> Its an executable that requires someone to run it. People need to learn to stop clicking on every damn executable they get in their email. Hell Outlook even displays a warning that attachments can contain virii or have malicous intent, but people still click on them.
That's exactly why we think it's Microsoft's fault: their pursuit of their shallowly conceived "ease of use" philosophy has led them to design software that incorporates "ease of use" features that very obviously are malapropos for the popular user base.
The reason you don't have this particular kind of virus/worm/whatsit on certain other OSes has nothing to do with the bugginess of the product; rather, it is because the people who design software for those other systems haven't tried to incorporate a "one-click EDI" function into their mail clients. EDI is serious business, and involves some significant issues of security and trust that simply aren't available in user-space internet.
If a company was so foolish as to provide a feature that lets you bypass your password by typing esc-p, wouldn't you recognize it as a huge security headache resulting from bad design, even though it's just an ease-of-use feature?
> Unfortunately, the article doesn't delve too deeply into the causes, merits, and implications of this decision.
No, but it does make passing mention of a couple of things, which were pretty much predictable anyway:
a) Stem hemorrhaging of cash from China to Redmond, Wash.
b) Stem hemorrhaging of information via spyware.
I've been predicting for several years that (b) alone will eventually cause most governments to convert to open source (or home-made) software. The risks of not doing so are simply too great, and in fact I'm surprised that there hasn't been a mass exodus already.
> That would be a very interesting exercise. It would be facinating to see just how fast OSDN would roll over and cough up the "Anonymous" IP address to the feds.
Does Slashdot even bother saving the IP address for every post?
> you're using the system password as part of your data security on your Win98 box.
> Did you know that the entire password system can be aborted by simply hitting escape?
> Have I just commited a federal crime, and if so, why?
Yes. Because as the USA is increasingly being operated as one big cream-skimming process that's driving our laws, infrastructure, and economy toward something you'd expect to find in a third-world nation fifty years ago, shooting the messenger is becoming the norm: failure to see the emperor's new clothes has become criminalized.
> > Kill long term viability in favor of short term profits. Get the profits. CEO uses the new profits to get a higher paying job elsewhere, leaving the new CEO with a mess on his hands...
> Fundamentally, why is this mentality so common? If shareholders really cared, then they would keep the CEO from taking the company through a roller-coaster ride.
Just guessing, but over the past generation or so there has been an enormous media spin that the stock market was for Joe Little Guy as much as for genuine Capitalists. Unfortunately JLG usually invests where someone else tells him to, or at best by looking at a stock's recent trends, and doesn't have the time or expertise to investigate how a company is actually being managed.
Basically we've evolved an efficient system for pumping cash out of JLG's pocket into rich folk's pocket, and what dnoyeb described is an unfortunate side effect. Scams like Enron and SCO are increasingly the norm, because the money at stake is increasingly invested by people with only a very shallow, short-term sense of what is going on behind the share prices.
> The webpage mentions that the program is windows based and doesn't save state. That means that all of those CPU hours came in a row (at idle priority even). Bash MS all you want, but Windows isn't as unstable and problematic as all of your anti-MS zealots would like to believe.
61.40 CPU-days spread between 10 people's computers, and you think that indicates enough uptime to brag about? Puh-leeze.
Now we're going to examine how many routes there are through all the bars in Amsterdam, and see if there are any "magic" routes that will let us complete the circuit without falling drunk in a bed of tulips.
> That is, of course, if you buy into the farce of evolution. I've never seen a generation so inclinced to believe a lie without proof. If you'd think for yourself, and not read the textbooks, you might realize that evolution isn't even an option.
Not read the textbooks? Sounds like "stay ignorant" is the key to your plan for understanding the universe.
> how is this a troll? it's an honest criticism of slashdot's most idiotic editor. i love how slashdot can dish it, but can't take it themselves when the eyes are on them. talk about hypocrites.
Sounds like you're not much a fan of "let the market decide".
> Hey wait a minute. I remember companies spending millions on backup generators and such. Even news bits about some companies finding it cheaper to generate their own power. Where exactly did they all that energy production capacity go?
Unfortunately they ordered all those generators from this guy.
> While my graphics hardware is not quite representative (the Matrox G450 is not known for great 3D performance), I ran two instances of glxgears. Short conclusion: MesaGL on Linux has the same problem. Long conclusion: the windows showed noticable slowdowns, up to the point where animation was suspended in one window while the other ran, with the system switching the running window at seemingly random intervals.
That's interesting. I also have a Matrox G450 AGP card, but running two instances of gears or glxgears works smoothly, and at almost exactly half the speed of a single instance. Three instances also scale linearly.
> There has been some work on using graphics cards for computation. The tough part is figuring out how to rephrase your algorithm in terms of what the GPU can handle.
Isn't there a lot of sloth involved in reading your results back as well?
Meanwhile, users of GCC can exploit whatever multimedia SIMD instructions their processor supports by telling the processor you want to use them. For x86 see this and this; for other architectures start here. (Notice the GCC version in the URL; the supported options sometimes change between versions, so you should look in a version of the GCC Manual that matches what you're actually using.)
I confess I haven't benchmarked these options, but in theory they should boost the performance of some kinds of number-crunching algorithms.
BTW, Linuxers can find what multimedia extensions their CPU supports with cat/proc/cpuinfo, even from a user account. Look for multimedia support in the list at the end of the cpuinfo. Lots of those extensions only support integers or low-resolution fp numbers, but IIRC SSE2 should be good for high-precision FP operations. Use google to find out what your extensions are good for.
And post us back if you do some benchmarking, or find some good ones on the Web.
> I'm more interested in using them for specific calculations. Imagine if one of these things was accidentally embued with the ability to factor gigantic numbers.
Maybe that's the breakthrough that will allow us to factor large primes!
> I mean, the Hubble is very sophisticated an capable of aking excellent shots. If they had allocated a bit of the money from the Homeland dept. to the next Hubble (Webb) i'm sure they could have used Huble to take shots of Iran and North Korea.
Better yet, they could fill it full of marbles and threaten to spill them out on countries that didn't obey our will!
> Isn't it amazing the scientists can pretty much say, without a doubt, that the launch of the Webb telescope, which is nearly 7 years away, will likely be delayed? They know that NASA and the government is so lined with red-tape, and moves so slowly, that a project that is 7 years away won't be launched on time.
What has that got to do with NASA and the big evile gummit? If someone announces a new game or OS, do you expect it to come out when they say it will?
Also, the long lead time makes a miss more likely, not less. Again, imagine a game that has been announced for release in 3 months vs. one for release in 3 years. Which would you be more willing to bet on making its deadline?
> Change the update machines, new names, etc etc. MS is resorting to smoke and mirror tricks. It will only fool the current worms, not future ones that will have the new machine names in them.
The first of which will probably be released in the next half hour or so - if it hasn't been already.
> Remember when we were the underdogs and everyone wanted us to do well? Well, now all that has backfired I'm afraid. We did too well, and now everyone wants us to lose again. Human nature sucks sometimes.
I suspect that the ill-wishing isn't because we've done too well, but rather because we're too damn greedy and pushy in our drive to do well.
> > No. The US doesn't invade it's neighbours. It invades complete strangers on the other side of the planet.
> Complete strangers? Hmm, I thought one of the arguments against the war in Iraq was that the US was in bed with them beforehand (similarly the Afghanis and Taliban).
Unfortunately I didn't bookmark it, but a few days ago I ran across a site parodying the proposal to let gamblers predict terrorism, and one of the parody suggestions was to let gamblers predict which current US puppet would be transformed into the next Master of Evil, a la OBL, Hussein, Noriega, etc.
> Here's where you kill your own argument in-utero. The US gets more of its oil from Venezuela (13%) than it does from Iraq (8%).
Yes, it looks like the motivation for the war wasn't who gets the Iraqi oil, but rather whose companies get the contracts on distributing it. Which, BTW, has been a major cause of international meddling in the Persian Gulf for about 90 years now, at least as I understand it.
Slashdot Mirror
> Its an executable that requires someone to run it. People need to learn to stop clicking on every damn executable they get in their email. Hell Outlook even displays a warning that attachments can contain virii or have malicous intent, but people still click on them.
That's exactly why we think it's Microsoft's fault: their pursuit of their shallowly conceived "ease of use" philosophy has led them to design software that incorporates "ease of use" features that very obviously are malapropos for the popular user base.
The reason you don't have this particular kind of virus/worm/whatsit on certain other OSes has nothing to do with the bugginess of the product; rather, it is because the people who design software for those other systems haven't tried to incorporate a "one-click EDI" function into their mail clients. EDI is serious business, and involves some significant issues of security and trust that simply aren't available in user-space internet.
If a company was so foolish as to provide a feature that lets you bypass your password by typing esc-p, wouldn't you recognize it as a huge security headache resulting from bad design, even though it's just an ease-of-use feature?
> It was Professor Plum in the library with the candlestick!!!!
Actually it was McBride in the closet with an inflatable doll, but his imagination made it real to him.
> On a side note, apparently persistence helps when submitting stories
<verizon>Can you hear me now?</verizon>
> Microsoft are MORONS. The fix for this particular worm required SP2 or greater. That is 8 hours and 10 minutes over dialup.
Think how fun it's going to be when you re-install your media and then get to download three years of cumulative updates.
> Unfortunately, the article doesn't delve too deeply into the causes, merits, and implications of this decision.
No, but it does make passing mention of a couple of things, which were pretty much predictable anyway:
a) Stem hemorrhaging of cash from China to Redmond, Wash.
b) Stem hemorrhaging of information via spyware.
I've been predicting for several years that (b) alone will eventually cause most governments to convert to open source (or home-made) software. The risks of not doing so are simply too great, and in fact I'm surprised that there hasn't been a mass exodus already.
Great for disposing of bodies, too.
> That would be a very interesting exercise. It would be facinating to see just how fast OSDN would roll over and cough up the "Anonymous" IP address to the feds.
Does Slashdot even bother saving the IP address for every post?
> you're using the system password as part of your data security on your Win98 box.
> Did you know that the entire password system can be aborted by simply hitting escape?
> Have I just commited a federal crime, and if so, why?
Yes. Because as the USA is increasingly being operated as one big cream-skimming process that's driving our laws, infrastructure, and economy toward something you'd expect to find in a third-world nation fifty years ago, shooting the messenger is becoming the norm: failure to see the emperor's new clothes has become criminalized.
> > Kill long term viability in favor of short term profits. Get the profits. CEO uses the new profits to get a higher paying job elsewhere, leaving the new CEO with a mess on his hands...
> Fundamentally, why is this mentality so common? If shareholders really cared, then they would keep the CEO from taking the company through a roller-coaster ride.
Just guessing, but over the past generation or so there has been an enormous media spin that the stock market was for Joe Little Guy as much as for genuine Capitalists. Unfortunately JLG usually invests where someone else tells him to, or at best by looking at a stock's recent trends, and doesn't have the time or expertise to investigate how a company is actually being managed.
Basically we've evolved an efficient system for pumping cash out of JLG's pocket into rich folk's pocket, and what dnoyeb described is an unfortunate side effect. Scams like Enron and SCO are increasingly the norm, because the money at stake is increasingly invested by people with only a very shallow, short-term sense of what is going on behind the share prices.
> The webpage mentions that the program is windows based and doesn't save state. That means that all of those CPU hours came in a row (at idle priority even). Bash MS all you want, but Windows isn't as unstable and problematic as all of your anti-MS zealots would like to believe.
61.40 CPU-days spread between 10 people's computers, and you think that indicates enough uptime to brag about? Puh-leeze.
Now we're going to examine how many routes there are through all the bars in Amsterdam, and see if there are any "magic" routes that will let us complete the circuit without falling drunk in a bed of tulips.
> That is, of course, if you buy into the farce of evolution. I've never seen a generation so inclinced to believe a lie without proof. If you'd think for yourself, and not read the textbooks, you might realize that evolution isn't even an option.
Not read the textbooks? Sounds like "stay ignorant" is the key to your plan for understanding the universe.
> how is this a troll? it's an honest criticism of slashdot's most idiotic editor. i love how slashdot can dish it, but can't take it themselves when the eyes are on them. talk about hypocrites.
Sounds like you're not much a fan of "let the market decide".
> Hey wait a minute. I remember companies spending millions on backup generators and such. Even news bits about some companies finding it cheaper to generate their own power. Where exactly did they all that energy production capacity go?
Unfortunately they ordered all those generators from this guy.
> Wow. Were they all psychics? Did they, back in '99, see the end of the dotcoms too?
Yes, but unfortunately they moved their money to Iraqi oil futures.
Maybe this was a Y2K bug. (If it blew up when it was supposed to it wouldn't be a bug, now would it.)
> While my graphics hardware is not quite representative (the Matrox G450 is not known for great 3D performance), I ran two instances of glxgears. Short conclusion: MesaGL on Linux has the same problem. Long conclusion: the windows showed noticable slowdowns, up to the point where animation was suspended in one window while the other ran, with the system switching the running window at seemingly random intervals.
That's interesting. I also have a Matrox G450 AGP card, but running two instances of gears or glxgears works smoothly, and at almost exactly half the speed of a single instance. Three instances also scale linearly.
FWIW I'm running a 2.4 kernel and XF86 4.3.0.
> There has been some work on using graphics cards for computation. The tough part is figuring out how to rephrase your algorithm in terms of what the GPU can handle.
Isn't there a lot of sloth involved in reading your results back as well?
Meanwhile, users of GCC can exploit whatever multimedia SIMD instructions their processor supports by telling the processor you want to use them. For x86 see this and this; for other architectures start here. (Notice the GCC version in the URL; the supported options sometimes change between versions, so you should look in a version of the GCC Manual that matches what you're actually using.)
I confess I haven't benchmarked these options, but in theory they should boost the performance of some kinds of number-crunching algorithms.
BTW, Linuxers can find what multimedia extensions their CPU supports with cat
And post us back if you do some benchmarking, or find some good ones on the Web.
> I'm more interested in using them for specific calculations. Imagine if one of these things was accidentally embued with the ability to factor gigantic numbers.
Maybe that's the breakthrough that will allow us to factor large primes!
> Stupid people messing stuff up? I'm SHOCKED!
I, for one, welcome our new fucktard overlords!
> I mean, the Hubble is very sophisticated an capable of aking excellent shots. If they had allocated a bit of the money from the Homeland dept. to the next Hubble (Webb) i'm sure they could have used Huble to take shots of Iran and North Korea.
Better yet, they could fill it full of marbles and threaten to spill them out on countries that didn't obey our will!
> Isn't it amazing the scientists can pretty much say, without a doubt, that the launch of the Webb telescope, which is nearly 7 years away, will likely be delayed? They know that NASA and the government is so lined with red-tape, and moves so slowly, that a project that is 7 years away won't be launched on time.
What has that got to do with NASA and the big evile gummit? If someone announces a new game or OS, do you expect it to come out when they say it will?
Also, the long lead time makes a miss more likely, not less. Again, imagine a game that has been announced for release in 3 months vs. one for release in 3 years. Which would you be more willing to bet on making its deadline?
> Change the update machines, new names, etc etc. MS is resorting to smoke and mirror tricks. It will only fool the current worms, not future ones that will have the new machine names in them.
The first of which will probably be released in the next half hour or so - if it hasn't been already.
> Remember when we were the underdogs and everyone wanted us to do well? Well, now all that has backfired I'm afraid. We did too well, and now everyone wants us to lose again. Human nature sucks sometimes.
I suspect that the ill-wishing isn't because we've done too well, but rather because we're too damn greedy and pushy in our drive to do well.
> > No. The US doesn't invade it's neighbours. It invades complete strangers on the other side of the planet.
> Complete strangers? Hmm, I thought one of the arguments against the war in Iraq was that the US was in bed with them beforehand (similarly the Afghanis and Taliban).
Unfortunately I didn't bookmark it, but a few days ago I ran across a site parodying the proposal to let gamblers predict terrorism, and one of the parody suggestions was to let gamblers predict which current US puppet would be transformed into the next Master of Evil, a la OBL, Hussein, Noriega, etc.
> Here's where you kill your own argument in-utero. The US gets more of its oil from Venezuela (13%) than it does from Iraq (8%).
Yes, it looks like the motivation for the war wasn't who gets the Iraqi oil, but rather whose companies get the contracts on distributing it. Which, BTW, has been a major cause of international meddling in the Persian Gulf for about 90 years now, at least as I understand it.