And a few more thoughts: Probably not much more than obscuring your open ports.
Some are adding ecryption. I preffer ssh to ecrypt my data. I know its not obscure that I am talking over an encrypted link, but port knocking isnt going to be obscure forever.
There will likely be a problem using this over proxied TCP connections such as TCP acceleration used over SAT links.
It would very likely seem usefull for those that are fighting with thier ISPs (such as me) about open ports on the household firewall (such as my ssh, they hate that for some reason). Ports reject by default, after a few knocks open it up for the terminal your at... could work OK if the 'knocker' portion was fairly portable.
Sooo two trillion then? When everything is said and done, it will likely end up being much more than people can project now. This is the government yes? And a long term project?
Do you think eisenhower would have/could have had the feds take on the Interstate project if they knew how much it costs today to build and maintain them?
This whole thing reagarding 'p2p' is almost ludicrous from a technical point of view, when taking into account the social impact that this new relativly new breed of software products has triggered(it has been done for decades, its just stupid simple now). Maybe the internet does not work around problems, but people certainly do. You cannot kill file sharing, and you may not regulate it, face it, your downloading a file everytime you hit slashdot. File sharing has never been illegal, but the files people tend to share really is illegal, and it never slowed me ^H^H^H them down from the beginning. Exactly how much more illegal can it be? No regulation will change that, and neither will technology. This is a social issue only. Just my own irritation speaking here: blocking ports at the ISP level only pisses people off. It does not prevent illegal file sharing, and we can only dream that it has mitigated spam. You can even block all inbound TCP/SYN packets and it wont slow people down much, MS has already proven that the three way handshake can be effectivly ignored, you just start sending data and hope for the ACKs (not that I am recommending it, only that it can be done.) I could easily be wrong. Maybe the new regulations and technical solutions for preventing illegal file sharing will go to eleven.
Thanks for allowing me my rant, even though I am agreeing with you. So what was the method described for killing the popular file sharing applications? Or would it be illegal to say?
We, as a society, have come to place bound books dear(or maybe we always have, couldnt tell you). A book gives a certain amount of permanance that can withstand many lifetimes if properly bound and cared for.
I witnessed a book burning once. No, not a single book cought aflame, but a congregation of peoples activly donating books to a book fueled bonfire. Some church think I guess. I moved along with my disgust in tow. I dont know what the books were, they could have even been Ann Rice novels for all I really know about it, but it made me feel dirty just the same.
I am thinking that it is this sort of reverence that causes us to care at all about the encyclopedia business. We are just sad to see it go. But go it will.
This looks fairly comparable to the one I just purchased a few months back. The one I just purchased is a P4 3ghz HT, 1gig ram, 60gb HD 7200, an expansion bay for another HD, 16inch 1600x1200 LCD, radeon 9000 128mb, TV tuner, and a host of media slots, and about 13 pounds. The poundage doesnt bother me. The high BTU heater aspect doesnt bother me. The 15 minut battery life doesnt really bother me (OK, I am lying on this one). The noise rarely bothers me. The 2500$ pricetag doesnt bother me.
I love my laptop and I am sure I would love this Acer.
Based upon the previous posts I would think that we are all mostly clueless with regard to what the technical problems that surround multi-player games really are.
But I wont let that stop me from ranting.
DOAC recently extended the laps time in order to account for satellite users. Please understand that these users typically have no lack of bandwidth, its the latency that kills them being some 600ms round trip time due to physics and stuff. Its hard to trump physics yes? It only makes sense to level the playing field by making it turn based, just like every other MMPORG out there. After all, there is a really good reason they did it in the first place. I am assuming that by turn based they mean that your have something akin to time slices within your area of infuence. If it is not turn based (within time slices) then it becomes freely timing based. I got OC48... what you got? DRAW! BANG! I win.
I am not convinced you should be self assured that the computers were state of the art either. When you have an expensive project like that, you generally want to keep unknowns to a minumum, so you tend to reuse computers that have proven reliable in the past and they are generally speced out years before launch regardless. Either way they are still gauranteed to be a few years old minimum. From the looks of it, the same formula was applied to the haircuts.
Not saying your wrong at all.I just dont know (nor do I much care really) But Mr/Mrs/Miss AC, how is it you know Infiniums employment history? I looked on google and found no evidence of any Mr/Mrs/Miss Anonymous Coward ever having been employed by Infinium. I checked slashdot and found that you have mostly been responsible for a great number of missinformed posts, flaimes,and even a decent number of outright lies.
but the antics of SCO are becoming inconsequential in my own mind. Thay aim to be in the papers and on slashdot once a week. For why? I am no financial expert so I must rely on you all, where is the info regarding the heads of SCO selling (or not selling) their SCO stock? How does one find out? They cant really believe in this can they?
But the thing that I find interesting has little to do with SCO, they were simply the impetus.
IBM is seemingly backing the GPL in effect if not in ideal, in a meaningfull way, regardless of the motivations.
from http://news.com.com/2100-1016-5082910.html?tag=nl
In an expanded counterclaim filed late Thursday in U.S. District Court for Utah, IBM added charges of copyright violation based on the GPL terms. The claim cites seven pieces of copyrighted software IBM contributed to Linux under the GPL. By violating the terms of the GPL, IBM states, SCO violated IBM's copyrights
Maybe its just easier for IBM, but they are using it. RMS should be proud even if it is Linux in the papers and GNU/Linux.
With regard to this SCO crap, we all knew it was untried, the fact is littered in the relevant GNU documentation. I suspect this will be a good thing for us all in the end, given that it will have at least been tried, and possibly all within a few years.
And it looks like the GNU licence has IBMs christening. No matter the motivations, this company is over 100 years old yes?
I see this all as (tentatively) a good thing.
But there is this thought: SCO will probably not matter. But what will we do with the next SCO? In the extream case, what if Torvalds says its all his and every user must give a dollar?
Basically, how does one go about protecting the GNU projects (Linux included)from everyone for everyone? Is the GPL solid enough? I guess we are about to find out.
I dont really know a lot about economics, which probably explains why I am thinking the parable isnt that silly. I think i understand your first #1 and your second #2 well enough to comment on.
The economy is effectivly trussed up when people spend. I think we agree on this given your second #2. I assume that we can also agree than the economy is stifled in a way when people save, given your first #1. I wont argue those points as I am inclined to believe it. But a counter point is not exactly what I get out of the parable or the interpretation. Instead, I read it as a warning that the assumption that the money would have been saved (or more specifically: stuffed in a shoebox thusly removing that value from the economy) rather than spent is a fallacy. Not that he might not have, but the assumption and ergo the justification of the event is whats bad, just as you did in the post. Overly complicating matters or the simple claim that they are more complex than described is not justfication for dismissing the concept. How is it wrong?
Unlike the standard database eula, the workstation type eula seems to contain no such restriction for the windows product. This seems to have a breakdown complete with somones interpretation, I assume the eula to be complete: http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:jI yh_0_YnHsJ: www.cyber.com.au/cyber/about/comparing_the_gpl_to_ eula.pdf+microsoft+eula&hl=en&ie=UTF-8 Since the workstation or "Home" product is to be untestable legaly, given the restrictions regarding connections, I also assume that the server products have no restrictions regarding publishing performance results. In short, MS would have nothing to sue over if such a public comparison were to be made. Besides, they have compaired their own product to open sourced products enough for there to be legitmate reasons for such a comparison made by open source advocates. Hell, I will do it if you can come up with a test suite that was meaningfull. You create the tests, you get the results, I take the brunt. I am that sure.
And finally, in the event that I could not legally compare the MS server products to comparable open source products, then I would be forced to use the workstation license and the results would read something like:
redhat/apache: performed well to 1024+ connections. Windows/anything: perfomed well to 10 connections on comparable hardware, as per the restrictive MS eula. Anyone out there know if there is restrictions on publishing performance results with win2003 server and/or the needed accompaning products?
You ask why gentoo does not have an installer? I have ask myself that very question. But then you make the claim that they are becoming "'l33t' redhat type distro'". Um didnt we just cover the fact that it does not come with an installer? The grass is always greener...
I find a general lack of a definitive hardware list. I presume this can be had by subscribing the to forum or mailing list, but I really think this should be published up front in a no nonsense manner. Or maybe I missed the page with the list... It happens.
I guess your feeling kind of angry over gentoo's general acceptance among some geek crowds. I assume you have your reasons. But I truelly believe that gentoo is what slackware once was, i.e. a distro that was forgiving of modifications, and it gives a pretty interface for doing so. Its tedious to set up, but once initial install is done, its almost painless for the life of the machine. To me, the theoretical (or proven) performance advantages are almost secondary, in most applications, to portages forgiving nature.. Its just so easy to administer. You would argue against the 'Gentoo-zealots' having no discernable advantage performance wise... And then suggest that portage is the only advantage Gentoo(zeolots) have (infered as I read it) over slackware. A fact to consider: Optimized binaries generally run faster than unopimized ( an unqualified 3% - 15%, got the charts to prove it). By the fact that portage is being ported to slackware, I assume your chosen distro, and by the fact that you mention it here, means that portage is important in your eyes. I have long held that the defining factor of any distro is its chosen package managment system (excusing directory layouts). So in a way, isnt slackware becoming more like gentoo in effect? I mean after all, we are all dealing with the same fucking code with some minor tweaks and major package maintainance differences. Oh, by the way. Gentoo is faster. Its going to kick Slackewares ass. Noted Debian and 'apt-get' fan
I think that most of the comments so far are pretty cheap jabs, easily done.
Though I partially agree with the sentiment, I disagree with your conclusions in both cause and effect.
maturity != security.
likewise:
brevity != security.
There is no magic formula that will equate to security. But there are some practices that will go a long ways and it does not take brevity or maturity to implement them. MS has shown no sign of ever implementing brevity (by any scale that has ever been made public), and maturity is arguable in any of their code other than word. But they screw Word up continuously in very irritating ways. But Word is another argument.
Small, well thought out code helps in the fact that you can readily understand the code, and thusly think the useable cases through. But this would hold true for all kinds of bugs that you may encounter. If its brief and gets to the point, you will find that people are ready and willing to help you with flaws, be it open source or otherwise.It helps to find any flaw, but does eaquate to security in any fasion any more than it equates to being bug free.
Maturity. For DOS, I have code out in the wild on the internet that has been used for almost ten years. I think some very strange folk still use it. Does that make it more secure? Its just old. Embarassingly old. You need people to probe and tear it apart, and reacreate it so many times thats there is little left to fix. Or maybe you did it right the first time. If it works reliably AND it stands up to abuse, thats maturity.
However, all to often MS comes up with a new feature or a new product with a blind eye towards security or maturity before they sell it to the general public.They are not some fly-by-night operation, they have positioned themselves in a place of authority. With authority you get certain obligations. To put it simply, the slashdot croud sees MS as having the obligation to not sell people peices of shit. Its not like they have to provide something extra, just dont provide things that stink of half baked crap. At least give fully baked crap. I mean, that is the whole arguement that they use to defend themselves and downgrade anything opensource that might be competative 'they are not proffesional, we are, more than anyone else. Trust in us. We are the authority. again: Opensource is unbaked crap, other comercial vendors are 1/2 baked, we are fully baked'. (last quote my own interpretation, not anything any MS person has said directly).
Many slashdot readers are opensource/GNU/GPL/artistic license advocates. Please excuse them when they laugh everytime MS falls down. Its an emotional croud that way. They feel personally slighted for many reasons.
With a new product, expect problems once people start actually using it. I agree you here. And the fact that slashdot does not find it noteworthy everytime netfilter or ipfw (whatever BSD calls it) trips would seem important in contrast. But do not be too ready to defend them( MS that is). There is just too many cases where this company has been known to take longer than six months to produce relativly simple security fixes for a security problem once it has been known to them.
There is no argument that can defend this behavour.Usually the defense is that there are regimented procedures to go through that any patch must go through before release. Understandable. But six months? People are broken now!
Last I heard this company had some 30,000 employees, then they brag about setting aside all eleven to concentrait on nothing but security. I am damned sure they have more than 11 OS and/or security related products, to me this is spreading it pretty thin. And I thought to myself "They think of this now?" This was circa 2002 or 2003. If this isnt laughable I am not sure what it would take to convince you except the cold hard facts. But this is after all slashdot and I must be brief or you will not read it.
I have never seen any evidence at all that they take security s
I had a long diatribe as is my fasion. But I was able to sum it up thusly:
In my opinion, the most important opinion will be hers. Get to know her. She may be different, but she is your daughter. If it is at all possible, she should have some say in her own destiny. After all, its your decision that she will have to live with for the rest of her life.
The rest is anecdotal.
Its very scary shit no matter how you wrap it in pretty new technology, its still shock therapy.
As unrelated as it may seem, I would try some of the physical therepy treatments described in other posts before I tried out biofeedback on my child. Physical therapy was attempted across the US 25 - 30 years ago with halfway decent results( the methods were certainly imperfect). Only then the theory was that attention problems were due to the supposed fact that some children did not get enough crawling as a toddler, so they had classrooms institute a '1/2 hour crawling policy'. As crazy as it sounds, the results were 'interesting' and it did significantly help some children diagnosed with what would later be known as ADD. I would check out the physical therapy thing. Maybe its nothing. But then again,it cannot possibly hurt her while you deliberate over the biofeedback option.
Or the treatment described is like that old book "Wrinkle in Time". Not the book itself although I wonder...
The part where a child is outside bouncing a ball out of sync with the rest of the kids on his block. Later, the child is subjected to negative biofeedback in the form of electric shock or some such thing, in order to help the child get his timing down and become within sync with the rest of the kids. Thats the way I remember it anyway after 20 years or so. Teachers and schools, by inference, desire children that have the 'follow the herd mantality', due to the fact that this makes a group of students easy to deal with. The list of options to control a chiles used to be punishment and peer redicule. Recently drugs was added to the list of options. Now its punishment, peer ridicule, drugs, and biofeedback.
You may or may not agree mith my analysis, I do agree with yours, all of these options trains people to be lesser than their potential in many respects. It attempts to train them to be factory workers. Its just easier that way. I wonder what Steven Hawking would have ended up like if he did not have his serously dehabilitating condition. Would he have diagnosable ADD? We will probably never know. Good chance that if he had both been born within the last 15 years and he could give his thoughts readily he would have been beaten down by drugs. You can bet he has at least a minor case of Tourette's inside his head while trying to talk. If he had full faculties he might have easily ended up a factory worker and his teachers would have been proud of his progress. "He works so well with other children" they would have said.
It would seem to my lay ass that having one illness increases the chance of having the SYMPTOMS of the other. Put yourself in the shoes of someone who cannot keep a line of thought to its end for the life of you. What you do you? You get frustrated and start using $!@#$ words untill your ears turn red or untill the thought comes back to you.
I for one would find it hard to concentrate when someone keeps shouting !@#$@#$@ words.
Slashdot Mirror
Speed = latency
Bandwidth = Well, bandwidth
Need to move more people across the border? You dont need to break the speed limit, you just need a bigger truck.
so I guess it falls to me.
Whats the forking problem?
And a few more thoughts:
Probably not much more than obscuring your open ports.
Some are adding ecryption. I preffer ssh to ecrypt my data. I know its not obscure that I am talking over an encrypted link, but port knocking isnt going to be obscure forever.
There will likely be a problem using this over proxied TCP connections such as TCP acceleration used over SAT links.
It would very likely seem usefull for those that are fighting with thier ISPs (such as me) about open ports on the household firewall (such as my ssh, they hate that for some reason). Ports reject by default, after a few knocks open it up for the terminal your at... could work OK if the 'knocker' portion was fairly portable.
43 Million victims, probably a direct result of thier aggressive advertising.
Sooo two trillion then?
When everything is said and done, it will likely end up being much more than people can project now. This is the government yes? And a long term project?
Do you think eisenhower would have/could have had the feds take on the Interstate project if they knew how much it costs today to build and maintain them?
This whole thing reagarding 'p2p' is almost ludicrous from a technical point of view, when taking into account the social impact that this new relativly new breed of software products has triggered(it has been done for decades, its just stupid simple now).
Maybe the internet does not work around problems, but people certainly do. You cannot kill file sharing, and you may not regulate it, face it, your downloading a file everytime you hit slashdot. File sharing has never been illegal, but the files people tend to share really is illegal, and it never slowed me ^H^H^H them down from the beginning. Exactly how much more illegal can it be? No regulation will change that, and neither will technology. This is a social issue only.
Just my own irritation speaking here: blocking ports at the ISP level only pisses people off. It does not prevent illegal file sharing, and we can only dream that it has mitigated spam. You can even block all inbound TCP/SYN packets and it wont slow people down much, MS has already proven that the three way handshake can be effectivly ignored, you just start sending data and hope for the ACKs (not that I am recommending it, only that it can be done.)
I could easily be wrong. Maybe the new regulations and technical solutions for preventing illegal file sharing will go to eleven.
Thanks for allowing me my rant, even though I am agreeing with you.
So what was the method described for killing the popular file sharing applications?
Or would it be illegal to say?
'unfriendly' is such an ugly word. We prefer the term 'user-indifferent'.
We, as a society, have come to place bound books dear(or maybe we always have, couldnt tell you). A book gives a certain amount of permanance that can withstand many lifetimes if properly bound and cared for.
I witnessed a book burning once. No, not a single book cought aflame, but a congregation of peoples activly donating books to a book fueled bonfire. Some church think I guess. I moved along with my disgust in tow. I dont know what the books were, they could have even been Ann Rice novels for all I really know about it, but it made me feel dirty just the same.
I am thinking that it is this sort of reverence that causes us to care at all about the encyclopedia business. We are just sad to see it go. But go it will.
This looks fairly comparable to the one I just purchased a few months back.
The one I just purchased is a P4 3ghz HT, 1gig ram, 60gb HD 7200, an expansion bay for another HD, 16inch 1600x1200 LCD, radeon 9000 128mb, TV tuner, and a host of media slots, and about 13 pounds.
The poundage doesnt bother me.
The high BTU heater aspect doesnt bother me.
The 15 minut battery life doesnt really bother me (OK, I am lying on this one).
The noise rarely bothers me.
The 2500$ pricetag doesnt bother me.
I love my laptop and I am sure I would love this Acer.
What you think the game developers are stupid?
Based upon the previous posts I would think that we are all mostly clueless with regard to what the technical problems that surround multi-player games really are.
But I wont let that stop me from ranting.
DOAC recently extended the laps time in order to account for satellite users. Please understand that these users typically have no lack of bandwidth, its the latency that kills them being some 600ms round trip time due to physics and stuff. Its hard to trump physics yes?
It only makes sense to level the playing field by making it turn based, just like every other MMPORG out there. After all, there is a really good reason they did it in the first place.
I am assuming that by turn based they mean that your have something akin to time slices within your area of infuence.
If it is not turn based (within time slices) then it becomes freely timing based. I got OC48... what you got? DRAW! BANG! I win.
Just kidding, I dont really have OC48....
I am not convinced you should be self assured that the computers were state of the art either. When you have an expensive project like that, you generally want to keep unknowns to a minumum, so you tend to reuse computers that have proven reliable in the past and they are generally speced out years before launch regardless. Either way they are still gauranteed to be a few years old minimum.
From the looks of it, the same formula was applied to the haircuts.
Well of course light duty magnetic fields can directly effect the health of your body or all these would would be of little practical use at all.
Not saying your wrong at all.I just dont know (nor do I much care really)
But Mr/Mrs/Miss AC, how is it you know Infiniums employment history? I looked on google and found no evidence of any Mr/Mrs/Miss Anonymous Coward ever having been employed by Infinium.
I checked slashdot and found that you have mostly been responsible for a great number of missinformed posts, flaimes,and even a decent number of outright lies.
To get into heaven. In that case its a win win alway the way around.
but the antics of SCO are becoming inconsequential in my own mind. Thay aim to be in the papers and on slashdot once a week. For why? I am no financial expert so I must rely on you all, where is the info regarding the heads of SCO selling (or not selling) their SCO stock? How does one find out? They cant really believe in this can they?
But the thing that I find interesting has little to do with SCO, they were simply the impetus.
IBM is seemingly backing the GPL in effect if not in ideal, in a meaningfull way, regardless of the motivations.
from http://news.com.com/2100-1016-5082910.html?tag=nl
In an expanded counterclaim filed late Thursday in U.S. District Court for Utah, IBM added charges of copyright violation based on the GPL terms. The claim cites seven pieces of copyrighted software IBM contributed to Linux under the GPL. By violating the terms of the GPL, IBM states, SCO violated IBM's copyrights
Maybe its just easier for IBM, but they are using it. RMS should be proud even if it is Linux in the papers and GNU/Linux.
With regard to this SCO crap, we all knew it was untried, the fact is littered in the relevant GNU documentation. I suspect this will be a good thing for us all in the end, given that it will have at least been tried, and possibly all within a few years.
And it looks like the GNU licence has IBMs christening. No matter the motivations, this company is over 100 years old yes? I see this all as (tentatively) a good thing.
But there is this thought: SCO will probably not matter. But what will we do with the next SCO? In the extream case, what if Torvalds says its all his and every user must give a dollar?
Basically, how does one go about protecting the GNU projects (Linux included)from everyone for everyone? Is the GPL solid enough? I guess we are about to find out.
Just a guess:
"Wash away" is to...
a) go into surrounding soil.
b) go into nearby ocean, water table, lake
c) go into ether
d) go into nearby cattle
I am picking #c. Ya, definately c.
I dont really know a lot about economics, which probably explains why I am thinking the parable isnt that silly.
I think i understand your first #1 and your second #2 well enough to comment on.
The economy is effectivly trussed up when people spend. I think we agree on this given your second #2. I assume that we can also agree than the economy is stifled in a way when people save, given your first #1.
I wont argue those points as I am inclined to believe it. But a counter point is not exactly what I get out of the parable or the interpretation. Instead, I read it as a warning that the assumption that the money would have been saved (or more specifically: stuffed in a shoebox thusly removing that value from the economy) rather than spent is a fallacy. Not that he might not have, but the assumption and ergo the justification of the event is whats bad, just as you did in the post.
Overly complicating matters or the simple claim that they are more complex than described is not justfication for dismissing the concept. How is it wrong?
Unlike the standard database eula, the workstation type eula seems to contain no such restriction for the windows product. This seems to have a breakdown complete with somones interpretation, I assume the eula to be complete:I yh_0_YnHsJ: www.cyber.com.au/cyber/about/comparing_the_gpl_to_ eula.pdf+microsoft+eula&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.41.104/search?q=cache:j
Since the workstation or "Home" product is to be untestable legaly, given the restrictions regarding connections, I also assume that the server products have no restrictions regarding publishing performance results.
In short, MS would have nothing to sue over if such a public comparison were to be made.
Besides, they have compaired their own product to open sourced products enough for there to be legitmate reasons for such a comparison made by open source advocates.
Hell, I will do it if you can come up with a test suite that was meaningfull. You create the tests, you get the results, I take the brunt. I am that sure.
And finally, in the event that I could not legally compare the MS server products to comparable open source products, then I would be forced to use the workstation license and the results would read something like:
redhat/apache: performed well to 1024+ connections.
Windows/anything: perfomed well to 10 connections on comparable hardware, as per the restrictive MS eula.
Anyone out there know if there is restrictions on publishing performance results with win2003 server and/or the needed accompaning products?
You ask why gentoo does not have an installer? I have ask myself that very question.
But then you make the claim that they are becoming "'l33t' redhat type distro'". Um didnt we just cover the fact that it does not come with an installer?
The grass is always greener...
I find a general lack of a definitive hardware list. I presume this can be had by subscribing the to forum or mailing list, but I really think this should be published up front in a no nonsense manner.
Or maybe I missed the page with the list... It happens.
I guess your feeling kind of angry over gentoo's general acceptance among some geek crowds. I assume you have your reasons.
But I truelly believe that gentoo is what slackware once was, i.e. a distro that was forgiving of modifications, and it gives a pretty interface for doing so.
Its tedious to set up, but once initial install is done, its almost painless for the life of the machine. To me, the theoretical (or proven) performance advantages are almost secondary, in most applications, to portages forgiving nature.. Its just so easy to administer.
You would argue against the 'Gentoo-zealots' having no discernable advantage performance wise... And then suggest that portage is the only advantage Gentoo(zeolots) have (infered as I read it) over slackware.
A fact to consider: Optimized binaries generally run faster than unopimized ( an unqualified 3% - 15%, got the charts to prove it).
By the fact that portage is being ported to slackware, I assume your chosen distro, and by the fact that you mention it here, means that portage is important in your eyes. I have long held that the defining factor of any distro is its chosen package managment system (excusing directory layouts).
So in a way, isnt slackware becoming more like gentoo in effect? I mean after all, we are all dealing with the same fucking code with some minor tweaks and major package maintainance differences.
Oh, by the way. Gentoo is faster. Its going to kick Slackewares ass.
Noted Debian and 'apt-get' fan
I think that most of the comments so far are pretty cheap jabs, easily done.
Though I partially agree with the sentiment, I disagree with your conclusions in both cause and effect.
maturity != security.
likewise:
brevity != security.
There is no magic formula that will equate to security. But there are some practices that will go a long ways and it does not take brevity or maturity to implement them. MS has shown no sign of ever implementing brevity (by any scale that has ever been made public), and maturity is arguable in any of their code other than word. But they screw Word up continuously in very irritating ways. But Word is another argument.
Small, well thought out code helps in the fact that you can readily understand the code, and thusly think the useable cases through. But this would hold true for all kinds of bugs that you may encounter. If its brief and gets to the point, you will find that people are ready and willing to help you with flaws, be it open source or otherwise.It helps to find any flaw, but does eaquate to security in any fasion any more than it equates to being bug free.
Maturity. For DOS, I have code out in the wild on the internet that has been used for almost ten years. I think some very strange folk still use it. Does that make it more secure? Its just old. Embarassingly old.
You need people to probe and tear it apart, and reacreate it so many times thats there is little left to fix. Or maybe you did it right the first time. If it works reliably AND it stands up to abuse, thats maturity.
However, all to often MS comes up with a new feature or a new product with a blind eye towards security or maturity before they sell it to the general public.They are not some fly-by-night operation, they have positioned themselves in a place of authority. With authority you get certain obligations.
To put it simply, the slashdot croud sees MS as having the obligation to not sell people peices of shit. Its not like they have to provide something extra, just dont provide things that stink of half baked crap. At least give fully baked crap. I mean, that is the whole arguement that they use to defend themselves and downgrade anything opensource that might be competative 'they are not proffesional, we are, more than anyone else. Trust in us. We are the authority. again: Opensource is unbaked crap, other comercial vendors are 1/2 baked, we are fully baked'.
(last quote my own interpretation, not anything any MS person has said directly).
Many slashdot readers are opensource/GNU/GPL/artistic license advocates. Please excuse them when they laugh everytime MS falls down. Its an emotional croud that way. They feel personally slighted for many reasons.
With a new product, expect problems once people start actually using it. I agree you here. And the fact that slashdot does not find it noteworthy everytime netfilter or ipfw (whatever BSD calls it) trips would seem important in contrast. But do not be too ready to defend them( MS that is). There is just too many cases where this company has been known to take longer than six months to produce relativly simple security fixes for a security problem once it has been known to them.
There is no argument that can defend this behavour.Usually the defense is that there are regimented procedures to go through that any patch must go through before release. Understandable. But six months? People are broken now!
Last I heard this company had some 30,000 employees, then they brag about setting aside all eleven to concentrait on nothing but security. I am damned sure they have more than 11 OS and/or security related products, to me this is spreading it pretty thin. And I thought to myself "They think of this now?"
This was circa 2002 or 2003. If this isnt laughable I am not sure what it would take to convince you except the cold hard facts. But this is after all slashdot and I must be brief or you will not read it.
I have never seen any evidence at all that they take security s
I had a long diatribe as is my fasion. But I was able to sum it up thusly:
In my opinion, the most important opinion will be hers. Get to know her. She may be different, but she is your daughter. If it is at all possible, she should have some say in her own destiny.
After all, its your decision that she will have to live with for the rest of her life.
The rest is anecdotal.
Its very scary shit no matter how you wrap it in pretty new technology, its still shock therapy.
As unrelated as it may seem, I would try some of the physical therepy treatments described in other posts before I tried out biofeedback on my child. Physical therapy was attempted across the US 25 - 30 years ago with halfway decent results( the methods were certainly imperfect). Only then the theory was that attention problems were due to the supposed fact that some children did not get enough crawling as a toddler, so they had classrooms institute a '1/2 hour crawling policy'. As crazy as it sounds, the results were 'interesting' and it did significantly help some children diagnosed with what would later be known as ADD.
I would check out the physical therapy thing. Maybe its nothing. But then again,it cannot possibly hurt her while you deliberate over the biofeedback option.
Or the treatment described is like that old book "Wrinkle in Time". Not the book itself although I wonder...
The part where a child is outside bouncing a ball out of sync with the rest of the kids on his block. Later, the child is subjected to negative biofeedback in the form of electric shock or some such thing, in order to help the child get his timing down and become within sync with the rest of the kids.
Thats the way I remember it anyway after 20 years or so.
Teachers and schools, by inference, desire children that have the 'follow the herd mantality', due to the fact that this makes a group of students easy to deal with.
The list of options to control a chiles used to be punishment and peer redicule. Recently drugs was added to the list of options. Now its punishment, peer ridicule, drugs, and biofeedback.
You may or may not agree mith my analysis, I do agree with yours, all of these options trains people to be lesser than their potential in many respects. It attempts to train them to be factory workers. Its just easier that way.
I wonder what Steven Hawking would have ended up like if he did not have his serously dehabilitating condition. Would he have diagnosable ADD? We will probably never know. Good chance that if he had both been born within the last 15 years and he could give his thoughts readily he would have been beaten down by drugs.
You can bet he has at least a minor case of Tourette's inside his head while trying to talk.
If he had full faculties he might have easily ended up a factory worker and his teachers would have been proud of his progress.
"He works so well with other children" they would have said.
It would seem to my lay ass that having one illness increases the chance of having the SYMPTOMS of the other.
Put yourself in the shoes of someone who cannot keep a line of thought to its end for the life of you. What you do you? You get frustrated and start using $!@#$ words untill your ears turn red or untill the thought comes back to you.
I for one would find it hard to concentrate when someone keeps shouting !@#$@#$@ words.
Just a thought.
So, where was I?