The problem is now that Microsoft knows (or being told) about the holes but often takes a very long time to fix it and sometimes ditch the bugs as "unimportant". This is even worse as this *will* give a plenty opportunity for the hackers to implement the exploit.
The very nature of closed sorce binary distribution, especially as practiced by M$, makes it imposible to fix bugs. The limited numbers of M$ developers are further hampered by NDA's and closed source than their numbers would indicate. because Software Develpmnet Kits (SDKs) needed by programers of M$ junk cost money to replace. This creates a secondary source of unpatched binaries that continue to infect the world even after M$ has patched the problems in their own code. M$ may or may not fix the SDK or holes in their OS, no one can help them, and those that would help may not even benifit from M$ fixing the problem. This is amplified by confused users who's only way to fix problems of M$ bit rot is to "rebuild" the machine with the ancient unfixed CD that came with it. The only solution to this kind of problem is free software.
article posits: teachers have not yet found better use for computers than as a big library. and ac responds, It is too tempting for them to be used for 'messing around' with...[horid software]... and the Internet....
That's right, this vast new library is ruining our children's education! They are sucked in and spend all their time reading and learning! The shame of it, censor it now or we will never be able to control their little thoughts.
If the EMT could see that the type of crash was likely to cause internal injuries, they could get you to a trauma center faster even if you didn't show any immediate symptoms.
Pthththth-fit. EMT need to get you to a trauma center based on their jundgment of your condition. A silly box in your car would provide them with few clues that can't be had from the apearence of your wrecked vehicle. There's only one speed they take people to the hospitial based on need, they go no faster or slower than they can safetly. If there's any chance you need to go, you go. No first responder is going to waste time looking for a little black box which may or may not provide uselful information and may or may not even be working.
This has noting to do with automobile makers charging you for a box you can't talk to or control. Let's just say that you are going to have a hard time convincing people that such a device is a feature they want, especially from the same companies that balked about the costs of putting in reasonable seatbelts and air bags. "Oh, that will ruin us" they told us. Right, safety is job one and this is being done for my good.
When the airbags go off in a new Mercedes SUV, the onboard phone rings the dealer 'concierge', who in turn attempts to contact the driver. It is just a simple leap to imagine a conference call to the nearest ambulance. GPS locators are already in place in the Mercedes...a pre-signed agreement to release your medical data, and the ambulance crew can have a head start on helping you in case of an injury.
You have got two seperate problems all mixed up and are using a flawed argument for one to advace the other. Medical records have nothing to do with automobiles. Your car having the brains to call an ambulance has nothing to do with propriatory formats.
Who needs the automobile vendor in the middle medical records? Does a doctor need permission from an unconcious victim to get medical records? I don't want my vehicle giving that kind of permission, espcially over something silly like an air bag explosion.
In any case, a standard format for the data should be made and it should be under the vehicle owner's control. I should know if someone I lent my car to has abused it. I should also be able to keep information about where I've been to myself or delete the information if I want to. This can't be done if every vehicle is built with a different, seceret format. A box I can't control in my vehicle makes my vehicle less mine and more someone else's spy and that is evil.
Your potential benifit is a seperate, spurious issue and you have not considered the implications of propriatory formats. You might be more careful in your advocacy. Don't call people Chicken Little when you don't know what you are talking about.
Only someone who's got experience with NT and "non-Windows" operating systems would know what kind of portablility the new.NeT should have. It will resemble the famous Korn shell of NT and be at least as portable as NT was. Ah yes, the new CEMENT OS is on the way.
Oh. Like cold fusion. Then the media will tear them apart.
Funny you should mention that. As a former student at the LSU Nuclear Science Center, I can tell you that cold fusion was investigated without results. People there spent time, energy and money to try to reproduce cold fusion but never saw any neutrons. It just goes to show that people will look into things.
I'm not sure they ever did anything with this kind of "fuser." They had a linear accelerator which they used for fusion and other experiments. I don't know what kind of flux they got out of it nor do I know if anyone there worked on any other kind of fusion. They have an impressive collection of thesis and disertations hanging around the building.
I was a bit dismayed to see that this article seemed to glorify spamming without mentioning any of the negative/annoying side effects.
Don't worry, M$NBC will make sure that only a few "legitimate" operations will be able to spam you. To do so, they will pump up the problems of unregulated email servers or some other stupid pap. How else can you extend your monopoly into the net? Works for both M$ and NBC. Then all your mail boxes will look like your AOL or Hotmail. At least then they might stop paying people to send out porn spam. Annoy people enough and you can screw them as you please when you claim to be their savior. Good stuff, eh?
I suggest you listen in on CB frequencies for a while at night to see what sort of thing lack of regulation would bring to the spectrum as a whole.
Can you tell me why I sould compare amplitude modulated voice comunications on a single frequency, technology much like Marconi used 100 years ago, to freqency hopping, digital communications? Asside from the use that people get out of CB and the usless FCC restrictions, these two unlicensed freqency specturms have little in common. What do you get out of FCC regulations? All I get is really bad broadcast TV and radio.
Have some juice and cookies, it will make you feel better when people disagree with you. It's not a flame, it's a different point of view.
The whole point of the article seems to be to reasure windoze users that it's OK to never leave the start menue and precondition expectations for those who do so that they feel miserable when they do. He offers up Connectix Virtual PC as a representative of Linux, then tells us that it will prove that Linux sucks. Have a look at the, will you, then go back to sleep and keep sending your money he tells us.
Yes, the whole article is an ignorant slam. It's so stupid, that a starting point of constructive criticism is hard to find. He describes the whole free software world as a windoze deriviative born on x86 by "boring coders" and other uncreative types that lacks "features" of the only true software, Microsoft. That's the kind of insight you might expect from someone who's only experience with the free software world comes from having popped a CD into his machine for five minutes or so. Of course not one word is correct. True to the pure troll, he offers no useful alternatives to the things he does not like, except to stick with the M$ word of undefined features.
For those of you who might not be aware of this, the millions of free and open software coders of the world are much better researched than Dvorac. GNU/Linux has taken the best sofware concepts from all operating systems. It takes it's multi user security model from the Unix world. WIMPs came from Bell and Xerox Park, and many different GUI systems are available as free software. The most prominant and one of the most powerful is XFree86, a network aware base for many fine Window managers. Window managers of all descriptions and sources are available to run on top of X. You can get Virtual Reality and 3D desktops if you want them. Yes, it's true that you can make these window managers act just like M$ junk, but you can change that with a press of a theme button. Some prominant window managers come with a default that looks like M$ junk so new users can learn how to make the thing work at their own pace. You see, choice is what free software is all about. Developers and users are free to follow any fancy they have and it all works together. Most free software has been ported to other hardware and even different software platforms. I have not even mentioned the Berkely Software Distribution universe and it's derivatives in use by many including the very artsy Apple. Free software is also being adopted by the opposite end of the computer using specturm as well - the dull likes of IBM and Wall Street Bankers. You can take it and make it what you want, so anyone and everyone is now doing just that. They are are generally happy and wonder in time how they ever managed to get along in the coiceless and ever more rapicious propriatory software world.
While it's a little harder to ignore the world, there are sucess stories like Japan. They told the west in general to stick it for a couple hundred years and studied like hell. When the US finaly showed up with gunboats, they opened up a little, studdied even harder and thought about how to tell the US to stick it. In all that time, they were very careful to not let anyone else exploit them. Finally, after a little not so nice expansion and a US economic boycot, they decided to tell the US to stick it. The US then crushed them utterly, decimating their military and flatening many large cities. Oh well, independence has a cost sometimes. Still, today they avoid economic exploitation. Their workers now earn more than US workers, on average, and they may actually work fewer hours. Ha!
It's all a matter of how much respect you have for your fellow citizen. In order for outsiders to enslave you, you must first enslave yourself.
In any case, this silly IMF phone tax will indeed tax business regardless of how regressive it may be. Reduced communications hurt everyone and slow up the entire economy. When you can't talk, you can't get things done.
L2ke 987t h2e says, you can pick the sound of an individual voice out of a room full of people, just like you can read the subject and start of this post. He's just worried that every room will start to sound like a crowd scene if our ear's calibration drifts due to cheapness on the part of comercial broadcasters. Some people never turn the TV off, and play the radio at the same time. Think of what that will do to infants. Will they grow up hearing the world as we do, or will they be damaged. It's worth considering.
Try an extreem example for yourself some time. Walk around with headphones on playing only a single tone and see what it does to your hearing.
How about when everyone in Al-Qeada admitted it....over and over again on videotape, on audiotape, and on the internet? Or how about many other countries overwhelming evidence that clearly points that direction? Or is that still not enough proof for you?
Nope, that's not good enough. I want a well documented proof in the public record. I want the guilty to stand trial and be convicted for all to see. You know, sworn testimony and all that. CNN film footage is not reasonable proof, even if it contains proportedly self incrimiating statements. I want the folks who made those statements caught and tried and proved guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Even self incrimination is not enough when you are dealing with suicide bombers!
You don't get that kind of proof from snooping on inocent people's email and business transactions. You get that kind of proof by examining witnesses and physical evidence AFTER a crime has been commited. Total Information Awareness will not prevent or solve terrorism any more than the universal police camera coverage in London has decreased crime or terrorism there. Total Information Awareness is simply a move towards tracking and harassing opposition. In the future it can be used to eliminate that opposition and it will be.
We have folks comparing this to another step twords 1984. In readiong their comments, I wonder if they've even read the book?
The central thesis of 1984 was that people will abuse the power they have. Once technology was developed to monitor your thoughts, thoughts would be monitored and any thought that might detract loyalty from the government would be outlawed. The term was thoughtcrime and it was related to sexcrime. Any means to achieve this state, including bombing your own people would be used and perpetual warfare was required to motivate the people and waste their efforts. We are very much on the way here in the US.
First, examine thoughtcrime. We already have laws against thoughts such as "hate crime" laws which gauge the intent of the criminal rather than actions and harm done. The federal government has long forbiden any group recieving federal funds from donating to "hate" groups. That's disturbing on it's own but much more so in a society where more than 1 in 4 $ of GDP are federal spending. Symbols are being outlawed, words and phrases are not far behind. These new monitoring plans are extensions of police "profiling" efforts and Carnivore. Now, thanks to Patriot and USA Act, domestic spying including inflitration of religious organizations, is legal. Illegal activities are being encouraged, with the understanding that it will lead to evidence that CAN be legaly used, and that is the spirit of these new laws. Today, your thoughts will get you monitored and blacklisted which involves a real loss of privalidge. Soon, those thoughts might get you raided and jailed. As the machinery of thought monitoring improves, more thoughts will become illegal. This new survailence system WILL be targeted, and hence very useful. Everybit as useful as the random checks of indviduals by two way televisions of 1984. The could be watching, so you have to behave, forever.
Now examine what the government is willing to do to achieve the above violation or your rights and expansion of it's power. I have yet to see reasonable proof of exactly who was responsible for 9/11, and so have not put the CIA or Israeli secret police off my list. Ossama was trained and supplied by the CIA when the struggle was against the Soviets. Any institution that has gained since then is suspect. There is no end to the "war against terror" A war against individual criminals is not a war, it's a police action, but that will have to do for now. Soon enough, we can get ourselves into a shooting war. Orwell predicted that all the centers of culture would be wiped out in order to make the new perpetual oligarchical states. I hope the folks willing to trade a little freedom for a little security are not also willing to trade a little prosperity for a little order.
And that is enough duckspeak for me today. File it, it will come in handy when The Book of rebelious thoughts is compiled to trap the disobedient. Oldthinkders unbellyfeel Ingsoc!
You are goddamned fucking lucky that the government tells you what the default values for things should be. That's what the government is there for, mostly; to tell you that the default value for a building is to have a fire exit and that it may not be locked.
Most rational specifications are for performance. The method should not matter as much as the end result. Fire codes are an extreem example, but even there the specification is flexible. The local government does not tell people how to build buildings, only that there needs to be so many exits per so many people and floor space. They don't nail you down to real specifics. Most rational specs are such as mil-specs for acryilic - it must be able to sit in the South Florida sun for one year without delaminating. How you make the thing does not matter, so long as it does what it should.
By these rational and objective standards M$ junk generally fails. If you say that a Word doc should be legible and keep it's formatting for a number of years, Word fails. The same thing can be said of all other M$ junk - it's designed to break and therfore government should reject it's use anywhere records are kept. That's all public work. That's hardly engineering the document, it's simply stating the thing should work as advertised.
All normal standards, from ASCII to WWWC are formed by professional agreement. Governments intervention is not needed. Disruptive vendors are generally seen through.
Whenever someone comes to me claiming to have built their PC, I ask them to describe their technique for etching multi-layer circuit boards....Then they stomp on my foot. I don't know why.
Real men need two layers or less. The techinques are simple and need no further explaination than double sided pc board. Now you know.
Just like a good education, some people don't get it. Who needs to spend time learning? Why put money into tools? I'm happier ignorant and helpless, thanks AC for the words of wizzdom.
The troll pretends not to understand that the DMCA will keep the free developers from granting his wish. Of course, the object seems to be to fire animosity through missinformation and thereby dilute the utility of this news site.
his animosity is manifest in posts like this and that and this. Nasty isn't he?
What a great flame. I don't own an Apple, and I got pissed. Well, here's a little something for your trouble.
You say this and a lot of other negative stuff about Apple:
A lot of my dislike of QuickTime has to do with their shitty, buggy, windows viewer program
What do you expect? It's windows, right? Try getting Media Player to behave. I'll spare you, it looks something like this. Broken OLE, poorly implemented file system, non implemented portable net graphics rendering, look at my advert, download my crap, ad nauseum (that's latin for party till you puke).
You don't work on libpr0n, do you? Nah, no one running win2k has a real clue, though you do seem to be catching on (if that's you) how painful sounding. Wait, this is you, "But in all seriousness I know my life would be a lot nicer if everyone used truly open, independent file formats and codecs." Bing, bing, bing, Gold Star for you.
Oh well, thanks for crapping on Apple. It's always nice to see a postive post, full of insight on how to make things work right. It's almost as good as a porn meta site that crams banner adverts accross real porn sites. To be fair, the ratings system is value added, but some people might get the impression you are simply pimping pimps. That's much better, however, than pimping M$ especially by simply crapping on everyone else.
You say two things that seem to contradict each other. Please help me out. First you say:
If you really want people like Texas Instruments to do something that would make a lot more sense, you would push for them to release an expanded line of DSP's and hardware that is container and codec agnostic. Demand more from your chips. Don't tell TI 'design a chip for MPEG-4,' tell them to stop making chips that require hideously expensive compilers and NDA's.
That looks sensible, but then you say:
I don't want TI to make chips that just support Ogg. I want TI to make chips that support stuff today, and give me at least a fighting chance on supporting tomorrow's Codec du Jour. People freak out if they buy a home computer that won't last them for a year.
I'm floored. Why don't you want TI to build Ogg chips? There's little in the electronics industry more general than a home computer, and you know that the reason most won't last for more than a year is a matter of abusive prorgraming by certian software vendors. Would'nt a little hardware support for patent free technology help fix things? While stuff like this is nice, would'nt it be great to have $2.00 OGG players hanging out in the toy section at Wal Mart? Is there something I don't know about those $2.00 MP3 players?
It's very nice of the state of New York, and perhaps the federal government, to take my tax money and not tell me what they did with it or let me enjoy the information collected. I'm glad the government will protect me and my culture this way. It reminds me of the DMCA, another great way my government protects me and my culture by keeping things secret.
Soon, I hope that they make the whole sea bottom property of the federal government, so that any ship that sinks will be owned by my children forever on the bottom. That way, I know that I'll always be able to get great rewards from today's disasters. As it is, just anyone can go out and riun my heratige. Obviouly, only someone approved by the federal government should be alowed to pick up wrecks from the sea floor. The proceeds can be used to keep me from doing the same thing myself. I know that I'm not special and can't or won't learn how to do things right. It's not like you can simply make a law about how certian wrecks must be documented and share the information about state of the art preservation, now is it? No, I'm sure people will always get around the law if they can for filthy lucre, after all I'm greedy like that and so are so many other posters here who openly say this is such a good thing that New York is doing.
New York has always been so far advanced in the ways of correct government. Just look at Tamany Hall! Wow, New Yorkers sure know how to co-operate. Exclusive franchises rock, NDAs are wonderful. How else can we maintain such excellence?
- Design the system so that it requires change controls
So who has the "change control" if not the administrator?
- Take daily md5 snap shots of systems
Woot, the system stays the same and this dude's chron jobs execute on time.
- Always keep off site duplicates of your monthly full back ups. It's not just for DR; it's also for versioning.
I suppose your monthly full back up will save your bacon, as well as the chron job. Still, the chron job can be found and the data repaired. That's what happened here, right?
- Sue him out of existence and make sure EVERY employer in the area knows about it - not just for vengence, but also as a heads up to other rouge sysadmins.
Not so fast. First you have to prove that he did it. I have not seen anything but an accuasation yet. Imagine that you have a disagreement with your boss. The dumb dumb wants to do something you know will be a disaster, you disagree and quit. He does it, it's a disaster, then he blames and frames you siting you being dissatisfied with the subpar salary you put up with for years. Woops, you be very very rouge now, like third degree red, while your boss claims that you are a rogue.
In other words, follow best practices and procedures.
That's a very good question, it's too bad you were joking. You can fix the advert problem by adding "ALL: www.transfer.com" to your hosts.deny file. It uses CGI to load up images from other sites based on some hideous random number. Blocking the images from www.transfer.com does no good because the images come from other servers. Blocking all crap from them cleans the page up and eliminates their pop ups too. Now for the serious matter.
The article was a slam job. It has a byline of december 17th and says that they tried to contact the sixty year old perpetrator the same day he was due to go to trial. Duh, someone chruning through the justice system might be hard to reach. Yet we are unable to tell if he refused comment or was simply not reached. All we have is the accusation.
Presumption of innoncence is a nice thing to have. There are several reasonable explainations for this man's actions. He might have quit in disgust, having been overridden by management on several key issues and just known that the results would be catastrophic. We have no proof yet that he really planted "bombs", we have only the prosecutor's interpretation of what the company and software vendors told them. I wonder just how he will be able to defend himself without access to systems that have been manipulated by his accusers.
This case should send chills down your spine. There is no way to keep a responsible person from sabotaging a company. It's the same case in meat space, anyone can throw a monkey wrench into the works. In cyberspace much more is stacked against you. The evidence is not easy to explain, is easy to create and destroy, and is wholy controled by those accusing you. It can not be visited by your defenders and what they find if they could look can be modified without a trace.
PDA troll from a guy who says he keeps his PDA in a drawer.
Wow, all in the last 25 comments. Now, above in glorious living print is a C#, Visual Studio, boast, perl smash. No sane person can favorably compare an M$ environment to a free on anymore.
Perl works great for me. Combined with bash scripting, GNU utilities like find, grep and friends, ordinary C/C++ programing, hell even FORTRAN, or any of the other compilers of the GNU compiler collection, and you have unmatched power and flexibility. No other platform offers as much. Find me an equal to ImageMagic. That's just a small example. Most common work is already done and modifying it to your particular case is not difficult. If that's not enough, you might consider security issues and the perpetual "upgrade" path that will break your M$ junk with more junk of equal or lesser quality and utility. In the free world, upgrades improve your old stuff and replacements are generally better.
In short, MS got it's ass kicked. They quickly swept that defeat under the rug, and you rarely ever hear about it, which is I'm sure what will happen with this defeat.
The embrace and extend policy you mentioned is ongoing, and the fools still think they can make the web an IE only place. They are doing this by a combinatin of making IE suck and promotions of horrid M$ only junk like activeX. So while they have changed their tune, the trajectory is the same. It's a stupid policy that will ruin them, because beter free alternatives are available.
The net result is that nothing actually works. Last weekend, I got a real shocking demonstration of just how bad IE really is. My father in law has a windoze 2000 box at the mercy of the smart updater. He has the latest and greatest IE6.0 with all the patches, and he has Norton Utilities to try and fix M$ registry problems and all that. I made a CD full of baby girl movies and tested it on his machine to see what he would see. He did not see much. IE was unable to display thubnails named ".thumb_number.thm.jpg", it was unable to display portable net graphics on it's own and object linking embeding for png and avi was horribly broken. Quick time, set as the default veiwer was able to display png files but not as thumbnails in an index. Media player was unable to display avi films, despite the fact that avi is a microsoft format. Media player played the sound and gave a picture of some stoner screen saver. Quicktime was able to display them on it's own, but IE insisted that Quicktime display inside IE. Everytime you pushed on a link, it piped up a dialog box that asked you if you wanted to run the movie inside IE. The default was yes and "remember my preference". If you clicked "no" it would pop the same dialog again as if it did not believe your first answer. It never remembered the "no" answer. Four clicks to view a movie or one click not to. Quicktime was unable to display the movie inside IE. Eventually, we made a mistake and the default behavior was the broken one. I really could not believe that it sucked that bad. This is the company that would try to manage my online identity?
M$ lost him that day. I downloaded Mozilla for him, it worked perfectly and that was it. This is a guy that gets his news from CNN, had swallowed the M$ propaganda about anti-trust and had an aversion to Netscape over it.
M$ needs to retreat and fix their junk, but it's way too late. They will be overwhelmed by the quality of free software. Bob, MSN, NET, it's all the same noise.
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The very nature of closed sorce binary distribution, especially as practiced by M$, makes it imposible to fix bugs. The limited numbers of M$ developers are further hampered by NDA's and closed source than their numbers would indicate. because Software Develpmnet Kits (SDKs) needed by programers of M$ junk cost money to replace. This creates a secondary source of unpatched binaries that continue to infect the world even after M$ has patched the problems in their own code. M$ may or may not fix the SDK or holes in their OS, no one can help them, and those that would help may not even benifit from M$ fixing the problem. This is amplified by confused users who's only way to fix problems of M$ bit rot is to "rebuild" the machine with the ancient unfixed CD that came with it. The only solution to this kind of problem is free software.
That's right, this vast new library is ruining our children's education! They are sucked in and spend all their time reading and learning! The shame of it, censor it now or we will never be able to control their little thoughts.
Pthththth-fit. EMT need to get you to a trauma center based on their jundgment of your condition. A silly box in your car would provide them with few clues that can't be had from the apearence of your wrecked vehicle. There's only one speed they take people to the hospitial based on need, they go no faster or slower than they can safetly. If there's any chance you need to go, you go. No first responder is going to waste time looking for a little black box which may or may not provide uselful information and may or may not even be working.
This has noting to do with automobile makers charging you for a box you can't talk to or control. Let's just say that you are going to have a hard time convincing people that such a device is a feature they want, especially from the same companies that balked about the costs of putting in reasonable seatbelts and air bags. "Oh, that will ruin us" they told us. Right, safety is job one and this is being done for my good.
When the airbags go off in a new Mercedes SUV, the onboard phone rings the dealer 'concierge', who in turn attempts to contact the driver. It is just a simple leap to imagine a conference call to the nearest ambulance. GPS locators are already in place in the Mercedes...a pre-signed agreement to release your medical data, and the ambulance crew can have a head start on helping you in case of an injury.
You have got two seperate problems all mixed up and are using a flawed argument for one to advace the other. Medical records have nothing to do with automobiles. Your car having the brains to call an ambulance has nothing to do with propriatory formats.
Who needs the automobile vendor in the middle medical records? Does a doctor need permission from an unconcious victim to get medical records? I don't want my vehicle giving that kind of permission, espcially over something silly like an air bag explosion.
In any case, a standard format for the data should be made and it should be under the vehicle owner's control. I should know if someone I lent my car to has abused it. I should also be able to keep information about where I've been to myself or delete the information if I want to. This can't be done if every vehicle is built with a different, seceret format. A box I can't control in my vehicle makes my vehicle less mine and more someone else's spy and that is evil.
Your potential benifit is a seperate, spurious issue and you have not considered the implications of propriatory formats. You might be more careful in your advocacy. Don't call people Chicken Little when you don't know what you are talking about.
Only someone who's got experience with NT and "non-Windows" operating systems would know what kind of portablility the new .NeT should have. It will resemble the famous Korn shell of NT and be at least as portable as NT was. Ah yes, the new CEMENT OS is on the way.
Funny you should mention that. As a former student at the LSU Nuclear Science Center, I can tell you that cold fusion was investigated without results. People there spent time, energy and money to try to reproduce cold fusion but never saw any neutrons. It just goes to show that people will look into things.
I'm not sure they ever did anything with this kind of "fuser." They had a linear accelerator which they used for fusion and other experiments. I don't know what kind of flux they got out of it nor do I know if anyone there worked on any other kind of fusion. They have an impressive collection of thesis and disertations hanging around the building.
Don't worry, M$NBC will make sure that only a few "legitimate" operations will be able to spam you. To do so, they will pump up the problems of unregulated email servers or some other stupid pap. How else can you extend your monopoly into the net? Works for both M$ and NBC. Then all your mail boxes will look like your AOL or Hotmail. At least then they might stop paying people to send out porn spam. Annoy people enough and you can screw them as you please when you claim to be their savior. Good stuff, eh?
Can you tell me why I sould compare amplitude modulated voice comunications on a single frequency, technology much like Marconi used 100 years ago, to freqency hopping, digital communications? Asside from the use that people get out of CB and the usless FCC restrictions, these two unlicensed freqency specturms have little in common. What do you get out of FCC regulations? All I get is really bad broadcast TV and radio.
Have some juice and cookies, it will make you feel better when people disagree with you. It's not a flame, it's a different point of view.
Yes, the whole article is an ignorant slam. It's so stupid, that a starting point of constructive criticism is hard to find. He describes the whole free software world as a windoze deriviative born on x86 by "boring coders" and other uncreative types that lacks "features" of the only true software, Microsoft. That's the kind of insight you might expect from someone who's only experience with the free software world comes from having popped a CD into his machine for five minutes or so. Of course not one word is correct. True to the pure troll, he offers no useful alternatives to the things he does not like, except to stick with the M$ word of undefined features.
For those of you who might not be aware of this, the millions of free and open software coders of the world are much better researched than Dvorac. GNU/Linux has taken the best sofware concepts from all operating systems. It takes it's multi user security model from the Unix world. WIMPs came from Bell and Xerox Park, and many different GUI systems are available as free software. The most prominant and one of the most powerful is XFree86, a network aware base for many fine Window managers. Window managers of all descriptions and sources are available to run on top of X. You can get Virtual Reality and 3D desktops if you want them. Yes, it's true that you can make these window managers act just like M$ junk, but you can change that with a press of a theme button. Some prominant window managers come with a default that looks like M$ junk so new users can learn how to make the thing work at their own pace. You see, choice is what free software is all about. Developers and users are free to follow any fancy they have and it all works together. Most free software has been ported to other hardware and even different software platforms. I have not even mentioned the Berkely Software Distribution universe and it's derivatives in use by many including the very artsy Apple. Free software is also being adopted by the opposite end of the computer using specturm as well - the dull likes of IBM and Wall Street Bankers. You can take it and make it what you want, so anyone and everyone is now doing just that. They are are generally happy and wonder in time how they ever managed to get along in the coiceless and ever more rapicious propriatory software world.
It's all a matter of how much respect you have for your fellow citizen. In order for outsiders to enslave you, you must first enslave yourself.
In any case, this silly IMF phone tax will indeed tax business regardless of how regressive it may be. Reduced communications hurt everyone and slow up the entire economy. When you can't talk, you can't get things done.
Try an extreem example for yourself some time. Walk around with headphones on playing only a single tone and see what it does to your hearing.
Nope, that's not good enough. I want a well documented proof in the public record. I want the guilty to stand trial and be convicted for all to see. You know, sworn testimony and all that. CNN film footage is not reasonable proof, even if it contains proportedly self incrimiating statements. I want the folks who made those statements caught and tried and proved guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. Even self incrimination is not enough when you are dealing with suicide bombers!
You don't get that kind of proof from snooping on inocent people's email and business transactions. You get that kind of proof by examining witnesses and physical evidence AFTER a crime has been commited. Total Information Awareness will not prevent or solve terrorism any more than the universal police camera coverage in London has decreased crime or terrorism there. Total Information Awareness is simply a move towards tracking and harassing opposition. In the future it can be used to eliminate that opposition and it will be.
The central thesis of 1984 was that people will abuse the power they have. Once technology was developed to monitor your thoughts, thoughts would be monitored and any thought that might detract loyalty from the government would be outlawed. The term was thoughtcrime and it was related to sexcrime. Any means to achieve this state, including bombing your own people would be used and perpetual warfare was required to motivate the people and waste their efforts. We are very much on the way here in the US.
First, examine thoughtcrime. We already have laws against thoughts such as "hate crime" laws which gauge the intent of the criminal rather than actions and harm done. The federal government has long forbiden any group recieving federal funds from donating to "hate" groups. That's disturbing on it's own but much more so in a society where more than 1 in 4 $ of GDP are federal spending. Symbols are being outlawed, words and phrases are not far behind. These new monitoring plans are extensions of police "profiling" efforts and Carnivore. Now, thanks to Patriot and USA Act, domestic spying including inflitration of religious organizations, is legal. Illegal activities are being encouraged, with the understanding that it will lead to evidence that CAN be legaly used, and that is the spirit of these new laws. Today, your thoughts will get you monitored and blacklisted which involves a real loss of privalidge. Soon, those thoughts might get you raided and jailed. As the machinery of thought monitoring improves, more thoughts will become illegal. This new survailence system WILL be targeted, and hence very useful. Everybit as useful as the random checks of indviduals by two way televisions of 1984. The could be watching, so you have to behave, forever.
Now examine what the government is willing to do to achieve the above violation or your rights and expansion of it's power. I have yet to see reasonable proof of exactly who was responsible for 9/11, and so have not put the CIA or Israeli secret police off my list. Ossama was trained and supplied by the CIA when the struggle was against the Soviets. Any institution that has gained since then is suspect. There is no end to the "war against terror" A war against individual criminals is not a war, it's a police action, but that will have to do for now. Soon enough, we can get ourselves into a shooting war. Orwell predicted that all the centers of culture would be wiped out in order to make the new perpetual oligarchical states. I hope the folks willing to trade a little freedom for a little security are not also willing to trade a little prosperity for a little order.
And that is enough duckspeak for me today. File it, it will come in handy when The Book of rebelious thoughts is compiled to trap the disobedient. Oldthinkders unbellyfeel Ingsoc!
I'll be able to "upgrade" to DRM for only the price of a new TV? Excellent! What am I waiting for?
Most rational specifications are for performance. The method should not matter as much as the end result. Fire codes are an extreem example, but even there the specification is flexible. The local government does not tell people how to build buildings, only that there needs to be so many exits per so many people and floor space. They don't nail you down to real specifics. Most rational specs are such as mil-specs for acryilic - it must be able to sit in the South Florida sun for one year without delaminating. How you make the thing does not matter, so long as it does what it should.
By these rational and objective standards M$ junk generally fails. If you say that a Word doc should be legible and keep it's formatting for a number of years, Word fails. The same thing can be said of all other M$ junk - it's designed to break and therfore government should reject it's use anywhere records are kept. That's all public work. That's hardly engineering the document, it's simply stating the thing should work as advertised.
All normal standards, from ASCII to WWWC are formed by professional agreement. Governments intervention is not needed. Disruptive vendors are generally seen through.
Real men need two layers or less. The techinques are simple and need no further explaination than double sided pc board. Now you know.
Just like a good education, some people don't get it. Who needs to spend time learning? Why put money into tools? I'm happier ignorant and helpless, thanks AC for the words of wizzdom.
his animosity is manifest in posts like this and that and this. Nasty isn't he?
You say this and a lot of other negative stuff about Apple:
A lot of my dislike of QuickTime has to do with their shitty, buggy, windows viewer program
What do you expect? It's windows, right? Try getting Media Player to behave. I'll spare you, it looks something like this. Broken OLE, poorly implemented file system, non implemented portable net graphics rendering, look at my advert, download my crap, ad nauseum (that's latin for party till you puke).
You don't work on libpr0n, do you? Nah, no one running win2k has a real clue, though you do seem to be catching on (if that's you) how painful sounding. Wait, this is you, "But in all seriousness I know my life would be a lot nicer if everyone used truly open, independent file formats and codecs." Bing, bing, bing, Gold Star for you.
Oh well, thanks for crapping on Apple. It's always nice to see a postive post, full of insight on how to make things work right. It's almost as good as a porn meta site that crams banner adverts accross real porn sites. To be fair, the ratings system is value added, but some people might get the impression you are simply pimping pimps. That's much better, however, than pimping M$ especially by simply crapping on everyone else.
If you really want people like Texas Instruments to do something that would make a lot more sense, you would push for them to release an expanded line of DSP's and hardware that is container and codec agnostic. Demand more from your chips. Don't tell TI 'design a chip for MPEG-4,' tell them to stop making chips that require hideously expensive compilers and NDA's.
That looks sensible, but then you say:
I don't want TI to make chips that just support Ogg. I want TI to make chips that support stuff today, and give me at least a fighting chance on supporting tomorrow's Codec du Jour. People freak out if they buy a home computer that won't last them for a year.
I'm floored. Why don't you want TI to build Ogg chips? There's little in the electronics industry more general than a home computer, and you know that the reason most won't last for more than a year is a matter of abusive prorgraming by certian software vendors. Would'nt a little hardware support for patent free technology help fix things? While stuff like this is nice, would'nt it be great to have $2.00 OGG players hanging out in the toy section at Wal Mart? Is there something I don't know about those $2.00 MP3 players?
Soon, I hope that they make the whole sea bottom property of the federal government, so that any ship that sinks will be owned by my children forever on the bottom. That way, I know that I'll always be able to get great rewards from today's disasters. As it is, just anyone can go out and riun my heratige. Obviouly, only someone approved by the federal government should be alowed to pick up wrecks from the sea floor. The proceeds can be used to keep me from doing the same thing myself. I know that I'm not special and can't or won't learn how to do things right. It's not like you can simply make a law about how certian wrecks must be documented and share the information about state of the art preservation, now is it? No, I'm sure people will always get around the law if they can for filthy lucre, after all I'm greedy like that and so are so many other posters here who openly say this is such a good thing that New York is doing.
New York has always been so far advanced in the ways of correct government. Just look at Tamany Hall! Wow, New Yorkers sure know how to co-operate. Exclusive franchises rock, NDAs are wonderful. How else can we maintain such excellence?
- Design the system so that it requires change controls
So who has the "change control" if not the administrator?
- Take daily md5 snap shots of systems
Woot, the system stays the same and this dude's chron jobs execute on time.
- Always keep off site duplicates of your monthly full back ups. It's not just for DR; it's also for versioning.
I suppose your monthly full back up will save your bacon, as well as the chron job. Still, the chron job can be found and the data repaired. That's what happened here, right?
- Sue him out of existence and make sure EVERY employer in the area knows about it - not just for vengence, but also as a heads up to other rouge sysadmins.
Not so fast. First you have to prove that he did it. I have not seen anything but an accuasation yet. Imagine that you have a disagreement with your boss. The dumb dumb wants to do something you know will be a disaster, you disagree and quit. He does it, it's a disaster, then he blames and frames you siting you being dissatisfied with the subpar salary you put up with for years. Woops, you be very very rouge now, like third degree red, while your boss claims that you are a rogue.
In other words, follow best practices and procedures.
Words of wisdom to be sure.
That's a very good question, it's too bad you were joking. You can fix the advert problem by adding "ALL: www.transfer.com" to your hosts.deny file. It uses CGI to load up images from other sites based on some hideous random number. Blocking the images from www.transfer.com does no good because the images come from other servers. Blocking all crap from them cleans the page up and eliminates their pop ups too. Now for the serious matter.
The article was a slam job. It has a byline of december 17th and says that they tried to contact the sixty year old perpetrator the same day he was due to go to trial. Duh, someone chruning through the justice system might be hard to reach. Yet we are unable to tell if he refused comment or was simply not reached. All we have is the accusation.
Presumption of innoncence is a nice thing to have. There are several reasonable explainations for this man's actions. He might have quit in disgust, having been overridden by management on several key issues and just known that the results would be catastrophic. We have no proof yet that he really planted "bombs", we have only the prosecutor's interpretation of what the company and software vendors told them. I wonder just how he will be able to defend himself without access to systems that have been manipulated by his accusers.
This case should send chills down your spine. There is no way to keep a responsible person from sabotaging a company. It's the same case in meat space, anyone can throw a monkey wrench into the works. In cyberspace much more is stacked against you. The evidence is not easy to explain, is easy to create and destroy, and is wholy controled by those accusing you. It can not be visited by your defenders and what they find if they could look can be modified without a trace.
IE troll about web standards.
802.11b troll
PDA troll from a guy who says he keeps his PDA in a drawer.
Wow, all in the last 25 comments. Now, above in glorious living print is a C#, Visual Studio, boast, perl smash. No sane person can favorably compare an M$ environment to a free on anymore.
Perl works great for me. Combined with bash scripting, GNU utilities like find, grep and friends, ordinary C/C++ programing, hell even FORTRAN, or any of the other compilers of the GNU compiler collection, and you have unmatched power and flexibility. No other platform offers as much. Find me an equal to ImageMagic. That's just a small example. Most common work is already done and modifying it to your particular case is not difficult. If that's not enough, you might consider security issues and the perpetual "upgrade" path that will break your M$ junk with more junk of equal or lesser quality and utility. In the free world, upgrades improve your old stuff and replacements are generally better.
The embrace and extend policy you mentioned is ongoing, and the fools still think they can make the web an IE only place. They are doing this by a combinatin of making IE suck and promotions of horrid M$ only junk like activeX. So while they have changed their tune, the trajectory is the same. It's a stupid policy that will ruin them, because beter free alternatives are available.
The net result is that nothing actually works. Last weekend, I got a real shocking demonstration of just how bad IE really is. My father in law has a windoze 2000 box at the mercy of the smart updater. He has the latest and greatest IE6.0 with all the patches, and he has Norton Utilities to try and fix M$ registry problems and all that. I made a CD full of baby girl movies and tested it on his machine to see what he would see. He did not see much. IE was unable to display thubnails named ".thumb_number.thm.jpg", it was unable to display portable net graphics on it's own and object linking embeding for png and avi was horribly broken. Quick time, set as the default veiwer was able to display png files but not as thumbnails in an index. Media player was unable to display avi films, despite the fact that avi is a microsoft format. Media player played the sound and gave a picture of some stoner screen saver. Quicktime was able to display them on it's own, but IE insisted that Quicktime display inside IE. Everytime you pushed on a link, it piped up a dialog box that asked you if you wanted to run the movie inside IE. The default was yes and "remember my preference". If you clicked "no" it would pop the same dialog again as if it did not believe your first answer. It never remembered the "no" answer. Four clicks to view a movie or one click not to. Quicktime was unable to display the movie inside IE. Eventually, we made a mistake and the default behavior was the broken one. I really could not believe that it sucked that bad. This is the company that would try to manage my online identity?
M$ lost him that day. I downloaded Mozilla for him, it worked perfectly and that was it. This is a guy that gets his news from CNN, had swallowed the M$ propaganda about anti-trust and had an aversion to Netscape over it.
M$ needs to retreat and fix their junk, but it's way too late. They will be overwhelmed by the quality of free software. Bob, MSN, NET, it's all the same noise.