Another problem that stems from Microsoft assuming it always knows best: You can't change the My Music folder to act like a normal folder. Sometimes when I download music I don't pay attention to the exact filename so I like to sort my music files by date to find the ones I just downloaded. Not an option with the My Music directory. Bleh.
Steven B. Lipner, Microsoft's director of security assurance, responded, saying: "I'd be astonished if the open-source community has in total done as many man-years of computer security code reviews as we have done in the last two months."
Dammit, can we just send some people to Mars already? All this work with robots going around and looking at Mars and analyzing the soil and air and whatever is impressive but we'd learn a lot more if we could just send some people out there and have them do the collection and analyze everything and bring some of it back with them. People can travel a lot farther than the little robot rovers can and they can do it a lot more dependably and there's a lot more that can be done to analyze Martian soil and air here on earth rather than on site. Argh! Stupid polititians not giving stupid NASA enough money to build a stupid spaceship to go to stupid Mars. Well, hopefully this discovery will spur someone to go to Mars. Well, unless they end up not finding conclusive data.
What's disturbing is that the US constitution says something very obfuscated along the lines of, "This document is the supreme law of the land, along with treaties we enter into," or something. So not only are treaties basically laws passed by the president and the Senate, but they're very difficult to overturn.
Of course, the Senate doesn't always ratify treaties that we sign. There are a couple of cold war era treaties regarding nuclear weapons and such that we signed as a country but were never ratified by the Senate.
First, reviewing or editting an article for a journal should get you a free copy of a similiarly priced journal. Often scientists review articles that are not in their field of expertise in order to maintain impartiality, so getting a copy of the journal that the article you reviewed is in isn't always worthwhile.
Second, the "Open Access" movement should organize it's own journals. These journals could be formed at any tiem for free by anyone. The journal would mainly consist of a review board that reviews articles. If the review board considers an article to be of a high enough quality and within a certain subject area then the review board can mark the article as being "included" in said journal. This way, while anyone can still publish a paper by uploading it or whatever, people can filter searches by particular journals, giving them a quick way to weed out lots of crap.
For those of you who are wondering about who pays the review board for their time have stumbled onto the problem that faces the open access movement. You need a lot of very smart people to review enough papers to make up good journals, and those very smart people quite often have better things to do with their time.
But the article notes that KaZaa has demonstrated in the past that they have the ability to disable thier own software remotely. Ooops.
This is why I think they're trying out a different argument. They can always fall back to, "we can't do it", but the other court case gives them a different option.
The reason they aren't shutting down isn't just because they want to be rebels or something. While KaZaa does state that there's nothing they can do now that their software's out there and being used, they say they're not shutting down in order to comply with a different court order. In a different case with Buma/Stemra (the Dutch licensing body that's also suing them to shut down), KaZaa won an injunction forcing Buma/Stemra to continue to negotiate with them about a streaming-on-demand service. KaZaa says that if their current sevice isn't up and running, they can't negotiate well with Buma/Stemra.
I'm personally of the same opinion as the author of the article. I think that as soon as they get shut down, they go to a much weaker position to negotiate from. Why negotiate with KaZaa to make money fromthe music they're distributing when they aren't distributing music anymore?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the article said MACHOS were just really large clumps of normal mass that don't emit any light, so when they say they've found MACHOS, they mean they've just found stuff. You know, really big rocks and such. It's impressive that they's partially proven a theory that would explain where all the dark matter is, but it really sounds like they're trying to sound impressive when they call what they've found MACHOS. Why not just "rocks", or "stuff"?
They have no legal expectation for safety. I didn't pay them for what they did, so they can put out whatever they want to publish. As long as they don't claim it's much more secure than it actually is, I haven't lost anything, whereas if I were to purchase software I have expended money in exchange for features, one of which should be security. If the free software is flawed I can stop using it or I can go into the code and fix it myself. If the software I purchased is flawed, I can't do anything about it. Maybe if I had access to the code for the software I purchased and I could modify it to fix holes, then maybe that would be okay.
Besides, right now there's still no one to hold accountable for holes in free software while you still have a company to go after if the commercial software they sold you was crap.
Shouldn't this have been caught before release? Who do I get to go after, since Apache is free? Should RedHat pay the penalty since they shipped the product? Or the Apache developers?
Good point. What I guess I should have said was, "commercially developed software" or something like that. If you use something someone wrote for free, you're on your own. I have no incentive to make software I give away for free safe so long as I don't go around making guarantees that it's completely safe. Basically, if a reasonable users does reasonable things with software that cost money and suffers because the software's really insecure, the company that made a profit from the programming of the software should be at least slightly liable.
And I used the word "reasonable" becuase that's the word that is most often used in laws and court descisions. It's a vague standard but it's used an awful lot.
That works if you're a private company. What happens when a soccer mom gets her cable modem turned off because someone exploited some hole in IIS that she installed on her computer without knowing it? Never mind that to fix the hole she'll have to d/l the patch from the microsoft website, which is kind of tough when you don't have web access anymore.
Sure, after the patches are out then it's your own responsibility to fix it. But some of the holes and/or default configurations have no business being in a piece of published commercial software.
More specifically, if you pay for some software and it has security holes that a reasonable and prudent check should have found before it went on sale, and those security holes cause you problems (like lost time, lost money, lost business, whatever), then you can at least try to get the purchase price of the software back from the publisher. Seriously. Lots of software has holes in it. But if I buy win2k and install it, and the default install turns on IIS, and IIS has enormous holes in it that should never have made it past quality control, then I should be able to get the cost fo the software back from microsoft when I suffer problems from their poorly designed software.
If you make the penalties for unsafe software too large, no one will write software. But there needs to be some sort of incentive for companies with so large a market share that they don't care how crappy their software is to make their software safe.
"God Emperor of Dune! was the best one. The whole point of the first three books, besides telling a story was to set up book 4. The series wouldn't have been as good as it was if it wasn't for the ideas he put forth in book four and carried out through the last two. He really goes out of his way to drive home both the advances and the risks of all the exploration that gets done after "God Emperor".
Mr. Spey
Re:what will be improved by finished product...
on
This is IT?
·
· Score: 1
If they can get the weight of the whole scooter under 30 pounds, have a top speed around 22-25 mph, a range of 35-40 miles, easily folded up and the cost around US$1,000, I think there would a LOT of consumer interest.
I don't want to be on one of these things and going 22-25 mph. That's the point. If I'm ever travelling somewhere that makes a top speed of 22-25 mph desirable, I shouldn't be using a ginger.
With the way every content company is a big megacorp that makes TV shows, movies, and music, it's very possible that they could completely inundate kids with messages that file sharing is the same as stealing, and stealing is bad. If it happens often enough, kids will absorb the message without thinking about it. The only reason it's so scary that all the media companies will all start pushing the same message is because they all have such a huge vested interest in pushing this particular message.
The best thing I see coming out of this is the possibility of an entire governmental agency switching over to solely free software. At that point you'll have all types of employees all using free destop productivity software. Whatever word processor they use, it'll have to work well and have everything they need and want it to. Same with presentation, spreadsheet, database, etc. applications.
One thing I've heard repeatedly from various places is that there's no set of free software applications that meet the above requirements, pretty much forcing people to use windows. Once an entire agency is using free software, the government is going to have to pay for some company to create exactly what it is that they need for the desktop, and since it's open source, it'll be available to everyone. So there'll be a standard install of a standard, easy to use desktop and it'll come with all the applications a person needs to be an engineer, statistition, executive, or even just a secretary.
I see this as possibly the only way free software will get a good business desktop in the near future, and I can't wait for it to happen.
My personal experience with what happenned on 9/11/01 is very interesting. However I thought I'd pass along other first person accounts that I'd heard today. Not many people here may read them, but they'll be archived on slashdot forever in case someone wants to read them later.
I was stuck in traffic in front of the Pentagon when the plane hit. The plan flew right over my car and crashed into the side of the building, less then 200 feet away. On the Northbound side of the road (Memorial Highway) the debris splash was bad but not terrible, nobody on the highway was injured, although many cars damaged to a greater or lessor degree. (My own included.) The debris also caused several accidents on the Southbound side, again all apparently minor due to the traffic induced low speeds.
Based on my observation I believe that nobody outside of the building was badly hurt. As horrible as this attack in Washington was, there was no sign of the widespread distruction we saw in New York, only the Pentagon was directly affected. The latest local news indicates that approximately 60 people have been admitted into local hospitals from the attack, mostly with burns, but they have only recently gotten the fire under control enough to begin the rescue effort. They expect that effort to take several days as they work to protect the rescue crew from building collapse and pools of jet fuel.
Another one:
By great fortune today, I was at Marine Corps Base Quantico instead of the Pentagon. I'm still calling around to confirm the status of some of my colleagues.
What I think they mean by "reference" is that National Semiconductor would rather sell the basic building blocks of the Geode to mass market companies (Sony, Panasonic, etc.) and have them assemble the final product. This would allow for different shapes and styles, a brand name and a logo in plain view, etc. However, in order to get people to start programming, National Semiconductor will sell you a plastic box with the geode inside of it.
It looks like National Semiconductor is trying to sell their hardware by getting Open Source programmers to write software for it. National Semiconductor wants to sell its hardware to resellers who can brand it and worry about bundling software with it so that it actually does something. Resellers will want to do this because they don't have worry about paying for software, since it will all be available for free.
On the one hand, I have no choice but to applaud National Semiconductor and the linux4.tv people for coming up with such an ingenious way to leverage the open source community to make a buck. On the other hand, it bothers me that they plan to use freely donated software to make their product more appealing. It's one thing for companies like RedHat and Mandrake to charge you for the physical version of their linux distros, but somehow it feels wrong to me for a company to set up a situation where people will want to essentially write their software for them for free. It feels like they're setting a trap for programmers and baiting it with the increased acceptance and use of linux.
I guess the bottom line is just whether or not they can save enough money buy getting free software to make their product cheaper than everyone else's, without having to use buggy code.
Random thought: Since all the software is free, I suppose you could just buy a blank, unbranded model and install everythign yourself. Now that's an appealing idea, and truer to the ideas behind the open source movement.
And for a subtle effect, get plants. Like cactus (hard to kill).
Screw cactus, get a fake plant. I've had one on my desk for over three months now and it's still fine, depite the fact that I haven't watered it or in any other way helped keep it healthy.
I was wondering about this, too, until I read the following towards the bottom of the article:
2. After 7 - 8 seconds of flight at 60 degrees followed by thrust vectoring to 90 degrees, the four fins separate from the rocket. The main engine cuts off at 40km, and the rocket glides for about five minutes in zero - G.
So hopefully it won't plow right into the balloon.
What's weird is when I was checking to make sure that like I posted to it worked, the picture displayed in the browser window when I loaded it looked just like a green "/." on a white background. So it looks like either the icon is being displayed improperly by IE5.5 or that the people at/. central saved it in the wrong format.
So I'm sitting at work using windows and IEv5.5. I just reloaded slashdot and noticed that there was a little icon next to http://www.slashdot.org in the address field that looked like an "/." icon. Is this new? I haven't noticed it before, and this certainly seems like something/. wouldn't make. For those who are curious, you can see the icon at http://jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu/~sjs2/favicon.ico.
Slashdot Mirror
Another problem that stems from Microsoft assuming it always knows best: You can't change the My Music folder to act like a normal folder. Sometimes when I download music I don't pay attention to the exact filename so I like to sort my music files by date to find the ones I just downloaded. Not an option with the My Music directory. Bleh.
Mr. Spey
Steven B. Lipner, Microsoft's director of security assurance, responded, saying: "I'd be astonished if the open-source community has in total done as many man-years of computer security code reviews as we have done in the last two months."
Hah hah hah!! What an idiot.
Mr. Spey
Dammit, can we just send some people to Mars already? All this work with robots going around and looking at Mars and analyzing the soil and air and whatever is impressive but we'd learn a lot more if we could just send some people out there and have them do the collection and analyze everything and bring some of it back with them. People can travel a lot farther than the little robot rovers can and they can do it a lot more dependably and there's a lot more that can be done to analyze Martian soil and air here on earth rather than on site. Argh! Stupid polititians not giving stupid NASA enough money to build a stupid spaceship to go to stupid Mars. Well, hopefully this discovery will spur someone to go to Mars. Well, unless they end up not finding conclusive data.
Mr. Spey
What's disturbing is that the US constitution says something very obfuscated along the lines of, "This document is the supreme law of the land, along with treaties we enter into," or something. So not only are treaties basically laws passed by the president and the Senate, but they're very difficult to overturn.
Of course, the Senate doesn't always ratify treaties that we sign. There are a couple of cold war era treaties regarding nuclear weapons and such that we signed as a country but were never ratified by the Senate.
Mr. Spey
First, reviewing or editting an article for a journal should get you a free copy of a similiarly priced journal. Often scientists review articles that are not in their field of expertise in order to maintain impartiality, so getting a copy of the journal that the article you reviewed is in isn't always worthwhile.
Second, the "Open Access" movement should organize it's own journals. These journals could be formed at any tiem for free by anyone. The journal would mainly consist of a review board that reviews articles. If the review board considers an article to be of a high enough quality and within a certain subject area then the review board can mark the article as being "included" in said journal. This way, while anyone can still publish a paper by uploading it or whatever, people can filter searches by particular journals, giving them a quick way to weed out lots of crap.
For those of you who are wondering about who pays the review board for their time have stumbled onto the problem that faces the open access movement. You need a lot of very smart people to review enough papers to make up good journals, and those very smart people quite often have better things to do with their time.
Mr. Spey
But the article notes that KaZaa has demonstrated in the past that they have the ability to disable thier own software remotely. Ooops.
This is why I think they're trying out a different argument. They can always fall back to, "we can't do it", but the other court case gives them a different option.
Mr. Spey
The reason they aren't shutting down isn't just because they want to be rebels or something. While KaZaa does state that there's nothing they can do now that their software's out there and being used, they say they're not shutting down in order to comply with a different court order. In a different case with Buma/Stemra (the Dutch licensing body that's also suing them to shut down), KaZaa won an injunction forcing Buma/Stemra to continue to negotiate with them about a streaming-on-demand service. KaZaa says that if their current sevice isn't up and running, they can't negotiate well with Buma/Stemra.
I'm personally of the same opinion as the author of the article. I think that as soon as they get shut down, they go to a much weaker position to negotiate from. Why negotiate with KaZaa to make money fromthe music they're distributing when they aren't distributing music anymore?
Mr. Spey
The first use of the not-word "teh":
...conference at teh Hyatt Los ... , from the fa.space group.
Mr. Spey
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the article said MACHOS were just really large clumps of normal mass that don't emit any light, so when they say they've found MACHOS, they mean they've just found stuff. You know, really big rocks and such. It's impressive that they's partially proven a theory that would explain where all the dark matter is, but it really sounds like they're trying to sound impressive when they call what they've found MACHOS. Why not just "rocks", or "stuff"?
Mr. Spey
They have no legal expectation for safety. I didn't pay them for what they did, so they can put out whatever they want to publish. As long as they don't claim it's much more secure than it actually is, I haven't lost anything, whereas if I were to purchase software I have expended money in exchange for features, one of which should be security. If the free software is flawed I can stop using it or I can go into the code and fix it myself. If the software I purchased is flawed, I can't do anything about it. Maybe if I had access to the code for the software I purchased and I could modify it to fix holes, then maybe that would be okay.
Besides, right now there's still no one to hold accountable for holes in free software while you still have a company to go after if the commercial software they sold you was crap.
Mr. Spey
Shouldn't this have been caught before release? Who do I get to go after, since Apache is free? Should RedHat pay the penalty since they shipped the product? Or the Apache developers?
Good point. What I guess I should have said was, "commercially developed software" or something like that. If you use something someone wrote for free, you're on your own. I have no incentive to make software I give away for free safe so long as I don't go around making guarantees that it's completely safe. Basically, if a reasonable users does reasonable things with software that cost money and suffers because the software's really insecure, the company that made a profit from the programming of the software should be at least slightly liable.
And I used the word "reasonable" becuase that's the word that is most often used in laws and court descisions. It's a vague standard but it's used an awful lot.
Mr. Spey
That works if you're a private company. What happens when a soccer mom gets her cable modem turned off because someone exploited some hole in IIS that she installed on her computer without knowing it? Never mind that to fix the hole she'll have to d/l the patch from the microsoft website, which is kind of tough when you don't have web access anymore.
Sure, after the patches are out then it's your own responsibility to fix it. But some of the holes and/or default configurations have no business being in a piece of published commercial software.
Mr. Spey
More specifically, if you pay for some software and it has security holes that a reasonable and prudent check should have found before it went on sale, and those security holes cause you problems (like lost time, lost money, lost business, whatever), then you can at least try to get the purchase price of the software back from the publisher. Seriously. Lots of software has holes in it. But if I buy win2k and install it, and the default install turns on IIS, and IIS has enormous holes in it that should never have made it past quality control, then I should be able to get the cost fo the software back from microsoft when I suffer problems from their poorly designed software.
If you make the penalties for unsafe software too large, no one will write software. But there needs to be some sort of incentive for companies with so large a market share that they don't care how crappy their software is to make their software safe.
Mr. Spey
"God Emperor of Dune! was the best one. The whole point of the first three books, besides telling a story was to set up book 4. The series wouldn't have been as good as it was if it wasn't for the ideas he put forth in book four and carried out through the last two. He really goes out of his way to drive home both the advances and the risks of all the exploration that gets done after "God Emperor".
Mr. Spey
If they can get the weight of the whole scooter under 30 pounds, have a top speed around 22-25 mph, a range of 35-40 miles, easily folded up and the cost around US$1,000, I think there would a LOT of consumer interest.
I don't want to be on one of these things and going 22-25 mph. That's the point. If I'm ever travelling somewhere that makes a top speed of 22-25 mph desirable, I shouldn't be using a ginger.
Mr. Spey
Wow. Luke's father whined even more than Luke does. Damn.
Mr. Spey
With the way every content company is a big megacorp that makes TV shows, movies, and music, it's very possible that they could completely inundate kids with messages that file sharing is the same as stealing, and stealing is bad. If it happens often enough, kids will absorb the message without thinking about it. The only reason it's so scary that all the media companies will all start pushing the same message is because they all have such a huge vested interest in pushing this particular message.
Mr. Spey
The best thing I see coming out of this is the possibility of an entire governmental agency switching over to solely free software. At that point you'll have all types of employees all using free destop productivity software. Whatever word processor they use, it'll have to work well and have everything they need and want it to. Same with presentation, spreadsheet, database, etc. applications.
One thing I've heard repeatedly from various places is that there's no set of free software applications that meet the above requirements, pretty much forcing people to use windows. Once an entire agency is using free software, the government is going to have to pay for some company to create exactly what it is that they need for the desktop, and since it's open source, it'll be available to everyone. So there'll be a standard install of a standard, easy to use desktop and it'll come with all the applications a person needs to be an engineer, statistition, executive, or even just a secretary.
I see this as possibly the only way free software will get a good business desktop in the near future, and I can't wait for it to happen.
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
Another one:
Mr. Spey
Cover your butt. Bernard is watching.
What I think they mean by "reference" is that National Semiconductor would rather sell the basic building blocks of the Geode to mass market companies (Sony, Panasonic, etc.) and have them assemble the final product. This would allow for different shapes and styles, a brand name and a logo in plain view, etc. However, in order to get people to start programming, National Semiconductor will sell you a plastic box with the geode inside of it.
Mr. Spey
It looks like National Semiconductor is trying to sell their hardware by getting Open Source programmers to write software for it. National Semiconductor wants to sell its hardware to resellers who can brand it and worry about bundling software with it so that it actually does something. Resellers will want to do this because they don't have worry about paying for software, since it will all be available for free.
On the one hand, I have no choice but to applaud National Semiconductor and the linux4.tv people for coming up with such an ingenious way to leverage the open source community to make a buck. On the other hand, it bothers me that they plan to use freely donated software to make their product more appealing. It's one thing for companies like RedHat and Mandrake to charge you for the physical version of their linux distros, but somehow it feels wrong to me for a company to set up a situation where people will want to essentially write their software for them for free. It feels like they're setting a trap for programmers and baiting it with the increased acceptance and use of linux.
I guess the bottom line is just whether or not they can save enough money buy getting free software to make their product cheaper than everyone else's, without having to use buggy code.
Random thought: Since all the software is free, I suppose you could just buy a blank, unbranded model and install everythign yourself. Now that's an appealing idea, and truer to the ideas behind the open source movement.
Mr. Spey
And for a subtle effect, get plants. Like cactus (hard to kill).
Screw cactus, get a fake plant. I've had one on my desk for over three months now and it's still fine, depite the fact that I haven't watered it or in any other way helped keep it healthy.
Mr. Spey
I was wondering about this, too, until I read the following towards the bottom of the article:
2. After 7 - 8 seconds of flight at 60 degrees followed by thrust vectoring to 90 degrees, the four fins separate from the rocket. The main engine cuts off at 40km, and the rocket glides for about five minutes in zero - G.
So hopefully it won't plow right into the balloon.
Mr. Spey
What's weird is when I was checking to make sure that like I posted to it worked, the picture displayed in the browser window when I loaded it looked just like a green "/." on a white background. So it looks like either the icon is being displayed improperly by IE5.5 or that the people at /. central saved it in the wrong format.
Mr. Spey
So I'm sitting at work using windows and IEv5.5. I just reloaded slashdot and noticed that there was a little icon next to http://www.slashdot.org in the address field that looked like an "/." icon. Is this new? I haven't noticed it before, and this certainly seems like something /. wouldn't make. For those who are curious, you can see the icon at http://jhunix.hcf.jhu.edu/~sjs2/favicon.ico.
Mr. Spey