That is more or less true. XP is descendent of NT, and NT has built in security.
But XP uses 9x style user level stuff. The kernel might be the most secure thing in the world, but compromises have been made to graft on insecure high level stuff, screwing up the whole system. And yes, you can blame MS for the always-administrator problem... They have not provided - or at least, they have not advertised to coders - the equivalent of redhats console-helper or su. They have not provided a reverse compatible, but sandboxed environment for programs not specifically flagged as being XP ready (whatever that means). Code not such flagged should be quarantined and restricted by the OS. To the coder, that might only be a one line change, but make them go out of the way to have the OS not treat the program as suspect.
Apple has gone through two major shifts, from 68k to PowerPC, and from legacy System to OS X. It has happened transparently to the users. Not exactly the same thing, but on the same order of difficulty
Cutting through all the BS, war comes down to one thing: Having someone stand on a piece of ground with a $2000 rifle saying "this is mine"; war is about capturing and holding territory.
Good point. When Netscape Confusicator was released as OSS, it diddnt so much as compile. As you say, too much cross-licensed code ripped out. And, I suspect, the build enviroment was weird enough that that was a major hurdle.
But the community at large was highly motivated to build a better browser, and Netscape had staff working on it too. Some of those staff members, JWZ with xemacs and xscreensaver, had experience with OSS projects.
Is the same true of Microsoft? If they wanted to, and if they activly persued it, could they create a community around an OSS Windows, and get more back they they put out? (lets be honest, that is the reason any company, "good" or "evil" by any definition, releases stuff as OSS) Interesting question.
Adobe-on-linux may cannibalize the products from other OSs, but so what? At worst, current Adobe users would switch OSs, but still use Adobe products; Adobe would sell the same number of licenses. It may mean that some current linux users now consider Adobe products, and buy them, where they would not switch OSs to run Photoshop. Choosing your OS before you choose your productivity package may be ass-backwards, but it happens more often then never.
That reminds me of a story my brother tells. He works as a software developer in a branch office; prety much evertone in his office is either a programmer, project manager, tech support of technical sales people. Not all of them geeks, but all heavy computer users.
The company hired on a new business manager/director of sales (whatever) for this office, good business/sales experience, but not technical sales.
Weekly meeting:
Boss: Oh yes. Head office has deployed the intranet. You all must change your homepage to our internal website. Herman (local network admin) is away, but Bob can help you change your homepage if you need assistance. Andrew: On the other hand, you are working at a software developement company; if you cant change your home page, you should pack up and go home now. Boss: *deer in the headlights look*
I'm not at all versed in the art of scanning through binary code looking for holes... Or even through code for that matter. But look at games, for example. How long does it take an experience cracker to build a no-CD crack for a game? They dont call it zero day warez for nothing. I know its not a direct analogy, crackers would not necessaraly have access to the binaries of the target system.
But the concern, the real concern, is not from a script kiddie using a year old exploit and turning your box into a porn site. The real concern is from someone finding a new exploit, breaking into a important system, undetected, and steal or alter data. The nature of the developement process means that mistakes that could be security problems dont become real world exploits. And those that do work their way into production code will eventuall be vetted out by a high school student or the OpenBSD team, and fixed publicly. Exploits that work their way into closed source code will stay their untill not when an exploit is found, but untill when an exploit is found by a good guy and reported. Or to put things another way, the security issues with OSS approches zero the longer it is used. Closed source software, the issues approch some constant above zero.
Well, this game has cut screens and at least a vague plot. Kinda like porn that way.
I dont understand id. Their game engines rock, no doubt, but the games are kinda sucky. In Doom 3 there is exactly one decision to make (send or dont send the message), but that decision has exactly zero effect on anything else, except for a cut screen. There should be multiple paths, NPCs that actually do something. Choices from level 1 should effect level n, for all values of n.
Beh. Its only a matter of time before someone does a total conversion. ET with the Doom3 engine.. Closer and closer to teledildonics every day.
Estonia likely has far fewer banks then the USA. Canada has, for all practical purposes, 6 banks. Well, 5 banks and hundreds of Credit Unions which have a single centeral authority. Thus a single interbanking system is far easier to manage. In the USA there are hundreds of banks and (I suspect) dozens of interbanking networks, none of which all the banks are members of. They are all too busy fighting with each other to add features.
Estonia has leapfroged over the technolgy used in the USA. Just as the USA and Canada lagged behind cellphone technology, partially because we have such a good land-line system, we lag behind here. The rest of the world skipped over crappy cellphone technology and doesnt have to worry about backwards compatability, and so has the best. Speculating, Estonia had crappy to non-existant banking systems while part of the USSR, and in the early 1990s installed 1990s technology. Contrast that with the USA where in the early 1990s banks were managing 1960s technology and working on the y2k problem, not adding new features.
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is a 116 km^2 US Naval base, established in 1898, the end of the Spanish-American War. It is less then 1/10 of 1% of the total land mass of Cuba. The US did not "take over" Gitmo. Cuba, as a country, did not exist when Cuba, the island, was transfered from Spain to the US, in 1898. Gitmo is controled by the US based on a perpetual lease signed in 1903 with the newly independent country of Cuba. It is worth mentioning that it was the United States that granted Cuba independence within 5 years of them winning the Spanish-American War, an act that apparently slipped the mind of the Spanish since the Conquistadors.
I dont quite understand what you are saying. To draw an analogy, your arguement seems to be// wiht: a RISC processor is more complex then a CISC becasuse the code required to do something usefull on a RISC system is shorter.
I guess that is an opinion question, a question of perspective. An EE would say a RISC system is less complex, but a CS writing a compiler, or someone writing in ASM would say the opposite. So the question in the DNA world then is: are you trying to understand DNA by looking at it and scratching your head, or are you trying to understand DNA by understanding the low level operations and simulating (either on a computer, or in the lab) specific, large scale, things?
Would not reducing the number of genes from 100,000 down to 25,000 reduce the number of possible interactions from (100,000!/2) to (25,000!/2)? Thats a factor of a number that has 357480 digits!
Actually, on a number of occasions through the year, I run into a porter(?) who works on Via Rail. And he says the same thing differently: modern but uncomfortable.
But I dont think the conspiricy theory fits here. If the government of Canada was intersted in getting VIA to purchase rail cars based on some non-business reasons, then they would direct them to Bombardier, or to lesser known domestic rail car manufacturers, such as Trenton Works(?), in Nova Scotia.
The purchase of the cars in question seems a good parallell to the subs. Some reasonable hardware was more-or-less lying around, unused, at the same time a agency was interested in purchasing similar hardware. That does not mean the hardware was unsuitable for the origional owners perspective: The Royal Navy was getting out of the diesel sub business. That doesnt mean that the diesel subs are bad, just that they are diesel. The Alstrom cars have some unusual specs, partially dictated by the safety requirments of the Chunnel. The modifications required to integrate them into a existing fleet is different then the requirments to replace an entire fleet. Passanger rail in Europe and in North America simply have different requirements.
Alstrom is a private company, and the vast majority, if not all, of the cars were alredy produced when Via anounced the purchase of them. The advantage to the UK had already happened: the jobs alredy done and paid for. The advantage was to Alstrom, a multinational, not to the UK.
As for the submarines, Canada being a british colony, it has to buy the old britshit junk; this is not limited to submarines, Canada has been busy buying totally inadapted trains from Britain...But the main reason why Canada bought the britshit subs is that in reality, it needed nuclear subs, but the best deal with no strings attached was from France, and there was no way a british colony would buy arms from France (the only other nuclear subs available were british or american, and both were encumbered with extremely restrictive licenses, whereas the french subs were not - and had much cheaper operating costs).
What in the fuck are you talking about? Most importantly, Canada is a former British colony. The United States is also a former British colony. The subs in question are diesel subs. Nuclear subs have never been a (reasonable) option, Canada has no nuclear arms at all. In reality, the British subs happened to be for sale about the same time as the existing subs were due for either major refits or replacement. The initial cost for the British was 800,000pounds, and Canada purchesed them for CAD$750,000, less then 1/2 price, ignoring 10 years of inflation. Even spending twice as much on refits and "Canadianization" of the boats then has been spent, they would still be a good deal.
Submarines are inherently dangerous things. It is entirely possible that there was no design flaw, no flaw in workmanship, and no crew error that caused the fires.
"Canada" hasent purchased any trains. CN is a publicly traded comapny, and has significant investements in US rail systems. Via Rail, a crown coporation , which has some new cars, purchased them from Alstrom, which is headquarters in France.
Canada has purchased military hardware from lots of countries, including France. I cant off hand think of any major system from France... But I also cant think of any major French military system at all. Well, thats not true, I know France is part of various european conglomorates building military hardware.
The United States is obligated to assist Canada if it is ever invaded. As is Belgium, Denmark, France, the UK, Italy, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal... All the NATO nations - amongst others. Even if not so obligated, removing a hostile force from a bordering counrty would actually be a good reason for the US to go to war -- and we are all aware of the flimsy excuses they need to do that.
IMHO the problem with X, and surrounding technology, is the "not my problem" syndrome. X11, by itself, provides very little. Arranging windows is not its problem, thats for the window manager. Drawing the content of the windows is not either X11s or the windows managers problem, thats for the app. This is why you cant either really "draw window contents while dragging" or true transparency; both work by taking a screenshot and drawing that. X11 has some abilities to cut/paste, but it is limited to text only. Not text plus some limited formating. Text only. Period. Gnome (and assumably KDE) deal with this in their own ways, but not with each other, or other things like OOo and Mozilla, or the X11 way. At least not all the time.
What the fuck is a MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1?
Before anyone jumps on me, I am aware that both those things Ive mentioned are getting solved. The come to mind because of that.. But they are getting solved 20 years after they should have been.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, they are different products. SLES is licensed per server, so I seriously doubt it.
That is more or less true. XP is descendent of NT, and NT has built in security.
But XP uses 9x style user level stuff. The kernel might be the most secure thing in the world, but compromises have been made to graft on insecure high level stuff, screwing up the whole system. And yes, you can blame MS for the always-administrator problem... They have not provided - or at least, they have not advertised to coders - the equivalent of redhats console-helper or su. They have not provided a reverse compatible, but sandboxed environment for programs not specifically flagged as being XP ready (whatever that means). Code not such flagged should be quarantined and restricted by the OS. To the coder, that might only be a one line change, but make them go out of the way to have the OS not treat the program as suspect.
Apple has gone through two major shifts, from 68k to PowerPC, and from legacy System to OS X. It has happened transparently to the users. Not exactly the same thing, but on the same order of difficulty
Cutting through all the BS, war comes down to one thing: Having someone stand on a piece of ground with a $2000 rifle saying "this is mine"; war is about capturing and holding territory.
A robot does not count
Good point. When Netscape Confusicator was released as OSS, it diddnt so much as compile. As you say, too much cross-licensed code ripped out. And, I suspect, the build enviroment was weird enough that that was a major hurdle.
But the community at large was highly motivated to build a better browser, and Netscape had staff working on it too. Some of those staff members, JWZ with xemacs and xscreensaver, had experience with OSS projects.
Is the same true of Microsoft? If they wanted to, and if they activly persued it, could they create a community around an OSS Windows, and get more back they they put out? (lets be honest, that is the reason any company, "good" or "evil" by any definition, releases stuff as OSS) Interesting question.
Adobe-on-linux may cannibalize the products from other OSs, but so what? At worst, current Adobe users would switch OSs, but still use Adobe products; Adobe would sell the same number of licenses. It may mean that some current linux users now consider Adobe products, and buy them, where they would not switch OSs to run Photoshop. Choosing your OS before you choose your productivity package may be ass-backwards, but it happens more often then never.
You are missing the point. There are greater issues then who gets elected. If you dont, or cant, understand that, I cant explain it to you.
Well, hell. Might as well not have elections at all, just phone up 15 or 20 people and see who they want.
That reminds me of a story my brother tells. He works as a software developer in a branch office; prety much evertone in his office is either a programmer, project manager, tech support of technical sales people. Not all of them geeks, but all heavy computer users.
The company hired on a new business manager/director of sales (whatever) for this office, good business/sales experience, but not technical sales.
Weekly meeting:
Boss: Oh yes. Head office has deployed the intranet. You all must change your homepage to our internal website. Herman (local network admin) is away, but Bob can help you change your homepage if you need assistance.
Andrew: On the other hand, you are working at a software developement company; if you cant change your home page, you should pack up and go home now.
Boss: *deer in the headlights look*
Uh, so create a view for the moron and be done with it.
Looks like its back to frame relay and ISDN for me.
I'm not at all versed in the art of scanning through binary code looking for holes... Or even through code for that matter. But look at games, for example. How long does it take an experience cracker to build a no-CD crack for a game? They dont call it zero day warez for nothing. I know its not a direct analogy, crackers would not necessaraly have access to the binaries of the target system.
But the concern, the real concern, is not from a script kiddie using a year old exploit and turning your box into a porn site. The real concern is from someone finding a new exploit, breaking into a important system, undetected, and steal or alter data. The nature of the developement process means that mistakes that could be security problems dont become real world exploits. And those that do work their way into production code will eventuall be vetted out by a high school student or the OpenBSD team, and fixed publicly. Exploits that work their way into closed source code will stay their untill not when an exploit is found, but untill when an exploit is found by a good guy and reported. Or to put things another way, the security issues with OSS approches zero the longer it is used. Closed source software, the issues approch some constant above zero.
Except that AutoCAD existed long before wxWidgets, GTK+, and GRE... Long before Windows MFC for that matter.
Well, this game has cut screens and at least a vague plot. Kinda like porn that way.
I dont understand id. Their game engines rock, no doubt, but the games are kinda sucky. In Doom 3 there is exactly one decision to make (send or dont send the message), but that decision has exactly zero effect on anything else, except for a cut screen. There should be multiple paths, NPCs that actually do something. Choices from level 1 should effect level n, for all values of n.
Beh. Its only a matter of time before someone does a total conversion. ET with the Doom3 engine.. Closer and closer to teledildonics every day.
A number of reasons I suspect.
Estonia likely has far fewer banks then the USA. Canada has, for all practical purposes, 6 banks. Well, 5 banks and hundreds of Credit Unions which have a single centeral authority. Thus a single interbanking system is far easier to manage. In the USA there are hundreds of banks and (I suspect) dozens of interbanking networks, none of which all the banks are members of. They are all too busy fighting with each other to add features.
Estonia has leapfroged over the technolgy used in the USA. Just as the USA and Canada lagged behind cellphone technology, partially because we have such a good land-line system, we lag behind here. The rest of the world skipped over crappy cellphone technology and doesnt have to worry about backwards compatability, and so has the best. Speculating, Estonia had crappy to non-existant banking systems while part of the USSR, and in the early 1990s installed 1990s technology. Contrast that with the USA where in the early 1990s banks were managing 1960s technology and working on the y2k problem, not adding new features.
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba is a 116 km^2 US Naval base, established in 1898, the end of the Spanish-American War. It is less then 1/10 of 1% of the total land mass of Cuba. The US did not "take over" Gitmo. Cuba, as a country, did not exist when Cuba, the island, was transfered from Spain to the US, in 1898. Gitmo is controled by the US based on a perpetual lease signed in 1903 with the newly independent country of Cuba. It is worth mentioning that it was the United States that granted Cuba independence within 5 years of them winning the Spanish-American War, an act that apparently slipped the mind of the Spanish since the Conquistadors.
I dont quite understand what you are saying. To draw an analogy, your arguement seems to be // wiht: a RISC processor is more complex then a CISC becasuse the code required to do something usefull on a RISC system is shorter.
I guess that is an opinion question, a question of perspective. An EE would say a RISC system is less complex, but a CS writing a compiler, or someone writing in ASM would say the opposite. So the question in the DNA world then is: are you trying to understand DNA by looking at it and scratching your head, or are you trying to understand DNA by understanding the low level operations and simulating (either on a computer, or in the lab) specific, large scale, things?
Would not reducing the number of genes from 100,000 down to 25,000 reduce the number of possible interactions from (100,000!/2) to (25,000!/2)? Thats a factor of a number that has 357480 digits!
Hmm. ?NC:
I guess 1 and two halves out of 3 isnt bad.
I have no point
Hmm.. It seems I may be responsible for slashdotting a CVS server. This may be a first.
Opensource? Uhh.. done: transgaming.org. No binaries, but this script makes things a snap.
Actually, on a number of occasions through the year, I run into a porter(?) who works on Via Rail. And he says the same thing differently: modern but uncomfortable.
But I dont think the conspiricy theory fits here. If the government of Canada was intersted in getting VIA to purchase rail cars based on some non-business reasons, then they would direct them to Bombardier, or to lesser known domestic rail car manufacturers, such as Trenton Works(?), in Nova Scotia.
The purchase of the cars in question seems a good parallell to the subs. Some reasonable hardware was more-or-less lying around, unused, at the same time a agency was interested in purchasing similar hardware. That does not mean the hardware was unsuitable for the origional owners perspective: The Royal Navy was getting out of the diesel sub business. That doesnt mean that the diesel subs are bad, just that they are diesel. The Alstrom cars have some unusual specs, partially dictated by the safety requirments of the Chunnel. The modifications required to integrate them into a existing fleet is different then the requirments to replace an entire fleet. Passanger rail in Europe and in North America simply have different requirements.
Alstrom is a private company, and the vast majority, if not all, of the cars were alredy produced when Via anounced the purchase of them. The advantage to the UK had already happened: the jobs alredy done and paid for. The advantage was to Alstrom, a multinational, not to the UK.
What in the fuck are you talking about? Most importantly, Canada is a former British colony. The United States is also a former British colony. The subs in question are diesel subs. Nuclear subs have never been a (reasonable) option, Canada has no nuclear arms at all. In reality, the British subs happened to be for sale about the same time as the existing subs were due for either major refits or replacement. The initial cost for the British was 800,000pounds, and Canada purchesed them for CAD$750,000, less then 1/2 price, ignoring 10 years of inflation. Even spending twice as much on refits and "Canadianization" of the boats then has been spent, they would still be a good deal.
Submarines are inherently dangerous things. It is entirely possible that there was no design flaw, no flaw in workmanship, and no crew error that caused the fires.
"Canada" hasent purchased any trains. CN is a publicly traded comapny, and has significant investements in US rail systems. Via Rail, a crown coporation , which has some new cars, purchased them from Alstrom, which is headquarters in France.
Canada has purchased military hardware from lots of countries, including France. I cant off hand think of any major system from France... But I also cant think of any major French military system at all. Well, thats not true, I know France is part of various european conglomorates building military hardware.
The United States is obligated to assist Canada if it is ever invaded. As is Belgium, Denmark, France, the UK, Italy, Iceland, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal... All the NATO nations - amongst others. Even if not so obligated, removing a hostile force from a bordering counrty would actually be a good reason for the US to go to war -- and we are all aware of the flimsy excuses they need to do that.
And, WTF? Companies should be physcially destroying drives.
Do you need a good reason to be opposed to C++?
Ill wander into this tarpit of X11.
IMHO the problem with X, and surrounding technology, is the "not my problem" syndrome. X11, by itself, provides very little. Arranging windows is not its problem, thats for the window manager. Drawing the content of the windows is not either X11s or the windows managers problem, thats for the app. This is why you cant either really "draw window contents while dragging" or true transparency; both work by taking a screenshot and drawing that. X11 has some abilities to cut/paste, but it is limited to text only. Not text plus some limited formating. Text only. Period. Gnome (and assumably KDE) deal with this in their own ways, but not with each other, or other things like OOo and Mozilla, or the X11 way. At least not all the time.
What the fuck is a MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1?
Before anyone jumps on me, I am aware that both those things Ive mentioned are getting solved. The come to mind because of that.. But they are getting solved 20 years after they should have been.