oh - I think I was a bit vague above - by 'script' in a) I meant a.php executable script (php is a scripting language) or other scripting language that the web server may be using - I don't mean shell script, which would probably require an exploit of some kind to execute it. I said script originally because there are alternatives to php, even if php is one of the most common.
I had my suspicions this would not be hacked - unless there's a flaw in ssh, you need to come through the web server, which is running as a user with no file or directory ownership. If this machine had, say phpNUKE running on it, it would have been a much juicier prospect.
Things I've noticed that can cause security risks on a web server: a) allows write access under the document root - many CMS (Content management systems) have such a mechanism to cache images like avatars (which honestly should go in the database), but say a hacker uploads a script instead of an image (I sure hope it's getting validated...) and by knowing the structure of the CMS can execute the script as the web user (www on mac) - whee - you've got at least limited system access (and could at minimum deface other avatars). This is one reason why 99% of my web servers are read only by www (and not owned by www) - only the writing required directories like an avatars directory is owned by www and permissions are 200 or 600 (for UNIX noobs, it's set by the chmod command - 3 columns of read=4, write=2, execute=1 - add them, first is user, second is group, third is other) - write or read/write only by the www user. 777 permissions, requirements given by such CMS as MDPro is terrible advice and definitely not needed. btw, instead of chmod, you could use ACLs on Tiger - see this article on Ars Technica
b) runs as root (e.g. cgi-bin)
c) runs with X windows and other apps open (say rlogin - if you can write a.rhosts file to/Library/Webserver you can log in as www without needing a password... I've used.rhosts hacks on UNIX for a long time - ever since I learned I was exploited that way during my introduction to UNIX in the late 1980s - that and tucking away mini-user change executables with the 's' bit set if I'm given root for an instant - like thru an exploit).
I can think of a several good reasons to worship caffeine
1) it doesn't impair your ability to work, which isn't true for most other substances 2) it's often free at workplaces and available at schools (usually in soda form for the latter) 3) it's better than being SMITTEN by the CAFFEINE GOD, you self-righteous caffeine-free prick.
I don't mean to discount their identification of a genetic link (which I think is valid), and I have no idea how Costa Ricans drink their coffee, but previous research has identified a risk in unfiltered coffee like that through a percolator or French press (or Turkish, Espresso machine, etc) vs filtered coffee. Since terpenes (oils) in unfiltered coffee are suspected raising cholesterol, it is possible that elevated cholesterol levels from drinking unfiltered coffee may also play a role here.
In any case, having that gene and drinking a lot of unfiltered coffee would put a person most at risk, I would think.
There's a point when spreadsheets become more work than maintaining a small database, or else a security liability, and Access works well for small businesses that need a small database. My sister-in-law is a prime example - she needs to have a vendor spreadsheet tailored for each vendor, which comes to over 500 spreadsheets. For a while she was using a single spreadsheet and pivot tables, but that has certain liabilities/deficiencies since all data is loaded at once so she moved to separate spreadsheets. Now she has different spreadsheets that can be selectively loaded by vendor ID and in some cases from a secure directory with a load-time security password - the last thing she needs is a vendor seeing themselves ranked performance-wise against other vendors, especially on the profitability chart (which could determine who gets dropped if more shelf space is needed, for instance, or might cause that vendor to increase prices to get more of a cut into the profit).
To be technical, the original poster is correct - a transformer is something that converts one type of voltage to another (step-down or step-up transformers). What you're describing is probably a power converter.
Or maybe you were thinking of rail guns... I do every time I think of EM coils.
It's not that easy, there is a download required for Windows 2000 and pre-SP2 XP machines. See the MS help article on it.
This post is acronym laden, so I've spelled out the meanings in most cases.
First off, there is an alternative to IPSec that also ships with Windows - PPP/PPTP (Point-to-Point [Tunneling] Protocol), but since I'm nearly unfamiliar with it, I'll let others discuss it, if necessary.
Firewall ports need to be opened for UDP 50 (ESP - Encapsulating Security Payload) and 500 (ISAKMP - ISA's Key Management Protocol, sometimes also called IKE - Internet Key Exchange) and if there's NAT (Network Address Translation) transversal anywhere in the system (i.e. any routers that redirect traffic to the 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x "internal use" domains such as those used by DHCP clients [including wireless]), you will also need UDP port 4500 (ipsec NAT-T).
I'm not sure if MS uses AH (Authentication Header) or just re-encapsulates at the firewall, but judging by their web page, I doubt it's a problem. In a nutshell, AH was designed by IPv6 people that think NAT is an unnecessary evil and that all machines need to be uniquely identified. In some ways their ideals are good (security guarantees the originating host), but I think the world is getting too paranoid about "Big Brother" for this to be realistic (all items downloaded can be uniquely identified to a machine - nice for the feds, bad for privacy). Basically, AH breaks at the router in NAT. The router repackages the packet to the real host outside the firewall and AH identifies the packet as tampered with. There are workarounds to this, but I don't believe the discussion is necessary.
You're also making the big assumption that these people are computer literate, as well, and judging by the post and their choice of hardware, I'm assuming not (Pelco is supposed to be easy to use - heck, my ex-boss's computer illiterate husband used one for security at her home, though she was somewhat computer literate [if you count Excel/Powerpoint goddess as computer literate]). Detailed instructions on the step-by-step requirements or more likely, a setup program to install and configure this will be required.
the boss's computer should be running Anti-virus software since it's not recording video, and keeping it and the system up-to-date should be done automatically using remote tools. This shouldn't be a problem - and the boss won't even know you're there.
heh - at least I'm not the only one to have one of those moments, though it was on either Internet radio and not an iPod. My (ex) boss walked in while a song called Fairytales of Slavery by the band Miranda Sex Garden was up on my player - an awkward moment to say the least. I had actually just brought up the player to change stations, too, because I was in the mood for something a bit more upbeat. That problem is now gone because my work blocks Internet radio (and I doubt I was the cause - they also started blocking IM, IRC, SSH, and VNC with a packet scanning firewall [e.g. no port forwarding] at the same time).
One major feature that wasn't offered free in the 98 (including patches and service packs) was USB - you needed at least 98SE.
I had to upgrade a machine after getting a bunch of free USB hardware and made the horrible mistake of going to ME rather than 2000 or 98SE. That OS lasted less than a year before I formatted the drive with a work copy Windows 2000 (yes, legally, but if I didn't have a free copy I would have been seriously tempted to pirated it). About a year later I did purchase XP, and aside from painfully having to talk to Microsoft to get my licenses renewed twice (I had a problem with IBM deathstars - lost 4 in one year), I haven't really had any issues with it.
in the US, cell phone calls are entirely based on minutes you use the phone, so if you receive 1500 minutes of cell phone calls, it is the same as making 1500 minutes of cell phone calls. There are very few "by-the-minute" plans outside of the just starting to emerge "disposable" cell phone market where you buy a cell phone with pre-paid minutes and recycle/dispose of it when you're done. OTOH, since everything is essentially prepaid monthly in a calling plan, received calls may entirely be covered by the basic service of the cell phone plan. There is a caveat - sending or receiving calls may have additional roaming fees if you are not "in-area" of your plan. In-area depends on plan, and can be regional (area as small as a city) to worldwide. Most plans, even my 10 year old one (which I keep because it costs me $20/month), include free nationwide long distance.
In any case, I seriously doubt it's significantly cheaper to make calls if received calls are free - the phone companies make up that money somewhere, whether it's increased service fees or charging the minutes to the receiver. It also helps cost-wise if the country has concentrated population centers and is not sprawling ones like in the US.
Actually, I'd go one step further - Enterprise environments won't use any software unless they get enough customer demand for it.
The company I work for is no exception - our ex-VP (due to aquisition, now an upper manager) claimed we would "Never, ever support Linux." The reason for that claim was that Linux had no paid support if there were problems. Since that time, we started supporting two Linux platforms that have paid support (Red Hat and Novell [SuSE]).
That's not the end of it - some of our UNIX customers (specifically AIX and IRIX) started to put pressure on our management to support the "unsupported" Mozilla because AOL was not supporting them well with Netscape. Shortly thereafter, we started supporting Moz. Eclipse support came more as a need - we needed an extensible IDE tool that we could ship for XML editing.
SAP certainly didn't jump out on a limb naming those 3 tools because I know several other enterprise tier companies that use them besides ours.
not proof reading again: this sentence doesn't make much sense He'd been severed from his previous high - hacking "the matrix" after getting caught through brain damage
this is better: He'd been severed from his previous high of hacking "the matrix" by being brain damaged by a corporation.
Warning - this post contains spoilers for various movies bracketed in [spoiler] [/spoiler].
Hollywood has an aversion to letting anything out without a happy ending or some kind of satisfying ending. To make matters worse, they want cut-and-dry good vs evil. Movies with moral ambiguity like Kingdom of Heaven (at least so I've heard - haven't seen it yet, but I know the history quite well and have read reviews) fail because happy endings are what the public want, as well.
But is Hollywood missing something? Star Wars Episode III is generally considered the best of the new Star Wars, and it had everything against it - we knew the finale where the main character becomes the villain - but Obi-wan, the secondary hero leaves him [spoiler] to burn to death on a lava world (not that such a world wouldn't kill a breathing person, but this whole series requires a suspension of belief). Even if he is a villain, would a "good" person leave him to burn there or would that person put him out of his misery? [/spoiler] Fantasy movies like Ladyhawk and Conan had thieves as the major/main characters, even though they were basically good-vs-evil movies. Gollum [spoiler] was essentially the "bad guy" in LoTR, but the hobbits had to trust in him to defeat the greater evil of Sauron, and Sauron was basically the embodiment of evil in the stories not an actual character. [/spoiler]
The only thing a completely negative ending is allowed in these days is horror movies - we no longer have tragedies in the Shakespearian sense, and I doubt we'll ever see a good Oedipus movie made (the story that pretty much defines tragedy). Even Aliens, which in my opinion is an action flick, gets lumped in the horror genre. The closest thing I can think of to a tragedy is the Constant Gardener [spoiler] where both main characters are killed off, but even then, the villain incriminated at the end. [/spoiler]
So we have 2 problems here -
1) movie studios think that a movie won't sell if it doesn't have a happy ending unless the viewer is pre-warned that the movie may not have a happy ending (e.g. horror movie). Suspense/Mystery movies are probably the only exception, as I've seen some movie stores stick something like Silence of the Lambs in Suspense while others will put it in Horror (usually ones with only Drama and Horror sections).
2) good and evil must be cut and dry because people want a hero and a villain.
Neither of these fit in Neuromancer's world - [semi-spoiler] the main character in Neuromancer was a suicidal drug addict. He'd been severed from his previous high - hacking "the matrix" after getting caught through brain damage. Whether the AI is evil or the controlling corporations are evil is a morally ambiguous question. The underlying story is really alegorical for machine controlling man instead of man machine and doesn't attempt to answer which is "good" or "evil". If Hollywood ever got its hands on this, Case would be a clean cut likable hunk that had a plug pulled out so he can't access the matrix and gets a new one soldered on so he can fight the evil AI and save the corporation using lots of fancy CG matrix fighting... in other words, at best a Bruckheimer film (a nearly plotless film with lots of eye candy and a few likable characters). [/semi-spoiler]
While I don't like this deal, the article does say it's not permanent - Intel has just bought itself an "exclusive" platform release for advanced features, which may/will be added for all platforms later. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me to see a hack/patch to make the advanced features work on AMD, though that itself may be illegal.
The big problem I have with this deal is that Skype is the dominant player in the PC VoIP market right now, and many people don't know the alternatives like Google Talk, Gizmoproject, GAIM, etc. My wife even knows Skype and she's never used it.
What value does it add? Marketing for Intel. What does Skype get? A lot of something green.
Wow - that sounds like doing things the hard way - I'm pretty sure real Apple ]['s just required an RF converter, like most consoles use to hook up to a TV, but maybe the clone was more like an Apple I (which required some hard wiring). My elementary school used monitors for the 16k IIs and 48k II+'s, but occasionally we'd hook one of them to a large TV for class (yes, we'd hook them, as in elementary school kids, as the teachers couldn't figure out how). I'm sure we did that with the ][+'s, but don't remember if we did or not with the ][ (the ][ was a bit out of favor, as the ][+ had much more memory and had better games).
I didn't own a computer of my own until late in college (A Powermac 7500 and started alternating between PCs and macs for several years thereafter), but used a wide variety of parent's and roommate's machines up until then (someone I lived with owned a... Apple//e, IBM PC jr, 386/33, Pentium II, Quadra, and a mac clone of some kind with a 603e).
well, I'll reference a German article about the current state of the US belief system (look near the bottom), since I can't find a better one quickly. While not as strong, Germany has 63% believing in some form of ID (compared to 84% in the US), and the poll was structured better - as I recall, there wasn't an option in the US poll for God guided evolution - it was God only, no evolution, God only, humans didn't evolve but everything else did, or no God. It only added up to 96%, so that may be the other 4% (or maybe that's other religions; e.g. Hindu).
Anyhow it kinda makes sense - people came to America to avoid religious persecution, so you have to expect to find more deeply religious people there. My ancestors on my mom's side came to America for exactly that reason (they were Mennonite). My dad's side (Catholic, converted to Lutheran) fled to America so great-great-great grandpa's boys wouldn't be conscripted into the Prussian army (he served in the Austrio-Prussian war and Franco-Prussian war, leaving before Germany was recongnized by the US, though I can't remember the exact year offhand - 1871 or 2, I believe).
Hmm... I just realized that my dad's ancestor crushed both my mom's ancestral homeland (Austria) and my wife's ancestral homeland (French).
I have to agree with you there - for me, the difference between Photoshop and Gimp are huge, tho for the last couple of years I've used Paintshop Pro, which I found a nice package and I prefer it to either for photo editing (yes photoshop is more powerful overall, but everything I use is in PSP and it's much easier to use, IMO). I think Gimp is improving - the UI changes from 1.x to 2.x were necessary, but some stuff like red eye removal are still painful (I prefer the channel select method, in GIMP, but try to teach that to a newbie).
Oddly enough, I do most of my programming on mac and linux these days, but all of my texture editing in Windows... maybe that's just weird to me because I also own a mac and have photoshop on it, albeit now a very old version - 3.x. I got screwed by Adobe's version-to-next-version only upgrade policy since I had a menial job over 4.x's lifetime and the (specifically the academic to professional) upgrade was no longer available after 5.0's release. I still have limited Photoshop access at work (version 6, not the new one - CS or whatever).
OTOH, my preference to Photoshop and PSP may be me - I liken this to my wife's dependence on Excel - I installed OpenOffice on her machine but it got kicked off for a full (professional) version of Office a month later because of her dependence on VB Scripting, menu layouts, OLE (or whatever MS calls it now) links into MS-Word docs, and Access database. I'm sure many of the things she does also exist in OpenOffice (she's huge on Pivot tables, which I've done in OO and even exported to Excel), but learning a new tool wasn't worth the time for her, doubly so when she can just get her office to pay for it (for that matter, I can too, but I refuse;)
Maybe not in CPU speeds, but in performance testing and battery life, Intel still has a pretty good advantage.
In desktop gaming AMD generally beats the snot out of Intel - you can see that by reading the CPU testing here, so it's no surprise (to me, at least) that high end gamer rigs prefer AMD.
technically, you're not safe from this on any OS that uses BIOS, though the deployment method may depend on Windows. I don't think EFI offers much help, either, as I've read that it includes a BIOS emulation layer that may be exploitable, so Intel mac users shouldn't be too smug.
For that matter, it would be possible to write a cross-platform executable if the interface to ACPI is written in x86 assembly without dependence on any libraries (target the instruction set rather than the OS).
sigh... someone will proabably exploit programmable GPUs next.
you're getting it confused with Coleco's Colecovision, a separate console with better graphics but worse games (a few nice games, but lots of bad ones). I owned both (er, mom owned both)... and an Atari 2600 and Apple ][ in that era.
I'm with you there - I read a book last year by a pretty big author (argh! I can't think of the name of the author or book right now) where supposedly a computer expert on viruses helped the author out on the technical side, and yet the program in the book was really a trojan, not a virus. In that case, I suspect it's because people are too stupid to know the difference, but the book included a glossary at the beginning with the terminology in it.
I like to add one more - bombs or timebombs - a little piece of malware that runs the program X # of times before deleting itself or delete itself after being copied X # of times. It was big in the early 1980s, but obscure today.
Dual Core/Dual CPU - any thread or process can be split off onto the additional cores (ok, with some OS limitations), so having multiple of them is a good thing to handle writes and reads from all those tuners. Disk reads/writes are one of the worst processor eating functions (though caching helps), as they have one of the longest pipelines and tend to stall it. Windows itself doesn't do threading well (at least to use up extra CPU/cores), but extra processes will benefit from the additional CPUs.
RAID 0 - is fastest. yes, for safety I'd probably favor RAID 1+0, but for raw speed RAID 0 is best.
file system... er, yeah I'd probably choose something other than NTFS personally, but if the apps depended on Windows, NTFS is the best choice.
My point is not that macs are safe - far from it, since most people keep their files as an admin level user and an exploit would destroy most of the stuff they care about. My point was that it's much harder for a virus to do damage without administrator priviledges, since admin is required to make it possible to infect (most) binaries including the core of the operating system. Yes, you could go about erasing all the user's files, but that's why I back them up as the root user. A virus cannot erase files it does not own, so it is potentially much less damaging than it would be in a typical Windows system where the user runs as admin (but as you say, a root exploit could do anything it wants).
You also have the issue of virus startup - on Windows, it usually writes itself into the registry or corrupts a system file to start itself instead, which would be considered a root level exploit on UNIX. On macs, if it doesn't exploit root there are two ways to do this - get in one of the StartupItems folders (now all owned by root so you can't generally write to it, but way back in X.0/Library/StartupItems was owned by the admin user but run as root, so a security flaw) or the user level crontab (otherwise only in scripts and executables, which technically makes it a variety of trojan). Since the virus can't write to StartupItems, it's stuck with crontabbing itself as a user. A UNIX admin should be able to remove such an exploit and may not even have to erase the user.
Everything I've mentioned sof far would be detectable and removable. How about the 'new' scourge - rootkits - which can be installed by any user with admin privileges. On mac/UNIX you have to gain root access somehow, which likely requires the active participation of the victim. On Windows, 99+% of users run as administrators, so it's easy to backdoor install them (like through an activeX component or browser flaw) and it's next to impossible to detect or remove them.
How about compromising a web browser on Windows? Getting in is a direct admin attack path (usually). All you can do on UNIX is exploit the browser user, not the entire OS.
Then you have web servers - apache on mac runs its connecting processes as www, which has virtually no OS privileges. Every web server I've ever used on Windows has full admin privileges. Exploit apache on mac and your virus can do next to nothing (even web pages aren't owned by www, all it can do is read them). Exploit on Windows and you can do EVERYTHING.
If I were writing a virus for mac and I didn't have a root exploit, I'd probably create it as a . file (invisible) and start it via crontab. The big problem there is where to put that executable to keep it from being erased like if the user's directory is deleted and restored. The tmp directories aren't guaranteed to keep files and there usually isn't a/usr/local, so maybe/Users/Shared? OTOH, I doubt most mac users make backups and know nothing about crontab, so if a good exploit location is found it would be easy to keep it going.
Slashdot Mirror
oh - I think I was a bit vague above - by 'script' in a) I meant a .php executable script (php is a scripting language) or other scripting language that the web server may be using - I don't mean shell script, which would probably require an exploit of some kind to execute it. I said script originally because there are alternatives to php, even if php is one of the most common.
I had my suspicions this would not be hacked - unless there's a flaw in ssh, you need to come through the web server, which is running as a user with no file or directory ownership. If this machine had, say phpNUKE running on it, it would have been a much juicier prospect.
.rhosts file to /Library/Webserver you can log in as www without needing a password... I've used .rhosts hacks on UNIX for a long time - ever since I learned I was exploited that way during my introduction to UNIX in the late 1980s - that and tucking away mini-user change executables with the 's' bit set if I'm given root for an instant - like thru an exploit).
Things I've noticed that can cause security risks on a web server:
a) allows write access under the document root - many CMS (Content management systems) have such a mechanism to cache images like avatars (which honestly should go in the database), but say a hacker uploads a script instead of an image (I sure hope it's getting validated...) and by knowing the structure of the CMS can execute the script as the web user (www on mac) - whee - you've got at least limited system access (and could at minimum deface other avatars). This is one reason why 99% of my web servers are read only by www (and not owned by www) - only the writing required directories like an avatars directory is owned by www and permissions are 200 or 600 (for UNIX noobs, it's set by the chmod command - 3 columns of read=4, write=2, execute=1 - add them, first is user, second is group, third is other) - write or read/write only by the www user. 777 permissions, requirements given by such CMS as MDPro is terrible advice and definitely not needed. btw, instead of chmod, you could use ACLs on Tiger - see this article on Ars Technica
b) runs as root (e.g. cgi-bin)
c) runs with X windows and other apps open (say rlogin - if you can write a
I can think of a several good reasons to worship caffeine
;)
1) it doesn't impair your ability to work, which isn't true for most other substances
2) it's often free at workplaces and available at schools (usually in soda form for the latter)
3) it's better than being SMITTEN by the CAFFEINE GOD, you self-righteous caffeine-free prick.
ok, 3 was really to poke fun at you
I don't mean to discount their identification of a genetic link (which I think is valid), and I have no idea how Costa Ricans drink their coffee, but previous research has identified a risk in unfiltered coffee like that through a percolator or French press (or Turkish, Espresso machine, etc) vs filtered coffee. Since terpenes (oils) in unfiltered coffee are suspected raising cholesterol, it is possible that elevated cholesterol levels from drinking unfiltered coffee may also play a role here.
In any case, having that gene and drinking a lot of unfiltered coffee would put a person most at risk, I would think.
yep - and incidentally, Werdna was Andrew Greenberg... - which could be gwerdna... odd coincidence?
Not related at all, but the other guy that wrote Wizardry, Robert Woodhead, was Trebor.
There's a point when spreadsheets become more work than maintaining a small database, or else a security liability, and Access works well for small businesses that need a small database. My sister-in-law is a prime example - she needs to have a vendor spreadsheet tailored for each vendor, which comes to over 500 spreadsheets. For a while she was using a single spreadsheet and pivot tables, but that has certain liabilities/deficiencies since all data is loaded at once so she moved to separate spreadsheets. Now she has different spreadsheets that can be selectively loaded by vendor ID and in some cases from a secure directory with a load-time security password - the last thing she needs is a vendor seeing themselves ranked performance-wise against other vendors, especially on the profitability chart (which could determine who gets dropped if more shelf space is needed, for instance, or might cause that vendor to increase prices to get more of a cut into the profit).
To be technical, the original poster is correct - a transformer is something that converts one type of voltage to another (step-down or step-up transformers). What you're describing is probably a power converter.
Or maybe you were thinking of rail guns... I do every time I think of EM coils.
It's not that easy, there is a download required for Windows 2000 and pre-SP2 XP machines. See the MS help article on it.
This post is acronym laden, so I've spelled out the meanings in most cases.
First off, there is an alternative to IPSec that also ships with Windows - PPP/PPTP (Point-to-Point [Tunneling] Protocol), but since I'm nearly unfamiliar with it, I'll let others discuss it, if necessary.
Firewall ports need to be opened for UDP 50 (ESP - Encapsulating Security Payload) and 500 (ISAKMP - ISA's Key Management Protocol, sometimes also called IKE - Internet Key Exchange) and if there's NAT (Network Address Translation) transversal anywhere in the system (i.e. any routers that redirect traffic to the 192.168.x.x or 10.x.x.x "internal use" domains such as those used by DHCP clients [including wireless]), you will also need UDP port 4500 (ipsec NAT-T).
I'm not sure if MS uses AH (Authentication Header) or just re-encapsulates at the firewall, but judging by their web page, I doubt it's a problem. In a nutshell, AH was designed by IPv6 people that think NAT is an unnecessary evil and that all machines need to be uniquely identified. In some ways their ideals are good (security guarantees the originating host), but I think the world is getting too paranoid about "Big Brother" for this to be realistic (all items downloaded can be uniquely identified to a machine - nice for the feds, bad for privacy). Basically, AH breaks at the router in NAT. The router repackages the packet to the real host outside the firewall and AH identifies the packet as tampered with. There are workarounds to this, but I don't believe the discussion is necessary.
You're also making the big assumption that these people are computer literate, as well, and judging by the post and their choice of hardware, I'm assuming not (Pelco is supposed to be easy to use - heck, my ex-boss's computer illiterate husband used one for security at her home, though she was somewhat computer literate [if you count Excel/Powerpoint goddess as computer literate]). Detailed instructions on the step-by-step requirements or more likely, a setup program to install and configure this will be required.
the boss's computer should be running Anti-virus software since it's not recording video, and keeping it and the system up-to-date should be done automatically using remote tools. This shouldn't be a problem - and the boss won't even know you're there.
heh - at least I'm not the only one to have one of those moments, though it was on either Internet radio and not an iPod. My (ex) boss walked in while a song called Fairytales of Slavery by the band Miranda Sex Garden was up on my player - an awkward moment to say the least. I had actually just brought up the player to change stations, too, because I was in the mood for something a bit more upbeat. That problem is now gone because my work blocks Internet radio (and I doubt I was the cause - they also started blocking IM, IRC, SSH, and VNC with a packet scanning firewall [e.g. no port forwarding] at the same time).
One major feature that wasn't offered free in the 98 (including patches and service packs) was USB - you needed at least 98SE.
I had to upgrade a machine after getting a bunch of free USB hardware and made the horrible mistake of going to ME rather than 2000 or 98SE. That OS lasted less than a year before I formatted the drive with a work copy Windows 2000 (yes, legally, but if I didn't have a free copy I would have been seriously tempted to pirated it). About a year later I did purchase XP, and aside from painfully having to talk to Microsoft to get my licenses renewed twice (I had a problem with IBM deathstars - lost 4 in one year), I haven't really had any issues with it.
that would entirely depend on cell phone package
in the US, cell phone calls are entirely based on minutes you use the phone, so if you receive 1500 minutes of cell phone calls, it is the same as making 1500 minutes of cell phone calls. There are very few "by-the-minute" plans outside of the just starting to emerge "disposable" cell phone market where you buy a cell phone with pre-paid minutes and recycle/dispose of it when you're done. OTOH, since everything is essentially prepaid monthly in a calling plan, received calls may entirely be covered by the basic service of the cell phone plan. There is a caveat - sending or receiving calls may have additional roaming fees if you are not "in-area" of your plan. In-area depends on plan, and can be regional (area as small as a city) to worldwide. Most plans, even my 10 year old one (which I keep because it costs me $20/month), include free nationwide long distance.
In any case, I seriously doubt it's significantly cheaper to make calls if received calls are free - the phone companies make up that money somewhere, whether it's increased service fees or charging the minutes to the receiver. It also helps cost-wise if the country has concentrated population centers and is not sprawling ones like in the US.
Actually, I'd go one step further - Enterprise environments won't use any software unless they get enough customer demand for it.
The company I work for is no exception - our ex-VP (due to aquisition, now an upper manager) claimed we would "Never, ever support Linux." The reason for that claim was that Linux had no paid support if there were problems. Since that time, we started supporting two Linux platforms that have paid support (Red Hat and Novell [SuSE]).
That's not the end of it - some of our UNIX customers (specifically AIX and IRIX) started to put pressure on our management to support the "unsupported" Mozilla because AOL was not supporting them well with Netscape. Shortly thereafter, we started supporting Moz. Eclipse support came more as a need - we needed an extensible IDE tool that we could ship for XML editing.
SAP certainly didn't jump out on a limb naming those 3 tools because I know several other enterprise tier companies that use them besides ours.
not proof reading again:
this sentence doesn't make much sense
He'd been severed from his previous high - hacking "the matrix" after getting caught through brain damage
this is better:
He'd been severed from his previous high of hacking "the matrix" by being brain damaged by a corporation.
Warning - this post contains spoilers for various movies bracketed in [spoiler] [/spoiler].
Hollywood has an aversion to letting anything out without a happy ending or some kind of satisfying ending. To make matters worse, they want cut-and-dry good vs evil. Movies with moral ambiguity like Kingdom of Heaven (at least so I've heard - haven't seen it yet, but I know the history quite well and have read reviews) fail because happy endings are what the public want, as well.
But is Hollywood missing something? Star Wars Episode III is generally considered the best of the new Star Wars, and it had everything against it - we knew the finale where the main character becomes the villain - but Obi-wan, the secondary hero leaves him [spoiler] to burn to death on a lava world (not that such a world wouldn't kill a breathing person, but this whole series requires a suspension of belief). Even if he is a villain, would a "good" person leave him to burn there or would that person put him out of his misery? [/spoiler] Fantasy movies like Ladyhawk and Conan had thieves as the major/main characters, even though they were basically good-vs-evil movies. Gollum [spoiler] was essentially the "bad guy" in LoTR, but the hobbits had to trust in him to defeat the greater evil of Sauron, and Sauron was basically the embodiment of evil in the stories not an actual character. [/spoiler]
The only thing a completely negative ending is allowed in these days is horror movies - we no longer have tragedies in the Shakespearian sense, and I doubt we'll ever see a good Oedipus movie made (the story that pretty much defines tragedy). Even Aliens, which in my opinion is an action flick, gets lumped in the horror genre. The closest thing I can think of to a tragedy is the Constant Gardener [spoiler] where both main characters are killed off, but even then, the villain incriminated at the end. [/spoiler]
So we have 2 problems here -
1) movie studios think that a movie won't sell if it doesn't have a happy ending unless the viewer is pre-warned that the movie may not have a happy ending (e.g. horror movie). Suspense/Mystery movies are probably the only exception, as I've seen some movie stores stick something like Silence of the Lambs in Suspense while others will put it in Horror (usually ones with only Drama and Horror sections).
2) good and evil must be cut and dry because people want a hero and a villain.
Neither of these fit in Neuromancer's world - [semi-spoiler] the main character in Neuromancer was a suicidal drug addict. He'd been severed from his previous high - hacking "the matrix" after getting caught through brain damage. Whether the AI is evil or the controlling corporations are evil is a morally ambiguous question. The underlying story is really alegorical for machine controlling man instead of man machine and doesn't attempt to answer which is "good" or "evil". If Hollywood ever got its hands on this, Case would be a clean cut likable hunk that had a plug pulled out so he can't access the matrix and gets a new one soldered on so he can fight the evil AI and save the corporation using lots of fancy CG matrix fighting... in other words, at best a Bruckheimer film (a nearly plotless film with lots of eye candy and a few likable characters). [/semi-spoiler]
While I don't like this deal, the article does say it's not permanent - Intel has just bought itself an "exclusive" platform release for advanced features, which may/will be added for all platforms later. Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me to see a hack/patch to make the advanced features work on AMD, though that itself may be illegal.
The big problem I have with this deal is that Skype is the dominant player in the PC VoIP market right now, and many people don't know the alternatives like Google Talk, Gizmoproject, GAIM, etc. My wife even knows Skype and she's never used it.
What value does it add? Marketing for Intel.
What does Skype get? A lot of something green.
Wow - that sounds like doing things the hard way - I'm pretty sure real Apple ]['s just required an RF converter, like most consoles use to hook up to a TV, but maybe the clone was more like an Apple I (which required some hard wiring). My elementary school used monitors for the 16k IIs and 48k II+'s, but occasionally we'd hook one of them to a large TV for class (yes, we'd hook them, as in elementary school kids, as the teachers couldn't figure out how). I'm sure we did that with the ][+'s, but don't remember if we did or not with the ][ (the ][ was a bit out of favor, as the ][+ had much more memory and had better games).
//e, IBM PC jr, 386/33, Pentium II, Quadra, and a mac clone of some kind with a 603e).
I didn't own a computer of my own until late in college (A Powermac 7500 and started alternating between PCs and macs for several years thereafter), but used a wide variety of parent's and roommate's machines up until then (someone I lived with owned a... Apple
well, I'll reference a
German article about the current state of the US belief system (look near the bottom), since I can't find a better one quickly. While not as strong, Germany has 63% believing in some form of ID (compared to 84% in the US), and the poll was structured better - as I recall, there wasn't an option in the US poll for God guided evolution - it was God only, no evolution, God only, humans didn't evolve but everything else did, or no God. It only added up to 96%, so that may be the other 4% (or maybe that's other religions; e.g. Hindu).
Anyhow it kinda makes sense - people came to America to avoid religious persecution, so you have to expect to find more deeply religious people there. My ancestors on my mom's side came to America for exactly that reason (they were Mennonite). My dad's side (Catholic, converted to Lutheran) fled to America so great-great-great grandpa's boys wouldn't be conscripted into the Prussian army (he served in the Austrio-Prussian war and Franco-Prussian war, leaving before Germany was recongnized by the US, though I can't remember the exact year offhand - 1871 or 2, I believe).
Hmm... I just realized that my dad's ancestor crushed both my mom's ancestral homeland (Austria) and my wife's ancestral homeland (French).
I have to agree with you there - for me, the difference between Photoshop and Gimp are huge, tho for the last couple of years I've used Paintshop Pro, which I found a nice package and I prefer it to either for photo editing (yes photoshop is more powerful overall, but everything I use is in PSP and it's much easier to use, IMO). I think Gimp is improving - the UI changes from 1.x to 2.x were necessary, but some stuff like red eye removal are still painful (I prefer the channel select method, in GIMP, but try to teach that to a newbie).
;)
Oddly enough, I do most of my programming on mac and linux these days, but all of my texture editing in Windows... maybe that's just weird to me because I also own a mac and have photoshop on it, albeit now a very old version - 3.x. I got screwed by Adobe's version-to-next-version only upgrade policy since I had a menial job over 4.x's lifetime and the (specifically the academic to professional) upgrade was no longer available after 5.0's release. I still have limited Photoshop access at work (version 6, not the new one - CS or whatever).
OTOH, my preference to Photoshop and PSP may be me - I liken this to my wife's dependence on Excel - I installed OpenOffice on her machine but it got kicked off for a full (professional) version of Office a month later because of her dependence on VB Scripting, menu layouts, OLE (or whatever MS calls it now) links into MS-Word docs, and Access database. I'm sure many of the things she does also exist in OpenOffice (she's huge on Pivot tables, which I've done in OO and even exported to Excel), but learning a new tool wasn't worth the time for her, doubly so when she can just get her office to pay for it (for that matter, I can too, but I refuse
Maybe not in CPU speeds, but in performance testing and battery life, Intel still has a pretty good advantage.
In desktop gaming AMD generally beats the snot out of Intel - you can see that by reading the CPU testing here, so it's no surprise (to me, at least) that high end gamer rigs prefer AMD.
technically, you're not safe from this on any OS that uses BIOS, though the deployment method may depend on Windows. I don't think EFI offers much help, either, as I've read that it includes a BIOS emulation layer that may be exploitable, so Intel mac users shouldn't be too smug.
For that matter, it would be possible to write a cross-platform executable if the interface to ACPI is written in x86 assembly without dependence on any libraries (target the instruction set rather than the OS).
sigh... someone will proabably exploit programmable GPUs next.
you mean Mattel Intellivision
you're getting it confused with Coleco's Colecovision, a separate console with better graphics but worse games (a few nice games, but lots of bad ones). I owned both (er, mom owned both)... and an Atari 2600 and Apple ][ in that era.
I'm with you there - I read a book last year by a pretty big author (argh! I can't think of the name of the author or book right now) where supposedly a computer expert on viruses helped the author out on the technical side, and yet the program in the book was really a trojan, not a virus. In that case, I suspect it's because people are too stupid to know the difference, but the book included a glossary at the beginning with the terminology in it.
I like to add one more - bombs or timebombs - a little piece of malware that runs the program X # of times before deleting itself or delete itself after being copied X # of times. It was big in the early 1980s, but obscure today.
Some defense of choices:
Dual Core/Dual CPU - any thread or process can be split off onto the additional cores (ok, with some OS limitations), so having multiple of them is a good thing to handle writes and reads from all those tuners. Disk reads/writes are one of the worst processor eating functions (though caching helps), as they have one of the longest pipelines and tend to stall it. Windows itself doesn't do threading well (at least to use up extra CPU/cores), but extra processes will benefit from the additional CPUs.
RAID 0 - is fastest. yes, for safety I'd probably favor RAID 1+0, but for raw speed RAID 0 is best.
file system... er, yeah I'd probably choose something other than NTFS personally, but if the apps depended on Windows, NTFS is the best choice.
My point is not that macs are safe - far from it, since most people keep their files as an admin level user and an exploit would destroy most of the stuff they care about. My point was that it's much harder for a virus to do damage without administrator priviledges, since admin is required to make it possible to infect (most) binaries including the core of the operating system. Yes, you could go about erasing all the user's files, but that's why I back them up as the root user. A virus cannot erase files it does not own, so it is potentially much less damaging than it would be in a typical Windows system where the user runs as admin (but as you say, a root exploit could do anything it wants).
/Library/StartupItems was owned by the admin user but run as root, so a security flaw) or the user level crontab (otherwise only in scripts and executables, which technically makes it a variety of trojan). Since the virus can't write to StartupItems, it's stuck with crontabbing itself as a user. A UNIX admin should be able to remove such an exploit and may not even have to erase the user.
/usr/local, so maybe /Users/Shared? OTOH, I doubt most mac users make backups and know nothing about crontab, so if a good exploit location is found it would be easy to keep it going.
You also have the issue of virus startup - on Windows, it usually writes itself into the registry or corrupts a system file to start itself instead, which would be considered a root level exploit on UNIX. On macs, if it doesn't exploit root there are two ways to do this - get in one of the StartupItems folders (now all owned by root so you can't generally write to it, but way back in X.0
Everything I've mentioned sof far would be detectable and removable. How about the 'new' scourge - rootkits - which can be installed by any user with admin privileges. On mac/UNIX you have to gain root access somehow, which likely requires the active participation of the victim. On Windows, 99+% of users run as administrators, so it's easy to backdoor install them (like through an activeX component or browser flaw) and it's next to impossible to detect or remove them.
How about compromising a web browser on Windows? Getting in is a direct admin attack path (usually). All you can do on UNIX is exploit the browser user, not the entire OS.
Then you have web servers - apache on mac runs its connecting processes as www, which has virtually no OS privileges. Every web server I've ever used on Windows has full admin privileges. Exploit apache on mac and your virus can do next to nothing (even web pages aren't owned by www, all it can do is read them). Exploit on Windows and you can do EVERYTHING.
If I were writing a virus for mac and I didn't have a root exploit, I'd probably create it as a . file (invisible) and start it via crontab. The big problem there is where to put that executable to keep it from being erased like if the user's directory is deleted and restored. The tmp directories aren't guaranteed to keep files and there usually isn't a