The problem occurs when you have a situation like Switzerland did a few years back; the results of AIDS tests were mistakenly made available to health insurance companies without the consent of the individuals involved. I don't remember the exact specifics of the case, and am open to corrections, so caveat emptor.
Health insurance is mandatory here, meaning that nobody can refuse you basic coverage, and paid by the private individual, with the cost dependent on your age, sex, where you live, and your health status when signing up. Extended coverage, which includes a lot of specialized treatments, can be refused for a whole number of reasons. I don't know about you, but I can certainly see how this might cause a bit of an, er, teensy weensy little problem.
You're right, electronic records are not, by their nature, bad. Electronic records in countries with such miserable privacy records as the US (yes, I'm American) and the UK are a very questionable practice. We've seen in number of other areas (airline passenger data, anyone?) the high potential of information leaks to those you wouldn't necessarily want to have access to parts of your personal data.
To be perfectly honest, yes, there are some situation where I don't _want_ law enforcement to have easy access to my info. I want them to have to jump through hoops to find out things about me, even if I haven't even thought of committing a crime (beyond considering brutally murdering certain spammers.) The cops can always get my information from a health insurance, hospital, department of motor vehicles, credit card company, whatever. But I want them to really have to want it bad before going to the trouble of sorting through scads of paper.
Re:OpenBSD Desktop? Icky Poo.
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A BSD For Your PHB
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Sigh, I knew I was going to get flamed for this. Here goes:
You just put in the CD/Floppy, select upgrade
I was trying to uprade from source, since the upgrade from CD reproduced some interesting errors, which I don't have the time to go fish from the mailing list archives. And while this was a single machine, relying on a physical medium to keep a large # of boxes (as for desktops in a large company) up to date won't cut it. In that respect, I've rarely had problems with FreeBSD's buildworld.
Now are you going to leave? Does this make slashdot any less useful? Or are you just whining
Why whining? I'm posting my experience and some reasons. Why the fuck is it that the moment you try to shaer with people why you did/didn't do something, it's whining? I found a solution and got on with it.
What problems? Start listing... I have...
-OpenBSD-sparc on my SS20 kept locking up mysteriously. This was not due to memory/hardware/power problems (tested & replaced repeatedly) and was reported by a number of people without a solution ever being discussed.
-Several interesting changes to security settings and pf rules that cost me hours of diggign through various configs (and no, it wasn't obvious from the docs.) I hate operating systems that think they know better than I do how secure they should be.
The list goes on. Maybe this really was just the luck of the draw, and I know "things happen", but in my case I just had too much grief with the damn thing on too many different occasions. I just didn't have the time to spend knob-dicking around getting my boxes to work with a deadline to meet.
Look, my point was "use what works". I'm sorry if that got lost in translation.
OpenBSD Desktop? Icky Poo.
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A BSD For Your PHB
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I ditched OpenBSD a while ago for FreeBSD on my firewall (been using it on laptops and fileserver for aeons now.) I didn't find the upgrade procedure easy or transparent, and while my questions to various help mailing lists were usually answered in at least some civil manner, I've seen plenty of perfectly reasonable ones that just elicited idiotic flames ("you're just not '1337 enough to run this OS") to make me wonder.
I am not questioning the quality of OpenBSD (or any *BSD/Linux.) I know people who happily use it as their OS for all desktop-type work. I switched because I had too many odd (quite possibly atypical) problems that I just didn't have the time to get into, and yes I do RTFM before doing stuff on my boxes. I also banished FreeBSD from my laptop in favor of Debian because I just didn't think it adequately supported things like ACPI, my wireless card, and other things that, for a machine I use to do loads of non-technical work, should "just work".
Like it or not, and this is the wave of stupidity that usually breaks against the immovable seawall of OS fanaticism, there are things that I just don't want my PHB to be involved in. Just like having a car and just wanting to send it to the garage for regular checkups and having it function shouldn't disqualify you from driving, nobody should _have_ to use an alternate OS just because it's the right thing to do in someone's opinion.
That said, if a PHB actually can be made to want to muck with OpenBSD or Linux or whatever as a desktop OS, great! I'm all for it, I think it's great! I think it's nice that people like Mallett make a convincing, well-argued case for how/why to use a non-commercial OS for daily tasks. I like the article; he does not resort to zealotry or preaching.
Bottom line, if you can make a well-founded, logical argument, and you have a boss who's receptive to trying new things (or has time) you may have rewarded him by giving him something new and interesting to try out. If not, well, feh, let him use his Windows box and you use whatever you're happy with or have to.
Angband/Moria/Omega are very much alive and kicking. Do a bit of googling for them; I love playing Angband on my laptop occasionally, when I want something more engrossing than solitaire, maybe with a bit of continuity.
They're also great if you're stuck with a VT in a server room somewhere, waiting for some backups or installs to finish restoring. And as for memorizing stuff, the maps are random:)
Fine and good, but I wouldn't make such a black & white blanket statement regarding "out of print" games. There are games around which will be covered by copyright until hell freezes over, but which are not for sale, no longer available in arcades, which have no support or patches, and which make the owning company no money at all.
I know that the real answer here is to convince the copyright holders to release their old games into the public domain--it's good for the gamers, and good PR for the producer, or at least to address the underlying legal structure (release things into the public domain on which maintenance/profit have lapsed, or some similar solution.) But until that occurs, I don't mind downloading, say, a MAME ROM for such a game.
The other aspect which makes, say, games a bit unique is that of "what if it sucks"? I don't really feel the need to justify my behavior here, but I like grabbing a game and trying it out a bit before I buy. A lot of good games do decent CD key checking online, so you almost have to go out and buy it--plus, if I really like it, I want the booklet, the case, whatnot. I really do not have an issue with downloading a cracked version and giving it a spin before buying, whether there is a demo version available or not.
For me, this goes in the same direction as being able to get your money back in a lot of movie theaters (at least in the US) if a film is so crappy that you have to walk out of it. I recently downloaded Ubi Soft's IL-2, Call of Duty, and Vietcong; I love CoD, and am going to buy a copy. Jury's still out on the other two.
The argument's been made for people like me that if I don't buy a game, the creators will go out of business. Fine. I don't pay for games that suck; it's called "survival of the fittest". I realize that not everyone can be relied on to adhere to this sort of principle, and that if stricter copy protection becomes standard, we'll have no choice but to buy a game before playing it. But when that occurs, I'll probably go back to Angband or having a life.
This is what I found pretty cool about Ubi Soft's IL-2. It runs decently on not-so-super-duper-optimized gaming boxes with nice graphics in multiplayer.
We've wondered whether the Russian coders super-duper trimmed down their code because they didn't have access to as high end workstations as a lot of western gamers.
I don't see how that's a major PR victory, that's just not being evil assholes.
Given the choice between two similar products, 'A' and 'B', where 'B's manufacturer has proven to not behave like evil assholes, I am often inclined to buy 'B'.
Just look at the number of kudos on slashdot or other sites when a manufacturer (Apple, Philips, IBM, etc.) decides to "stick it to the man" and do something un-evil-asshole-ish. At least some of those are bound to result in increased sales.
In fact, just not being an evil asshole (and making sure your customers are aware of it), also known as "taking the moral high ground", has proven time and time again to be a highly effective marketing tactic. I don't care if it's done by some cynical marketing droid or out of genuine goodness; the result is the same for me.
I think a large factor in the continuing popularity of side scroller-type or top-down games is that they're usually a lot simpler to play than 3D (not to mention less resource-intensive.)
Case in point: I can fire up MAME and Ghosts & Ghouls on my laptop, goof around a bit, there are about 7 controls for me to "master" (back, forth, jump, duck, up, down, fire) and my machine never grinds to halt because I don't have the latest super-duper 3D drivers installed.
This sort of goes into the whole difference between "casual gamer" and "hardcore gamer"--it is the same reason I enjoy Angband on the train, before a meeting, before going to sleep, whatever--the controls are more difficult and involved, but I can quickly start it up, futz around a bit, and close it when I don't feel like getting too mentally involved.
Whereas, when I start up Call of Duty or something similar, I sit down with a coke and my headphones for a few hours and really get into it, as I would with a movie. I wouldn't be able to sleep or concentrate on work after 5 minutes (good luck anyway keeping it that short) of playing the car chase missions in CoD.
Well I always sort of thought that this was part of the idea of the "Compact Disc" label--there have been a bunch of feces-flinging fun fests about copy protected CDs not playing on various devices, and Sony/IBM/insert-large-corporation-here getting its panties in a bunch because it doesn't conform to the "Compact Disc" standard (i.e. Red Book/whatever.)
This is one situation where the idea of a "standard", be it a corporate-owned and trademarked one or IETF or what-have-you making a lot of sense.
To be honest, the mental image of Mel Brooks and his Svedish-bikini-team chorus line belting out off-key klezmer tunes at the top of their voices while I'm getting a root canal bugs me more than the drills and pokey bits and slings and arrows of outrageous dentistry.
Thank you for keeping me out of the dentist's office for another year, friend. My cavities will sing "hava nagila" for you.
The advantage that Open Source has over closed, proprietary source because of its "tinker friendliness" still holds true, irregardless of the author's conclusion that it is "very, very difficult" to fix problems in OSS. The source code is still available, right?. This means that it is at least possible for someone motivated enough to try and fix it. You just don't have that when the source code not is avaliable (legally).
Well stated, thanks. Also what a lot of people forget is that not all OSS is convoluted, badly commented C/C++/whatever code. I installed a web-based groupware called PHProjekt for a client once (I highly recommend it--it's great for what it does) and encountered some crappy bugs in it. I'm no great coder, but I was able to look through it, find the problem, alert the developers to it and then fix it myself. They said "thank you" nicely, and got rid of the bug in the next release.
I can't emphasize enough just how much I appreciated being able to find and fix the problem within half an hour, compared to spending x hours on some random tech support hotline and waiting for an official patch to come out.
(a) the Gimp runs on my FreeBSD/Linux box (which I use frequently as a desktop, in addition to my XP box at home) and works just fine for a lot of not too complicated stuff (I'm no graphic artist, but I did my business cards with it, and they're very nice) and
(b) I can easily find docs and help and whatnot on said simple things to do with the Gimp, more so than I was able to with Photoshop. I've used both for various tasks, and being the complete bleeding amateur that I am, found each to have its strengths and weaknesses.
I like his points, but I'm not sure I agree with point #3. I'm not a programmer, but a lot of my fellow consultants make pretty good money off bespoke software for clients. It _is_ related to the point the author makes, regarding "I have some cool ideas, how do I make money off it?" insofar as a lot of people focus on a particular area for development (web services, smart card interfaces, mobile applications, whatever.)
Customers, especially large firms, don't buy that software, but they will hire a consultant to help them by writing an application that plugs a certain gap, period. The "sale" is the money they pay you for your time.
No, you probably won't get to release that application to the public under the GPL, but you may very well obtain future business based on reference projects, business which involves writing similar applications for different projects.
What I don't see nearly enough for my tastes is a "middle of the road", use-whatever-works-best approach in choosing or writing software. We live in the real world and gotta solve problems; if you have the time and energy to devote to writing programs idealistically, I salute you, honestly. If you don't, considering for example that you have to make things work for a client, or simply don't have the resources for it, nobody should give you s*** for it.
Juichiro Koizumi actually had something like this when he was elected Prime Minister of Japan. I never got to read his email lists (don't speak Japanese, duh) but the idea was to give everyone-and-their-mom who subscribed regular updates as to what was going on. Sort of a "what I did on my summer vacation" for politics. The same goes for the U.S.' FirstGov, to be fair.
The only other people I've seen who tried this consistently are the UK government. Their pages, even the "government for the people" type ones, come across as fairly formal and even a bit propagandistic--i.e. not necessarily something that the average slob just looking for a quick update as to what's going on would turn to. Many friends of mine in the UK also take these efforts with a grain of salt. They also seem to have spent quite a bit of money and time trying to push their pages, as opposed to using something as powerfully simple as a weblog by those-in-charge to get the message across.
Severe fallacy of equation on both your and OP's part.
I can't see how a modded PS/2 or XBox could skid out of control due to faulty custom brakes or excessive horsepower and kill someone (won't someone think of the children?) nor do I understand how a modchip could cause a console to burst into flames and barbecue a class of third-graders.
As for the crotchless clothes, well, that's up to discussion. For me personally it's not a question of "indecency", nor would I forbid it, but damn, some of that shit you just don't need to be confronted with on your morning commute:-)
No, you're right, but picture the Michigan Militia flying the thing. "Woo haa, Cletus, we goin' airborne!" just doesn't sound nearly as dramatic.
Plus, the years of selective inbreeding that went into creating most of the home-grown terrorist wingnuts probably isn't too conducive towards figuring out the difference between the buttons labeled "jettison bomb" and "jettison boob" (i.e. the one flying.)
...now we'll have wave upon wave of ultralights smearing themselves ineffectively across the sides of NYC skyscrapers.
Who knows, this may cause thousands of dollars of damages to our nation's economy through skyrocketing window cleaning costs.
As for fears that small planes might be used to carry weapons of mass destruction, I can't imagine any hostile states currently having the technology to produce a nuke weighing under a ton. I have a mental image of a fanatic-piloted sport plane hopping along a runway, frantically trying to get airborne despite the huge black ovoid labelled "ACME BOMB" in bright red letters, before plummeting dramatically off the side of a cliff. "Allah Ackbar, take off you piece of s***!" *Boom*
Those compromised but unidentified websites are sending a very clear warning about Internet security: industry self-regulation is always going to translate into industry self-protection.
Bullshit. What "industry"? Software has security holes, and I don't care what development model or software licensing model or legislative model you advocate, it will always have security holes. Remember, you're talking "lowest common denominator" here.
The best thing to do is pursue a good information policy (you'll note that Joe Public, the drooling casual user at least knows how to pronounce "security", if not necessarily how to spell it, compared to 5 years ago) and keep the admins responsible for doing their jobs and patching.
I've found ISP technical discussion groups to be fantastic forums for putting pressure on idiots who don't maintain minimal standards of security. There's also a growing trend in "industry" (whatever the hell that means anyway) to cooperate and share information about security response and new threat research. In fact, I'm helping some of my clients (big banks) build inter-company organizations like this right now. They love it.
As for the smaller shitty hacked mom-n-pop webservers, I hate to say it, but Microsoft (the prime culprits) _have_ been making it much much easier to keep systems up to date. Love 'em or hate 'em, they're catching on, and I've found their engineers and security types to be extremely motivated and cooperative.
As an affected company or user, you do not get around having up-to-date AV signatures, patched workstations and servers (I don't care how many you have, it can be done), malicious content filters for web/mail/whatever traffic and alert, skilled, well-paid security staff. Once again, this may spark the usual slashdot bitchfest of "I'm overworked, it can't be done, yada yada" but that..is...wrong. I've seen it happen, and the companies that did things right had fewer headaches, fewer costs, fewer bad things in general.
The author has a point, but he's reinventing the wheel. There are plenty of good, simple sources of information for management, developers, sysadmins, security professionals and casual users out there. What's sort of lacking is a way to pull it all together. Sites like secunia.com do a fantastic job of this (although they're too technical for Joe Sixpack) and most vendors of end-user security software certainly try.
I don't have a solution for the problem of users who just don't care, but I would challenge anyone to come up with one that doesn't break more than it fixes.
I'm a security guy, and I'm 30. I've neither given up hope (I wanted this job, it's fun) nor abandoned hope. In addition, most of the time it's not about telling developers to drop features in favor of security, but getting the lazy snots to do it right (and usually cheaper and more robust at that) and maybe being half an hour late for their wakeboarding appointment.
And I listen to lots of classic rock. Mainly because I'm too lazy to check up on new indie tunes coming out, and most of the commercial hiphop/electronica/random pop crap is dull...
You're right about Directory. I have some serious problems with both ZenWorks and Directory when having to "integrate" them in to specific types of environments though.
Specifically, I'm referring to a project I worked on for a large insurance to get smart card auth (something Microsoft are actually fairly good at) for login working with ZenWorks, Checkpoint VPN and a number of other tools. Without going into details, it was a nightmare.
To be fair, in our case a lot of the problems were caused by a thick-headed insistence on using nwgina combined with a very specific set of requirements. We ran into timeout issues, authentication incompatibilities, whatnot.
If they manage to get everything working together nicely in a Linux environment, power both to them and to the poor bastard consultants who have to set up things like we did!:)
What's actually worrying me a lot more than spyware hijacks are active scripting tricks.
We've encountered a lot of these recently, using compromised IIS5.0 pages (innocuous sites)--you can read a high-level overview here.
People are hijacking sites and leaving them as-is, but appending malicious scripts. The sites are innocuous enough for average users to access regularly, but they take advantage of various IE exploits, such as Download.Ject and friends.
The MS patches for ADODB stuff aren't too widely used in a lot of outfits as they can break lots of bits and bobs of the help "system" in Outlook and other vaguely browser-related toys. I'm currently doing some security work for a large corporation, and am having a demon of a time just trying to figure out with application testing people which MS patches do exactly what, what they break, etc. Ah the joys of using high quality commercial software backed by a reputable vendor.
It's not just IE either; there've been a number of browser vulnerabilities released recently, albeit more to do with spoofing or redirects than actual remote code exploits. For Joe Average, though, the result will be nearly as serious (for example, if cnn.com prompts him to click 'yes' on a popup he may do it, when he would not for a random porno site.)
To be fair to Microsoft, their local security guys are being extremely cooperative and helpful just trying to sort out the mess.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least if it's a cute nurse, she wouldn't be able to tell you're imagining her in her undies by your speeding pulse.
On the other hand, "My net blood flow through my impeller turbine surges when I think of you" just doesn't really sound all that romantic.
The problem occurs when you have a situation like Switzerland did a few years back; the results of AIDS tests were mistakenly made available to health insurance companies without the consent of the individuals involved. I don't remember the exact specifics of the case, and am open to corrections, so caveat emptor.
Health insurance is mandatory here, meaning that nobody can refuse you basic coverage, and paid by the private individual, with the cost dependent on your age, sex, where you live, and your health status when signing up. Extended coverage, which includes a lot of specialized treatments, can be refused for a whole number of reasons. I don't know about you, but I can certainly see how this might cause a bit of an, er, teensy weensy little problem.
You're right, electronic records are not, by their nature, bad. Electronic records in countries with such miserable privacy records as the US (yes, I'm American) and the UK are a very questionable practice. We've seen in number of other areas (airline passenger data, anyone?) the high potential of information leaks to those you wouldn't necessarily want to have access to parts of your personal data.
To be perfectly honest, yes, there are some situation where I don't _want_ law enforcement to have easy access to my info. I want them to have to jump through hoops to find out things about me, even if I haven't even thought of committing a crime (beyond considering brutally murdering certain spammers.) The cops can always get my information from a health insurance, hospital, department of motor vehicles, credit card company, whatever. But I want them to really have to want it bad before going to the trouble of sorting through scads of paper.
Sigh, I knew I was going to get flamed for this. Here goes:
...
You just put in the CD/Floppy, select upgrade
I was trying to uprade from source, since the upgrade from CD reproduced some interesting errors, which I don't have the time to go fish from the mailing list archives. And while this was a single machine, relying on a physical medium to keep a large # of boxes (as for desktops in a large company) up to date won't cut it. In that respect, I've rarely had problems with FreeBSD's buildworld.
Now are you going to leave? Does this make slashdot any less useful? Or are you just whining
Why whining? I'm posting my experience and some reasons. Why the fuck is it that the moment you try to shaer with people why you did/didn't do something, it's whining? I found a solution and got on with it.
What problems? Start listing... I have
-OpenBSD-sparc on my SS20 kept locking up mysteriously. This was not due to memory/hardware/power problems (tested & replaced repeatedly) and was reported by a number of people without a solution ever being discussed.
-Several interesting changes to security settings and pf rules that cost me hours of diggign through various configs (and no, it wasn't obvious from the docs.) I hate operating systems that think they know better than I do how secure they should be.
The list goes on. Maybe this really was just the luck of the draw, and I know "things happen", but in my case I just had too much grief with the damn thing on too many different occasions. I just didn't have the time to spend knob-dicking around getting my boxes to work with a deadline to meet.
Look, my point was "use what works". I'm sorry if that got lost in translation.
I ditched OpenBSD a while ago for FreeBSD on my firewall (been using it on laptops and fileserver for aeons now.) I didn't find the upgrade procedure easy or transparent, and while my questions to various help mailing lists were usually answered in at least some civil manner, I've seen plenty of perfectly reasonable ones that just elicited idiotic flames ("you're just not '1337 enough to run this OS") to make me wonder.
I am not questioning the quality of OpenBSD (or any *BSD/Linux.) I know people who happily use it as their OS for all desktop-type work. I switched because I had too many odd (quite possibly atypical) problems that I just didn't have the time to get into, and yes I do RTFM before doing stuff on my boxes. I also banished FreeBSD from my laptop in favor of Debian because I just didn't think it adequately supported things like ACPI, my wireless card, and other things that, for a machine I use to do loads of non-technical work, should "just work".
Like it or not, and this is the wave of stupidity that usually breaks against the immovable seawall of OS fanaticism, there are things that I just don't want my PHB to be involved in. Just like having a car and just wanting to send it to the garage for regular checkups and having it function shouldn't disqualify you from driving, nobody should _have_ to use an alternate OS just because it's the right thing to do in someone's opinion.
That said, if a PHB actually can be made to want to muck with OpenBSD or Linux or whatever as a desktop OS, great! I'm all for it, I think it's great! I think it's nice that people like Mallett make a convincing, well-argued case for how/why to use a non-commercial OS for daily tasks. I like the article; he does not resort to zealotry or preaching.
Bottom line, if you can make a well-founded, logical argument, and you have a boss who's receptive to trying new things (or has time) you may have rewarded him by giving him something new and interesting to try out. If not, well, feh, let him use his Windows box and you use whatever you're happy with or have to.
You're right, bud. Fuck 'em. Oh by the way, Taco, can you please turn off your servers on your way out the door to Canada?
Angband/Moria/Omega are very much alive and kicking. Do a bit of googling for them; I love playing Angband on my laptop occasionally, when I want something more engrossing than solitaire, maybe with a bit of continuity.
:)
They're also great if you're stuck with a VT in a server room somewhere, waiting for some backups or installs to finish restoring. And as for memorizing stuff, the maps are random
Fine and good, but I wouldn't make such a black & white blanket statement regarding "out of print" games. There are games around which will be covered by copyright until hell freezes over, but which are not for sale, no longer available in arcades, which have no support or patches, and which make the owning company no money at all.
I know that the real answer here is to convince the copyright holders to release their old games into the public domain--it's good for the gamers, and good PR for the producer, or at least to address the underlying legal structure (release things into the public domain on which maintenance/profit have lapsed, or some similar solution.) But until that occurs, I don't mind downloading, say, a MAME ROM for such a game.
The other aspect which makes, say, games a bit unique is that of "what if it sucks"? I don't really feel the need to justify my behavior here, but I like grabbing a game and trying it out a bit before I buy. A lot of good games do decent CD key checking online, so you almost have to go out and buy it--plus, if I really like it, I want the booklet, the case, whatnot.
I really do not have an issue with downloading a cracked version and giving it a spin before buying, whether there is a demo version available or not.
For me, this goes in the same direction as being able to get your money back in a lot of movie theaters (at least in the US) if a film is so crappy that you have to walk out of it. I recently downloaded Ubi Soft's IL-2, Call of Duty, and Vietcong; I love CoD, and am going to buy a copy. Jury's still out on the other two.
The argument's been made for people like me that if I don't buy a game, the creators will go out of business. Fine. I don't pay for games that suck; it's called "survival of the fittest". I realize that not everyone can be relied on to adhere to this sort of principle, and that if stricter copy protection becomes standard, we'll have no choice but to buy a game before playing it. But when that occurs, I'll probably go back to Angband or having a life.
This is what I found pretty cool about Ubi Soft's IL-2. It runs decently on not-so-super-duper-optimized gaming boxes with nice graphics in multiplayer.
We've wondered whether the Russian coders super-duper trimmed down their code because they didn't have access to as high end workstations as a lot of western gamers.
I don't see how that's a major PR victory, that's just not being evil assholes.
Given the choice between two similar products, 'A' and 'B', where 'B's manufacturer has proven to not behave like evil assholes, I am often inclined to buy 'B'.
Just look at the number of kudos on slashdot or other sites when a manufacturer (Apple, Philips, IBM, etc.) decides to "stick it to the man" and do something un-evil-asshole-ish. At least some of those are bound to result in increased sales.
In fact, just not being an evil asshole (and making sure your customers are aware of it), also known as "taking the moral high ground", has proven time and time again to be a highly effective marketing tactic. I don't care if it's done by some cynical marketing droid or out of genuine goodness; the result is the same for me.
I think a large factor in the continuing popularity of side scroller-type or top-down games is that they're usually a lot simpler to play than 3D (not to mention less resource-intensive.)
Case in point: I can fire up MAME and Ghosts & Ghouls on my laptop, goof around a bit, there are about 7 controls for me to "master" (back, forth, jump, duck, up, down, fire) and my machine never grinds to halt because I don't have the latest super-duper 3D drivers installed.
This sort of goes into the whole difference between "casual gamer" and "hardcore gamer"--it is the same reason I enjoy Angband on the train, before a meeting, before going to sleep, whatever--the controls are more difficult and involved, but I can quickly start it up, futz around a bit, and close it when I don't feel like getting too mentally involved.
Whereas, when I start up Call of Duty or something similar, I sit down with a coke and my headphones for a few hours and really get into it, as I would with a movie. I wouldn't be able to sleep or concentrate on work after 5 minutes (good luck anyway keeping it that short) of playing the car chase missions in CoD.
Well I always sort of thought that this was part of the idea of the "Compact Disc" label--there have been a bunch of feces-flinging fun fests about copy protected CDs not playing on various devices, and Sony/IBM/insert-large-corporation-here getting its panties in a bunch because it doesn't conform to the "Compact Disc" standard (i.e. Red Book/whatever.)
This is one situation where the idea of a "standard", be it a corporate-owned and trademarked one or IETF or what-have-you making a lot of sense.
To be honest, the mental image of Mel Brooks and his Svedish-bikini-team chorus line belting out off-key klezmer tunes at the top of their voices while I'm getting a root canal bugs me more than the drills and pokey bits and slings and arrows of outrageous dentistry.
Thank you for keeping me out of the dentist's office for another year, friend. My cavities will sing "hava nagila" for you.
The advantage that Open Source has over closed, proprietary source because of its "tinker friendliness" still holds true, irregardless of the author's conclusion that it is "very, very difficult" to fix problems in OSS. The source code is still available, right?. This means that it is at least possible for someone motivated enough to try and fix it. You just don't have that when the source code not is avaliable (legally).
Well stated, thanks. Also what a lot of people forget is that not all OSS is convoluted, badly commented C/C++/whatever code. I installed a web-based groupware called PHProjekt for a client once (I highly recommend it--it's great for what it does) and encountered some crappy bugs in it. I'm no great coder, but I was able to look through it, find the problem, alert the developers to it and then fix it myself. They said "thank you" nicely, and got rid of the bug in the next release.
I can't emphasize enough just how much I appreciated being able to find and fix the problem within half an hour, compared to spending x hours on some random tech support hotline and waiting for an official patch to come out.
...easy. Because
(a) the Gimp runs on my FreeBSD/Linux box (which I use frequently as a desktop, in addition to my XP box at home) and works just fine for a lot of not too complicated stuff (I'm no graphic artist, but I did my business cards with it, and they're very nice) and
(b) I can easily find docs and help and whatnot on said simple things to do with the Gimp, more so than I was able to with Photoshop. I've used both for various tasks, and being the complete bleeding amateur that I am, found each to have its strengths and weaknesses.
I like his points, but I'm not sure I agree with point #3. I'm not a programmer, but a lot of my fellow consultants make pretty good money off bespoke software for clients. It _is_ related to the point the author makes, regarding "I have some cool ideas, how do I make money off it?" insofar as a lot of people focus on a particular area for development (web services, smart card interfaces, mobile applications, whatever.)
Customers, especially large firms, don't buy that software, but they will hire a consultant to help them by writing an application that plugs a certain gap, period. The "sale" is the money they pay you for your time.
No, you probably won't get to release that application to the public under the GPL, but you may very well obtain future business based on reference projects, business which involves writing similar applications for different projects.
What I don't see nearly enough for my tastes is a "middle of the road", use-whatever-works-best approach in choosing or writing software. We live in the real world and gotta solve problems; if you have the time and energy to devote to writing programs idealistically, I salute you, honestly. If you don't, considering for example that you have to make things work for a client, or simply don't have the resources for it, nobody should give you s*** for it.
Juichiro Koizumi actually had something like this when he was elected Prime Minister of Japan. I never got to read his email lists (don't speak Japanese, duh) but the idea was to give everyone-and-their-mom who subscribed regular updates as to what was going on. Sort of a "what I did on my summer vacation" for politics. The same goes for the U.S.' FirstGov, to be fair.
The only other people I've seen who tried this consistently are the UK government. Their pages, even the "government for the people" type ones, come across as fairly formal and even a bit propagandistic--i.e. not necessarily something that the average slob just looking for a quick update as to what's going on would turn to. Many friends of mine in the UK also take these efforts with a grain of salt. They also seem to have spent quite a bit of money and time trying to push their pages, as opposed to using something as powerfully simple as a weblog by those-in-charge to get the message across.
Severe fallacy of equation on both your and OP's part.
:-)
I can't see how a modded PS/2 or XBox could skid out of control due to faulty custom brakes or excessive horsepower and kill someone (won't someone think of the children?) nor do I understand how a modchip could cause a console to burst into flames and barbecue a class of third-graders.
As for the crotchless clothes, well, that's up to discussion. For me personally it's not a question of "indecency", nor would I forbid it, but damn, some of that shit you just don't need to be confronted with on your morning commute
No, you're right, but picture the Michigan Militia flying the thing. "Woo haa, Cletus, we goin' airborne!" just doesn't sound nearly as dramatic.
Plus, the years of selective inbreeding that went into creating most of the home-grown terrorist wingnuts probably isn't too conducive towards figuring out the difference between the buttons labeled "jettison bomb" and "jettison boob" (i.e. the one flying.)
...now we'll have wave upon wave of ultralights smearing themselves ineffectively across the sides of NYC skyscrapers.
Who knows, this may cause thousands of dollars of damages to our nation's economy through skyrocketing window cleaning costs.
As for fears that small planes might be used to carry weapons of mass destruction, I can't imagine any hostile states currently having the technology to produce a nuke weighing under a ton. I have a mental image of a fanatic-piloted sport plane hopping along a runway, frantically trying to get airborne despite the huge black ovoid labelled "ACME BOMB" in bright red letters, before plummeting dramatically off the side of a cliff. "Allah Ackbar, take off you piece of s***!" *Boom*
Wile E. Coyote, eat your little heart out.
Those compromised but unidentified websites are sending a very clear warning about Internet security: industry self-regulation is always going to translate into industry self-protection.
:)
Bullshit. What "industry"? Software has security holes, and I don't care what development model or software licensing model or legislative model you advocate, it will always have security holes. Remember, you're talking "lowest common denominator" here.
The best thing to do is pursue a good information policy (you'll note that Joe Public, the drooling casual user at least knows how to pronounce "security", if not necessarily how to spell it, compared to 5 years ago) and keep the admins responsible for doing their jobs and patching.
I've found ISP technical discussion groups to be fantastic forums for putting pressure on idiots who don't maintain minimal standards of security. There's also a growing trend in "industry" (whatever the hell that means anyway) to cooperate and share information about security response and new threat research. In fact, I'm helping some of my clients (big banks) build inter-company organizations like this right now. They love it.
As for the smaller shitty hacked mom-n-pop webservers, I hate to say it, but Microsoft (the prime culprits) _have_ been making it much much easier to keep systems up to date. Love 'em or hate 'em, they're catching on, and I've found their engineers and security types to be extremely motivated and cooperative.
As an affected company or user, you do not get around having up-to-date AV signatures, patched workstations and servers (I don't care how many you have, it can be done), malicious content filters for web/mail/whatever traffic and alert, skilled, well-paid security staff. Once again, this may spark the usual slashdot bitchfest of "I'm overworked, it can't be done, yada yada" but that..is...wrong. I've seen it happen, and the companies that did things right had fewer headaches, fewer costs, fewer bad things in general.
The author has a point, but he's reinventing the wheel. There are plenty of good, simple sources of information for management, developers, sysadmins, security professionals and casual users out there. What's sort of lacking is a way to pull it all together. Sites like secunia.com do a fantastic job of this (although they're too technical for Joe Sixpack) and most vendors of end-user security software certainly try.
I don't have a solution for the problem of users who just don't care, but I would challenge anyone to come up with one that doesn't break more than it fixes.
Boy do I have a chip on my shoulder today
I'm a security guy, and I'm 30. I've neither given up hope (I wanted this job, it's fun) nor abandoned hope. In addition, most of the time it's not about telling developers to drop features in favor of security, but getting the lazy snots to do it right (and usually cheaper and more robust at that) and maybe being half an hour late for their wakeboarding appointment.
And I listen to lots of classic rock. Mainly because I'm too lazy to check up on new indie tunes coming out, and most of the commercial hiphop/electronica/random pop crap is dull...
You're right about Directory. I have some serious problems with both ZenWorks and Directory when having to "integrate" them in to specific types of environments though.
:)
Specifically, I'm referring to a project I worked on for a large insurance to get smart card auth (something Microsoft are actually fairly good at) for login working with ZenWorks, Checkpoint VPN and a number of other tools. Without going into details, it was a nightmare.
To be fair, in our case a lot of the problems were caused by a thick-headed insistence on using nwgina combined with a very specific set of requirements. We ran into timeout issues, authentication incompatibilities, whatnot.
If they manage to get everything working together nicely in a Linux environment, power both to them and to the poor bastard consultants who have to set up things like we did!
What's actually worrying me a lot more than spyware hijacks are active scripting tricks.
We've encountered a lot of these recently, using compromised IIS5.0 pages (innocuous sites)--you can read a high-level overview here.
People are hijacking sites and leaving them as-is, but appending malicious scripts. The sites are innocuous enough for average users to access regularly, but they take advantage of various IE exploits, such as Download.Ject and friends.
The MS patches for ADODB stuff aren't too widely used in a lot of outfits as they can break lots of bits and bobs of the help "system" in Outlook and other vaguely browser-related toys. I'm currently doing some security work for a large corporation, and am having a demon of a time just trying to figure out with application testing people which MS patches do exactly what, what they break, etc. Ah the joys of using high quality commercial software backed by a reputable vendor.
It's not just IE either; there've been a number of browser vulnerabilities released recently, albeit more to do with spoofing or redirects than actual remote code exploits. For Joe Average, though, the result will be nearly as serious (for example, if cnn.com prompts him to click 'yes' on a popup he may do it, when he would not for a random porno site.)
To be fair to Microsoft, their local security guys are being extremely cooperative and helpful just trying to sort out the mess.
Guys holding two pumpkins, that's hilarious.
:)
But for god's sake man, nobody's asking you to be a people person, just a boob person
I hardly think the St. Paddy's day parade sets out to prove the Irish are just like everyone else.
:)
In fact, I think you're almost spectacularly missing the point off making a pastime out of getting hammered on green beer. Erin go bragh!