fundamental reason for having a TC base. If you can arbitrarily corrupt this chain by "programming your computer to lie", then all bets are off and the trust model is irrevocably broken.
Perhaps the e-commerce use case is not the best example. Perhaps TC will never be acceptable on personal computers for general purpose uses. However, there are business cases where neither party has reason to 100% trust the other without a verifiable chain of trust measurements from the other that can be validated. In those situations, a TC transaction is pefectly reasonable and highly desirable.
I would never say "never", but in general the security of TPMs, and HSMs in general, are resistant to attacks by even the most determined criminals. There will be bugs and there will be exceptions on rare occasion, but they are the best that the industry has to offer at this time. Assume that if they have passed the strict reviews required to be used by NSA, CIA, foreign governments, and the financial industries, that they are pretty fucking solid and tamper proof.
You do not understand trusted computing. It is not about locking down your system.
It is a common fallacy that the primary goal of trusted computing is to enable DRM so the movie studios/RIAA controls your computer. This is simply not true. Trusted computing provides methods by which you, the owner and administrator of your computer, can KNOW, by having a chain of trust that is anchored by keys securely stored on a TPM chip soldered to the motherboard, that the software and hardware in your system has not been tampered with. One *could* use this to enable DRM or other user-unfriendly schemes, but there are many other use cases for trusted computing. Think e-commerce where you can verify the other system and it can verify yours to make sure neither end has been compromised prior to making a transaction.
Policy decisions are made based on the measurements that are returned by the verification process. Trusted Computing does not dictate the policies. If someone (or some company) wants to abuse the system and lock people out of their systems, then that would be bad policy and a bad implementation of TC concepts, but it doesn't mean that all TC applications are bad or are designed to restrict the user's ability to manage their systems as they see fit.
You are indeed a slashtard. Kerberos is a mandatory-to-implement feature in the NFSv4 spec and has been part of NFSv3 (optional feature) for many years. Kerberos is hardly outdated. You are a clueless, naive waife who has no real idea what is going on in the world of computer security if you think it is outdated and dying.
How do you know what the "views and leanings" of the founders are - are you one of them or are you just assuming that they are open source zealots who are programmed to automatically hate all that does not agree with Richard Stallman's manifesto?
Why does supporting Open Source mean that you have to assume that the big corporations are somehow evil and out to corrupt? Are you even aware that the biggest contributors to open source are some of the biggest corporations - IBM, Sun, Apple, Intel, etc. ? It is not a black-and-white world out there, there are good ideas being advanced on both "sides", to ignore that fact and adopt an antagonistic stance towards all that don't agree with you is childish and ignorant.
The rest of your post really makes no sense - if you call FUD, be specific - what part is FUD and why do you think it is so?
Posting a comment like "Linux has failed on the desktop" here is bound to generate hundreds of responses saying "No it hasn't! It works just great for ME!". For the majority of /. users, Linux is a perfectly fine desktop.
However, the OP is correct, the Linux desktop is a failure insofar as it has not, and likely will not, ever make any real impact on the overall desktop market. There are many many of reasons for this - some technical (ex: no photoshop, no Exchange, no iTunes), some aesthetic (except for Mac, the *ix desktop themes and styles are just not very good or consistent when compared to the XP interface), some are economic (Microsoft has deals with every major computer manufacturer to pre-install their OS, Linux will NEVER EVER EVER get double-digit, or even high single-digit, penetration when just about every computer sold to the public has MS pre-installed and ready to go).
And, please, don't follow up with a reply about how you can run Wine or how you can get the photoshop-like plugins for the GIMP, etc etc. Those are fine solutions for the technically adept, but are complete non-starters when trying to attract a larger, more generic user-base. Linux will never ever ever make an impact as a viable, every-day desktop for the average (i.e. non-slashdot-reading user). Consider that Mac OS/X has the prettiest, friendliest interface around and they only get about 6% of the market.
No, Trusted Solaris and Solaris 10 with Trusted Extensions would not have been vulnerable to that vuln. And, did you know that MIT Kerberos distributions (which include a telnet daemon) also had a very similar hole ? So, basically ANY site that was running MIT kerberos with telnet enabled - Linux, BSD, etc) were also vulnerable to the same attack. MIT Kerberos is included in RH Linux and many other Linux distros as well. http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/220816
The "DownloadHelper" extension for Firefox already does this, without all the bloat and adware that RealPlayer delivers. It works great for downloading videos embedded in websites like YouTube, etc.
Speak for yourself. I work for a BIG company that writes ALOT of open (and closed) source code and have been doing so for 7+ years. I am highly productive, I get top reviews every year, I make a nice 6-figure salary, and I get to work on tons of interesting projects developing operating system code both as a developer and a technical lead. The fact that it doesn't work for you means that either you or your company is not properly supporting you or does not fully grasp the telecommuting concept.
I do it every day, 5 days a week. Several times a year I fly out to visit the main office for a week and mingle with my coworkers and work on-site, but otherwise most of my communication is done via email and conference calls. It *can* work, but it really depends alot on the company, the culture, and the employee.