I did submit reports using their automatic tool. I didn't catch the option to attach my content in that. I know OOo 2 beta is getting heavy testing, and will be ready to go soon; I'm just skeptical about the "next week" time frame. It's awesome software, and I'm eager for it to be up soonest.
I tried to use OOo2 RC2 on a real presentation yesterday. Core dumped in three different places, but eventually got the presentation out. I'm skeptical that it's close to being debugged, but the proof's in the pudding, I guess.
Besides, there will be this blessed period in between where I don't have a working TV in my home. I've been trying to talk my wife into letting me kill our television for years; legal help would be greatly appreciated.
The home page for the ext3cow filesystem also does a good job of referencing other versioning filesystems and the like. I think you'll find what you want linked from there. I recommend Wayback, although it doesn't do everything you asked for.
The last two times I discovered we were hit, I got a security alert a few days later. This may indeed be a very quick response, but it doesn't solve my problem.:-)
I don't agree that TWiki is safe to use on public sites in its current form. The code base is so diffuse, complex, and difficult to audit that I expect more serious incidents in the near future. Responding to incidents is not the same as proactively hardening the software to prevent them. Perhaps the "Dakar" release will solve the problems---I hope so. But until then, I stand by my earlier non-recommendation.
While I agree with parent that Python code tends to be more readable than Perl code, I'd like to amplify that we really aren't moving from Perl to Python, but from TWiki to MoinMoin. I believe that MoinMoin is more secure because it has a far better security record, because I've watched freedesktop.org, which is a target, run successfully for a while, and because I was able to read, audit, and modify the authentication code at the heart of MoinMoin to suit our purposes quickly.
I'm not thrilled with MoinMoin's security either; as another poster said, it's hard to find a carefully security-hardened Wiki. Our choices were limited by the fact that we wanted to migrate our flat-file TWiki data to another flat-file Wiki, we wanted something with some history and a reasonably large feature set, and we had a limited time to do the final evaluation and make a move. But so far MoinMoin has worked out OK for us.
I've looked at some other Wikis. I'm not excited about keeping my content in a database, I want user edit authentication to control Wiki spam, I want the possibility of fully-private Wikis, and I need something scriptable for "farm" operation. There were a couple of other Perl-based Wikis that were possibilities, but ultimately MoinMoin seemed to be about as good as anything. We'll see how it looks after a month or two.
I also recently had my TWiki-based wiki farm broken into, for the 3rd time in 4 years, despite trying to stay up to date at least with Debian releases. Fortunately, I had each wiki set up to run suexec as an individual user, so the damage was reasonably well contained.
Since TWiki's security problems seem intractable (giant Perl codebase that's very difficult to audit and doesn't seem to have been designed to handle security) I decided that enough is enough and followed freedesktop.org's lead in moving the whole farm to MoinMoin. MoinMoin is written in Python rather than Perl, and seems to be better thought out in terms of security, although I had to hack up the source some to get what I wanted. Some open source migration tools will be made available shortly.
I wouldn't recommend to anyone that they run a publically-viewable TWiki installation at this point.
``The taxes are substantial, but it's just a piece of the puzzle,'' he said. ``The millions lost by the county could have been hundreds of millions if they built in Oregon...''
Heck yeah. Move it to Oregon! We'll find you a beautiful patch of land, and give you the tax break of the century the way we already have to Intel and Nike. We have plenty of geeks here who are plenty competent, and can really use the work. Heck, Google already has a new facility in the works in The Dalles; add it to that.
Google is welcome in our state; the heck with yours if you don't want 'em.
Yes. If anyone thinks that MS Office on Linux has anything to do with open formats for data storage, the issue has been successfully confused in their mind. I'm afraid I can pretty easily imagine some folks getting confused in this way, though, especially with proper assistance. "I can use my PC Word files with Word for Linux, and Linux is open source. So what's the problem?"
Microsoft's greatest strength (Windows/Office Monopoly) is actually their greatest weakness. No really. They have a direct channel to push technology into stuff that everyone buys and uses, but it will ultimately fail because they can't sell "Ad-Words" or something.
It is starting to fail now, but for a different reason. Governments don't like businesses to control them. In particular, governments don't like foreign businesses to control them. Every time Microsoft tries to use its channel these days, they're hit with sanctions of various kinds. Every time they try to extend their reach into a new market, they're slapped down in various ways. In the not-very-long run, this is a problem for them. How happy do you think Microsoft is about what's going on in China? Europe? Massachusetts?
Linux is the answer to all Microsoft's problems -- they only way they can handle the current non-factor of the Linux desktop is by coming out with Linux Office and Linux Windows, which wouldn't really improve their situation but Linux is like cool and stuff and isn't that a good enough reason?
A relatively easy and inexpensive way for Microsoft to confuse the issue on open formats for data storage and interchange would be to release its office suite for Linux. An incredibly difficult and expensive way to hinder open source in cannibalizing the applications market would be to provide a proprietary module for Linux that permitted running all Windows apps properly. I don't see large benefits to the Linux community from either approach. The office suite has already been re-commoditized by open source. Ditto for the browser. Nothing Microsoft will do in either space can undo that. Microsoft has a reasonable amount to gain from getting their products onto open platforms, and the open source community has little, as near as I can tell. Whether they embrace Linux or fight it, though, they have a genuine problem in the application space.
10 years from now, Microsoft will be in trouble. They might make two trillion dollars in that period of time, but I will eventually be proven right.
Sometimes changes happen quickly in the computer business. Sometimes they are very slow. When you have more than $80B in the bank, bet on slow. That said, Microsoft is fighting a three-front battle right now, and on every front it's against their own customers or potential customers. The open source folks want to ignore them, at best. Governments want to neutralize them. Google wants to eat their lunch. Any one of these three are a formidable adversary. I think you'll be surprised how much decline you will see in a short time if Microsoft doesn't find a way to quickly and effectively cope with at least one of these three threats.
Offtopic, perhaps, but I wouldn't recommend drinking acetic acid at any reasonable concentration either. Vinegar is dilute, on the order of 5%, and even drinking that straight probably isn't doing your stomach any favors.
I understand what the cable/card was/did. I'm pretty sure from researching it at the time, though, that the firmware also explicitly disallowed transferring digital video off a DVD into the computer, encoded or otherwise. Fixing this would presumably require at least a firmware upgrade. It would still be usable as a DVD drive for data, though.
I'm more sanguine than most about digital video copy protection vs the analog hole. The original computer DVD drives also refused to play video content except through a magic cable on the back that connected to a magic cable on your video card. This lasted about 6 months (during which time I unfortunately bought, then returned one of these setups) before the folks in Asia who could care less about our legal restrictions started to sell DVD drives that folks would actually buy. Within a year, the video content protection system (CSS) had been cracked, and the rest was history.
Similarly, I don't expect to be viewing HD-DVD content on my Linux box for a couple of years, after which I expect it will be a no-brainer.
IANAL, but it seems to me that the *AA crowd is "circumventing the security measures" of a piece of software. Bittorrent has mechanisms that try to keep it secure from being used in unauthorized ways. If the *AAers are creating hacked versions of Bittorrent that circumvent these protections by hacking the protocol, seems like they're committing a DMCA violation, or at least a violation of some hacking law? I'm sure there's some reason my analysis is wrong, but I'd love to know what it is.
The principal reasons LaTeX hasn't taken over the world are that it is almost unlearnable, and that the instant feedback of WYSIWYG is lost. I've been using LaTeX for almost 15 years, and still feel like there's a lot I don't know and can't do.
That said, the idea that one wouldn't write letters or a CV with it is just silly. My CV and resume are in LaTeX, and it is what I write letters with. It's way easier to get a document that doesn't look like a ransom note, and to get consistent formatting with different content, with LaTeX than with a WYSIWYG word processor. Trust me: when I evaluate the horribly-formatted.doc resumes I'm always receiving from potential employees, it's a strike against them. I'd encourage everyone to explore LaTeX as time permits them.
What exactly are you saying about the science-fiction content of #9, Mystery Science Theater 3000? How could it have robots and not be a Sci-Fi show? I'm not getting it; was there more to it than that?
At least Dr. Who is...wait for it...#8. Obviously neither of these shows rises to the all time caliber of our #2 winner...the new Battlestar Galactica series. (They say they almost picked it #1 over original Trek. Not that it's not a great show, but really...)
Recipe for a media troll: Collect a list of some vaguely homogenous and beloved kind, and assign some kind of vague ratings to each item. Then shuffle weighted-randomly, throw the ratings away, and publish as the definitive rank-ordered list. Hilarity ensues.
First of all, you can still buy 60-year-old wire recorders. What are the odds that you can't buy a vintage CD drive and enough vintage hardware to bridge it to the present day 50 years from now?
Second of all, any competent engineer with a scanning digitizing optical microscope and a copy of some books from the library on formats could put together a workable CD reader in about a week today. Think how easy it will be in 2045.
Yes, the CD may have degraded hugely by then. But if there's any redundancy in the underlying data, there should be enough left to hit the high spots. Ironically, the scanning microscope plus clever image processing should be way better than a standard CD player at this.
I think all this "legacy data" scare is just hype. I have an 250KB 8" floppy at my house right now that was written around 1975. If I could possibly bring myself to care about its contents, I'm pretty confident I could get the data off without much trouble or expense. But oddly, almost all data I actually care about has migrated right along with me to my 500MB of local storage. I see no reason to expect this situation to change.
The sections of the GPL you quote do indeed establish that programs that make use of GPLed code fall under the GPL, and thus must follow its terms. But this: "...and the compulsion to provide source code to anyone who asks free of charge plus any reasonable copying and/or distribution fees..." just isn't true and isn't supported by the quoted material. The GPL does compel you to distribute the source code to anyone who receives the binary on which it is based. See the GPL FAQ for details.
"Nobody likes having their source code used as if it was simply public domain. How would you like to have your source code used by anyone in anyway they want without having to give you anything in return?" Uh, I've been giving my work on e.g. Nickle, XCB, and PSAS away for over 20 years. I actually like it pretty well.
"Have you actually read the GPL or any other OSI approved licenses?" Read them, taught them, talked them over with lawyers including FSF's Eben Moglen. Let me recommend Larry Rosen's Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law as a resource to you as you explore the world of open source licensing further.
"If you read most open source software licenses then you would know that they include a clause which says something to the effect that all of your improvements must be given back to the community including the source code."
Uh, no. In fact, I'm not sure any OSI-approved license contains that language. The BSD/MIT license certainly does not---it says you can do pretty much any darn thing you want with the source code. The GPL does not: it says that if you choose to distribute a GPL-ed binary to someone, you must also make the source from which it was created available to that someone for no more than the cost of source delivery. The Mozilla Public License is the same as the GPL in this regard.
So you're either confused, in which case I hope this helps, or trolling, in which case IHBT...
OK, as you and others have pointed out, I was totally ignorant about PeerGuardian. mea culpa; I should have RTFA more carefully.
As far as email blacklists go, though, I can show you to set them up so that even your one spam a day is gone.:-) Seriously, performance metrics for spam filtering of any kind are hard to get right. I've never seen a blacklist where the false-positive rate was acceptably low and the filtering on hard spam was usefully high, but I'd love to find out I was wrong about that too. What are you using?
Stop using blacklists altogether. It isn't like the experiment hasn't been tried and failed. Folks have been using them for many years now, in increasing numbers, and the quantity of spam has decreased not at all, while many legitimate mails have been inadvertently (or intentionally, in some cases) squelched. Blacklists represent a ridiculously bad tradeoff of reliability for security, to the point that they do serve a useful function for me; I can tell who has a clue about running a mail system by whether they have them turned on or not.
It's not just the dramatically lower salary that's going to discourage competent, well-paid IBM professionals from moving on to become teachers (although a 4x pay cut is kind of dramatic for a job that requires two more years of training to qualify for). It's also the complete lack of respect, the poor work environment, the discipline problems that in some case become physical dangers, students who feel like prisoners and act accordingly, students who've been wrecked by their circumstances and can't reasonably be expected to learn math and science. These are the reasons why we don't have enough math and science teachers in the US in the first place, and trying to draw the newbies in from reasonable employment strikes me as a recipe for failure.
Slashdot Mirror
Me too. I formed two related hypotheses upon reading the instructions, and it turns out the second one was correct, so I had one wrong answer. :-)
What an idiot I must be.
I did submit reports using their automatic tool. I didn't catch the option to attach my content in that. I know OOo 2 beta is getting heavy testing, and will be ready to go soon; I'm just skeptical about the "next week" time frame. It's awesome software, and I'm eager for it to be up soonest.
I tried to use OOo2 RC2 on a real presentation yesterday. Core dumped in three different places, but eventually got the presentation out. I'm skeptical that it's close to being debugged, but the proof's in the pudding, I guess.
Besides, there will be this blessed period in between where I don't have a working TV in my home. I've been trying to talk my wife into letting me kill our television for years; legal help would be greatly appreciated.
The RIAA, once they have your creative fruits in their grasp...
Awesome! You get the Outstanding Veiled Metaphor of the Week Award. My lit teachers would be shocked, but proud.
The home page for the ext3cow filesystem also does a good job of referencing other versioning filesystems and the like. I think you'll find what you want linked from there. I recommend Wayback, although it doesn't do everything you asked for.
The last two times I discovered we were hit, I got a security alert a few days later. This may indeed be a very quick response, but it doesn't solve my problem. :-)
I don't agree that TWiki is safe to use on public sites in its current form. The code base is so diffuse, complex, and difficult to audit that I expect more serious incidents in the near future. Responding to incidents is not the same as proactively hardening the software to prevent them. Perhaps the "Dakar" release will solve the problems---I hope so. But until then, I stand by my earlier non-recommendation.
While I agree with parent that Python code tends to be more readable than Perl code, I'd like to amplify that we really aren't moving from Perl to Python, but from TWiki to MoinMoin. I believe that MoinMoin is more secure because it has a far better security record, because I've watched freedesktop.org, which is a target, run successfully for a while, and because I was able to read, audit, and modify the authentication code at the heart of MoinMoin to suit our purposes quickly.
I'm not thrilled with MoinMoin's security either; as another poster said, it's hard to find a carefully security-hardened Wiki. Our choices were limited by the fact that we wanted to migrate our flat-file TWiki data to another flat-file Wiki, we wanted something with some history and a reasonably large feature set, and we had a limited time to do the final evaluation and make a move. But so far MoinMoin has worked out OK for us.
I've looked at some other Wikis. I'm not excited about keeping my content in a database, I want user edit authentication to control Wiki spam, I want the possibility of fully-private Wikis, and I need something scriptable for "farm" operation. There were a couple of other Perl-based Wikis that were possibilities, but ultimately MoinMoin seemed to be about as good as anything. We'll see how it looks after a month or two.
I also recently had my TWiki-based wiki farm broken into, for the 3rd time in 4 years, despite trying to stay up to date at least with Debian releases. Fortunately, I had each wiki set up to run suexec as an individual user, so the damage was reasonably well contained.
Since TWiki's security problems seem intractable (giant Perl codebase that's very difficult to audit and doesn't seem to have been designed to handle security) I decided that enough is enough and followed freedesktop.org's lead in moving the whole farm to MoinMoin. MoinMoin is written in Python rather than Perl, and seems to be better thought out in terms of security, although I had to hack up the source some to get what I wanted. Some open source migration tools will be made available shortly.
I wouldn't recommend to anyone that they run a publically-viewable TWiki installation at this point.
``The taxes are substantial, but it's just a piece of the puzzle,'' he said. ``The millions lost by the county could have been hundreds of millions if they built in Oregon...''
Heck yeah. Move it to Oregon! We'll find you a beautiful patch of land, and give you the tax break of the century the way we already have to Intel and Nike. We have plenty of geeks here who are plenty competent, and can really use the work. Heck, Google already has a new facility in the works in The Dalles; add it to that.
Google is welcome in our state; the heck with yours if you don't want 'em.
Yes. If anyone thinks that MS Office on Linux has anything to do with open formats for data storage, the issue has been successfully confused in their mind. I'm afraid I can pretty easily imagine some folks getting confused in this way, though, especially with proper assistance. "I can use my PC Word files with Word for Linux, and Linux is open source. So what's the problem?"
Point by point:
Microsoft's greatest strength (Windows/Office Monopoly) is actually their greatest weakness. No really. They have a direct channel to push technology into stuff that everyone buys and uses, but it will ultimately fail because they can't sell "Ad-Words" or something.
It is starting to fail now, but for a different reason. Governments don't like businesses to control them. In particular, governments don't like foreign businesses to control them. Every time Microsoft tries to use its channel these days, they're hit with sanctions of various kinds. Every time they try to extend their reach into a new market, they're slapped down in various ways. In the not-very-long run, this is a problem for them. How happy do you think Microsoft is about what's going on in China? Europe? Massachusetts?
Linux is the answer to all Microsoft's problems -- they only way they can handle the current non-factor of the Linux desktop is by coming out with Linux Office and Linux Windows, which wouldn't really improve their situation but Linux is like cool and stuff and isn't that a good enough reason?
A relatively easy and inexpensive way for Microsoft to confuse the issue on open formats for data storage and interchange would be to release its office suite for Linux. An incredibly difficult and expensive way to hinder open source in cannibalizing the applications market would be to provide a proprietary module for Linux that permitted running all Windows apps properly. I don't see large benefits to the Linux community from either approach. The office suite has already been re-commoditized by open source. Ditto for the browser. Nothing Microsoft will do in either space can undo that. Microsoft has a reasonable amount to gain from getting their products onto open platforms, and the open source community has little, as near as I can tell. Whether they embrace Linux or fight it, though, they have a genuine problem in the application space.
10 years from now, Microsoft will be in trouble. They might make two trillion dollars in that period of time, but I will eventually be proven right.
Sometimes changes happen quickly in the computer business. Sometimes they are very slow. When you have more than $80B in the bank, bet on slow. That said, Microsoft is fighting a three-front battle right now, and on every front it's against their own customers or potential customers. The open source folks want to ignore them, at best. Governments want to neutralize them. Google wants to eat their lunch. Any one of these three are a formidable adversary. I think you'll be surprised how much decline you will see in a short time if Microsoft doesn't find a way to quickly and effectively cope with at least one of these three threats.
Offtopic, perhaps, but I wouldn't recommend drinking acetic acid at any reasonable concentration either. Vinegar is dilute, on the order of 5%, and even drinking that straight probably isn't doing your stomach any favors.
I understand what the cable/card was/did. I'm pretty sure from researching it at the time, though, that the firmware also explicitly disallowed transferring digital video off a DVD into the computer, encoded or otherwise. Fixing this would presumably require at least a firmware upgrade. It would still be usable as a DVD drive for data, though.
Am I off base here?
I'm more sanguine than most about digital video copy protection vs the analog hole. The original computer DVD drives also refused to play video content except through a magic cable on the back that connected to a magic cable on your video card. This lasted about 6 months (during which time I unfortunately bought, then returned one of these setups) before the folks in Asia who could care less about our legal restrictions started to sell DVD drives that folks would actually buy. Within a year, the video content protection system (CSS) had been cracked, and the rest was history.
Similarly, I don't expect to be viewing HD-DVD content on my Linux box for a couple of years, after which I expect it will be a no-brainer.
IANAL, but it seems to me that the *AA crowd is "circumventing the security measures" of a piece of software. Bittorrent has mechanisms that try to keep it secure from being used in unauthorized ways. If the *AAers are creating hacked versions of Bittorrent that circumvent these protections by hacking the protocol, seems like they're committing a DMCA violation, or at least a violation of some hacking law? I'm sure there's some reason my analysis is wrong, but I'd love to know what it is.
The principal reasons LaTeX hasn't taken over the world are that it is almost unlearnable, and that the instant feedback of WYSIWYG is lost. I've been using LaTeX for almost 15 years, and still feel like there's a lot I don't know and can't do.
That said, the idea that one wouldn't write letters or a CV with it is just silly. My CV and resume are in LaTeX, and it is what I write letters with. It's way easier to get a document that doesn't look like a ransom note, and to get consistent formatting with different content, with LaTeX than with a WYSIWYG word processor. Trust me: when I evaluate the horribly-formatted .doc resumes I'm always receiving from potential employees, it's a strike against them. I'd encourage everyone to explore LaTeX as time permits them.
Sorry, I guess I should have used a sarcasm tag in my first paragraph. Thanks, though, for the summary!
What exactly are you saying about the science-fiction content of #9, Mystery Science Theater 3000? How could it have robots and not be a Sci-Fi show? I'm not getting it; was there more to it than that?
At least Dr. Who is...wait for it...#8. Obviously neither of these shows rises to the all time caliber of our #2 winner...the new Battlestar Galactica series. (They say they almost picked it #1 over original Trek. Not that it's not a great show, but really...)
Recipe for a media troll: Collect a list of some vaguely homogenous and beloved kind, and assign some kind of vague ratings to each item. Then shuffle weighted-randomly, throw the ratings away, and publish as the definitive rank-ordered list. Hilarity ensues.
First of all, you can still buy 60-year-old wire recorders. What are the odds that you can't buy a vintage CD drive and enough vintage hardware to bridge it to the present day 50 years from now?
Second of all, any competent engineer with a scanning digitizing optical microscope and a copy of some books from the library on formats could put together a workable CD reader in about a week today. Think how easy it will be in 2045.
Yes, the CD may have degraded hugely by then. But if there's any redundancy in the underlying data, there should be enough left to hit the high spots. Ironically, the scanning microscope plus clever image processing should be way better than a standard CD player at this.
I think all this "legacy data" scare is just hype. I have an 250KB 8" floppy at my house right now that was written around 1975. If I could possibly bring myself to care about its contents, I'm pretty confident I could get the data off without much trouble or expense. But oddly, almost all data I actually care about has migrated right along with me to my 500MB of local storage. I see no reason to expect this situation to change.
The sections of the GPL you quote do indeed establish that programs that make use of GPLed code fall under the GPL, and thus must follow its terms. But this: "...and the compulsion to provide source code to anyone who asks free of charge plus any reasonable copying and/or distribution fees..." just isn't true and isn't supported by the quoted material. The GPL does compel you to distribute the source code to anyone who receives the binary on which it is based. See the GPL FAQ for details.
"Nobody likes having their source code used as if it was simply public domain. How would you like to have your source code used by anyone in anyway they want without having to give you anything in return?" Uh, I've been giving my work on e.g. Nickle, XCB, and PSAS away for over 20 years. I actually like it pretty well.
"Have you actually read the GPL or any other OSI approved licenses?" Read them, taught them, talked them over with lawyers including FSF's Eben Moglen. Let me recommend Larry Rosen's Open Source Licensing: Software Freedom and Intellectual Property Law as a resource to you as you explore the world of open source licensing further.
"If you read most open source software licenses then you would know that they include a clause which says something to the effect that all of your improvements must be given back to the community including the source code."
Uh, no. In fact, I'm not sure any OSI-approved license contains that language. The BSD/MIT license certainly does not---it says you can do pretty much any darn thing you want with the source code. The GPL does not: it says that if you choose to distribute a GPL-ed binary to someone, you must also make the source from which it was created available to that someone for no more than the cost of source delivery. The Mozilla Public License is the same as the GPL in this regard.
So you're either confused, in which case I hope this helps, or trolling, in which case IHBT...
OK, as you and others have pointed out, I was totally ignorant about PeerGuardian. mea culpa; I should have RTFA more carefully.
As far as email blacklists go, though, I can show you to set them up so that even your one spam a day is gone. :-) Seriously, performance metrics for spam filtering of any kind are hard to get right. I've never seen a blacklist where the false-positive rate was acceptably low and the filtering on hard spam was usefully high, but I'd love to find out I was wrong about that too. What are you using?
Stop using blacklists altogether. It isn't like the experiment hasn't been tried and failed. Folks have been using them for many years now, in increasing numbers, and the quantity of spam has decreased not at all, while many legitimate mails have been inadvertently (or intentionally, in some cases) squelched. Blacklists represent a ridiculously bad tradeoff of reliability for security, to the point that they do serve a useful function for me; I can tell who has a clue about running a mail system by whether they have them turned on or not.
It's not just the dramatically lower salary that's going to discourage competent, well-paid IBM professionals from moving on to become teachers (although a 4x pay cut is kind of dramatic for a job that requires two more years of training to qualify for). It's also the complete lack of respect, the poor work environment, the discipline problems that in some case become physical dangers, students who feel like prisoners and act accordingly, students who've been wrecked by their circumstances and can't reasonably be expected to learn math and science. These are the reasons why we don't have enough math and science teachers in the US in the first place, and trying to draw the newbies in from reasonable employment strikes me as a recipe for failure.