Any geek who does not know Douglas Engelbart should also check out The Mother of All Demos. Just some of the items featured:
High speed (300bps) communications
Interactive computing (i.e. more than an input (punch cards) output (printer) system)
The mouse
Hypertext
Menu based UI
White boards (collaborative computing)
We take all of those for granted these days, but try to imagine being at the demo and not only seeing these items for the first time, but seeing them all together in one demo!
You remember that kid who wanted to bomb mailboxes across America in the shape of a giant happy face?
No, I don't recall hearing about that. However, this event is more like some kid who wants to put happy faces on mailboxes across America in the shape of a giant cartoon bomb giving you the finger.
It's been a long time since I've actually had to compile an app. However, when I used to do that, the applications that I've used would have configure scripts that would see that I wasn't root and would setup the Makefile to install into my home directory. There was no need to run anything as root.
A proof of concept does something. That's how you get your proof. The thing is that it doesn't do something malicious. In the case of MySpace, that would probably include mangling of a profile or *deleting* your friends list. Anyway, I think that this explains his true intent.
From http://namb.la/popular/
7 hours later, 8:35 am: You have 74 friends and 221 friend requests.
Woah. I did not expect this much. I'm surprised it even worked.. 200 people have been infected in 8 hours. That means I'll have 600 new friends added every day. Woah.
1 hour later, 9:30 am: You have 74 friends and 480 friend requests.
Oh wait, it's exponential, isn't it. Shit.
I have had more than a handful of students say they have lost several years of digital photos of their grandchildren because a friend formatted their computer and reinstalled Windows. I'm not sure what your point is. I've seen that happen to people running Windows when they called Dell or AOL (WTF is an AOL tech doing walking people through an OS reinstall?!?!) or "a friend worked on it."
Anyway, if people actually have *no* directly line of support, then I'd probably say to stay away from Linux until you can walk into a store and buy more than one or two pieces of software for Linux. However, for people like me, whose parents will *never* install software without consulting me first (whether it be Windows or Mac OS) and are more likely to cause their own problems on Windows, Linux can be a great thing.
Here's a start: Linux needs to tuck the command line under the carpet. Blasphemy! [Runs and hides] I absolutely agree, but it's not Linux the kernel or GNU/Linux the OS that makes the command line a requirement to do fairly regular things like install new software. Developers aren't writing GUI installers for a lot of things and aren't packaging them. (Double-clicking on a.rpm or.deb file is pretty easy). Even big hardware vendors make you drop to a shell to perform an install. Things like that are detrimental to the image of Linux. However, I haven't had to drop to shell for any other mundane task in years.
I only used Google Checkout at Buy.com but I had about 5 orders go through without any problems with the order process itself. The only real problem that I had was choosing the wrong shipping method. The transactions are a little too easy. When I tried to cancel the order through Google checkout, the orders had already entered the shipping process. Going through the normal cancellation and RMA process with Buy.com itself was much faster, but I blame that on the integration. I don't know where blame for the integration problems should go though.
Shouldn't special needs like this go to your manager, who would then arrange the exception (or separate network) with the IT department? If you needed to purchase something on the company tab, would you be pushing the accounting department directly (assuming you don't already have the authority to do that) or would you have your manager approve the expense?
Why is this technology being, by-and-large, ignored?? Because we're still on a mostly IPv4 Internet and IPv4 has a very limited number of multicast addresses so content providers would have to fight for them and availability would depend on their schedules. Also, providers seem to be worried that it would saturate their networks. (Less bandwidth usage at the provider means that there will be more multicast services, meaning more clients, meaning more traffic across the upper tier provider's networks.) I'm waiting for what China has to show the rest of the world in the 2008 Olympics when they show off their fully IPv6 network.
I suppose that you could walk around with a copy of the files in/var/cache/apt/archives on your Debian distro. You could also keep a mirror archive if you want absolutely everything. Either way, it's basically all in once place. Also under Debian, if there are enough patches to warrant a "service pack," a release update is created.
If by "big," you mean Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, or other commercially supported distro, well you can do similar things with Ubuntu and there's probably already a script that does it for the RPM based distros as well. I've never carried around every Windows patch anyway. I usually keep the patches for the latest big vulerability that's being exploited by a worm at the time (which usually means that their Internet connection is getting sapped anyway) just so that I don't have to download it repeatedly.
In most areas in America, you may make right turns on a red signal, after stopping. Of course, most just coast through, especially at corners that don't have many pedestrians. I can't speak of California, but some states now revoke your driver's license if you are convicted of a DUI. And about buses and taxis, California is not known for their public transportation system. In fact, they're known for their serious lack of one. In New York City, however, it's a different story. You may not make rights turns on red and there is plenty of public transportation. On some roads, the buses and taxis outnumber the regular cars. There are also so many pedestrians (at least in Manhattan) that hitting one pedestrian probably means that you ran a few others down as well.
To give another example, imagine if I created a site with a name similar to Microsoft, and whenever someone Googled Microsoft, my domain would come up, and a significant number of people came to me first.
That's not exactly the case. utube.com existed before youtube.com--utube.com isn't trying to exploit YouTube's fame. It's more like Nissan Computer vs. Nissan Motors.
I find it mildly annoying that if I shut down my laptop (Ubuntu) without closing Firefox first, the next time I run it, it complains about exiting unexpectedly and offers to restore my session.
That's a good point and it's a minor annoyance, but I'd much prefer that behavior over having to shutdown (or log out) because of some oddly behaving app locking up the console (like Google Earth Beta 4 did to me recently) and not getting my session back.
3). Confusing Options dialog: hell, have you ever really gone through IE's Tools->Internet options ? Thought so. Anyway, it's really hard to spot well designed dialogs these days. Not a reason for not using the browser. Crap.
It seems you agree on his point and yet call it crap. The options dialog DOES suck. And yes, it's really easy to spot well designed option dialogs, take a look at Microsoft Office.
That's just funny. There are some parts that make sense in Office but what about getting to add-ins in Outlook or the difference between the default document location in Word and Excel? The options dialogs in FF may not be great, but they're better than those in a lot of other programs that I have to support. For the most part, they make a lot of sense to me.
What platform are you running on? I've never seen FF go above 150MB on Windows and I tend to keep it open for days. Under Linux, the memory usage that you see includes shared libraries so you can't be sure that it's all being used by FF. Still, I have 13 tabs open (that I've been using, I didn't just throw open a bunch of tabs to see what would happen) and that number is at 127MB.
That's an interesting theory, but if I'm not in the country until the border guard says I am, what country am I in? If I'm in international territory, who gave the border guard jurisdiction?
Wow, I've never encountered that issue. I've moved VMWare 2.0 images to VMWare 5.0 workstation without any problems from a Windows 95 box to a Debian Linux box.
Interesting.. perhaps it was the version of Visual Source Safe. I have to admit that I didn't spend a lot of time on it. (It was a developer house anyway and they decided that they wanted full admin rights.)
I can't list any of the programs that I couldn't get running properly with Run As since I only saw it as part of my experimentation to run Windows 2000 Pro without local admin rights. Obviously it was something that I had that would've included StarCraft/Broodwars, Diablo, Diablo II (with and without the expansion), one of my CBT exams, or something else that I haven't used in ages. I think that problem was with the installation of some programs as opposed to running the applications. I wish I could remember what they were. I still see that problem on occasion but in those cases, I just log in with a user with local admin rights and make sure that it runs without local admin rights.
The one program that I never got working properly by modifying the ACLs is WinFax Pro 10. I've gotten every poorly written educational program, inventory system, and accounting system to work without admin rights (among those that I've tried) but WinFax Pro 10 has managed to mystify me. If you have any tips on that, I'm all ears. Of my customer sites that are locked down, I have one that is an office of 40 that has 1 user with local admin rights because of WinFax Pro.
It's true that it's (usually) a poorly designed piece of software that needs to run with administrative privileges but it does stem from Windows' history. Still, it's no excuse for any updated or new piece of software not to work properly in a restricted user environment (except for the fact that even VSS needs local admin rights so the programmer has to flip back and forth or has to switch to a test environment every time). Also, I guess you haven't seen the various applications that I've seen that won't run with "Run As". Also, giving an office user the ability to use "Run As" kind of defeats the purpose, although it does provide some layer of security against things like casually running a program or a hole in IE that executes a program automatically.
Normal: There are programs that will not run properly using "Run As". Also, you lose access to network resources (drive mappings and printers in the local profile) that way. Also, giving regular users the ability to run things as an administrator doesn't keep them from willingly installing junk on their computers. Users at home should obviously be able to install software when needed, however "Run As" doesn't really work as advertised, which is the problem. Being able to install software as a regular user (by providing an admin level password) would also be nice. Temporarily elevating privileges while retaining ownership would prevent the problems with programs that want to write data to where they're installed. It's really the fault of the software that's still being written to Win95 standards. They've had years to fix such problems but I still see new releases of software that says "administrative privileges are required to run this software."
Expert: I've used RegMon and FileMon to fix issues with poorly designed software. (Why is educational software among the worst offenders?) A lot of business software does work properly without being a local admin so I've been able to setup new business computers without giving users local admin rights. Sometimes, there is still that piece of legacy software that won't run properly even if you give full control to the file system and to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. It has to do with the internals of Windows so the only thing that you can do is give the users local admin rights. Again, properly engineered software would fix this, but that doesn't help the legacy situation.
Slashdot Mirror
I can go to my local video store and keep the video for longer than 24 hours and pay less. I also don't need to run Windows to watch the damned movie.
- High speed (300bps) communications
- Interactive computing (i.e. more than an input (punch cards) output (printer) system)
- The mouse
- Hypertext
- Menu based UI
- White boards (collaborative computing)
We take all of those for granted these days, but try to imagine being at the demo and not only seeing these items for the first time, but seeing them all together in one demo!No, I don't recall hearing about that. However, this event is more like some kid who wants to put happy faces on mailboxes across America in the shape of a giant cartoon bomb giving you the finger.
You could do all that before Tor. For all we know, he was using Tor for something innocuous.
It's been a long time since I've actually had to compile an app. However, when I used to do that, the applications that I've used would have configure scripts that would see that I wasn't root and would setup the Makefile to install into my home directory. There was no need to run anything as root.
1 hour later, 9:30 am: You have 74 friends and 480 friend requests. Oh wait, it's exponential, isn't it. Shit.
I only used Google Checkout at Buy.com but I had about 5 orders go through without any problems with the order process itself. The only real problem that I had was choosing the wrong shipping method. The transactions are a little too easy. When I tried to cancel the order through Google checkout, the orders had already entered the shipping process. Going through the normal cancellation and RMA process with Buy.com itself was much faster, but I blame that on the integration. I don't know where blame for the integration problems should go though.
Shouldn't special needs like this go to your manager, who would then arrange the exception (or separate network) with the IT department? If you needed to purchase something on the company tab, would you be pushing the accounting department directly (assuming you don't already have the authority to do that) or would you have your manager approve the expense?
Why the hell is your "helpdesk" pulling cables or rebooting servers? Is this a tiny IT department?
Also, an executable sent via e-mail can't be executed until the user saves it to the HD and then makes it executable.
I suppose that you could walk around with a copy of the files in /var/cache/apt/archives on your Debian distro. You could also keep a mirror archive if you want absolutely everything. Either way, it's basically all in once place. Also under Debian, if there are enough patches to warrant a "service pack," a release update is created.
If by "big," you mean Red Hat, SuSE, Ubuntu, or other commercially supported distro, well you can do similar things with Ubuntu and there's probably already a script that does it for the RPM based distros as well. I've never carried around every Windows patch anyway. I usually keep the patches for the latest big vulerability that's being exploited by a worm at the time (which usually means that their Internet connection is getting sapped anyway) just so that I don't have to download it repeatedly.
We're now one step closer to creating KITT!
In most areas in America, you may make right turns on a red signal, after stopping. Of course, most just coast through, especially at corners that don't have many pedestrians. I can't speak of California, but some states now revoke your driver's license if you are convicted of a DUI. And about buses and taxis, California is not known for their public transportation system. In fact, they're known for their serious lack of one. In New York City, however, it's a different story. You may not make rights turns on red and there is plenty of public transportation. On some roads, the buses and taxis outnumber the regular cars. There are also so many pedestrians (at least in Manhattan) that hitting one pedestrian probably means that you ran a few others down as well.
To give another example, imagine if I created a site with a name similar to Microsoft, and whenever someone Googled Microsoft, my domain would come up, and a significant number of people came to me first.
That's not exactly the case. utube.com existed before youtube.com--utube.com isn't trying to exploit YouTube's fame. It's more like Nissan Computer vs. Nissan Motors.
I find it mildly annoying that if I shut down my laptop (Ubuntu) without closing Firefox first, the next time I run it, it complains about exiting unexpectedly and offers to restore my session.
That's a good point and it's a minor annoyance, but I'd much prefer that behavior over having to shutdown (or log out) because of some oddly behaving app locking up the console (like Google Earth Beta 4 did to me recently) and not getting my session back.
What platform are you running on? I've never seen FF go above 150MB on Windows and I tend to keep it open for days. Under Linux, the memory usage that you see includes shared libraries so you can't be sure that it's all being used by FF. Still, I have 13 tabs open (that I've been using, I didn't just throw open a bunch of tabs to see what would happen) and that number is at 127MB.
That's an interesting theory, but if I'm not in the country until the border guard says I am, what country am I in? If I'm in international territory, who gave the border guard jurisdiction?
Wow, I've never encountered that issue. I've moved VMWare 2.0 images to VMWare 5.0 workstation without any problems from a Windows 95 box to a Debian Linux box.
Interesting.. perhaps it was the version of Visual Source Safe. I have to admit that I didn't spend a lot of time on it. (It was a developer house anyway and they decided that they wanted full admin rights.) I can't list any of the programs that I couldn't get running properly with Run As since I only saw it as part of my experimentation to run Windows 2000 Pro without local admin rights. Obviously it was something that I had that would've included StarCraft/Broodwars, Diablo, Diablo II (with and without the expansion), one of my CBT exams, or something else that I haven't used in ages. I think that problem was with the installation of some programs as opposed to running the applications. I wish I could remember what they were. I still see that problem on occasion but in those cases, I just log in with a user with local admin rights and make sure that it runs without local admin rights. The one program that I never got working properly by modifying the ACLs is WinFax Pro 10. I've gotten every poorly written educational program, inventory system, and accounting system to work without admin rights (among those that I've tried) but WinFax Pro 10 has managed to mystify me. If you have any tips on that, I'm all ears. Of my customer sites that are locked down, I have one that is an office of 40 that has 1 user with local admin rights because of WinFax Pro.
It's true that it's (usually) a poorly designed piece of software that needs to run with administrative privileges but it does stem from Windows' history. Still, it's no excuse for any updated or new piece of software not to work properly in a restricted user environment (except for the fact that even VSS needs local admin rights so the programmer has to flip back and forth or has to switch to a test environment every time). Also, I guess you haven't seen the various applications that I've seen that won't run with "Run As". Also, giving an office user the ability to use "Run As" kind of defeats the purpose, although it does provide some layer of security against things like casually running a program or a hole in IE that executes a program automatically.
Normal: There are programs that will not run properly using "Run As". Also, you lose access to network resources (drive mappings and printers in the local profile) that way. Also, giving regular users the ability to run things as an administrator doesn't keep them from willingly installing junk on their computers. Users at home should obviously be able to install software when needed, however "Run As" doesn't really work as advertised, which is the problem. Being able to install software as a regular user (by providing an admin level password) would also be nice. Temporarily elevating privileges while retaining ownership would prevent the problems with programs that want to write data to where they're installed. It's really the fault of the software that's still being written to Win95 standards. They've had years to fix such problems but I still see new releases of software that says "administrative privileges are required to run this software." Expert: I've used RegMon and FileMon to fix issues with poorly designed software. (Why is educational software among the worst offenders?) A lot of business software does work properly without being a local admin so I've been able to setup new business computers without giving users local admin rights. Sometimes, there is still that piece of legacy software that won't run properly even if you give full control to the file system and to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE. It has to do with the internals of Windows so the only thing that you can do is give the users local admin rights. Again, properly engineered software would fix this, but that doesn't help the legacy situation.