Um, the whole event that we are discussing happened because liquidity (buyers at a market price) disappeared for a few seconds. That sounds like liquidity might be pretty important.

To see this, consider for a second how you'd feel about your bank account, if you didn't know from day to day how much your $5000 was really worth. That is what liquidity is, and I'll bet your daily behavior suggests you value it highly.

They produce nothing except market crashes.

They produce one other thing, that is important to you and I, and that is liquidity and price accuracy. Before electronic trading, stocks traded in spreads of 1/16 to 1/2 point, or even more. That's 12 to 50 cents. Per share. That the market maker put in his pocket, from the average stock purchaser.

With electronic trading, spreads are commonly 1 to 5 cents. That difference is real money when you buy or sell your shares. On a 1000 share lot of a $20 stock (typical for me), the improvement in liquidity means 1 to 2% improvement in return on each end of the trade, simply from the improvement of the market economics. That's money that the ordinary investor gets, that used to go into the pockets of the big brokers that make up the exchange.

The folks doing millisecond trades are arbitraging between various instruments, and I don't think the daily action of their business hurts us. This situation appears to have been due to a technical malfunction of the market, rather than a basic pernicious practice such as the whole sub-prime loan debacle was based on.

Not if they disclaimed all liability in the shrink wrap EULA. Which they do. Read one sometime, it'll be enlightening. Your windows based home control program could die due to a windows update, shutting off the power to grandma's iron lung, and MSFT would be free of claim. So, you'd be exactly in the same place as if you used Linux.

To the general point, for this crowd, MSFT can truly do nothing good. Giving the authorities a heads up once bad news is know is a bad thing? It sounds reasonable to me, and a prudent strategy for the company. I wonder if they give the US guys a little extra notice on the QT.

Perhaps I and the OP are being too subtle for you. Think about it a bit more deeply. They had evolved an economy that was based on agriculture, and required large amounts of manual labor. They didn't organize their lives around owning slaves, they organized their lives about being able to continue the cotton business. Which, for better or worse, the rest of the world was telling them was important through buying the cotton.

Slavery was important, but it likely wasn't the goal. That's an interesting distinction. They likely didn't care about slavery per se, they likely cared about being able to continue an economy. Yes, an economy largely based on slave labor. But it's an interesting distinction, because then you can start thinking about the overall economic causes for the conflict. This is interesting to me because it explains the sharecropper economy that followed the war.

Anyway, no one is arguing that slavery was at the center of this. The point is that banning slavery was an issue for the south because it threatened the underlying cotton economy. It's simplistic to say that slavery was what the war was about though.

Way to miss his point. Sure, slavery was at the heart of the issue, but so was the fact that the south was an economy based on cotton, agriculture, etc, without apparent alternatives to slave labor. It's worth a minute to think about the bigger picture, about why a people would be so invested in an invidious slave trade. It likely wasn't because the crackers sat around and decided one day that they'd like to own some nigras.

Any sort of development running a local database is one example. I do Java/postgres work on a single machine, doing numerical analysis. When I'm doing a run, which is about once a day, two procs are slammed for 2 hours. The other two are still sufficient for browsing /. .

All foreigners are fingerprinted when they enter the country, too.

Hm-m-m, maybe I was special, but I wasn't when I visited Tokyo.

If this is in fact about smart phones, there is at least one competitor (ATT).

Huh? I've heard of some corner case exploits on chroot'ed jails and the author of this system (Joanna) claimed some exploits on VM's which claim was controversial, IIRC. But in practice chrooted jails work pretty well and seem pretty secure if well implemented - I've been using them on FTP servers for years without incident, and they've passed numerous security reviews by our company's security team. VM's likewise seem to be pretty well isolated with either VMWare or Virtual Box. I'm not aware of any documented elevation risk that allows one to pop out of the VM to the host, and if you know of such a risk, I'd like to know more. I'm not sure what your critique of these approaches is. If there is a general indictment of these approaches, I'd like to know more about it, as would a lot of a lot of other folks.

100% protection isn't always an attainable goal. 99% protection is a lot better than no protection. A lot of these measures are a lot like having a dog at home. The dog may not be a perfect deterrent to burglars, but it is a deterrent. If the dog barks, most times the burglar is going to go somewhere else. That's acceptable for most people's needs, including mine, as I'm not running a bank or keeping national secrets.

There are various log files which record logins and use of sudo. You'd be able to review /var/log/secure, and see a login from IP 1.2.3.4 to the root account. There is a file that records use of sudo, though I don't know it's name off the top of my head. Unless, of course, they were nasty and educated enough to go edit the log files. In that case, there would be artifacts, like the passwd file getting changed during a time when no-one was supposedly logged in.

The existance of thesse log files is one reason for requiring use of sudo for everything. It provides an audit trail of who performed admin actions. Many sites disable root logins once this is set up.

There is even a simpler argument: This FOSS fan likes linux for my dev work because it's free, it works, and I like the unix system. There is no morality here - I just use it because it works. I'll use proprietary software without thinking twice (tax season, anyone?).

Unfortunately, Windows is just a little bit more than a VMS clone.

Man you say this like it is a bad thing. If Windows were a VMS clone, it would be bulletproof, stable, usable, but really expensive.

Wait...

I'm dating myself, but I used to love VMS.

Oh, please. Go back to your garage already. UAC, for better or worse, implemented a permissions scheme. Your statement is equivalent to saying that the user security subsystem was created to fix a design problem in the Unix kernel. Both functions exist because of human issues outside the machine.

So why is this a problem?

Generally it's a problem because the sysadmins are busy and can't get to it for a week, and something needs to be installed on this machine today or a team can't get work done.

You seem to be infected with the sysadmin disease that causes the patient to think that no-one else can run yum safely. Generally, the less experienced/capable the admin, the more susceptible they seem to be to this disease. Nobody should be working on the mail server, but they shouldn't need to be doing anything on the mail server, anyway - it should be a protected box. For general development boxes, it shouldn't be an issue. For production boxes, you NEED a sudo account so someone who knows what they are doing can perform production support. Trusting a system admin to do this who doesn't know the application is as risky as letting a secretary administer the mail server.

Less sarcastically, sudo exists for a reason. It's trivial to let someone perform a subset of admin tasks without giving away the keys to the store.

As an admin, it's also smart to learn to delegate these tasks when possible. It reduces your response time to tickets, improves user productivity, and creates skill redundancy. These are all good things for you and the business.