Re:Why take a shot a Shakespeare?
on
Fahrenheit 451
·
· Score: 1
Personally, I think Shakespeare was a great author for his time. Still, I think people put too much stock in his writing just because of his reputation.
A different approach: I tend to feel that the importance of Shakespeare is less in the quality of the writing per se, but rather in the cultural influence his writing has had (a feedback thing inasmuch as lots of people have to read Shakespeare because he's influential...loop).
In effect, whether consciously or not, we are all conditioned by Shakespeare's writings - society has placed a compiled binary of his works into our heads. I tend to feel that in this situation, there's a lot to be said for at least a passing familiarity with the source code. The idiom is littered with phrases from Shakespeare, often so deeply ingrained that we don't recognise them for what they are. So when we use phrases like 'a winter of discontent', or 'once more unto the breach' or 'dogs of war' or 'slings and arrows', we may be unaware of the original context and semantics. And our 'civilisation' is built on this stuff. Even if he was a totally awful writer, if his works were as pervasive as they are, I'd still want to see everyone reading them
My point is that there's been an ongoing technological battle between those who want their privacy and those who want to breach their privacy
On the other hand, the rate of progress in breaching privacy is exploding like everything else.
150 years ago, if you wanted to be absolutely certain a conversation was secure, all you haed to do was go out to the middle of a big field, check there was nobody within earshot, and whisper.
Is there any similarly effective means of achieving privacy currently available at negligible cost?
There is no such corporation as the RIAA. Of the widest mis-conceptions of the music industry heard on slashdot, it is perhaps most clueless to talk about RIAA as a corporation. It makes just as much sense to say that the SPAA has a monopoly on software. The RIAA represents some of the members who are large record companies. OK - maybe they are a monopoly in representation
Oh I do so hate inaccurate terminology. You're quite right, RIAA isn't a monopoly. The correct word is Cartel.
Not that I'm taking sides here, mind, just doing a bit of language checking.
According to this story there were problems with the software on the Jubilee Line extension.
"It was called Moving Block Signaling
Oh there were certainly problems, especially with the MBP (Moving Block Processor). It was a truly great idea, no question. Idea was, roughly, that since the dawn of railways, signalling has been on the 'Fixed Block' system - divide the railway into chunks, and only allow one train per chunk. MBP idea is that if the trains have a map of the system, and monitor their own speed, and the condition of their brakes, and the diameters of their wheels to the nearest 10oth of a millimeter, and a whole bunch more data, plus information about the other trains on the network, then the MBP can work out the safe braking distance (LMA, Limit of Movement Authority, including several extra metres for safety), the upshot being that you can then cram a lot more trains per mile of track, driving themselves more safely than humans ever could.
The old system would allow up to 12 trains per hour, MBP could potentially do 36, if you could get people on and off the trains fast enough.
The project went so far over budget the whole firm looked like going tits up, and after losing 25 million pounds on this project alone, it was all rather scaled down.
But to be honest, what really blew up everyone's plans was that, when the project started, it was meant to be delivered for 2003. Then the Major Government decided to have the Millenium Dome and furthermore decided that the Jubilee Line Extension would be the preferred (i.e. the only convenient) way of getting there. Bingo - the project delivery date suddenly moved forward by three years with no possibility of compromise. Now by early 1999, we'd run simulator tests - first two fake trains, then a real train and a sim, and were about due to get to the Two-Real-Trains test. However, at this point, a) London Underground needed pretty much constant access to the tracks, and b) we still needed to get our Safety Case. That could easily take another year.
So yes, they got Colour Light Signals (which apart from the MBP benefits described above also means you need to think about stuff like braking distances vs Line-Of-Sight).
The trains have most of the equipment, Automatic Train Operation, Automatic Train Protection, the Common Logical Environment (Effectively and Operating System for railways), and once MBP's finished it could be fairly easily retrofitted. It's still being developed for the Madrid Metro.
Basically, if our client (London Underground) hadn't had their timescales rewritten for them by the Govt, I believe we would have delivered the most advanced railway in the world, and the repeat business would have made not millions but billions.
Shame, really. A Lot of very good people did a lot of very good work on MBP.
I worked on some mission-critical/life-critical stuff about 2 years ago. It was aircraft related, [...] The processes we followed was absolutely document driven.
Likewise, i worked for a while on the signalling system for the Jubilee Line Extension for the London Underground.
Totally documentation driven. First there was the CRS (Customer Requirements Spec). - this then transformed via an SRS (Systems Requirement Spec.) into the FRS (Functional...) and the NFRS (Non-functional...). From these we had Software Design specs, Module Design Specs, Object Design Specs, Boundary Layer Design specs. in all there were around 4000 specification documents for the project, often at issue numbers well into the teens.
What really made the difference though, was not so much the existence of documentation, as the absolute insistence on traceability - every memeber function of every class in the whole system could be traced back to the Customer Requirement Spec, and every Requirement could be traced to its implementation. This meant - no chrome: everything in the spec was p[rovided, and nothing was provided that wasn't in the spec.
Also worth noting that: the whole thing was in ADA95. The compiler was very carefully chosen. Coding standards were tight, and tightly enforced - function point analysis was king - anything with more that 7 function points was OUT, simple as that. Every change to anything, however small, required an inspection meeting before and after implementation, with specialits from every part of the system which could be impacted, plus one of the two people with a general overview. Then there were the two independent test teams and the validation team.
Ye Gods it got tedious, no denying that. But in a situation where lives depended on good software...
Now I probably apply only a tiny fraction of what I learned, but when I decide to ignore part of the methodology, at least I know I'm ignoring it. And I'm aware of what I'm missing.
In short - learn about the safety-critical approach. Ditch most of it as excess baggage by all means - it's often simply not justifiable. But be aware of the choices you're making.
Yet none of you MS defenders has yet to come up with a good functional motivation for allowing email clients to execute random code. It's not at all clear that this EVER really benefited the 'gimme gimme' type of consumer.
OK, I'll bite
The reason is that Outlook doesn't execute random code. The only code that can execute within Outlook is embedded script-in-HTML. Which runs on a sandbox. The ILOVEYOU and Melissa malwares were both run by some external host, respectively the Windows Script Host and MS Word.
Maybe the MS-defenders, as you call them, didn't come up with 'a good functional motivation' for this feature simply because it does not exist and has never existed.
While we're at it, is there any 'good functional motivation' for that thing in Pine where issuing a Send command causes the Kariba Dam to overflow, drowning thousands of people? No. Maybe that's why there's no such feature.
Every groundless criticism like this merely devalues our overall message. We'll never persuade anyone when our real message is wrapped up in easily disproved allegations. Fight the fight with real, sharp weapons, not chocolate broadswords
True, the Germans may have invaded in 1941, but this was after STALIN butchered his own officer corps in a fit of murderous paranoia.
Also true, under the 1918 treaty of Brest-Litovsk the western powers deprived Russia of a third of its farmland, half its industry, 60 million of its poulation. To further annoy the Russians, the US, Britain, France and Japan sent over 100,000 troops to assist the 'White Army' in the Russian Civil War 1918 - 1921.
Perhaps the Russians' long-standing 'paranoia' about external intervention has just a smidgin of basis in history?
that has to be the silliest thing I've read in a while
I'm sure you've read sillier. Nobody's excusing the national socialist regime, but it's fair to say that the Versailles Treaty was in itself probably the paramount cause of the Second World War.
One of the major problems was that the treaty was never properly negotiated. The German government of the day agreed to an Armistice ('ceasefire') but by the time the treaty was up for negotiation, the Social Democratic revolution in Germany (led by Rosa Luxembourg) had led to the Kaiser's abdication, and there were no effective German negotiators at Versailles. The revolution fell within a year, after amputating the existing power structure of Kaiser, Junkers military families and assorted princelings and barons, but in the meantime the French, in particular, made sure that the Treaty's terms were basically a license to gouge the German economy. The Reparations far exceeded the costs of the War, and were more akin to Punitive Damages than proper Reparation.
Furthermore, at various times between the two wars, the French either insisted that the terms be tightened, or refused to allow any lightening of the burden. This was despite frequent efforts by the other victorious Allies to persuade them to show some magnanimity.
Effectively, Versailles handed the entire German economy to France for an indefinite period. Thus even though the Weimar Republic was at first a paragon of culture and good national behaviour, the German people's good behaviour was not rewarded, but rather was met with ever harsher demands. The harder the germans worked, both industrially and morally, the more they were punished. In these circumstances, their subsequent behavious is perhaps less surprising.
Given what happened to my family, it's a bit odd that I should be defending this, but it's pretty much indisputable that the Germans were gouged by the Versailles Treaty out of all proportion to what their former Kaiser had done.
I would suggest that the pivotal factor is payment for the original, unfinished work.
If the original contractor was paid for the time they spent and the incomplete work they did, then it presumably becomes the property of the Ad Agency
Now if as a result of the contractors' inability to do the job, they weren't paid, or payment is still in dispute, then it seems quite possible that their work remains their own.
If this weren't the case then all a client needs to do to get free code is to fire the contractors just before delivery.
What is this obsession with testing heavily obsolete versions for these exploits. I was under the impression that one of the major benefits of OSS is the rapid availability of, and ease of implementing, patches.
And yet this principle seems to be rarely applied to other (non-OSS) s/w. In this case we're looking at a version of NT4 (still the main NT, really, W2k notwithstanding) at SP3 when SP6 has been out for months, running IE4 when IE5 is a year old now.
MS do not charge for patches or SP's. They run a variety of alerting services from www.microsoft.com, and while they don't always patch everything as fast as they should, they do inform you as soon as the patches are out, IF you can be bothered to subscribe to the alerts.
That's because you installed the Outlook fix after the Melissa virus came out. You do NOT have a default install of Outlook
This is not relevant to anything. If you built Slackware when it first appeared, and never installed any patches since then, then 1 - you have a 'default install of Slackware', and 2 - you've got more vulnerabilites than you've had hot dinners.
Failure to patch is not a failure of a given OS, it's a PEBCAK.
Go to www.microsoft.com, click on Subscribe from the blue bar near the top, and subscribe to the alerting services.
MS is far from perfect, but failure to automagically patch exploits that don't yet exist is not a valid line of attack against anyone
I'm 100% certain that when i say this, i am saying it for all of Slashdot's readers
Sharp pin + balloon = 'Pop!'
This is going to be modded Redundant, and fair enough, but...
Please don't say it on behalf of this Slashdot reader. Microsoft's letter appears to be a single threat based on several issues. I entirely endorse the comments above about linking being fair use. I furthermore endorse the comments about use of properly referenced snippets being fair use (My degree was in Librarianship [yes, i know...] so I do have some grasp of fair use issues).
But regardless of DMCA, copying large uncredited chunks or the complete body of a copyrighted work is a breach of long-established copyright laws recognised both by the US government and many others. As someone said, it's exactly like posting the whole of that Stephen King e-book.
Basically, don't present yourself as a spokesperson for others without their consent.
If you steal your neighbor's cow in such a way that he starts with a herd of 50 cows, and you steal one, and he still somehow has 50 cows, then maybe you'd have an analogy.
This only works if your neighbour relies on his cows only for meat, labour, milk, leather and so on. If your neighbour wants to sell his cows, then a valid analogy would be 'if you steal your neighbour's cow in such a way that he starts with a herd of 50 cows worth 500$ each, and you steal one, copy it somehow and flood the market with millions of really cheap cows, thus bringing down the value of the 50 cows he's still got to 10$ for the whole herd...'.
You haven't removed any of his cows, but you have devalued them to the point where he can't even feed them economically. At which point he gets out of farming and moves into software like the rest of us did.
the enviroment is cleaner than it has been in 50 years
50 years is the merest blink of an eye. What I was referring to is the cleanup operation which will continue for generations. It can take more than 50 years for a landfill site to reach the water table. Once that happens, the water supply in the region could be contaminated for centuries.
We've been industrialising since the late 1700's. The environment is considerably filthier than it was 250 years ago.
In the words of John Maynard Keynes, "in the long term, you and I are both dead". THAT's the long term. TomV
It only works on a select few e-mail programs for Windows
Because the author chose to use CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
S/he could just as easilyy have chosen CreatObject("Eudora.Application") for example, and then we'd be screaming about Qualcomm's lax security. S/he could have had it rewrite Netscape.ini rather than IE's registry entries to alter the Start Page. The file destruction could just as easily have been achieved with a.bat file. The whole thing could have been written in C. The designer made certain choices which affected the outcome.
Please explain why non-Outlook users weren't as badly effected,
Mainly because the author chose CreateObject("Outlook.Application") instead of, for example, CreateObject("Eudora.Application")
Is it really a FAULT of MS if they document their interfaces better than their rivals?
Equally, the part that loaded the.exe could just as easily have been written into netscape.ini rather than the IE start page entry in the registry.
The security model in Win9x is at fault, yes, but Outlook itself is a red herring. Just as the whole.vbs was mostly a red herring to distract from the.exe
On the other hand, what are the benefits to all this scripting stuff being in the mail client?
And yes. We're talking about the mail client. Not the whole OS.
Will people please pay attention? Yes there is scripting in the mail client. No the ILOVEYOU script is NOT hosted by the client. It's hosted by wscript.exe. It's a shell script. Just like all those grown-up OS's have. And what's more if the client has been kept up to date and competently patched, it's not even possible to open an executable attachment from inside it.
When there are so many valid lines of attack, don't waste time on FUD.
I know if it were a tosss up between hugging a tree, and making some money I'd choose the money everytime.
as a temporary tenant of this planet, you are in no position to make decisions like this which will affect your children and mine for generations. It's a toss up between making some quick cash now and letting our descendants pick up the cleaning and repair bills, or showing some common courtesy, decency and consideration for your fellow people (yeah, other species too but i don't think you want to listen to that).
For example, I can open a nuclear power station, get electricity with very few chemical discharges, great. Except that my descendants will be paying for security, cleanup and processing of waste and decommissioning costs to the tune of many thousands of times what i've paid for, or gained from, my lovverly nuclear power station.
I don't know about you, but I'd like my descendants to be able to enjoy their income on a beautiful, green, clean planet, not spending every penny on a futile attempt to keep the filth of their ancestors under control.
the whole problem with Windows is that it needs to have its source code thrown out and started again from scratch; there's more dead wood in there than living after all these years of feature creep.
You're right, of course. And that's why Windows 2000 is 25 million or so lines of brand new code.
Which makes for a lot of bugs at first, of course, but believe me the legacy's gone (in terms of code, not functionality of course)
VBS and fully executable email attachments were just a problem waiting to happen. The problem is that the allmighty MSFT didn't even consider any attempt to enhance the security here.
Apart, perhaps, from issuing patches to prevent this very problem, under Outlook 97 issued May 99, 98 issued July 99 and 2000 issued Nov 99.
Don't blame the vendor for negligence if you can't be bothered to look for the patches, or subscribe to one of the alerting services they run. How secure is an unpatched slackware 1?
Many people in Hong Kong end up millionaires. Why? Because they aren't taxed to death
Don't believe the Hong Kong Low tax fallacy. Yes direct taxes are extremely low, BUT...
There is no private ownership of land in Hong Kong - the HK Government owns every square inch of it and charges rent and rates at sky high levels. As a proportion of income, it's a much higher take than most European countries or the US. It's just the direct tax rates that look good.
Slashdot Mirror
A different approach: I tend to feel that the importance of Shakespeare is less in the quality of the writing per se, but rather in the cultural influence his writing has had (a feedback thing inasmuch as lots of people have to read Shakespeare because he's influential...loop).
In effect, whether consciously or not, we are all conditioned by Shakespeare's writings - society has placed a compiled binary of his works into our heads. I tend to feel that in this situation, there's a lot to be said for at least a passing familiarity with the source code. The idiom is littered with phrases from Shakespeare, often so deeply ingrained that we don't recognise them for what they are. So when we use phrases like 'a winter of discontent', or 'once more unto the breach' or 'dogs of war' or 'slings and arrows', we may be unaware of the original context and semantics. And our 'civilisation' is built on this stuff. Even if he was a totally awful writer, if his works were as pervasive as they are, I'd still want to see everyone reading them
TomV
On the other hand, the rate of progress in breaching privacy is exploding like everything else.
150 years ago, if you wanted to be absolutely certain a conversation was secure, all you haed to do was go out to the middle of a big field, check there was nobody within earshot, and whisper.
Is there any similarly effective means of achieving privacy currently available at negligible cost?
TomV
Oh I do so hate inaccurate terminology. You're quite right, RIAA isn't a monopoly. The correct word is Cartel.
Not that I'm taking sides here, mind, just doing a bit of language checking.
TomV
in the time-honoured wording...
'you misspelt "people were stealing from Uncle Bobby like mad long before Phish ever gave people their permission to record and distribute concerts"'
Category error, not the same deal at all
TomV
"It was called Moving Block Signaling
Oh there were certainly problems, especially with the MBP (Moving Block Processor). It was a truly great idea, no question. Idea was, roughly, that since the dawn of railways, signalling has been on the 'Fixed Block' system - divide the railway into chunks, and only allow one train per chunk. MBP idea is that if the trains have a map of the system, and monitor their own speed, and the condition of their brakes, and the diameters of their wheels to the nearest 10oth of a millimeter, and a whole bunch more data, plus information about the other trains on the network, then the MBP can work out the safe braking distance (LMA, Limit of Movement Authority, including several extra metres for safety), the upshot being that you can then cram a lot more trains per mile of track, driving themselves more safely than humans ever could.
The old system would allow up to 12 trains per hour, MBP could potentially do 36, if you could get people on and off the trains fast enough.
The project went so far over budget the whole firm looked like going tits up, and after losing 25 million pounds on this project alone, it was all rather scaled down.
But to be honest, what really blew up everyone's plans was that, when the project started, it was meant to be delivered for 2003. Then the Major Government decided to have the Millenium Dome and furthermore decided that the Jubilee Line Extension would be the preferred (i.e. the only convenient) way of getting there. Bingo - the project delivery date suddenly moved forward by three years with no possibility of compromise. Now by early 1999, we'd run simulator tests - first two fake trains, then a real train and a sim, and were about due to get to the Two-Real-Trains test. However, at this point, a) London Underground needed pretty much constant access to the tracks, and b) we still needed to get our Safety Case. That could easily take another year.
So yes, they got Colour Light Signals (which apart from the MBP benefits described above also means you need to think about stuff like braking distances vs Line-Of-Sight).
The trains have most of the equipment, Automatic Train Operation, Automatic Train Protection, the Common Logical Environment (Effectively and Operating System for railways), and once MBP's finished it could be fairly easily retrofitted. It's still being developed for the Madrid Metro.
Basically, if our client (London Underground) hadn't had their timescales rewritten for them by the Govt, I believe we would have delivered the most advanced railway in the world, and the repeat business would have made not millions but billions.
Shame, really. A Lot of very good people did a lot of very good work on MBP.
TomV
Likewise, i worked for a while on the signalling system for the Jubilee Line Extension for the London Underground.
Totally documentation driven. First there was the CRS (Customer Requirements Spec). - this then transformed via an SRS (Systems Requirement Spec.) into the FRS (Functional...) and the NFRS (Non-functional...). From these we had Software Design specs, Module Design Specs, Object Design Specs, Boundary Layer Design specs. in all there were around 4000 specification documents for the project, often at issue numbers well into the teens.
What really made the difference though, was not so much the existence of documentation, as the absolute insistence on traceability - every memeber function of every class in the whole system could be traced back to the Customer Requirement Spec, and every Requirement could be traced to its implementation. This meant - no chrome: everything in the spec was p[rovided, and nothing was provided that wasn't in the spec.
Also worth noting that: the whole thing was in ADA95. The compiler was very carefully chosen. Coding standards were tight, and tightly enforced - function point analysis was king - anything with more that 7 function points was OUT, simple as that. Every change to anything, however small, required an inspection meeting before and after implementation, with specialits from every part of the system which could be impacted, plus one of the two people with a general overview. Then there were the two independent test teams and the validation team.
Ye Gods it got tedious, no denying that. But in a situation where lives depended on good software...
Now I probably apply only a tiny fraction of what I learned, but when I decide to ignore part of the methodology, at least I know I'm ignoring it. And I'm aware of what I'm missing.
In short - learn about the safety-critical approach. Ditch most of it as excess baggage by all means - it's often simply not justifiable. But be aware of the choices you're making.
TomV
OK, I'll bite
The reason is that Outlook doesn't execute random code. The only code that can execute within Outlook is embedded script-in-HTML. Which runs on a sandbox. The ILOVEYOU and Melissa malwares were both run by some external host, respectively the Windows Script Host and MS Word.
Maybe the MS-defenders, as you call them, didn't come up with 'a good functional motivation' for this feature simply because it does not exist and has never existed.
While we're at it, is there any 'good functional motivation' for that thing in Pine where issuing a Send command causes the Kariba Dam to overflow, drowning thousands of people? No. Maybe that's why there's no such feature.
Every groundless criticism like this merely devalues our overall message. We'll never persuade anyone when our real message is wrapped up in easily disproved allegations. Fight the fight with real, sharp weapons, not chocolate broadswords
TomV
Also true, under the 1918 treaty of Brest-Litovsk the western powers deprived Russia of a third of its farmland, half its industry, 60 million of its poulation. To further annoy the Russians, the US, Britain, France and Japan sent over 100,000 troops to assist the 'White Army' in the Russian Civil War 1918 - 1921.
Perhaps the Russians' long-standing 'paranoia' about external intervention has just a smidgin of basis in history?
TomV
I'm sure you've read sillier. Nobody's excusing the national socialist regime, but it's fair to say that the Versailles Treaty was in itself probably the paramount cause of the Second World War.
One of the major problems was that the treaty was never properly negotiated. The German government of the day agreed to an Armistice ('ceasefire') but by the time the treaty was up for negotiation, the Social Democratic revolution in Germany (led by Rosa Luxembourg) had led to the Kaiser's abdication, and there were no effective German negotiators at Versailles. The revolution fell within a year, after amputating the existing power structure of Kaiser, Junkers military families and assorted princelings and barons, but in the meantime the French, in particular, made sure that the Treaty's terms were basically a license to gouge the German economy. The Reparations far exceeded the costs of the War, and were more akin to Punitive Damages than proper Reparation.
Furthermore, at various times between the two wars, the French either insisted that the terms be tightened, or refused to allow any lightening of the burden. This was despite frequent efforts by the other victorious Allies to persuade them to show some magnanimity.
Effectively, Versailles handed the entire German economy to France for an indefinite period. Thus even though the Weimar Republic was at first a paragon of culture and good national behaviour, the German people's good behaviour was not rewarded, but rather was met with ever harsher demands. The harder the germans worked, both industrially and morally, the more they were punished. In these circumstances, their subsequent behavious is perhaps less surprising.
Given what happened to my family, it's a bit odd that I should be defending this, but it's pretty much indisputable that the Germans were gouged by the Versailles Treaty out of all proportion to what their former Kaiser had done.
TomV
To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, "the most obscene word in the english language is..... Nagasaki"
TomV
If the original contractor was paid for the time they spent and the incomplete work they did, then it presumably becomes the property of the Ad Agency
Now if as a result of the contractors' inability to do the job, they weren't paid, or payment is still in dispute, then it seems quite possible that their work remains their own.
If this weren't the case then all a client needs to do to get free code is to fire the contractors just before delivery.
TomV
What is this obsession with testing heavily obsolete versions for these exploits. I was under the impression that one of the major benefits of OSS is the rapid availability of, and ease of implementing, patches.
And yet this principle seems to be rarely applied to other (non-OSS) s/w. In this case we're looking at a version of NT4 (still the main NT, really, W2k notwithstanding) at SP3 when SP6 has been out for months, running IE4 when IE5 is a year old now.
MS do not charge for patches or SP's. They run a variety of alerting services from www.microsoft.com, and while they don't always patch everything as fast as they should, they do inform you as soon as the patches are out, IF you can be bothered to subscribe to the alerts.
Double Standards, basically.
TomV
This is not relevant to anything. If you built Slackware when it first appeared, and never installed any patches since then, then
1 - you have a 'default install of Slackware', and
2 - you've got more vulnerabilites than you've had hot dinners.
Failure to patch is not a failure of a given OS, it's a PEBCAK.
Go to www.microsoft.com, click on Subscribe from the blue bar near the top, and subscribe to the alerting services.
MS is far from perfect, but failure to automagically patch exploits that don't yet exist is not a valid line of attack against anyone
TomV
Sharp pin + balloon = 'Pop!'
This is going to be modded Redundant, and fair enough, but...
Please don't say it on behalf of this Slashdot reader. Microsoft's letter appears to be a single threat based on several issues. I entirely endorse the comments above about linking being fair use. I furthermore endorse the comments about use of properly referenced snippets being fair use (My degree was in Librarianship [yes, i know...] so I do have some grasp of fair use issues).
But regardless of DMCA, copying large uncredited chunks or the complete body of a copyrighted work is a breach of long-established copyright laws recognised both by the US government and many others. As someone said, it's exactly like posting the whole of that Stephen King e-book.
Basically, don't present yourself as a spokesperson for others without their consent.
TomV
This only works if your neighbour relies on his cows only for meat, labour, milk, leather and so on. If your neighbour wants to sell his cows, then a valid analogy would be 'if you steal your neighbour's cow in such a way that he starts with a herd of 50 cows worth 500$ each, and you steal one, copy it somehow and flood the market with millions of really cheap cows, thus bringing down the value of the 50 cows he's still got to 10$ for the whole herd...'.
You haven't removed any of his cows, but you have devalued them to the point where he can't even feed them economically. At which point he gets out of farming and moves into software like the rest of us did.
TomV
50 years is the merest blink of an eye. What I was referring to is the cleanup operation which will continue for generations. It can take more than 50 years for a landfill site to reach the water table. Once that happens, the water supply in the region could be contaminated for centuries.
We've been industrialising since the late 1700's. The environment is considerably filthier than it was 250 years ago.
In the words of John Maynard Keynes, "in the long term, you and I are both dead". THAT's the long term. TomV
Because the author chose to use CreateObject("Outlook.Application")
S/he could just as easilyy have chosen CreatObject("Eudora.Application") for example, and then we'd be screaming about Qualcomm's lax security. S/he could have had it rewrite Netscape.ini rather than IE's registry entries to alter the Start Page. The file destruction could just as easily have been achieved with a .bat file. The whole thing could have been written in C. The designer made certain choices which affected the outcome.
TomV
Mainly because the author chose CreateObject("Outlook.Application") instead of, for example, CreateObject("Eudora.Application")
Is it really a FAULT of MS if they document their interfaces better than their rivals?
Equally, the part that loaded the .exe could just as easily have been written into netscape.ini rather than the IE start page entry in the registry.
The security model in Win9x is at fault, yes, but Outlook itself is a red herring. Just as the whole .vbs was mostly a red herring to distract from the .exe
TomV
OL 97 May 99
OL 98 June 99
OL2k Nov 99
So who's at fault here?
TomV
And yes. We're talking about the mail client. Not the whole OS.
Will people please pay attention? Yes there is scripting in the mail client. No the ILOVEYOU script is NOT hosted by the client. It's hosted by wscript.exe. It's a shell script. Just like all those grown-up OS's have. And what's more if the client has been kept up to date and competently patched, it's not even possible to open an executable attachment from inside it.
When there are so many valid lines of attack, don't waste time on FUD.
TomV
as a temporary tenant of this planet, you are in no position to make decisions like this which will affect your children and mine for generations. It's a toss up between making some quick cash now and letting our descendants pick up the cleaning and repair bills, or showing some common courtesy, decency and consideration for your fellow people (yeah, other species too but i don't think you want to listen to that).
For example, I can open a nuclear power station, get electricity with very few chemical discharges, great. Except that my descendants will be paying for security, cleanup and processing of waste and decommissioning costs to the tune of many thousands of times what i've paid for, or gained from, my lovverly nuclear power station.
I don't know about you, but I'd like my descendants to be able to enjoy their income on a beautiful, green, clean planet, not spending every penny on a futile attempt to keep the filth of their ancestors under control.
TomV
You're right, of course. And that's why Windows 2000 is 25 million or so lines of brand new code.
Which makes for a lot of bugs at first, of course, but believe me the legacy's gone (in terms of code, not functionality of course)
TomV
Apart, perhaps, from issuing patches to prevent this very problem, under Outlook 97 issued May 99, 98 issued July 99 and 2000 issued Nov 99.
Don't blame the vendor for negligence if you can't be bothered to look for the patches, or subscribe to one of the alerting services they run. How secure is an unpatched slackware 1?
TomV
Don't believe the Hong Kong Low tax fallacy. Yes direct taxes are extremely low, BUT...
There is no private ownership of land in Hong Kong - the HK Government owns every square inch of it and charges rent and rates at sky high levels. As a proportion of income, it's a much higher take than most European countries or the US. It's just the direct tax rates that look good.
TomV
Let me get this straight. MS had a monopoly, which they exploited illegally, against the interests of the consumer.
That makes MS the villain, and Windows lusers the victims.
And you're proposing punishing the criminals' victims for the all-new offense of being victims?
OK, but next time you're robbed, defrauded, mugged or whatever, I reserve the right to see you rot in jail for it. NOT
Don't be so silly and childish
TomV