Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Dyn-O-Mite!, Paper, Sploits
"Kilby ... Kilby .. Kilby ..." [WHACK!] BMagneton writes: "The Nobel Prize for Physics was just awarded to several electronics pioneers, notably Alferov and Kroemer, who invented a bunch of semiconductor device construction methods, and Jack Kilby, who pretty much invented the microchip. The Nobel seems to have gone to a more practical/applied achievement than it usually does." And sconeu writes: "Wired News reports that Jack Kilby have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for his part in the invention of the IC. The prize was split with Herbert Kroemer of UC Santa Barbara and Zhores Alferov of Russia who worked on semiconductor development as well."
And as "Boo," acclaimed international film star Keanu Reeves! Godzookie2k writes: "I was bored out of my mind the other night, and stumbled to boo.com's old site to see what would pop up. Mouth agape, I read: 'Boo.com returns, October 30, 2000.' yippie, you can download the official "boo" screensaver and enter some contest. See for yourself."
Some things are worth bringing back (Old Coke, bermuda shorts), and others may not be. Frankly, I'd never heard of Boo except maybe vaguely in the background until they went bust, time number one. On the other hand, our friend Pee-Wee was pretty funny in Mystery Men, so maybe anything is possible.
A browser for your naked (P)PC; combine with image filtering, stir. Mozilla keeps getting better -- I'm not afraid to show it to anyone right now, for instance -- but it's not exactly lightweight. Anyone who's been following the progress of Galeon may be interested when Markos writes: "Tired of waiting for a lightweight browser, that supports https, frames and all the other good stuff? BrowseX may be what your looking for. 'BrowseX is an Open Source, cross-platform Web Browser written primarily in Tcl.' You can check out the screenshots, features, and download." Or, for those of the Motorola persuasion, you'll be happy to hear that, as sephus writes "Opera for Linux PPC is now available at http://opera.online.no/linux/tgz/ - by popular request from Slashdot readers :) Opera"
Remember, retailers, you better not install these on computer that you know full well are going to be loaded with a god-fearin' American OS-thingie, like Innernet 'Splorer!
"OK, Mr. Gates, Meet Mr. Ponzi. Howdya do?" robl writes "There was a suprisingly under-ranked comment in the Microsoft story yesterday [about Microsoft and Taxes], pointing to the Fool's take on Microsoft's tax situation. It does a great job of clarifying the sfgate article yesterday. You see, Microsoft exercises it's stock options by printing more stock certificates. So they really only lose the cost of the paper and toner to print the stock, and they gain the money from the employees who exercise the options."
In fairness, this is approximately the same system used to fill the hypothetical coffers of the Social Security administration, but MS probably doesn't pay $534.55 for each toner cartridge ;)
My god! And they claim to be secure!? sporri writes: "The OpenBSD homepage has been updated (or downgraded) and now announces "Three years without a remote hole in the default install!" after a root hole was discovered and exploted in a library used by chpass. The sad thing it was fixed in the "current" source tree in June.UpsideToday has an interview with Aaron Campbell." If that's the worst you can say about an OS's security, it's a pretty strong endorsement for it being exemplary in that regard. OpenBSD and Debian get my vote for Most Serious Projects. Comments on the strongest security for (any particular) default Linux distro? Makes me think about Bastille Linux ...
"Maybe it's the fact that it doesn't have a curses or X-based install,"
.."
I've been using Slackware since 2.3 (when I first started using Linux), and still use it today. AFAICT, it uses an ncurses based install. Perhaps it would've been better to say, "just because it doesn't have an X-based install routine
--
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Now they're planning a comeback...and even their announcement page has big graphics and javascript. They've commited the sin of disabling the back button to escape from the site. It really doesn't seem like they learned much from their original mistakes.
I watch the sea.
I saw it on TV.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
They don't guarantee a return on the purchase of their stock, as Mr. Ponzi did on his promissary notes.
However, their apparent profits are based on the same pyramid principle: new capital provides the return on investment for old investors.
This is what happens when people think that a simple extrapolation of past results is a reasonable model of future results.
An illustrative game: Gimme Double!
You hand someone a penny, and say "if you give me twice what I gave you, I might give you twice what you gave me".
They think "what the hell, it's only a penny!" and does it.
It goes back and forth for a while, with both players showing a 100% profit for each transaction (when it comes back to them), and wondering how far they should push it. Both want a significant profit, so they push it at least until it's enough money to care about.
Then one guys stops and keeps the money (hint, only play this game against compulsive gamblers).
In its purest form it's an honest game, just not a sensible one. The problem is when people don't recognize this game (the social stigma attached to gambling helps prevent people from learning these sorts of lessons).
Extend this to millions of players, add tokens to track who gave last, a system that lists the last payments as the "current price", and a class of professional analysts who pretend that it's all a sensible economic behavior, and you've created a pretty good model of a bubble stock like MS. Also, a pretty good model of the whole stock market. Not to mention a reasonable approximation of the monetary/banking system.
(BTW, anyone who sends me a penny at e-gold account number 134343 might get 2 pennies back... in some twisted alternate universe)
--------
My Stupid Patent (for those who care)
:)
A Plan to use Action Describing or Implicating Words in the spoken or written language as a persuasive tool to sell goods and or services.
Our method of Action Describing or Implicating Words (trade name: "Verbs") increases rates of sales by allowing the licensee of the method to fully describe anything, be it an object or an action. This also allows for more persuasive sales pitches! These "Verbs" are the most important part of our method, and should be considered our Intellectual Property. Being that our sales plan relies on this Intellectual Property, all uses not licensed by we, the inventors, are prohibited. Prosecutors will be Violated
Yes. It's a patent on verbs.
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
Weird.
sulli
RTFJ.
Definitely slackware.
Slackware has an appeal to me. Maybe it's the fact that it doesn't have a curses or X-based install, maybe I find pleasure in installing it on a laptop that has only a floppy drive so I have to use 25 disks. Maybe I like having to do it all myself instead of having to press 4 buttons and it be installed, security holes and all. Maybe I don't like package managers. Maybe I like to know where all of my stuff is on my system. Maybe I'm stubborn. Maybe I like to take pride in knowing how it all works.
The interesting part is that I like(d) to use Linux because it was difficult, it wasn't point and click. It was an adventure. Tackling some goal that I wanted to achieve with Linux was FUN. I came out of each one with a mastery over it. I figured out how it ticked! I know how it works. And I took pride in it. RedHat's taken a lot of that away from me.
Slackware is my distro of choice. I'm through with RedHat.
Mike
"I would kill everyone in this room for a drop of sweet beer."
Pardon me for pointing this out, but the posted comment did not say that. It pointed out how microsoft made 5 billion in stock and only 2.8 million in writing software.
2 09&cid=95
And then it pointed to Fool.com (where the information was found at).
Check it out for yourself: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=00/10/09/2226
... resizes your browser window. So, I'm assuming it's a pr0n site, having never visited the thing before today.
Ye Gods and little fishes -- there ought to be a death penalty instigated against web sites that resize your browser window.
Look, people I like my browser windows just how they are. If you screw with them, I'll fix what you fungled and leave, never to return.
Not knowing anything about Boo, I can still say with 100% conviction why they haven't made it. Their home page (as of now, which indicates to me that they've always been like this) is a giant image. This means that it barely gets indexed by search engines. That means nobody's gonna find it.
Good riddance, IMO.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
Okay. BAD REPORTER! BAD SLASHDOT!
I know we hate MS.. but that summary of the fool.com article is *WAY* out of context.
It's not that 'ms simply prints certificates to exercise options'....
THe quote is that 'rather than pay out cash, all MS has to do is have the BOARD OF DIRECTORS VOTE to issue stock certificates for the options.'
This is how *ALL STOCK OPTIONS EVERYWHERE* work. ALL OF THEM.
Also.. the talk of 'put warrants'. These are otherwise known as 'options', as in, options trading. Check out cboe.org (chicago bond & option exchange?). LOTS and LOTS of big companies are listed there and do the same thing.
The context of the fool article is that half of MS income statement can be accounted for on common stock alone, and that it really doesn't reflect their sale of product accurately at all, due to several reasons.
1) Employees are largely paid in options. The benefit to their financial statement here is that the wages they paid out (an incurred expense of business) is significantly less than you would expect, because options issued are not recorded as expenditures.
Employees receive no real benefit here; they are still taxed as if they were paid cash. Read the fool article for details (or learn about employee stock options).
2) Wages paid to employees is tax deductible for Microsoft. By giving them options valued at $xxx, they get the benefit of the tax deduction, without reducing their cash flow, becuase the employees were really paid in options.
3) In fact, on the books, the options actually caused INCOME to come into Microsoft, as employees had to buy them.
Now.. please note. This article is NOT trying to say that Microsoft is cheating on it's taxes, ripping off it's employees, or anything like that.
It's simply pointing out (like the fool always does) that, if you are trying to valuate microsoft and their earnings, as an INVESTOR, you should realize that a *large* part of what they claim as income is coming from their own common stock, and not the products they are selling. Coming by way of tax benefits offset by not spending 'real' money for employee compensation.
BTW... a smaller company can't do this as well, becuase the dilution of their stock from issuing more shares has a much larger impact on the stock value, and paying their employees large percentages of their salaries in options woudl drive the stock price continually downard, defeating the purpose. This only works as long as the company stock value keeps rising. (as long as it's rising, investors don't much care if it's diluted.. as long as it still rises... kind of fucked, eh?)
Is here. This guy really looked into Ponzi, and his site is the best I've found for explaining what a Ponzi scheme is in detail.
Of course, compared to many offers on the web today, Ponzi's supposed rate of return was downright conservative, but you can tell that Charles Ponzi would have LOVED the web. People are stupider these days, I guess...
JMR
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
there have actually been several local root exploits beside chpass recently (all but one were string format related). A few weeks ago, the site read "Only one local root exploit in the past 2 years." SecurityFocus.com's search engine seems dead, so i can't find the exact Bugtraq posts (i clean out my bugtraq file every week or so). But this is nothing new...
--BlueLines "The cost of living hasn't affected it's popularity." -anonymous
http://www.upside.com/texis/mvm/story?id=39dceffe0 is the correct link to the article about openBSD
OpenBSD has had remote holes, for example in their ftp server and the DHCP client, they however claim that since these are not turned on by default, they are "Secure by default". Realistically however most people using OpenBSD that need an ftp server were using the default one, and presto, they were vulnerable. Ditto for anyone using DHCP, which is extremely common on workstations, however the OpenBSD people argued that "no sane admin uses DHCP, it has to many security problems", while this is true to a degree (a "rogue" DHCP server can do quite a bit of damage) realistically unless you want to waste a lot of time configuring and maintaining network settings you use DHCP.
OTOH OpenBSD does have by far the best track record when it comes to exploits in the core distro, I should know, I write a weekly Linux digest and a weekly BSD digest, the BSD one takes a lot less effort.
BTW there is an all Linux security mailing list available now; Click here to sign up via the web form
.