it's possible the *entire* class failed, not just most.
Just based on the numbers, it's also possible the entire class passed. The security exploits had to be previously undiscovered, but they couldn't have known if one of their classmates discovered the same exploit (after all, that would be plagiarism, right?)
It doesn't matter much if the user has root access. You may want to keep the user from tinkering with the computer in an unapproved way, but hell, it's a computer, if you have physical access you can ultimately do whatever you want. The point is that not every process on the computer needs admin access to run.
If you give a user a normal login, and rights in sudoers to do whatever they want provided they type in their password first, you've prevented 90% or more of the damage that can be caused simply because (1) the user has to think before doing and (2) software the user runs can't make changes to access-controlled resources secretly. (Oops, Windows doesn't have sudo. Sucks to be Windows.)
Hmm, I remember seeing a diagram that showed that debt interest was more than 50% of the total budget, but my memory may be flawed... that may have been a projection.
Still, I'm right about DoD being #2, according to your numbers.:-)
While I agree with you in the fundamentals, I have to quibble with the invocation of the words "powerful lobby". No lobby has any power over the courts. If it did happen, it would probably cause the legislation to be changed to invalidate the ruling in a heartbeat, but there's little or nothing the BSA could do to stop the ruling from existing in the first place.
There may be some truth to this. Japan, after all, isn't allowed to arm itself since being on the losing side in WWII. And "defense" is the single biggest expense in our U.S. budget apart from paying the interest on the national debt. Japan still generates tons of money but doesn't have this enormous money pit to throw it into. Therefore, the entire country--the government itself--is like one of the people a previous poster mentioned, living at home with its parents and 100% disposable income. A lot of that money is inevitably going to land in product R&D, possibly by way of government infrastructure products that trickle down to consumer industries.
I had one Linux server mounting smbfs shares from fstab on my network, running Ubuntu. The default kernel is 2.6.x and mount.cifs is included, so I found it extremely easy to convert.
I was using the credentials option (-o credentials=/some/sekrit/file) and I discovered that cifs does not like spaces in this file, so I took out the spaces.
I was also using the badly-named fmask and dmask options (they are not masks). Cifs has renamed these to dir_mode and file_mode, and deprecated the old usage. I renamed dmask to dir_mode and fmask to file_mode.
file_mode and dir_mode expect to see a leading 0 to be interpeted as octal. I made this change.
Finally I changed smbfs to cifs.
After these minor changes that took me all of 3 minutes to make, I no longer have smbfs anywhere on this network.
And let's talk The Law
on
NYT on EA Games
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The interesting thing about this is an assumption that most of the employees seem to be operating under. Whenever the subject of hours come up, inevitably, it seems, someone mentions 'exemption'. They refer to a California law that supposedly exempts businesses from having to pay overtime to certain 'specialty' employees, including software programmers. This is Senate Bill 88. However, Senate Bill 88 specifically does not apply to the entertainment industry -- television, motion picture, and theater industries are specifically mentioned. Further, even in software, there is a pay minimum on the exemption: those exempt must be paid at least $90,000 annually. I can assure you that the majority of EA employees are in fact not in this pay bracket; ergo, these practices are not only unethical, they are illegal.
In order to make all those huge profits EA is exploiting their employees and breaking the law. It just does not get any clearer than this.
Hard to say. Here's the math
on
The Music Man
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
900000 songs at an average (pulled out of a hat) of 3m each would take a little over 5 continuous years to listen to, played back to back to back, assuming he didn't attempt to listen to them more than once. (He might, at that; you could listen to several songs at once if you were only trying to pick out those high-pitched squeals they insert, but you wouldn't be able to tell much about the quality of each song, I think.) If you assume about 12 hours out of every day is reserved for sleeping and misc. rather than music listening, he could listen to his entire collection in 10 years if he never repeated. To be frank, this is a little hard to believe, but it is within the realm of possibility.
I don't still have the shell script any more, and like I said, I'll bet you can easily find some software to do exactly the same for you. But here's the gist:
What I basically did was create a brand new gnucash file, then look at the first XML element. Then I wrote a shell script that looped through every single block on the drive looking for that string using dd|grep, just as I said in my earlier post. When the string was found, this first shell script printed the block number.
Now, armed with a list of likely blocks, I piped the list through another script that looked for the date I had last updated the file, again by looking at the XML in the dummy gnucash file for an example. That narrowed it down to two (the original and its backup), so I just used dd to grab that block + 200 blocks (or however many it worked out to, I don't remember after 2 years:) and save it as a file.
I probably used vim to do the cleanup; it's pretty trivial at that point, you just look for the start and end of an XML file.
I was probably using reiserfs at the time. This was at least 2 years ago.
Not that high, consider other contributing factors
on
Wal-Mart's Data Obsession
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· Score: 3, Informative
First of all, most Walmarts don't primarily sell food, they primarily sell loads of other stuff. In fact, what they sell is a lot of stuff that people might need to survive a hurricane, including various kinds of hardware, containers, lights, reading material. So a hurricane would naturally drive lots of people into Walmart. Naturally those people will buy food products while they're in there, and the standard Walmart sells mostly junk food. So it's not as if people are seeking out pop-tarts in hurricane season, but the massive influx of people buying all kinds of things will also increase the number of people buying non-perishable junk food.
Consider also that people will not be worrying about their diets when they're primarily worried about not being killed by their own rooftops...
Combine a bunch of these factors together, and yes, I can easily believe 7x.
I once lost a year's worth of gnucash xml data, including all the backups (and gnucash makes plenty--a new one every time you use it!). I promptly used dd/dev/hda1|grep to search for markers that I knew would be in a gnucash file, and with a little shell scripting found the original and every single backup file in deleted space. After determining with a little more fancier grepping which blocks represented my most recently updated file, I recovered that, trimmed off a bit of the filesystem cruft around the edges, and had my file back.
Then I promptly set up a system to encrypt and email myself the most recent file, every day.:-)
(Yes, I'm aware that there are programs that will do the same thing for me.)
Let us be clear: you hope Islam will one day kill off millions because they will not convert? And then become educated, civilized and toned down?
I kind of hope that, now that the world has seen the effects of holy wars that the education and toning down can happen without the slaughter of millions.
It's debatable that they've allowed any dilution of their name, in the legally defensible sense. TM's apply to a particular product type. If Hormel let anyone making a meat product call their product "spam" (with any capitalization) that would clearly be dilution. Other food products might also conceivably be called dilution. But software is not food, so while Hormel *can* sue spam software makers for trademark dilution, they probably would not win, and any outcome of that case would probably not affect Hormel's lawsuit against Spamme, makers of fine canned hamburger.:-) Note that I don't know the specifics of this case. If they're using labelling, imagery or something else that attempts to explicitly tie them to Hormel's product, Hormel might have a point.
Remember the rule of thumb: the existence of Apple Insurance doesn't in any way dilute the trademark of Apple Computers.
I'm downloading it right now, and I intend to install it on a couple of different systems in our intranet to see how it behaves as a server and as a desktop.
I am a hardcore Debian fan (in fact, I maintain the aap package in Debian unstable) but I find the installation procedure--in particular the hardware detection--to be junk. I am knowledgeable enough to work around the problems with the installer, but I share the Unix environment at my workplace with people who would be very frustrated at best and completely mystified at worst by the hoops you have to jump through to get some hardware to work.
Knoppix, Gnoppix and things like Morphix all have good-to-excellent hardware detection, but they have only fair-to-middlin' compatibility with Debian packages. By contrast (or so I've been told) Ubuntu uses the unstable Debian archive so it is very compatible.
In Ubuntu I hope to find a system that autodetects hardware, makes it *easy* to install hardware that isn't autodetected (this state of affairs being almost inevitable), has a sensible default set of packages for both servers and desktops, and provides security updates for packages. My interest was piqued when I was told by people I trust that this is indeed the case with Ubuntu.
I'm probably hoping for too much. We'll see how it goes....
be enlightened. There is no standard for when summer or winter starts, even in common parlance. And a number of other factors (latitude and longitude, culture, meteorological best practice...) muddy the waters even more.
Take a moment to reflect on the target audience of AOL. Just reflect; you know what they're like. They're not really stupid, but they're just not exactly hacker types.
Now think about what happens in that person's brain when they see an AOL icon in the corner of the browser window.
"I'm using AOL!"
Now imagine what happens inside the person's brain when AOL tries to sell them the AOL service.
"I'm already using AOL! Why would I pay for it?"...
Tabs are nice for a number of usability reasons. * The browser window size is predictable; that is, it won't change from one tab to the next, unless you change it for all of them. * The browser window location is predictable; same reason. * The number of things floating around on your desktop/taskbar is controllable. Having all those browser windows open slows you down in the most common use scenarios.
OTOH, your point about being able to switch back and forth between web pages is well taken. For that reason, it's still easy to open a new window: right click, new window (same as IE). Middle click is tab by default; I'll bet there's a FF extension somewhere that lets you do double-middle-click as new window.
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it's possible the *entire* class failed, not just most.
Just based on the numbers, it's also possible the entire class passed. The security exploits had to be previously undiscovered, but they couldn't have known if one of their classmates discovered the same exploit (after all, that would be plagiarism, right?)
You may have noticed the logo.
That's not there to hold the shoe together. We're already in this dread dystopia you seem sure will drive you into a ballistic fury.
It doesn't matter much if the user has root access. You may want to keep the user from tinkering with the computer in an unapproved way, but hell, it's a computer, if you have physical access you can ultimately do whatever you want. The point is that not every process on the computer needs admin access to run.
If you give a user a normal login, and rights in sudoers to do whatever they want provided they type in their password first, you've prevented 90% or more of the damage that can be caused simply because (1) the user has to think before doing and (2) software the user runs can't make changes to access-controlled resources secretly. (Oops, Windows doesn't have sudo. Sucks to be Windows.)
Hmm, I remember seeing a diagram that showed that debt interest was more than 50% of the total budget, but my memory may be flawed... that may have been a projection.
:-)
Still, I'm right about DoD being #2, according to your numbers.
While I agree with you in the fundamentals, I have to quibble with the invocation of the words "powerful lobby". No lobby has any power over the courts. If it did happen, it would probably cause the legislation to be changed to invalidate the ruling in a heartbeat, but there's little or nothing the BSA could do to stop the ruling from existing in the first place.
There may be some truth to this. Japan, after all, isn't allowed to arm itself since being on the losing side in WWII. And "defense" is the single biggest expense in our U.S. budget apart from paying the interest on the national debt. Japan still generates tons of money but doesn't have this enormous money pit to throw it into. Therefore, the entire country--the government itself--is like one of the people a previous poster mentioned, living at home with its parents and 100% disposable income. A lot of that money is inevitably going to land in product R&D, possibly by way of government infrastructure products that trickle down to consumer industries.
(Ugh, I used the term "trickle down".)
"Conspiracy" just means "More than one person helped commit this crime."
You can conspire to do anything illegal whatsoever, if they choose to charge you with it.
Time for rampant hedonism and fornication. We're all doomed.
Can we get an exact date on the doom? I want to start the bacchanalia about a week before, so as to optimize my avoidance of consequences.
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. -Mark Twain
They mean the software is likely to maim or kill you if you get too close.
After these minor changes that took me all of 3 minutes to make, I no longer have smbfs anywhere on this network.
Specifically:
In order to make all those huge profits EA is exploiting their employees and breaking the law. It just does not get any clearer than this.
900000 songs at an average (pulled out of a hat) of 3m each would take a little over 5 continuous years to listen to, played back to back to back, assuming he didn't attempt to listen to them more than once. (He might, at that; you could listen to several songs at once if you were only trying to pick out those high-pitched squeals they insert, but you wouldn't be able to tell much about the quality of each song, I think.) If you assume about 12 hours out of every day is reserved for sleeping and misc. rather than music listening, he could listen to his entire collection in 10 years if he never repeated. To be frank, this is a little hard to believe, but it is within the realm of possibility.
I don't still have the shell script any more, and like I said, I'll bet you can easily find some software to do exactly the same for you. But here's the gist:
:) and save it as a file.
What I basically did was create a brand new gnucash file, then look at the first XML element. Then I wrote a shell script that looped through every single block on the drive looking for that string using dd|grep, just as I said in my earlier post. When the string was found, this first shell script printed the block number.
Now, armed with a list of likely blocks, I piped the list through another script that looked for the date I had last updated the file, again by looking at the XML in the dummy gnucash file for an example. That narrowed it down to two (the original and its backup), so I just used dd to grab that block + 200 blocks (or however many it worked out to, I don't remember after 2 years
I probably used vim to do the cleanup; it's pretty trivial at that point, you just look for the start and end of an XML file.
Hope that helps.
I was probably using reiserfs at the time. This was at least 2 years ago.
First of all, most Walmarts don't primarily sell food, they primarily sell loads of other stuff. In fact, what they sell is a lot of stuff that people might need to survive a hurricane, including various kinds of hardware, containers, lights, reading material. So a hurricane would naturally drive lots of people into Walmart. Naturally those people will buy food products while they're in there, and the standard Walmart sells mostly junk food. So it's not as if people are seeking out pop-tarts in hurricane season, but the massive influx of people buying all kinds of things will also increase the number of people buying non-perishable junk food.
Consider also that people will not be worrying about their diets when they're primarily worried about not being killed by their own rooftops...
Combine a bunch of these factors together, and yes, I can easily believe 7x.
I once lost a year's worth of gnucash xml data, including all the backups (and gnucash makes plenty--a new one every time you use it!). I promptly used dd /dev/hda1|grep to search for markers that I knew would be in a gnucash file, and with a little shell scripting found the original and every single backup file in deleted space. After determining with a little more fancier grepping which blocks represented my most recently updated file, I recovered that, trimmed off a bit of the filesystem cruft around the edges, and had my file back.
:-)
Then I promptly set up a system to encrypt and email myself the most recent file, every day.
(Yes, I'm aware that there are programs that will do the same thing for me.)
Let us be clear: you hope Islam will one day kill off millions because they will not convert? And then become educated, civilized and toned down?
I kind of hope that, now that the world has seen the effects of holy wars that the education and toning down can happen without the slaughter of millions.
You're already at +5, so here's a +6 for you.
It's debatable that they've allowed any dilution of their name, in the legally defensible sense. TM's apply to a particular product type. If Hormel let anyone making a meat product call their product "spam" (with any capitalization) that would clearly be dilution. Other food products might also conceivably be called dilution. But software is not food, so while Hormel *can* sue spam software makers for trademark dilution, they probably would not win, and any outcome of that case would probably not affect Hormel's lawsuit against Spamme, makers of fine canned hamburger. :-) Note that I don't know the specifics of this case. If they're using labelling, imagery or something else that attempts to explicitly tie them to Hormel's product, Hormel might have a point.
Remember the rule of thumb: the existence of Apple Insurance doesn't in any way dilute the trademark of Apple Computers.
I'm downloading it right now, and I intend to install it on a couple of different systems in our intranet to see how it behaves as a server and as a desktop.
....
I am a hardcore Debian fan (in fact, I maintain the aap package in Debian unstable) but I find the installation procedure--in particular the hardware detection--to be junk. I am knowledgeable enough to work around the problems with the installer, but I share the Unix environment at my workplace with people who would be very frustrated at best and completely mystified at worst by the hoops you have to jump through to get some hardware to work.
Knoppix, Gnoppix and things like Morphix all have good-to-excellent hardware detection, but they have only fair-to-middlin' compatibility with Debian packages. By contrast (or so I've been told) Ubuntu uses the unstable Debian archive so it is very compatible.
In Ubuntu I hope to find a system that autodetects hardware, makes it *easy* to install hardware that isn't autodetected (this state of affairs being almost inevitable), has a sensible default set of packages for both servers and desktops, and provides security updates for packages. My interest was piqued when I was told by people I trust that this is indeed the case with Ubuntu.
I'm probably hoping for too much. We'll see how it goes
Doom, Doom II or Doom 3?
Wait, never mind.
be enlightened. There is no standard for when summer or winter starts, even in common parlance. And a number of other factors (latitude and longitude, culture, meteorological best practice ...) muddy the waters even more.
Take a moment to reflect on the target audience of AOL. Just reflect; you know what they're like. They're not really stupid, but they're just not exactly hacker types.
...
Now think about what happens in that person's brain when they see an AOL icon in the corner of the browser window.
"I'm using AOL!"
Now imagine what happens inside the person's brain when AOL tries to sell them the AOL service.
"I'm already using AOL! Why would I pay for it?"
Tabs are nice for a number of usability reasons.
* The browser window size is predictable; that is, it won't change from one tab to the next, unless you change it for all of them.
* The browser window location is predictable; same reason.
* The number of things floating around on your desktop/taskbar is controllable. Having all those browser windows open slows you down in the most common use scenarios.
OTOH, your point about being able to switch back and forth between web pages is well taken. For that reason, it's still easy to open a new window: right click, new window (same as IE). Middle click is tab by default; I'll bet there's a FF extension somewhere that lets you do double-middle-click as new window.