When you say "a couple of flash movies" do you mean "five or six 300MB TV episodes from Youtube"? If so, that would be most of your 1.5GB memory usage right there...
DNS does indeed try to define content, not very successfully but it does..edu = educational.com = commercial.mil = military.gov = governement.COUNTRY ACRONYM =...
That's defining who owns the server, not what content is on it. Furthermore, it's not really enforced anywhere except.gov,.mil, and sometimes.edu. Any given large corporation has their name.org,.net, and every country code redirected to their.com site. Slashdot sells ads and charges subscription fees, but they still have a.org (nonprofit organization) domain name. Most owners of.tv,.am, or.fm domains have never even heard of Tuvalu, Armenia or the Federates States of Micronesia.
Classifying any given email message as "spam" and "not spam" is fairly easy to do, too. Somehow I don't think that ICANN requiring all spam to be sent from mail servers in some newly-created.spam TLD would change anything at all to the stream of mortgage offers, penis pill ads, and stock scams that fill my inbox every day. My advice to the anti-porn crusaders^W^W.xxx TLD advocates: Have fun playing whack-a-mole with porn sites operated through the same type of tangled web of international ownership and hosting as spam and phishing sites. A decade of fighting with spammers teaches us that forcing a business that operates on the fringes of legality to comply with onerous new policies is very hard.
Apple continued to claim that there were no vulnerabilities in Mac OS X
All systems have vulnerabilities, how can they say that with a straight face?
They didn't say it. They just didn't rush to fall on their swords for some undisclosed third party's driver bugs fast enough for Ou, Maynor and Ellch's taste.
One wonders if subsequent developments in transportation technology--automobiles, airplanes, segways--have opened up new forms of political and social organization, such that the fascist constituency (those that passionately care about rail transport) have been minimized.
Yes, but they've just been replaced by a constituency willing to accept fascism as long as gasoline is cheap and the roads are pothole-free. Our willingness to accept both fascism AND airlines that run hours behind schedule still confuses me, though...
* The data is made available to everyone after a short time delay
We *assume* that the data are made available after a short time, but because of the encryption there's no way to correlate released data with observed transmissions from HST. Some people accept NASA's word on this, others don't.
Let me put it this way: Given the present theocratic leanings of the US government, if NASA found something that fundamentally challenged our notion of our place in the universe (like, say, one of the Mars rovers found fossil bacteria that predate any known life on Earth by a billion years or so) do you think we would ever hear about it through official channels? Or would NASA just "lose contact" with the vehicle and quietly shut down the program?
Is getting a shot at publishing before the other scientists really that much more important than keeping the christian fundies that control the hardware and the money honest?
In short, Zalewski seems to believe in full disclosure instead of responsible disclosure.
So do most of us here at/. when it comes to bugs in Windows or IE or Java VM. Why not Firefox?
Some of these bugs were initially reported in 2001 and were only fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.2, six years later. The lesson here seems clear to me: Reporting security holes on bugzilla get them marked DUPE/WONTFIX/NOTABUG and ignored for 5+ years. Publishing detailed explanations of the exploits on your blog gets them fixed within a few weeks.
Assuming you put enough RAM in your computer that you don't thrash constantly, you should get much better life out of a flash swap partition than that. Personally, I keep enough RAM in my boxes that they rarely hit swap at all, so I'm sure I'd *never* wear out a flash swap partition.
In practice, I doubt that anyone is likely to wear out an appropriately-sized flash swap partition within the lifespan of the machine it's installed in.
Ah, I see you've never experienced the joy of using a PC "protected" by Norton internet security! There are A LOT of PCs out there that swap nearly constantly even when doing nothing more strenuous than reading email.
The mantra of IT security is "Through overwhelming effort on our part, absolutely nothing of interest happened".
Lately it seems to be much closer to "Sarbanes-Oxley says you can't have N". (where N is any subset of the software required to do your job that is not also a subset of the union of MS Office and software bundled with Windows)
If by installing LDAP you eliminate a huge headache involving recompiling half the distribution, you win --- and it's not as if this LDAP functionality is actually used unless specifically enabled, and as an admin, I save time.
You save time until an app that no reasonable person would ever expect to link to OpenLDAP gets your system 0wned via a known vulnerability that you thought you were safe from because you don't use LDAP. Then you lose all that time and more, and possibly your job...
"Figuring out what the user needs is HARD! Lets just compile in everything we possibly can." is not a valid approach to software packaging.
"Satelite service, 512 Kbps for $60CDN or 1 Mbps for $100CDN"...and 2+ second ping times. Good luck using voip, multiplayer video games, bittorrent, or anything that uses enough bandwidth to justify paying for broadband over a satellite connection.
We don't have a bandwidth shortage. We have a few big telecoms sitting on something like elevnty hojillion gigabit-miles of intercity dark fiber that nobody wants to pay for, and cable operators with massive bandwidth in the last mile capping connection speeds because they're too cheap to pay the telecoms for more upstream bandwidth.
If the government wanted to do something about this "shortage" they could solve it pretty easily by ordering the telcos and ISP to either light up the unused fiber and raise consumer connection speeds across the board or immediately repay all the tax breaks and grants that we have handed out over the last 10 years to pay for fast, cheap, universal broadband that they have thus far failed to deliver.
A private home is one of the best means of investment. High Rise buildings are typically provided as a flat for rent -- the worse means of fudicial exercise.
That's only true if you assume the renter spends the difference between rent and mortgage payments + upkeep + tax + insurance on hookers and blow instead of saving it. It also fails to account for the renter being able to walk away from a depressed regional economy while the home owner* is stuck in a town with limited opportunity because can't afford to sell the house for $50k less than he owes on the mortgage. Home ownership is only a good investment if you plan to stay in a house many years, OR expect the price of your house to keep going up at the same (insane, unsustainable) rate it has for the last few years.
* Actually the bank owns most of the house and he just pays a monthly fee to live there... ** Caution, belief in continued home price increases without a basis in the fundamental forces of supply and demand is considered a "gateway psychosis" and has been linked to an increased risk of belief in the tooth fairy, young earth creationism, and scientology.
This does not mean they should not use computers, just they they don't use them like us. Other people have no care about their car's engine and how it works. This does not mean they do not need to travel.
True, but it does mean that they are unqualified for any job that requires a lot of computer work, just like the people who don't care how a car works are unqualified to work as a driver. You wouldn't hire a mechanic who doesn't want to understand how a torque wrench works, or a pilot who doesn't care what the throttle levers do. Why would anyone hire an office worker who can't be bothered to figure out the basics of Windows and MS Office?
Developing? I mean seriously.. How much Developing needs to be done to make a barebone phone?
My guess is it takes at least three engineers to make e-ink work in something other than a trivial demo, two engineers to figure out how to make it drop more calls than a CDMA Razr, two more engineers to minimize the battery life, seven salesmen to spin "we won't sell it in the US" as something positive, and a manager to kill the project when grey-market imports start cutting into sales of overpriced whizzy "full-featured" phones...
If the menu bar location really is a "love it or hate it" thing (and keeping it attached to windows is not a pseudo-religious FUD "we're not Apple!" thing), where's that option? It's probably the most requested feature for Gnome. I'm sure KDE is the same.
With a heart of ice and a head of solid granite, Dvorak is like +20 against cold. He'd just stumble out of the mountains months later with an implausible story about finding Apple's secret underground research facility (where they're developing the top-secret "Vista Ready" iMac) and how RMS, Google's black helicopters, and a troop of Mac fanboyscouts conspired to kill him...
Just as soon as someone thinks up a solution that doesn't require new hardware (no SecurID, RFID, or USB keys), works on every client browser/OS (no Windows/MSN passport), can be anonymous (no personal certs), can be revoked (no biometrics), and is more secure. Just because nobody's done it yet doesn't mean it's impossible...
Think managed web hosting companies that put dozens of virtual hosts on a single physical server. If this really works from an unprivileged account, one malicious user could steal SSL keys from all the rest.
Slashdot Mirror
When you say "a couple of flash movies" do you mean "five or six 300MB TV episodes from Youtube"? If so, that would be most of your 1.5GB memory usage right there...
DNS does indeed try to define content, not very successfully but it does. .edu = educational .com = commercial .mil = military .gov = governement .COUNTRY ACRONYM = ...
.gov, .mil, and sometimes .edu. Any given large corporation has their name .org, .net, and every country code redirected to their .com site. Slashdot sells ads and charges subscription fees, but they still have a .org (nonprofit organization) domain name. Most owners of .tv, .am, or .fm domains have never even heard of Tuvalu, Armenia or the Federates States of Micronesia.
That's defining who owns the server, not what content is on it. Furthermore, it's not really enforced anywhere except
Classifying any given email message as "spam" and "not spam" is fairly easy to do, too. Somehow I don't think that ICANN requiring all spam to be sent from mail servers in some newly-created .spam TLD would change anything at all to the stream of mortgage offers, penis pill ads, and stock scams that fill my inbox every day. My advice to the anti-porn crusaders^W^W .xxx TLD advocates: Have fun playing whack-a-mole with porn sites operated through the same type of tangled web of international ownership and hosting as spam and phishing sites. A decade of fighting with spammers teaches us that forcing a business that operates on the fringes of legality to comply with onerous new policies is very hard.
Apple continued to claim that there were no vulnerabilities in Mac OS X
All systems have vulnerabilities, how can they say that with a straight face?
They didn't say it. They just didn't rush to fall on their swords for some undisclosed third party's driver bugs fast enough for Ou, Maynor and Ellch's taste.
Living in the midwest, you should have some idea just how many ginormous diesel pickup trucks there are on the road. A lot of those are over $40k new.
Actually I just play one on the internet.
Anyway, learn to read, I'm not the same poster you were arguing with above.
One wonders if subsequent developments in transportation technology--automobiles, airplanes, segways--have opened up new forms of political and social organization, such that the fascist constituency (those that passionately care about rail transport) have been minimized.
Yes, but they've just been replaced by a constituency willing to accept fascism as long as gasoline is cheap and the roads are pothole-free. Our willingness to accept both fascism AND airlines that run hours behind schedule still confuses me, though...
* The data is made available to everyone after a short time delay
We *assume* that the data are made available after a short time, but because of the encryption there's no way to correlate released data with observed transmissions from HST. Some people accept NASA's word on this, others don't.
Let me put it this way: Given the present theocratic leanings of the US government, if NASA found something that fundamentally challenged our notion of our place in the universe (like, say, one of the Mars rovers found fossil bacteria that predate any known life on Earth by a billion years or so) do you think we would ever hear about it through official channels? Or would NASA just "lose contact" with the vehicle and quietly shut down the program?
Is getting a shot at publishing before the other scientists really that much more important than keeping the christian fundies that control the hardware and the money honest?
In short, Zalewski seems to believe in full disclosure instead of responsible disclosure.
/. when it comes to bugs in Windows or IE or Java VM. Why not Firefox?
So do most of us here at
Some of these bugs were initially reported in 2001 and were only fixed in Firefox 2.0.0.2, six years later. The lesson here seems clear to me: Reporting security holes on bugzilla get them marked DUPE/WONTFIX/NOTABUG and ignored for 5+ years. Publishing detailed explanations of the exploits on your blog gets them fixed within a few weeks.
Assuming you put enough RAM in your computer that you don't thrash constantly, you should get much better life out of a flash swap partition than that. Personally, I keep enough RAM in my boxes that they rarely hit swap at all, so I'm sure I'd *never* wear out a flash swap partition.
In practice, I doubt that anyone is likely to wear out an appropriately-sized flash swap partition within the lifespan of the machine it's installed in.
Ah, I see you've never experienced the joy of using a PC "protected" by Norton internet security! There are A LOT of PCs out there that swap nearly constantly even when doing nothing more strenuous than reading email.
The mantra of IT security is "Through overwhelming effort on our part, absolutely nothing of interest happened".
Lately it seems to be much closer to "Sarbanes-Oxley says you can't have N". (where N is any subset of the software required to do your job that is not also a subset of the union of MS Office and software bundled with Windows)
If by installing LDAP you eliminate a huge headache involving recompiling half the distribution, you win --- and it's not as if this LDAP functionality is actually used unless specifically enabled, and as an admin, I save time.
You save time until an app that no reasonable person would ever expect to link to OpenLDAP gets your system 0wned via a known vulnerability that you thought you were safe from because you don't use LDAP. Then you lose all that time and more, and possibly your job...
"Figuring out what the user needs is HARD! Lets just compile in everything we possibly can." is not a valid approach to software packaging.
"Satelite service, 512 Kbps for $60CDN or 1 Mbps for $100CDN" ...and 2+ second ping times. Good luck using voip, multiplayer video games, bittorrent, or anything that uses enough bandwidth to justify paying for broadband over a satellite connection.
We don't have a bandwidth shortage. We have a few big telecoms sitting on something like elevnty hojillion gigabit-miles of intercity dark fiber that nobody wants to pay for, and cable operators with massive bandwidth in the last mile capping connection speeds because they're too cheap to pay the telecoms for more upstream bandwidth.
If the government wanted to do something about this "shortage" they could solve it pretty easily by ordering the telcos and ISP to either light up the unused fiber and raise consumer connection speeds across the board or immediately repay all the tax breaks and grants that we have handed out over the last 10 years to pay for fast, cheap, universal broadband that they have thus far failed to deliver.
The FSF is making the best argument for using BSD instead of any code they hold copyright on that I've ever seen...
A private home is one of the best means of investment. High Rise buildings are typically provided as a flat for rent -- the worse means of fudicial exercise.
That's only true if you assume the renter spends the difference between rent and mortgage payments + upkeep + tax + insurance on hookers and blow instead of saving it. It also fails to account for the renter being able to walk away from a depressed regional economy while the home owner* is stuck in a town with limited opportunity because can't afford to sell the house for $50k less than he owes on the mortgage. Home ownership is only a good investment if you plan to stay in a house many years, OR expect the price of your house to keep going up at the same (insane, unsustainable) rate it has for the last few years.
* Actually the bank owns most of the house and he just pays a monthly fee to live there...
** Caution, belief in continued home price increases without a basis in the fundamental forces of supply and demand is considered a "gateway psychosis" and has been linked to an increased risk of belief in the tooth fairy, young earth creationism, and scientology.
"...and turn on Appletalk every five minutes."
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Is there anyone out there who has turned on Appletalk in the last five years let alone last five minutes?
This does not mean they should not use computers, just they they don't use them like us. Other people have no care about their car's engine and how it works. This does not mean they do not need to travel.
True, but it does mean that they are unqualified for any job that requires a lot of computer work, just like the people who don't care how a car works are unqualified to work as a driver. You wouldn't hire a mechanic who doesn't want to understand how a torque wrench works, or a pilot who doesn't care what the throttle levers do. Why would anyone hire an office worker who can't be bothered to figure out the basics of Windows and MS Office?
Developing? I mean seriously.. How much Developing needs to be done to make a barebone phone?
My guess is it takes at least three engineers to make e-ink work in something other than a trivial demo, two engineers to figure out how to make it drop more calls than a CDMA Razr, two more engineers to minimize the battery life, seven salesmen to spin "we won't sell it in the US" as something positive, and a manager to kill the project when grey-market imports start cutting into sales of overpriced whizzy "full-featured" phones...
If the menu bar location really is a "love it or hate it" thing (and keeping it attached to windows is not a pseudo-religious FUD "we're not Apple!" thing), where's that option? It's probably the most requested feature for Gnome. I'm sure KDE is the same.
The option is there in KDE.
OS X has a terribly unintuitive GUI for anyone who's grown up using a real OS
I don't think you quite understand what "intuitive" means. (Hint: it's not "emulates the quirks I'm used to")
With a heart of ice and a head of solid granite, Dvorak is like +20 against cold. He'd just stumble out of the mountains months later with an implausible story about finding Apple's secret underground research facility (where they're developing the top-secret "Vista Ready" iMac) and how RMS, Google's black helicopters, and a troop of Mac fanboyscouts conspired to kill him...
Can we get over passwords soon?
Just as soon as someone thinks up a solution that doesn't require new hardware (no SecurID, RFID, or USB keys), works on every client browser/OS (no Windows/MSN passport), can be anonymous (no personal certs), can be revoked (no biometrics), and is more secure. Just because nobody's done it yet doesn't mean it's impossible...
Think managed web hosting companies that put dozens of virtual hosts on a single physical server. If this really works from an unprivileged account, one malicious user could steal SSL keys from all the rest.
Materia is made from lifestream! We must blow up the reactors or the planet will die!
I'm in! Now where did I leave my dynamite and cigarettes?