Sorry, it wasn't really meant to be derogatory towards anyone (particularly not my father). I'm old enough that my father comes from a generation that wasn't comfortable with technology on average. He's stuck a couple years from retirment with a shiny new computer on his desk which he has little interest in using, and wouldn't care if it was technically superior, but only cares that stuff works as he expects.
I'm also old enough that I have friends who have children old enough to read/. and don't realise that 'old guys' like me aren't all twits with technology.
So perhaps I shouldn't use 'dad', it's just an example of someone near to me who woudn't have been capable of using Linux a few years ago, who now probably would.
Anyway, even though that's been something that's seemed secondary to many of us, there are a few (redhat lindows, and probably others) that have realised that and taken some pretty good steps towards it.
If I didn't have so much code that's linked to closed source msvc style libraries, I wouldn't even have a reason for windows anymore. Since most of the tools I use are open source (aside from that environment). Heck even gaming under linux isn't impossible anymore:).
Yup, I had at one time decided that what would be the 1337 way to go was to rather than use sin and cos for some rotations of an object in 3D space, I'd precalculate it offline, and use a lookup table.
Sure sounds smart right? but then, I was stealing 360 * 2 * sizeof(int) bytes of memory from the client (and not releasing it), for a computation that is performed exactly once for each of a maximum of 256 objects in a scene, only at level load and never again.
To save myself something on the order of 7 or 8 mults when the game's already busy doing shitloads of stuff anyway and clients are sitting around waiting for the massive i/o operation of loading level data, models, etc.
We then found a bug somewhere in the code that was using the lookup tables, and were concerned I'd made a rounding error (I hadn't, I'd rotated then transformed or transformed then rotated, forget which), and had swapped the lookup tables for the actual sin/cos functions.
We're now using the same code for rotations in real time, and swapping to the lookup tables was completely negligible.
The point of this is that it is rare to require optimization to even that level these days, much less being uber 1337 and coding in assembler, at least up at the 'application' level of games.
Maybe down in the rendering pipeline it's required, but even quake isn't coded 100% in assembler, and i'd hazard a quess that a vast majority of Q3 or even DoomIII is done in C++.
Any game programmer i've heard give a talk in the last few years says the same thing. Write it correctly, see how it works, then profile if it doesn't feel fast enough, only optimize the bare minimum you have to, and assembly is a last resort.
Good point, and what many of us forget about efficiency.
CPU cycles being relatively cheap, programmer efficiency is something is now attainable, rather than the times past where what amounts to one line of C code could take hours to get right in assembler (well maybe not for the geniuses, but if we only let the geniuses make software, we'd still have all of three programs to choose from).
And to misquote Don Knuth: Premature optimization is the death of something..
Yes, we should strive for a moderate level of efficiency and not do stupid things. However, the fact that we can achieve more due to high level languages, and create more is in general a good thing.
I recently read a palm book summary of 'the unix philosophy'. It said, take advantage of automatic code generators where possible, make the machine work for you.
Rather than hand coding every application in assembler, let the compilers and code generation tools work for you.
Yes, that doesn't obviate you from some requirement of knowing how it all works, and to be capable of hand tuning the code or porting to assembler if need be. Frankly, VERY few applications today would really benefit from such expensive work.
Consultants make what? $200 per hour? I can throw an awful lot of hardware at a slow performing application if it takes 10 times as long to get the product out the door.
Maybe it's not right in 'theory', but theory buys you something in acedemia, and precious little else in the real world.
The real world doesn't give a rat's ass about theoretical correctness, it cares about profitability.
Err...I hate to break this to you, but Word suffers from the same bloat, custom widgets and statically linked libraries (well, for all intents and purposes, since most Office code isn't shared with other apps).
Whatever other faults word suffers from, static linking isn't one of them. MSOblah.dll is where all the 'non-shared' execpt in the office suite code lives.
Microsoft doesn't statically link hardly anything, if they did, they'd have a hella hard time convincing the rest of us to use their.dll format wouldn't they;).
Internet Exploder is 30 KB, because all the code is in.dlls (littered throughout the system, but still it's not in the.exe).
Nobody know's better than the coder who codes and application how it should work.
Yeah right, so we should just let everyone make their own decisions on what order menus go in? Or perhaps you'd like to go back to early GUIs (kinda) like Windows 3.1 in which every applications file dialog was different.
Sorry, most programmers don't have a hot damn clue when it comes to users. We're too far removed from the average luser's problems.
All it took for me to have to 'help' lots of users in some environments was for some application to have something 'relocated' because the programmer knew best.
Users don't want clever, they want consistent, move one item in a menu because you 'know better' and you render your application unusable to the vast majority of users.
Guidelines should be negotiable, but Apple who's really always had a leg up on the competition has consistency from what little experience I have with them above all else. At least in the basic things like where things are in the interface.
Once the platform has established an idiom, if we're too dumb to figure it out as programmers or think we know better, we need to be slapped down.
Yes, I'd agree about _some_ websites. However, I've seen enough that cause me trouble to say that that freedom is a bad thing.;).
The companies, if the insurance leaves them feeling "financially safe" from an attack, will be even less inclined than they are now to implement proper security
Nope. You don't understand much about insurance if you think that:).
I worked in that industry for 5+ years, this is a second/third career for me.
Insurance companies are above all else cautious. They make money by not paying claims. That is not to say they do not pay legitimate ones, they do do that, contrary to popular opinion.
The do however analyse risk, and charge money to their customers to offset the potential payout that risk represents.
I would be willing to bet that a prerequisite for obtaining said 'crack' insurance would be passing an audit by one of their security folks, particularly when obtaining big policies with large potential payouts.
It's no different than fire insurance, if you want a million dollars of fire insurance, they're going to come down, and make sure you're not running an explosives factory in which everyone smokes at their 'station'.
Insurance doesn't encourage sloppiness, in fact, in North America, many of the early fire brigades were sponsored by and run by insurance companies themselves.
Insurers don't want to pay those claims any more than you want to be put out of business by a cracker. They'll ensure you've got an adequate plan, and they'll ease the financial blow, but believe me, what they won't do is let you drop all pretense of security, just because you're insured.
In fact, just before Y2K, the entire industry rushed to put in 'exclusions' -- i.e. they wouldn't pay a penny for Y2K related catastrophes, unless you paid HUGE dollars to them (because they hadn't had the benefit of collecting money for that specific risk).
This is just a sign of the times, Insurance companies are getting more in tune with technology, and likely have a panel of experts they can call on for inspecting/auditing, and assessing claims against that kind of risk.
I mean, you could, but it took two VCRs (did they exist then?)
Well the first home VCR I ever saw was in 1979.. not quite 30 years ago. Since TV stations adopted them first, and these folks were an early adopter, not the first to ever get one, I'd say yes, they existed 30 years ago -- or near enough to 30 years ago that it's irrelevant.:).
It's interesting seeing them confuse state operations and business...
Actually, the Microsoft rep was probably referring to the developers not being able to sustain themselves on open-source, which (correct or not) does make sense. Their "rhetorical" question, on the other hand, is a no-brainer [slashdot.org].
Well, that's because of their business model. Microsoft still holds dear to the idea that shrink wrapped software is a commodity.
Programmers aren't assembly line workers who assemble widgets for sale, we're experts at engineering a solution, which is why you pay us. OSS doesn't mean free of all costs, it means the source code is perpetually available.
The expertise required to make a software solution still costs money, and OSS developers can certainly make a living.
It's rather hard to convince customers of the benefits of this type of consulting. In traditional consulting, the consultants kept the code, unless you paid EXTRA for it.
With solutions built from OSS, you hire a consultant to build it, and if you need it changed, you hire ANY other consultant to fix it if the original one was hit by a bus.
You can pay the bills on OSS, once the word goes out to business in general that it does them no good to 'buy' software, what they really need is the solution to the general business problem, not the software per se.
Bah! I need more coffee before I can express this more eloquently:).
like Emacs and Mozilla are operating systems. Does Emacs or Mozilla control low-level I/O or memory management ? Do they provide process scheduling ? No ! Then things like these are not OSs in the traditional sense.
I think most of us were joking in saying that Emacs is an OS.. the reason people may get confused in Emac's case is it's as big as a bloody os used to be (30 Meg?).:).
"What, you are not able to pirate a copy of some new album? Poor baby. Pay for it."
Suppose for a moment that I already have. What is the justification now?
Oh fsck off.. who downloads stuff they have? You read slashdot for christ's sake, don't tell me you're also too stupid to rip it.
Sorry, that's a load of pewp. You don't really think the world is that stupid do you?
Now, if you were worried about the right to fair use, ripping and burning and using another copy on another machine, device, etc. you'd have a point. But no, no one believes you use a P2P network for stuff you have because you're conveniently 'incompetent' when it comes to ripping your own CD's.
Sorry, this isn't really just directed at you personally, this is the whole lot of people saying this. Quit insulting our intelligence with this idiotic claptrap.
Fair use arguably can be extended to 'try before you buy', but, downloading the files is as the law stands contrary to it. If the law should be changed, fine, if the price of the music should come down or go to the artists directly, fine. But the rest of it is foolish.
If I personally or casually KNOW an artist that makes a CD, I'll buy one, or if I think they're really cool and they're selling one at a club, I will. Other than that, that's my protest - I don't buy commercial music. Buying and ripping and sharing is not very effective protest, because the industry still sells *A* copy (several million in fact).
If you all stopped buying britney spears and the loads and loads of other crap that's been produced lately, and supported the independents you'd be doing the world some good.
Hmm, well I may be somewhat redundant, but I've been looking for and evaluating several cross platform GUI toolkits.
I started with QT, because a few years ago, did some work in it. Doesn't look like it's changed much, but to write apps that run on Windows/*nix, I've gotta cough up $3000 USD per seat.
Then I grabbed GTK+, wrote a simple app, used glade to make the GUI, and compiled on Linux and Windows -- great says I. Then I wondered why the Windows version looked like the Linux version. Strange, windows programs should look like Windows programs IMHO;).
Then I found wxWindows -- this is to me the one that's had 10 years of development, yet next to no press. They do what NO ONE in the GUI toolkit business has thought of -- the apps look like native apps, yet the same source code compiles and runs on multiple platforms ! That and it's LGPL'd so I can make OSS stuff, closed source stuff, etc.
Another plus I find is that unlike most OSS stuff that's made for Windows developers this thing supports (very well) Visual C++, and Borland C++ builder.
One thing that's a complete pain in the neck to me is building stuff with cygwin. If I'm programming on Windows, I'm going to have a decent development tool for the environment, and sorry gcc isn't it (it's great on *nix, but that's because the OS has a good shell already).
From looking at the documentation and investigating a little, it looks like I can take my MFC programs and port them (the parallels are amazing -- and the API is probably a lot better than MFC from what I've read).
I think this is the ultimate solution for me, I can write apps that run on Windows, *nix (wrapping either GTK+ or Motif/Lesstif), and MacOS 9 and 10.
If the native OS doesn't have a widget, wxWindows emulates it (such as MDI on GTK+).
Yeah, as evil as those 'public' member variables in C++;).
Sorry, just because you CAN write bad code doesn't mean you're required to. Only a poorly written language doesn't give you to do this when you cannot solve a problem in any other way.
Yes, you should encapsulate, but then, encapsulation is the one thing in OO programming that makes all of us non-OO programmers cringe -- yay! I get to write stupid get/set routines just because I dont' think I'm smart enough to not make things blow up by using the public members intelligently.
And public != buffer overrun, and since VB uses a BSTR, I'm confused by your statement -- BSTRs contain the length of the string at the start, so the functions that access them read up to 'len', and there's supposed to be run time checking, or perhaps I don't understand VB well enough to despise it.;).
SQL server has nothing to do with Office, nor does BackOffice.
Backoffice did include SQL server at one time, and maybe still does, but SQL server is about 12000 per CPU or per so many users. Last I checked, office was like 800;).
More marketing schleps watering down meaning..
Marketing dude: hey -- office sells well, let's call our new server suite 'BackOffice' Techno dude: Umm, we're not selling it to executives, sir, we're selling it to techs. Marketing dude: go reboot some servers, will ya?
If you are so worried about another machine trying to break into your own, I'd be securing yours better so you wouldn't have to worry...
Hmm. not sure how such blatant ignorance gets modded up by four moderators..;). Hopefully the actually interesting part (all but this sentence) is where they stopped reading...:P
The problem isn't security, it's the dos attack that code red was. Even with perfect (theoretical) security, code red caused harm. Code Red didn't affect *nix machines, it went through a hole in IIS's indexing service.
The problem wasn't that the machines were getting *infected* with code red, it's that the worm was idiotically crafted by someone who didn't have a vague clue. It would attempt to infect a whole subnet of computers, using an algorithm something like this:
while (computers in subnet) {
if (host has server on port 80)
{
while (computer_not_infected)
{
request 'default.ida';
if (get told of successful infection)
host++;
}
}
host++; }
So the target's security doesn't even enter into the picture -- not for a second. The problem is that the target keeps getting FLOODED by requests from one host or several in a subnet continuously, for days.
There's no security against that, maybe upstream firewalling, but then the upstream routers are still getting pounded by packets from the malicious computers.
We can still keep moving upstream, but the basic fact of the matter is, that not all ISPs are as responsible as the one that took people offline if they couldn't get a hold of them. Most staff their abuse desks with $5 an hour flunkies who don't know what a DOS attack is, much less a web server. They'll typically spend about 6 days denying that a problem exists, before acting on complaints if at all.
Some ISPs just route abuse@host to dev/null, so there's no solution but the one that is proposed here, to be able to attack the worm itself (not the host system).
Everyone here is getting excited because we can't fathom the idea of someone touching our precious little linux box who isn't ourselves.
THAT'S not the problem. We're likely all responsible and the first sign of trouble (if we didn't catch it ourselves), and we'd race to correct it -- certainly killing the damn errant process ourselves, and removing it.
The problem isn't the worm's ability to infect any but the most ignorant of sysadmins, the problem is the Internet wide DOS attack that was enacted against every other SECURE host by this poorly written worm.
That's what we're actually talking about, not being broken into, but being taken off the net because we CAN'T be broken into.
Tell them to buy secure systems and use safe practices, and punish them when they fail
Huh? What planet are you living on? Can you give a specific example of ONE single system/OS/whatever that hasn't been exploited ever?
If you really believe it's that simple you have no idea whatsoever about security, not even an inkling.
Budgets aren't infinite, security is all too often secondary among very intelligent capable people (from programmers to admins to purchasing managers etc). Getting broken can happen to anyone, period. Not every exploit is posted to bugtraq after the vendor has patched it, sometimes things are buried so deep that no one ever tried that method before.
It is about 10 million times easier to find a backdoor than to close them all, because you have to sit and consider every possible option. And if they cost money, good luck if you don't work for a relatively large organization.
We don't have disaster recovery plans for nothing.
Not to mention the fact that most times I bring a *nix box up on the net, it's a matter of MINUTES before i'm being scanned on every port imaginable.
No firing reasonable people who failed if they can reasonably learn from it is not sensible. In many companies there's one of them against millions of attackers. You should spend more time reading log files and less time planning the demise of hard working people who could work for companies that are mired in office politics that force them to make do with less and less every year.
Hmm.. this seems wrong to me. Reading the GPL, as I have been a lot lately, it states very clearly, that the GPL gives me freedom to do with as I like the software. Restricting my freedom by saying it's only available to the poor so to speak (i.e. non-commercial applications) seems to go against the very spirit of 'Free' as in liberty, not beer. Which is really what the GPL seems to say to me. It even categorically states 'this does not necessarily mean price' in a place or two.
Or did someone hack all the copies of the GPL I've seen to date?
Stupid English language confusing liberty and $0 price:D.
Let's take Open Office, here's what I see as a possibility. Distribute on CD-ROM in shrink wrapped boxes for people like my dad a commercial product (GPL doesn't prohibit this to my knowledge), offer me the ability to download and build the damn thing myself. I'm capable of that, and don't have to pay for it unless I want to.
Hell, I'd probably buy 'Open Source' stuff to support the development if folks would do that. If I'm too lazy to compile it, I'll pay someone else to do that;).
Unless I get really p.o.'d with a feature of a program, then I'll grab the source and change it to my liking. True Freedom for me and the world.
Now, your computer won't explode and kill you're family. You're keyboard won't start glowing and irradiate you and give you cancer, like a tanning bed can easily.
Well, maybe not true. This is my second (maybe third?) career. My first career was working in Insurance (property adjuster).
Of the 70 or so fire claims I was involved in, 2 were due to computer component malfunctions.
Clearly computers are much lower risk than cars, but there is still potential for damage there. Sure in this world of 'throw away the old one, and plug in a new one' most of that doesn't relate to the tech (our two were monitors frying - I think both from the same company;)), but it could. If techs who have no good business mucking about inside power supplies are doing it, government involvement could become the case.
My personal vote is to do what accountants/lawyers have done, a self-regulation scheme. Believe me, we DON'T want the government involved in this. It will be run by people that don't know the difference between Linux/Windows etc, or even what the certifications mean. They'll impose stupid requirements and do more harm than good.
My father is an insurance adjuster also, they eventually had government regulators step in to regulate them. He's been doing his job since before I was born (I'm in my mid 30's), and is well respected by his peers as a competent and informed adjuster -- in fact, some of the younger ones often call him for advice.
Unfortunately, because of years of experience but no 'formal education', the regulatory body decided to downgrade his license level. The courses, which I started taking are relatively useless to someone who has that many years of experience. I was bored and just started in that industry.
It would be good in a way if we could certify all of IT on our own. Also, smaller businesses could pool together to get liability insurance (getting sued even if you're innocent still costs thousands), which could be purchased from the professional association (pharmacists have similar schemes).
That way, completely rogue operators could be 'disbarred' as it were, and thus increasing the standard and wage for all of us.
It still doesn't stop kids from earning a few bucks in their spare time for college, because certification or not, there are still mechanics working from their garage 'hobbyists'. It would just mean that businesses would have some way of discerning the hobbiest from the pro.
I'm sure we've all met the clueless MSCE (even though some of them I respect, it's not hard enough to get to really make it meaningful). If we had our own association of professionals, we could easily weed out those that can't apply the knowledge in a meaningful way.
To borrow a little from Mel Brooks, the closed platform of consoles has both an upside and a downside (of the schwartz).
The up side is that unlike PC's where any 'client' can execute any arbitrary code (see both black and white hats can write stuff on open platforms), many of the types of cheats are impossible* on consoles. Not that consoles have made ANY real impact in multiplayer games to date.
The down side is small time independent game developers like myself have a hell of a time breaking into the console market.
But do I think that nintendo/sony/ms are evil for making them a closed platform? Not really, if they can forge into online gaming, a great many of the typical cheats that exist today would disappear.
* impossible is a bad choice of words. Unlikely or much less likely is a better choice. The problem here is let's say someone comes up with an 'OpenGL cheat' for a console game, it WOULD require installation of a modchip or bios flash. Unlike PC's where I can write an idiot proof installer, on consoles there is a certain level of expertise required to install my malicious code.
Anyway on-topic. I liked Lexmark until today. They made good printers. But sorry, if you can't compete with the after market toner guys then too bloody bad. Don't 'innovate' with lawyers like some other monopolies that shall remain nameless.
I'm wondering why all the biggest most successful capitalists in North America are suddenly running scared from competition (one of the basic principals of capitalism) all of a sudden.
Slashdot Mirror
Or perhaps we spent too much time away from english class. ;-)
:).
Argh.. damn coffee hadn't kicked in yet.. i really gotta start the IV drip TWO hours before waking up
Sorry, it wasn't really meant to be derogatory towards anyone (particularly not my father). I'm old enough that my father comes from a generation that wasn't comfortable with technology on average. He's stuck a couple years from retirment with a shiny new computer on his desk which he has little interest in using, and wouldn't care if it was technically superior, but only cares that stuff works as he expects.
/. and don't realise that 'old guys' like me aren't all twits with technology.
I'm also old enough that I have friends who have children old enough to read
So perhaps I shouldn't use 'dad', it's just an example of someone near to me who woudn't have been capable of using Linux a few years ago, who now probably would.
How rude, replying to myself.
:).
Anyway, even though that's been something that's seemed secondary to many of us, there are a few (redhat lindows, and probably others) that have realised that and taken some pretty good steps towards it.
If I didn't have so much code that's linked to closed source msvc style libraries, I wouldn't even have a reason for windows anymore. Since most of the tools I use are open source (aside from that environment). Heck even gaming under linux isn't impossible anymore
Or have we in geek culture spent too little time away from the average user to recognize this ourselves?
I've only been saying this since I started using Linux in 97/8... Think, but can your DAD use it?
Yup, I had at one time decided that what would be the 1337 way to go was to rather than use sin and cos for some rotations of an object in 3D space, I'd precalculate it offline, and use a lookup table.
Sure sounds smart right? but then, I was stealing 360 * 2 * sizeof(int) bytes of memory from the client (and not releasing it), for a computation that is performed exactly once for each of a maximum of 256 objects in a scene, only at level load and never again.
To save myself something on the order of 7 or 8 mults when the game's already busy doing shitloads of stuff anyway and clients are sitting around waiting for the massive i/o operation of loading level data, models, etc.
We then found a bug somewhere in the code that was using the lookup tables, and were concerned I'd made a rounding error (I hadn't, I'd rotated then transformed or transformed then rotated, forget which), and had swapped the lookup tables for the actual sin/cos functions.
We're now using the same code for rotations in real time, and swapping to the lookup tables was completely negligible.
The point of this is that it is rare to require optimization to even that level these days, much less being uber 1337 and coding in assembler, at least up at the 'application' level of games.
Maybe down in the rendering pipeline it's required, but even quake isn't coded 100% in assembler, and i'd hazard a quess that a vast majority of Q3 or even DoomIII is done in C++.
Any game programmer i've heard give a talk in the last few years says the same thing. Write it correctly, see how it works, then profile if it doesn't feel fast enough, only optimize the bare minimum you have to, and assembly is a last resort.
Good point, and what many of us forget about efficiency.
CPU cycles being relatively cheap, programmer efficiency is something is now attainable, rather than the times past where what amounts to one line of C code could take hours to get right in assembler (well maybe not for the geniuses, but if we only let the geniuses make software, we'd still have all of three programs to choose from).
And to misquote Don Knuth:
Premature optimization is the death of something..
Yes, we should strive for a moderate level of efficiency and not do stupid things. However, the fact that we can achieve more due to high level languages, and create more is in general a good thing.
I recently read a palm book summary of 'the unix philosophy'. It said, take advantage of automatic code generators where possible, make the machine work for you.
Rather than hand coding every application in assembler, let the compilers and code generation tools work for you.
Yes, that doesn't obviate you from some requirement of knowing how it all works, and to be capable of hand tuning the code or porting to assembler if need be. Frankly, VERY few applications today would really benefit from such expensive work.
Consultants make what? $200 per hour? I can throw an awful lot of hardware at a slow performing application if it takes 10 times as long to get the product out the door.
Maybe it's not right in 'theory', but theory buys you something in acedemia, and precious little else in the real world.
The real world doesn't give a rat's ass about theoretical correctness, it cares about profitability.
Err...I hate to break this to you, but Word suffers from the same bloat, custom widgets and statically linked libraries (well, for all intents and purposes, since most Office code isn't shared with other apps).
.dll format wouldn't they ;).
.dlls (littered throughout the system, but still it's not in the .exe).
Whatever other faults word suffers from, static linking isn't one of them. MSOblah.dll is where all the 'non-shared' execpt in the office suite code lives.
Microsoft doesn't statically link hardly anything, if they did, they'd have a hella hard time convincing the rest of us to use their
Internet Exploder is 30 KB, because all the code is in
There was a version of word that saved 40 KB EMPTY docs for pete's sake. That being said, I don't believe Open/Star Office is tons better.
I would have thought that no matter WHAT the format, and emtpy doc should be somewhere around 0 bytes.
Nobody know's better than the coder who codes and application how it should work.
;).
Yeah right, so we should just let everyone make their own decisions on what order menus go in? Or perhaps you'd like to go back to early GUIs (kinda) like Windows 3.1 in which every applications file dialog was different.
Sorry, most programmers don't have a hot damn clue when it comes to users. We're too far removed from the average luser's problems.
All it took for me to have to 'help' lots of users in some environments was for some application to have something 'relocated' because the programmer knew best.
Users don't want clever, they want consistent, move one item in a menu because you 'know better' and you render your application unusable to the vast majority of users.
Guidelines should be negotiable, but Apple who's really always had a leg up on the competition has consistency from what little experience I have with them above all else. At least in the basic things like where things are in the interface.
Once the platform has established an idiom, if we're too dumb to figure it out as programmers or think we know better, we need to be slapped down.
Yes, I'd agree about _some_ websites. However, I've seen enough that cause me trouble to say that that freedom is a bad thing.
The companies, if the insurance leaves them feeling "financially safe" from an attack, will be even less inclined than they are now to implement proper security
:).
Nope. You don't understand much about insurance if you think that
I worked in that industry for 5+ years, this is a second/third career for me.
Insurance companies are above all else cautious. They make money by not paying claims. That is not to say they do not pay legitimate ones, they do do that, contrary to popular opinion.
The do however analyse risk, and charge money to their customers to offset the potential payout that risk represents.
I would be willing to bet that a prerequisite for obtaining said 'crack' insurance would be passing an audit by one of their security folks, particularly when obtaining big policies with large potential payouts.
It's no different than fire insurance, if you want a million dollars of fire insurance, they're going to come down, and make sure you're not running an explosives factory in which everyone smokes at their 'station'.
Insurance doesn't encourage sloppiness, in fact, in North America, many of the early fire brigades were sponsored by and run by insurance companies themselves.
Insurers don't want to pay those claims any more than you want to be put out of business by a cracker. They'll ensure you've got an adequate plan, and they'll ease the financial blow, but believe me, what they won't do is let you drop all pretense of security, just because you're insured.
In fact, just before Y2K, the entire industry rushed to put in 'exclusions' -- i.e. they wouldn't pay a penny for Y2K related catastrophes, unless you paid HUGE dollars to them (because they hadn't had the benefit of collecting money for that specific risk).
This is just a sign of the times, Insurance companies are getting more in tune with technology, and likely have a panel of experts they can call on for inspecting/auditing, and assessing claims against that kind of risk.
I mean, you could, but it took two VCRs (did they exist then?)
:).
Well the first home VCR I ever saw was in 1979.. not quite 30 years ago. Since TV stations adopted them first, and these folks were an early adopter, not the first to ever get one, I'd say yes, they existed 30 years ago -- or near enough to 30 years ago that it's irrelevant.
It's interesting seeing them confuse state operations and business...
:).
Actually, the Microsoft rep was probably referring to the developers not being able to sustain themselves on open-source, which (correct or not) does make sense. Their "rhetorical" question, on the other hand, is a no-brainer [slashdot.org].
Well, that's because of their business model. Microsoft still holds dear to the idea that shrink wrapped software is a commodity.
Programmers aren't assembly line workers who assemble widgets for sale, we're experts at engineering a solution, which is why you pay us. OSS doesn't mean free of all costs, it means the source code is perpetually available.
The expertise required to make a software solution still costs money, and OSS developers can certainly make a living.
It's rather hard to convince customers of the benefits of this type of consulting. In traditional consulting, the consultants kept the code, unless you paid EXTRA for it.
With solutions built from OSS, you hire a consultant to build it, and if you need it changed, you hire ANY other consultant to fix it if the original one was hit by a bus.
You can pay the bills on OSS, once the word goes out to business in general that it does them no good to 'buy' software, what they really need is the solution to the general business problem, not the software per se.
Bah! I need more coffee before I can express this more eloquently
like Emacs and Mozilla are operating systems. Does Emacs or Mozilla control low-level I/O or memory management ? Do they provide process scheduling ? No ! Then things like these are not OSs in the traditional sense.
:).
I think most of us were joking in saying that Emacs is an OS.. the reason people may get confused in Emac's case is it's as big as a bloody os used to be (30 Meg?).
Never mind, I'm an idiot .. yes.. they could have had like 3 or 4 K of rom to put the 'os'/basic interpreter into :(
I would have KILLED for 5 K
Or something like that.. the vic had 1 K or ram, and I'm not sure what the rom had, but of course, that's semi-irrelevant anyway
"What, you are not able to pirate a copy of some new album? Poor baby. Pay for it."
Suppose for a moment that I already have. What is the justification now?
Oh fsck off.. who downloads stuff they have? You read slashdot for christ's sake, don't tell me you're also too stupid to rip it.
Sorry, that's a load of pewp. You don't really think the world is that stupid do you?
Now, if you were worried about the right to fair use, ripping and burning and using another copy on another machine, device, etc. you'd have a point. But no, no one believes you use a P2P network for stuff you have because you're conveniently 'incompetent' when it comes to ripping your own CD's.
Sorry, this isn't really just directed at you personally, this is the whole lot of people saying this. Quit insulting our intelligence with this idiotic claptrap.
Fair use arguably can be extended to 'try before you buy', but, downloading the files is as the law stands contrary to it. If the law should be changed, fine, if the price of the music should come down or go to the artists directly, fine. But the rest of it is foolish.
If I personally or casually KNOW an artist that makes a CD, I'll buy one, or if I think they're really cool and they're selling one at a club, I will. Other than that, that's my protest - I don't buy commercial music. Buying and ripping and sharing is not very effective protest, because the industry still sells *A* copy (several million in fact).
If you all stopped buying britney spears and the loads and loads of other crap that's been produced lately, and supported the independents you'd be doing the world some good.
Look at wxWindows [wxwindows.org]
;).
Hmm, well I may be somewhat redundant, but I've been looking for and evaluating several cross platform GUI toolkits.
I started with QT, because a few years ago, did some work in it. Doesn't look like it's changed much, but to write apps that run on Windows/*nix, I've gotta cough up $3000 USD per seat.
Then I grabbed GTK+, wrote a simple app, used glade to make the GUI, and compiled on Linux and Windows -- great says I. Then I wondered why the Windows version looked like the Linux version. Strange, windows programs should look like Windows programs IMHO
Then I found wxWindows -- this is to me the one that's had 10 years of development, yet next to no press. They do what NO ONE in the GUI toolkit business has thought of -- the apps look like native apps, yet the same source code compiles and runs on multiple platforms ! That and it's LGPL'd so I can make OSS stuff, closed source stuff, etc.
Another plus I find is that unlike most OSS stuff that's made for Windows developers this thing supports (very well) Visual C++, and Borland C++ builder.
One thing that's a complete pain in the neck to me is building stuff with cygwin. If I'm programming on Windows, I'm going to have a decent development tool for the environment, and sorry gcc isn't it (it's great on *nix, but that's because the OS has a good shell already).
From looking at the documentation and investigating a little, it looks like I can take my MFC programs and port them (the parallels are amazing -- and the API is probably a lot better than MFC from what I've read).
I think this is the ultimate solution for me, I can write apps that run on Windows, *nix (wrapping either GTK+ or Motif/Lesstif), and MacOS 9 and 10.
If the native OS doesn't have a widget, wxWindows emulates it (such as MDI on GTK+).
Yeah, as evil as those 'public' member variables in C++ ;).
;).
Sorry, just because you CAN write bad code doesn't mean you're required to. Only a poorly written language doesn't give you to do this when you cannot solve a problem in any other way.
Yes, you should encapsulate, but then, encapsulation is the one thing in OO programming that makes all of us non-OO programmers cringe -- yay! I get to write stupid get/set routines just because I dont' think I'm smart enough to not make things blow up by using the public members intelligently.
And public != buffer overrun, and since VB uses a BSTR, I'm confused by your statement -- BSTRs contain the length of the string at the start, so the functions that access them read up to 'len', and there's supposed to be run time checking, or perhaps I don't understand VB well enough to despise it.
SQL server has nothing to do with Office, nor does BackOffice.
;).
Backoffice did include SQL server at one time, and maybe still does, but SQL server is about 12000 per CPU or per so many users. Last I checked, office was like 800
More marketing schleps watering down meaning..
Marketing dude: hey -- office sells well, let's call our new server suite 'BackOffice'
Techno dude: Umm, we're not selling it to executives, sir, we're selling it to techs.
Marketing dude: go reboot some servers, will ya?
Hmm. not sure how such blatant ignorance gets modded up by four moderators..
The problem isn't security, it's the dos attack that code red was. Even with perfect (theoretical) security, code red caused harm. Code Red didn't affect *nix machines, it went through a hole in IIS's indexing service.
The problem wasn't that the machines were getting *infected* with code red, it's that the worm was idiotically crafted by someone who didn't have a vague clue. It would attempt to infect a whole subnet of computers, using an algorithm something like this:
So the target's security doesn't even enter into the picture -- not for a second. The problem is that the target keeps getting FLOODED by requests from one host or several in a subnet continuously, for days.
There's no security against that, maybe upstream firewalling, but then the upstream routers are still getting pounded by packets from the malicious computers.
We can still keep moving upstream, but the basic fact of the matter is, that not all ISPs are as responsible as the one that took people offline if they couldn't get a hold of them. Most staff their abuse desks with $5 an hour flunkies who don't know what a DOS attack is, much less a web server. They'll typically spend about 6 days denying that a problem exists, before acting on complaints if at all.
Some ISPs just route abuse@host to dev/null, so there's no solution but the one that is proposed here, to be able to attack the worm itself (not the host system).
Everyone here is getting excited because we can't fathom the idea of someone touching our precious little linux box who isn't ourselves.
THAT'S not the problem. We're likely all responsible and the first sign of trouble (if we didn't catch it ourselves), and we'd race to correct it -- certainly killing the damn errant process ourselves, and removing it.
The problem isn't the worm's ability to infect any but the most ignorant of sysadmins, the problem is the Internet wide DOS attack that was enacted against every other SECURE host by this poorly written worm.
That's what we're actually talking about, not being broken into, but being taken off the net because we CAN'T be broken into.
Tell them to buy secure systems and use safe practices, and punish them when they fail
:).
Huh? What planet are you living on? Can you give a specific example of ONE single system/OS/whatever that hasn't been exploited ever?
If you really believe it's that simple you have no idea whatsoever about security, not even an inkling.
Budgets aren't infinite, security is all too often secondary among very intelligent capable people (from programmers to admins to purchasing managers etc). Getting broken can happen to anyone, period. Not every exploit is posted to bugtraq after the vendor has patched it, sometimes things are buried so deep that no one ever tried that method before.
It is about 10 million times easier to find a backdoor than to close them all, because you have to sit and consider every possible option. And if they cost money, good luck if you don't work for a relatively large organization.
We don't have disaster recovery plans for nothing.
Not to mention the fact that most times I bring a *nix box up on the net, it's a matter of MINUTES before i'm being scanned on every port imaginable.
No firing reasonable people who failed if they can reasonably learn from it is not sensible. In many companies there's one of them against millions of attackers. You should spend more time reading log files and less time planning the demise of hard working people who could work for companies that are mired in office politics that force them to make do with less and less every year.
Sigh ok, I'm frothing now.. I give up
Right..
using the GPL version in a commercial capacity
:D.
;).
Hmm.. this seems wrong to me. Reading the GPL, as I have been a lot lately, it states very clearly, that the GPL gives me freedom to do with as I like the software. Restricting my freedom by saying it's only available to the poor so to speak (i.e. non-commercial applications) seems to go against the very spirit of 'Free' as in liberty, not beer. Which is really what the GPL seems to say to me. It even categorically states 'this does not necessarily mean price' in a place or two.
Or did someone hack all the copies of the GPL I've seen to date?
Stupid English language confusing liberty and $0 price
Let's take Open Office, here's what I see as a possibility. Distribute on CD-ROM in shrink wrapped boxes for people like my dad a commercial product (GPL doesn't prohibit this to my knowledge), offer me the ability to download and build the damn thing myself. I'm capable of that, and don't have to pay for it unless I want to.
Hell, I'd probably buy 'Open Source' stuff to support the development if folks would do that. If I'm too lazy to compile it, I'll pay someone else to do that
Unless I get really p.o.'d with a feature of a program, then I'll grab the source and change it to my liking. True Freedom for me and the world.
Now, your computer won't explode and kill you're family. You're keyboard won't start glowing and irradiate you and give you cancer, like a tanning bed can easily.
;)), but it could. If techs who have no good business mucking about inside power supplies are doing it, government involvement could become the case.
Well, maybe not true. This is my second (maybe third?) career. My first career was working in Insurance (property adjuster).
Of the 70 or so fire claims I was involved in, 2 were due to computer component malfunctions.
Clearly computers are much lower risk than cars, but there is still potential for damage there. Sure in this world of 'throw away the old one, and plug in a new one' most of that doesn't relate to the tech (our two were monitors frying - I think both from the same company
My personal vote is to do what accountants/lawyers have done, a self-regulation scheme. Believe me, we DON'T want the government involved in this. It will be run by people that don't know the difference between Linux/Windows etc, or even what the certifications mean. They'll impose stupid requirements and do more harm than good.
My father is an insurance adjuster also, they eventually had government regulators step in to regulate them. He's been doing his job since before I was born (I'm in my mid 30's), and is well respected by his peers as a competent and informed adjuster -- in fact, some of the younger ones often call him for advice.
Unfortunately, because of years of experience but no 'formal education', the regulatory body decided to downgrade his license level. The courses, which I started taking are relatively useless to someone who has that many years of experience. I was bored and just started in that industry.
It would be good in a way if we could certify all of IT on our own. Also, smaller businesses could pool together to get liability insurance (getting sued even if you're innocent still costs thousands), which could be purchased from the professional association (pharmacists have similar schemes).
That way, completely rogue operators could be 'disbarred' as it were, and thus increasing the standard and wage for all of us.
It still doesn't stop kids from earning a few bucks in their spare time for college, because certification or not, there are still mechanics working from their garage 'hobbyists'. It would just mean that businesses would have some way of discerning the hobbiest from the pro.
I'm sure we've all met the clueless MSCE (even though some of them I respect, it's not hard enough to get to really make it meaningful). If we had our own association of professionals, we could easily weed out those that can't apply the knowledge in a meaningful way.
To borrow a little from Mel Brooks, the closed platform of consoles has both an upside and a downside (of the schwartz).
The up side is that unlike PC's where any 'client' can execute any arbitrary code (see both black and white hats can write stuff on open platforms), many of the types of cheats are impossible* on consoles. Not that consoles have made ANY real impact in multiplayer games to date.
The down side is small time independent game developers like myself have a hell of a time breaking into the console market.
But do I think that nintendo/sony/ms are evil for making them a closed platform? Not really, if they can forge into online gaming, a great many of the typical cheats that exist today would disappear.
* impossible is a bad choice of words. Unlikely or much less likely is a better choice. The problem here is let's say someone comes up with an 'OpenGL cheat' for a console game, it WOULD require installation of a modchip or bios flash. Unlike PC's where I can write an idiot proof installer, on consoles there is a certain level of expertise required to install my malicious code.
Anyway on-topic. I liked Lexmark until today. They made good printers. But sorry, if you can't compete with the after market toner guys then too bloody bad. Don't 'innovate' with lawyers like some other monopolies that shall remain nameless.
I'm wondering why all the biggest most successful capitalists in North America are suddenly running scared from competition (one of the basic principals of capitalism) all of a sudden.