If you call the 18004myxbox number, they'll tell you that you should never put your xbox on the carpet.
If the problem is caused by people not reading the directions, then its not microsoft's fault
I call bullshit. People use game consoles sitting in front of their TV, a place that in the vast majority of cases is carpeted. If a consumer product can't be used for it's intended purpose in the way the ordinary person is likely to use it, it's defective.
If we were talking about a DVD player or PVR, your argument might have some merit. For a game console, I don't think so. A game console that doesn't work while sitting on the carpet is like a toaster that doesn't work while sitting on the kitchen counter.
Learning to build with lego is like learning to program -- you have to start by copying someone else's design in order to learn how to put the pieces together to make what you want.
A lego plan is valuable in the same way that "hello, world" is valuable -- it teaches you a technique that you can apply to your own designs.
Lego has been supporting it's business through the (mis)use of IP law. Their original patent on interlocking blocks expired (IIRC) in 1988. Since then, they've been using tradmark / trade dress law to bully the manufacturers of competing/compatible block systems. A court in Canada just handed down a ruling against Lego in favor of Megablocks, saying that the shape of the blocks is purely functional and is therefore not protected under trademark law. There have been similar rulings in other countries.
Lego's problem is that their corporate culture is accustomed to being a monopoly, and have not been able to make the transition to a free market. Add to this some craptastic business decisions -- spending tens of millions on licensing fees for movie tie-ins (Harry Potter and Spiderman, for instance -- and you've got a severely dysfunctional company.
You can make the best product in the world, but if you mismanage the company, it will lose money.
Not everyone who choses comp sci or some other "geeky" degree is automatically a geek. A lot of people are just in it for the money. If you look at the graph in the one linked article, there are two spikes -- the first one starting in the late 70's and early 80's and peaking in 83-84, which corresponds with the rise and fall of the 8-bit personal computer era; and the second one centered around the internet bubble.
When computers were percieved as being a cool and/or profitable career in mainstream culture, a lot of people gravitated for it for the status and/or the money, not because they were computer geeks. When the bubble bursts and computers fall out of the spotlight, the trend-followers leave for greener pastures.
Well, considering how buggy I found RC2 to be, it's good to find out ASAP when there's a new version available.
Your browser is an important tool, probably one of the most used pieces of software on your system. Keeping it up to date is important to a lot of people. Furthermore, Firefox is one of the most widely-used and visible open-source projects.
If we were talking about something like xmms, a new release would be a far less significant event.
Can you give me _ONE_ real example of how _YOUR_ rights have been violated here in the USA?
I live in Maryland (which doesn't issue carry permits unless you're politically connected), so my right to bear arms is violated on a daily basis.
Thanks to the USA-PATRIOT act, I might be one of the 30,000+ US citizens with no links to terrorism who was a subject of a national security letter. I'll never know, because of the gag order that accompanies them. My (9th amendment) right to know, as previously guaranteed by the FOIA act and other laws, has been nullified.
My right to petition the government for grievances and to peaceably assemble is violated every time I'm herded into a "free speech zone".
My right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures disappears the moment I get in to a motor vehicle, whether I'm driving it or not.
My property can be taken without just compensation any time the government feels that someone else would pay more tax if they had it instead of me.
That's just what I can think of at 11:30 at night after a couple of stiff drinks. I'm sure I can come up with some more.
When you "borrow" a car without permission, you are denying the rightful owner of that car the ability to use it, for whatever duration you have it. Only one person can control a physical item.
When you MAKE A COPY of something THE OWNER STILL HAS CONTROL OF THE ORIGINAL. Therefore, copying is not and cannot ever be theft.
The notion that making a copy of a song is "stealing" is as asinine as the superstition that having a picture taken "steals" your soul.
[RMS] has stated in the past that Free is more important than Good.
Which demonstrates that he's an ideagogue, not an engineer. This kind of rabid, single-minded outlook is something I'd expect to be coming from a right-wing radio talk show host.
The best way to make free software the norm is to make free alternatives to propriatary applications that are as good as, or better than, the products they are replacing. People use software because they want to get something accomplished, not to promote an ideology. If a propriatary tool does the job better, a smart person is going to choose it over the free alternative.
Good always trumps free.
When RAID was first deployed, the I was originally "inexpensive". "Inexpensive" in this context meaning "cheaper than the $100,000 washing machine sized disks you have now". Think old-school VAXen and PDP-11s.
"Inexpensive" transformed to "independent" when the industry moved away from big iron to modern server hardware using commodity SCSI disks.
I've been using gallery for a while to manage my family photo album. For a vanity site like mine, it's massive overkill; and from what I've seen, it really doesn't scale very well on the high end.
This past weekend I cranked out a 66 line bash script that reproduces about 90% of the functionality from Gallery that I actually use. If I really feel I need the other 10% I'll do a little more hacking.
... trolls like yours, where you use the pretense of defending the conversation to subvert it instead. Well done.
As long as we're in pedantic language nazi mode, I'll point out that my response was a flame, not a troll. Pot, meet kettle.
My post was two sentences. You're trying to start a completely worthless flamefest.
Replying to your troll is STARTING a flamefest? I think you need a refresher in cause and effect. For someone who claims to "promote critical thinking" you certainly seem to have a weak grasp of logic and a fondness for ad hominim attacks.
I don't feel the need to show everyone how smart I am or abuse others to feel superior
Right, you just abuse others to "improve future conversations" and "promote critical thinking". <sarcasm>I bow down before your superior intellect and noble motives</sarcasm>
If "improving future conversations" is that important to you, why not do something useful and submit a spell-checking patch to slashcode? Oh, I know -- because that would require more work than being a pompous self-righteous ass.
Oh, I see you made me a "foe". How mature. That really showed me! I guess that will teach me to abase myself before the next jackass who points out a trivial spelling error in one of my posts.
I'm done feeding you, Troll. You can crawl back under your bridge now.
how bout apache's gump project?.. how come that's not called gump.com
Is gump a registered trademark of a for-profit company? Don't think so. It might be appropriate for them scoop up gump.org if it's available, but since there isn't really any money that would be lost by not doing so, there's no need.
Not registering the domains associated with your trademarks in the internet age is gross misconduct and a failure of due diligence on part of the management. If I was a shareholder in a company that was marketing 'frobnitz(tm)', and they didn't register (or buy) the appropriate domains, I'd be talking to my lawyer about a shareholder lawsuit.
According to whois, Google registered the gmail.com domain on August 13, 1995. They had almost 9 years to dispute ownership of the name before Google's gmail service launched.
If these folks had 'gmail' as a legitimate trademark for an actual product or service (not vaporware), why then did they not register the domain names for their alleged trademark? Registering "gmail" in every top-level domain for 10 years would have cost them less than $1000. If they actually had a legitimate business plan to launch a "gmail" service, securing the domains would have been the FIRST thing they would have done. Failing to register the domains, while trademarking a non-existant "service" smells of submarine tactics and demonstrates bad faith. Their failure to secure thier trademark by registering the domains also demonstrates criminal negligence on their part and is grounds for a shareholder lawsuit.
Dollars to doughnuts says their business plan was "wait until someone with money grabs the gmail domains and does something with them, then sue them for everything we can get"
Spelling/Grammar trolls are off-topic and do nothing to improve the discussion. If you have something relevant and on-topic to contribute to the discussion, we would all like to hear it. If you don't, STFU.
If you want to show everyone how smart you are, a more effective way of doing so is to post an insightful, thought-provoking response. Pedantically correcting minor spelling and grammar mistakes in an online forum does not demonstrate your intelligence; at best it is seen as pathetic attention whoring, at worst you're putting yourself on the same level as the juvenile trolls who post hot grits jokes and penis bird pictures.
No, it comes down to "build a fault-tolerant design that has graceful and predictable failure modes".
You are never going to prevent all failures. Every engineering discipline except software engineering has learned this lesson. Warplanes have redundant systems and ejection seats, ships have multiple watertight compartments and lifeboats, nuclear power plants have containment vessels and scram switches, and so on. The common theme here is containment and mitigation of failures, not the prevention of them.
Postfix was designed so that failures are compartmentalized. No one ever said it was immune from failure -- just that the damage from an eventual failure would be contained.
The article you cite shows a bug which allowed a LOCAL USER to delete other people's mail. While this is indeed a flaw, the damage is completely contained to the mail system -- it is not remotely exploitable, does not allow privilige escalation, does not compromise root, and is trivially solved by not granting users shell accounts on the mail server.
Compare this bug to the numerous Sendmail bugs which allowed a REMOTE user to gain ROOT priviliges on the box. There is a HUGE difference in severity between a limited local denial of service attack and a remote root exploit.
Congradulations on proving the point you were trying to refute.
On the other hand, TFA seems to be saying that you shouldn't write flawed software. That's pretty much impossible when working on a large project.
I disagree. It is possible to write secure software -- TFA uses postfix as an example of a program that was designed from the outset to be secure. It's entirely a matter of mindset and discipline. If you approach a programming project with the attitude that you and your programmers are fallable and will write flawed code, and design your system from the outset to contain the damage that will result WHEN (not IF) a component fails, you will write good reliable secure software.
A good example this is Google. Google's system was designed to work on dirt-cheap commidity hardware with little to no redundancy at the server level. Having a box die is a routine event; they actually EXPECT a given number of boxes to die on any given day. The entire architecture is designed around the premise that any box can fail at any time, so it is designed so that the overall system will keep on working even after multiple failures.
The problem is that most pointy-haired bosses are not willing to invest in the up-front engineering expenses it takes to come up with a secure design -- they want to get something that solves the immediate problem done in the least amount of time for the least amount of money, and then refine it over time. In other words, they want you to hurry up and pinch off a turd, and then spend the next 10 years polishing it.
Programmers are not without blame either. Programmers are generally natural optimists -- they have a natural tendancy to assume that their code will work perfectly, even after years of experience have demonstrated that this is not true. It takes a constant, concious effort to remind yourself that your code WILL fail at some point. It takes discipline to consistantly design systems that will compensate for your human limitations. Unfortunately, most managers tend to encourage programmers' optimisim rather than forcing them to take a more pessimistic approach.
I can't remember specifics, but there have been a number of software vendors who've gotten burned by shipping a virus with their product over the years, going back to the early 90's.
This tradition is actually an anachronism from the bad old days when women were viewed as property.
The engagement ring was a "security deposit" of sorts, designed to compensate the bride (or more accurately, her father) in case the groom broke off the engagement. Remember at this time, marriages were most often arranged between families for political and/or financial reasons rather than for love. It was a contract, and the ring was a bond to ensure the contract was carried out.
My wife didn't want a diamond ring when we got engaged or married -- just a simple gold band. She thought it was a better idea to save that money for a down payment on a house.
You've got to love a woman who's smart enough not to be influenced by pretty baubles.
Slashdot Mirror
If we were talking about a DVD player or PVR, your argument might have some merit. For a game console, I don't think so. A game console that doesn't work while sitting on the carpet is like a toaster that doesn't work while sitting on the kitchen counter.
A lego plan is valuable in the same way that "hello, world" is valuable -- it teaches you a technique that you can apply to your own designs.
Lego's problem is that their corporate culture is accustomed to being a monopoly, and have not been able to make the transition to a free market. Add to this some craptastic business decisions -- spending tens of millions on licensing fees for movie tie-ins (Harry Potter and Spiderman, for instance -- and you've got a severely dysfunctional company.
You can make the best product in the world, but if you mismanage the company, it will lose money.
Not everyone who choses comp sci or some other "geeky" degree is automatically a geek. A lot of people are just in it for the money. If you look at the graph in the one linked article, there are two spikes -- the first one starting in the late 70's and early 80's and peaking in 83-84, which corresponds with the rise and fall of the 8-bit personal computer era; and the second one centered around the internet bubble. When computers were percieved as being a cool and/or profitable career in mainstream culture, a lot of people gravitated for it for the status and/or the money, not because they were computer geeks. When the bubble bursts and computers fall out of the spotlight, the trend-followers leave for greener pastures.
Well, considering how buggy I found RC2 to be, it's good to find out ASAP when there's a new version available. Your browser is an important tool, probably one of the most used pieces of software on your system. Keeping it up to date is important to a lot of people. Furthermore, Firefox is one of the most widely-used and visible open-source projects. If we were talking about something like xmms, a new release would be a far less significant event.
Thanks to the USA-PATRIOT act, I might be one of the 30,000+ US citizens with no links to terrorism who was a subject of a national security letter. I'll never know, because of the gag order that accompanies them. My (9th amendment) right to know, as previously guaranteed by the FOIA act and other laws, has been nullified.
My right to petition the government for grievances and to peaceably assemble is violated every time I'm herded into a "free speech zone".
My right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures disappears the moment I get in to a motor vehicle, whether I'm driving it or not.
My property can be taken without just compensation any time the government feels that someone else would pay more tax if they had it instead of me.
That's just what I can think of at 11:30 at night after a couple of stiff drinks. I'm sure I can come up with some more.
Link to Sybase SQL Anywhere Developer Edition
When you "borrow" a car without permission, you are denying the rightful owner of that car the ability to use it, for whatever duration you have it. Only one person can control a physical item.
When you MAKE A COPY of something THE OWNER STILL HAS CONTROL OF THE ORIGINAL. Therefore, copying is not and cannot ever be theft.
The notion that making a copy of a song is "stealing" is as asinine as the superstition that having a picture taken "steals" your soul.
Did anyone else notice that the names of the characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer almost all had a HUGE spike in popularity in the last decade?
When RAID was first deployed, the I was originally "inexpensive". "Inexpensive" in this context meaning "cheaper than the $100,000 washing machine sized disks you have now". Think old-school VAXen and PDP-11s. "Inexpensive" transformed to "independent" when the industry moved away from big iron to modern server hardware using commodity SCSI disks.
This past weekend I cranked out a 66 line bash script that reproduces about 90% of the functionality from Gallery that I actually use. If I really feel I need the other 10% I'll do a little more hacking.
If "improving future conversations" is that important to you, why not do something useful and submit a spell-checking patch to slashcode? Oh, I know -- because that would require more work than being a pompous self-righteous ass.
Oh, I see you made me a "foe". How mature. That really showed me! I guess that will teach me to abase myself before the next jackass who points out a trivial spelling error in one of my posts.
I'm done feeding you, Troll. You can crawl back under your bridge now.
According to whois, Google registered the gmail.com domain on August 13, 1995. They had almost 9 years to dispute ownership of the name before Google's gmail service launched.
If these folks had 'gmail' as a legitimate trademark for an actual product or service (not vaporware), why then did they not register the domain names for their alleged trademark? Registering "gmail" in every top-level domain for 10 years would have cost them less than $1000. If they actually had a legitimate business plan to launch a "gmail" service, securing the domains would have been the FIRST thing they would have done. Failing to register the domains, while trademarking a non-existant "service" smells of submarine tactics and demonstrates bad faith. Their failure to secure thier trademark by registering the domains also demonstrates criminal negligence on their part and is grounds for a shareholder lawsuit. Dollars to doughnuts says their business plan was "wait until someone with money grabs the gmail domains and does something with them, then sue them for everything we can get"
Spelling/Grammar trolls are off-topic and do nothing to improve the discussion. If you have something relevant and on-topic to contribute to the discussion, we would all like to hear it. If you don't, STFU. If you want to show everyone how smart you are, a more effective way of doing so is to post an insightful, thought-provoking response. Pedantically correcting minor spelling and grammar mistakes in an online forum does not demonstrate your intelligence; at best it is seen as pathetic attention whoring, at worst you're putting yourself on the same level as the juvenile trolls who post hot grits jokes and penis bird pictures.
How do you spell the phrase "pedantic anal-retentive twit"?
Postfix was designed so that failures are compartmentalized. No one ever said it was immune from failure -- just that the damage from an eventual failure would be contained.
The article you cite shows a bug which allowed a LOCAL USER to delete other people's mail. While this is indeed a flaw, the damage is completely contained to the mail system -- it is not remotely exploitable, does not allow privilige escalation, does not compromise root, and is trivially solved by not granting users shell accounts on the mail server.
Compare this bug to the numerous Sendmail bugs which allowed a REMOTE user to gain ROOT priviliges on the box. There is a HUGE difference in severity between a limited local denial of service attack and a remote root exploit.
Congradulations on proving the point you were trying to refute.
I can't remember specifics, but there have been a number of software vendors who've gotten burned by shipping a virus with their product over the years, going back to the early 90's.
My wife didn't want a diamond ring when we got engaged or married -- just a simple gold band. She thought it was a better idea to save that money for a down payment on a house. You've got to love a woman who's smart enough not to be influenced by pretty baubles.