But it's hardly relevant. I'm not trying to take some lofty 'Windows security is best' ground. I'm trying to explain why I think the Windows security system is, on the whole, more complete then the UNIX model. Specific exceptions are irrelevant, you can't just throw out SELINUX as proof that, since it supports ACLs well, UNIX in general supports ACLs well.
And your 'ACLs on anything other then NTFS' is also irrelevant. UNIX needs filesystem support in order to use ACLs, so does windows. Windows supports fewer filesystems then UNIX, true, but that's an entirely seperate issue.
Well yes, there is a certain amount of that. But the point I was making, badly I guess, was that better drivers who cope well with an unexpected merge tend to drive faster then the poorer drivers who don't cope as well.
yes, ACL support is spotty. it's getting better though.
This was my only real point - the Windows permissions system works, is a complete implementation and is therefore, better then the current UNIX systems we have.
By "The Windows permissions system is very complete, very granular and one of the few places where I think it surpasses its UNIX rivals" I meant that the Windows permissions system was more complete then anything UNIX had to offer - as a package including mature tools and complete OS support.
(And quoting from 2001 would have meant that Windows 2000 was around at the time, and therefore, at the time, Windows had a more complete implementation of ACLs. But I'll cede the point - UNIX ACLs aren't as much of a hack as they used to be.)
You don't have to use a GUI - you can use cacls. And I don't see the issue with large amounts of users and groups - assign users to the correct groups, assign the groups the correct file permissions - it's no harder then any other OS. Just because it can get more intricate doesn't mean it can't be simple.
And Linux ACL support is spotty - tools like tar, cpio, pax, and dump don't preserve ACL data. The support also requires a filesystem patch or that you use specific distros (Fedora Core 2 comes to mind). It's also somewhat non-standardised. Not saying it can't be done, but the system used in Windows (which, I believe evolved from VMS ACLs) often works better.
One day I want to do something grand, save a kid from a burning building, stop a mugging, win a major sporting event, something like that. And when people ask my inspiration, as they invariably do, I want to say, straight-faced, "Years of illegal drugs, violent video games and a ton of pornography".
Because OS X has real, actual unix permissions (unlike windows)
You're saying that the UNIX permission system is better then the Windows one? Have you ever used Windows permissions? Mac OS X may be by default very secure, but it's not because of it's permissions system.
Imagine you have 2 users, in two seperate groups, that both need read/write access to a single file. Imagine that one of these users needs execute permissions, and the other doesn't.
In Windows, I can set this up easily, just add the users to the file's security list and tick the right boxes. How would you do it with UNIX permissions?
The Windows permissions system is very complete, very granular and one of the few places where I think it surpasses its UNIX rivals.
I can say with complete certainty that slow drivers cause significantly more congestion than occasional problems caused by those going too fast.
I've recently moved to a new city where traffic is much slower than what I'm used to, and I have observed something I think is interesting. I think it's problem drivers that cause slow traffic, not slow traffic that causes problems.
Often, here, we get two lanes abruptly becoming one (link is pdf), with a minimum of warning. We also have absurdly low speed limits and lots of speed cameras, as a result, most people generally move at the same, slow, speed. However, when approaching these 'form one lane' spots, we have the 'good' drivers that form up nice and orderly and merge into the one lane flawlessly. We also have the 'bad' drivers, who stop in their lane and wait for a gap. These bad drivers cause other drivers to try and overtake behind them, snarling up traffic as it approaches the merge.
In my experience, if I end up following someone who just snarled up traffic by doing something dumb like that, when we get the the freeway, they'll be going 20km/hr under the limit. And the other way around, if I'm stuck behind someone, on a two-laned road, going 20km/hr under the limit, they more often snarl up traffic when approaching one of these stupid merge things.
So maybe it isn't slow speeds that cause congestion, but rather, bad drivers not behaving themselves.
I'm always amused by the need of scientists to classify species as male and female.
I wouldn't call it a need. Most species can be easily broken down into two distinct 'groups', usually one that fertalises the other's eggs (or analog). It is convenient to call these 'male' and 'female'.
In the case of most ants, we have the female queen who is fertalised by a male. We also have a whole worker 'caste' which is, by convention, 'female' because they're much more similar to a queen than to a male. However, these workers don't really matter because they don't reproduce and therefore their gender is less relevant.
(I'm not so sure about the 'by convention' bit - I'm looking at a textbook that supports it right now, but it's about 50 years old.)
I'm sorry that I didn't just yell at everyone and say 'its is a pronoun you idiots'. I tried to explain things in terms of the general it's mistake. Instead of saying that 'its is a pronoun, use the rules for pronouns', I tried to explain how to use its without having to resort to phrases like 'You should remember this from 5th grade English...'.
Yeah, I know. And 'weird is weird'. But I call bullshit on your always put the period/comma inside the end quotes - it's an Americanism, doesn't make any sense, and I won't do it.
My favourite is "for all intensive purposes" instead of "for all intents and purposes". It adds a dash of passion to something that's usually only adequate.
It is not:). It depends on a lot of things, but normally, if someone says "it is", they are putting the emphasis on the "is", not on the "it" (or in my example, the "is not", rather than the "it").
Well, yes. I was over-generalising a bit, but I'm using very formal in the sense of "relating to or involving outward form or structure", not really in the "suit and tie" sense. It's more precise language, most commonly used, as you mentioned, to emphasise the is, and therefore the truth, of your statement.
Of course, the fact that I used the word formal to mean two different things in the one paragraph didn't help anything, it must be getting late.
There's nothing unique about possessive 'its'. Pronouns do not take apostrophes in their possessive forms. None of them. His, hers, ours, mine, theirs, yours, its.
Yeah, that was sort of the point of using The easy way to think about it is to consider "his, hers, its" as my opening sentence.
"it's" is informal, "it is" is formal. In fact, in most situations "it is" is very formal. You would very seldom say it in conversation (relative to "it's", which is very common). As to it being bad style, it really isn't, unless you're writing something formal. Of course, for a formal bit of writing, any abbreviation is usually considered bad form.
Well, we have the period to indicate that we're creating an abbreviation of an entire word - so instead of 'Compact Discs' we would have 'C.D.s'. English has a lot of constructs designed to shortcut unweildy syntax.
This, of course, only applies when you're abbreviating an entire word from its first character onward. Hence, it's using a specific rule, not the general one wayland was talking about.
Yeah, that's wrong. The need to sometimes seperate the 's' from the word you're pluralising is usually remedied (at least in the few style guides I have on my desk) by putting the whole term in single or double quotes. Like 'CD's or "DVD"s. (Just assume that I've surrounded CD with single quotes and not a pair of apostrophes.)
This really only comes up with technical abbreviations where you don't want the 's' to be confused as part of the term, so usually CDs works fine, the caps giving away the abbreviation. Of course, you could write it C.D.s, which I believe is also correct - the fact the s doesn't have a trailing period giving away the plural.
It doesn't matter who knows it, it works. Consider the difference between "John added a litre of water to the container" and "A litre of water was added to the container by John".
In the first sentence, the important part is "John added...", you are describing what John is doing. In the second sentence, the important part is "A litre of water was added...", you are describing what happened. You know, consciously or unconsciously, which part is important because it was the part that was first.
You don't need to be aware of every linguistical construct in order for them to be effective.
No, you shouldn't have, because that's passive voice.
No, actually, I shouldv'e said exactly that. Because use of the passive voice moves attention from the action, i.e. "It does seem to break the...", to the subject acted upon, i.e. "...the general rule of..", which is what I intended to do. Feel free to argue it wasn't effective, but don't assume that just because the passive voice is generally to be avoided that it doesn't have its uses.
A man buys a new computer, sets it up, turns it on and goes for a cup of coffee. He takes longer getting coffee then the machine took to boot. When he returns to the room, the computer has been compromised.
Now the question is, if he took precisely 12 minutes longer then the machine took to boot to get his coffee and return, thereby observing it at the instant of the twelfth minute - does his machine count toward these statistics?
- Pre-SP2, most Windows users didn't know to enable the firewall
Pre-SP2, the firewall came online (I think) 4 steps after the network stack. At the height of Blaster et al, I watched a new install of XP, with firewall on, boot and immediately start with that 30 seconds til shutdown message. Forget 12 minutes, it got hit inside the second or two window between the network coming online and the firewall kicking in.
I agree, in part. But I think that the "it's" vs "its" thing is simply as a result of people not knowing what the word "its" means. Nothing about grammatical restraint or anything like that, just a lack of education.
I also believe that as long as spelling or grammar doesn't get in the way (i.e. as long as I, as the reader, do not have to spend my time translating your grammar and spelling) it really doesn't matter all that much.
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No, and not at the moment.
But it's hardly relevant. I'm not trying to take some lofty 'Windows security is best' ground. I'm trying to explain why I think the Windows security system is, on the whole, more complete then the UNIX model. Specific exceptions are irrelevant, you can't just throw out SELINUX as proof that, since it supports ACLs well, UNIX in general supports ACLs well.
And your 'ACLs on anything other then NTFS' is also irrelevant. UNIX needs filesystem support in order to use ACLs, so does windows. Windows supports fewer filesystems then UNIX, true, but that's an entirely seperate issue.
Or maybe it's poor road design.
Well yes, there is a certain amount of that. But the point I was making, badly I guess, was that better drivers who cope well with an unexpected merge tend to drive faster then the poorer drivers who don't cope as well.
yes, ACL support is spotty. it's getting better though.
This was my only real point - the Windows permissions system works, is a complete implementation and is therefore, better then the current UNIX systems we have.
By "The Windows permissions system is very complete, very granular and one of the few places where I think it surpasses its UNIX rivals" I meant that the Windows permissions system was more complete then anything UNIX had to offer - as a package including mature tools and complete OS support.
(And quoting from 2001 would have meant that Windows 2000 was around at the time, and therefore, at the time, Windows had a more complete implementation of ACLs. But I'll cede the point - UNIX ACLs aren't as much of a hack as they used to be.)
You don't have to use a GUI - you can use cacls. And I don't see the issue with large amounts of users and groups - assign users to the correct groups, assign the groups the correct file permissions - it's no harder then any other OS. Just because it can get more intricate doesn't mean it can't be simple.
And Linux ACL support is spotty - tools like tar, cpio, pax, and dump don't preserve ACL data. The support also requires a filesystem patch or that you use specific distros (Fedora Core 2 comes to mind). It's also somewhat non-standardised. Not saying it can't be done, but the system used in Windows (which, I believe evolved from VMS ACLs) often works better.
One day I want to do something grand, save a kid from a burning building, stop a mugging, win a major sporting event, something like that. And when people ask my inspiration, as they invariably do, I want to say, straight-faced, "Years of illegal drugs, violent video games and a ton of pornography".
Because OS X has real, actual unix permissions (unlike windows)
You're saying that the UNIX permission system is better then the Windows one? Have you ever used Windows permissions? Mac OS X may be by default very secure, but it's not because of it's permissions system.
Imagine you have 2 users, in two seperate groups, that both need read/write access to a single file. Imagine that one of these users needs execute permissions, and the other doesn't.
In Windows, I can set this up easily, just add the users to the file's security list and tick the right boxes. How would you do it with UNIX permissions?
The Windows permissions system is very complete, very granular and one of the few places where I think it surpasses its UNIX rivals.
I can say with complete certainty that slow drivers cause significantly more congestion than occasional problems caused by those going too fast.
I've recently moved to a new city where traffic is much slower than what I'm used to, and I have observed something I think is interesting. I think it's problem drivers that cause slow traffic, not slow traffic that causes problems.
Often, here, we get two lanes abruptly becoming one (link is pdf), with a minimum of warning. We also have absurdly low speed limits and lots of speed cameras, as a result, most people generally move at the same, slow, speed. However, when approaching these 'form one lane' spots, we have the 'good' drivers that form up nice and orderly and merge into the one lane flawlessly. We also have the 'bad' drivers, who stop in their lane and wait for a gap. These bad drivers cause other drivers to try and overtake behind them, snarling up traffic as it approaches the merge.
In my experience, if I end up following someone who just snarled up traffic by doing something dumb like that, when we get the the freeway, they'll be going 20km/hr under the limit. And the other way around, if I'm stuck behind someone, on a two-laned road, going 20km/hr under the limit, they more often snarl up traffic when approaching one of these stupid merge things.
So maybe it isn't slow speeds that cause congestion, but rather, bad drivers not behaving themselves.
I'm always amused by the need of scientists to classify species as male and female.
I wouldn't call it a need. Most species can be easily broken down into two distinct 'groups', usually one that fertalises the other's eggs (or analog). It is convenient to call these 'male' and 'female'.
In the case of most ants, we have the female queen who is fertalised by a male. We also have a whole worker 'caste' which is, by convention, 'female' because they're much more similar to a queen than to a male. However, these workers don't really matter because they don't reproduce and therefore their gender is less relevant.
(I'm not so sure about the 'by convention' bit - I'm looking at a textbook that supports it right now, but it's about 50 years old.)
Uhhh. That's exactly what I said.
I'm sorry that I didn't just yell at everyone and say 'its is a pronoun you idiots'. I tried to explain things in terms of the general it's mistake. Instead of saying that 'its is a pronoun, use the rules for pronouns', I tried to explain how to use its without having to resort to phrases like 'You should remember this from 5th grade English...'.
It should be "supercede," not "supersede."
Bzzzt. Nope, "supersede" is spelt with '-sede', not '-cede' like 'precede'.
Cause I was tired, it was late, and the space bar was all the way down there. It's a simple typo.
I think that comes from a bash.org quote - I used it someplace else in this thread.
Yeah, I know. And 'weird is weird'. But I call bullshit on your always put the period/comma inside the end quotes - it's an Americanism, doesn't make any sense, and I won't do it.
My favourite is "for all intensive purposes" instead of "for all intents and purposes". It adds a dash of passion to something that's usually only adequate.
It is not :). It depends on a lot of things, but normally, if someone says "it is", they are putting the emphasis on the "is", not on the "it" (or in my example, the "is not", rather than the "it").
Well, yes. I was over-generalising a bit, but I'm using very formal in the sense of "relating to or involving outward form or structure", not really in the "suit and tie" sense. It's more precise language, most commonly used, as you mentioned, to emphasise the is, and therefore the truth, of your statement.
Of course, the fact that I used the word formal to mean two different things in the one paragraph didn't help anything, it must be getting late.
There's nothing unique about possessive 'its'. Pronouns do not take apostrophes in their possessive forms. None of them. His, hers, ours, mine, theirs, yours, its.
Yeah, that was sort of the point of using The easy way to think about it is to consider "his, hers, its" as my opening sentence.
"it's" is informal, "it is" is formal. In fact, in most situations "it is" is very formal. You would very seldom say it in conversation (relative to "it's", which is very common). As to it being bad style, it really isn't, unless you're writing something formal. Of course, for a formal bit of writing, any abbreviation is usually considered bad form.
Well, we have the period to indicate that we're creating an abbreviation of an entire word - so instead of 'Compact Discs' we would have 'C.D.s'. English has a lot of constructs designed to shortcut unweildy syntax.
This, of course, only applies when you're abbreviating an entire word from its first character onward. Hence, it's using a specific rule, not the general one wayland was talking about.
Many people write plurals like
CD's
DVD's
etc.,
Yeah, that's wrong. The need to sometimes seperate the 's' from the word you're pluralising is usually remedied (at least in the few style guides I have on my desk) by putting the whole term in single or double quotes. Like 'CD's or "DVD"s. (Just assume that I've surrounded CD with single quotes and not a pair of apostrophes.)
This really only comes up with technical abbreviations where you don't want the 's' to be confused as part of the term, so usually CDs works fine, the caps giving away the abbreviation. Of course, you could write it C.D.s, which I believe is also correct - the fact the s doesn't have a trailing period giving away the plural.
too badd know one knows that
It doesn't matter who knows it, it works. Consider the difference between "John added a litre of water to the container" and "A litre of water was added to the container by John".
In the first sentence, the important part is "John added...", you are describing what John is doing. In the second sentence, the important part is "A litre of water was added...", you are describing what happened. You know, consciously or unconsciously, which part is important because it was the part that was first.
You don't need to be aware of every linguistical construct in order for them to be effective.
No, you shouldn't have, because that's passive voice.
No, actually, I shouldv'e said exactly that. Because use of the passive voice moves attention from the action, i.e. "It does seem to break the...", to the subject acted upon, i.e. "...the general rule of..", which is what I intended to do. Feel free to argue it wasn't effective, but don't assume that just because the passive voice is generally to be avoided that it doesn't have its uses.
A man buys a new computer, sets it up, turns it on and goes for a cup of coffee. He takes longer getting coffee then the machine took to boot. When he returns to the room, the computer has been compromised.
Now the question is, if he took precisely 12 minutes longer then the machine took to boot to get his coffee and return, thereby observing it at the instant of the twelfth minute - does his machine count toward these statistics?
- Pre-SP2, most Windows users didn't know to enable the firewall
Pre-SP2, the firewall came online (I think) 4 steps after the network stack. At the height of Blaster et al, I watched a new install of XP, with firewall on, boot and immediately start with that 30 seconds til shutdown message. Forget 12 minutes, it got hit inside the second or two window between the network coming online and the firewall kicking in.
I agree, in part. But I think that the "it's" vs "its" thing is simply as a result of people not knowing what the word "its" means. Nothing about grammatical restraint or anything like that, just a lack of education.
I also believe that as long as spelling or grammar doesn't get in the way (i.e. as long as I, as the reader, do not have to spend my time translating your grammar and spelling) it really doesn't matter all that much.
Heh, so you're saying I was correct by reason of typo?
I'm sure theres something deep, meaningful and on-topic to gain from this, but I'll be damned if I can think of anything.