So, once again use an occasion such as this to resoundingly denounce the fact the CERT, and major Linux distros other than Red Hat, have chosen to do the essentially same.
The point is, they chose to act in this manner. Microsoft appears to want that choice taken away by legislation. That's what has people upset, rightly so in my opinion.
Are you kidding? Americans have honed hatred into a fine artform. We have more social groups who would like to annihilate each other than any other nation on earth. Heck, we still bicker about our civil war, and that was over a hundred years ago.
And you think that's supposed to be a long time? Compared to two easy examples, the British Isles and the Middle East, where the conflicts have been going on for more than a thousand years, it looks like small beans. We may have variety, but I don't think we have the same depth.
Hear, hear. Bogus stories like this reduce my ever-lessening desire to read slashdot even further. The lead articles are less technically interesting than they used to be, the (participating) audience is less intelligent, and the editors don't seem to be willing to put in the effort to check stories for truth or to see if they've been posted before. This week. Geez. (You could even make a good try at doing a duplicate story check programatically.)
Self-imposed rating systems have generally worked fairly well, with the bonus that they keep Congress off of the entertanment industry's backs.
Think about the Motion Picture Ratings Board. They're completely self-created. They rate the movies according to their standards. The movie theaters voluntarily choose whether they want to carry an NC-17 or Unrated film, and all goes well. As far as I know, the under 17 w/o parent at an 'R'-rated movie isn't a law, it's just something the theaters choose to follow.
I cannot believe that you are putting forward the Motion Pictures Ratings Board as a desirable rating system. If a movie is not rated R or higher, it will never have a chance of being a commercial success because very very few theaters will carry unrated films or those rated NC-17 or lower., and therefore is unlikely to ever be produced in the first place. I find the results of forcing the vast majority of films to censor themselves, at least enough to get a coveted R rating to be very bland, indeed. Don't you?
People should scrap the one-size-fits-all rating systems, whether regulated by law or by a commercial oligarchy, and rely on reviews by trusted critics instead. Movie theaters can set their own age policies for the movies they show.
"When will the American public (especially the/. crowd) realize the rights guarenteed by the government are guarentees regarding government behavior."
That's not true. The government can, should, and does step in to forbid business practices that violate our civil liberties. Refusing service to people based on the color of their skin is one such practice that has been curtailed. Eavesdropping on employees' phone calls is another such practice.
When a condition of employment is a violation of civil liberties (you must be white, you must perform sexual favors for the boss, etc.), the business is doing something illegal. I can't say if forcing employees to consent to searches is or should be illegal. On the one hand, the people have a right to privacy. On the other hand, the government has a duty to protect the people; making it difficult to smuggle biological agents out of a government lab would seem to be reasonable.
In summary, read the bloody report and get some perspective before spouting off.
Or you could try this experiment. Find some predictions Gartner issued a few years back and compare them with the state of the world today. I suspect their accuracy will be demonstrably poor.
I recall one prediction issued in the early part of 2000 - I think it was Gartner but could be wrong - that by the end of 2000, ~85% of Americans would be using wireless devices to access the internet. Anyone with half a brain should have known that was a hopelessly optimistic prediction - but these chumps manage to sell that kind of bullshit all day long. It's astonishing, really, when you think about it.
This is all good and what not, until you realize that the standard of error for a voting machine is the *same* as that of the gallop poll - around 4%.
That's not true. The error rates for voting machines vary from type to type. The punchcard scanners are the worst at around 1%. Which is still insanely high, but not as laughably imprecise as 4%.
if they're implementing an ID system like this, then you know it's the correct technological solution.
Let me get this straight - you're bashing the slashdot crowd for knee-jerk distrust of mandating government-issued ID's for online access. And your rationale is that if the government says it's good, it must be good? Talk about knee-jerk...
Actually, IBM has put a good bit of resources (code and programmers) towards the Apache Software Foundation and its projects, and the ASF public license is mostly BSD.
In some cases, its probably more important to IBM that they retain the ability to release proprietary forks of the code, or proprietary products based heavily on the code. The ASF public license permits that, the GPL does not.
I think you might want to think about accessing the data as XML and using XSL:FO as an output format. You can use Apache FOP to generate PDF's from XSL:FO documents. There's also a commercial offering that does the same thing, can't remember the name offhand though.
SOFTWARE TO BE INCLUDED WITH SALE OF PERSONAL COMPUTER. (a) A person in the business of selling personal computers shall provide with each personal computer sold by that person software that enables the purchaser of the personal computer to automatically block or screen indecent material on the Internet
And they also may require monkeys to fly out of my butt when I purchase a computer as well, but that's not going to happen. How can these jokers mandate something that's impossible?
So what's new here? You should always assume your packets are being sniffed, regardless if you're behind a firewall or not. Use ssh, ssl, or ipsec for everything. You'd be a fool not to. The extra layer of encryption provided by WEP is a nice frosting, but it ain't the cake.
The development of this new nameserver daemon should be under a Free software liscense (GPL(!!)).
Then again, I could be wrong....
Yes, you're wrong. It's critical that there exist an absolutely free software implementation of all important internet protocols. Then vendors who want to write their own stuff have a base which correctly complies with the standards. There is a reason that apache httpd is licensed under BSD rather than GPL.
Glad you said something about the NMD. It's a dangerous, dangerous thing, and it's easy to understand why. China currently has a couple of dozen ICBM's with nuclear warheads - a useful deterrent against a possible American nuclear attack. If we were to develop an NMD that could credibly defend against an attack of that magnitude, what would China do?
Build more fricking nukes, that's what.
The NMD would contribute significantly to nuclear proliferation. It sounds great in theory, but if you do the math, you'll see that it would actually be a destabilizing influence.
It doesn't seem that the (rational subset of the) pro-nuclear folks have ever sat down and listened to the fears of the (rational subset of the) anti-nuclear folks. It boils down to this - nuclear waste has to be safely transported and stored somewhere where it will be safe for many, many years - much longer than we're accustomed to dealing with.
Neither our government nor our industry have a good track record in this regard - and rather than sit down, listen to the concerns, and try to design something truly safe, they continue to suggest transportation methodologies and storage facilities of questionable reliability and ecological soundness. Almost seems like they're waiting for our energy needs to become critical so we don't have any other choice.
File a complaint, man! You shouldn't just say that's the way things are and drop it, call them on it. I'm in North Carolina, in BellSouth territory. We had just opened a new office and were trying to get phones installed. We elected to use BTI instead of BellSouth to try to do our part to encourage competition. They, of course, had to subcontract to BellSouth to get the last mile work done. Oddly enough, BellSouth missed their appointment(s) to come out to install the lines - FOR FIVE WEEKS IN A ROW.
On the sixth week, I decided that this was just ridiculous and tracked down the state government agency in charge of telecommunications utilities issues - the State Utilities Commision, here in North Carolina anyway. I filed a complaint, the nice lady got on the phone, lit some fires, and several days later we had phones. I honestly hadn't expected action, but she said it wasn't simply a service issue but a safety issue as well. Good point.
I had similar problems getting DSL installed from an indepedent ISP using Covad's lines. Once again, I filed a complaint. The nice lady was very interested in my story, and asked me to encourage others experiencing such troubles to file complaints. The phone number for the North Carolina agency is 919-733-9277, it should be very easy for an experienced web surfer to find contact information for analogous agencies in other states.
But back to my earlier point point: simply moving to XML buys you nothing but complexity. What you really want is a common ordering and syntax to the different files such that they can be edited by a common tool. That's all well and good, but that can be achieved *without* XML just as easily as it can with. I see no inherit advantage in using XML, except the gain in "buzzword compliance".
You've evidently never read the XML specification, or tried to use XML anywhere. Here's the deal. XML takes ASCII to the next level. ASCII lets you encode strings (in latin characters) in files in standard fashion. XML lets you encode trees (in arbitrary character sets) in files in a standard fashion. Trees are the natural data structure for most configuration files.
Even more useful stuff - you get validation with DTDs and Schemas. That means each program doesn't necessarily have to check its own configuration files for sanity, it can rely on the parser to catch the syntactical and much of the grammatical errors. Hell, each program doesn't have to write its own parser any more, making it simpler and reducing the possible number of bugs in the system (if all daemons shared a common configuration file parser).
Finally, by using XSLT stylesheets, it's very easy to transform XML files between different formats - giving you a relatively simple upgrade procedure when a daemon changes its configuration file format, and giving you a relatively simple way to convert configuration files between daemons - from postfix to sendmail, say. Think I'm blowing smoke? I already have all of my system data centralized in one XML file from which I generate the various daemon's configuration files. I think this is probably going to be the way this unfolds - userland tools will arise that use XML files to generate the collection of oddities that is the/etc filesystem.
I really don't understand the Linux community's perceived resistance to XML. I think it's because Microsoft was an active participant in the development process, and because many of the early implementations of the XML tools were written in Java. I really wish that attitude would change, because XML is an important standard for taking UNIX to the next level. One of the things that made UNIX great was the proliferation of small command line tools that cooperated by passing ASCII streams around. Imagine how much more powerful that paradigm could be if you they passed trees around!
For those of you jonesing for a decent browser for Linux and are tired of watching mozilla continue to twitch, I strongly urge you to install KDE2 (comes with Mandrake-7.2) and give konqueror a whirl.
I had been skeptical, but I'm now a believer. Konqueror rocks! It's got it all - fast HTML rendering, javascript support, java applet support, even DHTML (although most sites are designed for broken implementations so don't expect much here). The form widgets put Netscape's to shame.
For us privacy freaks, the cookie selector lets you configure cookie policies on a per-cookie or per-domain basis. You can also selectively enable or disable java or javascript on a per-domain basis.
And the best part? I haven't made it crash even once yet. I started it last week to give it a whirl - and it's been my default browser ever since. And I don't even use KDE - I'm a blackbox man! Konqueror is the bomb. It is my new best friend.
There is several reasons why english spread so much, but I think one is really important. You can learn just 3000 words to be able to fully express
yourself in most cases. Basic english is something that really helps this language to spread. When you count into it kind of easy grammar...
if your assertion is correct, i wonder if it would be useful at all for someone to develop a formal basic english language subset so that native english speakers could explicitly restrict themselves to that subset when communicating to an international community - like an international open source project developers' mailing list. probably unnecessary, but perhaps useful as a stepping stone for a guided evolution towards a common global language.
The basic problem is that information vital to the use of the file is not stored in the data that you get with read()/write(). This makes it impossible to
cleanly store this data on another system or to transfer it. Yes, you can "encode" (or "binhex") it, but if you do that, why not just store the encoded
version on the disk, and remove a large and complex mess from the OS?
So you add new system calls - read_creator(), or read_meta("creator"). what's the big deal with that? applications which don't know about those system calls blithely ignore the meta information.
Slashdot Mirror
So, once again use an occasion such as this to resoundingly denounce the fact the CERT, and major Linux distros other than Red Hat, have chosen to do the essentially same.
The point is, they chose to act in this manner. Microsoft appears to want that choice taken away by legislation. That's what has people upset, rightly so in my opinion.
This is moderated as a troll? Bad use of mod points, the author is actually trying to make a point.
Are you kidding? Americans have honed hatred into a fine artform. We have more social groups who would like to annihilate each other than any other nation on earth. Heck, we still bicker about our civil war, and that was over a hundred years ago.
And you think that's supposed to be a long time? Compared to two easy examples, the British Isles and the Middle East, where the conflicts have been going on for more than a thousand years, it looks like small beans. We may have variety, but I don't think we have the same depth.
Hear, hear. Bogus stories like this reduce my ever-lessening desire to read slashdot even further. The lead articles are less technically interesting than they used to be, the (participating) audience is less intelligent, and the editors don't seem to be willing to put in the effort to check stories for truth or to see if they've been posted before. This week. Geez. (You could even make a good try at doing a duplicate story check programatically.)
Self-imposed rating systems have generally worked fairly well, with the bonus that they keep Congress off of the entertanment industry's backs.
Think about the Motion Picture Ratings Board. They're completely self-created. They rate the movies according to their standards. The movie theaters voluntarily choose whether they want to carry an NC-17 or Unrated film, and all goes well. As far as I know, the under 17 w/o parent at an 'R'-rated movie isn't a law, it's just something the theaters choose to follow.
I cannot believe that you are putting forward the Motion Pictures Ratings Board as a desirable rating system. If a movie is not rated R or higher, it will never have a chance of being a commercial success because very very few theaters will carry unrated films or those rated NC-17 or lower., and therefore is unlikely to ever be produced in the first place. I find the results of forcing the vast majority of films to censor themselves, at least enough to get a coveted R rating to be very bland, indeed. Don't you?
People should scrap the one-size-fits-all rating systems, whether regulated by law or by a commercial oligarchy, and rely on reviews by trusted critics instead. Movie theaters can set their own age policies for the movies they show.
"When will the American public (especially the /. crowd) realize the rights guarenteed by the government are guarentees regarding government behavior."
That's not true. The government can, should, and does step in to forbid business practices that violate our civil liberties. Refusing service to people based on the color of their skin is one such practice that has been curtailed. Eavesdropping on employees' phone calls is another such practice.
When a condition of employment is a violation of civil liberties (you must be white, you must perform sexual favors for the boss, etc.), the business is doing something illegal. I can't say if forcing employees to consent to searches is or should be illegal. On the one hand, the people have a right to privacy. On the other hand, the government has a duty to protect the people; making it difficult to smuggle biological agents out of a government lab would seem to be reasonable.
You nitwit. The terrorists don't want to divide us, they could give a shit. They want us to attack in hopes of forging a pan-Islamic union.
The anniversary of the signing of the Camp David Accords.
That is not true.
In summary, read the bloody report and get some perspective before spouting off.
Or you could try this experiment. Find some predictions Gartner issued a few years back and compare them with the state of the world today. I suspect their accuracy will be demonstrably poor.
I recall one prediction issued in the early part of 2000 - I think it was Gartner but could be wrong - that by the end of 2000, ~85% of Americans would be using wireless devices to access the internet. Anyone with half a brain should have known that was a hopelessly optimistic prediction - but these chumps manage to sell that kind of bullshit all day long. It's astonishing, really, when you think about it.
This is all good and what not, until you realize that the standard of error for a voting machine is the *same* as that of the gallop poll - around 4%.
That's not true. The error rates for voting machines vary from type to type. The punchcard scanners are the worst at around 1%. Which is still insanely high, but not as laughably imprecise as 4%.
if they're implementing an ID system like this, then you know it's the correct technological solution.
Let me get this straight - you're bashing the slashdot crowd for knee-jerk distrust of mandating government-issued ID's for online access. And your rationale is that if the government says it's good, it must be good? Talk about knee-jerk...
And this is modded up to 5?
Actually, IBM has put a good bit of resources (code and programmers) towards the Apache Software Foundation and its projects, and the ASF public license is mostly BSD.
In some cases, its probably more important to IBM that they retain the ability to release proprietary forks of the code, or proprietary products based heavily on the code. The ASF public license permits that, the GPL does not.
I think you might want to think about accessing the data as XML and using XSL:FO as an output format. You can use Apache FOP to generate PDF's from XSL:FO documents. There's also a commercial offering that does the same thing, can't remember the name offhand though.
SOFTWARE TO BE INCLUDED WITH SALE OF PERSONAL COMPUTER. (a) A person in the business of selling personal computers shall provide with each personal computer sold by that person software that enables the purchaser of the personal computer to automatically block or screen indecent material on the Internet
And they also may require monkeys to fly out of my butt when I purchase a computer as well, but that's not going to happen. How can these jokers mandate something that's impossible?
Your analogy breaks down in at least one regard. Once Fred the plumber gets paid for a job, that's it. Telco's keep raking it in every month.
So what's new here? You should always assume your packets are being sniffed, regardless if you're behind a firewall or not. Use ssh, ssl, or ipsec for everything. You'd be a fool not to. The extra layer of encryption provided by WEP is a nice frosting, but it ain't the cake.
The development of this new nameserver daemon should be under a Free software liscense (GPL(!!)).
Then again, I could be wrong....
Yes, you're wrong. It's critical that there exist an absolutely free software implementation of all important internet protocols. Then vendors who want to write their own stuff have a base which correctly complies with the standards. There is a reason that apache httpd is licensed under BSD rather than GPL.
This is the same situation.
Glad you said something about the NMD. It's a dangerous, dangerous thing, and it's easy to understand why. China currently has a couple of dozen ICBM's with nuclear warheads - a useful deterrent against a possible American nuclear attack. If we were to develop an NMD that could credibly defend against an attack of that magnitude, what would China do?
Build more fricking nukes, that's what.
The NMD would contribute significantly to nuclear proliferation. It sounds great in theory, but if you do the math, you'll see that it would actually be a destabilizing influence.
It doesn't seem that the (rational subset of the) pro-nuclear folks have ever sat down and listened to the fears of the (rational subset of the) anti-nuclear folks. It boils down to this - nuclear waste has to be safely transported and stored somewhere where it will be safe for many, many years - much longer than we're accustomed to dealing with.
Neither our government nor our industry have a good track record in this regard - and rather than sit down, listen to the concerns, and try to design something truly safe, they continue to suggest transportation methodologies and storage facilities of questionable reliability and ecological soundness. Almost seems like they're waiting for our energy needs to become critical so we don't have any other choice.
File a complaint, man! You shouldn't just say that's the way things are and drop it, call them on it. I'm in North Carolina, in BellSouth territory. We had just opened a new office and were trying to get phones installed. We elected to use BTI instead of BellSouth to try to do our part to encourage competition. They, of course, had to subcontract to BellSouth to get the last mile work done. Oddly enough, BellSouth missed their appointment(s) to come out to install the lines - FOR FIVE WEEKS IN A ROW.
On the sixth week, I decided that this was just ridiculous and tracked down the state government agency in charge of telecommunications utilities issues - the State Utilities Commision, here in North Carolina anyway. I filed a complaint, the nice lady got on the phone, lit some fires, and several days later we had phones. I honestly hadn't expected action, but she said it wasn't simply a service issue but a safety issue as well. Good point.
I had similar problems getting DSL installed from an indepedent ISP using Covad's lines. Once again, I filed a complaint. The nice lady was very interested in my story, and asked me to encourage others experiencing such troubles to file complaints. The phone number for the North Carolina agency is 919-733-9277, it should be very easy for an experienced web surfer to find contact information for analogous agencies in other states.
But back to my earlier point point: simply moving to XML buys you nothing but complexity. What you really want is a common ordering and syntax to the different files such that they can be edited by a common tool. That's all well and good, but that can be achieved *without* XML just as easily as it can with. I see no inherit advantage in using XML, except the gain in "buzzword compliance".
You've evidently never read the XML specification, or tried to use XML anywhere. Here's the deal. XML takes ASCII to the next level. ASCII lets you encode strings (in latin characters) in files in standard fashion. XML lets you encode trees (in arbitrary character sets) in files in a standard fashion. Trees are the natural data structure for most configuration files.
Even more useful stuff - you get validation with DTDs and Schemas. That means each program doesn't necessarily have to check its own configuration files for sanity, it can rely on the parser to catch the syntactical and much of the grammatical errors. Hell, each program doesn't have to write its own parser any more, making it simpler and reducing the possible number of bugs in the system (if all daemons shared a common configuration file parser).
Finally, by using XSLT stylesheets, it's very easy to transform XML files between different formats - giving you a relatively simple upgrade procedure when a daemon changes its configuration file format, and giving you a relatively simple way to convert configuration files between daemons - from postfix to sendmail, say. Think I'm blowing smoke? I already have all of my system data centralized in one XML file from which I generate the various daemon's configuration files. I think this is probably going to be the way this unfolds - userland tools will arise that use XML files to generate the collection of oddities that is the /etc filesystem.
I really don't understand the Linux community's perceived resistance to XML. I think it's because Microsoft was an active participant in the development process, and because many of the early implementations of the XML tools were written in Java. I really wish that attitude would change, because XML is an important standard for taking UNIX to the next level. One of the things that made UNIX great was the proliferation of small command line tools that cooperated by passing ASCII streams around. Imagine how much more powerful that paradigm could be if you they passed trees around!
For those of you jonesing for a decent browser for Linux and are tired of watching mozilla continue to twitch, I strongly urge you to install KDE2 (comes with Mandrake-7.2) and give konqueror a whirl.
I had been skeptical, but I'm now a believer. Konqueror rocks! It's got it all - fast HTML rendering, javascript support, java applet support, even DHTML (although most sites are designed for broken implementations so don't expect much here). The form widgets put Netscape's to shame.
For us privacy freaks, the cookie selector lets you configure cookie policies on a per-cookie or per-domain basis. You can also selectively enable or disable java or javascript on a per-domain basis.
And the best part? I haven't made it crash even once yet. I started it last week to give it a whirl - and it's been my default browser ever since. And I don't even use KDE - I'm a blackbox man! Konqueror is the bomb. It is my new best friend.
There is several reasons why english spread so much, but I think one is really important. You can learn just 3000 words to be able to fully express yourself in most cases. Basic english is something that really helps this language to spread. When you count into it kind of easy grammar...
if your assertion is correct, i wonder if it would be useful at all for someone to develop a formal basic english language subset so that native english speakers could explicitly restrict themselves to that subset when communicating to an international community - like an international open source project developers' mailing list. probably unnecessary, but perhaps useful as a stepping stone for a guided evolution towards a common global language.
The basic problem is that information vital to the use of the file is not stored in the data that you get with read()/write(). This makes it impossible to cleanly store this data on another system or to transfer it. Yes, you can "encode" (or "binhex") it, but if you do that, why not just store the encoded version on the disk, and remove a large and complex mess from the OS?
So you add new system calls - read_creator(), or read_meta("creator"). what's the big deal with that? applications which don't know about those system calls blithely ignore the meta information.
I've looked at many lists of banned and challenged books, and the bible doesn't even appear in the top fifty. My references include:
Can you back up your assertion?