They've got lots of eggs now -- they just have to scrape it off of their face very carefully and pull their foot out of their mouth. For desert, they can start eating their words.
Basically, the new notice says "Hold on -- we're not going to sit on our hands until everything runs on firefox!" They're still committing to support Firefox, but it's not a "Stop the presses!" kind of issue.
It's probably a competition issue for them because I'd expect that the people most likely to switch to Firefox probably make up a really juicy demographic that they don't want to lose out on.
If I, as the system owner, want to allow forkbombs, I should be able to make it possible. If I, as a newbie system owner, allow the next door neighbour's kid to login to the machine, the default security settings should make it as hard as possible for him to blow the machine up.
(( Impossible is... well, impossible -- but they should have to at least break a sweat, even with shell accesss ))
Sorry but the ability for a non-privileged user to run as many programs as the like is a feature, not a bug.
Just how many regular users expect to run 20000 processes at once? (or even 200?) When that happens it's almost always caused by a bug (or malicious activity). Right now, I have 50 user processes running. I'm a power user, but I'd probably never get blocked by a limit of 1000 unless I was doing something really wierd -- and something that weird should come with instructions on modifying the kernel settings.
Yes, it should always remain possible to set up your system so that you can run massive numbers of processes and/or threads, but the default should be to keep numbers to a dull roar in favour of system stability. People whose needs are such that they actually and legitimately want to fork massive numbers of processes are also the kinds of people who wouldn't have a hard time figuring out how to change the kernel settings to allow it.
As such, the default should err on the side of security, but allow a knowledgable user to do whatever the heck he wants.
Thing is, though, that local resource-exhaustion exploits are difficult to set. You want to allow a user felatively free reign -- even to the point of stressing the system, but still allow enough of a reserve so that an admin cam login and shut down a user who'se gone overboard. You also want to set a limit that will be reasonable 5 years down the road when processors are 10 times as fast (and/or 20-way SMP is standard issue)
Something to note here in Linux's favour: Even though the forkbomb brought the system to it's knees it stayed up. Although it might have taken 1/2hour to do, an admin may have been actually able to login and kill the offending process.
Yep. you're right. (at least about 'Stranger in a Strange Land' -- can't say anything about him not building the waterbed. The story I got was that someone tried to patent it, and he provided the prior art to block the patent.
It might have been a competitor to the blocked patent that provided the free waterbed.
ou're only partly right to say that there's no 'Linux Operating System'. There is no THE Linux Operating System. That's the nature of Open Source, and part of it's strength. Nobody can own it, and hopefully nobody ever will. (SCO tried, and now they're fighting to see who sinks last).
On the other hand, there are a few resonable choices for a representative sample for certain applications. When one is comparing 'Windows Vs Linux' for example, The most likely choices would be Redhat or Suse because those are the two that big business is most likely to be looking at for desktop/server replacements inside of their organizations. There are a couple of other lesser contenders that might be appropriate if you're looking at desktop use.
Really bad representatives might be DamnSmallLinux for the desktop or Knoppix vs Windows SE for embeded applications.
When you come to think of it, there's not even really a single 'Windows' either. Lots of people are still running Windows 98, 2000 and ME. There's also at least 2 flavours of 2003 and 4 or more of XP (home, Professional, 'lite', and the WMP reduced versions) then there's god only knows how many versions of SE. -- and with XP, there's pre-SP2 and post-SP2 which are far more incompatible with each other than most of the 'general desktop' versions of Linux are with each other -- and that's happening mid-stride with no user interaction.
As an example, I recently talked to a help-desk person who mentioned that she's been getting a number of complaints recently about Windows acting up in strange ways (stranger than usual). This is an organization that's got a reasonably tight grip on the software they've got on their machines. The best explanation I could come up with was 'It's probably SP2 breaking things'. She agrees, but she currently has no proof (although even if Microsoft said 'it's nothing we did!', I probably wouldn't trust them anyways).
If it consisted of simply adding an '&status' to the end of the URL, then a number of people might have just done it on a lark to satisfy their curisoity. It's not like they have much to gain from the early (interim) knowlege -- I'd rate it at trying to suss out your christmas presents.
If, on the other hand, it took some convoluted hacking that was clearly beyond the pale -- and, say, included things like cracking passwords, then I'd be more likely to say that they needed to get bitchslapped.
That having been said, it's not a carreer ending move -- unless Harvard puts them on a blacklist, anybody who could get accepted there probably has a choice of a few other good universities to go to.
On the other hand, these are also likely to be 'disposable' applicants -- not the children of alumni who probably had a separate, private, application process. In other words, the school could probably afford to hang them from the yardarm without having to pay for their high moral stance.
OpenSolaris is an operating system. Linux is a kernel.
The linux kernel is just a kernel (much like the solaris kernel is just a kernel), but when most people talk about 'Linux' they're usually talking about far more than just an operating system --
what RMS would rather be referred to GNU/Linux -- This includes the kernel, the OS tools, and the various apps that come with most distros.
Whether it's the wide 3rd party support you get for RedHat RPMs, the boot-from-a-CD convenience of knoppix or the built-for-a-purpose utility of smaller versions (like Damn-Small-Linux).
Microsoft, especially likes to include patches for all of the subsystems of Redhat into it's security counts, and then compare that to patches for just windows -- but when it comes to denigrating it as 'just a toy', they'd be more than happy to FUD on the side of 'it's nothing more than the kernel'.
You wouldn't happen to be one of those astro-turfers would you?
Except OpenOffice 2 uses a new format, and will automagically convert files to it when you save older documents in the newer version so they can't be opened in OO 1.x anymore.
Not a big shock -- but you can still force a save in the old OO1 format and if you're dealing with a lot of associates who are still using OO1, you can even set the old format to be your default. Thing is that the newest version of OO can still open the older documents -- (hilariously including older Microsoft documents that Microsoft has now forgotten how to open).
Unlike Microsoft, The Open/Star Office people have no real incentive to browbeat someone who's completely happy with an older version of their suite into upgrading unless they actually want some of the newer features.
(me: I like stumbling ahead of the crowd, so I loaded an OO2 pre-beta a couple of months ago)
Sarcasm aside:
considering how little research many newspaper and TV 'journalists' put into some of their stories, these days, if you used that as the measuring stick for (freedom of) 'the press' I think we'd have precious few press credentials out there.
Journalism runs the gamut from hard-core investigative journalism to random blatherings of a social reporter -- and that's the case on both the 'net and the 'tube. Unless the judge is willing to strip CNN of their 'press' protection for reports (also) published on www.cnn.com, then I think we have an 'equal protection of the law' issue here.
One high-profile example of weblogs beating out so-called professional journalism was when it took less than an hour for the 'blogs to start ripping apart Dan Rather's letters about George Bush's Military so-called service. (It's not that I consider GWB the model of honorable duty, but a faked letter is a faked letter). I think that some of the AbuGharib abuse issues also surfaced on the 'bloggs first.
I'm thinking (and IANAP) that this may be something like a white dwarf's configuration where you have a core of denser material with the actual fusion going on on the outside. The heavy central core may or may not contribute to further fusion (perhaps this is where the heavier atoms come from), but it provides the gravity needed to compress the hydrogen to a fusion stage.
Among other things, I just can't see an object made of mostly hydrogen and helium being almost 100 times the density of Jupiter.
In any case, getting on to the name: It's tiny like a dwarf should be; It's probably got a configuration vaguely reminiscent of a white dwarf (heavy central core with non-core fusion); and I'm guessing that it's radiating mostly in the red spectrum (because it's generating so little heat).
Voila! A bonafide Red Dwarf star (and it's not (just) a cheap pun).
It's not mandatory, unless you drive or travel. Yes, in theory, you can do without it flying if you're willing to submit to highly invasive searches everytime you travel -- essentially a form of harrassment, because it really does almost nothing for public safety (especially compared to the fact that if somebody tried to hijack a flight today, people would beat them to death with their heavily X-rayed shoes).
The middle and upper classes "need" it because they drive, or otherwise travel on a regular basis. Even lower classes tend to drive. The lowest classes who can't afford to drive risk being harrassed by the cops if they get stopped, and can't provide ID, or denied basic services if they can't prove their identity^wer citizenship. Most of them don't have $1/2Million for a lawyer to defend their rights -- or even know what their rights are, for that matter.
So, no, it's not mandatory, but it probably catches well over 95% of the population. That's way better than most mandatory programs.
They slipped it in by the back door. They mandated that all state drivers license data bases be linked together (essentially a distributed database). If they all contain the same basic information (and possibly optional data), and are readable by the same hardware, then we have a national network of cards that are functionaly identical -- the only real difference being the artwork on your national ID card.
And folks like you think that we should do whatever the government asks for the HOPE that we might, possibly make things safer by throwing away our rights.
Benjamin Franklin made the quote famous:
"They that can give up essential liberty to
obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." Malcolm X is also associated with that quote -- but he's a rebel, while Benjamin Franklin just, uhm, signed the Declaration of Independence and a couple of other related documents.
The airlines claim that they're just following the law, and that they have no choice.
The government brief claims that there is no such law, but that if there was there would be a good reason to keep it secret... In other words, they're arguing generally to have secret laws that they can enforce against us whenever they want -- No public debate, not even any public notice, just a
I'm sorry sir, but I'm going to have to arrest you
Why??
Because you broke the law.
What law?
I'm sorry, I can't tell you. It's a secret law.
Can you tell me why the law exists?
No sir. If I told you that, I could get arrested too.
So what can I do?
You'll just have to trust me, sir and let me take you to jail.
Oh, OK.....
Thank you sir. Let me just put these handcuffs on -- regulation, you see
Right... ouch!... Now, when will I be able to defend myself in front of a judge?
Well, if you insist, sir, but I don't think that anybody's been able to successfully defend themselves aganst this law.
Why not? -- No, wait. let me guess! You can't tell me!
Very good sir, you're learning.
Well, I'm not learning what I want to know.
I understand sir, but I think you should also know, that people who don't plead guilty tend to get stiffer sentences.
Why? ... sigh...
Right. Can you tell me what kind of sentence I can expect?... I didn't think so.
I feel like I'm writing a Monty Python script.
Getting back to my original note though: The airlines claim that there is a law and they're just enforcing it. The government claims that there is no law. If nothing else, this case is worthwhile to just figure out who's telling the truth, so that the next step can be taken in challenging this law or the lie of it's purported existence.
Speaking as a once 9th grade girl who is now quite grown up, girls in the public school system do care very much about what others think, even if they say they don't.
If they say that they don't care, it's probably because they think that it's the 'in' thing to do.
This doesn't stop, for most of them when they get out of Junior High (or High School, or University, or.....)
I was once in an elevator with 3 other women I was teaching, when I mentioned that I thought that women dressed as much for each other as guys. The reaction was such that the one other guy in the elevator backed into a corner and tried to make himself invisible, then pushed a button so that he could get out at the next available floor.
I mentioned this (years later) to someone else, and her reaction was: "There must be something to that -- because my first reaction was to rip you a new face, too."
A former girlfriend of mine worked as a bank teller, then as a customer service rep. She says that she always, always, ALWAYS gets a reciept for any transaction she does on one and then compares that to her bank statements afterwards.
These are also machines that, in their first generation, gave out too many bills to people and did all sorts of other things wrong -- and that's without a structural incentive to put hooks and backdoors in.
The diebold voting machines have, on occasion managed to count 10 times as many votes for a candidate as there were voters. The people in charge scratched thir heads and came up with a more plausable set of numbers. Is there any solid proof that the new numbers are actually what was voted in those booths?
Is their any actual proof (besides the "oh, you can trust us, we're law abiding republicans declarations of the various companies that there is, in fact, no way to add an easter egg or back-door which allows people to modify votes either on the fly or when loading the voting software?
All that would do is prove that customers are, in fact, willing to pay for the 'right' to download movies and the MPAA is willfully refusing to respond to that market (and related revenue source).
On the other hand, if the site were put together by (or with the blessing of) the MPAA then anybody downloading movies via it would have been legal.
Bwahahahahahahahah!
The tent cities like in the Ukraine and Lebanon would have been fine -- something more than just the quiet, "Oh gee. it looks like our votes can get hijacked by these machines." was (and still is) desparately needed.
When so-called elected officials accept the premise that a machine capable of delivering vote counts 5 times the number of voters, won't miscount your votes and don't need any sort of verifiable audit trail, something is seriouly stinky in Denmark (not to mention Detroit).
Hopefully slashdot would refuse to back down and we could actually litigate his claim that his spyware/malware app is really a legitimate program. (I'm expecting that, between donations to slashdot and crossover from groklaw, we could beat their lawyers into papershredder mulch.)
I don't know if it would be enough to embarass Bush into backing down from having someone like this as part of DHS but it would, at least, make me feel better.
This news seems to have reduced me to a ranting maniac.
Slashdot Mirror
They've got lots of eggs now -- they just have to scrape it off of their face very carefully and pull their foot out of their mouth. For desert, they can start eating their words.
It's probably a competition issue for them because I'd expect that the people most likely to switch to Firefox probably make up a really juicy demographic that they don't want to lose out on.
(( Impossible is ... well, impossible -- but they should have to at least break a sweat, even with shell accesss ))
Just how many regular users expect to run 20000 processes at once? (or even 200?) When that happens it's almost always caused by a bug (or malicious activity). Right now, I have 50 user processes running. I'm a power user, but I'd probably never get blocked by a limit of 1000 unless I was doing something really wierd -- and something that weird should come with instructions on modifying the kernel settings.
Yes, it should always remain possible to set up your system so that you can run massive numbers of processes and/or threads, but the default should be to keep numbers to a dull roar in favour of system stability. People whose needs are such that they actually and legitimately want to fork massive numbers of processes are also the kinds of people who wouldn't have a hard time figuring out how to change the kernel settings to allow it.
As such, the default should err on the side of security, but allow a knowledgable user to do whatever the heck he wants.
Thing is, though, that local resource-exhaustion exploits are difficult to set. You want to allow a user felatively free reign -- even to the point of stressing the system, but still allow enough of a reserve so that an admin cam login and shut down a user who'se gone overboard. You also want to set a limit that will be reasonable 5 years down the road when processors are 10 times as fast (and/or 20-way SMP is standard issue)
Something to note here in Linux's favour: Even though the forkbomb brought the system to it's knees it stayed up. Although it might have taken 1/2hour to do, an admin may have been actually able to login and kill the offending process.
It might have been a competitor to the blocked patent that provided the free waterbed.
And don't forget what happened the last time someone tried to take an axe to V*Ger.
(Am I using the wrong tense there?)
On the other hand, there are a few resonable choices for a representative sample for certain applications. When one is comparing 'Windows Vs Linux' for example, The most likely choices would be Redhat or Suse because those are the two that big business is most likely to be looking at for desktop/server replacements inside of their organizations. There are a couple of other lesser contenders that might be appropriate if you're looking at desktop use.
Really bad representatives might be DamnSmallLinux for the desktop or Knoppix vs Windows SE for embeded applications.
When you come to think of it, there's not even really a single 'Windows' either. Lots of people are still running Windows 98, 2000 and ME. There's also at least 2 flavours of 2003 and 4 or more of XP (home, Professional, 'lite', and the WMP reduced versions) then there's god only knows how many versions of SE. -- and with XP, there's pre-SP2 and post-SP2 which are far more incompatible with each other than most of the 'general desktop' versions of Linux are with each other -- and that's happening mid-stride with no user interaction.
As an example, I recently talked to a help-desk person who mentioned that she's been getting a number of complaints recently about Windows acting up in strange ways (stranger than usual). This is an organization that's got a reasonably tight grip on the software they've got on their machines. The best explanation I could come up with was 'It's probably SP2 breaking things'. She agrees, but she currently has no proof (although even if Microsoft said 'it's nothing we did!', I probably wouldn't trust them anyways).
If, on the other hand, it took some convoluted hacking that was clearly beyond the pale -- and, say, included things like cracking passwords, then I'd be more likely to say that they needed to get bitchslapped.
That having been said, it's not a carreer ending move -- unless Harvard puts them on a blacklist, anybody who could get accepted there probably has a choice of a few other good universities to go to.
On the other hand, these are also likely to be 'disposable' applicants -- not the children of alumni who probably had a separate, private, application process. In other words, the school could probably afford to hang them from the yardarm without having to pay for their high moral stance.
Seriously though:
The linux kernel is just a kernel (much like the solaris kernel is just a kernel), but when most people talk about 'Linux' they're usually talking about far more than just an operating system -- what RMS would rather be referred to GNU/Linux -- This includes the kernel, the OS tools, and the various apps that come with most distros. Whether it's the wide 3rd party support you get for RedHat RPMs, the boot-from-a-CD convenience of knoppix or the built-for-a-purpose utility of smaller versions (like Damn-Small-Linux).
Microsoft, especially likes to include patches for all of the subsystems of Redhat into it's security counts, and then compare that to patches for just windows -- but when it comes to denigrating it as 'just a toy', they'd be more than happy to FUD on the side of 'it's nothing more than the kernel'.
You wouldn't happen to be one of those astro-turfers would you?
Not a big shock -- but you can still force a save in the old OO1 format and if you're dealing with a lot of associates who are still using OO1, you can even set the old format to be your default. Thing is that the newest version of OO can still open the older documents -- (hilariously including older Microsoft documents that Microsoft has now forgotten how to open).
Unlike Microsoft, The Open/Star Office people have no real incentive to browbeat someone who's completely happy with an older version of their suite into upgrading unless they actually want some of the newer features.
(me: I like stumbling ahead of the crowd, so I loaded an OO2 pre-beta a couple of months ago)
Sarcasm aside: considering how little research many newspaper and TV 'journalists' put into some of their stories, these days, if you used that as the measuring stick for (freedom of) 'the press' I think we'd have precious few press credentials out there.
Journalism runs the gamut from hard-core investigative journalism to random blatherings of a social reporter -- and that's the case on both the 'net and the 'tube. Unless the judge is willing to strip CNN of their 'press' protection for reports (also) published on www.cnn.com, then I think we have an 'equal protection of the law' issue here.
One high-profile example of weblogs beating out so-called professional journalism was when it took less than an hour for the 'blogs to start ripping apart Dan Rather's letters about George Bush's Military so-called service. (It's not that I consider GWB the model of honorable duty, but a faked letter is a faked letter). I think that some of the AbuGharib abuse issues also surfaced on the 'bloggs first.
They come from the magnetic poles, which are not the same as the spin axis -- rather like earth's magnetic poles on a combo of crack and pcp.
Among other things, I just can't see an object made of mostly hydrogen and helium being almost 100 times the density of Jupiter.
In any case, getting on to the name: It's tiny like a dwarf should be; It's probably got a configuration vaguely reminiscent of a white dwarf (heavy central core with non-core fusion); and I'm guessing that it's radiating mostly in the red spectrum (because it's generating so little heat).
Voila! A bonafide Red Dwarf star (and it's not (just) a cheap pun).
When he retired from NASA, did he go to work for SCO?
The middle and upper classes "need" it because they drive, or otherwise travel on a regular basis. Even lower classes tend to drive. The lowest classes who can't afford to drive risk being harrassed by the cops if they get stopped, and can't provide ID, or denied basic services if they can't prove their identity^wer citizenship. Most of them don't have $1/2Million for a lawyer to defend their rights -- or even know what their rights are, for that matter.
So, no, it's not mandatory, but it probably catches well over 95% of the population. That's way better than most mandatory programs.
George Bush is dead! Long live George Bush!
Benjamin Franklin made the quote famous: "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Malcolm X is also associated with that quote -- but he's a rebel, while Benjamin Franklin just, uhm, signed the Declaration of Independence and a couple of other related documents.
The airlines claim that they're just following the law, and that they have no choice.
The government brief claims that there is no such law, but that if there was there would be a good reason to keep it secret. .. In other words, they're arguing generally to have secret laws that they can enforce against us whenever they want -- No public debate, not even any public notice, just a
I feel like I'm writing a Monty Python script.Getting back to my original note though: The airlines claim that there is a law and they're just enforcing it. The government claims that there is no law. If nothing else, this case is worthwhile to just figure out who's telling the truth, so that the next step can be taken in challenging this law or the lie of it's purported existence.
If they say that they don't care, it's probably because they think that it's the 'in' thing to do.
This doesn't stop, for most of them when they get out of Junior High (or High School, or University, or.....)
I was once in an elevator with 3 other women I was teaching, when I mentioned that I thought that women dressed as much for each other as guys. The reaction was such that the one other guy in the elevator backed into a corner and tried to make himself invisible, then pushed a button so that he could get out at the next available floor.
I mentioned this (years later) to someone else, and her reaction was: "There must be something to that -- because my first reaction was to rip you a new face, too."
Send me some images of you and Leeloo, and I'll see what I can do....
These are also machines that, in their first generation, gave out too many bills to people and did all sorts of other things wrong -- and that's without a structural incentive to put hooks and backdoors in.
The diebold voting machines have, on occasion managed to count 10 times as many votes for a candidate as there were voters. The people in charge scratched thir heads and came up with a more plausable set of numbers. Is there any solid proof that the new numbers are actually what was voted in those booths?
Is their any actual proof (besides the "oh, you can trust us, we're law abiding republicans declarations of the various companies that there is, in fact, no way to add an easter egg or back-door which allows people to modify votes either on the fly or when loading the voting software?
The software has already proven itself broken.
On the other hand, if the site were put together by (or with the blessing of) the MPAA then anybody downloading movies via it would have been legal.
Bwahahahahahahahah!
When so-called elected officials accept the premise that a machine capable of delivering vote counts 5 times the number of voters, won't miscount your votes and don't need any sort of verifiable audit trail, something is seriouly stinky in Denmark (not to mention Detroit).
I don't know if it would be enough to embarass Bush into backing down from having someone like this as part of DHS but it would, at least, make me feel better.
This news seems to have reduced me to a ranting maniac.