Worms/virii don't need human intervention to function.
Worms don't need human intervention to spread; they use remote exploits to crack a machine, then use the machine as a launch pad to search for other hosts to infect.
Viruses infect files (typically executables) by attaching themselves to them; they generally have to be executed by the user, although some use exploits (eg the wmf exploit) to execute when previewed (in effect, when executed by the system). However this still requires user interaction, as they have to perform the action (eg browse to the containing folder) that causes the preview to be triggered.
Trojans, as referenced in the post to which I replied, most definitely do require user interaction; they're just malware masquerading as good executables. If you don't run the exe, nothing happens. Much like most viruses, the difference being trojans usually also do what they claim to; viruses are purely payload.
You have my sympathies, but Sasser is a worm, not a trojan. Out of interest, as you were still installing the machine and hadn't yet installed all the updates, why wasn't it behind a locked-down firewall allowing only outgoing connections? (Or alternatively, why weren't the updates downloaded on another machine and transferred offline?)
I'm a programmer, not an arms manufacturer/seller, but putting on my cynical, "they wanna kill each other, someone's gonna give them the means to do it, might as well be me getting rich" hat for a moment, I really don't see any of those things as being issues.
Landmines already suffer from all but the first, and only avoid that one because no attempt at target recognition is made at all. As for the inability to tell friend from foe, all that does is limit their use to confirmed no-go areas; anyone in the area gets shot, everyone learns to avoid it, just as they now avoid mine fields.
I can't believe that very many of the people involved with this sort of thing, or their potential customers, would regard any of your objections (however valid they may be) as being real issues. It just plain not working (due to ammo starvation, etc) would get their notice, however.
The demos I'll grant you, but the rest wouldn't apply as it's not the copyright holders (or appointed representatives) that are performing the distribution.
That said, copyright not applying simply because you don't charge money for something is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard in a long time.
Don't forget that even for the Mars in the book, Earth's atmosphere is a lot thicker, and so frictional heating will be that much higher (and terminal velocity that much lower)
Now that Java is under GPL, IBM will have to release their JDK under GPL as well, right?
Wrong. Sun isn't (and most likely can't, depending on the licence details) retroactively changing the details of their licence with IBM, they're just saying that real soon now they will release Java under the GPL. That changes nothing in the past; IBM will still be able to keep their proprietary version closed. In fact, I'd be amazed if Sun didn't bump the version number at the time of release, thus making it utterly clear that no previous version is covered.
Even failing that, as copyright holders Sun are perfectly able to release it under a dual licensing scheme - you can modify it for free under the terms of the GPL, or make proprietary modifications under the terms of a commercial licence. (As I understand it, this is in fact what they're doing)
Now, if IBM were to obtain a copy of the GPLed release, then yes, any modifications they made to that copy would have to be released in accordance with the terms of the GPL. I can't see them doing that, however - they seem to be fairly clued-up when it comes to that sort of thing...
Sorry to pick on you, but you're the first person I've seen do it and there aren't too many comments on the article yet, so I thought I'd get in quick:
Java is not an acronym, its name should not be capitalised.
It's a minor thing I know, but I'm picky and pedantic enough* for it to irk me every time I see it.
(* goes with the territory; I'm an ex-physicist who moved over to programming. Equations and computers do not know what you mean, only what you say)
There are alternatives to Oracle, but none that I'm aware of are FOSS. If you actually need Oracle (and a lot of people using it don't), then Firebird simply isn't an alternative.
Most projects don't need Oracle, of course, and could well use an open source RDBMS instead.
1 vote in 100M might be insigificant, but 1 in 36 most certainly is.
I don't normally pull people up on grammar, but you just said that 1 vote in 36 is insignificant. Had you written "1 vote in 100m might not be significant..." then the end of the sentence would have had your intended meaning.
There is always a trade off between where you allocate resources
That depends on how much time and money you have to devote to the project. Time clearly hasn't been an issue for Vista, and given Microsoft's resources, I very much doubt that money has either.
Yes, of course for most projects there are constraints on how much effort can be expended, and the same is certainly true of Vista. However if you think for one second that resources have been diverted from making the OS secure (as in the OP's complaint) in favour of the sound scheme then you're a fool. That's not to say that it *will* be secure; just that if it isn't, it won't be because they paid some guy to make it make pretty noises.
No offence, but your post (and it's upward moderation) underscores a lot of what is wrong with a lot of open source software to my mind. The little bits of polish really do matter to most people; they may not notice it when it's there, but they sure as hell notice when it's missing.
You do realise that MS employs both programmers and sound engineers, right? And that devoting some time for a sound engineer to try to make sure the sound scheme is as good as possible does not detract one iota from the amount of effort that the programmers can put in to their parts of the project, right?
On a project of this size, aesthetics and engineering considerations are not mutually exclusive, you can have both. The problems only come when you have too few people, the wrong mix of skills, or too little time/money. None of these are problems for Vista.
The UK government has been pushing for choice for a while, in healthcare and schooling. Personally, I don't want to be able to choose, I want to be offered the best possible standard wherever I happen to go/send my child...
Wong also said that the manufacturer's license for Vista Home Premium is 10 percent more expensive than for XP Home.
There's this little thing called inflation; maybe you've heard of it? It means that, broadly speaking, prices go up with each passing year. The last desktop version of Windows was released 5 years ago; a 10% price increase accounts for less than 2% inflation per year. Sounds about right to me, at least for the UK.
Yes - and in that situation, I'd be amazed if the person wasn't pulled in for questioning. They may be perfectly innocent, but given the circumstantial evidence, they certainly have some questions to answer.
When you're arrested for a crime, they generally try to pin as many related things on you as possible. For example, if you break into a house using a crowbar, you'll be charged with breaking and entering and with going equipped. That does not mean that it's illegal to own a crowbar, or to carry one around with you. Likewise, if you beat someone up, you're going to be in more trouble if you take a weapon with you, than if you just grab something nearby at the time.
These documents are not forbidden (although I dare say that in the current climate showing too much interest in such things will get you some attention from the authorities), but they will be used as evidence and to jack up the charges against someone who's pulled in for related crimes.
We're not living in a police state just yet, despite the best efforts of B.liar and a series of increasingly fascist Home Secretaries. The danger is there, though...
I like to fire up Emacs and just start producing, knowing that I'll have autotools, my compilers (or interpreters) ready, not having to use some bloated solutions like MS Visual Studio, Borland tools
Yes, that's a matter of personal taste. Me, I do Java development, and if pressed can do so using nothing more than vi and ant. I'll take Eclipse over that any day of the week, though. Similarly, I work with people who are the exact opposite, using Eclipse only when they absolutely have to.
Well... it's possible you're not aware you're using Slashdot, I suppose. The AUP here includes making sure that every post includes a raving, drooling insistance that your rights have just been violated, have always been violated, and always will
Yeah, what's with that AUP anyway?! What if I don't want to post a drooling, raving insistence that my rights have been violated, huh? Huh! So much for free speech! Taco and the other editors are jack-booted fascists, worse than Hitler! Democracy on slashdot is officially dead!
Apple has already shown that it's not a big deal to port KHTML
Not to belittle their work, but they did "only" port it from one Unix-like system to another. Porting it to Windows will be rather more work, I suspect.
I just noticed that 'Firefox' and 'Thunderbird' aren't in the FF2 English dictionary!
No; they're not words, they're names. Slashdot isn't in it either. I'd be upset if they *were* in there, personally.
the solution is quite intuitive really
Now, I'm no MS fanboi, and I'm not about to claim that they invented it, but that's the way that's been done in Word for as long as I've been using it. I can't think of any other way you'd seriously want to do it, given that you can't left-click for it.
I agree 100%. Yesterday, it seemed like every single story was tagged with most or all of "itsatrap", "notatrap", "fud", "notfud", etc. Today, it looked like someone had woken up and seen some sense, as most of them were gone. Unfortunately, it looks like they're slowly but surely coming back.
Oh, one thing I do find amusing though is that someone has tagged the story about the bar owner being arrested for copyright violation for performing tunes on his harmonica with "riaa", even though the entire incident took place in Japan and the RIAA had nothing to do with it...
Tags seem like a good idea, but I can't help feeling that enough of the slashdot readership is too immature and irresponsible for it to work properly, and that's a real shame.
To answer your question though, I very much doubt that "itsatrap" is going to go away any time soon; it's even used as an example in the tagging FAQ. Monkey see...
Slashdot Mirror
Worms/virii don't need human intervention to function.
Worms don't need human intervention to spread; they use remote exploits to crack a machine, then use the machine as a launch pad to search for other hosts to infect.
Viruses infect files (typically executables) by attaching themselves to them; they generally have to be executed by the user, although some use exploits (eg the wmf exploit) to execute when previewed (in effect, when executed by the system). However this still requires user interaction, as they have to perform the action (eg browse to the containing folder) that causes the preview to be triggered.
Trojans, as referenced in the post to which I replied, most definitely do require user interaction; they're just malware masquerading as good executables. If you don't run the exe, nothing happens. Much like most viruses, the difference being trojans usually also do what they claim to; viruses are purely payload.
You have my sympathies, but Sasser is a worm, not a trojan. Out of interest, as you were still installing the machine and hadn't yet installed all the updates, why wasn't it behind a locked-down firewall allowing only outgoing connections? (Or alternatively, why weren't the updates downloaded on another machine and transferred offline?)
Making the worlds computing systems more reliable one trojan infested botnet at a time...
Trojans require user intervention to propagate - they're malicious software masquerading as (or piggy-backing on) benign software.
If your server is trojan-infested, you need to get yourself a better admin team.
The science book people of today don't like guys who talk about such things.
Maybe that's true in the US, but here in the UK Tesla and his work was certainly mentioned in my courses on Physics.
The court could very well decide it's Fair Use
By which time, of course, you've already been dragged to court and had to suffer through a potentially lengthy hearing...
So good, you said it twice!
I'm a programmer, not an arms manufacturer/seller, but putting on my cynical, "they wanna kill each other, someone's gonna give them the means to do it, might as well be me getting rich" hat for a moment, I really don't see any of those things as being issues.
Landmines already suffer from all but the first, and only avoid that one because no attempt at target recognition is made at all. As for the inability to tell friend from foe, all that does is limit their use to confirmed no-go areas; anyone in the area gets shot, everyone learns to avoid it, just as they now avoid mine fields.
I can't believe that very many of the people involved with this sort of thing, or their potential customers, would regard any of your objections (however valid they may be) as being real issues. It just plain not working (due to ammo starvation, etc) would get their notice, however.
The demos I'll grant you, but the rest wouldn't apply as it's not the copyright holders (or appointed representatives) that are performing the distribution.
That said, copyright not applying simply because you don't charge money for something is one of the most ridiculous things I've heard in a long time.
Don't forget that even for the Mars in the book, Earth's atmosphere is a lot thicker, and so frictional heating will be that much higher (and terminal velocity that much lower)
Now that Java is under GPL, IBM will have to release their JDK under GPL as well, right?
Wrong. Sun isn't (and most likely can't, depending on the licence details) retroactively changing the details of their licence with IBM, they're just saying that real soon now they will release Java under the GPL. That changes nothing in the past; IBM will still be able to keep their proprietary version closed. In fact, I'd be amazed if Sun didn't bump the version number at the time of release, thus making it utterly clear that no previous version is covered.
Even failing that, as copyright holders Sun are perfectly able to release it under a dual licensing scheme - you can modify it for free under the terms of the GPL, or make proprietary modifications under the terms of a commercial licence. (As I understand it, this is in fact what they're doing)
Now, if IBM were to obtain a copy of the GPLed release, then yes, any modifications they made to that copy would have to be released in accordance with the terms of the GPL. I can't see them doing that, however - they seem to be fairly clued-up when it comes to that sort of thing...
Sorry to pick on you, but you're the first person I've seen do it and there aren't too many comments on the article yet, so I thought I'd get in quick:
Java is not an acronym, its name should not be capitalised.
It's a minor thing I know, but I'm picky and pedantic enough* for it to irk me every time I see it.
(* goes with the territory; I'm an ex-physicist who moved over to programming. Equations and computers do not know what you mean, only what you say)
an often overlooked FOSS alternative to Oracle
There are alternatives to Oracle, but none that I'm aware of are FOSS. If you actually need Oracle (and a lot of people using it don't), then Firebird simply isn't an alternative.
Most projects don't need Oracle, of course, and could well use an open source RDBMS instead.
1 vote in 100M might be insigificant, but 1 in 36 most certainly is.
I don't normally pull people up on grammar, but you just said that 1 vote in 36 is insignificant. Had you written "1 vote in 100m might not be significant..." then the end of the sentence would have had your intended meaning.
They have a pretty limited range; knock on doors.
There is always a trade off between where you allocate resources
That depends on how much time and money you have to devote to the project. Time clearly hasn't been an issue for Vista, and given Microsoft's resources, I very much doubt that money has either.
Yes, of course for most projects there are constraints on how much effort can be expended, and the same is certainly true of Vista. However if you think for one second that resources have been diverted from making the OS secure (as in the OP's complaint) in favour of the sound scheme then you're a fool. That's not to say that it *will* be secure; just that if it isn't, it won't be because they paid some guy to make it make pretty noises.
No offence, but your post (and it's upward moderation) underscores a lot of what is wrong with a lot of open source software to my mind. The little bits of polish really do matter to most people; they may not notice it when it's there, but they sure as hell notice when it's missing.
You do realise that MS employs both programmers and sound engineers, right? And that devoting some time for a sound engineer to try to make sure the sound scheme is as good as possible does not detract one iota from the amount of effort that the programmers can put in to their parts of the project, right?
On a project of this size, aesthetics and engineering considerations are not mutually exclusive, you can have both. The problems only come when you have too few people, the wrong mix of skills, or too little time/money. None of these are problems for Vista.
No, they're saying that doctors get it wrong 20% of the time, while a group found that google gets 52% of that 20% right.
Do you really think doctors spend all their time searching for diagnoses on google?
The UK government has been pushing for choice for a while, in healthcare and schooling. Personally, I don't want to be able to choose, I want to be offered the best possible standard wherever I happen to go/send my child...
Wong also said that the manufacturer's license for Vista Home Premium is 10 percent more expensive than for XP Home.
There's this little thing called inflation; maybe you've heard of it? It means that, broadly speaking, prices go up with each passing year. The last desktop version of Windows was released 5 years ago; a 10% price increase accounts for less than 2% inflation per year. Sounds about right to me, at least for the UK.
Yes - and in that situation, I'd be amazed if the person wasn't pulled in for questioning. They may be perfectly innocent, but given the circumstantial evidence, they certainly have some questions to answer.
When you're arrested for a crime, they generally try to pin as many related things on you as possible. For example, if you break into a house using a crowbar, you'll be charged with breaking and entering and with going equipped. That does not mean that it's illegal to own a crowbar, or to carry one around with you. Likewise, if you beat someone up, you're going to be in more trouble if you take a weapon with you, than if you just grab something nearby at the time.
These documents are not forbidden (although I dare say that in the current climate showing too much interest in such things will get you some attention from the authorities), but they will be used as evidence and to jack up the charges against someone who's pulled in for related crimes.
We're not living in a police state just yet, despite the best efforts of B.liar and a series of increasingly fascist Home Secretaries. The danger is there, though...
I like to fire up Emacs and just start producing, knowing that I'll have autotools, my compilers (or interpreters) ready, not having to use some bloated solutions like MS Visual Studio, Borland tools
Yes, that's a matter of personal taste. Me, I do Java development, and if pressed can do so using nothing more than vi and ant. I'll take Eclipse over that any day of the week, though. Similarly, I work with people who are the exact opposite, using Eclipse only when they absolutely have to.
Well... it's possible you're not aware you're using Slashdot, I suppose. The AUP here includes making sure that every post includes a raving, drooling insistance that your rights have just been violated, have always been violated, and always will
Yeah, what's with that AUP anyway?! What if I don't want to post a drooling, raving insistence that my rights have been violated, huh? Huh! So much for free speech! Taco and the other editors are jack-booted fascists, worse than Hitler! Democracy on slashdot is officially dead!
Apple has already shown that it's not a big deal to port KHTML
Not to belittle their work, but they did "only" port it from one Unix-like system to another. Porting it to Windows will be rather more work, I suspect.
I just noticed that 'Firefox' and 'Thunderbird' aren't in the FF2 English dictionary!
No; they're not words, they're names. Slashdot isn't in it either. I'd be upset if they *were* in there, personally.
the solution is quite intuitive really
Now, I'm no MS fanboi, and I'm not about to claim that they invented it, but that's the way that's been done in Word for as long as I've been using it. I can't think of any other way you'd seriously want to do it, given that you can't left-click for it.
I agree 100%. Yesterday, it seemed like every single story was tagged with most or all of "itsatrap", "notatrap", "fud", "notfud", etc. Today, it looked like someone had woken up and seen some sense, as most of them were gone. Unfortunately, it looks like they're slowly but surely coming back.
Oh, one thing I do find amusing though is that someone has tagged the story about the bar owner being arrested for copyright violation for performing tunes on his harmonica with "riaa", even though the entire incident took place in Japan and the RIAA had nothing to do with it...
Tags seem like a good idea, but I can't help feeling that enough of the slashdot readership is too immature and irresponsible for it to work properly, and that's a real shame.
To answer your question though, I very much doubt that "itsatrap" is going to go away any time soon; it's even used as an example in the tagging FAQ. Monkey see...