What makes you think that you can change any personal data online ? This is an online transaction enabling system - no bank would allow you to change your address, physical or otherwise without seeing authentication presented in vivo, right ?
My bank has had this for ages. How's about protecting you from the man in the middle attack by a little extra procedure, though ? Immediately after you've done the transactions through the web and you log out, the bank sends you an encrypted email with all your transactions in it. Those emails can be parseable for your own financial package as well. And it should give you some time to cancel all the transactions that are bogus. There can be no forgery involved, since the bank _always_ sends those mails. Just an idea, I know there's no cure for utter stupidity.
Did you point your DBA to this guy's site ? Sorry. But that's number two on Google, and it made my countless oracle 9 and 10 installs a breeze on any system that I've decided to throw it on - Gentoo, Fedora, RedHat AS etc. If you couldn't find that or work with it, I feel for you. Otherwise, maybe it's time to look at other factors; hardware setup etc. Not necessarily Linux's fault.
Amen. Not to mention that Oracle comes with its own java, its own perl and its own apache, as did the backup solution from CA that we bought with it (that I discarded immediately). Never mind that these are all already available on my system (and in compatible versions, too); no - don't ask - don't try to find - just smear them on the hard-disk and gobble up gigabytes of space that I could have used for data retention. And I'm not whining about a few gig lost; it's the principle that's at fault. Oracle links at installation time, it has scripts running, and it has an extensive java based installer tool that asks loads and loads of questions - why can't they just take a few seconds to see whether I have perl, java and apache ? I know. It's the nature of open source; the people at glibc for example, thought it was a good idea to change the nature of strerror() from function to macro in between major revisions for localization purposes and then, of course, Oracle won't link anymore. It's pure frustration, and I'm stuck, ideologically speaking, between the evils here.
Well, you know.. Naughty bytes are only sent over networks with the evil bit set. Maybe we can have the same thing here; an extra evil-bit line added to every parallel bus on your system. For serial communication, we can stick with the old RFC.
There are, IMHO, three 'growth-paths' into computers for lay people. The first one is work (front-office), the second one advertising, and the third one is a geek relative (and general hype among the soldering-iron crowd). It may be controversial, but I think they have roughly the same kind of influence on buying decisions of commodity hardware.
MS have the first one nailed fast as a brick on a concrete floor. Apple's upgrade path doesn't help here, either, and neither does OSS's lack of commercial options (anyone care to invest a couple of million in my new-to-be-formed 1000 people on-site OSS support consultancy company ? I didn't think so either).
Advertising. Here Apple and MS go neck-and-neck. MS does more in volume (especially magazines), but Apple's ones are more sexy. OSS doesn't count, the occasional firefox-ad notwithstanding; it just doesn't have the bling to pay for it. And even if it did - what would it advertise ? Linux AS ? Ubuntu ? Openoffice ? They're all so different, and differently deployable (even on windows and macs, some of them), it's just not doable, campaign-wise.
The geek-nephew-factor; splits three ways. Mac hackers have had a sudden wake-up call, and don't forget that there's a good deal of hackers running around that swear by Windows. And they can hack it front-to-back, some of them. However, most of them are just really glad to be able to get away with being called a geek because they know how to edit the registry (not that I do).
Now add up the points: MS have 33 + 16 + 11, Apple have 16 + 11, and OSS has 11. Not quite where we are today, but an illustration, in my mind, of where it can go, given the status quo. Bear in mind that these are growth-paths; the reaping is to be done later only. Also notice how Mac overtook OSS within two years time; showing how powerful a tool vision and money is, something where OSS sometimes lacks a bit. Lastly note, if you please, that I have not a single drop of expertise in trend-forecasting. Just my two eurocents.
I do believe, my good sir or madam, that your reflex-like reaction has been thoroughly debunked already. Maybe it's time to put this in the slashdot FAQ.
Really ? The guy went to bed in the inflated panic Reagan era, when the worst fear was imminent total nuclear annihilation; he woke up in the inflated panic Bush Jr era, when the worst fear was that you might possibly lose your life in a terrorist attack. If you were to work for the government, or in a tall building, or take the train to work, that is. I think he'd rather flip back into his coma from laughing. Shame he missed the Clinton years, though.
I didn't understand a single sentence of the write-up. But I'm sure it must be me. I'm not young enough or something. Or maybe I'm out of touch. I'm sure everyone else has a natural understanding of what a 'hosting provider control panel' is. And what it means when the application is 'decoupled from the domain'. They got it in school. Yeah. That must be it. I must get out of the woods. Fly from my mother's basement. See the blue sky. Shake people's hands. Tell them I love them. In tears. Any day now. Any way now. I shall decouple my applications from the domain, and use my hosting provider control panel to get my satfisfaction. But the voices in my head keep telling me to shut up. Stay put. Keep those applications coupled to the domain. Eschew Ajax-based control-panels. Edit in nano. Nasty, nasty little me. Shh.
Amen. What do they mean with 'patterns' in this case anyway, or is it just a fashionable excuse to name-drop the term 'pattern' again ? The one example they're giving is so easy to circumvent, and so difficult, therefore, to detect, that I wish them all the luck in the world if they're planning to concentrate on this. I'd go for easier options, me, indeed as part of the compiler:
boolean b; if (b = false) {... }
while (in.readline() != null) { String str = in.readline(); }// seriously, I came across this once.
That sort of thing; what they're trying to do is write a Gang-of-four-validator. Helpfull for CMM level 5 corporations, but a project of such magnitude is better left to the likes of IBM. Until then, I'm afraid I'm going to look at it with a pinch of scepsis.
That's what was always the beauty of IP, right ? Everything can be decentralized - packet fails to travel over default route ? Throw it over another route. Mail fails to be delivered through default MTA ? Try the second MTA. Piece of the net goes down ? No worries - the rest is still holding up. That very thought is the beauty and the strength of IP, and that's what we should keep. There are, of course, many 'subcategories' of the internet that are in dire need of a rebuild (CA's, email, DNS, IPv4 -> IPv6) but on the whole it's a terrific system. The same goes for what ICANN does; the number-space is already allotted to other parties (RIPE etc.) and _is_ in fact already decentralized; the naming system can be decentralized as well (replicating root servers accross the globe held by different organizations); administratively, you could implement a simple system of voting among these organizations to help them with their decisionmaking (the.xxx TLD ?) This is the first argument; that it's simple to do and in the spirit of things.
The second argument would be that, in this time of inflated panic, it would be fantastic if the global IT community could set an example for the rest of the spectre of human endevour; namely that it's a small world and we all have to live in it together.
Microwave ? But doesn't that mean you'd always need line-of-sight with one of these babies ? Plus, there's circuitry when you want to make it do anything but just fly, and something for tracking; line-of-sight is fine an'all, but how are you going to track something that's practically translucent beyond a distance of, say, a couple of meters ?
No. But RedHat ES/AS does this. And it _does_ shut you down. Not to flame RedHat, as they are a respectable company that does a load of good for Linux through fedora and the tools that they invented and made GPL throughout the years. But my point is just that a company, provided that they tell you about it and make sure that you understand the implications, has every right to do this with their software.
It's the worst move MS could make; now that, after (too) many, many years, they have to power (both technologically and legally) to make _sure_ that every copy of a windows OS playing anywhere will always be a licensed one; forget it - they'd halve their marketshare overnight. The sound you'd hear wouldn't come from thousands of computers dying, it would be from thousands of MS shares sold never to be bought again.
Sure, the button exists, and a lot of (too righteous) people within MS will want it pushed, but will they really ? I don't think so. They may be self-righteous and stupid, but they're not _that_ stupid.
I'm not from the US either, but I understand that the power of 'precedent' is very strong in the US legal system (ruled like so-and-so once for this law under these circumstances, must rule like so-and-so forever for this law under comparable circumstances) above a certain level of court. This is not so much the case in countries not based on anglo-saxon common law, where judges are much more free to judge based on the circumstances of a particular case.
From a usability point-of-view, I don't see the point in having this damn small linux, but maybe that's because I would see the use of this thing only in the perspective of an admin. You see, if I want big, I'll use knoppix, or kororaa; if we're talking about small (and fitted with a floppy drive), then 1.4 MB is the max. And you can still fit a linux kernel (albeit one customized for the hardware), a libc, a shell and some disk-tools on that. That's great for repairs, or bootstrapping your old 386 and using it for vi. From the point-of-view of hardware, I also have a difficulty understanding why this is usefull; the devices in question have to be fitted with CD- or floppy-drives, so we're talking PCs here; if a PC had 50 MB of diskspace (say, a 386 or a 486; they're not using compression, are they ?) then all this fancy-schmansy gtk stuff is just going to kill it. Any PC above that would have a CD drive that I could stick a fully loaded CD in. And any PC that could really play the gtk stuff well, would have to be post-pentium at least. So, other than 'because we can' I see no answers that a project like this provides.
Sorry, I got it wrong again (a zero missing; damn keyboards) ! Never mind; it's (in a vacuum) approximately 0.8 mm/cycle. Reducing that by 2/3's would make it approach 0.5 mm/cycle. Let's just say it's a really tiny little bit of distance for a wave to travel before another one gets stirred up in the medium they travel in. Must be a really small wave, too.
350 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 (375 809 638 400) cycles per second divided by the distance light travels in a second (299 792 458 000 mm / s) is 1.2 mm. Just thought I'd throw that in.
CORBA tried to do too many things at once; not only was it supposed to be some kind of OO-RPC, it also specced a declaration language (IDL), which was replaced at some stage by an XML-variant, which it wanted to also use to incorporate data- and other resources, plus some kind of 'discovery' broadcasting protocol that you could use to find (distributed, of course) CORBA servers around you, oh, and object serialization in weird strings. On top of all that, you had to leave your blood, soul and first born child at the omg website in order to obtain documentation, because, as these guys felt it, they had gold in their hands, and they wanted to cash in on it good. And it _was_ good, but it was just that because of this in-built obscurity (in turn caused by its complexity and omg's secretiveness), nobody could really tell where CORBA stood; was it some kind of transactioning system a la the kind that IBM mainframes have ? Was it OO-RPC (but then, why not use RPC) ? Then all kinds of competing tech started to overtake it (java RMI, XML-RPC based tech) to which the omg only vaguely responded (the XML declaration thingy) but couldn't really, because of the moloch that CORBA had become. And thus they faded into obscurity.
The moral of the story ? When you want to sell a protocol or a language, be as simple as you can (modularize) and be as open as you can (throw it around, even) Otherwise, if you're not IBM or Sun or Oracle, you will not make it.
It's a miracle to me then, that he would crack a joke of such miserable quality. Or maybe he was just incredibly foresighted, as it emerged with the election of the new pope that the inquisition is still in existence.
What I find disturbing (and I've missed this argument in the whole discussion a bit) is that while Time-Warner asserts that copies of works in digital form are easily made, reproduced and solidified (by pirates), it always fails to mention that this goes for them too, doesn't it ?
I mean, the technology, as has been developed, has not solely been developed to benefit the publishing industry, but simply to benefit everybody and their mother (a question of professional pride, i'd say). The publishing industry is making a profit because of this progress, but they are still standing on the proverbial shoulders of giants (as is everybody else who uses technology)
If they can make a profit, then so can and should everybody else (pirates, seen in this light, are just one-man startups); this really is blatant anti-competitive action and it should be prosecuted until the end of days, just like oh dare I say it..;-)
Slashdot Mirror
What makes you think that you can change any personal data online ? This is an online transaction enabling system - no bank would allow you to change your address, physical or otherwise without seeing authentication presented in vivo, right ?
My bank has had this for ages. How's about protecting you from the man in the middle attack by a little extra procedure, though ? Immediately after you've done the transactions through the web and you log out, the bank sends you an encrypted email with all your transactions in it. Those emails can be parseable for your own financial package as well. And it should give you some time to cancel all the transactions that are bogus. There can be no forgery involved, since the bank _always_ sends those mails. Just an idea, I know there's no cure for utter stupidity.
Did you point your DBA to this guy's site ? Sorry. But that's number two on Google, and it made my countless oracle 9 and 10 installs a breeze on any system that I've decided to throw it on - Gentoo, Fedora, RedHat AS etc. If you couldn't find that or work with it, I feel for you. Otherwise, maybe it's time to look at other factors; hardware setup etc. Not necessarily Linux's fault.
Amen. Not to mention that Oracle comes with its own java, its own perl and its own apache, as did the backup solution from CA that we bought with it (that I discarded immediately). Never mind that these are all already available on my system (and in compatible versions, too); no - don't ask - don't try to find - just smear them on the hard-disk and gobble up gigabytes of space that I could have used for data retention. And I'm not whining about a few gig lost; it's the principle that's at fault. Oracle links at installation time, it has scripts running, and it has an extensive java based installer tool that asks loads and loads of questions - why can't they just take a few seconds to see whether I have perl, java and apache ? I know. It's the nature of open source; the people at glibc for example, thought it was a good idea to change the nature of strerror() from function to macro in between major revisions for localization purposes and then, of course, Oracle won't link anymore. It's pure frustration, and I'm stuck, ideologically speaking, between the evils here.
Well, you know.. Naughty bytes are only sent over networks with the evil bit set. Maybe we can have the same thing here; an extra evil-bit line added to every parallel bus on your system. For serial communication, we can stick with the old RFC.
There are, IMHO, three 'growth-paths' into computers for lay people. The first one is work (front-office), the second one advertising, and the third one is a geek relative (and general hype among the soldering-iron crowd). It may be controversial, but I think they have roughly the same kind of influence on buying decisions of commodity hardware.
MS have the first one nailed fast as a brick on a concrete floor. Apple's upgrade path doesn't help here, either, and neither does OSS's lack of commercial options (anyone care to invest a couple of million in my new-to-be-formed 1000 people on-site OSS support consultancy company ? I didn't think so either).
Advertising. Here Apple and MS go neck-and-neck. MS does more in volume (especially magazines), but Apple's ones are more sexy. OSS doesn't count, the occasional firefox-ad notwithstanding; it just doesn't have the bling to pay for it. And even if it did - what would it advertise ? Linux AS ? Ubuntu ? Openoffice ? They're all so different, and differently deployable (even on windows and macs, some of them), it's just not doable, campaign-wise.
The geek-nephew-factor; splits three ways. Mac hackers have had a sudden wake-up call, and don't forget that there's a good deal of hackers running around that swear by Windows. And they can hack it front-to-back, some of them. However, most of them are just really glad to be able to get away with being called a geek because they know how to edit the registry (not that I do).
Now add up the points: MS have 33 + 16 + 11, Apple have 16 + 11, and OSS has 11. Not quite where we are today, but an illustration, in my mind, of where it can go, given the status quo. Bear in mind that these are growth-paths; the reaping is to be done later only. Also notice how Mac overtook OSS within two years time; showing how powerful a tool vision and money is, something where OSS sometimes lacks a bit. Lastly note, if you please, that I have not a single drop of expertise in trend-forecasting. Just my two eurocents.
I do believe, my good sir or madam, that your reflex-like reaction has been thoroughly debunked already. Maybe it's time to put this in the slashdot FAQ.
Really ? The guy went to bed in the inflated panic Reagan era, when the worst fear was imminent total nuclear annihilation; he woke up in the inflated panic Bush Jr era, when the worst fear was that you might possibly lose your life in a terrorist attack. If you were to work for the government, or in a tall building, or take the train to work, that is. I think he'd rather flip back into his coma from laughing. Shame he missed the Clinton years, though.
Oh. Better put my flame-vest on now..
I didn't understand a single sentence of the write-up. But I'm sure it must be me. I'm not young enough or something. Or maybe I'm out of touch. I'm sure everyone else has a natural understanding of what a 'hosting provider control panel' is. And what it means when the application is 'decoupled from the domain'. They got it in school. Yeah. That must be it. I must get out of the woods. Fly from my mother's basement. See the blue sky. Shake people's hands. Tell them I love them. In tears. Any day now. Any way now. I shall decouple my applications from the domain, and use my hosting provider control panel to get my satfisfaction. But the voices in my head keep telling me to shut up. Stay put. Keep those applications coupled to the domain. Eschew Ajax-based control-panels. Edit in nano. Nasty, nasty little me. Shh.
Amen. What do they mean with 'patterns' in this case anyway, or is it just a fashionable excuse to name-drop the term 'pattern' again ? The one example they're giving is so easy to circumvent, and so difficult, therefore, to detect, that I wish them all the luck in the world if they're planning to concentrate on this. I'd go for easier options, me, indeed as part of the compiler:
... }
// seriously, I came across this once.
boolean b; if (b = false) {
while (in.readline() != null) { String str = in.readline(); }
That sort of thing; what they're trying to do is write a Gang-of-four-validator. Helpfull for CMM level 5 corporations, but a project of such magnitude is better left to the likes of IBM. Until then, I'm afraid I'm going to look at it with a pinch of scepsis.
That's what was always the beauty of IP, right ? Everything can be decentralized - packet fails to travel over default route ? Throw it over another route. Mail fails to be delivered through default MTA ? Try the second MTA. Piece of the net goes down ? No worries - the rest is still holding up. That very thought is the beauty and the strength of IP, and that's what we should keep. There are, of course, many 'subcategories' of the internet that are in dire need of a rebuild (CA's, email, DNS, IPv4 -> IPv6) but on the whole it's a terrific system. The same goes for what ICANN does; the number-space is already allotted to other parties (RIPE etc.) and _is_ in fact already decentralized; the naming system can be decentralized as well (replicating root servers accross the globe held by different organizations); administratively, you could implement a simple system of voting among these organizations to help them with their decisionmaking (the .xxx TLD ?) This is the first argument; that it's simple to do and in the spirit of things.
The second argument would be that, in this time of inflated panic, it would be fantastic if the global IT community could set an example for the rest of the spectre of human endevour; namely that it's a small world and we all have to live in it together.
No. This is slashdot.
Microwave ? But doesn't that mean you'd always need line-of-sight with one of these babies ? Plus, there's circuitry when you want to make it do anything but just fly, and something for tracking; line-of-sight is fine an'all, but how are you going to track something that's practically translucent beyond a distance of, say, a couple of meters ?
As per usual; the powersource ?
No. But RedHat ES/AS does this. And it _does_ shut you down. Not to flame RedHat, as they are a respectable company that does a load of good for Linux through fedora and the tools that they invented and made GPL throughout the years. But my point is just that a company, provided that they tell you about it and make sure that you understand the implications, has every right to do this with their software.
It's the worst move MS could make; now that, after (too) many, many years, they have to power (both technologically and legally) to make _sure_ that every copy of a windows OS playing anywhere will always be a licensed one; forget it - they'd halve their marketshare overnight. The sound you'd hear wouldn't come from thousands of computers dying, it would be from thousands of MS shares sold never to be bought again.
Sure, the button exists, and a lot of (too righteous) people within MS will want it pushed, but will they really ? I don't think so. They may be self-righteous and stupid, but they're not _that_ stupid.
I'm not from the US either, but I understand that the power of 'precedent' is very strong in the US legal system (ruled like so-and-so once for this law under these circumstances, must rule like so-and-so forever for this law under comparable circumstances) above a certain level of court. This is not so much the case in countries not based on anglo-saxon common law, where judges are much more free to judge based on the circumstances of a particular case.
From a usability point-of-view, I don't see the point in having this damn small linux, but maybe that's because I would see the use of this thing only in the perspective of an admin. You see, if I want big, I'll use knoppix, or kororaa; if we're talking about small (and fitted with a floppy drive), then 1.4 MB is the max. And you can still fit a linux kernel (albeit one customized for the hardware), a libc, a shell and some disk-tools on that. That's great for repairs, or bootstrapping your old 386 and using it for vi. From the point-of-view of hardware, I also have a difficulty understanding why this is usefull; the devices in question have to be fitted with CD- or floppy-drives, so we're talking PCs here; if a PC had 50 MB of diskspace (say, a 386 or a 486; they're not using compression, are they ?) then all this fancy-schmansy gtk stuff is just going to kill it. Any PC above that would have a CD drive that I could stick a fully loaded CD in. And any PC that could really play the gtk stuff well, would have to be post-pentium at least. So, other than 'because we can' I see no answers that a project like this provides.
Sorry, I got it wrong again (a zero missing; damn keyboards) ! Never mind; it's (in a vacuum) approximately 0.8 mm/cycle. Reducing that by 2/3's would make it approach 0.5 mm/cycle. Let's just say it's a really tiny little bit of distance for a wave to travel before another one gets stirred up in the medium they travel in. Must be a really small wave, too.
Sorry; that's the reverse of course: 29979245800 mm/s / 375809638400 cycle/s = 0.079772424 mm/cycle
350 * 1024 * 1024 * 1024 (375 809 638 400) cycles per second divided by the distance light travels in a second (299 792 458 000 mm / s) is 1.2 mm. Just thought I'd throw that in.
CORBA tried to do too many things at once; not only was it supposed to be some kind of OO-RPC, it also specced a declaration language (IDL), which was replaced at some stage by an XML-variant, which it wanted to also use to incorporate data- and other resources, plus some kind of 'discovery' broadcasting protocol that you could use to find (distributed, of course) CORBA servers around you, oh, and object serialization in weird strings. On top of all that, you had to leave your blood, soul and first born child at the omg website in order to obtain documentation, because, as these guys felt it, they had gold in their hands, and they wanted to cash in on it good. And it _was_ good, but it was just that because of this in-built obscurity (in turn caused by its complexity and omg's secretiveness), nobody could really tell where CORBA stood; was it some kind of transactioning system a la the kind that IBM mainframes have ? Was it OO-RPC (but then, why not use RPC) ? Then all kinds of competing tech started to overtake it (java RMI, XML-RPC based tech) to which the omg only vaguely responded (the XML declaration thingy) but couldn't really, because of the moloch that CORBA had become. And thus they faded into obscurity.
The moral of the story ? When you want to sell a protocol or a language, be as simple as you can (modularize) and be as open as you can (throw it around, even) Otherwise, if you're not IBM or Sun or Oracle, you will not make it.
It's a miracle to me then, that he would crack a joke of such miserable quality. Or maybe he was just incredibly foresighted, as it emerged with the election of the new pope that the inquisition is still in existence.
What I find disturbing (and I've missed this argument in the whole discussion a bit) is that while Time-Warner asserts that copies of works in digital form are easily made, reproduced and solidified (by pirates), it always fails to mention that this goes for them too, doesn't it ?
I mean, the technology, as has been developed, has not solely been developed to benefit the publishing industry, but simply to benefit everybody and their mother (a question of professional pride, i'd say). The publishing industry is making a profit because of this progress, but they are still standing on the proverbial shoulders of giants (as is everybody else who uses technology)
If they can make a profit, then so can and should everybody else (pirates, seen in this light, are just one-man startups); this really is blatant anti-competitive action and it should be prosecuted until the end of days, just like oh dare I say it.. ;-)
Isn't this the khttpd that was supposed to make it into kernel 2.4 versions (which I thought was a fairly crazy idea; a kernel serving http) ?