Ummm...the people who don't like it when "crackers" call themselves "hackers" aren't going to like it that Kevin Mitnick (a "cracker") called himself a "hacker". Very good - you can reason from the general to the specific. Do you have a point?
Mitnick's defense has repeatedly asked and been granted additional time to work on the defense. mitnick would have been long done with the trial by now if he had wanted to. He might even have been a free man (albeit with a recent conviction).
Your post tends to support the idea that MS is liable for damages caused by their software. McDonald's makes their coffee too hot. A woman accidentally pours it on her genitals. A jury find McDonald's liability to be $160K and the woman's $40K. MS sells an office suite that defaults to totally insecure. On their web site, there is doubtless information about how to secure it, so a customer is at least partially liable for damage caused by macro viruses, but I believe that Microsoft could also be found liable for some damages. Of course, the EULA states something to the effect that by using their software, you agree that any harm is your fault. Too bad McDonald's didn't put a EULA on their coffee.
MSNBC, Your One Source for Biased Communications.
on
WSJ Says Linux Lags
·
· Score: 3
I would be reasonably comfortable in saying that slashdot is a biased source of information too Slashdot does not pretend to be a journalistic site that provides impartial reporting. The opinions you see on slashdot are very obviously those of individuals. MSNBC purports to provide unbiased information. That is the distinction. If a Time/Warner media outlet is biased towards Windows NT, we might be able to effect a change in that, but if an MS-owned media outlet is biased, there is little likelihood of change.
I used to work in tech support at Gateway. One of their major accounts used Unix exclusively, and every box we shipped out the door to that client had Unix preloaded. Don't let the anti-MS hype fool you; it has always been possible to get ANY OS preloaded on ANY box from ANY OEM. They don't market that fact to Joe Blow, mainly because Joe Blow generally won't want to spend the additional cash it will cost.
The IBM suit, like all good suits, was there to sell his company, specifically his "ethical hacker" unit. He suggests that his (relatively small) group of "ethical hackers" could find potential security holes in your system - for a fee. It occurs to me that one could accomplish essentially the same goal by offering $1000 to anybody for each new security hole discovered (offer is null and void if said hole is used at any time to damage data etc). Given enough crackers, all security holes are obvious. I can feel the paranoid sysadmins recoiling in horror at this point, but a well-known site is going to be a target anyway; you may as well pay people for helping to find security holes.
Remind me not to bring you along next time I plan a war. You have no concept of stealth, or subtlety, or subversion. You have no concept of winning without ever decisively engaging the enemy. Go read the Art of War.
Why would you want to go to the effort of putting the suits out of business by writing free software to replace what they offer? Of all the programmers in the world, how many believe in freedom? I think we're in the minority. By the time we replace all of today's binaries, there will be ten times as much, and we'll be worse off than before. Better to convert the suits to our side, encourage more and more bosses to pay more and more programmers to write more and more free software. Minorities rarely win through open conflict. They win by exposing the absurdity in the enemy's position, and forcing the enemy to change it.
It's using Sony's proprietary real-time OS. Do you think there'll be a Linux port to this platform? Just think of the Bay-Woof cluster you could have with a pack of these things
If he really wanted it called GNU/Linux or whatever, he should have said something in the begining
Got that right. I've said before, and I'll say again: as soon as RMS realized that Linus Torvalds had created afree, GPLd kernel that would work with GNU software, he should have held a press conference, issued a press release, gone on the lecture circuit, given interviews to anyone who asked, all for the purpose of announcing to the world "THE ERA OF GNU IS AT HAND! AT LONG LAST, GNU IS A COMPLETELY FREE OS! THROW OFF YOUR CHAINS AND USE GNU!"
those people put everything else together with Linux, didn't realize what they were doing was taking the GNU system, nobody knows that now
RMS is flat wrong here. This is so obviously incorrect as to make me question either the man's intelligence or integrity.
Question to those who created Linux distributions: did you realize you were including GNU software? Question to the assembled masses: did you know you were using GNU software? Question to the suits: have you ever heard of GNU?
I believe that RMS is actually worried about question three here. It's too bad he's not articulate enough to say so. Freedom is good, and I support him 100% on that, but he reminds me a little of Hitler (the military strategist, not the whacked-out genocidal dictator), who thought it would be a bright idea to attack the Soviets. Richard's battle should not be with anyone else in the open source / free / liberated software movements; it should be with the suits. Make sure THEY know about GNU. Make sure THEY know that while Linux is the brain heart of the system, GNU is the lungs and heart and muscle of the system (not to mention the liver, kidney's and spleen:) Don't go around telling them we're going to make free versions of their software and run them out of business (I've read quotes from RMS that amount to this). Instead, teach them how to make money selling, serving, and supporting free software.
I wanted to see if I could find out if Michael Scott DeWitt (UF's legal counsel) was really a person, really a lawyer, etc, so I punched his name into Alta Vista. It displayed the following:
AltaVista found no document matching your query.
AltaVista Recommends: Gender & Sexuality > Pornography States M > Minnesota
the community already exists in which we can live without crappy software
That's fine, if you can live, work, and play entirely within the confines of the community. I think RMS has managed to do so; I know of no one else who has. Everyone I know at some point has had to deal with commercial software, and much of it is crappy. I have a family to feed, and if I lose my job, and the only job I can find the day I start looking is an NT admin job, I'll have to take it. THAT is ESR's point. If the open source/free/liberated software comunity loses the momentum it has gained in the last year in penetrating the corporate world, it will take a long time to build up that momentum again. The longer it takes, the greater the likelihood that there will be some point in YOUR life when economic necesity will force you to deal with crappy software.
Another thing to keep in mind is that freedom means freedom for everyone. When some are free and some are not, we have a situation not unlike that in the US between 1776 and 1865. If you fight for freedom of speech for yourself and *actively oppose*, by your words, deeds, or indifference, the same freedom of speech for others, you deserve (at best) to be spit on. Why should freedom of software be any different? And before you suggest that the comparison is unapt, consider how I'm communicating.
I believe there was a beta or some other kind of pre-release version of Windows 3.x that, when run on a non-MS DOS, gave a message to the effect that MS could not guarantee the stability of Windows on this OS and there could be big bad bugs FUD FUD FUD.
MS claimed (very reasonably) that it simply wanted to be sure users knew that there were potential incompatibilities.
What was truly insidious (and inspired, if you're a conspiracy theorist) was that it was THIS version of the software that was reviewed by the trade press. Since there was something like a four months between article's submission and its publication, they had to review a pre-release version or else miss out on all the hype surrounding the release of a new version of Windows.
can't see comments - thresholds bug?
on
Need a Job?
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· Score: 1
I had this happen, too, and when I checked, my threshold had magically been reset to 0.
Given a normal distribution (of the sort y=e(-x^2), mean=median=mode (by "mean" I mean "arithmetic mean"). Intelligence is generally accepted as having a normal distribution. Therefore, it I would not consider it incorrect to say that half the people are stupider than the average person. Surprisingly enough, even though you seem to say that the statement is incorrect, you understood the meaning, which is, after all, the purpose of language.
Furthermore, I would submit that, in fact, "average" is a standard English word and has no rigorous technical mathematical definition, so to try to use "average" in a technical context makes as much sense as trying to divide by zero: neither is rigorously defined. Therefore, attempting to correct someone's non-standard usage of "average" by explaining the technical usage is precisely nonsense.
There are general anesthetics that work along these general principles. The patient (victim?) feels EVERYTHING...but forgets about it afterwards. I learned about this while investigating pain-management techniques for use during childbirth.
It is difficult to gauge the age of the author of a piece if the author is a non-native speaker. My four-year-old son can speak better English than his 75-year-old Polish-American grandfather (my father-in-law), but I don't mistake that faculty for either intelligence or wisdom. Speaking to my father-in-law is a lot like talking to my two-year-old daughter; I can glean about 75% of the meaning if I look at him and concentrate real hard.
The article was a waste of my time, too, because I really couldn't see a point that I hadn't already beaten to death in my own thinking and reading. But that had nothing to do with the language.
Yeah, she should have known that anybody she met from the internet was going to be interested only in sex. Whatever. If a cop said something like that to my daughter he'd be in deeper kimchi than he realized existed. To suggest in any way that a woman was "asking for it" is like saying that a murder victim was asking for it because he should have known the guy had a gun when he yelled at the guy. For a cop to behave like this is a serious breech of the public trust.
Serial ports, parallel ports, and game ports are going away (not to mention ISA slots). This is part of a pseudo-standard that MS/Intel are pushing. In order to qualify a system as "PC99" (or whatever) compliant, you have to meet the standard. If you don't meet the standard, you can't say your computer is "designed for Windows" or something like that. This doesn't seem like a big deal until you realize that 95% of the computers sold to Joe Blow meet past versions of these specs and will meet future versions of these specs. USB is going to be the only way in or out for low-bandwidth external peripherals.
This is the worst kind of bloat I can imagine - a fancy text editor mated to a BASIC interpreter. Granted the usefulness of an integrated development environment in your word processor, it is doubly insane to permit programs to run automatically when the document is opened. While it is possible to disables macros in Word, this is not the default. 90% of users don't use macros (unless they are infected), so why couldn't MS change just one bit in its ditribution from ON to OFF and do some serious good toward slowing the spread of macro viruses?
The really sad thing is you can't sue them. They create an obviously deficient product, one which they could easily have changed to prevent material harm to their customers, yet they are not liable. But let somebody pour coffee all over their genitals, and Ronald McDonald is paying to the tune of $n*1E6.
Slashdot Mirror
I posted the above remark, hit back twice to get back to the article, and saw that my post already had a score of 3.
Ummm...the people who don't like it when "crackers" call themselves "hackers" aren't going to like it that Kevin Mitnick (a "cracker") called himself a "hacker". Very good - you can reason from the general to the specific. Do you have a point?
Mitnick's defense has repeatedly asked and been granted additional time to work on the defense. mitnick would have been long done with the trial by now if he had wanted to. He might even have been a free man (albeit with a recent conviction).
Your post tends to support the idea that MS is liable for damages caused by their software. McDonald's makes their coffee too hot. A woman accidentally pours it on her genitals. A jury find McDonald's liability to be $160K and the woman's $40K. MS sells an office suite that defaults to totally insecure. On their web site, there is doubtless information about how to secure it, so a customer is at least partially liable for damage caused by macro viruses, but I believe that Microsoft could also be found liable for some damages. Of course, the EULA states something to the effect that by using their software, you agree that any harm is your fault. Too bad McDonald's didn't put a EULA on their coffee.
I would be reasonably comfortable in saying that slashdot is a biased source of information too
Slashdot does not pretend to be a journalistic site that provides impartial reporting. The opinions you see on slashdot are very obviously those of individuals. MSNBC purports to provide unbiased information. That is the distinction. If a Time/Warner media outlet is biased towards Windows NT, we might be able to effect a change in that, but if an MS-owned media outlet is biased, there is little likelihood of change.
I used to work in tech support at Gateway. One of their major accounts used Unix exclusively, and every box we shipped out the door to that client had Unix preloaded. Don't let the anti-MS hype fool you; it has always been possible to get ANY OS preloaded on ANY box from ANY OEM. They don't market that fact to Joe Blow, mainly because Joe Blow generally won't want to spend the additional cash it will cost.
The IBM suit, like all good suits, was there to sell his company, specifically his "ethical hacker" unit. He suggests that his (relatively small) group of "ethical hackers" could find potential security holes in your system - for a fee. It occurs to me that one could accomplish essentially the same goal by offering $1000 to anybody for each new security hole discovered (offer is null and void if said hole is used at any time to damage data etc). Given enough crackers, all security holes are obvious. I can feel the paranoid sysadmins recoiling in horror at this point, but a well-known site is going to be a target anyway; you may as well pay people for helping to find security holes.
Scott Adams is an idealist. His ideal is that he gets lots of money. If you want to know how he thinks, read everything Dogbert says.
Well, it could be argued that Bill Clinton is the first president to sleep his way to the top...
Remind me not to bring you along next time I plan a war. You have no concept of stealth, or subtlety, or subversion. You have no concept of winning without ever decisively engaging the enemy. Go read the Art of War.
Why would you want to go to the effort of putting the suits out of business by writing free software to replace what they offer? Of all the programmers in the world, how many believe in freedom? I think we're in the minority. By the time we replace all of today's binaries, there will be ten times as much, and we'll be worse off than before. Better to convert the suits to our side, encourage more and more bosses to pay more and more programmers to write more and more free software. Minorities rarely win through open conflict. They win by exposing the absurdity in the enemy's position, and forcing the enemy to change it.
It's using Sony's proprietary real-time OS. Do you think there'll be a Linux port to this platform? Just think of the Bay-Woof cluster you could have with a pack of these things
If he really wanted it called GNU/Linux or whatever, he should have said something in the begining
Got that right. I've said before, and I'll say again: as soon as RMS realized that Linus Torvalds had created afree, GPLd kernel that would work with GNU software, he should have held a press conference, issued a press release, gone on the lecture circuit, given interviews to anyone who asked, all for the purpose of announcing to the world "THE ERA OF GNU IS AT HAND! AT LONG LAST, GNU IS A COMPLETELY FREE OS! THROW OFF YOUR CHAINS AND USE GNU!"
those people put everything else together with Linux, didn't realize what they were doing was taking the GNU system, nobody knows that now
:) Don't go around telling them we're going to make free versions of their software and run them out of business (I've read quotes from RMS that amount to this). Instead, teach them how to make money selling, serving, and supporting free software.
RMS is flat wrong here. This is so obviously incorrect as to make me question either the man's intelligence or integrity.
Question to those who created Linux distributions: did you realize you were including GNU software?
Question to the assembled masses: did you know you were using GNU software?
Question to the suits: have you ever heard of GNU?
I believe that RMS is actually worried about question three here. It's too bad he's not articulate enough to say so. Freedom is good, and I support him 100% on that, but he reminds me a little of Hitler (the military strategist, not the whacked-out genocidal dictator), who thought it would be a bright idea to attack the Soviets. Richard's battle should not be with anyone else in the open source / free / liberated software movements; it should be with the suits. Make sure THEY know about GNU. Make sure THEY know that while Linux is the brain heart of the system, GNU is the lungs and heart and muscle of the system (not to mention the liver, kidney's and spleen
The battle is not here, it's out there.
You people are too funny. Lots of gullable ones out there, I might say.
1. It's spelled "gullible"
2. And "gullible" isn't even in the dictionary. i don't know why everyone thinks it's really a part of standard english.
I wanted to see if I could find out if Michael Scott DeWitt (UF's legal counsel) was really a person, really a lawyer, etc, so I punched his name into Alta Vista. It displayed the following:
AltaVista found no document matching your query.
AltaVista Recommends:
Gender & Sexuality > Pornography
States M > Minnesota
the community already exists in which we can live without crappy software
That's fine, if you can live, work, and play entirely within the confines of the community. I think RMS has managed to do so; I know of no one else who has. Everyone I know at some point has had to deal with commercial software, and much of it is crappy. I have a family to feed, and if I lose my job, and the only job I can find the day I start looking is an NT admin job, I'll have to take it. THAT is ESR's point. If the open source/free/liberated software comunity loses the momentum it has gained in the last year in penetrating the corporate world, it will take a long time to build up that momentum again. The longer it takes, the greater the likelihood that there will be some point in YOUR life when economic necesity will force you to deal with crappy software.
Another thing to keep in mind is that freedom means freedom for everyone. When some are free and some are not, we have a situation not unlike that in the US between 1776 and 1865. If you fight for freedom of speech for yourself and *actively oppose*, by your words, deeds, or indifference, the same freedom of speech for others, you deserve (at best) to be spit on. Why should freedom of software be any different? And before you suggest that the comparison is unapt, consider how I'm communicating.
I believe there was a beta or some other kind of pre-release version of Windows 3.x that, when run on a non-MS DOS, gave a message to the effect that MS could not guarantee the stability of Windows on this OS and there could be big bad bugs FUD FUD FUD.
MS claimed (very reasonably) that it simply wanted to be sure users knew that there were potential incompatibilities.
What was truly insidious (and inspired, if you're a conspiracy theorist) was that it was THIS version of the software that was reviewed by the trade press. Since there was something like a four months between article's submission and its publication, they had to review a pre-release version or else miss out on all the hype surrounding the release of a new version of Windows.
I had this happen, too, and when I checked, my threshold had magically been reset to 0.
Given a normal distribution (of the sort y=e(-x^2), mean=median=mode (by "mean" I mean "arithmetic mean"). Intelligence is generally accepted as having a normal distribution. Therefore, it I would not consider it incorrect to say that half the people are stupider than the average person. Surprisingly enough, even though you seem to say that the statement is incorrect, you understood the meaning, which is, after all, the purpose of language.
Furthermore, I would submit that, in fact, "average" is a standard English word and has no rigorous technical mathematical definition, so to try to use "average" in a technical context makes as much sense as trying to divide by zero: neither is rigorously defined. Therefore, attempting to correct someone's non-standard usage of "average" by explaining the technical usage is precisely nonsense.
There are general anesthetics that work along these general principles. The patient (victim?) feels EVERYTHING...but forgets about it afterwards. I learned about this while investigating pain-management techniques for use during childbirth.
It is difficult to gauge the age of the author of a piece if the author is a non-native speaker. My four-year-old son can speak better English than his 75-year-old Polish-American grandfather (my father-in-law), but I don't mistake that faculty for either intelligence or wisdom. Speaking to my father-in-law is a lot like talking to my two-year-old daughter; I can glean about 75% of the meaning if I look at him and concentrate real hard.
The article was a waste of my time, too, because I really couldn't see a point that I hadn't already beaten to death in my own thinking and reading. But that had nothing to do with the language.
Yeah, she should have known that anybody she met from the internet was going to be interested only in sex. Whatever. If a cop said something like that to my daughter he'd be in deeper kimchi than he realized existed. To suggest in any way that a woman was "asking for it" is like saying that a murder victim was asking for it because he should have known the guy had a gun when he yelled at the guy. For a cop to behave like this is a serious breech of the public trust.
Serial ports, parallel ports, and game ports are going away (not to mention ISA slots). This is part of a pseudo-standard that MS/Intel are pushing. In order to qualify a system as "PC99" (or whatever) compliant, you have to meet the standard. If you don't meet the standard, you can't say your computer is "designed for Windows" or something like that. This doesn't seem like a big deal until you realize that 95% of the computers sold to Joe Blow meet past versions of these specs and will meet future versions of these specs. USB is going to be the only way in or out for low-bandwidth external peripherals.
This is the worst kind of bloat I can imagine - a fancy text editor mated to a BASIC interpreter. Granted the usefulness of an integrated development environment in your word processor, it is doubly insane to permit programs to run automatically when the document is opened. While it is possible to disables macros in Word, this is not the default. 90% of users don't use macros (unless they are infected), so why couldn't MS change just one bit in its ditribution from ON to OFF and do some serious good toward slowing the spread of macro viruses?
The really sad thing is you can't sue them. They create an obviously deficient product, one which they could easily have changed to prevent material harm to their customers, yet they are not liable. But let somebody pour coffee all over their genitals, and Ronald McDonald is paying to the tune of $n*1E6.
The original quote by Mr. Greenspan referred to monopolies that lasted a LOT longer than five years...