-Microsoft knows their software is weak when it comes to security.
-Microsoft pleads to the security community not to make any vulnerabilities public prior to notifying them for at least a few weeks, and sues everyone who doesn't fall in.
-Microsoft reveals the reason it wants vulnerabilites not to go public.... So CTOs can claim that security updates only happen every month rather than every day, keeping their job intact and making more money for MS in the long run.
-Somebody who cares about security rather than marketing posts a needed FrontPage Extensions update.
See.... someone at Microsoft has a clue. They just don't talk to the marketing folks. I don't blame 'em.
This is why Black Lotus and your hordes of hackers say "I can hack into anything."
Forget accounting fraud and unethical stock manipulations... The real threat will be obvious when hundreds of men from China gather on the lawn 100 feet away from the Pentagon and pull out their laptops.
If you are worried the most about forking, then you probably read much more open-source heavy press (Slashdot) that key the communities in to every newsworthy development in the hopes of expanding user and developer bases. On the other hand. To quote:
"With proprietary software, forking generally does not take place since development is centralized within a firm and disciplined by market forces."
The main problem with that statement is the use of both "disciplined" and "market forces". If a proprietary tool is extremely useful to you and few others, you can almost count on it getting discontinued after a year or two of stalled sales. If a tool can work wonders for many people, but is insanely hard to market, it will get split into a family of product each geared to a specific market. Those forks make open source forks look like small splinters or development experiments.
The first refernce: Patent for "Method and apparatus for generating text", 1987.
The following is an actual paragraph from the newly announced patent: Referring to FIG. 4, table 56 having words and their associated rhyme numbering is shown for the poem "why go slam, know the lamb." The words "lamb" and "slam" are both numbered.backslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..back slash..backslash. since they rhyme with each other and are placed in a first rhyme set, while "go" and "know" are numbered.backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash. since they rhyme with each other, and not with "lamb" and "slam," and thus are numbered to indicate membership in a second rhyme set. The resulting poem is; why go.backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash.slam.ba ckslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..backsla sh..backslash., know.backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash. the lamb.backslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..back slash..backslash..
I can't go on.... I can't see how the patent system is anything but a joke, one that does good for nobody but the lawyers.
Anyone who claims that the Internet, which started life as ARPANET, was not designed with security in mind.... does not deserve a "Score:5, Insightful", that's for sure. Even e-mail was designed with security in mind, it's just that the masses would still rather take e-mail from anyone rather than whitelist incoming mail from trusted networks only.
What cost? There's not a drastic ammount of difference between the cost of resources involved in publishing 10,000 CDs and 10,00,000... The real money gets absorbed by the publisher as profit, with additional bits going here and there to the developers, marketing folk, and retailers.
While this makes the publisher sound like they've got a really sweet deal, a ton of games are indeed flops and don't make enough money to pay off the developers, marketing, and distribution efforts.
Besides, if it's possible for someone to sneak a compromised DHCP server on your network, you're basically screwed anyway.
The janitors in my bank building could probably do this on multiple networks on multiple floors with ease. Heck, just drop a decently modded dreamcast under a secretary's desk or anywhere you can find a ethernet drop and weak switching.
This problem is rather simple... Operating systems such as Windows and MacOS X (don't troll me with Darwin) are commonly developed inside corporate environments, and a direct connection to the internet rather than a firewalled lan is the exception, rather than the rule. When the pointy haired boss walks in and requests a machine than can set up itself when he plugs in to the network, it gets delivered.
I expect retail software geared to the home user will continue to keep the tendancy of shipping flawed, because development often does not take place in a home environment. This goes for everything from Quake servers (remember ID's backdoor?) to all of the $40 photo-editing tools that are sold at Wal-Mart with marketing emphasis on the end user, with interfaces so all-encompasing, wizard-heavy, and dumbed-down that even I don't attempt to tech my low-tech friends how to use them.
- It breaks the right mouse button menu that users have come to expect.... Even in Firebird, the gestures are not noted in the status bar.
- It wastes bandwidth, every page using it would need a copy of this Javascript snippet (or linked to a.js file).
There are good uses for javascript (example), where bandwidth can be saved and the user experience gains a net improvement. This, however, is just another bad use.
There has got to be something significant with the timing of all of this... Novell gets SuSE and Ximian, Gateway starts offering SuSE... I really would not be surprised if there's something going on at Compaq/HP/Dell to turn the tables and apply serious pressure on Microsoft. Forget about pricing, I have a feeling that those guys would rather see a much larger disconnect between the OS and components like the Browser, Media Player, and *ESPECIALLY* MSN IM.
Guys, this is the man who wrote "Caligula". He is more intimately linked to many bad and savagable works of humanatiy than most of us will ever be. If he says that e-voting is bad, who am I to doubt it?
The vast majority of GUI-based configuration tools for Linux don't mesh well with hand-editing of text configuration files.... For example, while I would love to see Vim and Apache start handling config files in a way that supports collapsable sections, I have a feeling that we are at least 5 years away from any move of that magnitude.
Including issues such as effecitve configuration administration, if Linux will succeed in the long run (with or without Red Hat... no offense), what needs to happen within the next 5 years, and what role will Red Hat play in ensuring that those needs are met?
Ultimately, free software is long from dead, and all of us know this. However, deploying Linux system in a corporate environment generally involves investing time, and sometimes money, in a distribution. These investments seem to have led Microsoft to believe that there is great worth in these distribution companies. I'm here to tell you that there is NOT great worth in these companies.... Much of their work parallels community-based operating systems, and the only reason non-community distributions do so well is because you'll find them covered in polish and dummy-proofed.
In my office, for example, the slickest and most popular install was a simple Red Hat base, compiled software to fit the needs of that workstation or server, and a Ximian install on top, with Red Carpet managing packages and keeping the RH stuff up-to-date. The key to this system, all around, was simplicity. When RedHat decided to focus only Enterprise (which we did not need) and trust everything else on an unproven community, they lost me and my company as a customer. They've probably also lost a ton of support among those who've provided mirrors for their repackaging of our software, because this is nothing but a slap in their face and the disavowal of a long-term relationship with many schools and businesses.
However, it looks like RHAT's up around 4%.
Free software is not dead, but it could really use more polish and coordination among groups like Debian and less public focus on these repackaging companies...
I just wanted to say on the "original storyteller" claim that the story for "A Bug's Life" is essentially the same story used in "The Seven Samauri" and later recycled in "The Magnificent Seven"...
Let's admit one thing first.... While you wouldn't call any of Tartakovsky's works beautiful when compared to Disney, they do have a style that stays wonderfully consistent and someone eye-pleasing. Very easy to watch. Make no mistake about it, though... I expect to see cels and clones of cels re-used over and over throughout the entire series. While it probably won't be nearly as bad as your average Space Ghost or DragonBall Z, I'm sure it will wear us down.
Let's just hope the storytelling delivers... To be honest, I've not been too disappointed in the past.
Is that right now, their actions are in violation of the GPL, and while they can claim that they believe the GPL is unenforcable and void, that does not mean it is until the courts say so.
Essentially, what they are doing RIGHT NOW is as wrongheaded as pirating and selling the latest sets of MSDN.
The other issue is their notion that an invalid GPL means that all copyrights on Linux source code also becomes invalid and the work enters public domain. I'm no copyright expert, but I really doubt that's the way this works in the real world.
Sorry, but most addictions have absolutely nothing to do with liking something.... Rather, the brain just hooks onto the addiction, regardless of how enjoyable it is. Or isn't. Think of all the Everquest and Counter-Strike addictions, games that are addictive but not actually fun. Or couch potatoes who watch sitcoms that aren't funny.... Or slashdot posters that are want to get a point of view across no matter how futile or unenjoyable it is.
Look, man, you need to know that the video modes used to display blue screens of deaths don't support the use of 16 million pretty pretty colors, or even 256. Nope, those modes use a grand total of any of sixteen colors.
Featured prominently below the "features" on that page is a message from the editor, containing a link to the editor's blog, which supposedly contains his thoughts on the longhorn dev community at the moment.
The blog? It's blank, contains no entries yet. Looks like a premature launch, IMHO....
It's actually amazing how many spammers use real return addresses.... I'm pretty sure it's very common among the less sophisticated spammer with only a few thousand victims in their address book.
The fact that the Nigerian scam artists rely on return addresses completely counters your claim.
Face it, these guys are hitting blogs, so why is it so hard to believe that they wouldn't go for contact form?
A lot of these guys actually do depend on return addresses so they can sell more stuff. The vast majority of them, of course, don't, probably less than 1 or 2 percent. However, it's that tiny percent that actually go all the way through to my contact form to spam.
Also, I only meant to link my front page once, the other was supposed to be my contact page, but I forgot to finish typing the URL.
Last year, I closed my hotmail account and two spammed-to-heck e-mail accounts. To keep old friends and family from getting shafted, I had an autoreply attatched to those addresses, announcing that those addressess were closed and that I could be reached through the contact form on my website, prior to sending those e-mails to/dev/null.
To date, through this manual entry, effort-draining contact form, I have had at least 20 offers to increase my manly-ness, 10 offers to find the love of my life, and 5 death threats from annoyed spammers. Only one charitable organization had a problem with my auto-reply, because a spammer was using their e-mail address to send junk to me over and over again.
The genes of decesased signers of the U.S. Constitution were used to clone the heads of these former great leaders so that they could remove the burden of ammending the constitution off of the backs of the states.
The head of former president Abraham Lincoln, also cloned back to life, issued the following statement "It's obvious to us that it is much harder for great leaders and individuals to communicate with the public in this modern era than it was back in the late 1800's.... The great thinkers and speakers of this era no longer have the fortune of traveling by horse and buggy from city to city, so it is necessary for the government to do this work for us."
"An enlightened fellow, 'geekstreak', said it best: Governments need to promote ideas."
After this speech, the original framers of the Constitution created the fourth branch of the Federal government: The Promotion Branch. Realizing that the courts need to promote their beliefs if they are to continue to create law from the bench, the first responsibilty of the Promotion branch is to represnt the beliefs of the court system in the public, and to translate rulings into common sense English. It's been said that every ruling will take a team of 10 men at least 5 days to translate into English. The Promotion branch has already outsourced this work to undocumented peoples living in California, many of whom recently left well paying jobs in Wal-Mart.
Until France revokes their capitalism card, limiting workers to 35 hours (outside of overtime) is indeed weasily.... Simply put, it hurts the ability for the French economy to compete with productivity delivered by the rest of the world. The less money that flows into and out of France, the worse off the people, businesses, and government make out.
Slashdot Mirror
See, here's how it goes.
-Microsoft knows their software is weak when it comes to security.
-Microsoft pleads to the security community not to make any vulnerabilities public prior to notifying them for at least a few weeks, and sues everyone who doesn't fall in.
-Microsoft reveals the reason it wants vulnerabilites not to go public.... So CTOs can claim that security updates only happen every month rather than every day, keeping their job intact and making more money for MS in the long run.
-Somebody who cares about security rather than marketing posts a needed FrontPage Extensions update.
See.... someone at Microsoft has a clue. They just don't talk to the marketing folks. I don't blame 'em.
This is why Black Lotus and your hordes of hackers say "I can hack into anything."
Forget accounting fraud and unethical stock manipulations... The real threat will be obvious when hundreds of men from China gather on the lawn 100 feet away from the Pentagon and pull out their laptops.
If you are worried the most about forking, then you probably read much more open-source heavy press (Slashdot) that key the communities in to every newsworthy development in the hopes of expanding user and developer bases. On the other hand. To quote:
"With proprietary software, forking generally does not take place since development is centralized within a firm and disciplined by market forces."
The main problem with that statement is the use of both "disciplined" and "market forces". If a proprietary tool is extremely useful to you and few others, you can almost count on it getting discontinued after a year or two of stalled sales. If a tool can work wonders for many people, but is insanely hard to market, it will get split into a family of product each geared to a specific market. Those forks make open source forks look like small splinters or development experiments.
With the exception of people (?) like Michael Jackson and R. Kelly, who probably forwards these worms to everyone in his address book intentionally.
The first refernce: Patent for "Method and apparatus for generating text", 1987.
.backslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..back slash..backslash. since they rhyme with each other and are placed in a first rhyme set, while "go" and "know" are numbered .backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash. since they rhyme with each other, and not with "lamb" and "slam," and thus are numbered to indicate membership in a second rhyme set. The resulting poem is; why go .backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash.slam.ba ckslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..backsla sh..backslash., know .backslash..backslash..backslash.2.backslash..back slash..backslash. the lamb .backslash..backslash..backslash.1.backslash..back slash..backslash..
The following is an actual paragraph from the newly announced patent:
Referring to FIG. 4, table 56 having words and their associated rhyme numbering is shown for the poem "why go slam, know the lamb." The words "lamb" and "slam" are both numbered
I can't go on.... I can't see how the patent system is anything but a joke, one that does good for nobody but the lawyers.
Anyone who claims that the Internet, which started life as ARPANET, was not designed with security in mind.... does not deserve a "Score:5, Insightful", that's for sure. Even e-mail was designed with security in mind, it's just that the masses would still rather take e-mail from anyone rather than whitelist incoming mail from trusted networks only.
What cost? There's not a drastic ammount of difference between the cost of resources involved in publishing 10,000 CDs and 10,00,000... The real money gets absorbed by the publisher as profit, with additional bits going here and there to the developers, marketing folk, and retailers.
While this makes the publisher sound like they've got a really sweet deal, a ton of games are indeed flops and don't make enough money to pay off the developers, marketing, and distribution efforts.
Besides, if it's possible for someone to sneak a compromised DHCP server on your network, you're basically screwed anyway.
The janitors in my bank building could probably do this on multiple networks on multiple floors with ease. Heck, just drop a decently modded dreamcast under a secretary's desk or anywhere you can find a ethernet drop and weak switching.
This problem is rather simple... Operating systems such as Windows and MacOS X (don't troll me with Darwin) are commonly developed inside corporate environments, and a direct connection to the internet rather than a firewalled lan is the exception, rather than the rule. When the pointy haired boss walks in and requests a machine than can set up itself when he plugs in to the network, it gets delivered.
I expect retail software geared to the home user will continue to keep the tendancy of shipping flawed, because development often does not take place in a home environment. This goes for everything from Quake servers (remember ID's backdoor?) to all of the $40 photo-editing tools that are sold at Wal-Mart with marketing emphasis on the end user, with interfaces so all-encompasing, wizard-heavy, and dumbed-down that even I don't attempt to tech my low-tech friends how to use them.
- It breaks the right mouse button menu that users have come to expect.... Even in Firebird, the gestures are not noted in the status bar.
.js file).
- It wastes bandwidth, every page using it would need a copy of this Javascript snippet (or linked to a
There are good uses for javascript (example), where bandwidth can be saved and the user experience gains a net improvement. This, however, is just another bad use.
There has got to be something significant with the timing of all of this... Novell gets SuSE and Ximian, Gateway starts offering SuSE... I really would not be surprised if there's something going on at Compaq/HP/Dell to turn the tables and apply serious pressure on Microsoft. Forget about pricing, I have a feeling that those guys would rather see a much larger disconnect between the OS and components like the Browser, Media Player, and *ESPECIALLY* MSN IM.
Guys, this is the man who wrote "Caligula". He is more intimately linked to many bad and savagable works of humanatiy than most of us will ever be. If he says that e-voting is bad, who am I to doubt it?
The vast majority of GUI-based configuration tools for Linux don't mesh well with hand-editing of text configuration files.... For example, while I would love to see Vim and Apache start handling config files in a way that supports collapsable sections, I have a feeling that we are at least 5 years away from any move of that magnitude.
Including issues such as effecitve configuration administration, if Linux will succeed in the long run (with or without Red Hat... no offense), what needs to happen within the next 5 years, and what role will Red Hat play in ensuring that those needs are met?
Ultimately, free software is long from dead, and all of us know this. However, deploying Linux system in a corporate environment generally involves investing time, and sometimes money, in a distribution. These investments seem to have led Microsoft to believe that there is great worth in these distribution companies. I'm here to tell you that there is NOT great worth in these companies.... Much of their work parallels community-based operating systems, and the only reason non-community distributions do so well is because you'll find them covered in polish and dummy-proofed.
In my office, for example, the slickest and most popular install was a simple Red Hat base, compiled software to fit the needs of that workstation or server, and a Ximian install on top, with Red Carpet managing packages and keeping the RH stuff up-to-date. The key to this system, all around, was simplicity. When RedHat decided to focus only Enterprise (which we did not need) and trust everything else on an unproven community, they lost me and my company as a customer. They've probably also lost a ton of support among those who've provided mirrors for their repackaging of our software, because this is nothing but a slap in their face and the disavowal of a long-term relationship with many schools and businesses.
However, it looks like RHAT's up around 4%.
Free software is not dead, but it could really use more polish and coordination among groups like Debian and less public focus on these repackaging companies...
I just wanted to say on the "original storyteller" claim that the story for "A Bug's Life" is essentially the same story used in "The Seven Samauri" and later recycled in "The Magnificent Seven"...
Let's admit one thing first.... While you wouldn't call any of Tartakovsky's works beautiful when compared to Disney, they do have a style that stays wonderfully consistent and someone eye-pleasing. Very easy to watch. Make no mistake about it, though... I expect to see cels and clones of cels re-used over and over throughout the entire series. While it probably won't be nearly as bad as your average Space Ghost or DragonBall Z, I'm sure it will wear us down.
Let's just hope the storytelling delivers... To be honest, I've not been too disappointed in the past.
Is that right now, their actions are in violation of the GPL, and while they can claim that they believe the GPL is unenforcable and void, that does not mean it is until the courts say so.
Essentially, what they are doing RIGHT NOW is as wrongheaded as pirating and selling the latest sets of MSDN.
The other issue is their notion that an invalid GPL means that all copyrights on Linux source code also becomes invalid and the work enters public domain. I'm no copyright expert, but I really doubt that's the way this works in the real world.
Sorry, but most addictions have absolutely nothing to do with liking something.... Rather, the brain just hooks onto the addiction, regardless of how enjoyable it is. Or isn't. Think of all the Everquest and Counter-Strike addictions, games that are addictive but not actually fun. Or couch potatoes who watch sitcoms that aren't funny.... Or slashdot posters that are want to get a point of view across no matter how futile or unenjoyable it is.
No way.
Look, man, you need to know that the video modes used to display blue screens of deaths don't support the use of 16 million pretty pretty colors, or even 256. Nope, those modes use a grand total of any of sixteen colors.
Figured I'd point that out.
Featured prominently below the "features" on that page is a message from the editor, containing a link to the editor's blog, which supposedly contains his thoughts on the longhorn dev community at the moment.
The blog? It's blank, contains no entries yet. Looks like a premature launch, IMHO....
It's actually amazing how many spammers use real return addresses.... I'm pretty sure it's very common among the less sophisticated spammer with only a few thousand victims in their address book.
The fact that the Nigerian scam artists rely on return addresses completely counters your claim.
Face it, these guys are hitting blogs, so why is it so hard to believe that they wouldn't go for contact form?
A lot of these guys actually do depend on return addresses so they can sell more stuff. The vast majority of them, of course, don't, probably less than 1 or 2 percent. However, it's that tiny percent that actually go all the way through to my contact form to spam.
Also, I only meant to link my front page once, the other was supposed to be my contact page, but I forgot to finish typing the URL.
I've got a website.
/dev/null .
Last year, I closed my hotmail account and two spammed-to-heck e-mail accounts. To keep old friends and family from getting shafted, I had an autoreply attatched to those addresses, announcing that those addressess were closed and that I could be reached through the contact form on my website, prior to sending those e-mails to
To date, through this manual entry, effort-draining contact form, I have had at least 20 offers to increase my manly-ness, 10 offers to find the love of my life, and 5 death threats from annoyed spammers. Only one charitable organization had a problem with my auto-reply, because a spammer was using their e-mail address to send junk to me over and over again.
The genes of decesased signers of the U.S. Constitution were used to clone the heads of these former great leaders so that they could remove the burden of ammending the constitution off of the backs of the states.
The head of former president Abraham Lincoln, also cloned back to life, issued the following statement "It's obvious to us that it is much harder for great leaders and individuals to communicate with the public in this modern era than it was back in the late 1800's.... The great thinkers and speakers of this era no longer have the fortune of traveling by horse and buggy from city to city, so it is necessary for the government to do this work for us."
"An enlightened fellow, 'geekstreak', said it best: Governments need to promote ideas."
After this speech, the original framers of the Constitution created the fourth branch of the Federal government: The Promotion Branch. Realizing that the courts need to promote their beliefs if they are to continue to create law from the bench, the first responsibilty of the Promotion branch is to represnt the beliefs of the court system in the public, and to translate rulings into common sense English. It's been said that every ruling will take a team of 10 men at least 5 days to translate into English. The Promotion branch has already outsourced this work to undocumented peoples living in California, many of whom recently left well paying jobs in Wal-Mart.
It's not a problem for me, it's a problem for the people of France.... A problem that needs more press, IMHO ;) ....
Until France revokes their capitalism card, limiting workers to 35 hours (outside of overtime) is indeed weasily.... Simply put, it hurts the ability for the French economy to compete with productivity delivered by the rest of the world. The less money that flows into and out of France, the worse off the people, businesses, and government make out.