The types of attack which Windows is most infamous for - true self-replicating viruses and trojans that require you to be running as a local admin for them to work - are an endangered species. Newer attacks don't self-replicate like viruses and don't necessarily require you to be running as a local admin. Indeed, you can do quite a lot on any modern OS, be it Linux, some other Unix or Windows without being admin/root. You can certainly do enough to gain access to all sorts of juicy information and then pass it on through the Internet.
The main reason Windows is targeted by the malware authors - particularly on the desktop - is that a lot of the malware authors aren't doing it for interest, they're doing it for cash. What's the point in writing an exploit that will give access to a Linux desktop when you could write the exploit for Windows and target about fifteen times the number of potential victims?
To extend on this, the most common attack vector these days is social engineering. You literally convince people to install your virus and send it to others. This means no OS is effectively immune to viruses. But virus makers know that their hit ratio is going to be low (as smart people can detect BS) to they target 1, the most popular platform and 2 the dumbest users. So viruses come hidden in $Celebrity_Sex_Tape_OMG!!!.exe or pirated programs because people often dont check these things.
So if all the dumb people switch to Mac, all the virus writers will target Mac because that has the highest rate of success. What is needed to secure modern OS's is not SUDO but SUDO combined with checks on what API's the program accesses and or what functions it's performing (such as sending out hundreds of emails or starting a DDOS) and stop it or ask me if I want to let it continue. Of course this kind of detection needs to be a hell of a lot smarter then current AV.
This is happening today in places like Thailand and Iran.
Dead on about Iran, especially after having Persian Rap translated to me by an Iranian born Aussie (it was almost as bad as English Rap and production of "western" forms of music is banned in Iran, which includes Rap).
Thailand is a very different situation and far more complex. The conflict between the red-shirts (mostly rural Thais) and the government is a very old conflict between rich Thai's. The main bankroller of the red shirts was ousted PM Thaksin Shintarawa who was overthrown by a military coup in 2007 and stripped of all his assets in Thailand, his party was re-elected in 2008 and ousted by the yellow shirts (mostly mid-upper class Bangkok residents) in 2009 after they took over the Bangkok international airport. The current government is the result of that. Back to the point at hand, for both sides there is a lot of corruption, both literally paid people to protest both at the BKK international airport and the more recent Silom protests. The current Thai government is far from oppressive and the red shirts are far from the liberating hero's although this represents a division that has always existed between rural working Thai's and urban middle class Thai's.
If the red shirts had of toppled the current Thai government, Thaksin Shintarawa would have returned to rule and there'd be just as much corruption as before, just a different kind of corruption. Thailand is a country that has had 20 coups since 1932 when the Monarchy gave up absolute power and things will only get worse when the current King dies (which is likely to be soon). Often, Thai Democracy is just rich Thais fighting each other, that is definitely the case with the latest protests, Shintarawa wants his assets back.
Please name one boycott / trade restriction that has worked.
Iraq, by 1997 we had Saddam eating out of our hands. This is why Bush chose Iraq, it was a soft target or so he thought.
South Africa, this took decades of embargo but things changed.
Boycotts or Embargoes (on an international scale) are not about toppling regimes but keeping them pliable, under thumb and dependent on you. Obviously this doesn't work with Cuba, Iran or North Korea where you have powerful allies willing to step into the trade gap (read: China or Russia, also India now) but when they dont trade restrictions work. This is the same tactic the Soviets used to keep the eastern bloc in line, by controlling supply and trade they had comparatively few rebellions.
As another poster mentioned, lens quality starts to really matter that at 1080p--much more so that 720p.
True, but I wasn't talking about photo's/videos.
If I keep a sales.ppt or demo.avi on my phone, I can show this to perspective new clients without carrying around a heavy laptop using readily available equipment. I can watch the latest episode of something on the projector during lunch.
I already think any one using their phone for serious photography/video is mad anyway.
You think Arc is "steaming pile of 'software'"? I've tried a few of the free alternatives (QGIS, MapWindow, Thuban), and, while ambitious projects, they don't come anywhere close to Arc. Can you suggest something better?
The AC is right, ArcMAP, SDE, SERVER is a steaming pile of crap. Most GIS people would rather use MapInfo or ERDAS Imagine but the edict to use ESRI is handed down from on high. I used to work for a direct competitor to ESRI and our dinky little product outperformed ESRI's IMS and WMS up to twice as fast and reliable at one point but ESRI are incredibly hard to unseat from the minds of government/big mining decision makers.
Obligatory: I work at ESRI and find it hilarious that we're not mentioned in that article apart from the related video.
Just to clue everyone in, ESRI is the Microsoft of GIS except MS products typically have less bugs (yes I am trying to deploy ArcSDE 10 at the moment but for some reason it wont create the damn repository and the SDE (esri_sde) service crashes every time we try to start it).
Grumble, grumble, yes ESRI have been at the whole web mapping (WMS - Web Mapping Service) thing a lot longer then Google.
Probably a bit but I've never seen one of his tests replicated. Plus he tends to leave out a lot of factors (such as the starting and ending dBm for the "Death Grip" tests he did).
Sorry, though, I don't even have a lawn.
I used to, then the housemate killed it (lawns do use a lot of water and need a lot of maintenance). However if it makes you feel better you can get off my woodchips.
For that matter, it might even be Apple PR copied verbatim. It is amazing how many press agencies will just reprint PR copy that the like. A PR firm will send out the "OMG t3h new stuffs!" memo, as PR firms do, and sites will pick it up and regurgitate a good bit of it verbatim.
After that Apple will write benchmark for Anandtech who will publish it without question.
I instantly know when I hear things like "Snappier", "User Experience", "Superior UI" and "responsive/ness" that the poster has absolutely no clue and is just regurgitating Apple marketing.
I have a hard time understanding how 1080p is such a great feature on screens 4" or smaller in diameter.
The feature is important for 1080p output, combined with HDMI makes a phone compatible with most projectors, LCD/LED TV's and modern monitors. I can easily see myself walking in and displaying a video or presentation stored on my phone. Ideal for impromptu sales pitches or just bringing a movie over to a friends place.
Twitter, instead of, you know, email. Because it's more likely to be real.
Twitter, instead of email as it needs to be sent via SMS rather then GRPS/WAP which likely does not have coverage in Afghanistan's southern cave region. Yes, they are services by AT&T too.
In the world, USA is the only one net 'exporter' of audiovisual copyrights. That means that for any of the European governments, anyone who buys movies or music from USA just creates some trade deficit and harms the local economy - sure, there are treaties starting from Berne convention where they have agreed that they should protect copyrights, but keeping a practical mind in this economy means that it is in the country's best interests just to do the bare minimum instead of being effective.
Each teenager who downloads a Justin Bieber song instead of buying it means $1 gain for his country and $1 loss for USA, where the record studio execs would be spending their profits.
Actually it doesn't work like that.
The amount of money spent by the average person on entertainment is fixed, if you can afford to spend 40 EUR a month on entertainment you can still spend 40 EUR a month on entertainment. So if you buy 4 10 EUR CD's you have 4 CD's and the media cartels have 36 EUR (4 EUR to the artists/writers). If you buy 4x10 EUR CD's and pirate 4 CD's you have 8 CD's and the media cartels have 36 EUR.
At worst, you pirate four CD's and spend that 40 EUR on movie tickets in which case the media cartels still gets the vast majority of that 40 EUR.
The idea of total copyright enforcement increasing sales is false as every study into the subject has proven (piracy is free marketing, this has actually increased sales) but to be more specific Ubisoft's recent always online DRM with Assassins Creed only decreased sales and returns.
Of course they haven't counted on crowd-sourcing (no matter how many sites they shut down it just keeps coming back)
Thus it's the perfect ploy. A perpetually re-occurring issue much like recreational drug use. The governments get to claim they are "doing something" against some "great evil", because it is not viewed as a "evil" by a significant of the population it keeps occurring. So rather then fix the root of the problem (dissolve the entertainment cartels, decriminalise/regulate recreational drugs) they would rather be continually fighting it because that is easier then any real solution.
In a very real sense, all government expenditures are income transfer payments.
In a very real sense, all transaction are income transfer.
Frankly, I find the idea that you "own" income to be a sad delusion of libertarians. You, much like a business have cashflow, incoming cash and outgoing cash and if outgoing cash is greater then incoming cash then _you_ have an issue, not the gubbermit, not some income transfer conspiracy. Income is not a commodity and should never be thought of as such.
My in-laws recently had to evacuate a seriously -- and possibly terminally -- ill expatriate grandfather, an operation that has saddled grandpa's children with considerable debt.
I take it you live in a nation with no universal health care.
In Australia or the UK, this would have required a ticket to Australia or the UK.
Seeing that in print looks heartless, but the man moved voluntarily, aware of his worsening health.
Yes it does, but not in the way you think. The old man just wanted to spend some of his life living in paradise, to be happy which is what this thread is all about. I dont think it is fair to begrudge him for that.
As for the children's debt, I blame that squarely on the society that requires you to go into debt for life saving surgery.
* Sony, just like PC gaming, provides FREE ONLINE to every single PS3 owner.
Only Sony is permitted to provide that.
* Sony provides FREE DEDICATED servers for all major competitive online games just like on the PC
Only Sony is permitted to provide that.
* Sony is developer friendly and completely open to FREE add-on content for PS3 owners to download
Only Sony can decide what is permitted to run on the PS3
You may have noticed a pattern here. Sony maintains an iron grip on the PS3 unlike any company on the PC so they are worlds apart. Sony also has the power to pull the plug on any and all of these services just like they did with the "Other OS" option.
Wow, what a bunch of evil gamer hating misers are those Sony guys...
They dont hate games, they hate consumers in general. Sony has always been very anti-consumer, pro-lockin. They've just never been very good at it.
Nope - the idea of free speech however doesn't end with "let the idiots speak their idiocy" - it kind of demands that you then reply and tell them why they are being idiots.
You're confusing people shooting down the ideas of idiots with suggesting that the idiots should not be allowed to speak.
I was referring to/. in general, one group of people says "you're not free because these people say these things" and the other group says "you're not free because people aren't allowed to say these things". It creates a strawman on both sides because, as you pointed out neither one considers the entire picture, they focus on a single negative facet and use that as absolute proof. I dont atually agree with either of those stances for just that reason (doesn't take into account the whole picture).
As I said, these people keep getting shot down time and time again. The only people who take them seriously are the people wanting to complain about "mah freedoms", everyone else just ignores them like the idiots they are (and the best way to deal with an idiotic idea is not to give it the time of day).
The fact that Australia has politicians who are even willing to test the waters by floating such ideas says a lot by itself.
Yes, it says we are free and secure enough to let the most undesirable ideas be spoken aloud. What else do you propose, we censor people who have strange and uncomfortable ideas?
The fact these ideas keep failing time and time again says even more.
One thing that really annoys me about Americans in these arguments is that you argue against both sides, if we allow people to make stupid suggestions we are infringing freedoms by supporting fascist ideals, if we censor such people we are infringing freedoms and supporting fascist ideals. Quite a good strawman dont you think?
Apparently in about 30 minutes, Australians will find out who's going to run their country.
Julia Gillard,
Now that's over for another three years they can stop filling the news with it. I think I speak for most Aussies when I say, I'm sick of hearing about the election.
Slashdot Mirror
To extend on this, the most common attack vector these days is social engineering. You literally convince people to install your virus and send it to others. This means no OS is effectively immune to viruses. But virus makers know that their hit ratio is going to be low (as smart people can detect BS) to they target 1, the most popular platform and 2 the dumbest users. So viruses come hidden in $Celebrity_Sex_Tape_OMG!!!.exe or pirated programs because people often dont check these things.
So if all the dumb people switch to Mac, all the virus writers will target Mac because that has the highest rate of success. What is needed to secure modern OS's is not SUDO but SUDO combined with checks on what API's the program accesses and or what functions it's performing (such as sending out hundreds of emails or starting a DDOS) and stop it or ask me if I want to let it continue. Of course this kind of detection needs to be a hell of a lot smarter then current AV.
Dead on about Iran, especially after having Persian Rap translated to me by an Iranian born Aussie (it was almost as bad as English Rap and production of "western" forms of music is banned in Iran, which includes Rap).
Thailand is a very different situation and far more complex. The conflict between the red-shirts (mostly rural Thais) and the government is a very old conflict between rich Thai's. The main bankroller of the red shirts was ousted PM Thaksin Shintarawa who was overthrown by a military coup in 2007 and stripped of all his assets in Thailand, his party was re-elected in 2008 and ousted by the yellow shirts (mostly mid-upper class Bangkok residents) in 2009 after they took over the Bangkok international airport. The current government is the result of that. Back to the point at hand, for both sides there is a lot of corruption, both literally paid people to protest both at the BKK international airport and the more recent Silom protests. The current Thai government is far from oppressive and the red shirts are far from the liberating hero's although this represents a division that has always existed between rural working Thai's and urban middle class Thai's. If the red shirts had of toppled the current Thai government, Thaksin Shintarawa would have returned to rule and there'd be just as much corruption as before, just a different kind of corruption. Thailand is a country that has had 20 coups since 1932 when the Monarchy gave up absolute power and things will only get worse when the current King dies (which is likely to be soon). Often, Thai Democracy is just rich Thais fighting each other, that is definitely the case with the latest protests, Shintarawa wants his assets back.
Iraq, by 1997 we had Saddam eating out of our hands. This is why Bush chose Iraq, it was a soft target or so he thought.
South Africa, this took decades of embargo but things changed.
Boycotts or Embargoes (on an international scale) are not about toppling regimes but keeping them pliable, under thumb and dependent on you. Obviously this doesn't work with Cuba, Iran or North Korea where you have powerful allies willing to step into the trade gap (read: China or Russia, also India now) but when they dont trade restrictions work. This is the same tactic the Soviets used to keep the eastern bloc in line, by controlling supply and trade they had comparatively few rebellions.
It is currently illegal for _you_ to trade with North Korea, Murdoch is a law unto himself so he and News Corp can do as they please.
But we already did that, in 1985.
I'm going to ruin that fantasy for you... Because you could have just described Angela Lansbury.
Just like the EU sued Shell (Dutch) under the same laws to protect...
Wait, can I start again.
True, but I wasn't talking about photo's/videos.
.ppt or demo .avi on my phone, I can show this to perspective new clients without carrying around a heavy laptop using readily available equipment. I can watch the latest episode of something on the projector during lunch.
If I keep a sales
I already think any one using their phone for serious photography/video is mad anyway.
I second that and I do like to read but reading license agreements is like torture.
The AC is right, ArcMAP, SDE, SERVER is a steaming pile of crap. Most GIS people would rather use MapInfo or ERDAS Imagine but the edict to use ESRI is handed down from on high. I used to work for a direct competitor to ESRI and our dinky little product outperformed ESRI's IMS and WMS up to twice as fast and reliable at one point but ESRI are incredibly hard to unseat from the minds of government/big mining decision makers.
Just to clue everyone in, ESRI is the Microsoft of GIS except MS products typically have less bugs (yes I am trying to deploy ArcSDE 10 at the moment but for some reason it wont create the damn repository and the SDE (esri_sde) service crashes every time we try to start it).
Grumble, grumble, yes ESRI have been at the whole web mapping (WMS - Web Mapping Service) thing a lot longer then Google.
Probably a bit but I've never seen one of his tests replicated. Plus he tends to leave out a lot of factors (such as the starting and ending dBm for the "Death Grip" tests he did).
I used to, then the housemate killed it (lawns do use a lot of water and need a lot of maintenance). However if it makes you feel better you can get off my woodchips.
After that Apple will write benchmark for Anandtech who will publish it without question.
I instantly know when I hear things like "Snappier", "User Experience", "Superior UI" and "responsive/ness" that the poster has absolutely no clue and is just regurgitating Apple marketing.
The feature is important for 1080p output, combined with HDMI makes a phone compatible with most projectors, LCD/LED TV's and modern monitors. I can easily see myself walking in and displaying a video or presentation stored on my phone. Ideal for impromptu sales pitches or just bringing a movie over to a friends place.
Twitter, instead of email as it needs to be sent via SMS rather then GRPS/WAP which likely does not have coverage in Afghanistan's southern cave region. Yes, they are services by AT&T too.
Actually it doesn't work like that.
The amount of money spent by the average person on entertainment is fixed, if you can afford to spend 40 EUR a month on entertainment you can still spend 40 EUR a month on entertainment. So if you buy 4 10 EUR CD's you have 4 CD's and the media cartels have 36 EUR (4 EUR to the artists/writers). If you buy 4x10 EUR CD's and pirate 4 CD's you have 8 CD's and the media cartels have 36 EUR.
At worst, you pirate four CD's and spend that 40 EUR on movie tickets in which case the media cartels still gets the vast majority of that 40 EUR.
The idea of total copyright enforcement increasing sales is false as every study into the subject has proven (piracy is free marketing, this has actually increased sales) but to be more specific Ubisoft's recent always online DRM with Assassins Creed only decreased sales and returns.
Thus it's the perfect ploy. A perpetually re-occurring issue much like recreational drug use. The governments get to claim they are "doing something" against some "great evil", because it is not viewed as a "evil" by a significant of the population it keeps occurring. So rather then fix the root of the problem (dissolve the entertainment cartels, decriminalise/regulate recreational drugs) they would rather be continually fighting it because that is easier then any real solution.
In a very real sense, all transaction are income transfer.
Frankly, I find the idea that you "own" income to be a sad delusion of libertarians. You, much like a business have cashflow, incoming cash and outgoing cash and if outgoing cash is greater then incoming cash then _you_ have an issue, not the gubbermit, not some income transfer conspiracy. Income is not a commodity and should never be thought of as such.
I take it you live in a nation with no universal health care.
In Australia or the UK, this would have required a ticket to Australia or the UK.
Yes it does, but not in the way you think. The old man just wanted to spend some of his life living in paradise, to be happy which is what this thread is all about. I dont think it is fair to begrudge him for that.
As for the children's debt, I blame that squarely on the society that requires you to go into debt for life saving surgery.
Money may not be able to buy happiness, but it can rent it for a while.
Only Sony is permitted to provide that.
Only Sony is permitted to provide that.
Only Sony can decide what is permitted to run on the PS3
You may have noticed a pattern here. Sony maintains an iron grip on the PS3 unlike any company on the PC so they are worlds apart. Sony also has the power to pull the plug on any and all of these services just like they did with the "Other OS" option.
They dont hate games, they hate consumers in general. Sony has always been very anti-consumer, pro-lockin. They've just never been very good at it.
I was referring to /. in general, one group of people says "you're not free because these people say these things" and the other group says "you're not free because people aren't allowed to say these things". It creates a strawman on both sides because, as you pointed out neither one considers the entire picture, they focus on a single negative facet and use that as absolute proof. I dont atually agree with either of those stances for just that reason (doesn't take into account the whole picture).
As I said, these people keep getting shot down time and time again. The only people who take them seriously are the people wanting to complain about "mah freedoms", everyone else just ignores them like the idiots they are (and the best way to deal with an idiotic idea is not to give it the time of day).
There, fixed that for you.
The whole penal colony joke became unfunny when we stopped giggling at penal because it sounds like penis.
Yes, it says we are free and secure enough to let the most undesirable ideas be spoken aloud. What else do you propose, we censor people who have strange and uncomfortable ideas?
The fact these ideas keep failing time and time again says even more.
One thing that really annoys me about Americans in these arguments is that you argue against both sides, if we allow people to make stupid suggestions we are infringing freedoms by supporting fascist ideals, if we censor such people we are infringing freedoms and supporting fascist ideals. Quite a good strawman dont you think?
Julia Gillard,
Now that's over for another three years they can stop filling the news with it. I think I speak for most Aussies when I say, I'm sick of hearing about the election.