Thats the problem with a totally uncoordinated test effort. The devs probably hack together some stubs to test some units but I doubt they are in a condition to be distributed.
Silly human, you have the source code, who needs documentation?
I really can't defend either testing method very heavily. In MS's case they have a small number of fairly well trained people pour over the code and run numerous coordinated tests and try to find all the problems. In Open Source's case they have millions of people of unknown training pour over the source code and run a crazy number of uncoordinated tests.
Its like MS uses a couple.22 rifle shots and Open Source uses a shot gun from long range. Neither way gets great coverage.
Is linux more secure than Windows NT? I'm not going to make any bets. I will say that windows probably gets beat on a whole lot more these days by the random hackers because if they pull of an exploit it will hit millions of computers instead of thousands.
Security is a design stage thing and honestly its been built on top of both Linux and Windows NT. Someone needs to start from the ground up with security in mind (yes I know there are projects in the world today with this goal in mind).
Thats always been my take on this. The one major downside is that we may need the resources in the future. Otherwise what better way is there to spread it through the universe so it can be redeposited at a later date in a different spot in less toxic densities.
Yeah, a couple of US thieves could steal everything in the country. I guess its a good thing your govt takes all your money in taxes and there is nothing to steal:)
I mean if you really want to defame MS you wait until they are already released before you explain all the exploits. Now MS just gets to go fix the bug and say "We released a secure product".
MS may not be the best at security, but recent publicity has put them on the defensive and they are actually fixing security holes. I bet this exploit won't work on the release version of the.NET Framework.
The.NET framework is the VM and a bunch of libraries to go with it. It just happens that this new framework is very well suited for writing applications using the philosophy of.NET.
The whole idea with.NET is to make everything work together really. Unfortunately most people don't want there cell phone edit thier outlook address book. Moreover most people do not want all thier data stored in some cloud that they do not own that can be accessed to anyone and is protected by dubious security models. Also people tend to feel overwhelmed when they are asked to create a personal profile so that they can keep track of a couple phone numbers.
I personally like the idea of doing things once and having the changes apply everywhere but it is a disadvantage to centralize all data and to locate it offsite.
I think that its mistaken to write them off as worthless, you must however realize how the sampling happens and use that in your interpretation of the results.
A regular poll picks a "random" cross section of people (yeah right) that should include someone thats pretty much like all the someones in the world. That way the distribution of preference in the sample should match the distribution of preference in general.
In a web poll you can't control the (easily anyways) the sample so you have to analyse the poll for selection effects in order to make any sense of the results. It may well be that the valid conclusion to draw from this web poll is that 90% of MS employees will be implementing.NET applications.
Actually I later read that they way they knew they were duplicates was the referrer info. Seems like they came from normal accounts in the MS domain. It looks like a zealot employee after reading the e-mail circulating around campus, decided HE/SHE could get the votes up by clicking over and over. I think this was a case of someone working for MS seeing the poll and going hey guys it would be neat if we voted in this poll, we are all building.NET products after all.
I would say this is no worse than/. readers who write parts of the linux OS going to a poll and voting for linux. And I am fairly certain that there are linux users that would try to click the link 228 times.
Ok, I take back part of my argument if what I recently read is correct. It looks like there were nutz people clicking the link over and over but that was the stupidity of a zealot (linux supporters have stupid zealots in thier midsts as well).
Wouldn't there be a fair bit of company loyalty in at least a large handful of MS employees that would drive them to respond with NO PROVOCATION from managers or the like. MS employees are geeks just like the rest of the/. audience. In this world where linux has more than a little influence you would expect people that are loyal to MS to respond to negative messages. Is it wrong to believe in something you helped create? If so all of you linux programmers ought to quit posting to slashdot because *gasp* your biased!
I don't believe it was an automated script. I do believe it was the fact there are a handful of proxies that serve 40,000 employees for MS. All votes submited from on MS campuses or networks would go through these proxies and all have the same IP.
It would be nice if they explained the metric for deciding if a submission was a duplicate.
No, what happened is there are a handful of proxies to serve 20,000 employees. It makes perfect sense that if MS said hey guys, you are implementing.NET projects so go vote, that there would be lots of "multiple vote" submissions from the same machines especially if filtering was done on IP. Any corporation that uses a web gateway in its firewall would have the same problem. Its like if you are home and you NAT you would get picked up for multiple submissions if you voted on your computer and your wife voted on her computer.
I guess what I'd argue ethics wise is whether its right for the employees for the company creating the product should vote to say "I'm using the product its cool". On one hand it is a whole bunch of people that ARE implementing.NET products. On the other hand its 1 single company implementing all those projects.
Not that I will defend MS on the ethics front here because they were trying to boost the score for.NET. I don't know that I'd go so far as to say they rigged the vote. There are 40,000 MS employees many of which who are extremely loyal to the company who would vote from inside the MS firewall. All of those votes would be routed through the proxies so all 40,000 votes from independant people would actually look like they came from a few hundred IP's.
Random is just exactly what it says, random, meaning any sequence of bits is equally likely. It is possible, chosing perfectly randomly, to get the sequence 1111111... which is very compressable.
The probability of being able to compress any 1 string chosen at random is very high. The probability of being able to compress EVERY string in a set is zero.
Its very important to make this distinction about randomness when speaking about compression or you won't at all understand the arguments presented.
By claiming lossless compression it seems to me the are garunteeing that the process is reversable. If you can't get your original info back then it is lost.
You would think this is true in reality, but mathematically the absense of a "marker" is really just a unique marker. Saying that it is not is like saying zero is not a number.
I agree with you, though if you are going to leak an e-mail like this, at least sensor partner names and such. I can understand trying to torpedo your own company due to disagreements but your partners pay the accounts that pay your paycheck.
If this e-mail is to be believed at all I think Brian had a good argument. It sux that you leak info about your own company, but it is far worse to leak partner names at the same time.
People seem to believe that because a copy of the item was made and the original owner (the creator of the product in this case) still has everything he started with that no theft has happend. What the fail to understand is the complaint isn't about the "product" but that the complaint is that you are stealing the rents the creator would have gotten on that product.
This is where the clever piracy supporter will jump in and shout "The person that pirated the product would never have paid for it in the first place" but all this amounts to is an attempt to rationalize the theft of rents. In the end, if you believe the creator has any rights of ownership on the product, you must concede he also has rights to charge rents if people use the property he owns.
If you don't believe the creator has any ownership then I'd rather not associate with you and I certainly will not let you use anything that I create.
Your argument (if I understand it) goes like this. You have an item and its totally ok for you and your friends to view that item together. It is also ok for each of your friends to look at the item individually or in groups. Then you try to take the leap that making a copy of the item for your friends is in reality the same thing as them viewing it together or individually. I'm sorry but the argument doesn't follow, you give me no reason to believe that it really is the same thing either way. Granted both ways the same people get to view the item, but when you make a copy you now have another item. I guess it all hinges on who you believe should have control of distribution. It also hinges on what exactly you think "buying" software or a cd means.
If you think that the creator shouldn't have the right to control distribution of his works or that once he has created a work and shown it publically he has given it to society then ok it makes sense. If you think that "buying" a cd means you have the right to do whatever you want with it, well then that also makes sense.
I tend to be on the side of the creator though, I think the creator should get to control who uses or sees his work and what restrictions are placed upon its use. I don't think anyone should be obligated to create, if someone creates something, and they are kind enough to let you use it (even at a price) then you should feel lucky. If you don't agree with the creator or his stipulations of use, then don't use the product, get it from someone else or do it yourself.
Yes but that definition of "sharing" still doesn't cover creating a new item for your friends use. Jointly would mean that you both use the same item at the same time.
I guess my argument is that just because something easy to copy doesn't mean anyone should be allowed to copy it.
The day where I have no rights as a creator I will probably stop letting anyone use my creations. Yes I'm a capitalist bastard, but why shouldn't I be?
The open source world works under the premise that everyone contributes so everyone has ownership. That isn't a real world thought, the truth is a few people contribute a great deal of time and the rest of the people leech off of it. In time the people that are exerting the effort will go away and all that will be left are the leech's and then there will be no software for you.
Our world is cruel, and if you are always nice, you will get taken advantage of.
I repeat myself but thats because you repeat yourself with the same stupid thought.
Sharing works like this, you have an item, you give that item to your friend to use, during that time you DO NOT have the item, when your friend is done he gives the item back and he NO LONGER has the item. You know what, sharing is allowed under the law, at least as far as any of the licences I have read say.
As soon as you move to making a "copy" of the item to give to a friend, you are no longer sharing, you are getting twice the use of the product that you are licenced for. That, under our system of laws, is illegal.
I'll remind you of what you said the next time a burgler breaks into your house and steals everything you own. Or better yet I'll remind you when one of these mega corporations steals the really cool software idea that YOU came up with and makes millions off of it and not give you a single penny.
The laws were written in order to try and provide a way that EVERYONE in the society could live peacefully and happily together. That means they give benifits and limitations to the little people and the mega corporations alike. If you don't want to live in this framework, work through the political process to try and change it or leave the country. There are few excuses that I'll buy for disregarding the law in this fashion.
But see its not "sharing" because you make another of the product. If you were to give your cd to your friend for a week so he could play and during that time you did not play, that would be sharing. What you are doing is getting more use out of the product than you were licenced to recieve. Under the current system piracy is both morally and legally wrong.
That said it comes to an issue of whether you think MS should have the right to make a licence that limits your use like they do currently. I happen to be on the side of "why shouldn't they be allowed to" because MS made the software in the first place, they should have the right to define the contract for sale. If you don't like it, don't enter into it by using the product. If enough people buy (or get through open source channels) another product, MS will be forced to change its practices or dissappear.
Finally I want to pop your misconception of corporations. The corporation as an entity is just a legal target. As far as who wants MS to profit, its every employee and every stockholder in the company, and why shouldn't they? They put in thier investment capital, or hard work, or good ideas and they have every reason to deserve monatery gain from that investment.
I looked at that again (should use preview damn it) and I guess to make it more clear I am surprised that/. seems to think this interview will serve in some official capacity. I think that/. has a good chance of influencing the appointment since our govt tends to do a decent job of making decisions that the people want, whether the majority knows what is right or not is another question.
I wonder the same thing, what authority does/. have to interview candidates "as an initial interview" for the position?
I understand that/. can interview whoever they want as long as the person consents, but it sounds like they are deluded into believing it has authority in the final position. Please oh gods of/. don't tell me you are so arrogant to believe you control a fedral appointment.
My question for the man (in what I consider a completely informal interview for an online web form) is what are your exact qualifications for the job? I want something more than "I've been online for a long time and used a lot of OS's" because I've done that too and I don't feel qualified. What legal background do you have in this area?
Slashdot Mirror
Thats the problem with a totally uncoordinated test effort. The devs probably hack together some stubs to test some units but I doubt they are in a condition to be distributed.
I really can't defend either testing method very heavily. In MS's case they have a small number of fairly well trained people pour over the code and run numerous coordinated tests and try to find all the problems. In Open Source's case they have millions of people of unknown training pour over the source code and run a crazy number of uncoordinated tests.
Its like MS uses a couple .22 rifle shots and Open Source uses a shot gun from long range. Neither way gets great coverage.
Is linux more secure than Windows NT? I'm not going to make any bets. I will say that windows probably gets beat on a whole lot more these days by the random hackers because if they pull of an exploit it will hit millions of computers instead of thousands.
Security is a design stage thing and honestly its been built on top of both Linux and Windows NT. Someone needs to start from the ground up with security in mind (yes I know there are projects in the world today with this goal in mind).
Thats always been my take on this. The one major downside is that we may need the resources in the future. Otherwise what better way is there to spread it through the universe so it can be redeposited at a later date in a different spot in less toxic densities.
Yeah, a couple of US thieves could steal everything in the country. I guess its a good thing your govt takes all your money in taxes and there is nothing to steal :)
MS may not be the best at security, but recent publicity has put them on the defensive and they are actually fixing security holes. I bet this exploit won't work on the release version of the .NET Framework.
The .NET framework is the VM and a bunch of libraries to go with it. It just happens that this new framework is very well suited for writing applications using the philosophy of .NET.
The whole idea with .NET is to make everything work together really. Unfortunately most people don't want there cell phone edit thier outlook address book. Moreover most people do not want all thier data stored in some cloud that they do not own that can be accessed to anyone and is protected by dubious security models. Also people tend to feel overwhelmed when they are asked to create a personal profile so that they can keep track of a couple phone numbers.
I personally like the idea of doing things once and having the changes apply everywhere but it is a disadvantage to centralize all data and to locate it offsite.
A regular poll picks a "random" cross section of people (yeah right) that should include someone thats pretty much like all the someones in the world. That way the distribution of preference in the sample should match the distribution of preference in general.
In a web poll you can't control the (easily anyways) the sample so you have to analyse the poll for selection effects in order to make any sense of the results. It may well be that the valid conclusion to draw from this web poll is that 90% of MS employees will be implementing .NET applications.
I would say this is no worse than /. readers who write parts of the linux OS going to a poll and voting for linux. And I am fairly certain that there are linux users that would try to click the link 228 times.
With all the fakes in the world does this seem like its going to help anything at all?
Ok, I take back part of my argument if what I recently read is correct. It looks like there were nutz people clicking the link over and over but that was the stupidity of a zealot (linux supporters have stupid zealots in thier midsts as well).
Wouldn't there be a fair bit of company loyalty in at least a large handful of MS employees that would drive them to respond with NO PROVOCATION from managers or the like. MS employees are geeks just like the rest of the /. audience. In this world where linux has more than a little influence you would expect people that are loyal to MS to respond to negative messages. Is it wrong to believe in something you helped create? If so all of you linux programmers ought to quit posting to slashdot because *gasp* your biased!
It would be nice if they explained the metric for deciding if a submission was a duplicate.
I guess what I'd argue ethics wise is whether its right for the employees for the company creating the product should vote to say "I'm using the product its cool". On one hand it is a whole bunch of people that ARE implementing .NET products. On the other hand its 1 single company implementing all those projects.
Not that I will defend MS on the ethics front here because they were trying to boost the score for .NET. I don't know that I'd go so far as to say they rigged the vote. There are 40,000 MS employees many of which who are extremely loyal to the company who would vote from inside the MS firewall. All of those votes would be routed through the proxies so all 40,000 votes from independant people would actually look like they came from a few hundred IP's.
Random != Perfectly Distributed
Random != Non-Repeating
Random is just exactly what it says, random, meaning any sequence of bits is equally likely. It is possible, chosing perfectly randomly, to get the sequence 1111111... which is very compressable.
The probability of being able to compress any 1 string chosen at random is very high. The probability of being able to compress EVERY string in a set is zero.
Its very important to make this distinction about randomness when speaking about compression or you won't at all understand the arguments presented.
By claiming lossless compression it seems to me the are garunteeing that the process is reversable. If you can't get your original info back then it is lost.
You would think this is true in reality, but mathematically the absense of a "marker" is really just a unique marker. Saying that it is not is like saying zero is not a number.
If this e-mail is to be believed at all I think Brian had a good argument. It sux that you leak info about your own company, but it is far worse to leak partner names at the same time.
This is where the clever piracy supporter will jump in and shout "The person that pirated the product would never have paid for it in the first place" but all this amounts to is an attempt to rationalize the theft of rents. In the end, if you believe the creator has any rights of ownership on the product, you must concede he also has rights to charge rents if people use the property he owns.
If you don't believe the creator has any ownership then I'd rather not associate with you and I certainly will not let you use anything that I create.
If you think that the creator shouldn't have the right to control distribution of his works or that once he has created a work and shown it publically he has given it to society then ok it makes sense. If you think that "buying" a cd means you have the right to do whatever you want with it, well then that also makes sense.
I tend to be on the side of the creator though, I think the creator should get to control who uses or sees his work and what restrictions are placed upon its use. I don't think anyone should be obligated to create, if someone creates something, and they are kind enough to let you use it (even at a price) then you should feel lucky. If you don't agree with the creator or his stipulations of use, then don't use the product, get it from someone else or do it yourself.
I guess my argument is that just because something easy to copy doesn't mean anyone should be allowed to copy it.
The day where I have no rights as a creator I will probably stop letting anyone use my creations. Yes I'm a capitalist bastard, but why shouldn't I be?
The open source world works under the premise that everyone contributes so everyone has ownership. That isn't a real world thought, the truth is a few people contribute a great deal of time and the rest of the people leech off of it. In time the people that are exerting the effort will go away and all that will be left are the leech's and then there will be no software for you.
Our world is cruel, and if you are always nice, you will get taken advantage of.
Sharing works like this, you have an item, you give that item to your friend to use, during that time you DO NOT have the item, when your friend is done he gives the item back and he NO LONGER has the item. You know what, sharing is allowed under the law, at least as far as any of the licences I have read say.
As soon as you move to making a "copy" of the item to give to a friend, you are no longer sharing, you are getting twice the use of the product that you are licenced for. That, under our system of laws, is illegal.
The laws were written in order to try and provide a way that EVERYONE in the society could live peacefully and happily together. That means they give benifits and limitations to the little people and the mega corporations alike. If you don't want to live in this framework, work through the political process to try and change it or leave the country. There are few excuses that I'll buy for disregarding the law in this fashion.
That said it comes to an issue of whether you think MS should have the right to make a licence that limits your use like they do currently. I happen to be on the side of "why shouldn't they be allowed to" because MS made the software in the first place, they should have the right to define the contract for sale. If you don't like it, don't enter into it by using the product. If enough people buy (or get through open source channels) another product, MS will be forced to change its practices or dissappear.
Finally I want to pop your misconception of corporations. The corporation as an entity is just a legal target. As far as who wants MS to profit, its every employee and every stockholder in the company, and why shouldn't they? They put in thier investment capital, or hard work, or good ideas and they have every reason to deserve monatery gain from that investment.
I looked at that again (should use preview damn it) and I guess to make it more clear I am surprised that /. seems to think this interview will serve in some official capacity. I think that /. has a good chance of influencing the appointment since our govt tends to do a decent job of making decisions that the people want, whether the majority knows what is right or not is another question.
I understand that /. can interview whoever they want as long as the person consents, but it sounds like they are deluded into believing it has authority in the final position. Please oh gods of /. don't tell me you are so arrogant to believe you control a fedral appointment.
My question for the man (in what I consider a completely informal interview for an online web form) is what are your exact qualifications for the job? I want something more than "I've been online for a long time and used a lot of OS's" because I've done that too and I don't feel qualified. What legal background do you have in this area?