Yes, that's what I was thinking too. I recently wrote my own bootloader for a project. It honestly took me less time to do it from scratch (copy kernel from flash to mem, jump to it, done) than to read, understand and customize Coreboot or U-Boot or one of the many everything but the kitchen sink boot projects.
Of course you do realize that a generic bootloader like Coreboot must be more complex than a one off unportable one you can quickly write yourself for one set of hardware, am I right?
In your comment you use the term "kitchen sink". To you this may mean that there are many things in the "sink" that you will have no use for... To me this means that Coreboot supports more that just the things that you will have a use for.
A one off BIOS, or one that is specifically designed for the hardware is fine, and it is simple... However, the next hardware revision may require you to rewrite large portions that you may not have had to if you had considered the various different kitchens before you built your sink.
Additionally, your one-off BIOS is unlikely to benefit from changes that other hardware BIOS software coders create, and your one-off BIOS's unique interface may render it more difficult for users to add changes to it than a more widespread BIOS that the user is more familiar with...
TL;DR: Note the simplicity of the task at hand -- Inventing a Wheel; Also note that a the Hacker's principal virtue of laziness still applies. In short, let's not reinvent the wheel.
Perhaps this is just further testing of their hypothesis:
If you only slightly abuse the consumers, they will dump you for another company that treats them better; However, If you abuse your customers thoroughly enough they will never leave you.
Instead they'll start making excuses for their abusers: "It's not Sony's fault! They were pwn'd by 1337 haxorz, see they still love me, they promise not to be reckless like that ever again..."
Ultimately, after being subjected to enough abuse, they begin lying to themselves: "I'm sorry, Sony, please don't raise the prices. You can charge me again, I'm just grateful for the DRM you let me pay for, I'll try not to loose my downloaded data anymore... You're right, I should have backed up my data -- How stupid of me to think you'd let me re-download without paying, It's not like it costs you nothing to retransmit me the file -- I'll pay for a better connection next time."
"We're sorry for wanting to use the hardware the way we want -- You're right Sony, Hackers ARE bad. I see now that I should loathe Anonymous and Mr. Hotz -- People like that rob me of my PSN, and cause cheating -- It's not like I should expect my player hosted online matches to work without your amazing authentication server to coordinate the connection -- Yes, I'm sorry, I am too untrustworthy to be given the option of entering the IP addresses of our peers, please give me back the central network! I'll behave! I promise!"
The real work, the popular work, may have been the proprietary work. For example Apple's cocoa user interface code as opposed to the underlying freebsd code.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Yeah.... the "real" work was cocoa and not the entire underlying OS... meh, whatever. If BSD Unix had used a license like the GPL, apple would have had to find some other OS to leach off of -- Or maybe BSD Unix would be a strong competitor in the online serverspace, and smartphone niches that Apple's OSX and Linux fills?
You act like there's no real-world examples of BSD vs GPL. Your Apple vs Unix vs Linux example disproves your argument! It's not like we have no examples of how BSD can just be gobbled up into a proprietary software, and how GPL software doesn't allow such a thing, and how well each different community is doing as a result... (Note: Even TiVO has to give their changes back to the communtiy, thus enabling ME to make my own TiVO with the same codebase if I wish -- ergo, GPL2 isn't poisonous for hardware makers).
GPL'd GNU/Linux gets better when it gets used by big players in the software space -- BSD? Well, It just gets used as a base, and is left as it was before hand... Additionally, devs can be sniped from the BSD projects and go to work for the proprietary vendor, further weakening the BSD community project.
Yes, but the beer is only drinkable on the distributor's terms. They tell you when and where you can drink it. If the distributor goes belly up or stops making the beer, you don't know how to make it yourself and lose it forever . . . so wasteful. So this free beer is fine and all, but where is the freedom? I think that's the point. Free as in beer is a preferable short term solution. But RMS was looking in the long run, and in the long run, he has been right every goddam time.
Just an interesting note: I'm a coder and home-brewer... I work on open source software and share beer recipes with my friends at the local beer-club... People bring odd beers as well as their own creations, we taste them, many are good, others end up in the swill bucket. Fortunately my local home-brew supply store sponsors the meeting place for us (at their store), and there is always another beer-club to join, free beer to drink, and recipes to be had. (It's essential to keep a detailed log so that if the beer turns out well received, it can be reproduced).
Like software, beer takes resources to make. It takes a rare individual to freely share the product of their hard work, but the rewards and camaraderie are more than payment enough for some... donations are always appreciated as well (in both camps).
You see: Free as in beer means something WAY different to me than all you other small minded folk who know nothing of beer -- I make beer. Free as in beer to me means free to SHARE it. I can take just about any of the free beer I get at a beer club, culture its yeast strain & use the ingredient list to create more of the same.... So, it's really a failure in the saying... It should be "Free as in Lunch"? -- no... because I'm also a good cook, and can reproduce foods by taste and by recipe..... What about free as in promotional? (that's more like it)
(From your comments I take it you drink the crappy store bought mass produced beer that tastes like water? If not, check your local brew club for some of the best beer in town).
That is precisely the view my racist neighbor holds -- However, I do not. I don't believe race sex creed or origin has anything to do with goodness. I believe that each person should be evaluated individually for goodness and evilness, and that nearly all have a fair measure of both...
Where are the free PDF versions? Aren't these books open?;-)
So, what you're asking is basically: "Where's all the free beer?"
I agree. The thought has crossed my mind many a time; Some of us are less picky than others...
Sure, It's awesome when something is free as "in freedom",
but even more so when it's also free as "in beer".
I frequently enjoy the freedoms of free software, but where's all the beer it has been in?
HELLO! The beer is still drinkable! Just because it's got a bit of FLOSS in it
doesn't mean all of us would turn our nose up at it... so wasteful.
So if you don't want to hire people who say they did it all by themselves you won't be hiring anyone who's a team player or anyone who wants to share the knowledge.
I agree with your sentiment, but you fail to see the value in accomplishment of smaller projects that you can actually do all by yourself.
I made a pac-man clone -- All by myself... I made a remote personal music streaming server with native, web & Android clients... All by myself...
I wouldn't exactly be listing the OpenGL-ES devs, Java & C language architects as helping me out these various projects -- I have created my own programming languages in assembly, and hand compiled them into machine code -- All by myself... Not listing Intel and AMD in the credits for my language and compiler on those platforms seems OK to me -- After all, they just listed the asm to machine instruction table and register layouts, They didn't help me invent a language or compiler for said language any more than JavaScript designers, Firefox & IE devs helped me write my Web-enabled Tetris clone...
Sure, for large multi developer projects there are always others I will list as contributors; however, for small projects I don't think "all by myself" is a bad thing to say -- Also note, I've worked with coders that have never done anything 100% by themselves -- they rely heavily on everyone else around them -- They're EXCELENT team players -- They know exactly how to manipulate others into making it seem like they're not totally useless themselves. Perhaps if they were managers it would seem ok, but they're getting paid to code, and are only a drain on the rest of the "team".
I don't think "All By Myself" has to mean anything good or bad, it depends on the project... Conversely I don't think "Team Player" only describes good uses of the word "player".
I know it's socially cool to be anti-male, but come on.
Yep... Over-broad stereotyping should be avoided at all costs. No matter how much life experience you have, that stereotype may not apply to the person in front of you.
Even my racist bigot of a neighbor will admit that not all black people are "niggers".
After all, there's lots of profit in making sure your games remain playable for decades.
I'm sure you're trying to being sarcastic, but you failed at it.
Yes, there is profit in making sure your games remain playable for decades.
Why just last week I convinced 3 of my friends to purchase Doom, Doom2, Quake and Quake2. We can still play these games online via DosBox. There is no DRM in the games, ergo ID software is still making money on those games. The only thing they had to do to make them playable for decades: Not Impose Online DRM.
Now, ID also open sourced these games, but you must still have a copy of the original game assets (textures & levels) to use the open source game engines (now with improved cross platform higher res added features eg: FreeLook, in Doom / Heretic / Hexen).
There is a strong modding community that supports those games for free -- actually we pay ID for their original game assets (even though there are full replacements (total conversions) for many of the older games).
Thanks for Not Using DRM ID! I hope you make the same decision with RAGE! (Hint: Loyal customer BECAUSE I can still play the games 16 years later, and for the foreseeable future.)
i have a drawer full of pc games that don't work on my pc unless i install windows 95 or something. tbh i might as well throw them out, there's no way i'm ever playing them again.
That's funny, I have several shelves of PC games from the MS-DOS era, and Win95+ that run fine on my Linux machine via DosBox and/or Wine. In fact, I have a VM images of Win3.1 all the way to Win7, and I expect all of the games that I can play in my (hardware supported, no overhead) virtualized environments for the foreseeable future.
You're throwing them out because you nolonger care to play them, not because it's impossible to play them -- You haven't even searched at all for the answer to your "problem".
Honestly, this is ridiculous. I don't know if the submitter is some sort of apologist or just really lacking in the history of online gaming but online gaming and online game distribution has been around for about 25 years now give or take, and thats just one example. This would be about EXACTLY as old as the revered plastic grey box in question, give or take a couple if you were living in japan or not.
Different networks and system have been more secure than others this whole time, and the real question is "Why would some companies risk security in the name lower maintenance costs given the number of terrible consequences these days". The PSN outage and data leak raises questions about Sony and their decision making processes, not about the state of digital distribution and online gaming in general.
No. You don't get it. When you play most XBL and PSN enabled games the "server" is one of the player's consoles! The only thing that PSN or XBL is needed for is to determine which players want to play with each-other ie for Matchmaking and score tracking only.
The matchmaking server determines NAT and optionally allows for STUN in order to traverse NAT, selecting a compatible "game server" amongst those players.
Now, let's say me and my 8 friends all have properly configured our NAT routers -- On a console, (and some PC games) There is no where to enter the IP(s) for the games to connect to each-other. It's not like the game server code on your disk/console stops working when they take down the matchmaking server (eg: Halo2's). It's not even like the PSN or XBL "connectivity" servers are gone (they may disable the matchmaking server for a game, but the STUN and other connectivity services are still working!)
Please think about this: I enter voice chat with a party of friends on XBL. I take out the current game and put in Halo2. In fact, all of my friends do too.... Now, here we all are STILL FUCKING TALKING TO EACH OTHER OVER XBL P2P VOICE CHAT, but our Halo2 games can't talk to each other! If just a few bytes of data were ALLOWED to tell our Halo2 games which IP (one of us) should be the server and which should be the client then WE COULD STILL PLAY ONLINE (custom unranked matches). But nooooo, MS disabled that feature -- Hey, Halo3 is out... we should use that to play, some of the DLC levels are spitting images of our favorites from Halo2! -- until they disable its server functionality (Halo Reach is out... some of its levels are spitting images of our past favorites...)
When actually playing most online games (besides MMOs) the connection operates via P2P -- client server model, but not a single centralized server -- one of the players is the server, that's why when some people rage quit then you see: "Selecting New Host" -- they were the host. So, it doesn't really cost the game companies anything for us to play together. Our XBL Party Chat connection system is fully capable of sending a second channel of data "Game=Halo2; IP=10.6.6.6; Port=5309" -- IT ALREADY TELLS ALL MY FRIENDS WHICH GAME I'M CURRENTLY PLAYING as visible in the "friends" menu item, and IT ALREADY TELLS THEM MY IP ADDRESS so that P2P chat works! It even lets me send "game invites" to my friends............ What The Fuck! I hate DRM!
The answer is that Game companies want their older games to die. End of artificial life expectancy is used to force you into the next iteration -- force you to upgrade. (NOTE: Windows XP will be EOL'ed in a little more than 1000 days just for this same purpose -- whereas my company pays coders to support their systems still running "officially unsupported" RHEL 2 and backport security fixes because it's still cheaper than migrating away from that system).
Additionally, I have 2 Xbox360s. One for guests. My teenage brother frequently spends the night, so I got another XBox (Which is lame because I can still only play on one due to DRM I have to s
I blew that thing so much trying to get it to work (often failing), I feel like a cheap whore now just thinking about it.
That was the only game system that failed on me.
I've NEVER had to blow into any NES games that I play via my purely digital NES (emulator) -- And yes, I dump my own ROMs (did have to clean some of their contacts -- but never again!)
Image search Rogueware poisoning is yet another reason to start looking somewhere else for search results.
CORRECT. The more people stop using Google, the better their search will get -- They surely prioritize things; If everyone is displeased but keeps using their product out of habit then it's not as big of a priority. If they start losing lots of visitors over it then it will get fixed.
>You ARE aware that this is already in Firefox 4...
You ARE aware that this header makes fuck-all difference, right? The entire world is not subject to this law, and even if it was, black hats will still not abide it any more than they have abided the laws against spam mails.
Your point makes a very little bit of sense.
How many hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars do the black-hat sites make in profit? Google, Facebook, etc, have a lot to loose -- Imagine lawsuits and at the very worst case, no-longer operating in the US or even EU. To be sure, this California law will be the first of many.
Being a "no fucks given" Internet Outlaw doesn't earn you big adverting revenue -- Watch a TV commercial -- Cars, Sports teams, TV shows, even my nightly news program all have tie-ins with web analytic companies like Facebook (and increasingly Twitter).
Do you honestly think they want to be associated with some prosecuted out of the country and anti-privacy news headlined outlaw websites? There is money to be made being reputable, there is far less to be made being a sleaze.
> Now, we're just asking that Google, Facebook, et al. respect our wishes
And what of all the other sites that won't? Heck, what if even those sites won't? That's why the person you're following up to is saying this must be enforced by the browser *not giving out the damn data*. That' the ONLY way it can work. Anything else is pure fantasy.
Your web browser has no control over the fact that your IP address must be known in order to receive information from a server.
Some IP addresses are transient, but not enough that it's not a damn good way to track you. You can TRY to stop all the ways that a website can track you, but even the URL can be munged (user identifying tokens added) in order to track you -- The browser must use URLs -- This is how we created login systems before Cookies were invented. Hell, a bit of javascript running on a page that has a bunch of links to other sites can figure out which sites/pages you've visited simply by looking at their color or other such properties.
It's a cat & mouse game that you can't win -- You'll never keep the shady folks from tracking your browsing habits on their sites -- But what you can do is make it expensive for the big profitable "good" guys to ignore your privacy settings. These giants are much more of a threat -- their "like" buttons and "analytics" or "advertising" tracking systems are nearly everywhere online, this is not the sort of breadth that joeOutlawICanSeeYourIP.com typically has.
I have over 100 tricks in my "user persistence systems" repository. I add a few every month or so -- If I can figure out inventive ways that not even no-script or other "anti-tracking" programs block, then so can all the other web devs who are working on this "problem". Many of my tricks can identify your IP even while you are using TOR or other web proxy services! Without the cooperation of the sites we visit, there is no way to keep them from tracking us.
What if Facebook partners with Slashdot? What if Google partners with Your ISP. No amount of browser tech can stop Slashdot or your ISP from selling their logs to Facebook and Google. Legislation can.
To riff on your post - there are firefox addons that significantly reduce, if not outright kill, these cookie-less tracking techniques. Given your knowledge of the problem, I think you are aware of the addons, but for anyone else reading along who wants to start to take control back themselves rather than rely on the political process to come up with a "compromise":
Yes, Noscript is very useful -- In fact, it implements the very "DNT:1" HTTP header that I mentioned -- Firefox4 does (my build does, not sure if all Firefox4 versions do, but the current trunk & nightly builds do. Microsoft has said that IE9 will support the anti-tracking header. Google chrome of course will not -- and that my friend's is why I don't use chrome (I have an ugly Chromium patch that adds this feature though!)
Here's a PDF if you would like to read more about the DNT:1 header.
ghostery - http://www.ghostery.com/
Ghostery specifically blocks when one page pulls in javascript and other "bugs" from those tracking sites. It will even give you a quick list of the trackers on each page when it loads.
I use noscript with most, but not quite all, javascript blocked in conjunction with ghostery to keep guys like facebook and doubleclick/google from tracking me. Of course I block all cookies and do other things too, those two are just the most pertinent to the discussion.
Of course, this doesn't keep the partners of Facebook and Google/doubleclick from tracking you. Imagine if slashdot and othe sites you visit were paid a small fee per line of their server logs -- No sort of client side solution will stop them from tracking you this way short of not using the web. (What if they partner with your ISP!?)
Unfortunately legislation is the only answer -- Without any monetary penalties for ignoring our privacy demands, these companies will continue do just that.
The DNT:1 header tells Slashdot and any 3rd party hosts that your user information should not be saved -- This nips the problem in the bud, as evidenced by the outcry of some of the largest web-tracking companies.... If it wouldn't work, they wouldn't care!
The measure would negatively affect consumers who have come to expect rich content and free services through the Internet,
Personally it freaks me out whenever I go on a random site and it shows me my own facebook profile picture along with a message such as "Be the first of your friends to recommend this article!!"
I'm still caving to peer pressure and keeping a FB profile, but I resent it always more and more. One thing is for sure - that's one company I'm not investing in any time soon.
I've got a simple solution -- Simply change all the facebook like button icons to this image -- Feel free to use it on your sites (yes it's creepy, no it's not goatse). The alt text should read something like: "You can hide, but you can't run!"
I mean, seriously. There is no mechanism by which Do Not Track can actually be made to work as it is currently being proposed. This is more important than whether you think it's a good idea.
If you want to be able to opt out of being tracked, you need to built it in to browser behavior and/or web protocols themselves. You can't simply ASK sites not to track you and expect anything to happen, nor can you rely on a law to do this for you.
You mean, like including the newly proposed DNT:1 HTTP header in every HTTP request in order to signify that this request should not be subject to tracking?
You ARE aware that this is already in Firefox 4, and no-script, and will be in the new version IE9 --- we already asked, we even submitted code, and got the code accepted in browsers, and are already using said browsers with said feature.
Now, we're just asking that Google, Facebook, et al. respect our wishes and stop tracking users that include the DNT:1 header.
However, You're right! It IS currently unenforceable, but if the law passes, then it WILL be enforceable.
No, it just requires not loading their stuff from any site. It really isn't hard at all to block everything from FB, wherever it is, just like anyone with a shred of sense blocks doubleclick and google's trackers.
People who can't be arsed to do that are going be tracked, but I don't feel too sorry for them. If you don't care about the issue enough to take 5 minutes of your time to prevent it, then it really wasn't very important to you in the first place.
Your computer **is your computer**. It obeys you. If you do not wish it to load FB tracking, it will not do so. You get to tell it what to do. That's what it's for: so you can tell it what to do. If you don't want it to do X or Y, by all means, feel free.
It's like: if I don't like McDonalds, I don't have to go. Nobody is making me eat their food. Nobody is making me load FB's tracking shit either, so I don't.
Their website is their website -- slashdot's sever will do whatever they tell it to do, including sending their tracking data directly to the highest bidder. Granted, they probably don't -- no, they give "hints" about what stories I read to doubleclick, but I blocked doubleclick.com...
Perhaps doubleclick.com then pays a small fee per line of slashdot's/var/log files? They probably don't, but what's stopping them? Nothing. You can simply GTFO the Internet, that will stop them from tracking you --- I'd rather not do this, I'd rather all these web analytic sites obey the newly proposed legislation and my wishes expressed via my requests donning the new HTTP header: "DNT:1"
Whatever, nice try. As if Facebook only owns those two domains.... Try that with google.com & www.google.com. Oops, don't forget doubleclick.net, ad.doubleclick.net -- Hell, these companies can have thousands of domains for all I know; you can never block them all...
... But, hey! If we pass a law that says they can't track you if your HTTP header contains "DNT:1", this covers ALL of their domains, and any that the will ever purchase, including raw IP address URLs. Then I'll be able to control at least some of my privacy -- at least WRT companies that actually follow the law. That's why the legislation is needed, if there is no penalty for not obeying my wishes (and HTTP header), then they will just ignore it.
FYI: Web Advertising sees the "hosts" file as damage, and has long since routed around it.
Facebook already has an opt-out privacy mechanism called no using it.
Incorrect.
Please do realize that "not using" Facebook, means not allowing your browser to connect to Facebook... Even if you never directly go to facebook.com, if you see a website with a "like" button, you are using Facebook! How do you think the like buttons know how many (or that none of) "your friends like this"?
Since HTML web pages, for better or worse, allow multi-server content, any page can request that an image, script or other resource be pulled in from Facebook. The request for the resource contains your IP address (by necessity), and the URL of the page you are looking at, and some browsers even send cookies associated with the individual site, and will set additional cookies if the 3rd party resource returns them in the resource header.
Even if you have never created a facebook.com account, they may already know a lot about your browsing habits -- They can at the very least, associate your IP address with every page that you see with a like button on it; Most probably, they are also using cookies and/or other cached data (such as a cached JS script or PNG image) in order to track you as well (the script reads data from itself and adds additional resources to the page containing the cached unique ID value -- thus tracking you even with cookies disabled for Facebook.com).
Just "not using" Facebook means somehow obtaining a list of all domain names, affiliate domain names AND ip addresses that belong to or partner with Facebook, and then blocking them (via host file redirect, and/or firewall and browser settings).
Note: You can replace the word Facebook above with any company name, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, they ALL have the capacity to track you, and IMO, need to be slightly regulated -- AT THE BARE MINIMUM LET US OPT OUT!! I don't think it's too much to ask that they obey my wishes, and do not track me when a short and simple header string is included in the beginning of any HTTP request "DNT:1"
I can then configure my web browser to specify "DNT:0", or omit the header for sites that I don't mind tracking me -- In fact, perhaps those sites will give me a perk in exchange for my personal browsing habits.
As it currently stands, they give me nothing in return for violating my privacy. I'll gladly pay for search and other currently "free" services if I have to -- At least I'll know who is tracking me, and be able to somewhat control my privacy again (well, at least for the sites that obey the newly proposed legislation and HTTP header.... these are the ones I care about -- the ones so big that they can tell just about everywhere I go online).
This has been a long time coming -- We've gone a long time without requiring strict regulation of user privacy data. The large web-analytic companies (Google, Facebook, et al.) are not satisfied with collecting a meager amount of data from just their explicit visitors -- We can see where they will go when left to their own self regulation -- Even this page has a "Facebook" spy image on it! Things are out of hand, it's time we started to "Take back the Web", as the Firefox slogan originally promised.
Note: Google Analytics is most certainly used to track a large swath of the web -- Even if you've never been to google.com and only ever use Altavista or Bing.
For instance, this page's source contains the following javascript, which adds another javascript tag to the page, ergo, it could perform the above mentioned cookieless tracking technique... And... If this JS doesn't, how do I know the script it pulls in doesn't? I haven't the time or resources to view source every flipping page I view... The pulled in script could pull in any number of additional scripts, in fact, Google's code can be in full control of this page, adding and removing elements as it sees fit, and even recording every key I'm pressing right now -- well, they coul
I'm not sure if you're going for funny or not -- Just to clarify, CGI was traditionally done via C. Apache is written in C. To this day, I still write processor intensive server side code in C or C++ (with a few C libs to support cross platform code & CGI) -- Even dinky hosing services like 1&1 offer remote SSH, have C/C++ compilers installed (G++, GCC), as well as GIT.
I wouldn't develop on any system that doesn't at least support this minimal setup -- for web development or otherwise...
Perhaps you mean C isn't a cross platform client side sand-boxed language?
Neither is JavaScript:
It's not cross platform -- The amount of conditional cruft you have to add to ATTEMPT a cross-browser solution is rediculous, so much so that there are entire libraries and frameworks for client side JS just to get most of the way there, and even then, some browsers are left behind.
It's not sand-boxed -- Modern browsers compile JS to machine code and run that... Because the language requires features that make it slow, to do it any other way (bytecode in a VM), is terribly slow.
I use JS, but it's not all it's cracked up to be... Most devs I know only use it as a client side language because it's available -- not because the language is so great.
My final set of tools came to be powershell (access to the.net framework, you can do almost anything), Systernals psexec (for running processes on remote machines), and basic vbscript.bat. I had it set up with a web interface so I could enter a dos command into a web interface and point it a machine. It would build the bat and run it on the remote machine and return the standard out. This allowed me to add IIS sites and app pools, install com components, install apps, run msunit tests, and basically do whatever I wanted to any machine on the domain.
Took me a quarter to build, but worked well.
I've moved on in the company, but my replacement is still using it.
So... you built SSH for your current Windows setup, in 3 months. I'm glad *nix comes with that little gem so that each IT department using *nix doesn't have to roll their own (like you had to on Windows). Let's hope your program is well documented, and works easily after the next Windows revision...
I'm glad you were able to hack together your own solution, but wouldn't it be great if MS gave you those options at the CLI and a remote command line interface out of the box, instead of requiring you to build your own? I mean... Don't get me wrong, The ability to pass COM objects around in.net is great -- but why not start off being able to do that at the CLI and build on top of that, so that if you have to, it can all be done over something like SSH. Some people (not me, but some people), don't want to have to write a C# program just to perform "advanced" administration tasks such as automation, and remote terminal access...
I wonder -- what security measures are in place for your HTML <textarea> to remote.bat system?
A quote comes to mind, not aimed at you, but MS...
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer
In this case, MS has dodged the bullet by simply passing on the condemnation to their Windows admins.
The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
I mean -- its not like our space faring civilization will ever just build itself us.
I mean -- It's not like theres ever been another dominant life form that's now utterly extinct due to one or two slightly above average asteroids striking the Earth -- You can be complacent because you're ancestors were not dinosaurs... I suppose you believe Mammals are impervious to extinction events since we're so prevalent and adaptable (tell that to the anaerobic life that was killed off in the great origination catastrophe --- hint: our oxygen levels drop a bit more, we won't be having this discussion, it'll be the anaerobes' turn again).
In short: Life on Earth finally got decent brains! Let's not flippin' waste them due to insignificant BS and artificially important economic issues -- Anything less than advocating space exploration is burying your head in the sand (and ignoring the fossil record found there).
Those that don't know their history are doomed; There is no second chance to repeat it for some species.
Why not just turn off the computer, and systematically try out each new legislation in a different state/province/city/etc. before adopting it for the whole of the Nation -- Multiple trials can be executed simultaneously if needed.
There's really no reason the whole of the nation (or its economic future) should be at stake due to crappy laws... Oh, that's right -- Equal rights means everyone must all have the same rights always everywhere or else --- or else -- or else state/county/township and other local laws could be applied to individuals depending on where they live, and that's not fair, wait, what did I just say?
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that's what I was thinking too. I recently wrote my own bootloader for a project. It honestly took me less time to do it from scratch (copy kernel from flash to mem, jump to it, done) than to read, understand and customize Coreboot or U-Boot or one of the many everything but the kitchen sink boot projects.
Of course you do realize that a generic bootloader like Coreboot must be more complex than a one off unportable one you can quickly write yourself for one set of hardware, am I right?
In your comment you use the term "kitchen sink". To you this may mean that there are many things in the "sink" that you will have no use for... To me this means that Coreboot supports more that just the things that you will have a use for.
A one off BIOS, or one that is specifically designed for the hardware is fine, and it is simple... However, the next hardware revision may require you to rewrite large portions that you may not have had to if you had considered the various different kitchens before you built your sink.
Additionally, your one-off BIOS is unlikely to benefit from changes that other hardware BIOS software coders create, and your one-off BIOS's unique interface may render it more difficult for users to add changes to it than a more widespread BIOS that the user is more familiar with...
TL;DR: Note the simplicity of the task at hand -- Inventing a Wheel; Also note that a the Hacker's principal virtue of laziness still applies. In short, let's not reinvent the wheel.
Perhaps this is just further testing of their hypothesis:
If you only slightly abuse the consumers, they will dump you for another company that treats them better; However, If you abuse your customers thoroughly enough they will never leave you.
Instead they'll start making excuses for their abusers: "It's not Sony's fault! They were pwn'd by 1337 haxorz, see they still love me, they promise not to be reckless like that ever again..."
Ultimately, after being subjected to enough abuse, they begin lying to themselves: "I'm sorry, Sony, please don't raise the prices. You can charge me again, I'm just grateful for the DRM you let me pay for, I'll try not to loose my downloaded data anymore... You're right, I should have backed up my data -- How stupid of me to think you'd let me re-download without paying, It's not like it costs you nothing to retransmit me the file -- I'll pay for a better connection next time."
"We're sorry for wanting to use the hardware the way we want -- You're right Sony, Hackers ARE bad. I see now that I should loathe Anonymous and Mr. Hotz -- People like that rob me of my PSN, and cause cheating -- It's not like I should expect my player hosted online matches to work without your amazing authentication server to coordinate the connection -- Yes, I'm sorry, I am too untrustworthy to be given the option of entering the IP addresses of our peers, please give me back the central network! I'll behave! I promise!"
The real work, the popular work, may have been the proprietary work. For example Apple's cocoa user interface code as opposed to the underlying freebsd code.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Yeah.... the "real" work was cocoa and not the entire underlying OS... meh, whatever. If BSD Unix had used a license like the GPL, apple would have had to find some other OS to leach off of -- Or maybe BSD Unix would be a strong competitor in the online serverspace, and smartphone niches that Apple's OSX and Linux fills?
You act like there's no real-world examples of BSD vs GPL. Your Apple vs Unix vs Linux example disproves your argument! It's not like we have no examples of how BSD can just be gobbled up into a proprietary software, and how GPL software doesn't allow such a thing, and how well each different community is doing as a result... (Note: Even TiVO has to give their changes back to the communtiy, thus enabling ME to make my own TiVO with the same codebase if I wish -- ergo, GPL2 isn't poisonous for hardware makers).
GPL'd GNU/Linux gets better when it gets used by big players in the software space -- BSD? Well, It just gets used as a base, and is left as it was before hand... Additionally, devs can be sniped from the BSD projects and go to work for the proprietary vendor, further weakening the BSD community project.
Yes, but the beer is only drinkable on the distributor's terms. They tell you when and where you can drink it. If the distributor goes belly up or stops making the beer, you don't know how to make it yourself and lose it forever . . . so wasteful. So this free beer is fine and all, but where is the freedom? I think that's the point. Free as in beer is a preferable short term solution. But RMS was looking in the long run, and in the long run, he has been right every goddam time.
Just an interesting note: I'm a coder and home-brewer... I work on open source software and share beer recipes with my friends at the local beer-club... People bring odd beers as well as their own creations, we taste them, many are good, others end up in the swill bucket. Fortunately my local home-brew supply store sponsors the meeting place for us (at their store), and there is always another beer-club to join, free beer to drink, and recipes to be had. (It's essential to keep a detailed log so that if the beer turns out well received, it can be reproduced).
Like software, beer takes resources to make. It takes a rare individual to freely share the product of their hard work, but the rewards and camaraderie are more than payment enough for some... donations are always appreciated as well (in both camps).
You see: Free as in beer means something WAY different to me than all you other small minded folk who know nothing of beer -- I make beer. Free as in beer to me means free to SHARE it. I can take just about any of the free beer I get at a beer club, culture its yeast strain & use the ingredient list to create more of the same.... So, it's really a failure in the saying... It should be "Free as in Lunch"? -- no... because I'm also a good cook, and can reproduce foods by taste and by recipe..... What about free as in promotional? (that's more like it)
(From your comments I take it you drink the crappy store bought mass produced beer that tastes like water? If not, check your local brew club for some of the best beer in town).
That is precisely the view my racist neighbor holds -- However, I do not. I don't believe race sex creed or origin has anything to do with goodness. I believe that each person should be evaluated individually for goodness and evilness, and that nearly all have a fair measure of both...
Where are the free PDF versions? Aren't these books open? ;-)
So, what you're asking is basically: "Where's all the free beer?"
I agree. The thought has crossed my mind many a time; Some of us are less picky than others...
Sure, It's awesome when something is free as "in freedom",
but even more so when it's also free as "in beer".
I frequently enjoy the freedoms of free software, but where's all the beer it has been in?
HELLO! The beer is still drinkable! Just because it's got a bit of FLOSS in it
doesn't mean all of us would turn our nose up at it... so wasteful.
So if you don't want to hire people who say they did it all by themselves you won't be hiring anyone who's a team player or anyone who wants to share the knowledge.
I agree with your sentiment, but you fail to see the value in accomplishment of smaller projects that you can actually do all by yourself.
I made a pac-man clone -- All by myself... I made a remote personal music streaming server with native, web & Android clients... All by myself...
I wouldn't exactly be listing the OpenGL-ES devs, Java & C language architects as helping me out these various projects -- I have created my own programming languages in assembly, and hand compiled them into machine code -- All by myself... Not listing Intel and AMD in the credits for my language and compiler on those platforms seems OK to me -- After all, they just listed the asm to machine instruction table and register layouts, They didn't help me invent a language or compiler for said language any more than JavaScript designers, Firefox & IE devs helped me write my Web-enabled Tetris clone...
Sure, for large multi developer projects there are always others I will list as contributors; however, for small projects I don't think "all by myself" is a bad thing to say -- Also note, I've worked with coders that have never done anything 100% by themselves -- they rely heavily on everyone else around them -- They're EXCELENT team players -- They know exactly how to manipulate others into making it seem like they're not totally useless themselves. Perhaps if they were managers it would seem ok, but they're getting paid to code, and are only a drain on the rest of the "team".
I don't think "All By Myself" has to mean anything good or bad, it depends on the project... Conversely I don't think "Team Player" only describes good uses of the word "player".
FTFA
I know it's socially cool to be anti-male, but come on.
Yep... Over-broad stereotyping should be avoided at all costs. No matter how much life experience you have, that stereotype may not apply to the person in front of you.
Even my racist bigot of a neighbor will admit that not all black people are "niggers".
After all, there's lots of profit in making sure your games remain playable for decades.
I'm sure you're trying to being sarcastic, but you failed at it.
Yes, there is profit in making sure your games remain playable for decades.
Why just last week I convinced 3 of my friends to purchase Doom, Doom2, Quake and Quake2. We can still play these games online via DosBox. There is no DRM in the games, ergo ID software is still making money on those games. The only thing they had to do to make them playable for decades: Not Impose Online DRM.
Now, ID also open sourced these games, but you must still have a copy of the original game assets (textures & levels) to use the open source game engines (now with improved cross platform higher res added features eg: FreeLook, in Doom / Heretic / Hexen).
There is a strong modding community that supports those games for free -- actually we pay ID for their original game assets (even though there are full replacements (total conversions) for many of the older games).
Thanks for Not Using DRM ID! I hope you make the same decision with RAGE! (Hint: Loyal customer BECAUSE I can still play the games 16 years later, and for the foreseeable future.)
i have a drawer full of pc games that don't work on my pc unless i install windows 95 or something. tbh i might as well throw them out, there's no way i'm ever playing them again.
That's funny, I have several shelves of PC games from the MS-DOS era, and Win95+ that run fine on my Linux machine via DosBox and/or Wine. In fact, I have a VM images of Win3.1 all the way to Win7, and I expect all of the games that I can play in my (hardware supported, no overhead) virtualized environments for the foreseeable future.
You're throwing them out because you nolonger care to play them, not because it's impossible to play them -- You haven't even searched at all for the answer to your "problem".
Honestly, this is ridiculous. I don't know if the submitter is some sort of apologist or just really lacking in the history of online gaming but online gaming and online game distribution has been around for about 25 years now give or take, and thats just one example. This would be about EXACTLY as old as the revered plastic grey box in question, give or take a couple if you were living in japan or not.
Different networks and system have been more secure than others this whole time, and the real question is "Why would some companies risk security in the name lower maintenance costs given the number of terrible consequences these days". The PSN outage and data leak raises questions about Sony and their decision making processes, not about the state of digital distribution and online gaming in general.
No. You don't get it. When you play most XBL and PSN enabled games the "server" is one of the player's consoles! The only thing that PSN or XBL is needed for is to determine which players want to play with each-other ie for Matchmaking and score tracking only.
The matchmaking server determines NAT and optionally allows for STUN in order to traverse NAT, selecting a compatible "game server" amongst those players.
Now, let's say me and my 8 friends all have properly configured our NAT routers -- On a console, (and some PC games) There is no where to enter the IP(s) for the games to connect to each-other. It's not like the game server code on your disk/console stops working when they take down the matchmaking server (eg: Halo2's). It's not even like the PSN or XBL "connectivity" servers are gone (they may disable the matchmaking server for a game, but the STUN and other connectivity services are still working!)
Please think about this: I enter voice chat with a party of friends on XBL. I take out the current game and put in Halo2. In fact, all of my friends do too.... Now, here we all are STILL FUCKING TALKING TO EACH OTHER OVER XBL P2P VOICE CHAT, but our Halo2 games can't talk to each other! If just a few bytes of data were ALLOWED to tell our Halo2 games which IP (one of us) should be the server and which should be the client then WE COULD STILL PLAY ONLINE (custom unranked matches). But nooooo, MS disabled that feature -- Hey, Halo3 is out... we should use that to play, some of the DLC levels are spitting images of our favorites from Halo2! -- until they disable its server functionality (Halo Reach is out... some of its levels are spitting images of our past favorites...)
When actually playing most online games (besides MMOs) the connection operates via P2P -- client server model, but not a single centralized server -- one of the players is the server, that's why when some people rage quit then you see: "Selecting New Host" -- they were the host. So, it doesn't really cost the game companies anything for us to play together. Our XBL Party Chat connection system is fully capable of sending a second channel of data "Game=Halo2; IP=10.6.6.6; Port=5309" -- IT ALREADY TELLS ALL MY FRIENDS WHICH GAME I'M CURRENTLY PLAYING as visible in the "friends" menu item, and IT ALREADY TELLS THEM MY IP ADDRESS so that P2P chat works! It even lets me send "game invites" to my friends............ What The Fuck! I hate DRM!
The answer is that Game companies want their older games to die. End of artificial life expectancy is used to force you into the next iteration -- force you to upgrade. (NOTE: Windows XP will be EOL'ed in a little more than 1000 days just for this same purpose -- whereas my company pays coders to support their systems still running "officially unsupported" RHEL 2 and backport security fixes because it's still cheaper than migrating away from that system).
Additionally, I have 2 Xbox360s. One for guests. My teenage brother frequently spends the night, so I got another XBox (Which is lame because I can still only play on one due to DRM I have to s
I blew that thing so much trying to get it to work (often failing), I feel like a cheap whore now just thinking about it.
That was the only game system that failed on me.
I've NEVER had to blow into any NES games that I play via my purely digital NES (emulator) -- And yes, I dump my own ROMs (did have to clean some of their contacts -- but never again!)
new data showed that many of the planet's surface features were in the wrong place, sometimes off by as much as 30 kilometers (19 miles).
I find it hard to take seriously any "scientific" paper which refers to Titan as a planet rather than a moon.
That's no Moon! It's a -- oh, wait... yeah, it is, my bad.
Image search Rogueware poisoning is yet another reason to start looking somewhere else for search results.
CORRECT. The more people stop using Google, the better their search will get -- They surely prioritize things; If everyone is displeased but keeps using their product out of habit then it's not as big of a priority. If they start losing lots of visitors over it then it will get fixed.
Clueless post is clueless.
>You ARE aware that this is already in Firefox 4...
You ARE aware that this header makes fuck-all difference, right? The entire world is not subject to this law, and even if it was, black hats will still not abide it any more than they have abided the laws against spam mails.
Your point makes a very little bit of sense.
How many hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars do the black-hat sites make in profit? Google, Facebook, etc, have a lot to loose -- Imagine lawsuits and at the very worst case, no-longer operating in the US or even EU. To be sure, this California law will be the first of many.
Being a "no fucks given" Internet Outlaw doesn't earn you big adverting revenue -- Watch a TV commercial -- Cars, Sports teams, TV shows, even my nightly news program all have tie-ins with web analytic companies like Facebook (and increasingly Twitter).
Do you honestly think they want to be associated with some prosecuted out of the country and anti-privacy news headlined outlaw websites? There is money to be made being reputable, there is far less to be made being a sleaze.
> Now, we're just asking that Google, Facebook, et al. respect our wishes
And what of all the other sites that won't? Heck, what if even those sites won't? That's why the person you're following up to is saying this must be enforced by the browser *not giving out the damn data*. That' the ONLY way it can work. Anything else is pure fantasy.
Your web browser has no control over the fact that your IP address must be known in order to receive information from a server. Some IP addresses are transient, but not enough that it's not a damn good way to track you. You can TRY to stop all the ways that a website can track you, but even the URL can be munged (user identifying tokens added) in order to track you -- The browser must use URLs -- This is how we created login systems before Cookies were invented. Hell, a bit of javascript running on a page that has a bunch of links to other sites can figure out which sites/pages you've visited simply by looking at their color or other such properties.
It's a cat & mouse game that you can't win -- You'll never keep the shady folks from tracking your browsing habits on their sites -- But what you can do is make it expensive for the big profitable "good" guys to ignore your privacy settings. These giants are much more of a threat -- their "like" buttons and "analytics" or "advertising" tracking systems are nearly everywhere online, this is not the sort of breadth that joeOutlawICanSeeYourIP.com typically has.
I have over 100 tricks in my "user persistence systems" repository. I add a few every month or so -- If I can figure out inventive ways that not even no-script or other "anti-tracking" programs block, then so can all the other web devs who are working on this "problem". Many of my tricks can identify your IP even while you are using TOR or other web proxy services! Without the cooperation of the sites we visit, there is no way to keep them from tracking us.
What if Facebook partners with Slashdot? What if Google partners with Your ISP. No amount of browser tech can stop Slashdot or your ISP from selling their logs to Facebook and Google. Legislation can.
To riff on your post - there are firefox addons that significantly reduce, if not outright kill, these cookie-less tracking techniques. Given your knowledge of the problem, I think you are aware of the addons, but for anyone else reading along who wants to start to take control back themselves rather than rely on the political process to come up with a "compromise":
noscript - http://noscript.net/
Yes, Noscript is very useful -- In fact, it implements the very "DNT:1" HTTP header that I mentioned -- Firefox4 does (my build does, not sure if all Firefox4 versions do, but the current trunk & nightly builds do. Microsoft has said that IE9 will support the anti-tracking header. Google chrome of course will not -- and that my friend's is why I don't use chrome (I have an ugly Chromium patch that adds this feature though!)
Here's a PDF if you would like to read more about the DNT:1 header.
ghostery - http://www.ghostery.com/ Ghostery specifically blocks when one page pulls in javascript and other "bugs" from those tracking sites. It will even give you a quick list of the trackers on each page when it loads.
I use noscript with most, but not quite all, javascript blocked in conjunction with ghostery to keep guys like facebook and doubleclick/google from tracking me. Of course I block all cookies and do other things too, those two are just the most pertinent to the discussion.
Of course, this doesn't keep the partners of Facebook and Google/doubleclick from tracking you. Imagine if slashdot and othe sites you visit were paid a small fee per line of their server logs -- No sort of client side solution will stop them from tracking you this way short of not using the web. (What if they partner with your ISP!?)
Unfortunately legislation is the only answer -- Without any monetary penalties for ignoring our privacy demands, these companies will continue do just that.
The DNT:1 header tells Slashdot and any 3rd party hosts that your user information should not be saved -- This nips the problem in the bud, as evidenced by the outcry of some of the largest web-tracking companies.... If it wouldn't work, they wouldn't care!
The measure would negatively affect consumers who have come to expect rich content and free services through the Internet,
Personally it freaks me out whenever I go on a random site and it shows me my own facebook profile picture along with a message such as "Be the first of your friends to recommend this article!!"
I'm still caving to peer pressure and keeping a FB profile, but I resent it always more and more. One thing is for sure - that's one company I'm not investing in any time soon.
I've got a simple solution -- Simply change all the facebook like button icons to this image -- Feel free to use it on your sites (yes it's creepy, no it's not goatse). The alt text should read something like: "You can hide, but you can't run!"
Clueless post is clueless.
I mean, seriously. There is no mechanism by which Do Not Track can actually be made to work as it is currently being proposed. This is more important than whether you think it's a good idea.
If you want to be able to opt out of being tracked, you need to built it in to browser behavior and/or web protocols themselves. You can't simply ASK sites not to track you and expect anything to happen, nor can you rely on a law to do this for you.
You mean, like including the newly proposed DNT:1 HTTP header in every HTTP request in order to signify that this request should not be subject to tracking?
You ARE aware that this is already in Firefox 4, and no-script, and will be in the new version IE9 --- we already asked, we even submitted code, and got the code accepted in browsers, and are already using said browsers with said feature.
Now, we're just asking that Google, Facebook, et al. respect our wishes and stop tracking users that include the DNT:1 header.
However, You're right! It IS currently unenforceable, but if the law passes, then it WILL be enforceable.
No, it just requires not loading their stuff from any site. It really isn't hard at all to block everything from FB, wherever it is, just like anyone with a shred of sense blocks doubleclick and google's trackers.
People who can't be arsed to do that are going be tracked, but I don't feel too sorry for them. If you don't care about the issue enough to take 5 minutes of your time to prevent it, then it really wasn't very important to you in the first place.
Your computer **is your computer**. It obeys you. If you do not wish it to load FB tracking, it will not do so. You get to tell it what to do. That's what it's for: so you can tell it what to do. If you don't want it to do X or Y, by all means, feel free.
It's like: if I don't like McDonalds, I don't have to go. Nobody is making me eat their food. Nobody is making me load FB's tracking shit either, so I don't.
Their website is their website -- slashdot's sever will do whatever they tell it to do, including sending their tracking data directly to the highest bidder. Granted, they probably don't -- no, they give "hints" about what stories I read to doubleclick, but I blocked doubleclick.com...
Perhaps doubleclick.com then pays a small fee per line of slashdot's /var/log files? They probably don't, but what's stopping them? Nothing. You can simply GTFO the Internet, that will stop them from tracking you --- I'd rather not do this, I'd rather all these web analytic sites obey the newly proposed legislation and my wishes expressed via my requests donning the new HTTP header: "DNT:1"
rooftop@desktop:~$ cat /etc/hosts | grep facebook
0.0.0.0 facebook.com
0.0.0.0 www.facebook.com
Whatever, nice try. As if Facebook only owns those two domains.... Try that with google.com & www.google.com. Oops, don't forget doubleclick.net, ad.doubleclick.net -- Hell, these companies can have thousands of domains for all I know; you can never block them all...
FYI: Web Advertising sees the "hosts" file as damage, and has long since routed around it.
Facebook already has an opt-out privacy mechanism called no using it.
Incorrect.
Please do realize that "not using" Facebook, means not allowing your browser to connect to Facebook... Even if you never directly go to facebook.com, if you see a website with a "like" button, you are using Facebook! How do you think the like buttons know how many (or that none of) "your friends like this"?
Since HTML web pages, for better or worse, allow multi-server content, any page can request that an image, script or other resource be pulled in from Facebook. The request for the resource contains your IP address (by necessity), and the URL of the page you are looking at, and some browsers even send cookies associated with the individual site, and will set additional cookies if the 3rd party resource returns them in the resource header.
Even if you have never created a facebook.com account, they may already know a lot about your browsing habits -- They can at the very least, associate your IP address with every page that you see with a like button on it; Most probably, they are also using cookies and/or other cached data (such as a cached JS script or PNG image) in order to track you as well (the script reads data from itself and adds additional resources to the page containing the cached unique ID value -- thus tracking you even with cookies disabled for Facebook.com).
Just "not using" Facebook means somehow obtaining a list of all domain names, affiliate domain names AND ip addresses that belong to or partner with Facebook, and then blocking them (via host file redirect, and/or firewall and browser settings).
Note: You can replace the word Facebook above with any company name, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, they ALL have the capacity to track you, and IMO, need to be slightly regulated -- AT THE BARE MINIMUM LET US OPT OUT!! I don't think it's too much to ask that they obey my wishes, and do not track me when a short and simple header string is included in the beginning of any HTTP request "DNT:1"
I can then configure my web browser to specify "DNT:0", or omit the header for sites that I don't mind tracking me -- In fact, perhaps those sites will give me a perk in exchange for my personal browsing habits.
As it currently stands, they give me nothing in return for violating my privacy. I'll gladly pay for search and other currently "free" services if I have to -- At least I'll know who is tracking me, and be able to somewhat control my privacy again (well, at least for the sites that obey the newly proposed legislation and HTTP header.... these are the ones I care about -- the ones so big that they can tell just about everywhere I go online).
This has been a long time coming -- We've gone a long time without requiring strict regulation of user privacy data. The large web-analytic companies (Google, Facebook, et al.) are not satisfied with collecting a meager amount of data from just their explicit visitors -- We can see where they will go when left to their own self regulation -- Even this page has a "Facebook" spy image on it! Things are out of hand, it's time we started to "Take back the Web", as the Firefox slogan originally promised.
Note: Google Analytics is most certainly used to track a large swath of the web -- Even if you've never been to google.com and only ever use Altavista or Bing.
For instance, this page's source contains the following javascript, which adds another javascript tag to the page, ergo, it could perform the above mentioned cookieless tracking technique... And... If this JS doesn't, how do I know the script it pulls in doesn't? I haven't the time or resources to view source every flipping page I view... The pulled in script could pull in any number of additional scripts, in fact, Google's code can be in full control of this page, adding and removing elements as it sees fit, and even recording every key I'm pressing right now -- well, they coul
C isn't web scale.
I'm not sure if you're going for funny or not -- Just to clarify, CGI was traditionally done via C. Apache is written in C. To this day, I still write processor intensive server side code in C or C++ (with a few C libs to support cross platform code & CGI) -- Even dinky hosing services like 1&1 offer remote SSH, have C/C++ compilers installed (G++, GCC), as well as GIT.
I wouldn't develop on any system that doesn't at least support this minimal setup -- for web development or otherwise...
Perhaps you mean C isn't a cross platform client side sand-boxed language?
Neither is JavaScript:
It's not cross platform -- The amount of conditional cruft you have to add to ATTEMPT a cross-browser solution is rediculous, so much so that there are entire libraries and frameworks for client side JS just to get most of the way there, and even then, some browsers are left behind.
It's not sand-boxed -- Modern browsers compile JS to machine code and run that... Because the language requires features that make it slow, to do it any other way (bytecode in a VM), is terribly slow.
I use JS, but it's not all it's cracked up to be... Most devs I know only use it as a client side language because it's available -- not because the language is so great.
My final set of tools came to be powershell (access to the .net framework, you can do almost anything), Systernals psexec (for running processes on remote machines), and basic vbscript .bat. I had it set up with a web interface so I could enter a dos command into a web interface and point it a machine. It would build the bat and run it on the remote machine and return the standard out. This allowed me to add IIS sites and app pools, install com components, install apps, run msunit tests, and basically do whatever I wanted to any machine on the domain.
Took me a quarter to build, but worked well.
I've moved on in the company, but my replacement is still using it.
So... you built SSH for your current Windows setup, in 3 months. I'm glad *nix comes with that little gem so that each IT department using *nix doesn't have to roll their own (like you had to on Windows). Let's hope your program is well documented, and works easily after the next Windows revision...
I'm glad you were able to hack together your own solution, but wouldn't it be great if MS gave you those options at the CLI and a remote command line interface out of the box, instead of requiring you to build your own? I mean... Don't get me wrong, The ability to pass COM objects around in .net is great -- but why not start off being able to do that at the CLI and build on top of that, so that if you have to, it can all be done over something like SSH. Some people (not me, but some people), don't want to have to write a C# program just to perform "advanced" administration tasks such as automation, and remote terminal access...
I wonder -- what security measures are in place for your HTML <textarea> to remote .bat system?
A quote comes to mind, not aimed at you, but MS...
"Those who don't understand UNIX are condemned to reinvent it, poorly." – Henry Spencer
In this case, MS has dodged the bullet by simply passing on the condemnation to their Windows admins.
The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.
I mean -- its not like our space faring civilization will ever just build itself us.
I mean -- It's not like theres ever been another dominant life form that's now utterly extinct due to one or two slightly above average asteroids striking the Earth -- You can be complacent because you're ancestors were not dinosaurs... I suppose you believe Mammals are impervious to extinction events since we're so prevalent and adaptable (tell that to the anaerobic life that was killed off in the great origination catastrophe --- hint: our oxygen levels drop a bit more, we won't be having this discussion, it'll be the anaerobes' turn again).
In short: Life on Earth finally got decent brains! Let's not flippin' waste them due to insignificant BS and artificially important economic issues -- Anything less than advocating space exploration is burying your head in the sand (and ignoring the fossil record found there).
Those that don't know their history are doomed; There is no second chance to repeat it for some species.
There's really no reason the whole of the nation (or its economic future) should be at stake due to crappy laws... Oh, that's right -- Equal rights means everyone must all have the same rights always everywhere or else --- or else -- or else state/county/township and other local laws could be applied to individuals depending on where they live, and that's not fair, wait, what did I just say?