A comment posted by an Australian gentleman a day or two ago indictated that one day he was unable to access any US site. The links were down or the routing got messed up or something, it doesn't matter what, prevented communications between Australia and the US. He poked at the net with some blunt tools and found that access to Europe had been rerouted through South Africa and that Asia was accessible directly. It's interesting to note that despite the fact that traffic could have been routed through South Africa and Europe to get to the US, it wasn't. Please don't read too much into that, it was probably just an issue of timing, but it is interesting to note the limits of dynamic routing have grown to almost include the entire Earth.
It's been said before that the Internet routes around censorship... apparently it can route around the United States, too. It's also been said before that the foreign policy of the United States should be to "Walk softly, and carry a big stick." So much for walking softly.
Besides, the business wouldn't be worth anything after they were finished.
That's not the point. The point is that Havenco exists to provide political protection from governments that are uneasy about certain types of information being available or simply existing at all. The United Kingdom, or any other nation, may not benefit from conquering Sealand. However, that a government might be threatened, or perceive a threat from Sealand's and Havenco's existence might be reason enough to justify the military expenditure.
Ok, I hate participating in offtopic threads, but I've got something to say in this one...
Stallman's got some great ideas about software and society and their role together. He is very particular about how those ideas are articulated and won't hesitate to correct someone's speech if they "slip up" on a fine point or two. Unfortunately, and I've been party to this behavior personally, he is completely intractible. Sure most of us in this forum agree with most of his broad conclusions about open source software, it's the details and those "other points he tries to push" that usually separate us from him. And once he has made up his mind about a particular issue, there's no changing it, no matter how long and how hard one might push. The man has absolutely no ability to listen to and consider other people's thoughts.
Consider the open source vs free software debate. Everyone here knows that these terms refer to the same thing. OSI, who tried to trademark "open source" has a detailed set of criteria for determining what is open source and what isn't. By and large, free software is open souce and vice versa by OSI's own definition. Stallman argued that the open source label presented the idea in the wrong way, that people won't understand that there is freedom associated with open source software that isn't available with non open source software. The counterargument was roughly that free software is a fine label, but after 15 years, there was only a fraction of the interest in the software that insued within a few months after the term open source was coined. The fact remains that of all the users who might be using free software in say, ten years, only a small proportion will recognize the difference between it and proprietary software, let alone care about the details the Stallman is trying to push.
Another such issue is GNU/Linux. I feel that the root of this is approximately the same, that in the long run, no one will care who's writing the software except a small minority. Honestly, do you know who wrote the CORBA ORB in Netscape's Java implementation? If you do, do you know anyone else who knows and do you care that it was Borland? Those who do care about the authorship of their software will find out who wrote it, and they will find out that a great deal of their software comes from GNU. Whether or not they know exactly which programs on their system are GNU programs is a separate question, but if those people want to find out who wrote gcc, they'll find that information. No one is hiding it.
The issue I emailed him about was patent licensing in the free software community. He and I wrote each other a total of about four messages, and the gist of each of his replies was, "No, we're going to do it this way..." There was no discussion. No consideration. He had already made up his mind and his reply defaulted to no.
This is all very similar to what happened in 1776 in Philadelphia. A bunch of pissed off merchants and land owners got together and collectively said these things in this order:
"Fuck the Brits, we're running the show around here."
"We hate kings, so scrap that idea. Forget taxes without representation. Forget...." etc, etc.
"Ok, now what? Umm... there's gonna be a president that the people pick and there's gonna be a congress..."
You get the idea.
In order to "hijack the net back" what would you need to do?
First of all, let everyone know that we're in charge now. Get the names back. That means a group of people, probably academics or researchers or curious other parties, with access to some significant bandwidth would have to set up a loose network of root servers. Then publicize and get lots of people to start using those root servers. The difficult part is the next step... getting people to stop using the existing roots.
After you get the names back... Revert to pristine protocols, pristine policies, etc. This warrants an explanation... Regardless of each of our personal opinions about good and bad, I think we can all agree that certain extensions to various protocols are controversial. For instance cookies. There are lots of widely varying opinions about cookies, informed and uninformed and everything in between. And it's not so much the technology, but what companies like DoubleClick are trying or have tried to do with them. So the "Geek Congress" convenes somewhere and what all the shitty standards are and then scraps those that are.
Next the net has to be taken in a new direction. The corporate interests have taken all things Internet in a certain direction for, I dunno, two or three years now? After we take things back and clean them up, we take the net in a new direction. We write rules like (this is just an example), Slashdot elects one representative, UF elects one, ADM elects one, etc. and then we've got this body of rulemakers who are basicly running the net. And what is their basis of power? Two things: netizens elected them and they control the guts (root servers, standards bodies).
That last one, ELF, sounds like a area that needs some research. I imagine it would be possible to use the ocean itself as a medium for digital transmission. The frequencies and digital encoding you'd have to use would probably limit the bandwidth to something pretty low and there would have to be receivers near shore with, umm, "land"-based connectivity, but it sounds cheap enough.
If C++ is all you've used as far as OOP goes then there's a whole world you haven't explored. Most of the problems with C++ derive from the fact that it is a superset of a procedural language with wild features like templates and such that just turn into a mess if you decide to use them. A language like Java or Python that does OOP nicely is fine to start with. Procedural programming is useful, but not for a lot of things one would expect a kid would want to do (think lots of visuals in a nice looking GUI).
No, it's peer to peer. As in, you connect to the server and ask it who has "x" and the server says where "x" can be had. Then your client connects to somebody else's client and gets "x".
They probably did one of a few things in order of probability:
1) They logged on as regular Napster users and searched for Metallica songs to see who's trading them.
2) They worked with Napster to actually dig through their online database of who's got what to see who's got Metallica songs.
3) They worked with Napster to watch searches to see who was searching for Metallica songs.
Working with Napster? I really REALLY doubt that. When you search for songs, you get a list back from the server of places you can get them. On the list is also the name of the user who's running each source. If I were NetPD, that's what I would have done.
My mind is changed. This man and his band obviously have a lot of obstacles in front of them and it's unfortunate that companies like Napster have put those obstacles in place, because the rights to those songs do belong to the band.
However, he consistently refers to songs as being "on the service" and uses an analogy to book-of-the-month clubs. I think he's still confused about where these songs are coming from. If I read him correctly(1), I think he believes that Napster, Inc. collects songs and houses them and makes them available to Napster users. If this were the case, then his comments about Napster representatives' smirks and (ha ha ha)s are totally justified. Unfortunately, though his intentions and points are all perfectly valid, the misunderstanding about the origin of the songs on Napster is leading him into the wrong battle. It is the Napster users who put songs on Napster, not Napster, Inc. and Napster, Inc. is under no legal obligation to account for or correct the actions of its users. I respect Lars's and Metallica's choice not to participate in Napster, but he and Metallica must also respect Napster's choice not to get involved in the legality of it's users' actions.
On the other hand, does Napster have a moral obligation to defend Metallica's copyright? Napster knows that infringement is going on (how can they not?), and has been asked to make a simple modification to their servers, that is, don't allow Metallica's songs to appear in search results. Refusing to make this change is perfectly within their legal right, but morally it is a big "fuck you" to Metallica or anyone else who has a vested interest in the songs users put on Napster and Lars is justified in his anger. Legally, however, there is no basis on which to attack Napster.
As for other technology like Gnutella (I'm not personally familiar with Freenet), Lars is still justified in being upset. His comment about waiting for the companies involved to solidify and then sue them just like Napster is very uninformed. There is no company at the heart of Gnutella and if there was, the operation of Gnutella net would not depend on its continuing existence. Metallica will still need to find and defend itself against individuals, just as it should in the Napster case.
(1) Please, if anyone reads him differently, or (Lars:) if you read this, please clarify how you understand the operations of Napster.
Well, since one can generally spray pirates off your rig with a nice powerful fire hose and most rigs are equipped with such hoses (they drill oil, it's a hazard) I don't think it's a problem.
Can anyone suggest a good working Gnutella client for Linux that can share files? If I can find one I'll go back to those posts in question, make a local copy and put the Kerberos spec on Gnutella net.
In the meantime, keep searching for ms-kerberos-spec.txt on Gnutella.
If the law doesn't provide protection, it seems like there will be less released
Maybe so, but is it really worth it? The DMCA may have subdued Microsoft's fears enough to release the specs, but the DMCA is a terrible terrible law with provisions that are inherently at odds with constitutional rights. As #705 by Nickbot suggests, the only way to get this law into court so that a judge can say it's unconstitutional is to break it.
If Andover's got the guts, I suggest they resist Microsoft, seek out the help of the ACLU and EFF, and take this as far as it has to go to get the DMCA overturned.
I would personally like to thank Microsoft for pointing out exactly which comments contain copies of the document in question and which ones have links to copies of the document. It saved me so much time, time that I would have spent wading through comments but instead put toward my homework and ultimately my Bachelor's. So not only would I like to thank Microsoft for helping me find their document, I would like to thank Microsoft for helping me get my bachelor's degree. Thanks Microsoft!
No the bug (or feature... whatever) did not cause billions of lost files. That is not the point. The point is that this piece of software (Outlook on the Win* platform) is implemented without adequate constraints and allowed billions of lost files. To say that oxygen allowed WW2 is absurd, granted, but to say unconstrained VB scripting facilities and unconstrained file access allowed the virus to do its business, that's a perfectly valid argument. Would python scripting in some Linux mail client allow a virus to delete files? Of course it would, but only those in your home directory and not any programs/configs/other users' data that are not "yours" on a Linux or any Unix system. Arguably, these are the ones you value the most, since you can replace everything else from some external source, but it still highlights the major shortcoming of Outlook/Windows 9?. That is, Windows allows a program run by any user to do anything to any part of the system. Outlook extends this by allowing an email from anywhere to do anything that Outlook itself is allowed to do. There was another post by someone else about leaving your window open on vacation and not blaming yourself for the consequences... a very apt comparison to your own logic about this not being Microsoft's fault, indeed.
Now, IIRC, Win 3.1 had a virus checker. Maybe it was separate from Windows and the PC maker included it on mine, maybe it was really a tool that MS bundled with Windows. Either way, what the fuck happened to the MS virus scanner? It seems perfectly reasonable to me that Microsoft is better equipped than anyone to protect against the potential pitfalls of their products, yet every virus scanner that they list here is a third party.
One of two things (that I can think of in the few moments that I am spending with this comment) caused MS to drop MS Anitvirus. Make that three.
Bone-headed managers at MS care about things other than security in their products and forced MS engineers/programmers/drones to work on Features (Not Bugs) (tm).
Bone-headed managers at MS couldn't justify the expense of maintaining the tool when so few customers used it.
Bone-headed managers at MS are convinced that MS engineers/programmers/drones actually do have a handle on the full import and far-reaching affects of every last line of code, and therefore each bug (in their mind) is The Last Bug.
(I'm up to four now) Bone-headed managers at MS made deals with third parties not to produce an antivirus tool in exchange for some easy money from said third parties. Note to DoJ: are you getting all this?
(five) Bone-headed managers at MS really do think these things are Features (Not Bugs)(tm), and therefore do not believe the phrase, "It's a feature, not a bug." is an excuse, but a real explanation.
So, out of these five choices, which one is not to blame on MS management? I'm sure there are other explanations. I'm am also very confident that any other explanation would involve bone-headed managers, since rampant bone-headedness anywhere else in the company is ultimately the fault of bone-headed managers (for not fixing the problem of bone-headedness).
This is not a problem that will go away. It is also not a problem that anyone can solve, because products will not get better until people start looking for alternatives, which they may, but don't hold your breath because (average) people don't care enough about this problem to look for an alternative. The solution to this problem in the average mind is not a secure replacement, but a band-aid that will cover it up. It comes from the notion that certain software can fix other software, the same way a certain part may fix a broken car or a certain glue may fix a broken vase. What people don't understand is that this principle doesn't apply to software. It's either good or bad and no other magic program exists that can "fix" any flaws.
This situation will not change for a long time... about a generation or so. It won't be until then that enough people understand this idea about software, or really even understand what software is. Everyone here gets it, the same way all the grease monkeys who hung out at the corner garage got internal combustion in the 1930's. It wasn't for another couple of decades that it occurred to most people that exploding gas moves some parts in the engine to make other parts spin, which spins the wheels, which moves the car. Given the rate of change in technology, I wouldn't be surprised if it took fifty years before J. Random Consumer finally knew that a program is basically a long line of data, and that there's a circuit that does what the data says to do to other data.
Is MS to blame for the security problems in its products? Yes, absolutely.
Are average people to blame for choosing that software? No. Or at least not to the extent you and I who understand the issues would be to blame for it.
I thought the FBI once said, "If there's going to be a Big Brother in this country, it's going to be us. It's going to be the FBI." Real had better start playing nice or they'll get their Eurasian asses whooped cause between them and the FBI, there's only one that can ask the military for backup.
Ahem...
Well, revisionism does rear its ugly head now and then but it doesn't really amount to much when the culprit is caught. What I want to know is how to make a stink about it. No offense, but a "by the way" type article posted in the backwaters of/. isn't exactly a media coup.
It was on the main page... Unfortunately, however, I've seen quite of few articles like this appear on the main page and then slip off into the oblivion of the "Truly Interested Parties Only" section, which is apparently read by about 10 people.
There's really no room for discussion on this topic is there? Since it's obvious that UCITA doesn't do squat to protect consumers and has everything to do with protecting businesses, who here has anything to say except "This law sucks."
What are the chances that this thing will stand up in court, anyway? Let me think... shrinkwrap licenses and friends designed to make reviewing the license incredibly inconvenient or impossible before accepting them. Last time I checked, judges are consumers, not businesses, and I just can't see any of them upholding this crap knowing that they too will have to agree to terms they can't see.
...there's no definitve proof that Darwin was right. After all, his theories on natural selection turned out to be partially incorrect.
As did Newton's theories of motion. Partially, but not enough to make them useless. We can't just expect our legislators to understand relativity or evolution, though. After all, the only education they ever got was in school.:)
I wrote some programs (they're pretty much worthless, but they do exist) half a year ago and uploaded them to my geocities thingy as tarballs under GPL. I don't believe they actually have any control over them, either. They've got a copyright in my name plastered all over every source file and explicit licensing terms included (in the cannonical fashion). What's a fat ass company to do?
JBuilder (by Bor^H^H^HIns^H^H^HBorland) is 80% Java according to the hard copy. The remaining 20% is probably just the two VMs. FreeBuilder (defunct?) is 100% Java _and_ GPL'd.
What the hell is it with these god damn curvy, "sleek" cases? I basically treat my box like a piece of furniture, there's stuff stacked on it, I put it on the bookshelf, I stack books against it (mindfull of the ventilation holes, of course). Can't do that as nicely with a lot of new cases. It's not hard to find a nice rectanglular x by y by z case, but these odd shaped ones, I think, have got to go.
Slashdot Mirror
Allow me to retort...
A comment posted by an Australian gentleman a day or two ago indictated that one day he was unable to access any US site. The links were down or the routing got messed up or something, it doesn't matter what, prevented communications between Australia and the US. He poked at the net with some blunt tools and found that access to Europe had been rerouted through South Africa and that Asia was accessible directly. It's interesting to note that despite the fact that traffic could have been routed through South Africa and Europe to get to the US, it wasn't. Please don't read too much into that, it was probably just an issue of timing, but it is interesting to note the limits of dynamic routing have grown to almost include the entire Earth.
It's been said before that the Internet routes around censorship... apparently it can route around the United States, too. It's also been said before that the foreign policy of the United States should be to "Walk softly, and carry a big stick." So much for walking softly.
Besides, the business wouldn't be worth anything after they were finished.
That's not the point. The point is that Havenco exists to provide political protection from governments that are uneasy about certain types of information being available or simply existing at all. The United Kingdom, or any other nation, may not benefit from conquering Sealand. However, that a government might be threatened, or perceive a threat from Sealand's and Havenco's existence might be reason enough to justify the military expenditure.
Ok, I hate participating in offtopic threads, but I've got something to say in this one...
..." There was no discussion. No consideration. He had already made up his mind and his reply defaulted to no.
Stallman's got some great ideas about software and society and their role together. He is very particular about how those ideas are articulated and won't hesitate to correct someone's speech if they "slip up" on a fine point or two. Unfortunately, and I've been party to this behavior personally, he is completely intractible. Sure most of us in this forum agree with most of his broad conclusions about open source software, it's the details and those "other points he tries to push" that usually separate us from him. And once he has made up his mind about a particular issue, there's no changing it, no matter how long and how hard one might push. The man has absolutely no ability to listen to and consider other people's thoughts.
Consider the open source vs free software debate. Everyone here knows that these terms refer to the same thing. OSI, who tried to trademark "open source" has a detailed set of criteria for determining what is open source and what isn't. By and large, free software is open souce and vice versa by OSI's own definition. Stallman argued that the open source label presented the idea in the wrong way, that people won't understand that there is freedom associated with open source software that isn't available with non open source software. The counterargument was roughly that free software is a fine label, but after 15 years, there was only a fraction of the interest in the software that insued within a few months after the term open source was coined. The fact remains that of all the users who might be using free software in say, ten years, only a small proportion will recognize the difference between it and proprietary software, let alone care about the details the Stallman is trying to push.
Another such issue is GNU/Linux. I feel that the root of this is approximately the same, that in the long run, no one will care who's writing the software except a small minority. Honestly, do you know who wrote the CORBA ORB in Netscape's Java implementation? If you do, do you know anyone else who knows and do you care that it was Borland? Those who do care about the authorship of their software will find out who wrote it, and they will find out that a great deal of their software comes from GNU. Whether or not they know exactly which programs on their system are GNU programs is a separate question, but if those people want to find out who wrote gcc, they'll find that information. No one is hiding it.
The issue I emailed him about was patent licensing in the free software community. He and I wrote each other a total of about four messages, and the gist of each of his replies was, "No, we're going to do it this way
This is all very similar to what happened in 1776 in Philadelphia. A bunch of pissed off merchants and land owners got together and collectively said these things in this order:
...." etc, etc.
..."
"Fuck the Brits, we're running the show around here."
"We hate kings, so scrap that idea. Forget taxes without representation. Forget
"Ok, now what? Umm... there's gonna be a president that the people pick and there's gonna be a congress
You get the idea.
In order to "hijack the net back" what would you need to do?
First of all, let everyone know that we're in charge now. Get the names back. That means a group of people, probably academics or researchers or curious other parties, with access to some significant bandwidth would have to set up a loose network of root servers. Then publicize and get lots of people to start using those root servers. The difficult part is the next step... getting people to stop using the existing roots.
After you get the names back... Revert to pristine protocols, pristine policies, etc. This warrants an explanation... Regardless of each of our personal opinions about good and bad, I think we can all agree that certain extensions to various protocols are controversial. For instance cookies. There are lots of widely varying opinions about cookies, informed and uninformed and everything in between. And it's not so much the technology, but what companies like DoubleClick are trying or have tried to do with them. So the "Geek Congress" convenes somewhere and what all the shitty standards are and then scraps those that are.
Next the net has to be taken in a new direction. The corporate interests have taken all things Internet in a certain direction for, I dunno, two or three years now? After we take things back and clean them up, we take the net in a new direction. We write rules like (this is just an example), Slashdot elects one representative, UF elects one, ADM elects one, etc. and then we've got this body of rulemakers who are basicly running the net. And what is their basis of power? Two things: netizens elected them and they control the guts (root servers, standards bodies).
ELF/VLF communication is not restricted to EM technology. Think about it...
ELF: Extremely Low Frequency
VLF: Very Low Frequency
They refer to wave carriers, not electromagnetic carriers specificly. Audio is a wave carrier, too.
That last one, ELF, sounds like a area that needs some research. I imagine it would be possible to use the ocean itself as a medium for digital
transmission. The frequencies and digital encoding you'd have to use would probably limit the bandwidth to something pretty low and there would have to be receivers near shore with, umm, "land"-based connectivity, but it sounds cheap enough.
If C++ is all you've used as far as OOP goes then there's a whole world you haven't explored. Most of the problems with C++ derive from the fact that it is a superset of a procedural language with wild features like templates and such that just turn into a mess if you decide to use them. A language like Java or Python that does OOP nicely is fine to start with. Procedural programming is useful, but not for a lot of things one would expect a kid would want to do (think lots of visuals in a nice looking GUI).
No, it's peer to peer. As in, you connect to the server and ask it who has "x" and the server says where "x" can be had. Then your client connects to somebody else's client and gets "x".
They probably did one of a few things in order of probability:
1) They logged on as regular Napster users and searched for Metallica songs to see who's trading them.
2) They worked with Napster to actually dig through their online database of who's got what to see who's got Metallica songs.
3) They worked with Napster to watch searches to see who was searching for Metallica songs.
Working with Napster? I really REALLY doubt that. When you search for songs, you get a list back from the server of places you can get them. On the list is also the name of the user who's running each source. If I were NetPD, that's what I would have done.
My mind is changed. This man and his band obviously have a lot of obstacles in front of them and it's unfortunate that companies like Napster have put those obstacles in place, because the rights to those songs do belong to the band.
However, he consistently refers to songs as being "on the service" and uses an analogy to book-of-the-month clubs. I think he's still confused about where these songs are coming from. If I read him correctly(1), I think he believes that Napster, Inc. collects songs and houses them and makes them available to Napster users. If this were the case, then his comments about Napster representatives' smirks and (ha ha ha)s are totally justified. Unfortunately, though his intentions and points are all perfectly valid, the misunderstanding about the origin of the songs on Napster is leading him into the wrong battle. It is the Napster users who put songs on Napster, not Napster, Inc. and Napster, Inc. is under no legal obligation to account for or correct the actions of its users. I respect Lars's and Metallica's choice not to participate in Napster, but he and Metallica must also respect Napster's choice not to get involved in the legality of it's users' actions.
On the other hand, does Napster have a moral obligation to defend Metallica's copyright? Napster knows that infringement is going on (how can they not?), and has been asked to make a simple modification to their servers, that is, don't allow Metallica's songs to appear in search results. Refusing to make this change is perfectly within their legal right, but morally it is a big "fuck you" to Metallica or anyone else who has a vested interest in the songs users put on Napster and Lars is justified in his anger. Legally, however, there is no basis on which to attack Napster.
As for other technology like Gnutella (I'm not personally familiar with Freenet), Lars is still justified in being upset. His comment about waiting for the companies involved to solidify and then sue them just like Napster is very uninformed. There is no company at the heart of Gnutella and if there was, the operation of Gnutella net would not depend on its continuing existence. Metallica will still need to find and defend itself against individuals, just as it should in the Napster case.
(1) Please, if anyone reads him differently, or (Lars:) if you read this, please clarify how you understand the operations of Napster.
Well, since one can generally spray pirates off your rig with a nice powerful fire hose and most rigs are equipped with such hoses (they drill oil, it's a hazard) I don't think it's a problem.
Can anyone suggest a good working Gnutella client for Linux that can share files? If I can find one I'll go back to those posts in question, make a local copy and put the Kerberos spec on Gnutella net.
In the meantime, keep searching for ms-kerberos-spec.txt on Gnutella.
Maybe so, but is it really worth it? The DMCA may have subdued Microsoft's fears enough to release the specs, but the DMCA is a terrible terrible law with provisions that are inherently at odds with constitutional rights. As #705 by Nickbot suggests, the only way to get this law into court so that a judge can say it's unconstitutional is to break it.
If Andover's got the guts, I suggest they resist Microsoft, seek out the help of the ACLU and EFF, and take this as far as it has to go to get the DMCA overturned.
I would personally like to thank Microsoft for pointing out exactly which comments contain copies of the document in question and which ones have links to copies of the document. It saved me so much time, time that I would have spent wading through comments but instead put toward my homework and ultimately my Bachelor's. So not only would I like to thank Microsoft for helping me find their document, I would like to thank Microsoft for helping me get my bachelor's degree. Thanks Microsoft!
Ok, so instead of deciding ahead of time, they just use PROM in that id field and then burn in the value once they've tested it. Good enough?
No the bug (or feature... whatever) did not cause billions of lost files. That is not the point. The point is that this piece of software (Outlook on the Win* platform) is implemented without adequate constraints and allowed billions of lost files. To say that oxygen allowed WW2 is absurd, granted, but to say unconstrained VB scripting facilities and unconstrained file access allowed the virus to do its business, that's a perfectly valid argument. Would python scripting in some Linux mail client allow a virus to delete files? Of course it would, but only those in your home directory and not any programs/configs/other users' data that are not "yours" on a Linux or any Unix system. Arguably, these are the ones you value the most, since you can replace everything else from some external source, but it still highlights the major shortcoming of Outlook/Windows 9?. That is, Windows allows a program run by any user to do anything to any part of the system. Outlook extends this by allowing an email from anywhere to do anything that Outlook itself is allowed to do. There was another post by someone else about leaving your window open on vacation and not blaming yourself for the consequences... a very apt comparison to your own logic about this not being Microsoft's fault, indeed.
Now, IIRC, Win 3.1 had a virus checker. Maybe it was separate from Windows and the PC maker included it on mine, maybe it was really a tool that MS bundled with Windows. Either way, what the fuck happened to the MS virus scanner? It seems perfectly reasonable to me that Microsoft is better equipped than anyone to protect against the potential pitfalls of their products, yet every virus scanner that they list here is a third party.
One of two things (that I can think of in the few moments that I am spending with this comment) caused MS to drop MS Anitvirus. Make that three.
- Bone-headed managers at MS care about things other than security in their products and forced MS engineers/programmers/drones to work on Features (Not Bugs) (tm).
- Bone-headed managers at MS couldn't justify the expense of maintaining the tool when so few customers used it.
- Bone-headed managers at MS are convinced that MS engineers/programmers/drones actually do have a handle on the full import and far-reaching affects of every last line of code, and therefore each bug (in their mind) is The Last Bug.
- (I'm up to four now) Bone-headed managers at MS made deals with third parties not to produce an antivirus tool in exchange for some easy money from said third parties. Note to DoJ: are you getting all this?
- (five) Bone-headed managers at MS really do think these things are Features (Not Bugs)(tm), and therefore do not believe the phrase, "It's a feature, not a bug." is an excuse, but a real explanation.
So, out of these five choices, which one is not to blame on MS management? I'm sure there are other explanations. I'm am also very confident that any other explanation would involve bone-headed managers, since rampant bone-headedness anywhere else in the company is ultimately the fault of bone-headed managers (for not fixing the problem of bone-headedness).This is not a problem that will go away. It is also not a problem that anyone can solve, because products will not get better until people start looking for alternatives, which they may, but don't hold your breath because (average) people don't care enough about this problem to look for an alternative. The solution to this problem in the average mind is not a secure replacement, but a band-aid that will cover it up. It comes from the notion that certain software can fix other software, the same way a certain part may fix a broken car or a certain glue may fix a broken vase. What people don't understand is that this principle doesn't apply to software. It's either good or bad and no other magic program exists that can "fix" any flaws.
This situation will not change for a long time... about a generation or so. It won't be until then that enough people understand this idea about software, or really even understand what software is. Everyone here gets it, the same way all the grease monkeys who hung out at the corner garage got internal combustion in the 1930's. It wasn't for another couple of decades that it occurred to most people that exploding gas moves some parts in the engine to make other parts spin, which spins the wheels, which moves the car. Given the rate of change in technology, I wouldn't be surprised if it took fifty years before J. Random Consumer finally knew that a program is basically a long line of data, and that there's a circuit that does what the data says to do to other data.
Is MS to blame for the security problems in its products? Yes, absolutely.
Are average people to blame for choosing that software? No. Or at least not to the extent you and I who understand the issues would be to blame for it.
I thought the FBI once said, "If there's going to be a Big Brother in this country, it's going to be us. It's going to be the FBI." Real had better start playing nice or they'll get their Eurasian asses whooped cause between them and the FBI, there's only one that can ask the military for backup.
/. isn't exactly a media coup.
Ahem...
Well, revisionism does rear its ugly head now and then but it doesn't really amount to much when the culprit is caught. What I want to know is how to make a stink about it. No offense, but a "by the way" type article posted in the backwaters of
Hence, disclaiming it, which is also prohibited.
It was on the main page... Unfortunately, however, I've seen quite of few articles like this appear on the main page and then slip off into the oblivion of the "Truly Interested Parties Only" section, which is apparently read by about 10 people.
There's really no room for discussion on this topic is there? Since it's obvious that UCITA doesn't do squat to protect consumers and has everything to do with protecting businesses, who here has anything to say except "This law sucks."
What are the chances that this thing will stand up in court, anyway? Let me think... shrinkwrap licenses and friends designed to make reviewing the license incredibly inconvenient or impossible before accepting them. Last time I checked, judges are consumers, not businesses, and I just can't see any of them upholding this crap knowing that they too will have to agree to terms they can't see.
...there's no definitve proof that Darwin was right. After all, his theories on natural selection turned out to be partially incorrect.
:)
As did Newton's theories of motion. Partially, but not enough to make them useless. We can't just expect our legislators to understand relativity or evolution, though. After all, the only education they ever got was in school.
...and I'll see you on the flip side.
You know, it was just a week and a half ago I spent five days canoeing in Ontario. Absolutely gorgeous.
I wrote some programs (they're pretty much worthless, but they do exist) half a year ago and uploaded them to my geocities thingy as tarballs under GPL. I don't believe they actually have any control over them, either. They've got a copyright in my name plastered all over every source file and explicit licensing terms included (in the cannonical fashion). What's a fat ass company to do?
JBuilder (by Bor^H^H^HIns^H^H^HBorland) is 80% Java according to the hard copy. The remaining 20% is probably just the two VMs. FreeBuilder (defunct?) is 100% Java _and_ GPL'd.
#define RANT
What the hell is it with these god damn curvy, "sleek" cases? I basically treat my box like a piece of furniture, there's stuff stacked on it, I put it on the bookshelf, I stack books against it (mindfull of the ventilation holes, of course). Can't do that as nicely with a lot of new cases. It's not hard to find a nice rectanglular x by y by z case, but these odd shaped ones, I think, have got to go.
#undef RANT
I'd rather have a rackmount case.