Let me start by saying i was a huge-ass hypercard addict in the fifth grade, and that the damn thing probably had a huge formative impact on me.
Let me continue by saying that i think it was a great, great loss that apple chose to drop hypercard the way they did. Had it continued to *grow*, it could have been a disturbingly influential piece of software. Hypercard could have been what Virtual Basic is now, only better. Short bit of obligatory history for the slashbots here: Hypercard was created BECAUSE of visual basic. Remember, Apple historically thought Basic was a nifty language. When Microsoft was first working on VB, apple asked them to create a BASIC R.A.D. tool, and MS agreed.. time passed, VB came out for windows, VB did not come out for mac. Even more time passed. Apple realizes VB is not going to come out for mac, and so an engineer there named Bill Atkinson (AKA "the dhali lama") decided screw microsoft, he was going to create his OWN visual basic.. and it came out beautifully. Hypercard was just SUCH an elegant tool for what it did, ESPECIALLY for the time, in every way, from the way it made the Fields and Buttons feel like the graphical elements they were to the strength and simplicity of the scripting language. Unfortunately with time apple just started neglecting it, in a horrible way. They blatantly refused to add color, they wouldn't take the obvious step of expanding their concept of button icons into real, useful SPRITES, and they let it get SLOW.. what could have been a fantastic low-end development tool was left to rot. And yet somehow it survived, mostly at this point living on the strength of the Quicktime integration. If you could write XTNDs (extentions to hypercard living inside a stack, written in "real" programming languages like c or pascal), hypercard was still useful.
hell, Cyan was a hypercard company. Myst was a hypercard app, and i think Riven was too.. or had they switched to Director by that point? Blah.
However, at this point.. dude, it's too late. Let the thing die. It had it's day. It's fun as a relic, but.. just.. no. If hypercard still holds some niftiness for you, just drop the damn thing and get Shockwave Flash. It is well worth the $300 or whatever it is (i don't have it). Flash IS what hypercard COULD HAVE BEEN: vector-based, visually rich, POWERFUL, flexible, cross-platform.. hell, just look at Flash and give me one good reason for Hypercard to still exist. And as far as hypercard serving a PURPOSE.. well, at this point the tools apple is serving instead have such power, such potential. I don't know if any of you have ever USED the combination of neXTStep interfacebuilder and objective C, but i honestly doubt it would be any more difficult to get a fifth grader like i was-- if you presented it right, and threw in kinda object library for sprite animation, and integrated that library with I_B-- to deeply grok writing cocoa software to the point where they could do everything they could in hypercard and more without much more difficulty. But oh, i mean, HELL. At this point *QUICKTIME* is as powerful or more so than hypercard. That's right, Quicktime now has sprites and interactivity and filters and everything hypercard had! I was actually for a short time considering writing a program that would convert hypercard stacks into quicktime movies! (I still think this would be an awesome project.)
If we're going to carbonize/update ANYTHING, it should be World Builder. Anyone remember World Builder games? "Mr. Roger's Revenge" and that whole bunch.. i mean like just think like what if they like added support for like color and quicktime movies and hypercard and shit DUDE HOW FUCKING L337 WOULD THAT BE??
(note: i honestly do not think i am being sarcastic about this last bit.)
Well, i would like to note that complexity and difficulty are not the same thing, but:
OK. My apologies.:)
I was somewhat confused as to the exact functionings of BIND at the time of the making of my post, and those initial comments were more than likely plain wrong. -_- However i think if you just delete everything before the words "despite this", or at least the stuff before "the important thing though" from my post, the rest is, umm, fairly important. Or something.
I would go into a long rant here about my personal belief that unweildiness of Mozilla (yes, i've poked the code) and MSIE and such are due to the fact that they are less than excellently thought out and designed attempts to create unreasonably monolithic applications, NOT because the nature of a web browser DEMANDS it be bloated.. but that would be offtopic, and i am not of such skill i could tell you how to do such a program CORRECTLY -_-
Well, as long as so much attention is centered here.. no one seems to have mentioned it yet, so i'd like to point out (for those who may not be aware) that the Everything Engine, the software on which everything2 was built, is freely available and Open Source and nearing an official 1.0 release. Check out:
http://everydevel.com/
The system is truly impressive as an abstract and astoundingly flexible architecture to let you VERY easily create collaboratively managed websites (assuming you are a relatively experienced perl programmer), and i would just like to suggest that those in the general Slashdot population to whom the system might be useful go take look at it and maybe play with it some. The chances of it being useful to you someday are not bad..
I would say two things: first off, Creating something like BIND is infinitely more difficult than something like MSIE-- MSIE has a huge number of disparate things it's expected to do, while BIND is in a certain manner less "complex", but all the things MSIE does are *simple* and it doesn't have to do them *efficiently*. Despite this BIND, at least from where i'm standing, seems to be doing *better* than MSIE. I mean, it may just be i'm not paying attention, but big BIND problems seem to come along every five months and big MSIE problems seem to come along every two or three.. and the MSIE problems seem a bit worse. The IMPORTANT thing, though, and this has been noted elsewhere in this same discussion, is that BIND is aimed at *professionals*-- people who are skilled, and people for whom constnatly watching the security news and speedily applying new patches to the machines they are charged with watching can be considered to be part of their *job*. MSIE/OE, meanwhile, is VERY heavily used by people who don't understand computers at all, people who just wnat to print things in wordperfect every so often and get e-mail every so often. MICROSOFT HAS AN OBLIGATION TO PROTECT THESE PEOPLE, microsoft has an obligation to not leave the defenseless with security vulnerabilities, microsoft has certain obligations to simple SAFETY that the people who write BIND do not. ANd MS is failing at it. Do you really think that the kind of person who is scared by computers to the point where they never ask "I wonder how i can delete these shortcut icons off my desktop?" Is going to *EVER* update their IE, or check microsoft.com for updates, or even be able to figure out what a service pack is?
As far as Wu-ftpd goes.. dude. Seriously. Use Proftpd. It's better anyway.:) With something like Wu, it gets to the point where if you don't like the security track record of a product you should consider just not *using* it.. hell, you even have alternatives to BIND. Microsoft should realize that people don't have too much alternative to using MSIE, realize that people aren't going to switch based on security, and make it their job to fix security as a result. Although i'd bet that they let security get so bad *because* they knew nobody would stop using MSIE because of it.
> If you want to make a constructive criticism, then you should have them rewrite the whole OS.
Not a bad idea. Here's a better one. Two words: CODE AUDITS.
(at the sound of the magical words "code audit", angelic voices are heard singing from the heavens.)
MS doesn't need to *rewrite* this stuff, not *really*, but initiating a large-scale security-oriented code audit of the entire text of their networking and web browser code is something that they could really stand to do, BEFORE they start thinking about windows xp or whatever. They certainly have the resources. How do you propose to get them the initiative? Cuz it's sure as hell not my problem:)
> In short, I wish people would stop with the idiotic Microsoft bashing. All software has bugs. Let's fix it and move on.
The problem with this is that this isn't just a Well, Now It's Over And We Can All Get On With Our Lives type thing. If this were an isolated incident, "Move on" would be good advice indeed; however, Microsoft is developing a literal track record when it comes to security vulnerabilities. Security holes in MSIE, SERIOUS ones, seem to be cropping up on the order of once every couple of months;
i can think of at least four times since MSIE 4 that ways for attackers to affect the contents of an MSIE user's hard drive have been discovered, and i haven't even been watching it closely.
Are you really sure that "forgive and forget" is a good idea?? Do you honestly think that this isn't going to happen again? Do you honestly think if people let this issue rest-- and they will-- that microsoft is going to change its ways on its own? It certainly didn't the LAST couple of times this happened.
Keep in mind these are the people that you're supposed to be buying an attempted NETWORK OS (windows xp) from in a year or so, and they can't pull off security in a passive web browser. XP involves the passing around of remote executable code, doesn't it? Don't you think some SERIOUS pressure needs to be brought to bear on microsoft until they take steps to ensure that the security issues in their browsers are dealt with, COMPLETELY?
I am a Mac OS X user, so i am not *too* worried about this, but i do use MSIE from time to time, and so i for one am extremely alarmed with microsoft's nonchalance with security issues. Microsoft seems to have no interest to bring these "technologies" (activex, for example) that seem to be causing the problems to the macintosh platform, and the Macintosh port of IE shares no codebase with the windows version, so i am not directly threatened; however i still feel somewhat insecure with using MSIE.
I will say quite openly that everything in general does not have what you could call an *emphasis* on factual/informative writings, and i would say that that e2's psychological tendencies to reward the poorly constructed sex jokes written by 14-year-olds and vaguely neglect factual writings *have* probably driven off some people who would have been beneficial to the site (although i would say there have been MINIMAL effects from this). However, i must say i completely completely disagree with what you are saying. What i suspect you are neglecting to realize is that whether e2 is deeply informative or not depends on the *kind* of information you are looking for. If you are looking for scientific or mathematical concepts, then e2 damn near achieves its ultimate goal of providing decent coverage for every single thing you could possibly think of to look for. If you are looking for information on technical things (i.e. computing, programming, UNIX) then e2 is only about halfway there. If you look for serious historical material, you're going to find damn near nothing (a shame, because i think the web-of-definition-links format of e2 would be perfect for history writeups.. but i digress.) E2 has certain places where it is strong and certain places where it is weak, and i for one see the weak places less as a deficiency than i see them as a CHALLENGE, to help e2 grow to encompass those things it neglects now.
I will say this-- if you compare e2 to the more facts-only wiki-like endeavors such as h2g2, you will find that while those site's writings are in general more *in-depth* than the corresponding e2 nodes, e2 has a *much* larger coverage of disparate things. E2 contains general summaries for almost everything there is, but exhaustive coverage of few things. Whether this is a good or a bad thing i cannot say, although i DO know that there are a good number of pockets of extremely esoteric material where e2 just SHINES. E2 may never be as consistent as the moderated h2g2, but i think it's safe to say that you won't see people feeling quite as free to just ramble about pagan holidays and canadian politics and other quirky such things with as little abandon as they do on e2.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that not everyone on Everything has the same goals for the site. The site has no one single use. If everything2 is good at anything, it is leaving people free to slowly mold the site to their own purposes; talk to a bunch of e2 users and you'll find that each one probably has a different vision for where everything2 should go, and it is possible-- given time-- for every single one of those visions to be fulfilled, without interfering with any of the others. You care about the informative aspects; some people on e2 ignore those aspects, and care only about searching for people's life stories. There are people who really just want a community. There are people who just sit around and post collections of elizabethan poetry. The strength of e2, in the end, really lies not in how much content is there *now* but in its flexibility.. because that flexibility in the end gives it the potential to be more than its competitors will ever be.
And one thing you have to give e2: The s/n levels are EXPONENTIALLY higher than they are on slashdot; i would perhaps say, although this varies from part of the site from part of the site, they are even higher than on kuro5hin. And unlike slash or really even kuro, the nature of the site means that you rarely have to wade through crap to get to the good stuff. If you get the hang of looking for things the right way, you can just spend hours clicking through what seems like an endless supply of fascinating material, and learn the entire time, without having to look at a single sex joke.
I think jabber actually solves this problem perfectly in a much more elegant manner; the connection code is running remotely, not in the client, meaning changes don't need to be propigated-- the jabber server is the only thing you need to change.
This is why halfway through yesterday, Fire (the sole *real* method for i, a Mac OS X user, to connect to AIM and thus contact quite a few people i want to talk to..) and Gaim were still blocked from AOL, but Jabber peoples could connect just fine-- only, though, if they were on the jabber.org server, because that was the only one that had been fixed with the entry hack. That's the good thing about this approach, you have one small client and it can adapt to whatever happens. THe problem with this, of course, is that AOL can IP-block the jabber server, meaning everyone is simply screwed.. not sure how to get around that.
Note: don't feel *too* sorry for me. Fire has been updated, but requires OS X Final, which comes out tomorrow; there's a mac os x jabber client that i'm having trouble with compiling, but which binaries will be available for starting tomorrow; and OS X Final will have working java support, so i can run QuickBuddy (*shudder*) if i need to. So i'm locked into using micq in Terminal until tomorrow, which is unfortunate, and i may be forced to use *ugh* a telephone if i want to talk to some of the people i really do need to contact today.. but i'll survive. Still, this really sucks..
Um.:blinks: 'k, whatever. I'm sorry if you were offended, i was merely trying to say that i am not going to put much credit in your argument until you can produce some assurance that the assumption that you're basing it on is well-founded./me shrugs..
So you are saying then that you don't have any documentation?
> Anyone who knows anyone with a Sega Dreamcast can tell you very quickly why Sega was brutalized on that system : Piracy.
That is a rather serious allegation, and if true it is an extremely interesting one. Can you give us any documentation or proof of what you are saying, or is this simple speculation?
Regardless of what you consider "moral", there have been products and markets destroyed by piracy (see that Korean word processing company) and there have been products and markets where rampant piracy has had no effect or beneficial effects. The piracy issue is something that the game companies surely need to think about (although i for one would suggest that Sony is taking the wrong tactic of dealing with it.. oh, but that's an argument for another post), but i for one don't feel like listening to anyone talk about the degree to which the game companies are or are not being "hurt" until they can produce some hard figures on what they're saying.
Perhaps the thing you bring up is not a disadvantage, but the reason that the entire system was implemented in the first place?
Why implement a system that causes a huge amount of hassle to all legitimate gamers without appreciably making a dent in piracy? Well, like you said, such add-ons are historically purchased by a vast minority of customers; yet said add-ons only have value if they are owned by the vast majority of customers.
So, all Sony has to do is implement this DiVX style system, thus mafia-style "encouraging" you to get a network adaptor. Think about it.
To you, your purchase of that modem adaptor just so you can play use-controlled games was a hassle; to sony, it was $45 revenue.
So painfully obvious.
The eternal stupidity vs. malice dichonomy.. I don't know how to spell 'dichonomy'.
Don't laugh, you just know SOMEBODY in the slashdot reading audience saw jawtheshark's post and started writing a oneline perl assembler immediately -_-
(hell.. whenever i can get through to the/.ed ftp server, i'll try to write one myself..:)
As of this posting neither netscape 4/windows nt or wget/slackware were able to connect, with or without email address passwords.
My guess is it's just slashdot effect, and the problem is that the quota for simultaneous anonymous connections is exceeded. Or the sysadmin was so horrified by the number of people hammering on her server that she disabled the anonymous acct. altogether. Wait 24 hours, it'll be ok -_-
It's not like i know much of anthing about anything..
But the way i see it, this (bandwidth allocation) is not an administrative problem-- it is a network problem. Therefore, solving the problem with administrative solutions would be counterproductive and possibly damaging in other subtle ways. Surely there is some usign-network-technology way to ration network resources? I mean, SURELY if there are three or four users taking up disproportionate amounts of network resources such that other people's services are being denied, couldn't the network-- based SOLELY off of technological networking things, NOT off of administrative thigns like disconnectiong accounts or monitoring traffic-- simply give less resources to the people hogging it? There must be some way to put quotas on network usage so that people don't block service to other nearby users. And if said technology does not exist maybe it should be developed... No?
"not my bandwidth in the first place"? well, no, but by working for the company or paying for the college i am in some way subsidising that bandwidth. i for one think that from the college/workplace's standpoint (the Law Enforcement standpoint would of course be wholly different..) i should have the right to do whatever i like with it as long as i am not interfering with other users-- and i believe it should be the network infrastructure's job to prevent me from interfering with other users, not my job to not do things that could possibly interfere.
The point you make is fascinating, but not all of us use our modems to play games. Would the "give poor performance and kill the CPU" argument still hold for those of us who use modems primarily for file transfer, and never run anything more interaction-intensive than IRC?
"The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd." --André Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism
This whole thing is an interesting question, really... whether requesting something can be an attack.
I.E. you nonmaliciously (meaning, it isn't a DOS, you're actually getting information) ask for large gobs of information off of some site, the way these bots did.. or the way a spambot might.. they call this "denying services", but still, it's a simple the questioner requests, the answerer replies. If it's "unauthorized use".. well, how can you talk about unauthorized use on a public server? How can these things, authorization and to who, be implied on a public internet? Should it be the job of the requester to not go where they clearly shouldn't be, or the job of the requestee to keep them out?
Or look at it in terms of a port scan. I request things from each of these ports, thus figuring out which are open (and thus vulnerable to attack). I've seen people try to procecute this based on "unauthorized usage of machine".. well hold up, who said you had to authorize something? This person is just sending pings to ports, on a machine that by its presence on the internet you have implied responds to traffic. Why on earth would you need "permission" prior to using a system? If so, how would that permission be obtained?.. but of course none of this changes the fact that the port scan is almost always part of a malicious cracking attack.
Or, let's say-- hypothetically-- there was a single-line javascript that, if accessed from a windows NT machine, would cause the kernel to be overwritten by 0s. If you put that up on a web page, would that be "hacking"? You didn't break the machine yourself; you politely ask the machine to break itself, and it complies. Is that your fault?
But then, when you get down to it, all forms of "cracking" could be seen as requests. I request you process this block of information that just happens to cause a buffer overflow... you didn't have to process it, now did you? That last bit doesnt' really sound reasonable.. you have to draw a line somewhere, you have to note somewhere that it's no longer a request but an attack. Somewhere, for the sake of sanity, you have to draw the line, and how do you do that? Intent? How do you prove intent in court? What's the difference between the slashdot effect and a DDOS, at an abstract level?
But still how the hell can you say it's illegal to ask for something because the questioned might give you an answer even though they don't want to...? That's where the law is heading, where it's been heading for awhile, and that's completely absurd.
Please, please know this: ***AQUA IS NOT AN API.*** Aqua is the name given to a particular "look" for apps. Aqua is, essentially, a theme and a small collection of (optionally followed) UI guidelines. Not a product or a program or an API.
Cocoa, on the other hand.. cocoa/nextstep is being reimplemented for UNIXlike operating systems in a project called "GNUStep". Go look for it. Large parts of the API are already finished, but it's still buggy and unstable. However, even if this is finished, these will still be simply libraries-- not really anything like Wine. So you'd still need a recompile. Meaning MS would have to purposefully decide to *use* the gnustep libraries *to* port to linux/bsd, something that would be simple to do but which they woud be highly unlikely to do even were the gnustep libraries usable and complete. It would be technically possible for all this to happen, but i don't see it happening unless the GNUStep people make big strides very quickly and the justice department opensources MSOffice (ha!)
Well, i don't know what they mean by "re-writing", but...
It may have less to do with the "modern OS" bit than it does to do with the "modern API" bit. As in, besides the wonderful UNIXish multitasking/threading/protected memory/etc of mac os x, development is expected to take place in something called cocoa (: yellowbox : nextstep), an extremely, extremely advanced object oriented API which you are expected to develop for in java or [sound of heavenly voices] Objective C.
One would imagine that doing a from-the-ground-up rewrite developing in Objective C in a ***fully*** OO environment would enable/encourage/force you to produce a much, much more clean, elegant, and thus higher-quality product than clumsily trying to interface C or C++ against the somewhat inconsistent oldskool Macintosh Toolbox APIs.
That would be my interpretation, anyway. I think if he meant they were rewriting Office in Carbon rather than Cocoa he'd not have said "specifically".
In general, slashcode is still designed as a linear news engine, not something like Everything designed more as a collaborative database being constantly revised in all directions. Still, the way they have geekt set up now, it seems to work just fine, so i wouldn't worry about that.
My only worry, though, is that unless they do some thinking ahead this site is not going to scale at ALL. Not because of shortcomings in slash; just because they haven't put any thought into what happens once this goes from some people sitting around and passing around pictures to a rather large database.
Specifically, every single posting seems way too isolated.
So, here are my humbly worthless two bits of advice to the maintainers of this page, should they read this article:
You need to modify the database entries for each shirt to contain the date the shirt was printed. You need this. Once you have a whole bunch of shirts and you can't just read the entire archive at a glance anymore, it will become pretty much impossible to understand anything's place within the grand scheme of things. Being able to see shirts listed chronologically from Bell Labs--UNIX Project to Linux 2.4 release instead of listed chronologically by post date-- which might as well be randomly shuffled-- would make things a great deal more interesting, not to mention meaningful. Knowing that "IAUMA" is from 1995 and not 1983 helps. A lot.
(by the way-- how hard would it be to rig together a "return random t-shirt entry" thing? that would be nifty:) )
You ought to set up some kind of system where related t-shirts can be identified and linked together. Using slashdot's sections is nice. You may want to expand this, maybe into having each shirt be registered on a hierarchy of vague category->company->product or some such, so all your Power Macintosh G4 t-shirts aren't lumped together in a pile with obscure jokes involving AppleSoft BASIC. This really isn't important, but doing something like this, or some other way to hit a button on an entry and get similar and related t-shirts, would definitely make it much more interesting to browse your site later on. At the least, though, i would suggest you find ways to string together posts of shirts that were in series-- if someone goes through and notices that four of these netscape 4.5 t-shirts were printed at the same time in the same run (you usually see several variants of a single t-shirt being released at the same time, now don't you?) there should be a way to link them together as "same series".. you could use the comment areas for all this, but that will get unweildy *quick*. *shrug*
Also: What happens once people who are selling geek t-shirts-- copyleft, etc-- start posting all their new products on this site, essentially using it as free ad space? Is this something you want to encourage? If encouraged, do you want in some way to control it or segregate all the currently-for-sale t-shirts into a seperate section (since sold t-shirts would pretty quickly drown out "historical" t-shirts in volume) or maybe even charge for it?
All of this is, of course, assuming you're expecting for this to be something you seriously continue to update for a long time, and not something you work on for a few weeks, lose interest, and set it to drift (which is probably what would happen to it if I were in charge.. which is why it's a good thing i'm not in charge:) ).
The fact it isn't a given yet is simply all the more reason to blow it out of proportion.
If microsoft tests the water with these vague liscencing announcements and the Community raises hell, microsoft will refrain from actually implementing said liscenses.
If, meanwhile, we all go peacefully back to our homes, Microsoft will interpret that as oh, well the citizens don't really mind that much. And they will go ahead and do it. And after months of predictions of doom coming from the four GNU people in the back who have THE END IS NEAR signs tied around them, MS will probably even be able to pass off their actions as NOBLE-- as oh, look how LENIENT our new liscencing plan is. In certain metaphorical and temporal ways the plan will fuck you up the ass, of course, but compared to what ms COULD have done it will be lenient.. and people will find a way to argue we should all be grateful.
If microsoft wants to stop people illegally pirating their OSes-- and if the issue is as bad as they claim, there are a great many more sane ways they can go about doing that, including through law enforcement agencies.
No form of copy protection ever divised is capable of in the long run raising the difficulty of pirating a product more than it raises the difficult for legitimate users. This kind of thing goes far, far beyond that, by actively making life infinitely easier for crackers than for legitimate users. Legitimate users must worry constantly about getting an id# every time they twiddle with their modem card, or something crucial overheats and screws all the BIOS' internals... crackers can just boot directly into their lightweight plex86 bootstraps, whatever happens, and not have to worry about this kind of thing..
Seems to me that some people are unreasonable and won't give credit or payment where it's due no matter what, but the majority of the people would i think at some level prefer what they feel is the more "moral" course. And like it or not, people will judge the morality of "going around the system" almost wholly on the basis of whether they feel the demands made by the system are reasonable. And so the two most effective ways i can think of for microsoft to make people worry less about the absolute morality of that decision-- do i pirate or go to the store-- are:
Price gouge-- for example, charge several hundred dollars for something, such as the Windows ME Harder edition, that could very easily be called a minor increment on the previous one.
Put a great deal of hassle into the process of going through the system correctly. Make "the right thing" horribly difficult, in procedure as well as monetary cost, both to perform and to internally justify the trouble of. Make it clear to the consumer that you don't trust them, that you consider them lying theiving scum whoever they are. People will to some extent behave how you expect them-- treat them as equal partners, say you have paid for this, you have paid for one copy, do not run one copy at a time, and they will feel happy to do so, whether they do so or not. Tell a person they will be considered scum whether they do it legally or not and they will feel less compelled to do it your way.
Of course, none of this is my problem because i currently neither own nor use a single microsoft product. (I used to use MSIE/mac, but then it mysteriously stopped working, and idiotically the only way you can reinstall the mac os x version of msie is by reinstalling the entire OS.. ah well) That comes with its varied own set of problems, but this is the decision i have made, for many reasons, and at times like this i am glad of it..
Well, a big part of the problem is that the government has made it so difficult, through "export regulations", to distribute ANY heavy-encryption software that ssh is simply not there in almost any real installed user base.
If the government would strop trying to hold back and start trying to encourage encryption among its citizens, and allow the world toward a natural state of widescale encryption regardless of nature of networked data, we would see a great deal less of this kind of problem.
But no, the government is more interested in upholding its "munitions regulations" than it is i n protecting the security and well-being of its own citizens, which is, y'know, technically the governments' job.
The benefit to telnet is that you can wind up at some shitty windows PC anywhere in the world, hit "telnet:" into netscape's Location box, and access your acct.
Thus ISPs have no choice but to allow telnet, as otherwise they will frequently be denying services to their own customers. Stranded at a gas station in pensacola and need to get on irc to talk to someone? Sorry. Even the possibility-- and it is more than possible, it is very likely-- that someone is going to urgently need that telnet access at some point is generally enough to offset the allowing of ssh.
Until CONSUMER INSTALLS of windows containing ssh BY DEFAULT become ubiquitous, isps will not drop their telnet access. Period. As of now, a few linux distributions still exist that don't contain ssh by default!
Note: Mac OS X looks like it will have ssh bundled by default.. the public beta does, anyway...
Anyway, i'm perplexed. I've never ever had an ISP that let you have a shell account. Why the hell was i so unlucky? ^_^
This is nothing. Wait until people are rewriting the hardware abstraction bits of the Mach microkernel to add support for non-standard hardware and then creating unauthorized ports. You can do that, you know-- i've talked to people who have recompiled their darwin kernels and installed them under os x and had it work perfectly. So once people start using this to make os x work on non-apple or non-supported hardware... ooh, that should be interesting to watch.
Which isn't to say apple doesn't secretly want that. Apple has a pretty firm history of denouncing such activity, then turning the blind eye of "unsupported" to a hell of a lot of things you'd think they'd be reacting against. Or writing in things to make such activity easier and then refusing to document them.
No way of knowing what would happen, of course. Apple Computer is the single most unpredictable force on earth.
Alright, this says about half of what i want to say, but here's just a quick little overview which will be ignored and drowned in the same stupid, inane comments that seem to be all slashdot can produce on the subject of apple.
Watching the mac community i have seen it simply split in half between those who want Aqua and those who don't. Those who have discovered aqua works for them are happy and have the luxury of getting to simply label anyone who doesn't agree with them as closed-minded and reactionary; those who don't are simply having to face the reality that for the next God knows how long they will hve to either live with this or screw up their system with half-assed, patchwork third-party hacks. Those in the second group are becoming desperate, and are probably closing themselves to some of the [very few, in my opinion] interface changes in os x that needed to be done. Apple, meanwhile, is (i'm afraid) going to wind up so inundated with DUDE WHY DID YOU GET RID OF TEH AAPPOLE mENU!!! you SUCK!!! That they will probably be somewhat closed off to any real, constructive critisism.
From my end, this is not about resisting change. It's about customizablity, and apple's dogged resistance to allowing it. The mac os, since version 8.5, has had the most advanced theming system ever designed for anything; apple refuses to release the specs on how to design for it. Themes exist based on reverse-engineered specs, and most of them are quirky and/or slow. Apple seems to have some kind of seige mentality.
Aqua is everything some people need. It doesn't fit everyone's needs. It was designed to be as simple as possible, to be straightforward for imac users and not overwhelm people. The problems from go from practical -- that os x, rather than doing things in a different way, simply removes huge blocks of functionality (say, an easy heirarchal interface to common things, or an easy way to knock windows out of the way such as windowshade as opposed to a minimize that turns the window into an postage-stamp white blur eating up the single most precious piece of screen real estate you have) without providing new ways to do it -- to personal -- in my opinion, maximize/minimize and excessively paned interfaces are hideous, clumsy concepts, and this is simply the way i feel and the way i've always felt -- to the simple fact that aqua, with its glaring white lack of contrast between different screen areas, gives me and many other people literal splitting headaches with prolonged use. (the headaches have stopped now that i've installed a far uglier but at least darker theme.) Obviously not everyone will feel these way. Some people will find the way the dock lets them do the practical things efficient, some people have different personal preferences, some people won't have the headache problem.. and i am happy that these people get to use mac os x and are satistfied with it. But apple needs to recognize that people's opinions will differ, and build in the greatest amount of customizability they can...
Or maybe they're forcing everyone to use the aqua interface as a test. Maybe they're preparing at the same time a completely old-school os 9 interface you'll be able to switch between at will with an aqua interface. There is already signs of this; there is a quick, simple command (defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSInterfaceStyle nextstep) that will let you completely convert all cocoa apps to an old-school completely nextstep interface, both in appearance and behavior. (Minimizing even works the old, cool, freeform nextstep-dock way.) Maybe apple is forcing us to use the new interface because they want us to all give it as much of a chance as we can so we can overcome our initial misgivings and give real, informed feedback on it instead of just switching into an OS 9-style shell without giving it a chance, and once the real os x is released they'll suddenly give us all these options that were hidden before. But i don't feel terribly optimistic.
Quick note to Prophet of Doom and Ex Machina: Yer idiots. Both of you. OK, maybe not idiots. But you are at the least uninformed. OS 9 was customizable. There were more wierd interface hacks for every Mac OS i've used since 7 than you can imagine, interface customizations that ran deeper than anything i've seen as part of windows. Maybe the proverbial sheeplike mac user who will accept whatever they put in front of them unquestioningly exists, but i don't know where they are. Most mac users either use it unquestioningly because they *like* it that way-- and if they don't, they switch to windows or download an extention or something. meanwhile: OS X will The "customizable" things here have nothing to do with the bsd code inside. The part we are talking about customizing here is the interface, which is not part of the open source core any more than GNOME is part of the linux kernel. Yes, it is possible now for us to compile our own kernels, which is wonderful. But in the end it isn't the least bit relevant to aqua. In the end it will be more possible to make os x "hackable" than it was for OS 9, but this has nothing to do with anything apple will do and allow and everything to do with simple subtleties of the way Objective C and the apis work, everything to do with nib files and messaging.. basically not becuase apple makes it easier to customize in os x, but because os x makes it easier to go around apple.
In the meantime if i was happy with a good, modern OS with a nice convenient bash shell and a clumsy interface i would have switched to debian a year ago. But i'm staying with os x because i think i can meld it to what i want, and because i believe below aqua it is the best OS ever created...
OK, I submit now for your flames. I suggest you ignore the question of whether i am making any kind of general point, take some one tiny aspect of what i've said which is flawed, blow it up real big and use it as an excuse to dismiss everything else i or any other mac user has ever said and conclude with a personal attack.
f you have a piece of data that can be used as-is to authenticate, then you have what we usually call "plain text passwords".
You are missing the point.
The password would not be hashed to prevent someone taking a single account on the machine; the password would be hashed because many people use the same password in a great many places.
It's just common courtesy; hash it, and you at least have taken a step to prevent the damage from spreading just beyond your site. Normal plaintexting is just irresponsible. Think about, say, slashdot-- for each of these users they have a valid email adress and a valid password. How many people you really think are going to be using different passwords for their slashdot account and the e-mail accounts listed on slashdot..?
I would like to state upfront that this post contains no content; i know nothing on this subject. My reason for posting is that i hope people who do know things will reply.
Anyway: Isn't this exactly the kind of thing Eiffel is meant to solve? I mean, i haven't looked at it closely yet, but Design by Contract was basically designed for the problem of large, poorly organized projects in which the components were written by people who were not totally certain what the other components were doing, right? The have horror stories in which different components make incorrect assumptions about how the other will work and do Bad Things were what lead to eiffel, right?
Would the concepts behind design by contract/eiffel have helped with the problems facing netscape, in that objects would be constrained to doing only those things they should be allowed to do? And at the least, those interactions would be clearly defined-- i mean, wouldn't being forced to think out the components and classes specifically in terms of interaction lead to those interactions at least being in some low level way documented-- because at least the question of how should this fit into this has been asked?
Am i just confused? Please help with any knowledge you may have..
Slashdot Mirror
Let me continue by saying that i think it was a great, great loss that apple chose to drop hypercard the way they did. Had it continued to *grow*, it could have been a disturbingly influential piece of software. Hypercard could have been what Virtual Basic is now, only better. Short bit of obligatory history for the slashbots here: Hypercard was created BECAUSE of visual basic. Remember, Apple historically thought Basic was a nifty language. When Microsoft was first working on VB, apple asked them to create a BASIC R.A.D. tool, and MS agreed.. time passed, VB came out for windows, VB did not come out for mac. Even more time passed. Apple realizes VB is not going to come out for mac, and so an engineer there named Bill Atkinson (AKA "the dhali lama") decided screw microsoft, he was going to create his OWN visual basic.. and it came out beautifully. Hypercard was just SUCH an elegant tool for what it did, ESPECIALLY for the time, in every way, from the way it made the Fields and Buttons feel like the graphical elements they were to the strength and simplicity of the scripting language. Unfortunately with time apple just started neglecting it, in a horrible way. They blatantly refused to add color, they wouldn't take the obvious step of expanding their concept of button icons into real, useful SPRITES, and they let it get SLOW
hell, Cyan was a hypercard company. Myst was a hypercard app, and i think Riven was too.. or had they switched to Director by that point? Blah.
However, at this point.. dude, it's too late. Let the thing die. It had it's day. It's fun as a relic, but.. just.. no. If hypercard still holds some niftiness for you, just drop the damn thing and get Shockwave Flash. It is well worth the $300 or whatever it is (i don't have it). Flash IS what hypercard COULD HAVE BEEN: vector-based, visually rich, POWERFUL, flexible, cross-platform.. hell, just look at Flash and give me one good reason for Hypercard to still exist. And as far as hypercard serving a PURPOSE.. well, at this point the tools apple is serving instead have such power, such potential. I don't know if any of you have ever USED the combination of neXTStep interfacebuilder and objective C, but i honestly doubt it would be any more difficult to get a fifth grader like i was-- if you presented it right, and threw in kinda object library for sprite animation, and integrated that library with I_B-- to deeply grok writing cocoa software to the point where they could do everything they could in hypercard and more without much more difficulty. But oh, i mean, HELL. At this point *QUICKTIME* is as powerful or more so than hypercard. That's right, Quicktime now has sprites and interactivity and filters and everything hypercard had! I was actually for a short time considering writing a program that would convert hypercard stacks into quicktime movies! (I still think this would be an awesome project.)
If we're going to carbonize/update ANYTHING, it should be World Builder. Anyone remember World Builder games? "Mr. Roger's Revenge" and that whole bunch.. i mean like just think like what if they like added support for like color and quicktime movies and hypercard and shit DUDE HOW FUCKING L337 WOULD THAT BE??
(note: i honestly do not think i am being sarcastic about this last bit.)
OK. My apologies.
I was somewhat confused as to the exact functionings of BIND at the time of the making of my post, and those initial comments were more than likely plain wrong. -_- However i think if you just delete everything before the words "despite this", or at least the stuff before "the important thing though" from my post, the rest is, umm, fairly important. Or something.
I would go into a long rant here about my personal belief that unweildiness of Mozilla (yes, i've poked the code) and MSIE and such are due to the fact that they are less than excellently thought out and designed attempts to create unreasonably monolithic applications, NOT because the nature of a web browser DEMANDS it be bloated
http://everydevel.com/
The system is truly impressive as an abstract and astoundingly flexible architecture to let you VERY easily create collaboratively managed websites (assuming you are a relatively experienced perl programmer), and i would just like to suggest that those in the general Slashdot population to whom the system might be useful go take look at it and maybe play with it some. The chances of it being useful to you someday are not bad..
As far as Wu-ftpd goes.. dude. Seriously. Use Proftpd. It's better anyway.
> If you want to make a constructive criticism, then you should have them rewrite the whole OS.
MS doesn't need to *rewrite* this stuff, not *really*, but initiating a large-scale security-oriented code audit of the entire text of their networking and web browser code is something that they could really stand to do, BEFORE they start thinking about windows xp or whatever. They certainly have the resources. How do you propose to get them the initiative? Cuz it's sure as hell not my problemNot a bad idea. Here's a better one. Two words: CODE AUDITS.
The problem with this is that this isn't just a Well, Now It's Over And We Can All Get On With Our Lives type thing. If this were an isolated incident, "Move on" would be good advice indeed; however, Microsoft is developing a literal track record when it comes to security vulnerabilities. Security holes in MSIE, SERIOUS ones, seem to be cropping up on the order of once every couple of months;
i can think of at least four times since MSIE 4 that ways for attackers to affect the contents of an MSIE user's hard drive have been discovered, and i haven't even been watching it closely.
Are you really sure that "forgive and forget" is a good idea?? Do you honestly think that this isn't going to happen again? Do you honestly think if people let this issue rest-- and they will-- that microsoft is going to change its ways on its own? It certainly didn't the LAST couple of times this happened.
Keep in mind these are the people that you're supposed to be buying an attempted NETWORK OS (windows xp) from in a year or so, and they can't pull off security in a passive web browser. XP involves the passing around of remote executable code, doesn't it? Don't you think some SERIOUS pressure needs to be brought to bear on microsoft until they take steps to ensure that the security issues in their browsers are dealt with, COMPLETELY?
I am a Mac OS X user, so i am not *too* worried about this, but i do use MSIE from time to time, and so i for one am extremely alarmed with microsoft's nonchalance with security issues. Microsoft seems to have no interest to bring these "technologies" (activex, for example) that seem to be causing the problems to the macintosh platform, and the Macintosh port of IE shares no codebase with the windows version, so i am not directly threatened; however i still feel somewhat insecure with using MSIE.
I will say quite openly that everything in general does not have what you could call an *emphasis* on factual/informative writings, and i would say that that e2's psychological tendencies to reward the poorly constructed sex jokes written by 14-year-olds and vaguely neglect factual writings *have* probably driven off some people who would have been beneficial to the site (although i would say there have been MINIMAL effects from this). However, i must say i completely completely disagree with what you are saying. What i suspect you are neglecting to realize is that whether e2 is deeply informative or not depends on the *kind* of information you are looking for. If you are looking for scientific or mathematical concepts, then e2 damn near achieves its ultimate goal of providing decent coverage for every single thing you could possibly think of to look for. If you are looking for information on technical things (i.e. computing, programming, UNIX) then e2 is only about halfway there. If you look for serious historical material, you're going to find damn near nothing (a shame, because i think the web-of-definition-links format of e2 would be perfect for history writeups.. but i digress.) E2 has certain places where it is strong and certain places where it is weak, and i for one see the weak places less as a deficiency than i see them as a CHALLENGE, to help e2 grow to encompass those things it neglects now.
I will say this-- if you compare e2 to the more facts-only wiki-like endeavors such as h2g2, you will find that while those site's writings are in general more *in-depth* than the corresponding e2 nodes, e2 has a *much* larger coverage of disparate things. E2 contains general summaries for almost everything there is, but exhaustive coverage of few things. Whether this is a good or a bad thing i cannot say, although i DO know that there are a good number of pockets of extremely esoteric material where e2 just SHINES. E2 may never be as consistent as the moderated h2g2, but i think it's safe to say that you won't see people feeling quite as free to just ramble about pagan holidays and canadian politics and other quirky such things with as little abandon as they do on e2.
The thing you have to keep in mind is that not everyone on Everything has the same goals for the site. The site has no one single use. If everything2 is good at anything, it is leaving people free to slowly mold the site to their own purposes; talk to a bunch of e2 users and you'll find that each one probably has a different vision for where everything2 should go, and it is possible-- given time-- for every single one of those visions to be fulfilled, without interfering with any of the others. You care about the informative aspects; some people on e2 ignore those aspects, and care only about searching for people's life stories. There are people who really just want a community. There are people who just sit around and post collections of elizabethan poetry. The strength of e2, in the end, really lies not in how much content is there *now* but in its flexibility.. because that flexibility in the end gives it the potential to be more than its competitors will ever be.
And one thing you have to give e2: The s/n levels are EXPONENTIALLY higher than they are on slashdot; i would perhaps say, although this varies from part of the site from part of the site, they are even higher than on kuro5hin. And unlike slash or really even kuro, the nature of the site means that you rarely have to wade through crap to get to the good stuff. If you get the hang of looking for things the right way, you can just spend hours clicking through what seems like an endless supply of fascinating material, and learn the entire time, without having to look at a single sex joke.
Taco: fix the god-damn wandermeister!
Thank you.
This is why halfway through yesterday, Fire (the sole *real* method for i, a Mac OS X user, to connect to AIM and thus contact quite a few people i want to talk to..) and Gaim were still blocked from AOL, but Jabber peoples could connect just fine-- only, though, if they were on the jabber.org server, because that was the only one that had been fixed with the entry hack. That's the good thing about this approach, you have one small client and it can adapt to whatever happens. THe problem with this, of course, is that AOL can IP-block the jabber server, meaning everyone is simply screwed.. not sure how to get around that.
So you are saying then that you don't have any documentation?
That is a rather serious allegation, and if true it is an extremely interesting one. Can you give us any documentation or proof of what you are saying, or is this simple speculation?
Regardless of what you consider "moral", there have been products and markets destroyed by piracy (see that Korean word processing company) and there have been products and markets where rampant piracy has had no effect or beneficial effects. The piracy issue is something that the game companies surely need to think about (although i for one would suggest that Sony is taking the wrong tactic of dealing with it.. oh, but that's an argument for another post), but i for one don't feel like listening to anyone talk about the degree to which the game companies are or are not being "hurt" until they can produce some hard figures on what they're saying.
Perhaps the thing you bring up is not a disadvantage, but the reason that the entire system was implemented in the first place?
Why implement a system that causes a huge amount of hassle to all legitimate gamers without appreciably making a dent in piracy? Well, like you said, such add-ons are historically purchased by a vast minority of customers; yet said add-ons only have value if they are owned by the vast majority of customers.
So, all Sony has to do is implement this DiVX style system, thus mafia-style "encouraging" you to get a network adaptor. Think about it. To you, your purchase of that modem adaptor just so you can play use-controlled games was a hassle; to sony, it was $45 revenue. So painfully obvious.
The eternal stupidity vs. malice dichonomy .. I don't know how to spell 'dichonomy'.
Don't laugh, you just know SOMEBODY in the slashdot reading audience saw jawtheshark's post and started writing a oneline perl assembler immediately -_-
(hell.. whenever i can get through to the /.ed ftp server, i'll try to write one myself.. :)
My guess is it's just slashdot effect, and the problem is that the quota for simultaneous anonymous connections is exceeded. Or the sysadmin was so horrified by the number of people hammering on her server that she disabled the anonymous acct. altogether. Wait 24 hours, it'll be ok -_-
It's not like i know much of anthing about anything..
But the way i see it, this (bandwidth allocation) is not an administrative problem-- it is a network problem. Therefore, solving the problem with administrative solutions would be counterproductive and possibly damaging in other subtle ways. Surely there is some usign-network-technology way to ration network resources? I mean, SURELY if there are three or four users taking up disproportionate amounts of network resources such that other people's services are being denied, couldn't the network-- based SOLELY off of technological networking things, NOT off of administrative thigns like disconnectiong accounts or monitoring traffic-- simply give less resources to the people hogging it? There must be some way to put quotas on network usage so that people don't block service to other nearby users. And if said technology does not exist maybe it should be developed... No?
"not my bandwidth in the first place"? well, no, but by working for the company or paying for the college i am in some way subsidising that bandwidth. i for one think that from the college/workplace's standpoint (the Law Enforcement standpoint would of course be wholly different..) i should have the right to do whatever i like with it as long as i am not interfering with other users-- and i believe it should be the network infrastructure's job to prevent me from interfering with other users, not my job to not do things that could possibly interfere.
The point you make is fascinating, but not all of us use our modems to play games. Would the "give poor performance and kill the CPU" argument still hold for those of us who use modems primarily for file transfer, and never run anything more interaction-intensive than IRC?
I.E. you nonmaliciously (meaning, it isn't a DOS, you're actually getting information) ask for large gobs of information off of some site, the way these bots did.. or the way a spambot might.. they call this "denying services", but still, it's a simple the questioner requests, the answerer replies. If it's "unauthorized use".. well, how can you talk about unauthorized use on a public server? How can these things, authorization and to who, be implied on a public internet? Should it be the job of the requester to not go where they clearly shouldn't be, or the job of the requestee to keep them out?
Or look at it in terms of a port scan. I request things from each of these ports, thus figuring out which are open (and thus vulnerable to attack). I've seen people try to procecute this based on "unauthorized usage of machine".. well hold up, who said you had to authorize something? This person is just sending pings to ports, on a machine that by its presence on the internet you have implied responds to traffic. Why on earth would you need "permission" prior to using a system? If so, how would that permission be obtained? .. but of course none of this changes the fact that the port scan is almost always part of a malicious cracking attack.
Or, let's say-- hypothetically-- there was a single-line javascript that, if accessed from a windows NT machine, would cause the kernel to be overwritten by 0s. If you put that up on a web page, would that be "hacking"? You didn't break the machine yourself; you politely ask the machine to break itself, and it complies. Is that your fault?
But then, when you get down to it, all forms of "cracking" could be seen as requests. I request you process this block of information that just happens to cause a buffer overflow... you didn't have to process it, now did you? That last bit doesnt' really sound reasonable.. you have to draw a line somewhere, you have to note somewhere that it's no longer a request but an attack. Somewhere, for the sake of sanity, you have to draw the line, and how do you do that? Intent? How do you prove intent in court? What's the difference between the slashdot effect and a DDOS, at an abstract level?
But still how the hell can you say it's illegal to ask for something because the questioned might give you an answer even though they don't want to...? That's where the law is heading, where it's been heading for awhile, and that's completely absurd.
There is no right answer here, is there?
Cocoa, on the other hand.. cocoa/nextstep is being reimplemented for UNIXlike operating systems in a project called "GNUStep". Go look for it. Large parts of the API are already finished, but it's still buggy and unstable. However, even if this is finished, these will still be simply libraries-- not really anything like Wine. So you'd still need a recompile. Meaning MS would have to purposefully decide to *use* the gnustep libraries *to* port to linux/bsd, something that would be simple to do but which they woud be highly unlikely to do even were the gnustep libraries usable and complete. It would be technically possible for all this to happen, but i don't see it happening unless the GNUStep people make big strides very quickly and the justice department opensources MSOffice (ha!)
It may have less to do with the "modern OS" bit than it does to do with the "modern API" bit. As in, besides the wonderful UNIXish multitasking/threading/protected memory/etc of mac os x, development is expected to take place in something called cocoa (: yellowbox : nextstep), an extremely, extremely advanced object oriented API which you are expected to develop for in java or [sound of heavenly voices] Objective C.
One would imagine that doing a from-the-ground-up rewrite developing in Objective C in a ***fully*** OO environment would enable/encourage/force you to produce a much, much more clean, elegant, and thus higher-quality product than clumsily trying to interface C or C++ against the somewhat inconsistent oldskool Macintosh Toolbox APIs.
That would be my interpretation, anyway. I think if he meant they were rewriting Office in Carbon rather than Cocoa he'd not have said "specifically".
In general, slashcode is still designed as a linear news engine, not something like Everything designed more as a collaborative database being constantly revised in all directions. Still, the way they have geekt set up now, it seems to work just fine, so i wouldn't worry about that.
My only worry, though, is that unless they do some thinking ahead this site is not going to scale at ALL. Not because of shortcomings in slash; just because they haven't put any thought into what happens once this goes from some people sitting around and passing around pictures to a rather large database.
Specifically, every single posting seems way too isolated.
So, here are my humbly worthless two bits of advice to the maintainers of this page, should they read this article:
- You need to modify the database entries for each shirt to contain the date the shirt was printed. You need this. Once you have a whole bunch of shirts and you can't just read the entire archive at a glance anymore, it will become pretty much impossible to understand anything's place within the grand scheme of things. Being able to see shirts listed chronologically from Bell Labs--UNIX Project to Linux 2.4 release instead of listed chronologically by post date-- which might as well be randomly shuffled-- would make things a great deal more interesting, not to mention meaningful. Knowing that "IAUMA" is from 1995 and not 1983 helps. A lot.
- You ought to set up some kind of system where related t-shirts can be identified and linked together. Using slashdot's sections is nice. You may want to expand this, maybe into having each shirt be registered on a hierarchy of vague category->company->product or some such, so all your Power Macintosh G4 t-shirts aren't lumped together in a pile with obscure jokes involving AppleSoft BASIC. This really isn't important, but doing something like this, or some other way to hit a button on an entry and get similar and related t-shirts, would definitely make it much more interesting to browse your site later on. At the least, though, i would suggest you find ways to string together posts of shirts that were in series-- if someone goes through and notices that four of these netscape 4.5 t-shirts were printed at the same time in the same run (you usually see several variants of a single t-shirt being released at the same time, now don't you?) there should be a way to link them together as "same series".. you could use the comment areas for all this, but that will get unweildy *quick*. *shrug*
Also: What happens once people who are selling geek t-shirts-- copyleft, etc-- start posting all their new products on this site, essentially using it as free ad space? Is this something you want to encourage? If encouraged, do you want in some way to control it or segregate all the currently-for-sale t-shirts into a seperate section (since sold t-shirts would pretty quickly drown out "historical" t-shirts in volume) or maybe even charge for it?(by the way-- how hard would it be to rig together a "return random t-shirt entry" thing? that would be nifty :) )
All of this is, of course, assuming you're expecting for this to be something you seriously continue to update for a long time, and not something you work on for a few weeks, lose interest, and set it to drift (which is probably what would happen to it if I were in charge.. which is why it's a good thing i'm not in charge :) ).
So good luck, and fix those colours, boy!!
If microsoft tests the water with these vague liscencing announcements and the Community raises hell, microsoft will refrain from actually implementing said liscenses.
If, meanwhile, we all go peacefully back to our homes, Microsoft will interpret that as oh, well the citizens don't really mind that much. And they will go ahead and do it. And after months of predictions of doom coming from the four GNU people in the back who have THE END IS NEAR signs tied around them, MS will probably even be able to pass off their actions as NOBLE-- as oh, look how LENIENT our new liscencing plan is. In certain metaphorical and temporal ways the plan will fuck you up the ass, of course, but compared to what ms COULD have done it will be lenient.. and people will find a way to argue we should all be grateful.
If microsoft wants to stop people illegally pirating their OSes-- and if the issue is as bad as they claim, there are a great many more sane ways they can go about doing that, including through law enforcement agencies.
No form of copy protection ever divised is capable of in the long run raising the difficulty of pirating a product more than it raises the difficult for legitimate users. This kind of thing goes far, far beyond that, by actively making life infinitely easier for crackers than for legitimate users. Legitimate users must worry constantly about getting an id# every time they twiddle with their modem card, or something crucial overheats and screws all the BIOS' internals... crackers can just boot directly into their lightweight plex86 bootstraps, whatever happens, and not have to worry about this kind of thing..
Seems to me that some people are unreasonable and won't give credit or payment where it's due no matter what, but the majority of the people would i think at some level prefer what they feel is the more "moral" course. And like it or not, people will judge the morality of "going around the system" almost wholly on the basis of whether they feel the demands made by the system are reasonable. And so the two most effective ways i can think of for microsoft to make people worry less about the absolute morality of that decision-- do i pirate or go to the store-- are:
Of course, none of this is my problem because i currently neither own nor use a single microsoft product. (I used to use MSIE/mac, but then it mysteriously stopped working, and idiotically the only way you can reinstall the mac os x version of msie is by reinstalling the entire OS.. ah well) That comes with its varied own set of problems, but this is the decision i have made, for many reasons, and at times like this i am glad of it..
Well, a big part of the problem is that the government has made it so difficult, through "export regulations", to distribute ANY heavy-encryption software that ssh is simply not there in almost any real installed user base.
If the government would strop trying to hold back and start trying to encourage encryption among its citizens, and allow the world toward a natural state of widescale encryption regardless of nature of networked data, we would see a great deal less of this kind of problem.
But no, the government is more interested in upholding its "munitions regulations" than it is i n protecting the security and well-being of its own citizens, which is, y'know, technically the governments' job.
The benefit to telnet is that you can wind up at some shitty windows PC anywhere in the world, hit "telnet:" into netscape's Location box, and access your acct.
Thus ISPs have no choice but to allow telnet, as otherwise they will frequently be denying services to their own customers. Stranded at a gas station in pensacola and need to get on irc to talk to someone? Sorry. Even the possibility-- and it is more than possible, it is very likely-- that someone is going to urgently need that telnet access at some point is generally enough to offset the allowing of ssh.
Until CONSUMER INSTALLS of windows containing ssh BY DEFAULT become ubiquitous, isps will not drop their telnet access. Period. As of now, a few linux distributions still exist that don't contain ssh by default!
Note: Mac OS X looks like it will have ssh bundled by default.. the public beta does, anyway...
Anyway, i'm perplexed. I've never ever had an ISP that let you have a shell account. Why the hell was i so unlucky? ^_^
This is nothing. Wait until people are rewriting the hardware abstraction bits of the Mach microkernel to add support for non-standard hardware and then creating unauthorized ports. You can do that, you know-- i've talked to people who have recompiled their darwin kernels and installed them under os x and had it work perfectly. So once people start using this to make os x work on non-apple or non-supported hardware... ooh, that should be interesting to watch.
Which isn't to say apple doesn't secretly want that. Apple has a pretty firm history of denouncing such activity, then turning the blind eye of "unsupported" to a hell of a lot of things you'd think they'd be reacting against. Or writing in things to make such activity easier and then refusing to document them.
No way of knowing what would happen, of course. Apple Computer is the single most unpredictable force on earth.
Watching the mac community i have seen it simply split in half between those who want Aqua and those who don't. Those who have discovered aqua works for them are happy and have the luxury of getting to simply label anyone who doesn't agree with them as closed-minded and reactionary; those who don't are simply having to face the reality that for the next God knows how long they will hve to either live with this or screw up their system with half-assed, patchwork third-party hacks. Those in the second group are becoming desperate, and are probably closing themselves to some of the [very few, in my opinion] interface changes in os x that needed to be done. Apple, meanwhile, is (i'm afraid) going to wind up so inundated with DUDE WHY DID YOU GET RID OF TEH AAPPOLE mENU!!! you SUCK!!! That they will probably be somewhat closed off to any real, constructive critisism.
From my end, this is not about resisting change. It's about customizablity, and apple's dogged resistance to allowing it. The mac os, since version 8.5, has had the most advanced theming system ever designed for anything; apple refuses to release the specs on how to design for it. Themes exist based on reverse-engineered specs, and most of them are quirky and/or slow. Apple seems to have some kind of seige mentality.
Aqua is everything some people need. It doesn't fit everyone's needs. It was designed to be as simple as possible, to be straightforward for imac users and not overwhelm people. The problems from go from practical -- that os x, rather than doing things in a different way, simply removes huge blocks of functionality (say, an easy heirarchal interface to common things, or an easy way to knock windows out of the way such as windowshade as opposed to a minimize that turns the window into an postage-stamp white blur eating up the single most precious piece of screen real estate you have) without providing new ways to do it -- to personal -- in my opinion, maximize/minimize and excessively paned interfaces are hideous, clumsy concepts, and this is simply the way i feel and the way i've always felt -- to the simple fact that aqua, with its glaring white lack of contrast between different screen areas, gives me and many other people literal splitting headaches with prolonged use. (the headaches have stopped now that i've installed a far uglier but at least darker theme.) Obviously not everyone will feel these way. Some people will find the way the dock lets them do the practical things efficient, some people have different personal preferences, some people won't have the headache problem.. and i am happy that these people get to use mac os x and are satistfied with it. But apple needs to recognize that people's opinions will differ, and build in the greatest amount of customizability they can...
Or maybe they're forcing everyone to use the aqua interface as a test. Maybe they're preparing at the same time a completely old-school os 9 interface you'll be able to switch between at will with an aqua interface. There is already signs of this; there is a quick, simple command (defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSInterfaceStyle nextstep) that will let you completely convert all cocoa apps to an old-school completely nextstep interface, both in appearance and behavior. (Minimizing even works the old, cool, freeform nextstep-dock way.) Maybe apple is forcing us to use the new interface because they want us to all give it as much of a chance as we can so we can overcome our initial misgivings and give real, informed feedback on it instead of just switching into an OS 9-style shell without giving it a chance, and once the real os x is released they'll suddenly give us all these options that were hidden before. But i don't feel terribly optimistic.
Quick note to Prophet of Doom and Ex Machina: Yer idiots. Both of you. OK, maybe not idiots. But you are at the least uninformed. OS 9 was customizable. There were more wierd interface hacks for every Mac OS i've used since 7 than you can imagine, interface customizations that ran deeper than anything i've seen as part of windows. Maybe the proverbial sheeplike mac user who will accept whatever they put in front of them unquestioningly exists, but i don't know where they are. Most mac users either use it unquestioningly because they *like* it that way-- and if they don't, they switch to windows or download an extention or something. meanwhile: OS X will The "customizable" things here have nothing to do with the bsd code inside. The part we are talking about customizing here is the interface, which is not part of the open source core any more than GNOME is part of the linux kernel. Yes, it is possible now for us to compile our own kernels, which is wonderful. But in the end it isn't the least bit relevant to aqua. In the end it will be more possible to make os x "hackable" than it was for OS 9, but this has nothing to do with anything apple will do and allow and everything to do with simple subtleties of the way Objective C and the apis work, everything to do with nib files and messaging.. basically not becuase apple makes it easier to customize in os x, but because os x makes it easier to go around apple.
In the meantime if i was happy with a good, modern OS with a nice convenient bash shell and a clumsy interface i would have switched to debian a year ago. But i'm staying with os x because i think i can meld it to what i want, and because i believe below aqua it is the best OS ever created...
OK, I submit now for your flames. I suggest you ignore the question of whether i am making any kind of general point, take some one tiny aspect of what i've said which is flawed, blow it up real big and use it as an excuse to dismiss everything else i or any other mac user has ever said and conclude with a personal attack.
-mr. cranky
i hate slashdot
The password would not be hashed to prevent someone taking a single account on the machine; the password would be hashed because many people use the same password in a great many places.
It's just common courtesy; hash it, and you at least have taken a step to prevent the damage from spreading just beyond your site. Normal plaintexting is just irresponsible. Think about, say, slashdot-- for each of these users they have a valid email adress and a valid password. How many people you really think are going to be using different passwords for their slashdot account and the e-mail accounts listed on slashdot..?
Anyway: Isn't this exactly the kind of thing Eiffel is meant to solve? I mean, i haven't looked at it closely yet, but Design by Contract was basically designed for the problem of large, poorly organized projects in which the components were written by people who were not totally certain what the other components were doing, right? The have horror stories in which different components make incorrect assumptions about how the other will work and do Bad Things were what lead to eiffel, right?
Would the concepts behind design by contract/eiffel have helped with the problems facing netscape, in that objects would be constrained to doing only those things they should be allowed to do? And at the least, those interactions would be clearly defined-- i mean, wouldn't being forced to think out the components and classes specifically in terms of interaction lead to those interactions at least being in some low level way documented-- because at least the question of how should this fit into this has been asked?
Am i just confused? Please help with any knowledge you may have..