Now, Ring Around the Rosie is a centuries old nursery rhyme that most know dates back to the time of the Black Death. I won't go into the details, but thats what it is about.
It's good you won't go into details, because they're wrong. `Ring Around the Rosie' has nothing to do with the Black Death or any other kind of infectious illness. The best guess is it dates back to the `play-parties' young people held in Protestant areas that forbade dancing in the 19th Century. Those rhymes (and the actions to go along with them) were, apparently, far enough from dancing to be acceptable to the Moral Majority of the era.
The problem is that available computing power is too disparate to ever get the computing cost right. Make HashCash too easy to produce and high-end machines will crank out millions of tokens (perhaps even selling them to spammers). Make Hashcash too expensive to produce and you effectively lock-out low end machines, like PDAs and old 486 boxes.
This is a very interesting issue, and I see no effective way around it. HashCash is otherwise very promising (it either forces down the number of spams/spammer or forces the spammer into expensive hardware purchases, both of which eat into the profit margin), but these concerns do cast doubt on its effectiveness in this age of small, mobile Internet Appliances.
Any way of making it easier on the PDA user (hardware hash processing, distributed processing, etc.) will also make it easier on the spammers (any hardware hash coprocessor we design for PDAs will, eventually, become a PC card for thousands of avid spammers, and at least a few distributed processing networks will be corrupted) and, therefore, defeat the purpose.
Anyone to solve this problem will earn the kudos of the Internet community. (Don't postulate Moore's Law as a solution. We will always have people forced to use low-end machines by economics or backwards-compatibility. Look at Mac users.)
If they all share the same code, and that code works for one case, then it works for all of them.
`If the code works at all' is your unstated assumption, and that's what's torpedoing this whole plan. I don't place that much trust in any one piece of code.
So if it is, then why can't the separate-but-equal approach be applied to BusyBox, why haven't the developers chosen a less monolithic solution?
As I've said before, if all of your eggs are in one basket, you'd better be damned sure that basket is near-perfect. I don't think any basket can be that perfect.
Code re-use is a good idea as long as the code is not buggy. If the code is buggy, everything is failing at once and you're left with a severely damaged system. I'd rather have a fighting chance.
If BusyBox has a buffer overflow when argv[0] is set to, say, "vi", then that would be no more and no less damaging than if a regular system had a buffer overflow in vi.
Ideally. But the real world is not ideal: Bugs may well be in shared code, and so would hit all BusyBoxApps equally. Then you are screwed.
What exactly is the failure scenario you're afraid of here?
Partially the security threat the other guy mentioned, partially simple buggy code: If all of your code is relying on the same routines to handle regular expressions, or argument processing, or anything else you can name, you'd better be pretty damned sure that code is bugfree. Everything is depending on it.
If, on the other hand, everything is split up (in the current scenario, in other words), a bug in grep's regexp handling isn't going to affect vi's regexp handling, and a bug in su's argument handling isn't going to be manifested in bash, too. Bugs are isolated and can be fixed without risk of hurting something else in that huge mess of a binary you would otherwise have.
Blackbox solutions in general look appealing until you realize Murphy's Law hasn't been repealed. Things will fail in obscure, abstruse ways, and it's always better to isolate failure as much as possible.
Why can't Busybox be used for regular, 24/7 server use? It seems to provide all the necessary building block utilities one would expect in any Unix distribution; I'm up for it replacing/bin/* completely.
Do you really want all your eggs in one basket like that? Taking all of the essential system tools and replacing them with one single program is a good way to foster paranoia and early retirement in the sysadmin staff, and for what?
As long as it works well, fine. You've saved a little hard disk space and a little RAM. So what? Hard disks and RAM are cheap and getting cheaper. Splurge and give your sysadmins some full-size programs. It'll cost you less than your daily soda.
As soon as it fails, you are screwed. You no longer have a freaking shell. What do you intend to do now? Do you really want to have to use a rescue floppy every time a single program fails? It's a better risk to have multiple programs to spread the 'essential tasks' burden over than to load down one single program.
Finally, how often does bash crash? Ever? I'd be willing to bet it's never happened to you. It's never happened to me. Same with most, if not all, of the GNU Project's tools. And as long as bash stays up, you can usually work around the failure of almost anything else, because everything won't be failing at once. That's what you give up when you chase the BusyBox solution.
Mr. Carmack, I think I'm going to buy the next Quake for Linux. I'm not a big gamer. I, in fact, rarely game. But I do enjoy supporting certain kinds of companies. Companies that give active support to Linux to the point of accepting and responding to the Linux community deserve my money.
Sitting, as I am, behind a slow modem connection, I'm not going to download an alpha pre-release. I would download it from the official venues, and I'm surely not going to download it from possibly disreputable ones. Even if I was sitting at the end of a fat T1 or DSL, I wouldn't want to: I like surprises. I like not knowing precisely what is going to be there. I haven't kept up with gaming since Duke Nukem 3D, so the next Quake should be a pleasant surprise.
For example, if someone commits murder in the US, there is a good chance the Canadians will return the person.
They won't if the person is facing the death sentence. Canadian law prohibits sending someone to face a possible death sentece, so the prosecution has to stop seeking death or the perp can stay in Canada, drinking Molson and watching ice hockey.
It'll be nice to Hillary Rosin rotting in prison in Buenos Aires!
South Africa, numnuggies. Think Cape Town, not Rio.
Besids, it won't happen: The *AAs are rich, powerful groups that could easily pay $200, $2000, or $2000000 to anyone if it meant opening up a market to them.
Yes I understand that some of these licenses are actually useful, but its getting to the point where there are more dumb ones than good ones.
You choose the one you want and that serves you the best. If there are licenses that serve no purpose natural selection will weed them out as fewer and fewer people use them and, maybe, as they are struck down in court.
I believe NASA should have a monopoly on space travel as they are the only ones who seem to get it right.
So, Challenger didn't blow up a little ways above the Atlantic, then? It didn't shower bits of debris over the ocean? The entire crew, including a schoolteacher, didn't die in that eminently preventable accident? The Challenger Disaster was due, plain and simple, to the gross incompetence of those in charge. They shouldn't have launched when it was so cold, they shouldn't have failed to make sure the O-Rings would hold, and they damn well should have listened to the people who told them these things beforehand.
I won't even mention the Polar Lander. A fucking faliure to convert to metric is not excusable!
NASA deserves what it gets. Give me amateur rocketry, because NASA couldn't do it to save their asses.
Most if not all desktop linux users are way more proficient than that.
For the time being, sadly true.
But the glory of this deal is that Linux is slowly coming to the Mass Market. Billy Joe-Bob Windoze User will have the option of something as idiot-proof as AOL and as cheap as Linux. If Billy Joe-Bob decides that knocking $100 off the price of his next email machine is worth it for the 'store-brand' OS, he'll do it, and Linux has just swept another sale right out from under Microsoft.
This is how Linux finally meets Microsoft on Redmond's own ground.
Re:Full-powered skript kiddie battle station
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AOL's new Linux PC
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· Score: 1
Root by default is simply a page from Microsoft's very successful history.
No, it's simply an example of people not caring about security until they're forced to. People always think 'Worms happen to other people' and 'Script kiddies won't notice me, I'm nobody!' or, the most insidious (and stupidest), 'I've got nothing to hide' until, one fine day, they're running BackOrifice, CodeRed, and the latest DDoS zombie program.
Microsoft knows this. It simply hasn't been forced to care.
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Flirting With Mac OS X
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10 months ago I used Novell Netware on a 286 at my home office, where I served goatse.cx images to the poor, underprivileged trolls barely making it on Slashdot. I wanted a system I could take with me, to keep current on the latest link-munging techniques and image URLs.
None of the Windows laptops cut it with battery life or monitor durability (they tended to commit suicide after the fifth spreadeagled rectum). Worse, none of them could play the video of Ballmer hopping around like a cracked-up horny toad at a sufficient volume to frighten all the small children on a given flight.
So I looked at the iBook. I broke out my mad money, saved over the years from selling bumfight videos online, and bought the 1600Mhz DVD-ROM liquid-nitrogen-cooled iZilla. I had enough left over to buy the optional iHover attachment to prevent it from crushing my legs. I use it everywhere! Showing the finest in Internet goat-pr0n to those who intend to eat veal at restaurants, giving poor premeds a free view of the inside of the colon at med schools, and giving small children nightmares about drugged-up CEOs chasing them down and crushing them, my iBook is there! Its minature keys are perfectly sized for jizim removal, and its one-button mouse is perfect for one-handed Internet surfing.
Of course, I use nothing but OS X on the beast (up the RAM to at least 1200 Megs) and it's great. Proper terminal window to r00t other peoples' servers, Outlook-compliant email client for vectoring all the latest worms, 802.11b card for warwalking around looking for chalk, and best of all, unlike any other OS in the known Universe, IT JUST WORKS.
I've definately reached the point where I no longer want to have all my machines as play toys - the iBook is a workhorse and just keeps on slogging. Mmmm... horse.
My Name's Steve Jobs... NO!... it's... Snurb... and I'm a network administrator and CEO of... NO!... and... uh... al-Quaeda operative... yeah, that's the ticket!
In a market saturated with various OS vendors, the prices for the OS could not be too high, maybe 5-10 times smaller than what MS Windows costs. If the prices are low, the OS still remains a commodity but it is not critical for open source developers to build their own OS if they could just buy one that suits their needs for 10$.
True in one way, deeply flawed in another.
If OSes were cheaper, and the market was at or approaching saturation as far as OS vendors were concerned, people would have less reason to make their own. But that's not the only reason Linux, and the rest of the Open Source crowd, has caught on. If everyone is selling closed-source OSes, and nobody is really willing to play ball with companies that have odd requirements (I need the source code for security reasons, dammit! I do defense contracts!), there would still be a valid market for Open-Source OSes. Would they be as popular as Linux? Probably not. Would they have the same kind of desperate relevance in the face of MS/Washington's DRM bullshit? No, as there would be no High King to influence government.
So while Microsoft's dominance wasn't an absolute precondition for Linux's existence, it certainly has propelled an essentially 'project' OS into amazing popularity.
And at that point, when said person has nothing much to live for anymore and certainly nothing to lose, Scientology HQ will go up in a big orange-red ball of ammonium nitrate and diesel oil.
And then Scientologists learn what Hindus have known for centuries: Karma's a bitch.
Frankly, I'm surprised that it hasn't happened already. But with their present behavior, it's only a matter of time.
The law is available to everyone, for whatever purpose.
Interesting you should mention that, seeing as how the Church has killed before and nothing much has come of it. Where was the law available for everyone then?
I referr you to this page, the Lisa McPherson Memorial Page. The Church basically took Lisa from a hospital after a car crash to a hotel, where they deprived her of food and water until she died. She was under Scientology care, in direct supervision of people following Scientology doctrine, when she died of extreme dehydration.
Law? The Church deserves no law, for it uses the law to its own ends, proclaiming it as it sees fit and ignoring it when it is inconvenient for them.
Conclusion: What was the Church of Scientology thinking? This move will only increase the number of people hitting xenu.net.
It's an old Scientology dogma to "attack, never defend." The Scienos cannot bear to have sites critical of them to exist where they can do something about it. The only reason xenu.net has existed this long is because it's hosted by XS4ALL, a hosting concern in The Netherlands, and is therefore out of range of the vicious Scieno lawyers. Anything Scientology can hit, it will hit as a matter of dogma.
In a very real way, the Church of Scientology is waging a Crusade on the Internet. Its knights are lawyers, its swords are copyright law, and its Holy Land is an Internet the Church can control.
Well, the Raging Clueless Cult will never silence this heathen. Muahahaha!
It's no more onerous to clear up trash leaflets off your yard than it is to hit delete...
A fallacy neatly exploded when one realizes that it costs the recipient to get email. Similar to how it costs the recipient to get faxes, so spamming fax machines is illegal. Really, the pro-spammers don't have a legal leg to stand on because their big case really doesn't fit the situation: It costs me nothing to remove fliers, but it costs me money to download email. Big difference. Precedent-defining difference.
Free speech cuts both ways - it protects crypto code publication and it also protects political SPAM. That's the point about the 1st ammendment it's there to protect unpopular speech because the popular variety doesn't need protection!
It isn't the speech, it's the mode of speaking: I can stand in my own house and scream anything I damn well choose, but when I start to stand in your house, it's regulatable.
Similarly, I can put nearly anything I want in something you choose to receive, but if you haven't chosen to accept it, it's a different story.
Look at tattooing: I can tattoo the DeCSS algorithm onto my own chest, or the chest of another consenting person, but I cannot tattoo it onto the chest of a non-consenting person. Trying to tattoo something onto a non-consenting person is assault with a deadly weapon, regardless of the First Amendment.
I've heard your argument before, but it doesn't hold water and I think any court in the land would agree with me.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean the joke pages? Or are there other examples of deliberate idiocy from the Mikkelson Camp?
Snopes has all this stuff. Why can't people check Snopes more often?
Any way of making it easier on the PDA user (hardware hash processing, distributed processing, etc.) will also make it easier on the spammers (any hardware hash coprocessor we design for PDAs will, eventually, become a PC card for thousands of avid spammers, and at least a few distributed processing networks will be corrupted) and, therefore, defeat the purpose.
Anyone to solve this problem will earn the kudos of the Internet community. (Don't postulate Moore's Law as a solution. We will always have people forced to use low-end machines by economics or backwards-compatibility. Look at Mac users.)
Code re-use is a good idea as long as the code is not buggy. If the code is buggy, everything is failing at once and you're left with a severely damaged system. I'd rather have a fighting chance.
If, on the other hand, everything is split up (in the current scenario, in other words), a bug in grep's regexp handling isn't going to affect vi's regexp handling, and a bug in su's argument handling isn't going to be manifested in bash, too. Bugs are isolated and can be fixed without risk of hurting something else in that huge mess of a binary you would otherwise have.
Blackbox solutions in general look appealing until you realize Murphy's Law hasn't been repealed. Things will fail in obscure, abstruse ways, and it's always better to isolate failure as much as possible.
As long as it works well, fine. You've saved a little hard disk space and a little RAM. So what? Hard disks and RAM are cheap and getting cheaper. Splurge and give your sysadmins some full-size programs. It'll cost you less than your daily soda.
As soon as it fails, you are screwed. You no longer have a freaking shell. What do you intend to do now? Do you really want to have to use a rescue floppy every time a single program fails? It's a better risk to have multiple programs to spread the 'essential tasks' burden over than to load down one single program.
Finally, how often does bash crash? Ever? I'd be willing to bet it's never happened to you. It's never happened to me. Same with most, if not all, of the GNU Project's tools. And as long as bash stays up, you can usually work around the failure of almost anything else, because everything won't be failing at once. That's what you give up when you chase the BusyBox solution.
Mr. Carmack, I think I'm going to buy the next Quake for Linux. I'm not a big gamer. I, in fact, rarely game. But I do enjoy supporting certain kinds of companies. Companies that give active support to Linux to the point of accepting and responding to the Linux community deserve my money.
Sitting, as I am, behind a slow modem connection, I'm not going to download an alpha pre-release. I would download it from the official venues, and I'm surely not going to download it from possibly disreputable ones. Even if I was sitting at the end of a fat T1 or DSL, I wouldn't want to: I like surprises. I like not knowing precisely what is going to be there. I haven't kept up with gaming since Duke Nukem 3D, so the next Quake should be a pleasant surprise.
Besids, it won't happen: The *AAs are rich, powerful groups that could easily pay $200, $2000, or $2000000 to anyone if it meant opening up a market to them.
I won't even mention the Polar Lander. A fucking faliure to convert to metric is not excusable!
NASA deserves what it gets. Give me amateur rocketry, because NASA couldn't do it to save their asses.
Three CDs? Cheap to crap out, easy to install, and the nail in Microsoft's coffin.
Gives you the warm fuzzies, don't it?
But the glory of this deal is that Linux is slowly coming to the Mass Market. Billy Joe-Bob Windoze User will have the option of something as idiot-proof as AOL and as cheap as Linux. If Billy Joe-Bob decides that knocking $100 off the price of his next email machine is worth it for the 'store-brand' OS, he'll do it, and Linux has just swept another sale right out from under Microsoft.
This is how Linux finally meets Microsoft on Redmond's own ground.
Microsoft knows this. It simply hasn't been forced to care.
10 months ago I used Novell Netware on a 286 at my home office, where I served goatse.cx images to the poor, underprivileged trolls barely making it on Slashdot. I wanted a system I could take with me, to keep current on the latest link-munging techniques and image URLs.
... NO! ... it's ... Snurb ... and I'm a network administrator and CEO of ... NO! ... and ... uh ... al-Quaeda operative ... yeah, that's the ticket!
None of the Windows laptops cut it with battery life or monitor durability (they tended to commit suicide after the fifth spreadeagled rectum). Worse, none of them could play the video of Ballmer hopping around like a cracked-up horny toad at a sufficient volume to frighten all the small children on a given flight.
So I looked at the iBook. I broke out my mad money, saved over the years from selling bumfight videos online, and bought the 1600Mhz DVD-ROM liquid-nitrogen-cooled iZilla. I had enough left over to buy the optional iHover attachment to prevent it from crushing my legs. I use it everywhere! Showing the finest in Internet goat-pr0n to those who intend to eat veal at restaurants, giving poor premeds a free view of the inside of the colon at med schools, and giving small children nightmares about drugged-up CEOs chasing them down and crushing them, my iBook is there! Its minature keys are perfectly sized for jizim removal, and its one-button mouse is perfect for one-handed Internet surfing.
Of course, I use nothing but OS X on the beast (up the RAM to at least 1200 Megs) and it's great. Proper terminal window to r00t other peoples' servers, Outlook-compliant email client for vectoring all the latest worms, 802.11b card for warwalking around looking for chalk, and best of all, unlike any other OS in the known Universe, IT JUST WORKS.
I've definately reached the point where I no longer want to have all my machines as play toys - the iBook is a workhorse and just keeps on slogging. Mmmm... horse.
My Name's Steve Jobs
If OSes were cheaper, and the market was at or approaching saturation as far as OS vendors were concerned, people would have less reason to make their own. But that's not the only reason Linux, and the rest of the Open Source crowd, has caught on. If everyone is selling closed-source OSes, and nobody is really willing to play ball with companies that have odd requirements (I need the source code for security reasons, dammit! I do defense contracts!), there would still be a valid market for Open-Source OSes. Would they be as popular as Linux? Probably not. Would they have the same kind of desperate relevance in the face of MS/Washington's DRM bullshit? No, as there would be no High King to influence government.
So while Microsoft's dominance wasn't an absolute precondition for Linux's existence, it certainly has propelled an essentially 'project' OS into amazing popularity.
Stephenson gives a very cogent commentary on exactly this kind of thing in his extremely well-written essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line".
I referr you to this page, the Lisa McPherson Memorial Page. The Church basically took Lisa from a hospital after a car crash to a hotel, where they deprived her of food and water until she died. She was under Scientology care, in direct supervision of people following Scientology doctrine, when she died of extreme dehydration.
Law? The Church deserves no law, for it uses the law to its own ends, proclaiming it as it sees fit and ignoring it when it is inconvenient for them.
In a very real way, the Church of Scientology is waging a Crusade on the Internet. Its knights are lawyers, its swords are copyright law, and its Holy Land is an Internet the Church can control.
Well, the Raging Clueless Cult will never silence this heathen. Muahahaha!
Similarly, I can put nearly anything I want in something you choose to receive, but if you haven't chosen to accept it, it's a different story.
Look at tattooing: I can tattoo the DeCSS algorithm onto my own chest, or the chest of another consenting person, but I cannot tattoo it onto the chest of a non-consenting person. Trying to tattoo something onto a non-consenting person is assault with a deadly weapon, regardless of the First Amendment.
I've heard your argument before, but it doesn't hold water and I think any court in the land would agree with me.