Everything in a Stratus was redundant. CPU, memory, disk drives, etc. They had unmatched reliability but at a cost. If memory serves, a redundant 600MB disk assembly cost on the order of US$20K (that was around 1991). Replacing a running CPU didn't mean downtime. You were still running on the other member of the redundant pair. And I expect that most of the Stratus systems had more than one redundant pair of CPUs. (The 680x0 CPUs were pretty good but weren't going to set any speed records.)
The VOS operating system would even detect when a terminal was going bad and alert field service. (I'd bet that their UNIX clone OS could do that as well.) More than once I had the field service rep walk up to my cubicle and want to know where so-and-so sat so he could replace their terminal or I'd get a phone call out of the blue to let me know that they'd been alerted about a terminal that was going to need replacement.
And that's just one vendor that could contest this. Heck if your looking for prior art, DEC had maintenance consoles on some of the larger PDP-11s that could be used by field service to service the system or run diagnostics remotely. I'm not sure if they had a ``phone home'' capability but I wouldn't be a bit surprised. (I have some of the old literature/manuals down in the basement but I wouldn't know which boxes to dig through anymore -- the pack rat's curse!)
Indeed I did find mention of the ability to get into the old DEC machines remotely I could not find whether the system could call on its own, though. Unfortunately most old dec stories are about what was wrong with dec service not what was right:).
"Blue is too peaceful. RED scares the crap out of end users."
Which is exactly why MS's SODs are blue. Do you think Redmond wants to put up with the calls they'd get and the general aversion to the product with red screens? (As if blue weren't bad enough.)
I also think it is the biggest marketing mistake Microsoft ever made. Think about it. Every WinNT and Win2k box boots to a blue screen normally. The BSOD is blue as well, leading the user to think blue screens are normal on Windows. I have even taken calls from customers who had no idea there was an error on the screen because it was blue. They would call and say "My server is hung at that blue screen it starts up with...."
Then again, the idea that blue screens are normal on Windows is not so bad because it is true;).
Perhaps we could develop a Slashdot reading model which understands that a patent is really about the claims, not about the abstract or a simple short phrase summarizing the patent.
For God's sake, any patent can be summarized into a phrase making it sound obvious, and most patents are actually about some marginally improved twist on a mature technology. That's why they have things like cites of previous patents.
On Slashdot, any new patent gets described in a way that makes a caveman beating two rocks together sound like prior art. I recall some clever LCD resolution enhancement get compared to Wozniak's also clever but completely unrelated scheme for kludging NTSC color out of a TTL circuit.
We need a new moderation "-100 Just doesn't understand." p.Well, slashdot is the home of hyperbole, to be sure. However, I am curious. Do you have any reason to believe the aforementioned patent s *not* covered in prior art/obvious, etc? I can think of a whole lot of phone home software that predates Microsoft's and even works on their platform. The Motive tools that were standard on Dell desktops and servers for awhile come to mind, as well as the Netscape phone home feature, in addition to the IBM mainframe/RS6000 service processor aforementioned and a plethora of other hardware and software tools I could mention. So what is it about Microsoft's claims on this patent specifically that leads you to believe slashdot is off-base in your considered professional opinion?
But you always could record something on a limited budget. I'm recording on a 4track and a small mixer which in total cost 200$
I'm not very good (which is why I've not forked out a huge amount on equipment) but I know a few good quality bands in the underground circuit that are recording on the same sort of stuff and sound good. The quality of the tune is more important than the quality of the production.
While I am inclined to agree, with respect to recording it really depends. Production can make someone who cannot sing at all sound good. That is the secret of Britney Spears et al. Lots of money to add effects and manipulate the hell out of the sound to make it palatable.
Now, I myself prefer raw talent with as little production as possible, but there are those who disagree, clearly.
" their stock price will bump up and that's about it. "
WTF? You terminate one of your most lucrative relationship in business and your stock goes up?
Welcome to crazy accounting world. Much like back in the day, when a company laid off workers it meant they were in financial trouble and the stock price went down, but now it is seen as a good thing they are "cutting costs" and "restructuring" so the stock price goes up; if a company decides to sue their customers it is now seen as "strongly defending their IP" and the stock price goes up, rather than people seeing it as as in the company has no leadership and can no longer produce products for sale in a competitive market.
Ultimately, it does not matter. If the stock price starts going up, people will buy in not caring why the stock price goes up. This will ultimately drive the stock price up more. A certain amount of investing is paint-by-numbers with irrational numbers. Such is the business of the stock market casino.
Well you have a point, there. But ultimately the benefit of going this route is that you end up with the cartdridge hardware and software both. Granted in my case I would probably just buy the roms if given the chance, or download them if not. If I had roms for every game I had ever bought with my own money I would have a lot of roms.
I think these guys are doing the right thing and we should support them. I mean this is the way it should work. The companies that produced the games get some kiznash and we get our games. After all, in the case of the arcade games you are getting a game that might cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy the hardware. The main problem people had, the thrust behind abandonware, etc, is that people *want* to buy these games but can't get them for love or money. So now that they are letting us have them for a few bucks apiece, we should support this model so more games become available this way.
I think a lot of people here are missing the point of this CD. This is something for tired Opteron owners waiting for x86-64 specific software, this is not a long-term "solution" by any means. This is so you can just stick in your computer, and try out a common application under something 64 bit, so people who shelled out the moneh can test drive their new systems.
In other words, FOOLs! (see also Early Adopters, Verion 1.0)
Why do people pay twice as much for stuff that they can't even use yet and which would be buggy if they used it at all? This is why I usually wait awhile to get into new tech, so that the bugs can be worked out and the price comes down to something reasonable.
So if your punters are using IE6 on Windows, they can undo that mistake with Ctrl-Z. I would assume that this also applies to Mozilla cross-platform. Don't know if it works in IE 4, 5 or 5.5, but it may well do so.
Yes, ctrl-z is undo in Mozilla on Linux and windows as well. Interesting that IE, Opera and Safari do not on the Mac, though. Perhaps now that the interface is messed up in OSX, Linux is easier to use than the Mac?:)
You first state that "UI can also be an area that should *not* be consumer-driven"
But your following supported text basically complains about poor bitmapped menu systems. I think your missing the point. UI is about User Interface-ing with your software. Good UI is about the user being able to use your software effectively. The point of the book was for people developing software to take this into consideration and use some simple User tests of how the User Interfaces with the software. Note where the User is having issues and work on improvements. You can only get to this point by going to the consumer (User). Your UI can be bitmapped and still be highly effecient if you take the right approach at building a great UI. Which involves "consumer driven" Tests. So i think it's unfortunate that you feel you shouldn't go to the consumer to drive the interface. I think this book was meant for you to read, becuase you think you alone - hammering away at the keyboard - understands all the different ways people use software.
I think that the poster was more concerned about MarketDroids who think that a Good Interface means having lots of Eye Candy to Attract Customers. Maybe it was not properly expressed, but I think the point was that the UI should be usable, rather than being designed for marketing purposes.
If you think a stock pump-n-dump to illegaly make money is "the most vile of sin"s then i think you need to watch the evening news a bit more......It's a crime and should be punished, but just today we have a story of a lady leaving a 2-year old in her apartment for days while she was in jail, never mentioned to the cops that a child was left home alone! That's VILE!
'Defined and orderly' implies intelligence. Since Creationism is the one which attributes everything to an intelligent God, and evolution attributes everything to blind, random chance, anything 'defined and orderly' cannot be the result of random chance.
Evolution does not preclude God, neither does it depend on chance. Yes, the order of the universe has been for ages pointed to by deists as evidence of God's existence. Protestants of the 17the century understood that science, being the pursuit of truth, was a Godly profession. Unfortunately it only took them 1-200 years to forget that.
The only point of direct contention between evolutionary science and creation is the account of Adam being created from the earth, and even modern evolutionary science has come to a similar conclusion though it is a but more involved than the Genesis account. The ideas that science is the antithesis of God, that evolution is the antithesis of creation are complete baloney and are the basis of straw man arguments like the ones you are repeating.
Yes, security is merely risk control and considering any given risk in isolation is specious.
Perhaps you don't write a lot of academic papers, but I don't think the problem was that Greer was considering a point in isolation. The very point of any academic paper is to narrow focus so that something can be examined in detail. In other words, the only thing Greer was discussing for the purposes of the paper was the monoculture and its effect on security. The effects are well documented and incredibly obvious, but apparently no one has had the guts to actually say anything about it in an academic paper or study it in detail before now.
The only case where the single platform argument does hold is when you have fault tolerant systems and you are concerned to make sure that they are resistant to software failures. This is an interesting theory but in practice it is probably better to commit your resources to writing one copy of the code and making that as bug free as possible. Code errors tend to have path dependencies.
We are not talking about coding per se, but sysadmining. People who deploy Windows are not writing it. They buy it from Microsoft. But honestly the problem would exist with any vendor. For instance, the Morris worm was successful due to the proliferation of old, unpatched UNIX systems running the same programs (in one case sendmail) with bad security practices. Changing any one of these things (running a different vendor, patching, or fixing security) would have lessened risk. Greer is saying a diverse IT environment will reduce risk somewhat. He is not saying it is a panacea as security panaceas were not the focus of this paper.
Yes. Reliance on a single vendor allows one to maximize the syngergy between products (if it exists, maybe MS is a bad example), minimize training costs (again, assuming product continuity), and in many cases, increase security across the board in cases where the products are designed to work together. Also, ROI for support contracts is an inverse proportion to the number of vendors in an environment as the amount of time on the phone spent convincing them "its not the other guy's shit" is reduced:)
Be that as it may, none of this suggests that security is increased by a reliance on a single vendor.
When I flip thru channels after a long nite out there are many infomercials. They only state that it is a commercial at the beginning and end. I wouldn't consider that disclosure. Disclosure would be a permenant banner on the bottom of the screen.
The worst thing about it is that every night after a certain time the History, Discovery, and Learning Channels et al become infomercials. Now maybe Ron Popeil's Pocket Fisherman is important history to some, but give me a break!:P
No, it was a recent article called "Linux Most Attacked Server?" The study was repeated on OSNews and several other sites. In it, a study showed over 60% of successful breaches are of Linux servers. ~30% was Windows machines.
The "study" if it could be called that, was also immediately debunked and completely discredited. The same person anipulated results to bash microsoft as well. Basically it was a classic example of the ability to manipulate a study to match any preconceived result, and the press's and the public's gullability.
Any fool can put out a press release saying "a recent study shows that X" regardless of whether X is actually true, whether the report of the study even says X, or whether the study truly proves X, and approximately 3 people in the world will read it. One of the three has a 5% chance of trying at some point in his/her life to actually reproduce the results. The rest will just blindly bleat the press release as you have.
But... the toaster manual is in Extended Backus-Naur Form! Everyone knows EBNF is the optimal way to configure and document the configuration of toast-making devices!
-Isaac
(those that miss the joke should look up EBNF and sudo. Mommy! It burns!)
Egad. I thought you were joking... man that is scary!:P
That said, RTFM, then if you need help ask. But don't always assume that because someone is asking, they haven't RTFM.
If the answer is actually *in* TFM, and they are asking the question, then they have not read TFM enough.
That said, I have actually gone hunting for TFM on some things only to find an FAQ that says "This is for people who don't RTFM" but does not contain any useful information (or FAQ's for that matter. I think "how the hell do I make this work?" would be a pretty frequent FAQ for something with no useful manual). I thought of mailing the author, but they say they answer no questions and there is no mailing list, so I gave up on that package.:P
I realize how someone of limited intelligence might come to that conclusion, however that was not at all what I was 'really saying'. Any employee of mine should feel free to speak only truth. I'd fire someone I caught lying. However, publishing a paper bashing your biggest source of revenue is NOT SMART. It wasn't the veracity of his comments that got him fired, it was at whom they were aimed. Should an employee of mine cause my customers to stop giving me revenue, with what would you propose I pay the rest of my employees? Righteous anger? Become self-employed if you don't wish to consider the consequences of your actions, or else you risk becoming unemployed.
I think you are missing a very important point, here. @Stake's sole product is security advice. If they cannot publish any papers critical of Microsoft, what good is their security advice?
A company whose business is to provide factual consulting information should ensure that that information is accurate and in fact the best advice they can provide their customers. If they are artificially limited in the advice they can give, that opens the doror for a situation in which they are providing bad advice to their customers, for a fee. Would you buy that?
And in this case by your own admission what Greer was saying was factually correct, and good advice to customers. He did not give this advice as a representative of @Stake, but you seem not to care about that hair so I will not split it here. If @Stake truly believes that going to a 100% Microsoft shop is the best advice for their customers (which would be the opposite of Greer's paper) despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary they are indeed lying to their customers and giving them bad advice for their money.
It is not smart for a consulting company to become biased in any way because their aim should be to provide the best solution for their customers, no matter what that solution is. It is also not smart for any company to ignore or suppress all criticism. Criticism is healthy and it is a way for companies to do better. Denying the truth is the way to ruin. Unfortunately for microsoft, this is the way they are headed. They refuse to understand or believe the probelsm with their model and OS design, so they will never fix them. Instead they will continue to try to force people to buy their products and therefore not have to improve them since they don't have to compete with anyone.
That's what the scientific community would like you to believe, but you can't prove randomness scientifically. The whole point of random is that something may or may not happen. I could prove that lack of sunlight causes car tires to go flat with the kind of evidence that people use to support evolution.
Randomness is not required for the evolutionary process. In fact, it is a very well defined orderly process. It is clearly one which you have not studied very well, perhaps because of your prejudices. Perhaps you should read more?
Slashdot Mirror
Everything in a Stratus was redundant. CPU, memory, disk drives, etc. They had unmatched reliability but at a cost. If memory serves, a redundant 600MB disk assembly cost on the order of US$20K (that was around 1991). Replacing a running CPU didn't mean downtime. You were still running on the other member of the redundant pair. And I expect that most of the Stratus systems had more than one redundant pair of CPUs. (The 680x0 CPUs were pretty good but weren't going to set any speed records.)
The VOS operating system would even detect when a terminal was going bad and alert field service. (I'd bet that their UNIX clone OS could do that as well.) More than once I had the field service rep walk up to my cubicle and want to know where so-and-so sat so he could replace their terminal or I'd get a phone call out of the blue to let me know that they'd been alerted about a terminal that was going to need replacement.
And that's just one vendor that could contest this. Heck if your looking for prior art, DEC had maintenance consoles on some of the larger PDP-11s that could be used by field service to service the system or run diagnostics remotely. I'm not sure if they had a ``phone home'' capability but I wouldn't be a bit surprised. (I have some of the old literature/manuals down in the basement but I wouldn't know which boxes to dig through anymore -- the pack rat's curse!)
Indeed I did find mention of the ability to get into the old DEC machines remotely I could not find whether the system could call on its own, though. Unfortunately most old dec stories are about what was wrong with dec service not what was right :).
"Blue is too peaceful. RED scares the crap out of end users."
Which is exactly why MS's SODs are blue. Do you think Redmond wants to put up with the calls they'd get and the general aversion to the product with red screens? (As if blue weren't bad enough.)
I also think it is the biggest marketing mistake Microsoft ever made. Think about it. Every WinNT and Win2k box boots to a blue screen normally. The BSOD is blue as well, leading the user to think blue screens are normal on Windows. I have even taken calls from customers who had no idea there was an error on the screen because it was blue. They would call and say "My server is hung at that blue screen it starts up with...."
Then again, the idea that blue screens are normal on Windows is not so bad because it is true ;).
"Next we'll be reading about how each patent clerk gets his own stripper and lapdances are mandatory every hour on the hour."
Hey, I want that job.
Too bad it s being outsourced to India where the strippers are considerably cheaper.
Perhaps we could develop a Slashdot reading model which understands that a patent is really about the claims, not about the abstract or a simple short phrase summarizing the patent.
For God's sake, any patent can be summarized into a phrase making it sound obvious, and most patents are actually about some marginally improved twist on a mature technology. That's why they have things like cites of previous patents.
On Slashdot, any new patent gets described in a way that makes a caveman beating two rocks together sound like prior art. I recall some clever LCD resolution enhancement get compared to Wozniak's also clever but completely unrelated scheme for kludging NTSC color out of a TTL circuit.
We need a new moderation "-100 Just doesn't understand."
p.Well, slashdot is the home of hyperbole, to be sure. However, I am curious. Do you have any reason to believe the aforementioned patent s *not* covered in prior art/obvious, etc? I can think of a whole lot of phone home software that predates Microsoft's and even works on their platform. The Motive tools that were standard on Dell desktops and servers for awhile come to mind, as well as the Netscape phone home feature, in addition to the IBM mainframe/RS6000 service processor aforementioned and a plethora of other hardware and software tools I could mention. So what is it about Microsoft's claims on this patent specifically that leads you to believe slashdot is off-base in your considered professional opinion?
But you always could record something on a limited budget. I'm recording on a 4track and a small mixer which in total cost 200$
I'm not very good (which is why I've not forked out a huge amount on equipment) but I know a few good quality bands in the underground circuit that are recording on the same sort of stuff and sound good. The quality of the tune is more important than the quality of the production.
While I am inclined to agree, with respect to recording it really depends. Production can make someone who cannot sing at all sound good. That is the secret of Britney Spears et al. Lots of money to add effects and manipulate the hell out of the sound to make it palatable.
Now, I myself prefer raw talent with as little production as possible, but there are those who disagree, clearly.
" their stock price will bump up and that's about it. "
WTF? You terminate one of your most lucrative relationship in business and your stock goes up?
Welcome to crazy accounting world. Much like back in the day, when a company laid off workers it meant they were in financial trouble and the stock price went down, but now it is seen as a good thing they are "cutting costs" and "restructuring" so the stock price goes up; if a company decides to sue their customers it is now seen as "strongly defending their IP" and the stock price goes up, rather than people seeing it as as in the company has no leadership and can no longer produce products for sale in a competitive market.
Ultimately, it does not matter. If the stock price starts going up, people will buy in not caring why the stock price goes up. This will ultimately drive the stock price up more. A certain amount of investing is paint-by-numbers with irrational numbers. Such is the business of the stock market casino.
and what is your time worth to you?
Well you have a point, there. But ultimately the benefit of going this route is that you end up with the cartdridge hardware and software both. Granted in my case I would probably just buy the roms if given the chance, or download them if not. If I had roms for every game I had ever bought with my own money I would have a lot of roms.
I think these guys are doing the right thing and we should support them. I mean this is the way it should work. The companies that produced the games get some kiznash and we get our games. After all, in the case of the arcade games you are getting a game that might cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars to buy the hardware. The main problem people had, the thrust behind abandonware, etc, is that people *want* to buy these games but can't get them for love or money. So now that they are letting us have them for a few bucks apiece, we should support this model so more games become available this way.
Part of the beauty of ROM images is that they don't wear out like our favorite cartidges and consoles do.
But with the right equipment and know-how, you can make a rom image from the used cartridge.
The GameCube has a 485MHz PowerPC 405 variant, dubbed "Gecko". It is a 32-bit processor with 64-bit floating point.
And you may be surprised but it does not come with car insurance! :P
I think a lot of people here are missing the point of this CD. This is something for tired Opteron owners waiting for x86-64 specific software, this is not a long-term "solution" by any means. This is so you can just stick in your computer, and try out a common application under something 64 bit, so people who shelled out the moneh can test drive their new systems.
In other words, FOOLs! (see also Early Adopters, Verion 1.0)
Why do people pay twice as much for stuff that they can't even use yet and which would be buggy if they used it at all? This is why I usually wait awhile to get into new tech, so that the bugs can be worked out and the price comes down to something reasonable.
So if your punters are using IE6 on Windows, they can undo that mistake with Ctrl-Z. I would assume that this also applies to Mozilla cross-platform. Don't know if it works in IE 4, 5 or 5.5, but it may well do so.
Yes, ctrl-z is undo in Mozilla on Linux and windows as well. Interesting that IE, Opera and Safari do not on the Mac, though. Perhaps now that the interface is messed up in OSX, Linux is easier to use than the Mac? :)
You first state that "UI can also be an area that should *not* be consumer-driven"
But your following supported text basically complains about poor bitmapped menu systems. I think your missing the point. UI is about User Interface-ing with your software. Good UI is about the user being able to use your software effectively. The point of the book was for people developing software to take this into consideration and use some simple User tests of how the User Interfaces with the software. Note where the User is having issues and work on improvements. You can only get to this point by going to the consumer (User). Your UI can be bitmapped and still be highly effecient if you take the right approach at building a great UI. Which involves "consumer driven" Tests. So i think it's unfortunate that you feel you shouldn't go to the consumer to drive the interface. I think this book was meant for you to read, becuase you think you alone - hammering away at the keyboard - understands all the different ways people use software.
I think that the poster was more concerned about MarketDroids who think that a Good Interface means having lots of Eye Candy to Attract Customers. Maybe it was not properly expressed, but I think the point was that the UI should be usable, rather than being designed for marketing purposes.
If you think a stock pump-n-dump to illegaly make money is "the most vile of sin"s then i think you need to watch the evening news a bit more......It's a crime and should be punished, but just today we have a story of a lady leaving a 2-year old in her apartment for days while she was in jail, never mentioned to the cops that a child was left home alone! That's VILE!
That's the worst case of pump and dump ever! :P
'Defined and orderly' implies intelligence. Since Creationism is the one which attributes everything to an intelligent God, and evolution attributes everything to blind, random chance, anything 'defined and orderly' cannot be the result of random chance.
Evolution does not preclude God, neither does it depend on chance. Yes, the order of the universe has been for ages pointed to by deists as evidence of God's existence. Protestants of the 17the century understood that science, being the pursuit of truth, was a Godly profession. Unfortunately it only took them 1-200 years to forget that.
The only point of direct contention between evolutionary science and creation is the account of Adam being created from the earth, and even modern evolutionary science has come to a similar conclusion though it is a but more involved than the Genesis account. The ideas that science is the antithesis of God, that evolution is the antithesis of creation are complete baloney and are the basis of straw man arguments like the ones you are repeating.
Yes, security is merely risk control and considering any given risk in isolation is specious.
Perhaps you don't write a lot of academic papers, but I don't think the problem was that Greer was considering a point in isolation. The very point of any academic paper is to narrow focus so that something can be examined in detail. In other words, the only thing Greer was discussing for the purposes of the paper was the monoculture and its effect on security. The effects are well documented and incredibly obvious, but apparently no one has had the guts to actually say anything about it in an academic paper or study it in detail before now.
The only case where the single platform argument does hold is when you have fault tolerant systems and you are concerned to make sure that they are resistant to software failures. This is an interesting theory but in practice it is probably better to commit your resources to writing one copy of the code and making that as bug free as possible. Code errors tend to have path dependencies.
We are not talking about coding per se, but sysadmining. People who deploy Windows are not writing it. They buy it from Microsoft. But honestly the problem would exist with any vendor. For instance, the Morris worm was successful due to the proliferation of old, unpatched UNIX systems running the same programs (in one case sendmail) with bad security practices. Changing any one of these things (running a different vendor, patching, or fixing security) would have lessened risk. Greer is saying a diverse IT environment will reduce risk somewhat. He is not saying it is a panacea as security panaceas were not the focus of this paper.
Yes. Reliance on a single vendor allows one to maximize the syngergy between products (if it exists, maybe MS is a bad example), minimize training costs (again, assuming product continuity), and in many cases, increase security across the board in cases where the products are designed to work together. Also, ROI for support contracts is an inverse proportion to the number of vendors in an environment as the amount of time on the phone spent convincing them "its not the other guy's shit" is reduced :)
Be that as it may, none of this suggests that security is increased by a reliance on a single vendor.
When I flip thru channels after a long nite out there are many infomercials. They only state that it is a commercial at the beginning and end. I wouldn't consider that disclosure. Disclosure would be a permenant banner on the bottom of the screen.
The worst thing about it is that every night after a certain time the History, Discovery, and Learning Channels et al become infomercials. Now maybe Ron Popeil's Pocket Fisherman is important history to some, but give me a break! :P
It is well-known that Microsoft hires some of the best programmers in the world.
Who knows that? Who says that? Microsoft, maybe? How do they know that? Did their programmers win some sort of contest?
No, it was a recent article called "Linux Most Attacked Server?" The study was repeated on OSNews and several other sites. In it, a study showed over 60% of successful breaches are of Linux servers. ~30% was Windows machines.
The "study" if it could be called that, was also immediately debunked and completely discredited. The same person anipulated results to bash microsoft as well. Basically it was a classic example of the ability to manipulate a study to match any preconceived result, and the press's and the public's gullability.
Any fool can put out a press release saying "a recent study shows that X" regardless of whether X is actually true, whether the report of the study even says X, or whether the study truly proves X, and approximately 3 people in the world will read it. One of the three has a 5% chance of trying at some point in his/her life to actually reproduce the results. The rest will just blindly bleat the press release as you have.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't both of those use OpenSSL?
Yes, thank you Captain Obvious.
But... the toaster manual is in Extended Backus-Naur Form! Everyone knows EBNF is the optimal way to configure and document the configuration of toast-making devices!
-Isaac
(those that miss the joke should look up EBNF and sudo. Mommy! It burns!)
Egad. I thought you were joking... man that is scary! :P
That said, RTFM, then if you need help ask. But don't always assume that because someone is asking, they haven't RTFM.
If the answer is actually *in* TFM, and they are asking the question, then they have not read TFM enough.
That said, I have actually gone hunting for TFM on some things only to find an FAQ that says "This is for people who don't RTFM" but does not contain any useful information (or FAQ's for that matter. I think "how the hell do I make this work?" would be a pretty frequent FAQ for something with no useful manual). I thought of mailing the author, but they say they answer no questions and there is no mailing list, so I gave up on that package. :P
"Hi there! Would you like some toast?"
Toaster:"You seem to be trying to make toast. Would you like some help?"
Refrigerator:"You seem to be trying to find the butter. Would you like some help?"
I realize how someone of limited intelligence might come to that conclusion, however that was not at all what I was 'really saying'. Any employee of mine should feel free to speak only truth. I'd fire someone I caught lying. However, publishing a paper bashing your biggest source of revenue is NOT SMART. It wasn't the veracity of his comments that got him fired, it was at whom they were aimed. Should an employee of mine cause my customers to stop giving me revenue, with what would you propose I pay the rest of my employees? Righteous anger? Become self-employed if you don't wish to consider the consequences of your actions, or else you risk becoming unemployed.
I think you are missing a very important point, here. @Stake's sole product is security advice. If they cannot publish any papers critical of Microsoft, what good is their security advice?
A company whose business is to provide factual consulting information should ensure that that information is accurate and in fact the best advice they can provide their customers. If they are artificially limited in the advice they can give, that opens the doror for a situation in which they are providing bad advice to their customers, for a fee. Would you buy that?
And in this case by your own admission what Greer was saying was factually correct, and good advice to customers. He did not give this advice as a representative of @Stake, but you seem not to care about that hair so I will not split it here. If @Stake truly believes that going to a 100% Microsoft shop is the best advice for their customers (which would be the opposite of Greer's paper) despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary they are indeed lying to their customers and giving them bad advice for their money.
It is not smart for a consulting company to become biased in any way because their aim should be to provide the best solution for their customers, no matter what that solution is. It is also not smart for any company to ignore or suppress all criticism. Criticism is healthy and it is a way for companies to do better. Denying the truth is the way to ruin. Unfortunately for microsoft, this is the way they are headed. They refuse to understand or believe the probelsm with their model and OS design, so they will never fix them. Instead they will continue to try to force people to buy their products and therefore not have to improve them since they don't have to compete with anyone.
That's what the scientific community would like you to believe, but you can't prove randomness scientifically. The whole point of random is that something may or may not happen. I could prove that lack of sunlight causes car tires to go flat with the kind of evidence that people use to support evolution.
Randomness is not required for the evolutionary process. In fact, it is a very well defined orderly process. It is clearly one which you have not studied very well, perhaps because of your prejudices. Perhaps you should read more?