I never said that random Windows trojans are any nastier than MacDefender, I just don't understand why a trojan for OS X gets a shitload of media attention and "ZOMG DANGER!!1" reactions while no one even mentions trojans for Windows.
That a program can do bad things is hardly news, especially if it's a program the user just gave root/admin privileges to. Yet somehow even "geeky" websites went on about MacDefender like it was an advanced next-gen piece of malware, it was just a trojan with a few clever tricks to make the installer auto-download if the user was running Safari. I've seen plenty of those for Windows and I'd hardly consider them major threats.
And also the first to be attacked. The contest isn't a simultaneous attack on all platforms, it is done sequentially with OS X being the first in line (and thus the first to fall). It's like claiming Joe is more bullet-proof than Jim because the gunman shot Jim first...
Yeah, sure, MacDefender was a big nasty thing that required you to install it yourself, ooooh scary...
And yes, it required several "ok" clicks as well as the user inputting his/her admin password for the machine. Classic trojan behavior.
I actually stumbled upon a MacDefender "downloader site", do you know what it did? It showed a website that looked vaguely like a Finder window with a small "ZOMG VIRUSESSES!!!!11one" popup in the middle while it forced a download of the installer. Had I then actually run the installer it would still have required me to actively install MacDefender. Yeah, it's still malware but those making this out to be some elaborate technical super-virus need to have their heads checked, it's a simple trojan.
I think the problem with HURD was simply that they wanted to do it the Right Way(tm) and they had no real reason to hurry the project, then came Linux which was originally just Linus' toy project that he pushed out the door really early (back in those days being able to install a complete Linux system straight from a set of floppies would've been a luxury). First-mover advantage (well, there were a few others but Linux was unencumbered by the intellectual property of others like BSD or comparatively weird licensing like MINIX).
Maybe I'm wrong here but when looking at what's available on the "open market" right now it seems you've got security researchers, old-school hackers who tend to not really trust the government and actual criminals (in the sense that they're in it for the money and have few if any scruples).
Not really a good pool to hire mercenaries from, it'd be like hiring regular mercenaries from a pool filled with a bunch of guys who have the skills but are more interested in defensive measures (security researchers), roving bands of anarchists who pick their battles solely based on what would be the most interesting challenge and who don't like governments and of course bands of heavily armed criminals much like the "armies" of the south american drug cartels.
I just don't think it would work out well. Of course, if they manage to create a new group of actual "cyber-mercenaries" that's a whole other thing but it's also not a sure thing (being able to create that group, that is).
Since when is playing by the same rules set out for everyone else "finding a way to game the system"?
Well, normally the phrase "gaming the system" is used to describe actions which may be legal/allowed by the rules but which are considered ethically questionable. An example would be someone with a lot of money on his/her hands figuring out that at certain times they are practically guaranteed a profit on the lottery if they just put enough money into it. There are no rules against it but most people would consider it gaming the system as lotteries are not normally intended as "investments" where you put in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And I'm swedish, I may not be a lawyer but I still find it highly unlikely that if I write a small piece of code for a larger work project and I then go home and, in my own time, write a more general version of the same code (say, rather than just a class with a couple of essential functions I write a small library) and then deploy it at work (without actually doing any development on that codebase at work) that an employer would have a snowflake's chance in hell of getting a court to give them the copyright for the code written at home.
There's a difference between loyalty toward your employer while you're on the clock and loyalty to your employer when they're not paying you (of course, employers tend to attempt to abuse the system by punishing you on the clock for your actions off the clock but that's when you get the union involved). You also left out the last paragraph from that abstract which explains the part that is generally held as "if you're the boss your public image and all that stuff is important off the clock, if you're just another employee with normal pay then you can't be expected to give a fuck". That is, what you linked is, at least among swedes, also about your general behaviour and how it's not ok to fire a cashier or a programmer for posting pics of themselves really drunk on Facebook while the CEO is expected to be more loyal to the employer due to his/her position in the company...
I just think you're making a lot of assumptions about the laws in the jurisdiction I'm in. Heck, the employment contract I signed was a grand total of one A4 page that was mostly taken up by personal information. Apart from this I also signed a second agreement where I promised not to abuse the company's IT resources (this is the part that included not giving business secrets to competitors or using them against the company in some other way).
As for the law, what I do know is illegal here is selling products or services to your employer (without jumping through various legal hoops anyway) since there could obviously be some bias and it could easily be used to funnel money out of the company and into your pockets. As for the company trying to take code you've written because it somehow involves something you also happened to have worked on at work (domain-wise, not the actual code from work), I just can't see that happening (barring circumstances like getting paid overtime for the work you did at home and similar situations).
In the situation where you provide a working solution at work then write your own more general and complete open source version at home and end up deploying that version at work I just don't see any court here siding with the employer (once again, unless you collected overtime pay for it or something similarly stupid, but then you were actually paid for the work).
This sort of clause is to prevent employees from doing a poor job at work and then rushing off home to do the "proper job" and then setting up in competition.
Well, I can't speak for anyone but myself but in my case I didn't do a poor job, I just wrote the code that was required, if anything my employer would've had issues with me wasting company time writing code they wouldn't need. The "proper job" at home was a much more generalized class. There's also the fact that I was obviously not tasked with just writing that class, it was merely something that had to be created to complete the task at hand.
The employer pays a salary rather than weekly wages and expects to have the creative output of it's employees.
I don't know what kind of wacky employment contract you have but mine clearly states I should work 40 hours per week and that's what I'm getting paid for, I'm not getting paid for the code I write at home in my own time.
The employer is not subsidising R&D and training of it's employees future inventions.
And I'm not writing code for free.
My contract has such a clause but is limited to software that relates to the companies business. So I can write a tic-tac-toe solver at home and keep rights to it.
My contract actually has no non-compete clause at all except for a bit of legalese which (when translated to english from swedish legalese) can be summed up as "You can't use information stolen from us to compete with us or any other shady stuff like that", it doesn't prohibit me from leaving to create a competing service/product or going to work with a competitor, I just can't use any insider information (like knowledge of upcoming products or technical limitations in the software we use).
Those clauses are not absurd if the work done at home is related to the company's business or in the same industry.
In many jurisdictions this would still be absurd. And when you disregard the legal issues it is even more absurd, why would a skilled developer not work on personal projects that have things in common with their work projects? I've had plenty of situations where I've had to do something fairly specific while at work and this has inspired me to go home and write a better version with more complete functionality at home, doesn't mean my employer has any right to that code, I would not have written that code if it would become their property, I wrote it in my own time and while I may have gotten some basic inspiration for it at work I didn't actually use anything I wrote for work.
An example of this would be a tiny php class I threw together at work, all it did was convert colors from HSL to RGB and allowed you to change the Hue, Saturation and Lightness values directly, a few weeks later at home I sat down and wrote a much more complete class that did a lot more but which also happened to include a conversion from HSL to RGB (technically it stored the RGB, HSL and HSV values side-by-side whenever you called a setter. It was pretty complete in terms of generating colors (and has come in handy a few times since). Do you think my employer should own that code just because I threw together a skeleton class with a convertToRGB() function in it on company time?
Well, that actually kind of makes sense, doesn't it?
It's only correlation and I haven't bothered reading up on their methodology but it does make sense, an individual with a low IQ is likely to have a lower income and also most likely not be as knowledgeable about computers as an individual with a high IQ. This doesn't mean every low IQ individual is poor and knows nothing about alternative browsers or software updates or that every high IQ individual has a high income and knows a lot about computers, just that it makes sense more generally.
I really don't know all that many truly stupid people who are good with computers or have high incomes (most of them are still good people, they just aren't very smart and they don't exactly have high income jobs).
Iirc your high speed infrastructure was built for home schooling, eg videoconfering with teachers because of
the enormous distances between people and the various snow blizzards ?
Nah, it's mostly that there was a big push with government-funded backbone buildouts as well as the fact that various laws force what you might consider cooperation and resource sharing.
But to stay on topic wouldn't a very good low bitrate codec be awesome to enhance the codecs used in phones, walkie-talkies, etc...
Right now they use codecs designed for their purpose but not a lot of further development of them has been done that i know of.
Well sure, but my point was more that I, like many "regular" users am more interested in finding the best codec in terms of the bitrate at which you have a "perfect" sound (as opposed to finding which codec performs the best at a specified bitrate).
Heck, even 128 kbps mp3 sounds pretty decent these days since encoders aren't as lame (yay for puns!) as they used to be. Still, I tend to stick to 192+ kbps for music otherwise I do tend to hear minor differences when listening on a good stereo. For my iPhone I could probably just encode everything as 128 kbps mp3 and not hear a difference but at home, seated on the couch and listening actively there are definitely songs that even the best mp3 encoders seem to have issues with at bitrates of 160 kbps or lower, nothing like it was a few years ago but storage and bandwidth have long been cheap enough that to me this isn't an issue. But yeah, for things like phones and walkie-talkies low bitrate performance is a good thing although I'd rather want to know what the performance is like at 24, 32, 48 and possibly 64 kbps in that case...
It seems everyone is always on about performance and storage capacity. But what about the reliability?
Now, admittedly it's a bit of an edge case but in my home server I have a comparatively ancient 30 GB IDE disk for the system disk and a bunch of SATA drives in RAID-Z for bulk storage and I've been thinking about moving to a new system disk out of pure paranoia (this thing has been in constant use for what seems like an eternity) but I can't seem to find any good statistics for the reliability of current drives.
Is there really no one out there who has said "fuck performance, we're gonna build drives that are good for at least five years"? I know there are a couple of sites out there that have stats collected from users but if I go with the best drives there then I'm still going to have to put a lot of effort into finding anyone even selling those models anymore...
I thought 96 kbps was "lo-quality" for internet radio and other streaming audio since at least 2004 or so...
If I wanted to stream audio live from my home connection I could, theoretically, stream it to 700+ users at once even at 128 kbps (A more realistic figure might be simply "hundreds of users" but my point still stands, this isn't 1999 anymore).
So yeah, it can still be interesting for truly massive setups where you have thousands of listeners at once (or you're already using loads of bandwidth for video and every little saving counts) but overall, for most people, testing 96 kbps just isn't all that relevant (besides, most people seem to hate HD video with overcompressed audio, nothing ruins your viewing experience like horrible audio to go with your perfect 1080p video).
The BBC article? Yes, but I've also been following Norwegian and Swedish news and who did this has yet to be confirmed, what has been confirmed though is that there has also been a shooting at a social democrat youth camp, and for some reason the nordic neo-nazis hate social democrats which is why I pointed out that if these events were related then this makes it a lot more likely that this is a domestic terrorism incident and not islamic terrorists.
Not necessarily, if the shooting at the social democrat youth camp just now (by a fake police officer) is related then I'm betting on local nazi crackpots...
Oh, it's here in Europe already, at least in Sweden.
When I was a kid and we went on field trips (age 6-10 or so) with school no one wore those horrible orange vests with reflective strips except for the "special" kids (which was why most kids I knew referred to such vests as "CP vests"), these days when you see a group of kids that age out on a field trip they're all wearing the vests...
There are lots of little things like that, or just how parents these days apparently think it's perfectly normal to track their teenage kids with GPS (and call them if the GPS goes offline), when I was twelve me and my friends would be out until almost midnight on summer nights, racing our bicycles up and down steep hills, climbing trees and not "checking in" with our parents until we came home again, today that would be considered "irresponsible parenting" by most parents...
Well, I'd say it's obvious this is more about user experience than good will.
Basically, what Apple sells is a system, an ecosystem, a user experience or whatever you want to call it and all those fluffy feelgood things that come with that tightly integrated "It Just Works" world. As part of this they've opted to just trust the user when it comes to software licenses because it enhances the user experience which means they make more money.
Yeah, the perfomance is pretty much the main problem for me as it stands, my current work laptop is what qualifies as a "portable workstation" (meaning it's luggable) and I could actually use more RAM and a faster CPU/more cores.
I suppose I should be looking at a Mini-ITX box with a Core i5/i7 and 8-12 gigs of RAM...
The main problem I have with my work laptop is actually that it's hard to place on a desk due to the monitor, I'd rather have two VGA/DVI/DP ports than a monitor and one port for an external display. And yeah, the keyboard really wouldn't be needed either, I just want it to be portable in the sense that I can move it between the office and my home office...
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could just use your ISP's outgoing SMTP relay.
I never said that random Windows trojans are any nastier than MacDefender, I just don't understand why a trojan for OS X gets a shitload of media attention and "ZOMG DANGER!!1" reactions while no one even mentions trojans for Windows.
That a program can do bad things is hardly news, especially if it's a program the user just gave root/admin privileges to. Yet somehow even "geeky" websites went on about MacDefender like it was an advanced next-gen piece of malware, it was just a trojan with a few clever tricks to make the installer auto-download if the user was running Safari. I've seen plenty of those for Windows and I'd hardly consider them major threats.
And also the first to be attacked. The contest isn't a simultaneous attack on all platforms, it is done sequentially with OS X being the first in line (and thus the first to fall). It's like claiming Joe is more bullet-proof than Jim because the gunman shot Jim first...
Yeah, sure, MacDefender was a big nasty thing that required you to install it yourself, ooooh scary...
And yes, it required several "ok" clicks as well as the user inputting his/her admin password for the machine. Classic trojan behavior.
I actually stumbled upon a MacDefender "downloader site", do you know what it did? It showed a website that looked vaguely like a Finder window with a small "ZOMG VIRUSESSES!!!!11one" popup in the middle while it forced a download of the installer. Had I then actually run the installer it would still have required me to actively install MacDefender. Yeah, it's still malware but those making this out to be some elaborate technical super-virus need to have their heads checked, it's a simple trojan.
It's not a "BSD kernel", it's XNU which is a fork of the Mach kernel.
I think the problem with HURD was simply that they wanted to do it the Right Way(tm) and they had no real reason to hurry the project, then came Linux which was originally just Linus' toy project that he pushed out the door really early (back in those days being able to install a complete Linux system straight from a set of floppies would've been a luxury). First-mover advantage (well, there were a few others but Linux was unencumbered by the intellectual property of others like BSD or comparatively weird licensing like MINIX).
Maybe I'm wrong here but when looking at what's available on the "open market" right now it seems you've got security researchers, old-school hackers who tend to not really trust the government and actual criminals (in the sense that they're in it for the money and have few if any scruples).
Not really a good pool to hire mercenaries from, it'd be like hiring regular mercenaries from a pool filled with a bunch of guys who have the skills but are more interested in defensive measures (security researchers), roving bands of anarchists who pick their battles solely based on what would be the most interesting challenge and who don't like governments and of course bands of heavily armed criminals much like the "armies" of the south american drug cartels.
I just don't think it would work out well. Of course, if they manage to create a new group of actual "cyber-mercenaries" that's a whole other thing but it's also not a sure thing (being able to create that group, that is).
Since when is playing by the same rules set out for everyone else "finding a way to game the system"?
Well, normally the phrase "gaming the system" is used to describe actions which may be legal/allowed by the rules but which are considered ethically questionable. An example would be someone with a lot of money on his/her hands figuring out that at certain times they are practically guaranteed a profit on the lottery if they just put enough money into it. There are no rules against it but most people would consider it gaming the system as lotteries are not normally intended as "investments" where you put in hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And I'm swedish, I may not be a lawyer but I still find it highly unlikely that if I write a small piece of code for a larger work project and I then go home and, in my own time, write a more general version of the same code (say, rather than just a class with a couple of essential functions I write a small library) and then deploy it at work (without actually doing any development on that codebase at work) that an employer would have a snowflake's chance in hell of getting a court to give them the copyright for the code written at home.
There's a difference between loyalty toward your employer while you're on the clock and loyalty to your employer when they're not paying you (of course, employers tend to attempt to abuse the system by punishing you on the clock for your actions off the clock but that's when you get the union involved). You also left out the last paragraph from that abstract which explains the part that is generally held as "if you're the boss your public image and all that stuff is important off the clock, if you're just another employee with normal pay then you can't be expected to give a fuck". That is, what you linked is, at least among swedes, also about your general behaviour and how it's not ok to fire a cashier or a programmer for posting pics of themselves really drunk on Facebook while the CEO is expected to be more loyal to the employer due to his/her position in the company...
I just think you're making a lot of assumptions about the laws in the jurisdiction I'm in. Heck, the employment contract I signed was a grand total of one A4 page that was mostly taken up by personal information. Apart from this I also signed a second agreement where I promised not to abuse the company's IT resources (this is the part that included not giving business secrets to competitors or using them against the company in some other way).
As for the law, what I do know is illegal here is selling products or services to your employer (without jumping through various legal hoops anyway) since there could obviously be some bias and it could easily be used to funnel money out of the company and into your pockets. As for the company trying to take code you've written because it somehow involves something you also happened to have worked on at work (domain-wise, not the actual code from work), I just can't see that happening (barring circumstances like getting paid overtime for the work you did at home and similar situations).
In the situation where you provide a working solution at work then write your own more general and complete open source version at home and end up deploying that version at work I just don't see any court here siding with the employer (once again, unless you collected overtime pay for it or something similarly stupid, but then you were actually paid for the work).
This sort of clause is to prevent employees from doing a poor job at work and then rushing off home to do the "proper job" and then setting up in competition.
Well, I can't speak for anyone but myself but in my case I didn't do a poor job, I just wrote the code that was required, if anything my employer would've had issues with me wasting company time writing code they wouldn't need. The "proper job" at home was a much more generalized class. There's also the fact that I was obviously not tasked with just writing that class, it was merely something that had to be created to complete the task at hand.
The employer pays a salary rather than weekly wages and expects to have the creative output of it's employees.
I don't know what kind of wacky employment contract you have but mine clearly states I should work 40 hours per week and that's what I'm getting paid for, I'm not getting paid for the code I write at home in my own time.
The employer is not subsidising R&D and training of it's employees future inventions.
And I'm not writing code for free.
My contract has such a clause but is limited to software that relates to the companies business. So I can write a tic-tac-toe solver at home and keep rights to it.
My contract actually has no non-compete clause at all except for a bit of legalese which (when translated to english from swedish legalese) can be summed up as "You can't use information stolen from us to compete with us or any other shady stuff like that", it doesn't prohibit me from leaving to create a competing service/product or going to work with a competitor, I just can't use any insider information (like knowledge of upcoming products or technical limitations in the software we use).
Those clauses are not absurd if the work done at home is related to the company's business or in the same industry.
In many jurisdictions this would still be absurd. And when you disregard the legal issues it is even more absurd, why would a skilled developer not work on personal projects that have things in common with their work projects? I've had plenty of situations where I've had to do something fairly specific while at work and this has inspired me to go home and write a better version with more complete functionality at home, doesn't mean my employer has any right to that code, I would not have written that code if it would become their property, I wrote it in my own time and while I may have gotten some basic inspiration for it at work I didn't actually use anything I wrote for work.
An example of this would be a tiny php class I threw together at work, all it did was convert colors from HSL to RGB and allowed you to change the Hue, Saturation and Lightness values directly, a few weeks later at home I sat down and wrote a much more complete class that did a lot more but which also happened to include a conversion from HSL to RGB (technically it stored the RGB, HSL and HSV values side-by-side whenever you called a setter. It was pretty complete in terms of generating colors (and has come in handy a few times since). Do you think my employer should own that code just because I threw together a skeleton class with a convertToRGB() function in it on company time?
Well, that actually kind of makes sense, doesn't it?
It's only correlation and I haven't bothered reading up on their methodology but it does make sense, an individual with a low IQ is likely to have a lower income and also most likely not be as knowledgeable about computers as an individual with a high IQ. This doesn't mean every low IQ individual is poor and knows nothing about alternative browsers or software updates or that every high IQ individual has a high income and knows a lot about computers, just that it makes sense more generally.
I really don't know all that many truly stupid people who are good with computers or have high incomes (most of them are still good people, they just aren't very smart and they don't exactly have high income jobs).
It's more likely that you suffer from some form of mental illness...
Iirc your high speed infrastructure was built for home schooling, eg videoconfering with teachers because of the enormous distances between people and the various snow blizzards ?
Nah, it's mostly that there was a big push with government-funded backbone buildouts as well as the fact that various laws force what you might consider cooperation and resource sharing.
But to stay on topic wouldn't a very good low bitrate codec be awesome to enhance the codecs used in phones, walkie-talkies, etc ...
Right now they use codecs designed for their purpose but not a lot of further development of them has been done that i know of.
Well sure, but my point was more that I, like many "regular" users am more interested in finding the best codec in terms of the bitrate at which you have a "perfect" sound (as opposed to finding which codec performs the best at a specified bitrate).
Heck, even 128 kbps mp3 sounds pretty decent these days since encoders aren't as lame (yay for puns!) as they used to be. Still, I tend to stick to 192+ kbps for music otherwise I do tend to hear minor differences when listening on a good stereo. For my iPhone I could probably just encode everything as 128 kbps mp3 and not hear a difference but at home, seated on the couch and listening actively there are definitely songs that even the best mp3 encoders seem to have issues with at bitrates of 160 kbps or lower, nothing like it was a few years ago but storage and bandwidth have long been cheap enough that to me this isn't an issue. But yeah, for things like phones and walkie-talkies low bitrate performance is a good thing although I'd rather want to know what the performance is like at 24, 32, 48 and possibly 64 kbps in that case...
It seems everyone is always on about performance and storage capacity. But what about the reliability?
Now, admittedly it's a bit of an edge case but in my home server I have a comparatively ancient 30 GB IDE disk for the system disk and a bunch of SATA drives in RAID-Z for bulk storage and I've been thinking about moving to a new system disk out of pure paranoia (this thing has been in constant use for what seems like an eternity) but I can't seem to find any good statistics for the reliability of current drives.
Is there really no one out there who has said "fuck performance, we're gonna build drives that are good for at least five years"? I know there are a couple of sites out there that have stats collected from users but if I go with the best drives there then I'm still going to have to put a lot of effort into finding anyone even selling those models anymore...
Yes, it's not particularly expensive or uncommon in Sweden.
I thought 96 kbps was "lo-quality" for internet radio and other streaming audio since at least 2004 or so...
If I wanted to stream audio live from my home connection I could, theoretically, stream it to 700+ users at once even at 128 kbps (A more realistic figure might be simply "hundreds of users" but my point still stands, this isn't 1999 anymore).
So yeah, it can still be interesting for truly massive setups where you have thousands of listeners at once (or you're already using loads of bandwidth for video and every little saving counts) but overall, for most people, testing 96 kbps just isn't all that relevant (besides, most people seem to hate HD video with overcompressed audio, nothing ruins your viewing experience like horrible audio to go with your perfect 1080p video).
And just for completeness, he's got a Facebook page.
The BBC article? Yes, but I've also been following Norwegian and Swedish news and who did this has yet to be confirmed, what has been confirmed though is that there has also been a shooting at a social democrat youth camp, and for some reason the nordic neo-nazis hate social democrats which is why I pointed out that if these events were related then this makes it a lot more likely that this is a domestic terrorism incident and not islamic terrorists.
Not necessarily, if the shooting at the social democrat youth camp just now (by a fake police officer) is related then I'm betting on local nazi crackpots...
Oh, it's here in Europe already, at least in Sweden.
When I was a kid and we went on field trips (age 6-10 or so) with school no one wore those horrible orange vests with reflective strips except for the "special" kids (which was why most kids I knew referred to such vests as "CP vests"), these days when you see a group of kids that age out on a field trip they're all wearing the vests...
There are lots of little things like that, or just how parents these days apparently think it's perfectly normal to track their teenage kids with GPS (and call them if the GPS goes offline), when I was twelve me and my friends would be out until almost midnight on summer nights, racing our bicycles up and down steep hills, climbing trees and not "checking in" with our parents until we came home again, today that would be considered "irresponsible parenting" by most parents...
Well, I'd say it's obvious this is more about user experience than good will.
Basically, what Apple sells is a system, an ecosystem, a user experience or whatever you want to call it and all those fluffy feelgood things that come with that tightly integrated "It Just Works" world. As part of this they've opted to just trust the user when it comes to software licenses because it enhances the user experience which means they make more money.
Yeah, the perfomance is pretty much the main problem for me as it stands, my current work laptop is what qualifies as a "portable workstation" (meaning it's luggable) and I could actually use more RAM and a faster CPU/more cores.
I suppose I should be looking at a Mini-ITX box with a Core i5/i7 and 8-12 gigs of RAM...
The main problem I have with my work laptop is actually that it's hard to place on a desk due to the monitor, I'd rather have two VGA/DVI/DP ports than a monitor and one port for an external display. And yeah, the keyboard really wouldn't be needed either, I just want it to be portable in the sense that I can move it between the office and my home office...