Apple Security Contact info:
on
Cracking OSX
·
· Score: 3
As noted in the article, but which seems to have been overlooked by most posters:
For starters, there's no security destination for OS X users on Apple's Web site. Nor does Apple operate a security mailing list to notify users of potential weaknesses and patches they could apply to lock down their systems. Microsoft, Sun, and Red Hat all maintain security mailing lists and
security destinations.
Apple also has failed to provide a way for programmers or others to notify the company of new security flaws. "There is currently no known e-mail address, or drop box of any sort, to notify Apple of a potential or confirmed security problem in any of their products," Norvell says. That isolates the best source of information about new security leaks: Apple's customers.
Furthermore, Apple hasn't shown any indication that it has assigned dedicated staff to tackle security issues and writing patches. A key component of security for any serious OS is a team of experienced code writers that can quickly
evaluate threats, assess the damage potential, and inform customers. Such a dedicated response team is particularly crucial with Unix products.
Here's why: Due to the underlying similarity of all Unix systems, a vulnerability in one type of Unix system can often be to compromise another. That means security engineers must scramble to ensure that Unix problems announced on
one platform won't prove hazardous to others. This is the way the CERT notification system has worked until now, and it has depended on software
vendors investigating reports in a timely manner. That's tough to do without a dedicated security staff.
Sounds like someone is going to have to setup a slash code site just for the OSX and their security issues.
The way I see it, The more you restrict content, and prohibit linking, or printing, or charge for even the priveledge of listening or reading something, the more value your content has to have.
There will always be a market for free content.
Otherwise you run into the situation of those certain stores. There are some stores in fancy areas of any city where you can shop at only if someone has told you where they are, and where if you have to ask, you can't afford it anyhow. It is shopping by appointment only. It is not just fashion, but includes antiques, and many other high price items.
Now this makes sense with exotic items. It even makes sense with things like porn.
But in the model of the corner grocery store, where you want to encourage traffic and lots of people, you can not suddenly put a lock on the door. What level of paranoia must you have to suddenly require an ID and a credit check to buy the equivalent of a can of Internet soup and a newspaper? I would go shop someplace else. I would move to another neighborhood.
An awful lot of sites going to the shopping by appointment only model are only selling soup, and they are cutting their own throats.
I can see the use of this software for the exclusive content set. Artists, etc. But in the long run, alot content will develop it's own alternate forums.
(I don't want to retype this, and what I wrote originally seems to fit here. so pardon me for a quick cut/paste/edit)
In an earlier thread someone posted the following:
Why would individuals encrypt their emails and other correspondence to each other? What is the rational explanation? The only reason I can see for day-to-day use of encryption is personal emails is that you have something to hide or you have a bad case of paranoia. No offence
people - but what makes what you say so interesting that you are so concerned about other people reading it? If you are doing something illegal, or you are concerned about maintaining secrecy because other people may steal your original (and so far unpatented) ideas then maybe there is a point - but I have met some people who refuse to exchange email unless it is PGP encrypted - what's up with that?
My response was:
The issue is one of Privacy.
If you do not belive in privacy, then I can recommend a glass house for you.
After all, you are not doing anything illegal? And if all houses were made of glass we would be able to catch criminals alot easier. We could just watch them all of the time with TV cameras.
What are you doing that is so important that it would require secrecy and privacy 24 hours a day? You must have a criminal frame of mind, not wanting to live in a glass house. This obsession with privacy is merely paranoia, y'know, and is easily fixed with one of several medications. Let us recommend a nice doctor who would be very willing to help you with medications.
I think this is very easily applicable to the Media companies. Let's open all of the books of all of the companies, and of all of the executives, because after all, They have nothing to hide at all, Right? Right?
[There have been so many rumors of associations with criminal elements, we need to make sure that everything is on the up and up]
What is good for the goose is good for the gander. The Media Moguls deserve the Glass House treatment. Since they are acting in a way that seems so criminal to many of us, how about actually investigating them for other crimes? What are the odds that someone would find something?
I made note of this thought in another topic, but the connection to the immediate topic was not as obvious in that context.
What I am seeing is a bigger picture. The bigger picture is like several pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, where for example, monitoring systems (as in the previous thread) advances in AI, and mechanisms sure as self healing devices, servers, whatever, are walking towards another future that may blind side us as much as the Internet blindsided folks. (In this context, it is interesting to look at the world of something like MaxHeadroom, an interesting show that had no clue that the Internet was coming)
Looking at this, and looking at the increase in AI, etc. I am coming to the conclusion that we are eventually heading to a world where, for example robots with mobile AIs will be smarter than humans. It will not be so long that computers in the cellars of corporations will have AI equal to or greater than Humans.
We could be heading to a world where the AIs and the Robots are in charge. All at first, on a gradient, a little here, and a little there. Then one day, there you are.
sheer Speculative fantasy, of course. Just trying to play connect the dots with each change and increase in technology.
This sounds like a business plan waiting to happen.
altjough what we would really need would be the service manuals for the things so that we can verifiy functionality.
I would be really ticked if it turned out to be something like, "well you can only use 3com routers with your 3com ethernet cards" - ie - merely marketing hype to lock you in to their hardware, which is probably just a generic OEM with branding on the outside.
these things need to be as well documented as regular dialup modems used to be.
There has been an ongoing fight to have FM radio stations licensed that would only be 100 watt stations. The idea is that this would be perfect for colleges, non-profits, etc.
for some strange reason this has been opposed by the bigger interests.
So I see this, and I think that this is somethng that the "big boys" would like only so long as they have their fingers in the pie. In this regard, this is compatible with the business aims of entities similar to the RIAA, MPAA, the Microsoft Monopoly, etc.
The little fellow is not allowed direct ownership, just to hand over money on a continuing basis. This has interesting imnplications for political speech.
Problem is that there are some chord changes that are essentially the same for a number of songs. For example, the theme for the Flintstones TV show sped up, or slowed down, are the same as the chords for many other classic jazz tunes. for example, "I've Got Rhythm"
Other songs that have similar chord changes are between thenselves are: "Heart and Soul", "Last Kiss", "Stand By Me", "D'yer Myker", and most of "Grease".
Also Check out Rage Against the Machine's "Wake Up" from the Matrix soundtrack and Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir".
If you're looking for the already implemented RSS 0.92 look here [http://backend.userland.com/rss092] There's also a reference to RSS 0.93 on which development started on April 01,2001.
This is merely Vital information.
As seen on the site:
How 0.92 relates to 0.91
RSS 0.92 is upward-compatible with RSS 0.91.
Every new feature of 0.92 is optional, meaning that a 0.91 file is also a valid 0.92 file.
Now if Netscrape would only document this better and let the rest of the world what is going on.
THIS MATTER having come before the Court pursuant to the Application of the United States of America, which Application requests that an Order be issued:
etc.
What gets me is that is very similar to the FBI investigations of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s.
Makes you wonder whose side they are on.
This irritates me.
Could someone look at the parent message please and moderate that up?
While there are not universally accepted standards, here is something that I have seen used
Crash Bugs - Crashing the OS, application, or another App. Includes Lockups
Data Bugs - Data loss or corruption. This is Bad(tm)
Functionality - Does the damn thing work?
Compatibility - video and print driver issues for example, and many other more obvious issues
Usability - Navigation, etc. This is an area intense debate.
Design - Usually consistancy of design, Icons, etc. closely tied in to Usability. Did we do this right in the first Place?
Content Bugs - typos, incorrect data, etc. Can include entire missing pages, etc. Note that legal issues for things like copyright notices can be important.
Race Conditions - When things go wrong because you fire off widget 2 while widget 1 is still calculating. Can depend on system speed.
Professional Polish - for lack of a better term - a subcategory of design bugs. Did you use the exact same size, color, and positioning of button etc everywhere in the app? Or did programmer one do it just a little different compared to programmers 2 and 3, resulting in a slightly off change in appearance or language in different areas of the app?
Priorities usually go from
Show Stopper -
High -
Medium -
low -
Obviously something like the text color being dark blue instead of the spec of black doesn't hurt anything and would be a low level bug.
I am sure there are plenty of QA sites out there, but I don't have the master page of links right at hand.
I wonder what market share it has compared to the other players in the market? I am not in this end of the business and so they are not familiar to me.
Just trying to find reasonable information is not worth the hassle of navigating a sea of spin doctor positioning papers.
If middle class jobs were performed by robots society would be destroyed.
Well. This is one of several possible scenarios when AI is pervasive enough that robots can be pervasive, and we are no longer at the top of the totem pole. Or are we going to have a society where the robots are in charge?
Notwithstanding the fact that they are entirely ineffective and quite obsolete, I think the idea is pretty decent as an addition to existing security policy. Otherwise, however, administrators will be replaced with autonomous AI 'black boxes', that will serve as the replacement security staff.
Agreed. I can see the marketroids going after the pointy haired bosses saying that you can replace your staff with these AI boxes.
The only problem is when this advances to the next stage, which is AI management, AI corporations, etc. The question is if this would be good or bad. Would we have a world of AI drones producing income so that we can live off their work and have a permanent vacation at the beach with fancy drinks decorated with umbrellas?
You got to wonder how fragile these things are at the time of manufacter. There are the usual concerns about cosmic rays, etc. So I wonder about the rundundancy built into the design.
I recall that on a typical wafer as made many years ago, the waste of nonfunctional CPUs was some absurd percentage. I wonder what it is with these things?
I was going to convert it (the Maryland law) from rtf to text. but it is 90 pages long, and very confusing to read.
But this is still a hoot.
We need a lawyer or law geek to go through this. I am interested in many of the sections that seemed to allow all kinds of consumer rights, but I might be hallucinating.
I am also wondering is this would mean that Windows would be outlawed in Maryland? [joke]
For example section 21-708. ADEQUATE ASSURANCE OF PERFORMANCE.
This sounds fascinating.
One part of the Maryland law is that One of the most contentious pieces of the Uniform Computer
Information Transaction Act -- allowing vendors to remotely disable software on a user's computer if the user was in breach of the software's licensing terms -- has been modified. The change eliminates the provision for software sold via retail outlets. But is still an issue for corporate users.
Update RE: Let's play "Bet Your Life"
on
Space Station BSOD
·
· Score: 2
A Nasa Engineer wrote in to the Register [here], and supplied extra info on the Systems onboard. Here are the essential bits:
The IBM Thinkpad laptops to which you refer, [are] called PCS (Portable Computer System) [and] are used throughout the station. They are indeed 486 based laptops. However, they are running Sun's Solaris OS for x86, and the OpenWindows WM, and a custom application that provides a graphical interface to the various on-board systems.
It is not unusual for a project of this size and scope to be using technology that seems dated to the man-on-the-street. [...] The PCS runs its own applications, which have very little to do with the actual main function operations in a module. [...] The laptop's processor is not involved in the calculation, monitoring or execution of the station's processes. [...] The computers that crashed (the C&Cs) and the PCS laptops are not the same computers
So usual original assumption was wrong. But that still leaves us with the other question of what *are* they running on the main system.
And the Original question of what you would bet your life on is also still interesting.
I can see the pen gesture. But I think that this is better suited to a 3d interface down the road a bit.
I get a smile out of the idea of people controlling their computers with the equivalent of wands, magic wands. In terms of a 3d interface it makes sense, complete with custom interfaces with funny symbols on them in a circle around the user.
There is no indication of an actual BSOD, since there is no indication of MS Windows being used. And how exactly would you get a BSOD
screenshot unless you were using VMWare or something? Seems rather impossible to me.
You use a camera. Check out this short Register story, which has a link to a very high rez photo where you can sorta make out the error messages, especially if you are familiar with the system.
This reminds me of the US Navy ship that had it's operational systems running on WIN NT. When they had a BSOD, the ship was dead in the water, and had to be towed in. There is this government news article, which has the details of that old story.
We simply cannot have peoples lives being dependant on software that can crash. In a business context, we can get used to crashes, after all it is only data, and it is only the livelyhood of the bussiness at stake. It is only maybe millions of dollars. In space, it is lives.
Which OS would you be willing to literally bet your life on?
Just in case you missed this, deceased billionaire Tommy Bartlett paid cash for Russia's spare Mir space station and brought it to the US Midwest as a tourist attraction, for his little Wisconson playground named Robot World. Links here, here, and here.
So it doen't surprise me that someone might want a Soyuz
Sun wheeled out its Mount Rushmore of cerebral greats
- Gage, Joy, Gosling - to herald the unveiling of its Jxta peer-to-peer
project today.
Announced by Bill Joy at the O'Reilly P2P conference in February, Jxta
(pronounced "Juxta") is now live and we're awash with positioning papers,
technical documentation and real downloadable code. But the instant reaction
from the peer-to-peer community - who've been at this for a little while
longer - was cool.
"It's no good for FreeNet, next to no use for MojoNation or Gnutella,
and no good for SETI at home," FreeNet developer Adam Langely told us.
"It is buzzword compliant, though."
And Jxta's reliance on XML brought an "Oh my god," from the developer
- a contributor to the excellent O'Reilly P2P book, Disruptive Technologies
- who's juggling a rewrite of the FreeNet core in C++ whilst studying for
his GCSEs.
It's not as if the guest of honour has marched in to the P2P party,
wolfed down the free booze and fondled the hostess. Almost, but not quite.
This party doesn't really need a guest of honour it seems, even if it
is Sun itself in best-behaviour mode. Bill Joy modestly described Jxta
as a project that attempts to define protocols, that's all. Within a year
he told us today, we might have enough usable protocols to embed in some
real devices.
But watching these billionaire new frontiersmen earnestly describe the
problems that P2P networks need to overcome, after we've watched 18 months
of very public sweat and anguish from the Gnutella, FreeNet et al networks
as they tackle these problems, strikes as the definition of redundancy.
"These networks develop in vertical silos, and they don't interoperate,"
said Gage in his introduction today. Which is true: "The P2P projects have
nothing in common except TCP/IP", agrees Langely. But far from being their
weakness, it's really their strength. Gnutella began life as a brute force,
quick-and-dirty mechanism for file sharing, and FreeNet as a long term
project to build a secure space free from surveillance. To adopt Sun's
Jxta plumbing would not only entail throwing away these hard-won lessons,
but it would compromise what each network was created to do. For example,
FreeNet is inundated with offers of help to turn it into a platform for
instant messaging, a global anonymous email gateway, or the new Napster.
Take your pick. But as FreeNet luminary Brandon Wiley unfailingly points
out - FreeNet is uniquely useful for dissidents in China (it was inspired
by Ross Anderson's Eternity
service meme) - so please don't mess it up.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and indeed, well-though-out
but pointlessly blue-sky RFCs, and Sun's error is really in mistaking social
spaces for technical problems. This conundrum was best illustrated at the
O'Reilly conference when a panel moderator (forgive us, we can't remember
which one, and we paraphrase liberally here) asked: "Is there a P2P? Is
there a P2P business model? Or will it be like client/server? Will we be
sitting around at a client/server conference in a year's time?"
So Sun's Jxta is a technology project looking for social uses, and the
P2P networks are social projects looking for technology solutions, and
the two seem to be passing each other like the proverbial ships in the
night.
But let's get some perspective: it's a benign adventure, and doesn't
deserve the rancour that say, a Microsoft P2P 'solution' - let your imaginations
run riot here, folks - would attract. We've seen so many such pogroms in
the past (Pen Windows, anyone?) that trample over not only optimistic start-ups,
but entire business models, and with Jxta being the hesitant Apache-licensed
venture that is, comparisons don't stand up to scrutiny.
As if P2P had never happened We'll go into the technical details when we've had time to digest them
(comments welcome), but Jxta's a layered set of protocols tackling not
just interoperability but monitoring and performance too.
If you were starting from scratch, then Jxta would be an obvious place
to go. The monitoring stuff is nice, as plenty of fringe edge networking
gets proscribed by vigilant BOFHs, fearful of congestion at network and
disk choke-points. And not just BOFHs, either - any local ISP worth its
salt should by now have recognised that P2P is a loyalty/community trump
card, too.
Interestingly, Joy is thinking small with Jxta. It could be, he suggested,
a way of steering users between the mess of access networks that we'll
be faced with pretty soon - between 2.5G GPRS/EDGE packet data, 802.11
networks, and our local LAN or dial-up connections. "Devices are too small
to carry ten protocol stacks," said Joy optimistically, without quite convincing
us that a Jxta-enabled device would solve the problem. But give the man
credit, he's looking for an answer to a problem most folk haven't even
recognised yet. Unfortunately, the conversation took a turn into the utterly
surreal, as Joy began to explain how embedded IP devices in schoolkids'
sneakers could cause havoc for teachers, and how Jxta-enabled sneakers
would solve the problem, because of their device recovery and monitoring
characteristics. Sensibly, and abruptly, Gage drove the conversation back
on to dry land before anyone had time to notice.
Let's kill the geeks But if the distress in the people's P2P community wasn't enough, the
opprobrium unleashed on the P2P meme by a lordly tech press is nothing
short of astonishing.
"Bill Joy is catching the tail end of a euphoria that never came into
existence," declares the New York Times, grandly.
The CNet/ZDNet conglomerate has outsourced its opinion to Gartner Group
analysts, who opine:
"Sun was careful to avoid the term P2P, not wanting to be associated
with a technology that appears to be going out of fashion." A fashion created
by... analysts such as Daryl Plummer and David Smith as recently as last
August, we seem to remember.
Ouch! Since when were the NYT and CNet such pernickety style mongers,
we wonder?
Ever since they had the P2P meme foisted upon them, we suspect, and
there's more than a hint of snobbishness at attempting to bury an idea
that the geek press had the temerity to name before they did. O'Reilly
might not have named P2P - we're not absolutely sure who did, and we really
couldn't care less - but the meme left the industry elite gasping for air,
and without an industry elite to follow, the industry-led tech press was
left experiencing a kind of zero-gravity for the first time. The Fourth
Estate marches to a well regulated beat. OK, we'll give you 'Open Source'
as a rebranding excercise, you can hear them think, but P2P, that's just
too much weird shit...
P2P networks, or whatever they'll be called now, are about to be touted
as the saviour of Europe's 3G crisis, for the very simple reason that they're
communication
rather than content based. And while we don't claim to predict the future,
that it's a model that's as sane as anything else on the table.
re: the CNN archive - the Movie and Music interests will want to charge in any way possible for anything they can get their hands on.
For example, if you have a figure skater performing to a bit of music, someone will want a license fee. Or a news story with a movie clip in it. Same thing.
Well, alot of folks seem to have this idea that work should never be fun. Obviously, Work can be fun.
There are at least two different cultures, however.
One is the corporate culture where the company has been running the same system for ages, and the guys are grooved in to pumping out comapny reports, and other business functions, be it across the wan, or whatever. You get good at what you do, and learn all kinds of shortcuts, etc to getting the job done, regardless of how screwed up the system gets when someone messes it up
Another is the Linux/unix wizard who is able to create things on the fly etc. But note that this is not the same as a project with finetuning for multiple years on end. (Take an extreme example of this long term fine tuning the programming for the Space Shuttle) This is where projects are generally short term. Days, weeks, and sometimes months.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a business plan to me.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
There will always be a market for free content.
Otherwise you run into the situation of those certain stores. There are some stores in fancy areas of any city where you can shop at only if someone has told you where they are, and where if you have to ask, you can't afford it anyhow. It is shopping by appointment only. It is not just fashion, but includes antiques, and many other high price items.
Now this makes sense with exotic items. It even makes sense with things like porn.
But in the model of the corner grocery store, where you want to encourage traffic and lots of people, you can not suddenly put a lock on the door. What level of paranoia must you have to suddenly require an ID and a credit check to buy the equivalent of a can of Internet soup and a newspaper? I would go shop someplace else. I would move to another neighborhood.
An awful lot of sites going to the shopping by appointment only model are only selling soup, and they are cutting their own throats.
I can see the use of this software for the exclusive content set. Artists, etc. But in the long run, alot content will develop it's own alternate forums.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
In an earlier thread someone posted the following:
Why would individuals encrypt their emails and other correspondence to each other? What is the rational explanation? The only reason I can see for day-to-day use of encryption is personal emails is that you have something to hide or you have a bad case of paranoia. No offence people - but what makes what you say so interesting that you are so concerned about other people reading it? If you are doing something illegal, or you are concerned about maintaining secrecy because other people may steal your original (and so far unpatented) ideas then maybe there is a point - but I have met some people who refuse to exchange email unless it is PGP encrypted - what's up with that?
My response was:
The issue is one of Privacy.
If you do not belive in privacy, then I can recommend a glass house for you.
After all, you are not doing anything illegal? And if all houses were made of glass we would be able to catch criminals alot easier. We could just watch them all of the time with TV cameras.
What are you doing that is so important that it would require secrecy and privacy 24 hours a day? You must have a criminal frame of mind, not wanting to live in a glass house. This obsession with privacy is merely paranoia, y'know, and is easily fixed with one of several medications. Let us recommend a nice doctor who would be very willing to help you with medications.
I think this is very easily applicable to the Media companies. Let's open all of the books of all of the companies, and of all of the executives, because after all, They have nothing to hide at all, Right? Right?
[There have been so many rumors of associations with criminal elements, we need to make sure that everything is on the up and up]
What is good for the goose is good for the gander. The Media Moguls deserve the Glass House treatment. Since they are acting in a way that seems so criminal to many of us, how about actually investigating them for other crimes? What are the odds that someone would find something?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
What I am seeing is a bigger picture. The bigger picture is like several pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, where for example, monitoring systems (as in the previous thread) advances in AI, and mechanisms sure as self healing devices, servers, whatever, are walking towards another future that may blind side us as much as the Internet blindsided folks. (In this context, it is interesting to look at the world of something like MaxHeadroom, an interesting show that had no clue that the Internet was coming)
Looking at this, and looking at the increase in AI, etc. I am coming to the conclusion that we are eventually heading to a world where, for example robots with mobile AIs will be smarter than humans. It will not be so long that computers in the cellars of corporations will have AI equal to or greater than Humans.
We could be heading to a world where the AIs and the Robots are in charge. All at first, on a gradient, a little here, and a little there. Then one day, there you are.
sheer Speculative fantasy, of course. Just trying to play connect the dots with each change and increase in technology.
But something to think about.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
altjough what we would really need would be the service manuals for the things so that we can verifiy functionality.
I would be really ticked if it turned out to be something like, "well you can only use 3com routers with your 3com ethernet cards" - ie - merely marketing hype to lock you in to their hardware, which is probably just a generic OEM with branding on the outside.
these things need to be as well documented as regular dialup modems used to be.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
for some strange reason this has been opposed by the bigger interests.
So I see this, and I think that this is somethng that the "big boys" would like only so long as they have their fingers in the pie. In this regard, this is compatible with the business aims of entities similar to the RIAA, MPAA, the Microsoft Monopoly, etc.
The little fellow is not allowed direct ownership, just to hand over money on a continuing basis. This has interesting imnplications for political speech.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Other songs that have similar chord changes are between thenselves are: "Heart and Soul", "Last Kiss", "Stand By Me", "D'yer Myker", and most of "Grease".
Also Check out Rage Against the Machine's "Wake Up" from the Matrix soundtrack and Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir".
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
This is merely Vital information.
As seen on the site:
How 0.92 relates to 0.91
RSS 0.92 is upward-compatible with RSS 0.91.
Every new feature of 0.92 is optional, meaning that a 0.91 file is also a valid 0.92 file.
Now if Netscrape would only document this better and let the rest of the world what is going on.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
etc.
What gets me is that is very similar to the FBI investigations of the Civil Rights movement in the 60s.
Makes you wonder whose side they are on.
This irritates me.
Could someone look at the parent message please and moderate that up?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
- Crash Bugs - Crashing the OS, application, or another App. Includes Lockups
- Data Bugs - Data loss or corruption. This is Bad(tm)
- Functionality - Does the damn thing work?
- Compatibility - video and print driver issues for example, and many other more obvious issues
- Usability - Navigation, etc. This is an area intense debate.
- Design - Usually consistancy of design, Icons, etc. closely tied in to Usability. Did we do this right in the first Place?
- Content Bugs - typos, incorrect data, etc. Can include entire missing pages, etc. Note that legal issues for things like copyright notices can be important.
- Race Conditions - When things go wrong because you fire off widget 2 while widget 1 is still calculating. Can depend on system speed.
- Professional Polish - for lack of a better term - a subcategory of design bugs. Did you use the exact same size, color, and positioning of button etc everywhere in the app? Or did programmer one do it just a little different compared to programmers 2 and 3, resulting in a slightly off change in appearance or language in different areas of the app?
Priorities usually go from- Show Stopper -
- High -
- Medium -
- low -
Obviously something like the text color being dark blue instead of the spec of black doesn't hurt anything and would be a low level bug.I am sure there are plenty of QA sites out there, but I don't have the master page of links right at hand.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Just trying to find reasonable information is not worth the hassle of navigating a sea of spin doctor positioning papers.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Well. This is one of several possible scenarios when AI is pervasive enough that robots can be pervasive, and we are no longer at the top of the totem pole. Or are we going to have a society where the robots are in charge?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
Agreed. I can see the marketroids going after the pointy haired bosses saying that you can replace your staff with these AI boxes.
The only problem is when this advances to the next stage, which is AI management, AI corporations, etc. The question is if this would be good or bad. Would we have a world of AI drones producing income so that we can live off their work and have a permanent vacation at the beach with fancy drinks decorated with umbrellas?
It's going to be a long strange road.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
I recall that on a typical wafer as made many years ago, the waste of nonfunctional CPUs was some absurd percentage. I wonder what it is with these things?
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
But this is still a hoot.
We need a lawyer or law geek to go through this. I am interested in many of the sections that seemed to allow all kinds of consumer rights, but I might be hallucinating.
I am also wondering is this would mean that Windows would be outlawed in Maryland? [joke]
For example section 21-708. ADEQUATE ASSURANCE OF PERFORMANCE.
This sounds fascinating.
One part of the Maryland law is that One of the most contentious pieces of the Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act -- allowing vendors to remotely disable software on a user's computer if the user was in breach of the software's licensing terms -- has been modified. The change eliminates the provision for software sold via retail outlets. But is still an issue for corporate users.
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The IBM Thinkpad laptops to which you refer, [are] called PCS (Portable Computer System) [and] are used throughout the station. They are indeed 486 based laptops. However, they are running Sun's Solaris OS for x86, and the OpenWindows WM, and a custom application that provides a graphical interface to the various on-board systems.
It is not unusual for a project of this size and scope to be using technology that seems dated to the man-on-the-street. [...] The PCS runs its own applications, which have very little to do with the actual main function operations in a module. [...] The laptop's processor is not involved in the calculation, monitoring or execution of the station's processes. [...] The computers that crashed (the C&Cs) and the PCS laptops are not the same computers
So usual original assumption was wrong. But that still leaves us with the other question of what *are* they running on the main system.
And the Original question of what you would bet your life on is also still interesting.
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I get a smile out of the idea of people controlling their computers with the equivalent of wands, magic wands. In terms of a 3d interface it makes sense, complete with custom interfaces with funny symbols on them in a circle around the user.
;-)
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You use a camera. Check out this short Register story, which has a link to a very high rez photo where you can sorta make out the error messages, especially if you are familiar with the system.
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We simply cannot have peoples lives being dependant on software that can crash. In a business context, we can get used to crashes, after all it is only data, and it is only the livelyhood of the bussiness at stake. It is only maybe millions of dollars. In space, it is lives.
Which OS would you be willing to literally bet your life on?
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So it doen't surprise me that someone might want a Soyuz
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No Joy from P2P vets for Sun's Jxta
By: Andrew Orlowski in San Francisco
Posted: 26/04/2001 at 00:52 GMT
Sun wheeled out its Mount Rushmore of cerebral greats - Gage, Joy, Gosling - to herald the unveiling of its Jxta peer-to-peer project today.
Announced by Bill Joy at the O'Reilly P2P conference in February, Jxta (pronounced "Juxta") is now live and we're awash with positioning papers, technical documentation and real downloadable code. But the instant reaction from the peer-to-peer community - who've been at this for a little while longer - was cool.
"It's no good for FreeNet, next to no use for MojoNation or Gnutella, and no good for SETI at home," FreeNet developer Adam Langely told us. "It is buzzword compliant, though."
And Jxta's reliance on XML brought an "Oh my god," from the developer - a contributor to the excellent O'Reilly P2P book, Disruptive Technologies - who's juggling a rewrite of the FreeNet core in C++ whilst studying for his GCSEs.
It's not as if the guest of honour has marched in to the P2P party, wolfed down the free booze and fondled the hostess. Almost, but not quite.
This party doesn't really need a guest of honour it seems, even if it is Sun itself in best-behaviour mode. Bill Joy modestly described Jxta as a project that attempts to define protocols, that's all. Within a year he told us today, we might have enough usable protocols to embed in some real devices.
But watching these billionaire new frontiersmen earnestly describe the problems that P2P networks need to overcome, after we've watched 18 months of very public sweat and anguish from the Gnutella, FreeNet et al networks as they tackle these problems, strikes as the definition of redundancy.
"These networks develop in vertical silos, and they don't interoperate," said Gage in his introduction today. Which is true: "The P2P projects have nothing in common except TCP/IP", agrees Langely. But far from being their weakness, it's really their strength. Gnutella began life as a brute force, quick-and-dirty mechanism for file sharing, and FreeNet as a long term project to build a secure space free from surveillance. To adopt Sun's Jxta plumbing would not only entail throwing away these hard-won lessons, but it would compromise what each network was created to do. For example, FreeNet is inundated with offers of help to turn it into a platform for instant messaging, a global anonymous email gateway, or the new Napster. Take your pick. But as FreeNet luminary Brandon Wiley unfailingly points out - FreeNet is uniquely useful for dissidents in China (it was inspired by Ross Anderson's Eternity service meme) - so please don't mess it up.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and indeed, well-though-out but pointlessly blue-sky RFCs, and Sun's error is really in mistaking social spaces for technical problems. This conundrum was best illustrated at the O'Reilly conference when a panel moderator (forgive us, we can't remember which one, and we paraphrase liberally here) asked: "Is there a P2P? Is there a P2P business model? Or will it be like client/server? Will we be sitting around at a client/server conference in a year's time?"
So Sun's Jxta is a technology project looking for social uses, and the P2P networks are social projects looking for technology solutions, and the two seem to be passing each other like the proverbial ships in the night.
But let's get some perspective: it's a benign adventure, and doesn't deserve the rancour that say, a Microsoft P2P 'solution' - let your imaginations run riot here, folks - would attract. We've seen so many such pogroms in the past (Pen Windows, anyone?) that trample over not only optimistic start-ups, but entire business models, and with Jxta being the hesitant Apache-licensed venture that is, comparisons don't stand up to scrutiny.
As if P2P had never happened
We'll go into the technical details when we've had time to digest them (comments welcome), but Jxta's a layered set of protocols tackling not just interoperability but monitoring and performance too.
If you were starting from scratch, then Jxta would be an obvious place to go. The monitoring stuff is nice, as plenty of fringe edge networking gets proscribed by vigilant BOFHs, fearful of congestion at network and disk choke-points. And not just BOFHs, either - any local ISP worth its salt should by now have recognised that P2P is a loyalty/community trump card, too.
Interestingly, Joy is thinking small with Jxta. It could be, he suggested, a way of steering users between the mess of access networks that we'll be faced with pretty soon - between 2.5G GPRS/EDGE packet data, 802.11 networks, and our local LAN or dial-up connections. "Devices are too small to carry ten protocol stacks," said Joy optimistically, without quite convincing us that a Jxta-enabled device would solve the problem. But give the man credit, he's looking for an answer to a problem most folk haven't even recognised yet. Unfortunately, the conversation took a turn into the utterly surreal, as Joy began to explain how embedded IP devices in schoolkids' sneakers could cause havoc for teachers, and how Jxta-enabled sneakers would solve the problem, because of their device recovery and monitoring characteristics. Sensibly, and abruptly, Gage drove the conversation back on to dry land before anyone had time to notice.
Let's kill the geeks
But if the distress in the people's P2P community wasn't enough, the opprobrium unleashed on the P2P meme by a lordly tech press is nothing short of astonishing.
"Bill Joy is catching the tail end of a euphoria that never came into existence," declares the New York Times, grandly.
The CNet/ZDNet conglomerate has outsourced its opinion to Gartner Group analysts, who opine:
"Sun was careful to avoid the term P2P, not wanting to be associated with a technology that appears to be going out of fashion." A fashion created by ... analysts such as Daryl Plummer and David Smith as recently as last
August, we seem to remember.
Ouch! Since when were the NYT and CNet such pernickety style mongers, we wonder?
Ever since they had the P2P meme foisted upon them, we suspect, and there's more than a hint of snobbishness at attempting to bury an idea that the geek press had the temerity to name before they did. O'Reilly might not have named P2P - we're not absolutely sure who did, and we really couldn't care less - but the meme left the industry elite gasping for air, and without an industry elite to follow, the industry-led tech press was left experiencing a kind of zero-gravity for the first time. The Fourth Estate marches to a well regulated beat. OK, we'll give you 'Open Source' as a rebranding excercise, you can hear them think, but P2P, that's just too much weird shit...
P2P networks, or whatever they'll be called now, are about to be touted as the saviour of Europe's 3G crisis, for the very simple reason that they're communication rather than content based. And while we don't claim to predict the future, that it's a model that's as sane as anything else on the table.
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Who wants to bet that they get visited by a bunch of guys with nail guns?
I mean, this is just a land grab to see what they can get away with. and they must be hoping that everyone is a sheeple.
I want to go break some fingers at the patent office. Someone needs to patent the idea of a word processor and a spread sheet.
This is starting to fall into the category of needing heavy weaponry as an attitude adjustment tool.
[sigh]
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For example, if you have a figure skater performing to a bit of music, someone will want a license fee. Or a news story with a movie clip in it. Same thing.
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There are at least two different cultures, however.
One is the corporate culture where the company has been running the same system for ages, and the guys are grooved in to pumping out comapny reports, and other business functions, be it across the wan, or whatever. You get good at what you do, and learn all kinds of shortcuts, etc to getting the job done, regardless of how screwed up the system gets when someone messes it up
Another is the Linux/unix wizard who is able to create things on the fly etc. But note that this is not the same as a project with finetuning for multiple years on end. (Take an extreme example of this long term fine tuning the programming for the Space Shuttle) This is where projects are generally short term. Days, weeks, and sometimes months.
Each one is a different personality
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