Wow, some of you must have a hard time walking with your knees jerking so violently. I know that we've all decided that President Bush and every last person in the US Government are now minions of the Antichrist who think nothing of trampling the rights of every American, biting the heads off cute furry animals, and beating up old ladies on the street just for fun. But you should at least try and retain the appearance of rational thought.
How many articles have we already had on Slashdot lamenting how hard it is to properly secure a WiFi network? Why is it horrible when the Feds point out something that we already know? How is it a sign of the End Times for the gov't to advocate good security practices? If they'd said "Gee, guys, the root logins on your main servers really should have passwords" would we have people unsecuring their boxes in protest?
The article is vague and badly written, and we have no real context for any of the quotes they include. (Hell, no one they quote uses the word "terrorist" at all.) However, it's fairly clear from their analogy to the phone system that they're talking about big corporations, ISPs and big network providers. These are buinesses that already have a legal responsibility to secure their networks properly, and some of them have already shown that they either can't do it with current technology, don't care enough to bother, or just don't know how to do it right.
This is not an attack on people or businesses who want to operate open access points. But that decision should be a positive choice, not an accident or a consquence of someone bypassing bad default security settings. And when that choice is made it needs to consider the security of other data on the network, like confidental customer information, that obviously should not be open to every random person with an 802.11 card.
But nevermind all that. Let's go back to babbling about the imminent arrival of a police state and demonzing people on the basis of inflammatory Slashdot postings. That's ever so much more productive.
Remarkable! I see clear parallels between this pioneering Victorian scientist and the much later experiments chronicled in the televised documentaries of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his faithful assistant Beaker.
This whole line of reasoning is a crock of horseshit, e.g., "oooh, we need to protect our subways from evil nuke-toting terrorists!"
Let's examine this, shall we? Any terrorist organization with the resources and intelligence to get something like a suitcase-sized nuclear device into the United States quite probably isn't brain-dead enough to tote the thing through a secured installation wired to detect the bomb.
Sure, and any terrorist interested in hijacking a plane isn't about to carry aboard a weapon or an explosive device, so we might as well just stop checking for them.
Although it appears some of my more idiotic countrymen think that very thing could happen. Forget the easily-made and easily-transported conventional explosives and poisonous gases - think of those nukes!
I very much doubt that anyone's forgotten about conventional explosives or poison gases. They have detectors for those too, you know. Some people really are capable of assessing more than one kind of threat at the same time, all without assuming that everyone else is an idiot.
9/11 has apparently lobotomized more than a few people.
I think you misunderstand. No one is claiming that their work is being stolen, only that they are not respected for their contributions. How many well-known OSS coders can you name? Ok, now name a similar group of OSS interface designers, documentation writers, and artists.
I'm not sure how you define "function" in this context. If it comes to war-- which is what I assume you're talking about, what with the "nuked off the face of the earth" thing and all-- the several states will be utterly defenseless. An occupying force could march into any state capitol in the country, gun down the legislature, and take control with virtually no organized opposition.
It certainly wouldn't be business as usual, nor would a full-scale land invasion be easily repelled, but I have to question your "no organized opposition" statement. The states do have National Guard units at their disposal in the event of a millitary emergency. They're soldiers with millitary equipment and training, and it's unlikely that they'd all be off serving overseas somewhere when the bad stuff happens. There's also the civilian police forces, some of which have some pretty serious firepower of their own.
Oh, and your thing about "a radical difference in behavior, speech, mannerism, dress?" Utter crap. There are essentially no cultural differences between any two points in this country, notwithstanding differences that are based on factors that transcend geography, such as race or ethnicity.
Huh? So people here in Westminster, Maryland act, talk, dress, eat, and think exactly like the people in Los Angeles, Missoula, Gettysburg, and Anchorage? That's a ridiculous statement.
By using some combination of these technologies we can move away from environmentally unsafe gases. While this new technology is certainly new and may be superior in many aspects, the only reason we have not moved to more efficient and/or "eco-friendly" designs to date is expense. Welcome to capitalist terra, my friends.
It's not as though expense can be omitted from the equation entirely. Cheap and easily produced refrigeration technology (and air conditioning, which is closely related) have probably prevented more illnesses than any recent development since antibiotics.
For advice on making weblogs more accessible my favorite resource has been Mark Pilgrim's "Dive Into Accessibility" series:
http://diveintoaccessibility.org/
The specific customization techniques he demonstrates are aimed at the most popular weblogging packages like movable type, and greymatter. But most of the tips are easily applied to any web site, weblog or not.
I think you have hit on the crux of the matter. You only really hear these type of arguments ("profit is all that matters for corporations") from Americans. In the rest of the world, they sound frankly screwed up.
WTF? So coporations in other countries are beacons of moral purity and selfless sacrifice? Not hardly. French corporations are implicated in political bribes. South African De Beers does all sorts of evil stuff to maintain their lucrative position. Those are just a couple examples off the top of my head.
There are probably a million similar "scandals" around the world every day, but because they involve less prominent countries or happen in places where corruption is a way of life no one considers them dramatic enough to report. Trying to brush off greed as a purely American failing may make you feel better, but it's just ridiculous.
That's exactly the problem. The open source alternative isn't something people prefer. It's something they reluctantly settle for when nothing better is available. People who do have the money choose to buy the real thing. That's not a good way to become mainstream.
No, most people don't "need" Photoshop, but they want it. Why? Figure it out and then make Gimp the answer to that question.
Actually, yes, it is a recipe for failure. The problem is how developers define "smartest".
Two customers submit suggestions to a developer of, say, a word processing app.
The first customer suggests a really good way to improve the performance of a critical function of the app by implementing a nifty programming technique. It's a good idea. The developer is impressed by how smart this guy is. Idea is implemented.
The second customer suggests an improvement to simplify a complex series of dialog boxes in the mail-merge routine. She also points out a few misspellings and confusing grammatical errors elsewhere in the interface. The developer is annoyed. The interface makes perfect sense. Why is this idiot wasting his time with this trivial crap?
No, not every developer acts that way. But too many do. A good development team would recognize that both have an important part in the process. "Smart" don't enter into it.
>The only one that I can think of MAYBE for the >latter category is Gimp, and the user interface >on that thing is so horrible as to be useless >for anyone but a true geek (at least, the last >time I used it which was admittedly a while ago).
uhh.. it's proprietary cousin's interfaces are just as bad. Face it, anything more complex then MSPaint is a geek tool and needs a geek interface.
No, no, no. This is a blind spot that's far too common among open source developers. The complexity of your application is not an excuse for a bad UI. It's actually just the opposite. Making complex things easy is the really hard part.
Photoshop's interface is complex, but it's internally consistent and well designed. It's not perfect, but it's significantly better than any alternative, open source or otherwise. That's why people use it.
With any app as flexible as Photoshop there's always going to be a learning curve, but there's a huge difference between learning the nuances of a program and optimizing your workflow, and wasting time memorizing the random whims of a kludged together interface.
I agree. We're way too cautious with space flight. The Russians are much more realistic.
I'm not suggesting that we want to be careless or cavalier about the loss of life or very expensive equipment, but if our forefathers had had a similar attitude about long ocean voyages then we'd all still be crammed into Europe. Exploration in any hostile environment is inherently risky. If we actually intend to have a long-term, useful presence in space then it's inevitable that people are going to die there. The astronauts and administrators know this already, so we might as well prepare the public for that reality and get some work done.
It's not just for fun, of course. This is for people who's faces have been pretty much destroyed. Someone who's been in a terrible fire, for example, and who's face is essentially gone. I don't mean to sound insensitive, but it's probably intended for patients where things can't get much worse than they already are.
Also, as others have said, deep bone structure is as much a part of your face as the flesh on top. By the time they finished reconnecting everything and making the necessary adjustments someone with a transplanted face probably wouldn't look much like the original donor.
Stupid phone companies. Its a fucking phone!! First, fix it so i can hear someone, THEN gimme the damn bowling games.
Yes, mobile phone service sucks because they've pulled all their best engineers out of the field and made them write bowling games instead.
Negatory, good buddy. Building fancier handsets is trivial compared to actually improving coverage, and it's not like the two are mutually exclusive. Let's say the phone companies overcame all the various technical problems like interference, desensing, varying topography, etc. That still leaves political problems like unrealistic people in upscale neighborhoods who magically want 100% coverage without any visible antennas and dumb people who apparently think that cell phone towers will steal their souls.
It would also help if the phone companies would stop taking on massive numbers of new customers when they can't support the ones they have, but I guess the money has to come from somewhere.
You're absolutely right. I didn't mean to imply that Multiplan was a Mac program; that sentence was badly written. Excel was born as a Mac program, Multiplan was the older app available for a bunch of 8-bit systems back then.
John gets cancer. John goes in for new treatment with new cancer drug. New cancer drug was found because of Free Software written for biological research [bioinformatics.org] and improved upon by scientist-programmers all over the world. John's life is extended or even saved because people could all contribute to the software that researchers were able to use to make something valuable to everyone.
Ok. John's living in a country that's banned closed-source software for political reasons. John undergoes a battery of tests to evaluate his condition. Unfortunately, the most advanced analysis software at this time is commercial closed-source, and despite their need for this package the doctors have been repeatedly frustrated in their attempts to purchase it. Alas, a vital clue that might have saved John's life is missed.
Happily, John is an Open Source advocate. He dies happy man, untainted by the evil of closed-source and a martyr for the cause of Freedom.
Freedoms benefit you in more ways than you can realize, and it is a sign of enslavement when you're willing to sacrifice them for nothing.
Interesting. So restricting the use of closed source software is actually enhancing freedom. You're free to do whatever you want, so long as you do what I say.
Software is a tool. Use the best tool for the job at hand. Trust the people who use the tools to decide what's best.
Office is originally a clone... Word is a ripoff from WordPerfect
Only if you consider WordPerfect to be a "ripoff" of Wordstar. Or EasyWriter. Or Electric Pencil. Or one of the other dedicated word processing systems that were around for a good decade before WordPerfect was published.
Excel a copy of 1-2-3
Excel was more of an evolution of MS Multiplan, created for the original Mac back in 1985. It had a graphical interface from the start. It followed the same general conventions as 1-2-3, but it would have been silly not to.
(and those copies of Visi-Calc and Visi-Text from early 80-s or was it late 70-s)
VisiCalc was introduced in 1979 . The other Visi-On suite applications did not achieve the same level of success.
Fighting over who did what first is pretty pointless. Software inspires others software. Look at all the open source projects that exist only to ape their existing commercial counterparts.
This is not an OSS vs close-source issue. A Red Hat vulnerability is just as much of a burden on a typical desktop user as a Windows vulnerability. And how easy it is to fix any kind of software problem varies wildly with the complexity of the problem, the interest/capabilities in the support community, and ultimately the technical ability of the end user.
MS' solution to this bug is a kluge. They either failed to consider this problem or implemented their solution poorly. Hindsight is 20/20. Either way, it looks like they (or other people using the flawed module) painted themselves into a corner.
But don't kick back and assume that the same thing can never happen on an open source project, because I guarantee you're mistaken.
OK, but it doesn't seem like the retailers sending the letters are primarily interested gathering information about the leaker's identity. They apparently just want the information removed, and that's where I'm confused. Are NDA's "contagious"? If a guy on the street stops me and whispers "Next Friday, DVD player at Walmart for 69.94! Pass it on!" can Walmart prevent me from telling someone else?
Thanks, I didn't realize truckers used it. It's also part of the APCO standard ten-codes used by police departments around the United States, where it means pretty much the same thing.
These sites are getting this infomation from people who are preparing the ads that haven't yet been released, all of whom are under non-disclosure agreements to not tell what's in the ads that they're working on.
If the people working on the ads have signed an NDA then they probably violated it by disclosing the information, and they should be disciplined.
The web sites being harassed, however, never signed anything.
I second that. I read Salon on my PDA almost every day at lunch. I bought a subscription, and soon thereafter they dropped the stories from AvantGo. That was just plain stupid. They should've bitten the bullet and left the premium content available until they had a solution in place; it's not as though millions of potential subscribers would've flocked to an AvantGo channel just to grab a handful of premium articles each day.
That's true, of course. But it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Once upon a time, for example, everyone's shopping habits were "tracked" by the grocer behind the counter. He could easily gauge the buying habits of all his regular customers and make appropriate recommendations. The anonymity of the modern shopping experience is more of an accident than an expectation.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, some of you must have a hard time walking with your knees jerking so violently. I know that we've all decided that President Bush and every last person in the US Government are now minions of the Antichrist who think nothing of trampling the rights of every American, biting the heads off cute furry animals, and beating up old ladies on the street just for fun. But you should at least try and retain the appearance of rational thought.
How many articles have we already had on Slashdot lamenting how hard it is to properly secure a WiFi network? Why is it horrible when the Feds point out something that we already know? How is it a sign of the End Times for the gov't to advocate good security practices? If they'd said "Gee, guys, the root logins on your main servers really should have passwords" would we have people unsecuring their boxes in protest?
The article is vague and badly written, and we have no real context for any of the quotes they include. (Hell, no one they quote uses the word "terrorist" at all.) However, it's fairly clear from their analogy to the phone system that they're talking about big corporations, ISPs and big network providers. These are buinesses that already have a legal responsibility to secure their networks properly, and some of them have already shown that they either can't do it with current technology, don't care enough to bother, or just don't know how to do it right.
This is not an attack on people or businesses who want to operate open access points. But that decision should be a positive choice, not an accident or a consquence of someone bypassing bad default security settings. And when that choice is made it needs to consider the security of other data on the network, like confidental customer information, that obviously should not be open to every random person with an 802.11 card.
But nevermind all that. Let's go back to babbling about the imminent arrival of a police state and demonzing people on the basis of inflammatory Slashdot postings. That's ever so much more productive.
Remarkable! I see clear parallels between this pioneering Victorian scientist and the much later experiments chronicled in the televised documentaries of Dr. Bunsen Honeydew and his faithful assistant Beaker.
This whole line of reasoning is a crock of horseshit, e.g., "oooh, we need to protect our subways from evil nuke-toting terrorists!"
Let's examine this, shall we? Any terrorist organization with the resources and intelligence to get something like a suitcase-sized nuclear device into the United States quite probably isn't brain-dead enough to tote the thing through a secured installation wired to detect the bomb.
Sure, and any terrorist interested in hijacking a plane isn't about to carry aboard a weapon or an explosive device, so we might as well just stop checking for them.
Although it appears some of my more idiotic countrymen think that very thing could happen. Forget the easily-made and easily-transported conventional explosives and poisonous gases - think of those nukes!
I very much doubt that anyone's forgotten about conventional explosives or poison gases. They have detectors for those too, you know. Some people really are capable of assessing more than one kind of threat at the same time, all without assuming that everyone else is an idiot.
9/11 has apparently lobotomized more than a few people.
Apparently so.
I think you misunderstand. No one is claiming that their work is being stolen, only that they are not respected for their contributions. How many well-known OSS coders can you name? Ok, now name a similar group of OSS interface designers, documentation writers, and artists.
I'm not sure how you define "function" in this context. If it comes to war-- which is what I assume you're talking about, what with the "nuked off the face of the earth" thing and all-- the several states will be utterly defenseless. An occupying force could march into any state capitol in the country, gun down the legislature, and take control with virtually no organized opposition.
It certainly wouldn't be business as usual, nor would a full-scale land invasion be easily repelled, but I have to question your "no organized opposition" statement. The states do have National Guard units at their disposal in the event of a millitary emergency. They're soldiers with millitary equipment and training, and it's unlikely that they'd all be off serving overseas somewhere when the bad stuff happens. There's also the civilian police forces, some of which have some pretty serious firepower of their own.
Oh, and your thing about "a radical difference in behavior, speech, mannerism, dress?" Utter crap. There are essentially no cultural differences between any two points in this country, notwithstanding differences that are based on factors that transcend geography, such as race or ethnicity.
Huh? So people here in Westminster, Maryland act, talk, dress, eat, and think exactly like the people in Los Angeles, Missoula, Gettysburg, and Anchorage? That's a ridiculous statement.
By using some combination of these technologies we can move away from environmentally unsafe gases. While this new technology is certainly new and may be superior in many aspects, the only reason we have not moved to more efficient and/or "eco-friendly" designs to date is expense. Welcome to capitalist terra, my friends.
It's not as though expense can be omitted from the equation entirely. Cheap and easily produced refrigeration technology (and air conditioning, which is closely related) have probably prevented more illnesses than any recent development since antibiotics.
For advice on making weblogs more accessible my favorite resource has been Mark Pilgrim's "Dive Into Accessibility" series:
http://diveintoaccessibility.org/
The specific customization techniques he demonstrates are aimed at the most popular weblogging packages like movable type, and greymatter. But most of the tips are easily applied to any web site, weblog or not.
So the people that made the matches and gasoline are morally responsibile for Nazi bookburning, right?
I think you have hit on the crux of the matter. You only really hear these type of arguments ("profit is all that matters for corporations") from Americans. In the rest of the world, they sound frankly screwed up.
WTF? So coporations in other countries are beacons of moral purity and selfless sacrifice? Not hardly. French corporations are implicated in political bribes. South African De Beers does all sorts of evil stuff to maintain their lucrative position. Those are just a couple examples off the top of my head.
There are probably a million similar "scandals" around the world every day, but because they involve less prominent countries or happen in places where corruption is a way of life no one considers them dramatic enough to report. Trying to brush off greed as a purely American failing may make you feel better, but it's just ridiculous.
That's exactly the problem. The open source alternative isn't something people prefer. It's something they reluctantly settle for when nothing better is available. People who do have the money choose to buy the real thing. That's not a good way to become mainstream.
No, most people don't "need" Photoshop, but they want it. Why? Figure it out and then make Gimp the answer to that question.
Actually, yes, it is a recipe for failure. The problem is how developers define "smartest".
Two customers submit suggestions to a developer of, say, a word processing app.
The first customer suggests a really good way to improve the performance of a critical function of the app by implementing a nifty programming technique. It's a good idea. The developer is impressed by how smart this guy is. Idea is implemented.
The second customer suggests an improvement to simplify a complex series of dialog boxes in the mail-merge routine. She also points out a few misspellings and confusing grammatical errors elsewhere in the interface. The developer is annoyed. The interface makes perfect sense. Why is this idiot wasting his time with this trivial crap?
No, not every developer acts that way. But too many do. A good development team would recognize that both have an important part in the process. "Smart" don't enter into it.
>The only one that I can think of MAYBE for the
>latter category is Gimp, and the user interface
>on that thing is so horrible as to be useless
>for anyone but a true geek (at least, the last
>time I used it which was admittedly a while ago).
uhh.. it's proprietary cousin's interfaces are just as bad. Face it, anything more complex then MSPaint is a geek tool and needs a geek interface.
No, no, no. This is a blind spot that's far too common among open source developers. The complexity of your application is not an excuse for a bad UI. It's actually just the opposite. Making complex things easy is the really hard part.
Photoshop's interface is complex, but it's internally consistent and well designed. It's not perfect, but it's significantly better than any alternative, open source or otherwise. That's why people use it.
With any app as flexible as Photoshop there's always going to be a learning curve, but there's a huge difference between learning the nuances of a program and optimizing your workflow, and wasting time memorizing the random whims of a kludged together interface.
I agree. We're way too cautious with space flight. The Russians are much more realistic.
I'm not suggesting that we want to be careless or cavalier about the loss of life or very expensive equipment, but if our forefathers had had a similar attitude about long ocean voyages then we'd all still be crammed into Europe. Exploration in any hostile environment is inherently risky. If we actually intend to have a long-term, useful presence in space then it's inevitable that people are going to die there. The astronauts and administrators know this already, so we might as well prepare the public for that reality and get some work done.
It's not just for fun, of course. This is for people who's faces have been pretty much destroyed. Someone who's been in a terrible fire, for example, and who's face is essentially gone. I don't mean to sound insensitive, but it's probably intended for patients where things can't get much worse than they already are.
Also, as others have said, deep bone structure is as much a part of your face as the flesh on top. By the time they finished reconnecting everything and making the necessary adjustments someone with a transplanted face probably wouldn't look much like the original donor.
Stupid phone companies. Its a fucking phone!! First, fix it so i can hear someone, THEN gimme the damn bowling games.
Yes, mobile phone service sucks because they've pulled all their best engineers out of the field and made them write bowling games instead.
Negatory, good buddy. Building fancier handsets is trivial compared to actually improving coverage, and it's not like the two are mutually exclusive. Let's say the phone companies overcame all the various technical problems like interference, desensing, varying topography, etc. That still leaves political problems like unrealistic people in upscale neighborhoods who magically want 100% coverage without any visible antennas and dumb people who apparently think that cell phone towers will steal their souls.
It would also help if the phone companies would stop taking on massive numbers of new customers when they can't support the ones they have, but I guess the money has to come from somewhere.
You're absolutely right. I didn't mean to imply that Multiplan was a Mac program; that sentence was badly written. Excel was born as a Mac program, Multiplan was the older app available for a bunch of 8-bit systems back then.
John gets cancer. John goes in for new treatment with new cancer drug. New cancer drug was found because of Free Software written for biological research [bioinformatics.org] and improved upon by scientist-programmers all over the world. John's life is extended or even saved because people could all contribute to the software that researchers were able to use to make something valuable to everyone.
Ok. John's living in a country that's banned closed-source software for political reasons. John undergoes a battery of tests to evaluate his condition. Unfortunately, the most advanced analysis software at this time is commercial closed-source, and despite their need for this package the doctors have been repeatedly frustrated in their attempts to purchase it. Alas, a vital clue that might have saved John's life is missed.
Happily, John is an Open Source advocate. He dies happy man, untainted by the evil of closed-source and a martyr for the cause of Freedom.
Freedoms benefit you in more ways than you can realize, and it is a sign of enslavement when you're willing to sacrifice them for nothing.
Interesting. So restricting the use of closed source software is actually enhancing freedom. You're free to do whatever you want, so long as you do what I say.
Software is a tool. Use the best tool for the job at hand. Trust the people who use the tools to decide what's best.
Office is originally a clone...
Word is a ripoff from WordPerfect
Only if you consider WordPerfect to be a "ripoff" of Wordstar. Or EasyWriter. Or Electric Pencil. Or one of the other dedicated word processing systems that were around for a good decade before WordPerfect was published.
Excel a copy of 1-2-3
Excel was more of an evolution of MS Multiplan, created for the original Mac back in 1985. It had a graphical interface from the start. It followed the same general conventions as 1-2-3, but it would have been silly not to.
(and those copies of Visi-Calc and Visi-Text from early 80-s or was it late 70-s)
VisiCalc was introduced in 1979 . The other Visi-On suite applications did not achieve the same level of success.
Fighting over who did what first is pretty pointless. Software inspires others software. Look at all the open source projects that exist only to ape their existing commercial counterparts.
This is not an OSS vs close-source issue. A Red Hat vulnerability is just as much of a burden on a typical desktop user as a Windows vulnerability. And how easy it is to fix any kind of software problem varies wildly with the complexity of the problem, the interest/capabilities in the support community, and ultimately the technical ability of the end user.
MS' solution to this bug is a kluge. They either failed to consider this problem or implemented their solution poorly. Hindsight is 20/20. Either way, it looks like they (or other people using the flawed module) painted themselves into a corner.
But don't kick back and assume that the same thing can never happen on an open source project, because I guarantee you're mistaken.
OK, but it doesn't seem like the retailers sending the letters are primarily interested gathering information about the leaker's identity. They apparently just want the information removed, and that's where I'm confused. Are NDA's "contagious"? If a guy on the street stops me and whispers "Next Friday, DVD player at Walmart for 69.94! Pass it on!" can Walmart prevent me from telling someone else?
Thanks, I didn't realize truckers used it. It's also part of the APCO standard ten-codes used by police departments around the United States, where it means pretty much the same thing.
These sites are getting this infomation from people who are preparing the ads that haven't yet been released, all of whom are under non-disclosure agreements to not tell what's in the ads that they're working on.
If the people working on the ads have signed an NDA then they probably violated it by disclosing the information, and they should be disciplined.
The web sites being harassed, however, never signed anything.
I second that. I read Salon on my PDA almost every day at lunch. I bought a subscription, and soon thereafter they dropped the stories from AvantGo. That was just plain stupid. They should've bitten the bullet and left the premium content available until they had a solution in place; it's not as though millions of potential subscribers would've flocked to an AvantGo channel just to grab a handful of premium articles each day.
Isn't there any kind of group licensing option in your school district?
That's true, of course. But it's not necessarily a bad thing.
Once upon a time, for example, everyone's shopping habits were "tracked" by the grocer behind the counter. He could easily gauge the buying habits of all his regular customers and make appropriate recommendations. The anonymity of the modern shopping experience is more of an accident than an expectation.