The students in one of my brother's classes were disappointed to hear that Forrest Gump didn't really employ an amputee - that they removed his legs with CGI.
I guess I see what he means, but he may be reading more into it than the authors ever thought of. Invoking Godel's theorem is an interesting and applicable idea, but I suspect if the authors had made the connection, they would have somehow dropped the name in there. Perhaps he was stumbling about the idea when talking about the inherent flaws in the Matrix.
Long ago, my wife and I came out of a movie saying to each other, "That was so deep the author was drowning in his own work."
Reading the discussion on this thread, there's no concensus. There seem to be two extremes, though:
One hand: Windows is simply a bigger target, if Linux were this big a target, it would be in just as much trouble.
Other hand: Windows is not designed for security, so it's an easy target.
Gripping hand: (my opinion) Both are true.
Security needs (at least) architecture, implementation, and culture. It's easy to argue that Win9X-based OS's fail on all three counts. It's possible to argue that WinNT-based OS's may even be superior to Linux, having stuff like ACLs from the get-go.
As for implementation, I'm not sure. It seems to me that most (not all) of the Windows exploits are really architectural, not implementation. It seems like the exploits take advantage of the tight integration Windows offers rather than buffer overflows and off-by-one, Code Red obviously excepted. Linux exploits are generally in the implementation area. One might wonder how many implementation flaws are in Windows, once architectural flaws are closed.
IMHO where Windows falls flattest is in the culture. So what if the OS can separate users from admin, when a lion's share of software requires admin to run? As others have said, Windows users expect things to be insecurely easy.
But what really scares me is Lindows. Running ordinary users as root throws away the single simplest, strongest chunk of security we've got. It also brings out one other aspect of Linux - I suspect/fear once a box is r00ted, it's a much more powerful base for further mischief than Windows. I just wish Lindows could come up with some other ease-of-use scheme than running as root all the time.
Does this take care of remapping both outgoing and incoming addresses?
I've been running Exim for years, primarily for its ease of rewriting and reasonable security record. I've thought of moving to Postfix, but have never really had the time to dig into rewriting.
I also maintain my Mom's dialup system. Exim isn't designed for dialup, but is able to easily queue, recover, and force-send from ip-up. How is Postfix with intermittant connections?
>Also, it doesn't require that you install all the author's other tools in order to have a functioning MTA.
This one does it for me. I currently use Exim, which also drops in for sendmail and is reasonably secure. If/when I want more security, I'll probably go Postfix because of the simple drop-in.
Security is never unimportant, but for an internal-only MTA for a family of four that accepts no external connections, it's secondary. I will however agree that had I been running Sendmail, the March problem would have had me.
But they need to have some sort of pretext for doing so, and they're already SCO licensees. There may be no legal way for Microsoft to give SCO more money without getting a serious examination by the SEC.
"Hello, my name is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux, Linux." (aka/usr/share/sndconfig/sample.au in RedHat)
It's audio, so the RIAA needs to be in on this. If you've ever downloaded a RedHat Linux ISO, you've probably downloaded this audio file. This means you owe the RIAA and SCO.
Time to buy the tinfoil with CASH, and don't use the store discount card. That way they won't know that their mind-control projectors in the van by the street will be totally ineffective. They will be completely unprepared for my overmodulated frobazz directional emitter.
IMHO he's absolutely right about that. Nothing grabbed my pre-teen and early teen attention like astronauts, space-walks, and moon walks. I wonder how many kids went into the sciences after watching our astronauts.
But gcc is still what most of us use. Kind of a different application of, "'something that works' is the enemy of 'excellent'" that so often gets applied to X86 and Windows.
Just make sure that as you try to replace the 30 year old horror known as X86 that you're not getting yourself in even deeper. Philosophically, Intel appears historically to have placed hardware squarely in the driver's seat. Perhaps that has even been the right move, as X86 has won out over software-wise more elegant competition.
IA64 (or IPF, if you prefer) continues that tradition of designing hardware, and forcing software to accomodate. In this case, they've gone even further in exposing the intimate details of the hardware architecture to the compiler, and it's taken until the past 6 months to make the combined processor/compiler become competitive.
So if it IS the new heir-apparent, what happens on the first true Post-McKinley core? How will McKinley-compiled code run on Post-McKinley? How will Post-McKinley-compiled code run on McKinley? Are the good old days of fat binaries back? How long will it take for good Post-McKinley compilers to evolve, after the hardware is available?
Before throwing away X86, as horrible as we may think it is, we need to make sure we're going to do better.
Well so far Intel is 82.5% right with their strategy, but that's down from being 82.7% right a year ago.
But speaking of benchmarketing, it would be REALLY fun to see some sort of CPU shootout, *all done with gcc*. Most of us either buy applications, or compile them ourselves, using gcc.
Really, Spec means very little to us. Quake, Unreal, etc fps are meaningful to those of us that play those games. To the Linux crowd, at home, business, and universities, gcc is how we get executables.
Apple recently got a black eye for using gcc for benchmarking, but perhaps erroneously. Intel does wonders on benchmarks, but I hear rumblings that they have Spec-tuned compilers that may not yield results as good on things that don't look like Spec.
When the masses, such as we are, compile, we use gcc. (I agree that most masses just buy Quake, Unreal, Photoshop, etc.) But I argue that a small subset compiles, and a smaller subset yet forks over for commercial compilers.
In addition to UDF, you need packet write, both "experimental." The packet write stuff I've been able to find seems badly dated. (>12-18 months) Plus it seems to be drive-dependent whether you can do it even with patches.
Do you have some more up-to-date links you could share?
In the pre-story splash he said he always wanted to write a "Playboy Story" and was surprised when he had actually written one. His agent didn't like the title, so he suggested, "Tom Swift and His Electric Penis" as an alternative. It was submitted under the original title.
Greg Bear had the 'therapied population' in some of his novels. It sounded like medication systems like this, only implanted rather than swallowed. Continuous lower dosages seems IMHO to be the way to go, rather than seesawing beteen approaching-ineffective and approaching-lethal the way periodic medications do. (I know they don't approach lethal that closely, and that some medications just plain build up over time, and don't really seesaw.)
In the novels, they focused more on psychoactive drugs to control our crazy tendancies, but IMHO the first drug would/should have been insulin. They also created a three-tier society, with 'high naturals' on top, who needed no therapy, the 'therapied' in the middle, and those who denied needed therapy on the bottom. Therapy wasn't forced except in violent cases.
Seems to me that there's a perfect opportunity here for some insider trading. Say a terrorist organization comes up with a dummy corporation that can play the Pentagon's Policy Analysis Market.
They can then base bets based on their own activities. Obviously they'd have to keep a low profile, and couldn't be too good, but 'better than average' could still be a moneymaker.
Imagine the Pentagon having to add the Policy Analysis Market to the list of Terrorist Organization because they funded some.
This may be the critical tweak to his plan, put the 1-to-1 ratio back in.
Adopt a check-out/check-in system for the CDs, as well as a loan term. You borrow a CD, perhaps even just a track, and nobody else can. The inventory system keeps track of how often requests are unfulfilled, and buys additional copies.
How many CDs out of my library do I listen to in any given two-week interval? (small fraction) I suspect most of us are the same, and those who listen more have bigger collections, so they still hit only a small fraction.
You don't need a copy of every Pink Floyd CD for every Pink Floyd fan in the world. Well, maybe you d, but you don't need a copy of every Pink Floyd CD for every occasional listener of Pink Floyd.
This isn't a sink-the-RIAA, like Cringley's plan, but it's not so much a legal loophole, either. It may not even have to jump through as many corporate hoops, merely taking the mechanisms of CleanFilms.
You brought out this point better than I did, that the wealth redistribution in the US effected by moving jobs overseas is going to hurt as much as the loss of jobs, themselves.
In another response on this or a similar thread I advocated that jobs sent overseas be paid MORE money than we would otherwise. Not exactly a protectionist measure, but it would have the effect of slowing job loss, because there's less incentive. In addition, the presence of more money in the foreign economy will help grow that economy into customers. Maybe there would be fewer salaries, but those salaries would be multiplied many times as they spread out into local goods and services.
I feel that there's real danger ahead. Corporate heads are dismantling the US economy - burning up the middle class for a one-time padding of their wallets. In many ways it resembles short-sided views toward environmentalism, "clean air and water"/"customers for my goods" will always be there.
Tree-huggerism aside, we've pretty well proven that there is a cost to keeping clean air and water, and IMHO it's been worth the price we've been paying, and New England has damage to say that we haven't done enough (or perhaps only long enough) yet.
A viable customer base is going to prove to be as valuable as clean air and water. The danger is that the US market will lose viability (past food, clothing, and shelter) before the foreign markets gain viability. (past food, clothing, and shelter)
((GOT IT!!! The Indian climate is warmer, so they can go naked and spend the clothing money saved on electronic gadgets and SUVs.))
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The students in one of my brother's classes were disappointed to hear that Forrest Gump didn't really employ an amputee - that they removed his legs with CGI.
I guess I see what he means, but he may be reading more into it than the authors ever thought of. Invoking Godel's theorem is an interesting and applicable idea, but I suspect if the authors had made the connection, they would have somehow dropped the name in there. Perhaps he was stumbling about the idea when talking about the inherent flaws in the Matrix.
Long ago, my wife and I came out of a movie saying to each other, "That was so deep the author was drowning in his own work."
Reading the discussion on this thread, there's no concensus. There seem to be two extremes, though:
One hand: Windows is simply a bigger target, if Linux were this big a target, it would be in just as much trouble.
Other hand: Windows is not designed for security, so it's an easy target.
Gripping hand: (my opinion) Both are true.
Security needs (at least) architecture, implementation, and culture. It's easy to argue that Win9X-based OS's fail on all three counts. It's possible to argue that WinNT-based OS's may even be superior to Linux, having stuff like ACLs from the get-go.
As for implementation, I'm not sure. It seems to me that most (not all) of the Windows exploits are really architectural, not implementation. It seems like the exploits take advantage of the tight integration Windows offers rather than buffer overflows and off-by-one, Code Red obviously excepted. Linux exploits are generally in the implementation area. One might wonder how many implementation flaws are in Windows, once architectural flaws are closed.
IMHO where Windows falls flattest is in the culture. So what if the OS can separate users from admin, when a lion's share of software requires admin to run? As others have said, Windows users expect things to be insecurely easy.
But what really scares me is Lindows.
Running ordinary users as root throws away the single simplest, strongest chunk of security we've got.
It also brings out one other aspect of Linux - I suspect/fear once a box is r00ted, it's a much more powerful base for further mischief than Windows.
I just wish Lindows could come up with some other ease-of-use scheme than running as root all the time.
Does this take care of remapping both outgoing and incoming addresses?
I've been running Exim for years, primarily for its ease of rewriting and reasonable security record. I've thought of moving to Postfix, but have never really had the time to dig into rewriting.
I also maintain my Mom's dialup system. Exim isn't designed for dialup, but is able to easily queue, recover, and force-send from ip-up. How is Postfix with intermittant connections?
>Also, it doesn't require that you install all the author's other tools in order to have a functioning MTA.
This one does it for me. I currently use Exim, which also drops in for sendmail and is reasonably secure. If/when I want more security, I'll probably go Postfix because of the simple drop-in.
Security is never unimportant, but for an internal-only MTA for a family of four that accepts no external connections, it's secondary. I will however agree that had I been running Sendmail, the March problem would have had me.
If you're messing with electron spins, forget superconductivity and that stuff.
I want a Spindizzy.
(ref: James Blish, "Cities in Flight")
But they need to have some sort of pretext for doing so, and they're already SCO licensees. There may be no legal way for Microsoft to give SCO more money without getting a serious examination by the SEC.
I know that, silly. It was supposed to be humor.
I guess maybe emoticons are really necessary, though personally I don't much like them.
It's audio , so the RIAA needs to be in on this. If you've ever downloaded a RedHat Linux ISO, you've probably downloaded this audio file. This means you owe the RIAA and SCO.
Time to buy the tinfoil with CASH, and don't use the store discount card. That way they won't know that their mind-control projectors in the van by the street will be totally ineffective. They will be completely unprepared for my overmodulated frobazz directional emitter.
Today has been a really bad day. It's been a bad week. A moment to bang on a deserving head can be cathartic.
But I'll agree, right after I posted, a better place to bang became available.
But SCO is only licensing binaries, so it's just not possible to get a regular Gentoo release into compliance, only the bootstrap binaries.
That's the real fallacy of SCO licensing. How many of those systems are running stock kernels.
Go up, land halfway around the Earth.
X-Prixe-3 - Land having circled the Earth. (not orbit, but parabolic boost + glide)
X-Prize-4 - Orbits + return.
After all when someone won the first Kremer Prize and did the figure-8, there was a new prize to cross the English Channel.
IMHO he's absolutely right about that. Nothing grabbed my pre-teen and early teen attention like astronauts, space-walks, and moon walks. I wonder how many kids went into the sciences after watching our astronauts.
You make good points about optimization.
But gcc is still what most of us use. Kind of a different application of, "'something that works' is the enemy of 'excellent'" that so often gets applied to X86 and Windows.
Just make sure that as you try to replace the 30 year old horror known as X86 that you're not getting yourself in even deeper. Philosophically, Intel appears historically to have placed hardware squarely in the driver's seat. Perhaps that has even been the right move, as X86 has won out over software-wise more elegant competition.
IA64 (or IPF, if you prefer) continues that tradition of designing hardware, and forcing software to accomodate. In this case, they've gone even further in exposing the intimate details of the hardware architecture to the compiler, and it's taken until the past 6 months to make the combined processor/compiler become competitive.
So if it IS the new heir-apparent, what happens on the first true Post-McKinley core?
How will McKinley-compiled code run on Post-McKinley?
How will Post-McKinley-compiled code run on McKinley?
Are the good old days of fat binaries back?
How long will it take for good Post-McKinley compilers to evolve, after the hardware is available?
Before throwing away X86, as horrible as we may think it is, we need to make sure we're going to do better.
Well so far Intel is 82.5% right with their strategy, but that's down from being 82.7% right a year ago.
But speaking of benchmarketing, it would be REALLY fun to see some sort of CPU shootout, *all done with gcc*. Most of us either buy applications, or compile them ourselves, using gcc.
Really, Spec means very little to us. Quake, Unreal, etc fps are meaningful to those of us that play those games. To the Linux crowd, at home, business, and universities, gcc is how we get executables.
Apple recently got a black eye for using gcc for benchmarking, but perhaps erroneously. Intel does wonders on benchmarks, but I hear rumblings that they have Spec-tuned compilers that may not yield results as good on things that don't look like Spec.
When the masses, such as we are, compile, we use gcc. (I agree that most masses just buy Quake, Unreal, Photoshop, etc.) But I argue that a small subset compiles, and a smaller subset yet forks over for commercial compilers.
Are you doing this?
In addition to UDF, you need packet write, both "experimental." The packet write stuff I've been able to find seems badly dated. (>12-18 months) Plus it seems to be drive-dependent whether you can do it even with patches.
Do you have some more up-to-date links you could share?
"More than the sum of his parts" by Joe Haldeman
In the pre-story splash he said he always wanted to write a "Playboy Story" and was surprised when he had actually written one. His agent didn't like the title, so he suggested, "Tom Swift and His Electric Penis" as an alternative. It was submitted under the original title.
Greg Bear had the 'therapied population' in some of his novels. It sounded like medication systems like this, only implanted rather than swallowed. Continuous lower dosages seems IMHO to be the way to go, rather than seesawing beteen approaching-ineffective and approaching-lethal the way periodic medications do. (I know they don't approach lethal that closely, and that some medications just plain build up over time, and don't really seesaw.)
In the novels, they focused more on psychoactive drugs to control our crazy tendancies, but IMHO the first drug would/should have been insulin. They also created a three-tier society, with 'high naturals' on top, who needed no therapy, the 'therapied' in the middle, and those who denied needed therapy on the bottom. Therapy wasn't forced except in violent cases.
But that's a few years away.
Seems to me that there's a perfect opportunity here for some insider trading. Say a terrorist organization comes up with a dummy corporation that can play the Pentagon's Policy Analysis Market.
They can then base bets based on their own activities. Obviously they'd have to keep a low profile, and couldn't be too good, but 'better than average' could still be a moneymaker.
Imagine the Pentagon having to add the Policy Analysis Market to the list of Terrorist Organization because they funded some.
This may be the critical tweak to his plan, put the 1-to-1 ratio back in.
Adopt a check-out/check-in system for the CDs, as well as a loan term. You borrow a CD, perhaps even just a track, and nobody else can. The inventory system keeps track of how often requests are unfulfilled, and buys additional copies.
How many CDs out of my library do I listen to in any given two-week interval? (small fraction) I suspect most of us are the same, and those who listen more have bigger collections, so they still hit only a small fraction.
You don't need a copy of every Pink Floyd CD for every Pink Floyd fan in the world. Well, maybe you d, but you don't need a copy of every Pink Floyd CD for every occasional listener of Pink Floyd.
This isn't a sink-the-RIAA, like Cringley's plan, but it's not so much a legal loophole, either. It may not even have to jump through as many corporate hoops, merely taking the mechanisms of CleanFilms.
Are you trying to tell us that mitosis is a violation of the DMCA, but meiosis isn't?
You brought out this point better than I did, that the wealth redistribution in the US effected by moving jobs overseas is going to hurt as much as the loss of jobs, themselves.
In another response on this or a similar thread I advocated that jobs sent overseas be paid MORE money than we would otherwise. Not exactly a protectionist measure, but it would have the effect of slowing job loss, because there's less incentive. In addition, the presence of more money in the foreign economy will help grow that economy into customers. Maybe there would be fewer salaries, but those salaries would be multiplied many times as they spread out into local goods and services.
I feel that there's real danger ahead. Corporate heads are dismantling the US economy - burning up the middle class for a one-time padding of their wallets. In many ways it resembles short-sided views toward environmentalism, "clean air and water"/"customers for my goods" will always be there.
Tree-huggerism aside, we've pretty well proven that there is a cost to keeping clean air and water, and IMHO it's been worth the price we've been paying, and New England has damage to say that we haven't done enough (or perhaps only long enough) yet.
A viable customer base is going to prove to be as valuable as clean air and water. The danger is that the US market will lose viability (past food, clothing, and shelter) before the foreign markets gain viability. (past food, clothing, and shelter)
((GOT IT!!! The Indian climate is warmer, so they can go naked and spend the clothing money saved on electronic gadgets and SUVs.))
Now we'll all be branded as terrorists for launching a DDOS attack on a government web site.