That is, from what I've seen, very true. Most of the older computer scientists that I know have jobs teaching or researching. Companies seem to want cheap labour that can hack together the code, be paid the bare reasonable minimum and sent off again.Maybe that's why there's so many developers willing to go out on a limb and write Free Software?
Does anyone know what the hiring policies of places like VA Linux and RedHat are with regards to more experienced tech workers? (Not the stated policies, the ones that seem to be implied by their actions)
You've said basically what I tried to say below, but much better. Yes, a Windows environment may be familiar, so I can use it quickly... But the limitations of the model mean I can't always do what I want. (For example, even though I'm not a graphics person, I've got The GIMP installed in case I or someone else needs to. Couldn't do that on a Windows box.)
Excuse me if my wording's not clear, I'm a bit rushed.
No, Windows users don't. (I'm a reformed, and now pro-Linux Windows user) I can generally sit down at someone else's Windows box and know my way around inside of five minutes. This is because, in general, Windows just doesn't allow for as much reconfiguration as other systems do. (Linux I have experience with, what about other OSes?) I like being able to configure my system so that everything works the way I like it to. The defaults may not be what I like, but the flexibility is there to make it what I like.
Yes, it does create a larger learning curve. But I think the end result, being able to create an environment you're comfortable in, is worth it. Whether that environment is mainly text, really simple graphics, or the latest and greatest from KDE or GNOME.
I also know that its not always easy to get Linux (again, what I have experience with, can others provide more general details?) to work the way you like. Some things are easy to change, others are harder. But almost everything can be changed.
(My main area of preference is that, for most things, I like a light-on-dark color scheme. Unfortunately, almost everything in the Windows universe defaults to dark-on-light, and changing it in a way that doesn't make a lot of things look like crud is hard for me to do.)
And in this case, bugs isn't defined as normal ("it doesn't free memory", "this bit's vulnerable to buffer overflow", etc). It should also mean that the FBI's code does things other than what they claim it does. Sniff out any packets criticizing the FBI and report the user, for example, or many other things I'm sure they would find useful in some way or another.
Yes, but the problem you run into there is that, in order to inspect the system in any meaningful fashion, the inspectors have to have access to the source. I doubt the people shouting about this would be satisfied if they let a bunch of compsci profs look at the insides of the hardware. So they have to, at some point, let someone see what they've done in there. And it would probably be fairly trivial to work around it anyway, for a reasonably serious criminal. See various articles on this very site about encryptin, burying message data in image files, etc. I'm concerned about the implications for the "average citizen." There are only three logical reasons I can think of why they'd want it kept so top-secret:
Their "AI" stuff really is that bad.
They're really, really stupid and actually believe all this garbage they're throwing around.
It doesn't do what they've been claiming it does, to one degree or another.
Someone linked to a Bugtraq article that provided a VERY good explanation. At least, good if you can read simple C code involving printf(). Basically, what happens is that someone calls printf(user_input_string) instead of printf("%s", user_input_string), or whatever the string format specifier is. So its only a danger if your output function uses format specifiers and doesn't do error checking.
The CNet article really is very poor. The author makes it sound like an end-of-the-world bug in the Unix kernel-level display routines.
I was thinking more along the lines of adding a section to the site dedicated to providing orginization and information. I suppose a Slashbox would work too... Perhaps it would be good if there was a Slashbox linking to multiple sections, each one involving a particular shitty law?
Unfortunately, I'm drawing a blank on more detailed ideas for the content of these sections... Guess my lunchtime coffee's effects are finally wearing off...
What kind of content? I'm more interested in the tech end myself, but I'm wondering what kind of Free content people are working on. Free artwork (still visual stuff) is already fairly common...
Or, even better. Since pretty much everyone on Slashdot (aside from maybe those ugly things under the bridge and the guys over there with flamethrowers) dislikes the DMCA for one reason or another, create a new Slashdot section dedicated to co-ordinating opposition to it. Make a petition part of it, but do other stuff too. Heck, when K5 gets back up, get together with Rusty (he's the guy in charge of K5, right?) and make it a joint effort!
Most? *peers suspiciously at his memory* Oh, so THAT's what all those funny-colored circles are! Whose bright idea was it to give the kernel crayons and point it in the direction of the system memory?
Actually, why bother to use cables at all? I'd think that would just create lots of technical problems relating to friction, and would offer a very tempting point of failure. Wouldn't magnetic rails/rings of some sort be better? I seem to recall that a lot of near-future sci-fi does use those for accelerating things to space... How feasible would this be? Can someone else provide some URLs or hard data? -RickHunter
Re:I think goes deeper than a lack of action...
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Excuse me, but most of my friends IRL are "non-computer-savvy," and I've done a pretty good job of getting across to them the problems these new laws and lawsuits are causing. And the Napster case isn't copyright infringement, not unless they can prove that Napster has no other uses and never could. If it were copyright infringement, they'd go after all the people illegally trading songs.
(Of course, since they used Napster's internal memos to try and prove that the executives involved (at least some of them) started it for the purpose of copyright infringement, then those executives should be penalized.)
-RickHunter
Re:Irish Music Rights Organisation gets Legal too
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Or even copylefted or "original copyright" works. By copylefted, I mean a GPL or BSD like lisence, but modified for music. And by "original copyright," I mean that the artist agrees to only enforce the pre-music-industry-addon copyright laws. Fourteen years, then public domain, fair use, etc. In return, the artist doesn't have to deal with a record company "contract."
Once I get some cash to spare (currently in university) I know that I'm going to try to contribute regularly to the EFF. Or, if one's started by then, a Canadian orginization with the same objectives.
-RickHunter
Re:Have you joined the EFF
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That would be so cool... Going to try and sign up for the EFF and not being able to for days because their sever was overloaded with all the people signing up. Not too likely, but we can hope...
-RickHunter
Re:It's still a democracy.....use it!
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I think that most computer people dislike Hatch because his name's been associated with the DMCA and other nasty stuff. But he's come right out and said that the DMCA had major problems that his staff didn't catch, and that he wants to get rid of it or fix it as soon as possible. From what that article said about him, he intended the DMCA to be what it was advertised as... Then the big media names rewrote it. I'm not a US citizen, but if I was, I'd probably support him.
Of course, I may also not know the big picture. Unfortunately, I don't have a link to the article I saw this stuff in, but if someone could provide links to articles on Hatch, I think that'd be handy.
And one would hope that the Mozilla authors are responsible enough to remove any feature that does wind up being proven to have such a huge security hole (or at least disable it by default) until its been fixed. I don't know of any right now, but I'm sure some will be found eventually.
Ah. If that's the way it works, then no, it isn't very different from a buffer overflow. But from what I understand about the way GCC works, it would do the same stuff as gas, wouldn't it....? Yes, someone who knows more would be VERY helpful here... I'm going to do a search on bugtraq, see what I can come up with.
<sarcasm>Except America, because they're exempt from everything the UN does...</sarcasm>
Seriously, this is already happening, even without government intervention. I seem to recall that, in Britain, the best selling CD player is the one without region encoding. It was a blatant attempt by the MPAA to control who sees what when, and consumers didn't like it. Unfortunately, its also one of the least important (easiest to get around) parts of the whole CSS thing. And its also probably the only part most consumers will care anything about.
Of course, the American public won't care about it. After all, the only things anyone would want to watch are produced in America, right? Never mind that one of the most popular kids shows (Pokemon) is from Japan, and that there's (in total) a fairly substantial group of people who like foreign entertainment media....
Nope. Completely different kind of beast. From what I can tell, this article's talking about printing a string to the screen (I think that's it...) that contains certant control characters that run programs. It sounds like an author misinterpreting the facts to me too, but it could be a real problem. I don't know enough about the code involved.
Yes, this is a good idea. However, it also has the possibility of abuse through artificially inflated ratings by special interest groups, etc. Of course, the best solution to that is, not surprisingly, to be a responsible parent. Be with your kids when they buy things, and make sure that its stuff you'd want them to have. My parents did that with me, and I've turned out Ok.... Probably....
Well, yes. Having a more responsible entity controlling the root nameservers would be an incredible boost. Maybe we should turn that over to Sealand?;-)
PC Gamer doesn't seem that afraid to give good reviews to innovative games. They review a lot of the "X with Y from Z" style of games, and they generally give them very low scores. The only one that they didn't do that for was Starcraft (I'm a Total Annihilation fan, FYI). Of course, my opinion of several of the games they did give high scores to is somewhat different, but they're still pretty good...
Slashdot Mirror
That is, from what I've seen, very true. Most of the older computer scientists that I know have jobs teaching or researching. Companies seem to want cheap labour that can hack together the code, be paid the bare reasonable minimum and sent off again.Maybe that's why there's so many developers willing to go out on a limb and write Free Software?
Does anyone know what the hiring policies of places like VA Linux and RedHat are with regards to more experienced tech workers? (Not the stated policies, the ones that seem to be implied by their actions)
-RickHunter
You've said basically what I tried to say below, but much better. Yes, a Windows environment may be familiar, so I can use it quickly... But the limitations of the model mean I can't always do what I want. (For example, even though I'm not a graphics person, I've got The GIMP installed in case I or someone else needs to. Couldn't do that on a Windows box.)
Excuse me if my wording's not clear, I'm a bit rushed.
-RickHunter
No, Windows users don't. (I'm a reformed, and now pro-Linux Windows user) I can generally sit down at someone else's Windows box and know my way around inside of five minutes. This is because, in general, Windows just doesn't allow for as much reconfiguration as other systems do. (Linux I have experience with, what about other OSes?) I like being able to configure my system so that everything works the way I like it to. The defaults may not be what I like, but the flexibility is there to make it what I like.
Yes, it does create a larger learning curve. But I think the end result, being able to create an environment you're comfortable in, is worth it. Whether that environment is mainly text, really simple graphics, or the latest and greatest from KDE or GNOME.
I also know that its not always easy to get Linux (again, what I have experience with, can others provide more general details?) to work the way you like. Some things are easy to change, others are harder. But almost everything can be changed.
(My main area of preference is that, for most things, I like a light-on-dark color scheme. Unfortunately, almost everything in the Windows universe defaults to dark-on-light, and changing it in a way that doesn't make a lot of things look like crud is hard for me to do.)
-RickHunter
Many eyes. Shallow bugs.
And in this case, bugs isn't defined as normal ("it doesn't free memory", "this bit's vulnerable to buffer overflow", etc). It should also mean that the FBI's code does things other than what they claim it does. Sniff out any packets criticizing the FBI and report the user, for example, or many other things I'm sure they would find useful in some way or another.
-RickHunter
Yes, but the problem you run into there is that, in order to inspect the system in any meaningful fashion, the inspectors have to have access to the source. I doubt the people shouting about this would be satisfied if they let a bunch of compsci profs look at the insides of the hardware. So they have to, at some point, let someone see what they've done in there. And it would probably be fairly trivial to work around it anyway, for a reasonably serious criminal. See various articles on this very site about encryptin, burying message data in image files, etc. I'm concerned about the implications for the "average citizen." There are only three logical reasons I can think of why they'd want it kept so top-secret:
-RickHunter
Someone linked to a Bugtraq article that provided a VERY good explanation. At least, good if you can read simple C code involving printf(). Basically, what happens is that someone calls printf(user_input_string) instead of printf("%s", user_input_string), or whatever the string format specifier is. So its only a danger if your output function uses format specifiers and doesn't do error checking.
The CNet article really is very poor. The author makes it sound like an end-of-the-world bug in the Unix kernel-level display routines.
-RickHunter
I was thinking more along the lines of adding a section to the site dedicated to providing orginization and information. I suppose a Slashbox would work too... Perhaps it would be good if there was a Slashbox linking to multiple sections, each one involving a particular shitty law?
Unfortunately, I'm drawing a blank on more detailed ideas for the content of these sections... Guess my lunchtime coffee's effects are finally wearing off...
-RickHunter
What kind of content? I'm more interested in the tech end myself, but I'm wondering what kind of Free content people are working on. Free artwork (still visual stuff) is already fairly common...
-RickHunter
Or, even better. Since pretty much everyone on Slashdot (aside from maybe those ugly things under the bridge and the guys over there with flamethrowers) dislikes the DMCA for one reason or another, create a new Slashdot section dedicated to co-ordinating opposition to it. Make a petition part of it, but do other stuff too. Heck, when K5 gets back up, get together with Rusty (he's the guy in charge of K5, right?) and make it a joint effort!
-RickHunter
Most? *peers suspiciously at his memory* Oh, so THAT's what all those funny-colored circles are! Whose bright idea was it to give the kernel crayons and point it in the direction of the system memory?
-RickHunter
Actually, why bother to use cables at all? I'd think that would just create lots of technical problems relating to friction, and would offer a very tempting point of failure. Wouldn't magnetic rails/rings of some sort be better? I seem to recall that a lot of near-future sci-fi does use those for accelerating things to space... How feasible would this be? Can someone else provide some URLs or hard data?
-RickHunter
Excuse me, but most of my friends IRL are "non-computer-savvy," and I've done a pretty good job of getting across to them the problems these new laws and lawsuits are causing. And the Napster case isn't copyright infringement, not unless they can prove that Napster has no other uses and never could. If it were copyright infringement, they'd go after all the people illegally trading songs.
(Of course, since they used Napster's internal memos to try and prove that the executives involved (at least some of them) started it for the purpose of copyright infringement, then those executives should be penalized.)
-RickHunter
Or even copylefted or "original copyright" works. By copylefted, I mean a GPL or BSD like lisence, but modified for music. And by "original copyright," I mean that the artist agrees to only enforce the pre-music-industry-addon copyright laws. Fourteen years, then public domain, fair use, etc. In return, the artist doesn't have to deal with a record company "contract."
-RickHunter
No, I'm sorry sir, but your reality cheque has bounced. Please fold yourself into another set of dimensions and try again.
-RickHunter
Once I get some cash to spare (currently in university) I know that I'm going to try to contribute regularly to the EFF. Or, if one's started by then, a Canadian orginization with the same objectives.
-RickHunter
That would be so cool... Going to try and sign up for the EFF and not being able to for days because their sever was overloaded with all the people signing up. Not too likely, but we can hope...
-RickHunter
I think that most computer people dislike Hatch because his name's been associated with the DMCA and other nasty stuff. But he's come right out and said that the DMCA had major problems that his staff didn't catch, and that he wants to get rid of it or fix it as soon as possible. From what that article said about him, he intended the DMCA to be what it was advertised as... Then the big media names rewrote it. I'm not a US citizen, but if I was, I'd probably support him.
Of course, I may also not know the big picture. Unfortunately, I don't have a link to the article I saw this stuff in, but if someone could provide links to articles on Hatch, I think that'd be handy.
-RickHunter
And one would hope that the Mozilla authors are responsible enough to remove any feature that does wind up being proven to have such a huge security hole (or at least disable it by default) until its been fixed. I don't know of any right now, but I'm sure some will be found eventually.
-RickHunter
Ah. If that's the way it works, then no, it isn't very different from a buffer overflow. But from what I understand about the way GCC works, it would do the same stuff as gas, wouldn't it....? Yes, someone who knows more would be VERY helpful here... I'm going to do a search on bugtraq, see what I can come up with.
-RickHunter
<sarcasm>Except America, because they're exempt from everything the UN does...</sarcasm>
Seriously, this is already happening, even without government intervention. I seem to recall that, in Britain, the best selling CD player is the one without region encoding. It was a blatant attempt by the MPAA to control who sees what when, and consumers didn't like it. Unfortunately, its also one of the least important (easiest to get around) parts of the whole CSS thing. And its also probably the only part most consumers will care anything about.
Of course, the American public won't care about it. After all, the only things anyone would want to watch are produced in America, right? Never mind that one of the most popular kids shows (Pokemon) is from Japan, and that there's (in total) a fairly substantial group of people who like foreign entertainment media....
-RickHunter
Nope. Completely different kind of beast. From what I can tell, this article's talking about printing a string to the screen (I think that's it...) that contains certant control characters that run programs. It sounds like an author misinterpreting the facts to me too, but it could be a real problem. I don't know enough about the code involved.
-RickHunter
Yes, this is a good idea. However, it also has the possibility of abuse through artificially inflated ratings by special interest groups, etc. Of course, the best solution to that is, not surprisingly, to be a responsible parent. Be with your kids when they buy things, and make sure that its stuff you'd want them to have. My parents did that with me, and I've turned out Ok.... Probably....
-RickHunter
Well, yes. Having a more responsible entity controlling the root nameservers would be an incredible boost. Maybe we should turn that over to Sealand? ;-)
-RickHunter
PC Gamer doesn't seem that afraid to give good reviews to innovative games. They review a lot of the "X with Y from Z" style of games, and they generally give them very low scores. The only one that they didn't do that for was Starcraft (I'm a Total Annihilation fan, FYI). Of course, my opinion of several of the games they did give high scores to is somewhat different, but they're still pretty good...
-RickHunter
One to definitely add to the list of good British games: Independence War. Its old, but amazingly well-done.
-RickHunter