Read Milgram's book instead. It's a very readable account of his experiments, that will change the way you think about the society you live in. Everyone should read this book.
a. To rid your machine of the current worm, reboot your computer.
b. To protect your system from re-infection:
Install Microsoft's patch for the Code Red vulnerability problem:
Surely that should be:
a. Take your machine offline
b. To rid your machine of the current worm, reboot your computer.
c. To protect your system from re-infection:
Install Microsoft's patch for the Code Red vulnerability problem:
d. Take your machine back online
Otherwise there's a chance you'll be reinfected between rebooting and upgrading.
Has it occurred to you that admins who run open relays probably don't check the mail of the postmaster account very often? They probably don't know how to set up the MTA to forward the postmaster's mail to a login account. (Maybe the box was set up by a friend, or the person who used to run it has left the company - either way, whoever's currently in charge of the box has no idea how to configure the MTA otherwise they wouldn't be wasting their resources running an open relay.)
about 3 years a go i read an article on microsoft's web site, which i WISH i had saved. it was basically slating the JAVA and J2EE environment and how SUN was targeting networking computing was such a step back in technology. back to the old terminal days of old.
A similar Microsoft article is still available from Google's cache.
Don't joke about it. In the UK, virus writing is already defined as terrorism because it is an action "designed to interfere with or seriously disrupt an electronic system". Studying viruses is also terrorism, since "a person commits an offence if he collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or he possesses a document or record containing information of this kind". By downloading an article about the SirCam virus into your browser's cache, you may have inadvertently committed an act of terrorism. But don't worry, the police won't bother to arrest you unless you do something to piss them off. Better keep your head down from now on, terrorist.
And you know what? If you get coy with it and try to NOT make pathologically obvious clicks- the interpolation on CD players won't kick in!
I'm not sure that's true. It's the invalid ECC bits that cause the interpolation to kick in, not the invalid audio bits. So the audio bits could be close to the correct signal - they could, for example, be used to add an annoying 200Hz buzz that would only be audible if you digitally extracted the audio.
If you have the luxury of being able to call on expert support in every aspect of your life, then I guess it's irrelevant how complex your tools are - you can always get someone else to fix them. However, if you want to be self-reliant in some aspects of your life, you'll have to learn to maintain your own tools. Maintaining a PC isn't difficult; if you can learn to use a word processor, you can learn to maintain a PC. The knowledge required to maintain a PC shouldn't be considered irrelevant to the average user: using a word processor is relevant to the task of writing a letter, and maintaining a PC is relevant to the task of using a word processor. To go back to the car analogy: part of being a good driver is being able to fill the petrol tank or change a tyre. Cars and computers are not Bic pens: you can't just throw them away when they break down.
Sure you can pay someone to fix your PC instead of taking care of it; you can also pay someone to type your letters for you, or even pay someone to compose them. But most people enjoy the satisfaction of knowing they have solved a problem for themselves.
Of course there are some problems (like rearranging the tissues in the box) that aren't worth solving - I guess the problem of maintaining your PC may or may not be worth solving depending on how stubborn you are and how much you can afford to spend on tech support calls.;-)
The system is not complex. It does word processing, spreadsheeting, presentationing, and emailing (not to mention pr0n surfing, but let's keep that to ourselves).
So a car is not complex, because it just drives from place to place? And the government is not complex, because it just makes laws and runs the country?
You can only separate the complexity of the tool from the complexity of the task if your tools are 100% reliable. Otherwise, the user is occasionally going to be exposed to breakdowns which reveal the underlying complexity of the tool. This leaves the user with two options:
Get someone else to fix it
Learn how it works
The first option is attractive if you're intimidated by the complexity of the tool. But the second option always makes sense in the long run. To use any tool effectively you must understand how it works. Why do presenters fall back on OHPs when the data projector breaks down? Because they understand how an OHP works. Why do writers fall back on pencil and paper when Word crashes? Because they understand pencil and paper. If you understand how your software works and you can fix it, you don't need any other tools to fall back on.
You have to understand how it works so that then when it breaks, you'll understand how it's broken.
This isn't a peripheral issue - ALL COMPUTERS BREAK so this issue concerns ALL COMPUTER USERS, from newbies to experts and from MacOS to Linux. If you don't want to spend years learning how to deal with each problem individually, you need to understand the underlying causes.
You say "of course it works quickly and simply with Windows", and 95% of the time that's true. But the other 5% of the time something breaks and you're screwed. You can't find out what's going on under the hood, because the hood's welded shut. You have no way to fix the problem because you can't even diagnose the problem, because some helpful UI expert hid all the information from you.
"Why should people have to understand all sorts of things before they can even use the OS?" They shouldn't. But if they want to use the OS effectively, the easiest way is to understand how it works. That's not due to bad design, it's a common property of all complex systems: unless you understand the mechanism, you can't understand the behaviour.
If my ripping software can make a bit-for-bit copy of the disk, won't a CD player be able to interpolate across the errors in the copy just like it interpolates across the errors in the original?
It looks like this scheme will only stop you ripping the CD to a WAV file (eg for MP3 encoding). It will still be possible to make 'perfect' (errors intact) copies of the CD.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention: the only way you can make the situation worse is to allow the infrastructure company to be a service provider. This gives it a massive advantage over other service providers, since it controls the common infrastructure, and takes away its incentive to invest in the infrastructure, since it would be spending money for the benefit of its competitors.
The combination of an unfair competitive position and freedom from long-term investment worries may go some way to explaining BT's financial success since privatisation.
The problem is not lack of regulation, the problem is that privatisation of national infrastructure does not and cannot work.
The justification usually given for privatising public services is that they can be made more efficient if private companies compete for contracts. Sounds like a good idea, but unfortunately it doesn't work for national infrastructure, because there's no room for competition. National rail and utility networks have to be national. So when you privatise them you have to decide (1) who's going to own the existing network and (2) who's going to stop the new owners from breaking it up or running it into the ground. The usual response to (1) is to create a national infrastructure company (eg Railtrack) and grant it a monopoly. The solution to (2) is to create a regulatory body to supervise the infrastructure company.
At this point you may notice that what we have created is not very different from what we had before (except that there are lots of ministers with lots of shares in the infrastructure company, and none of the assets paid for by the public belong to the public any more). We have a national monopoly controlled by a government department. Where are the benefits of competition going to come from if companies can't compete to run the infrastructure?
The answer is service providers - companies that operate services (train journeys, telephone calls, water) over national infrastructure (tracks, cables, pipes). But they can't compete in the sense of choosing a can of Coke over a can of Pepsi - you can't choose which water provider to use every time you turn on the tap. You have to use the provider that 'operates' the pipes running to your house. Who chooses that provider? The regulator. 'Competition' occurs once every few years when the service contracts come up for renewal; service providers which have performed so badly that they have been fined to the brink of bankruptcy by the regulator might lose their contracts. Note that the service providers are not competing with one another on a day-to-day basis. They are only competing against standards set by a government department. It is only when a company fails to meet those standards for several years running that competition between companies occurs.
For example, I get to work on a train operated by Thameslink. Thameslink has a monopoly on my local line, so I have no choice about which service provider I use. No matter how much Thameslink pisses me off, I'm not going to switch to the competition because the competition doesn't run trains in my area. The only way I can get an improved service is if Thameslink performs so badly that the government takes away its contract. This is not free market competition, it's a command economy. It combines all the bloat and sluggishness of a command economy (the rail regulator is, after all, a government department) with the disadvantages of the private sector (accountability to shareholders rather than customers, long-term investment sacrificed for short-term profit).
Why on earth was this horrible public/private chimera created? Because corrupt ministers realised they were sitting on billions of pounds worth of saleable goods, and there was public support from people like you for the idea of privatisation even in situations where the principles of the market economy cannot be applied.
One reason for creating banknotes containing chips is to prevent forgery (or make it prohibitively expensive). A note without a working chip would be worthless. Banks and retailers wouldn't accept it; if an individual found out you'd passed them a de-chipped note they'd regard you as a forger.
When Don Box (one of the designers of SOAP) presented sessions on SOAP and XML at Microsoft's TechEd Europe conference last year, he used Emacs for all of his demonstrations. I guess he won't be demonstrating the Mobile Internet Toolkit this year... --
...would be a server sitting at home on a broadband always-on connection, while I carry around a little Palm-sized wireless thin client, or optionally access my apps from any PC using a browser plugin (so that none of my personal information is left in the PC, and I don't have to put up with the web's display inconsistencies, slow rendering, privacy problems, blah blah).
Work at home, work at work, work on the move... your files and programs stay on the same server and nothing travels across the network except GUI events (encrypted, of course). You don't have to store your data on anyone else's machine: you can even download your own browser plugin from your own machine if you need to access your programs from an untrusted PC.
We could do all of this with free software. Most of what we need is already out there; the biggest problem I can see is the availability of broadband connections for home servers. There is no reason this needs to be centralized (by Microsoft or anyone else). --
Chairman Bill donates millions to charity. That's the kind of 'redistribution of wealth' our great country was founded to oppose!
Let your friends and family know today: Microsoft = Communism. We must fight this evil threat with every resource available to us. If one of your neighbors buys Microsoft software, the insidious Domino Effect means that your very home is threatened with Communist infiltration! You don't need to buy or use Microsoft software to be infected: it can install itself using an ordinary phone line! Even now, Communist elements within our school system are teaching your children to use Microsoft software! We must act now to stamp out this evil menace! --
Maybe in the US you will. In Canada, they'll just give you a stern ticking-off and make you watch some government-funded cartoons about social responsibility. --
Interesting suggestion, but I wonder whether someone who doesn't have the time/interest to contribute code to a project should be managing the project! --
Slashdot Mirror
Read Milgram's book instead. It's a very readable account of his experiments, that will change the way you think about the society you live in. Everyone should read this book.
b. To protect your system from re-infection:
Install Microsoft's patch for the Code Red vulnerability problem:
Surely that should be:
a. Take your machine offline
b. To rid your machine of the current worm, reboot your computer.
c. To protect your system from re-infection:
Install Microsoft's patch for the Code Red vulnerability problem:
d. Take your machine back online
Otherwise there's a chance you'll be reinfected between rebooting and upgrading.
--
Has it occurred to you that admins who run open relays probably don't check the mail of the postmaster account very often? They probably don't know how to set up the MTA to forward the postmaster's mail to a login account. (Maybe the box was set up by a friend, or the person who used to run it has left the company - either way, whoever's currently in charge of the box has no idea how to configure the MTA otherwise they wouldn't be wasting their resources running an open relay.)
--
diff message1 message2 | wc -l
--
A similar Microsoft article is still available from Google's cache.
--
Don't joke about it. In the UK, virus writing is already defined as terrorism because it is an action "designed to interfere with or seriously disrupt an electronic system". Studying viruses is also terrorism, since "a person commits an offence if he collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism, or he possesses a document or record containing information of this kind". By downloading an article about the SirCam virus into your browser's cache, you may have inadvertently committed an act of terrorism. But don't worry, the police won't bother to arrest you unless you do something to piss them off. Better keep your head down from now on, terrorist.
--
I'm not sure that's true. It's the invalid ECC bits that cause the interpolation to kick in, not the invalid audio bits. So the audio bits could be close to the correct signal - they could, for example, be used to add an annoying 200Hz buzz that would only be audible if you digitally extracted the audio.
--
Sure you can pay someone to fix your PC instead of taking care of it; you can also pay someone to type your letters for you, or even pay someone to compose them. But most people enjoy the satisfaction of knowing they have solved a problem for themselves.
Of course there are some problems (like rearranging the tissues in the box) that aren't worth solving - I guess the problem of maintaining your PC may or may not be worth solving depending on how stubborn you are and how much you can afford to spend on tech support calls. ;-)
--
So a car is not complex, because it just drives from place to place? And the government is not complex, because it just makes laws and runs the country?
You can only separate the complexity of the tool from the complexity of the task if your tools are 100% reliable. Otherwise, the user is occasionally going to be exposed to breakdowns which reveal the underlying complexity of the tool. This leaves the user with two options:
- Get someone else to fix it
- Learn how it works
The first option is attractive if you're intimidated by the complexity of the tool. But the second option always makes sense in the long run. To use any tool effectively you must understand how it works. Why do presenters fall back on OHPs when the data projector breaks down? Because they understand how an OHP works. Why do writers fall back on pencil and paper when Word crashes? Because they understand pencil and paper. If you understand how your software works and you can fix it, you don't need any other tools to fall back on.--
This isn't a peripheral issue - ALL COMPUTERS BREAK so this issue concerns ALL COMPUTER USERS, from newbies to experts and from MacOS to Linux. If you don't want to spend years learning how to deal with each problem individually, you need to understand the underlying causes.
You say "of course it works quickly and simply with Windows", and 95% of the time that's true. But the other 5% of the time something breaks and you're screwed. You can't find out what's going on under the hood, because the hood's welded shut. You have no way to fix the problem because you can't even diagnose the problem, because some helpful UI expert hid all the information from you.
"Why should people have to understand all sorts of things before they can even use the OS?" They shouldn't. But if they want to use the OS effectively, the easiest way is to understand how it works. That's not due to bad design, it's a common property of all complex systems: unless you understand the mechanism, you can't understand the behaviour.
--
It looks like this scheme will only stop you ripping the CD to a WAV file (eg for MP3 encoding). It will still be possible to make 'perfect' (errors intact) copies of the CD.
--
The filters in the soundcard's DAC should remove the ultrasonic frequencies. So there's no need to build a filter, just use a loopback cable.
--
The combination of an unfair competitive position and freedom from long-term investment worries may go some way to explaining BT's financial success since privatisation.
--
The justification usually given for privatising public services is that they can be made more efficient if private companies compete for contracts. Sounds like a good idea, but unfortunately it doesn't work for national infrastructure, because there's no room for competition. National rail and utility networks have to be national. So when you privatise them you have to decide (1) who's going to own the existing network and (2) who's going to stop the new owners from breaking it up or running it into the ground. The usual response to (1) is to create a national infrastructure company (eg Railtrack) and grant it a monopoly. The solution to (2) is to create a regulatory body to supervise the infrastructure company.
At this point you may notice that what we have created is not very different from what we had before (except that there are lots of ministers with lots of shares in the infrastructure company, and none of the assets paid for by the public belong to the public any more). We have a national monopoly controlled by a government department. Where are the benefits of competition going to come from if companies can't compete to run the infrastructure?
The answer is service providers - companies that operate services (train journeys, telephone calls, water) over national infrastructure (tracks, cables, pipes). But they can't compete in the sense of choosing a can of Coke over a can of Pepsi - you can't choose which water provider to use every time you turn on the tap. You have to use the provider that 'operates' the pipes running to your house. Who chooses that provider? The regulator. 'Competition' occurs once every few years when the service contracts come up for renewal; service providers which have performed so badly that they have been fined to the brink of bankruptcy by the regulator might lose their contracts. Note that the service providers are not competing with one another on a day-to-day basis. They are only competing against standards set by a government department. It is only when a company fails to meet those standards for several years running that competition between companies occurs.
For example, I get to work on a train operated by Thameslink. Thameslink has a monopoly on my local line, so I have no choice about which service provider I use. No matter how much Thameslink pisses me off, I'm not going to switch to the competition because the competition doesn't run trains in my area. The only way I can get an improved service is if Thameslink performs so badly that the government takes away its contract. This is not free market competition, it's a command economy. It combines all the bloat and sluggishness of a command economy (the rail regulator is, after all, a government department) with the disadvantages of the private sector (accountability to shareholders rather than customers, long-term investment sacrificed for short-term profit).
Why on earth was this horrible public/private chimera created? Because corrupt ministers realised they were sitting on billions of pounds worth of saleable goods, and there was public support from people like you for the idea of privatisation even in situations where the principles of the market economy cannot be applied.
--
The pair of legs powered by a chainsaw engine is more of a walking wheelbarrow than an exoskeleton. More pics here.
--
Microsoft has been bringing down my computer for years - what's changed?
--
What a strange idea - do you buy things based on whether you like them, or based on whether you think they're targeted at you?
--
What's \. - an MS-DOS advocacy site?
--
One reason for creating banknotes containing chips is to prevent forgery (or make it prohibitively expensive). A note without a working chip would be worthless. Banks and retailers wouldn't accept it; if an individual found out you'd passed them a de-chipped note they'd regard you as a forger.
--
When Don Box (one of the designers of SOAP) presented sessions on SOAP and XML at Microsoft's TechEd Europe conference last year, he used Emacs for all of his demonstrations. I guess he won't be demonstrating the Mobile Internet Toolkit this year...
--
Work at home, work at work, work on the move... your files and programs stay on the same server and nothing travels across the network except GUI events (encrypted, of course). You don't have to store your data on anyone else's machine: you can even download your own browser plugin from your own machine if you need to access your programs from an untrusted PC.
We could do all of this with free software. Most of what we need is already out there; the biggest problem I can see is the availability of broadband connections for home servers. There is no reason this needs to be centralized (by Microsoft or anyone else).
--
Microsoft = Communism!
That's right, the world's largest software company is little more than a Maoist personality cult bent on world domination! Just look at the facts:
- Microsoft's
.NET architecture is moving power away from independent PCs and towards centralized servers. .NET is collectivization for the 21st century!
- Microsoft software controls 95% of the world's personal computers. Windows is the software equivalent of a single-party political system!
- Microsoft ruthlessly squashes all opposition by giving away for free services you would otherwise have to pay for - a classic Communist tactic!
- Chairman Bill wears little round glasses! See any resemblance?
- Chairman Bill donates millions to charity. That's the kind of 'redistribution of wealth' our great country was founded to oppose!
Let your friends and family know today: Microsoft = Communism. We must fight this evil threat with every resource available to us. If one of your neighbors buys Microsoft software, the insidious Domino Effect means that your very home is threatened with Communist infiltration! You don't need to buy or use Microsoft software to be infected: it can install itself using an ordinary phone line! Even now, Communist elements within our school system are teaching your children to use Microsoft software! We must act now to stamp out this evil menace!--
Maybe in the US you will. In Canada, they'll just give you a stern ticking-off and make you watch some government-funded cartoons about social responsibility.
--
kernal adj, 1. Relating to the technical appetites: kernal desire, kernal panic. 2. Holy or unworldly: kernal hacker, kernal space.
--
Interesting suggestion, but I wonder whether someone who doesn't have the time/interest to contribute code to a project should be managing the project!
--