There is a difference between two countries that are otherwise fairly sane who have a (even very heated) dispute lasting decades or even longer... and crazy or religious idealogues in control of a countries nuclear arsenal.
North Koreas leader has shown a tendancy to be outright nuts, and doing crazy unpredictable things. He's said a lot of really really agressive things and we really don't know what to expect from someone like that. As such, allowing them to have nukes of any consequence (they have already shown to have nuke capaibility, but no real way to deliver it or any stockpile) would also be unpredictable.
Iran has a slightly less crazy ruler, but he is a religious idealogue. If he thinks god told him to nuke someone, it could very well happen. Or worse, he might have to live up to his hyperbole or risk the rath of his own people.
When someone is claiming the flaw was fixed "overnight", yeah.. nine whole days.. and that's at LEAST 9 whole days.
There is this myth that flaws in linux are fixed within hours and ditributed to everyone instantly and everyone is safe all the time... There is also a myth that flaws are never kept secret and are fully disclosed as soon as found so that people can apply workarounds.
Both myths are wrong in most cases, as most critical bugs are embargoed from publication, sometimes for months. Then it's "announced" with a fix and it appears that it happened overnight, when in reality you've been vulnerable for a great deal of time but didn't know it.
If by "immediately fixed" you mean nearly two weeks being kept secret by the kernel team while they worked on it, and you were vulnerable.. and if by "distributed overnight" you mean probably several more days before the various distros make it availble...
This bug was reported to the kernel team on 10/12, not yesterday.
Notice the "Assigned" date, 10/12/2010, that's the date the CVE was created for this flaw and it was likely known and reported several days before that.
What this means is that the kernel team knew of the flaw, it was reported in secret, and they kept it a secret while they researched a fix. So people were vulnerabile for almsot 2 weeks, even though there was a known workaround that would have prevented them from being vulnerable if they had known.
Open source doesn't magically make you know about flaws either. So your argument is specious.
My point is that everyone argues that making it open source will fix the problem. It won't. The problem is flaws in the system, both in process and code and design.
If you had merely used the example it would be fine, but you chose to editorialize it with claims that are untrue and biased. Is it any wonder you get biased responses?
If you want to make an objective statement, don't say things like "magically found", that just reveals your bias.
Where did I claim you claimed to be? I called you one.
The fact is, even close elections tend to follow pattters that are visible from more general results. Whinging about felons and "found votes" is the sign of someone grasping for straws to get their candidate certified.
Question: How do you know that this is the source used and not a modified version? How does anyone know? At some point there is always going to be opportunity for corrupt officials to "fix" things.
Being open source doesn't magically make it any better. In fact, there was an article recently about an open source based voting system in (i think) Washington DC that was found to be riddled with security flaws and problems as well.
Coleman is a carpet bagger. He moved here from new york, pretended to be a democrat to get elected into local politics then changed parties once he was elected. Franken moved here as well, but at least he was born and raised here. The guy is dishonest, a cheat, and even if he'd won the election he'd have serious legal issues to deal with that came to light during the election. Anyone that could support that in a candidate should just crawl in a hole and die.
And you're being dishonest about "found" votes as well. That was bogus talking points the republicans spread and you believe it.
I would suggest you are simply set in your ways and unable to make a change. I see this all the time. Whenever Microsoft allows the old version of something, the first thing 99% of the people do is disable the new one, and therefore very few people ever move to the new interface, relgardless of how beneficial that may be.
Microsoft doesn't want to support the old style interface for a number of business and usability reasons. So if you refuse to use anything but the old interface, you're prbably not part of MS's target market for MS Office. You probably wouldn't upgrade anyways, because you're too set in your ways.
This reminds me of the sad case of Wordperfect PerfectOffice for Windows 3.1. Corel, which owned it at the time, noticed that there was still a large population of Windows 3.1 users (this was around 1997 or 1998) and figured it was a perfect market to tap to gain extra revenue, because they would be offering them a modern office suite when everyone else was ignoring them. They'd own the market!
Sadly, they never bothered to actually ask any Windows 3.1 users if they wanted it. What they failed to take into consideration was that those who don't upgrade, are highly unlikely to buy new software for their old platform. What they have is obviously "good enough" for them, so why upgrade? They printed millions of copies and they sat in warehouses collecting dust. They lost a ton of money on it.
When you create a new version of your application, you are targeting a) frequent and early adopters and b) new users. Old, crabby, stuck in their ways slashdotters may be loud and squeaky, but they're not a sizeable portion of the people buying their upgrade software.
Actually, Excel is also still MDI and hides them. It's very annoying.
This is probably my #1 thing i hate about MS Office. You can open two copies of excel (or PP) but it's a bit of work, and you have to change the default actions for the shell if you want it to work that way automatically.
I disagree that the ribbon is biased towards the mouse. It works quite well with the keyboard, with all the old shortcuts that still work exactly as before. If all the old shortcuts work, how can it be more biased towards the mouse than the old way? Unless the utility with the mouse has greatly increased, which is not quite a good argument in favor of the old way.
There are literally hundreds of reasons that the ribbon is superior to menus. Perhaps many of those reasons don't apply to you, or you are simply stubborn and don't want to learn something new. There are of course reasons why the menus are better than ribbons, but too many people act like it's all or nothing... That either Ribbons are better or menus are better, for everyone. Period. What's worse, most people argue reasons that aren't even true, like there being no keyboard shortcuts or that they're different keyboard shortcuts than they used to be. Or that the ribbon takes up more space (which it doesn't, especially if you auto-hide it)
But, here's a few examples.
Menus are hard for people without fine motor control to use. If you are old, disabled, or simply not very well coordinated, ribbons will be much easier to use than trying to make your mouse follow the narrow paths that make submenus show up.
The menus have become monstrous, with more and more features being added to apps, it's harder and harder to find the items you're looking for. The ribbon allows better organization, and "context sensitivity".
The ribbon is far more intuitive to new users.
The ribbon scales to your screen, making buttons smaller if you have less room and changing various other sizes.
The ribbon provides live previews of changes before you apply them.
Etc.. etc.. etc.. The ribbon is a net win if you give it a chance. Most people that argue against it have not given it a chance.
It's not there. They removed it, precisely because people complained about it. So stop whining about something that's already fixed.
And if you think the ribbon takes 1/3 of your screen realestate, you either have a very small screen or a very large tendancy to exagerate. Even so, there is an up arrow in the upper right corner that hides the ribbon, or ctrl-f1. Again, problem solved, and that's been there since the beginning.
Most 900 and pay line services don't work with VOIP services, hell they don't work with cell phones. This is why 900 services are going the way of the dodo. Pay per SMS has become far more profitable.
The only way your scenario works is if there's a VOIP to local phone service gateway in place that allows this, which would require a ver small subset of VOIP installations.
I also think this is probably far more of an issue for commercial VOIP systems, since they would probably be far less likely to have OS updates applied to them than someone using Asterisk, FreeSwitch, or other software based ones.
Seriously? You had to link to the wikipedia entries for Collusion and Price fixing? Like people that visit slashdot are so illiterate that they don't know the meaning of these basic terms and their ramifications?
While this is a valid point, it really doesn't take into account the fact it takes a long time to develop a mature, reliable, secure OS. OpenBSD has been at it for more than a decade and still has issues, and some of the finest minds in security work on that, and they started with a relatively secure code base to begin with.
If you're writing your own OS from scratch, you can expect 20-30 years before it will be more secure and reliable than existing OS's (and those OS's won't be staying still so they will mature in that timeframe as well). And that's if you have experts working on it. If you're going to copy an existing OS, then what's the point?
Now, I can understand that a country wants to encourage OS development, and is willing to sponsor a defense project to build an OS, with the expectation it may take 20-30 years.. but it should really stay hidden and not publicised like this, otherwise the people start wondering "Hey, why don't we have this OS yet?" and then you end up pushing it into production long before it's ready.
The sad part is, India has a huge problem with brain drain. A large percentage of the top computer scientists relocate to EU countries, or the US. Only the truly patriotic or mediocre or worse candidates stay home, or perhaps those with some kind of community ties...
However, if India became seriouis about building a world class research program, it might encourage top talent to stay in India. I can see that as another benefit of such a program.
So i guess my point is, there are a lot of reasons why this is a good idea, but sadly.. I doubt that those reasons are the reasons they're doing it.
Hotmail does run on Windows. When it was purchased it did not, and it took them some time convert it. The "stories" about conversion failures were rediculous, the timelines did not give enough time for a real conversion of such systems, and people probably mistook various prototype testing as real attempts.
Sourcesafe was also never meant for anything other than workgroup projects, not large scale. As such, nobody would be expected to run something the size of the windows code base on vss. Nowadays, Microsoft has an enterprise class version control in Team Foundation Server, but I imagine they have a lot of legacy to convert to move that to TFS any time soon.
They also ran a large part of their internal processes for years on an AS/400, including accounting and other aspects. Microsoft didn't have applications to do what they needed on Windows, and didn't really want to invest in building them. However, now that they bought Great Plains.. that's a different story.
Due to legacy concerns, they aren't likely to convert from p4 for a very long time, although the beauty of git is that in workgroups you can use git and push changes upstream. If anything, they're most likely to convert to TFS, for long term overall project.. Already most of the tools development, web development, etc.. is done on TFS.
I mean, come on.. they just FINALLY added on-the-fly error checking in the latest version? That's been in VS for many years. Interface builder *finally* part of the IDE? sheesh.
Most people wouldn't. It's only if you're connected to a Windows domain network that becomes a requirement (Part of that whole Common Criteria secure attention sequence bit).
However, it's also used for features things like locking your display, and accessing the task manager.
Slashdot Mirror
There is a difference between two countries that are otherwise fairly sane who have a (even very heated) dispute lasting decades or even longer... and crazy or religious idealogues in control of a countries nuclear arsenal.
North Koreas leader has shown a tendancy to be outright nuts, and doing crazy unpredictable things. He's said a lot of really really agressive things and we really don't know what to expect from someone like that. As such, allowing them to have nukes of any consequence (they have already shown to have nuke capaibility, but no real way to deliver it or any stockpile) would also be unpredictable.
Iran has a slightly less crazy ruler, but he is a religious idealogue. If he thinks god told him to nuke someone, it could very well happen. Or worse, he might have to live up to his hyperbole or risk the rath of his own people.
When someone is claiming the flaw was fixed "overnight", yeah.. nine whole days.. and that's at LEAST 9 whole days.
There is this myth that flaws in linux are fixed within hours and ditributed to everyone instantly and everyone is safe all the time... There is also a myth that flaws are never kept secret and are fully disclosed as soon as found so that people can apply workarounds.
Both myths are wrong in most cases, as most critical bugs are embargoed from publication, sometimes for months. Then it's "announced" with a fix and it appears that it happened overnight, when in reality you've been vulnerable for a great deal of time but didn't know it.
If by "immediately fixed" you mean nearly two weeks being kept secret by the kernel team while they worked on it, and you were vulnerable.. and if by "distributed overnight" you mean probably several more days before the various distros make it availble...
This bug was reported to the kernel team on 10/12, not yesterday.
Of course what you don't know is that this issue has been known by the kernel team and unreported for at least 9 days.
http://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2010-3904
Notice the "Assigned" date, 10/12/2010, that's the date the CVE was created for this flaw and it was likely known and reported several days before that.
What this means is that the kernel team knew of the flaw, it was reported in secret, and they kept it a secret while they researched a fix. So people were vulnerabile for almsot 2 weeks, even though there was a known workaround that would have prevented them from being vulnerable if they had known.
Open source doesn't magically make you know about flaws either. So your argument is specious.
My point is that everyone argues that making it open source will fix the problem. It won't. The problem is flaws in the system, both in process and code and design.
If you had merely used the example it would be fine, but you chose to editorialize it with claims that are untrue and biased. Is it any wonder you get biased responses?
If you want to make an objective statement, don't say things like "magically found", that just reveals your bias.
Where did I claim you claimed to be? I called you one.
The fact is, even close elections tend to follow pattters that are visible from more general results. Whinging about felons and "found votes" is the sign of someone grasping for straws to get their candidate certified.
Question: How do you know that this is the source used and not a modified version? How does anyone know? At some point there is always going to be opportunity for corrupt officials to "fix" things.
Being open source doesn't magically make it any better. In fact, there was an article recently about an open source based voting system in (i think) Washington DC that was found to be riddled with security flaws and problems as well.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/10/10/05/2246215/DC-Suspends-Tests-of-Online-Voting-System?from=rss
Oh geez, you're one of those Coleman Kooks.
Coleman is a carpet bagger. He moved here from new york, pretended to be a democrat to get elected into local politics then changed parties once he was elected. Franken moved here as well, but at least he was born and raised here. The guy is dishonest, a cheat, and even if he'd won the election he'd have serious legal issues to deal with that came to light during the election. Anyone that could support that in a candidate should just crawl in a hole and die.
And you're being dishonest about "found" votes as well. That was bogus talking points the republicans spread and you believe it.
You mean like how you can just hit the alt-key once and you see little tooltips over all the functions that point out their keyboard shortcuts?
The people that claim Office 2007-10 has no visual cues have never actually tried.
"-bash: sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-gnome: command not found"
Strange, you seem so sure that there is nothing else that has to be done.
I would suggest you are simply set in your ways and unable to make a change. I see this all the time. Whenever Microsoft allows the old version of something, the first thing 99% of the people do is disable the new one, and therefore very few people ever move to the new interface, relgardless of how beneficial that may be.
Microsoft doesn't want to support the old style interface for a number of business and usability reasons. So if you refuse to use anything but the old interface, you're prbably not part of MS's target market for MS Office. You probably wouldn't upgrade anyways, because you're too set in your ways.
This reminds me of the sad case of Wordperfect PerfectOffice for Windows 3.1. Corel, which owned it at the time, noticed that there was still a large population of Windows 3.1 users (this was around 1997 or 1998) and figured it was a perfect market to tap to gain extra revenue, because they would be offering them a modern office suite when everyone else was ignoring them. They'd own the market!
Sadly, they never bothered to actually ask any Windows 3.1 users if they wanted it. What they failed to take into consideration was that those who don't upgrade, are highly unlikely to buy new software for their old platform. What they have is obviously "good enough" for them, so why upgrade? They printed millions of copies and they sat in warehouses collecting dust. They lost a ton of money on it.
When you create a new version of your application, you are targeting a) frequent and early adopters and b) new users. Old, crabby, stuck in their ways slashdotters may be loud and squeaky, but they're not a sizeable portion of the people buying their upgrade software.
Actually, Excel is also still MDI and hides them. It's very annoying.
This is probably my #1 thing i hate about MS Office. You can open two copies of excel (or PP) but it's a bit of work, and you have to change the default actions for the shell if you want it to work that way automatically.
I disagree that the ribbon is biased towards the mouse. It works quite well with the keyboard, with all the old shortcuts that still work exactly as before. If all the old shortcuts work, how can it be more biased towards the mouse than the old way? Unless the utility with the mouse has greatly increased, which is not quite a good argument in favor of the old way.
There are literally hundreds of reasons that the ribbon is superior to menus. Perhaps many of those reasons don't apply to you, or you are simply stubborn and don't want to learn something new. There are of course reasons why the menus are better than ribbons, but too many people act like it's all or nothing... That either Ribbons are better or menus are better, for everyone. Period. What's worse, most people argue reasons that aren't even true, like there being no keyboard shortcuts or that they're different keyboard shortcuts than they used to be. Or that the ribbon takes up more space (which it doesn't, especially if you auto-hide it)
But, here's a few examples.
Menus are hard for people without fine motor control to use. If you are old, disabled, or simply not very well coordinated, ribbons will be much easier to use than trying to make your mouse follow the narrow paths that make submenus show up.
The menus have become monstrous, with more and more features being added to apps, it's harder and harder to find the items you're looking for. The ribbon allows better organization, and "context sensitivity".
The ribbon is far more intuitive to new users.
The ribbon scales to your screen, making buttons smaller if you have less room and changing various other sizes.
The ribbon provides live previews of changes before you apply them.
Etc.. etc.. etc.. The ribbon is a net win if you give it a chance. Most people that argue against it have not given it a chance.
Where do you see an "orb" in this UI?
http://www.winsupersite.com/images/office/office2010_outlook_preview.jpg
It's not there. They removed it, precisely because people complained about it. So stop whining about something that's already fixed.
And if you think the ribbon takes 1/3 of your screen realestate, you either have a very small screen or a very large tendancy to exagerate. Even so, there is an up arrow in the upper right corner that hides the ribbon, or ctrl-f1. Again, problem solved, and that's been there since the beginning.
Uh.. what? There's no such thing as "three menus deep" in the ribbon. It's all at the top level. One level deep.
You might argue that the various "modes" might be a level, but even so that's max 2 "levels".
Most 900 and pay line services don't work with VOIP services, hell they don't work with cell phones. This is why 900 services are going the way of the dodo. Pay per SMS has become far more profitable.
The only way your scenario works is if there's a VOIP to local phone service gateway in place that allows this, which would require a ver small subset of VOIP installations.
I also think this is probably far more of an issue for commercial VOIP systems, since they would probably be far less likely to have OS updates applied to them than someone using Asterisk, FreeSwitch, or other software based ones.
Seriously? You had to link to the wikipedia entries for Collusion and Price fixing? Like people that visit slashdot are so illiterate that they don't know the meaning of these basic terms and their ramifications?
Condescending much?
While this is a valid point, it really doesn't take into account the fact it takes a long time to develop a mature, reliable, secure OS. OpenBSD has been at it for more than a decade and still has issues, and some of the finest minds in security work on that, and they started with a relatively secure code base to begin with.
If you're writing your own OS from scratch, you can expect 20-30 years before it will be more secure and reliable than existing OS's (and those OS's won't be staying still so they will mature in that timeframe as well). And that's if you have experts working on it. If you're going to copy an existing OS, then what's the point?
Now, I can understand that a country wants to encourage OS development, and is willing to sponsor a defense project to build an OS, with the expectation it may take 20-30 years.. but it should really stay hidden and not publicised like this, otherwise the people start wondering "Hey, why don't we have this OS yet?" and then you end up pushing it into production long before it's ready.
The sad part is, India has a huge problem with brain drain. A large percentage of the top computer scientists relocate to EU countries, or the US. Only the truly patriotic or mediocre or worse candidates stay home, or perhaps those with some kind of community ties...
However, if India became seriouis about building a world class research program, it might encourage top talent to stay in India. I can see that as another benefit of such a program.
So i guess my point is, there are a lot of reasons why this is a good idea, but sadly.. I doubt that those reasons are the reasons they're doing it.
No, an OS isn't a weapons system. But it is a defense system. They are not the same thing.
Hotmail does run on Windows. When it was purchased it did not, and it took them some time convert it. The "stories" about conversion failures were rediculous, the timelines did not give enough time for a real conversion of such systems, and people probably mistook various prototype testing as real attempts.
Sourcesafe was also never meant for anything other than workgroup projects, not large scale. As such, nobody would be expected to run something the size of the windows code base on vss. Nowadays, Microsoft has an enterprise class version control in Team Foundation Server, but I imagine they have a lot of legacy to convert to move that to TFS any time soon.
They also ran a large part of their internal processes for years on an AS/400, including accounting and other aspects. Microsoft didn't have applications to do what they needed on Windows, and didn't really want to invest in building them. However, now that they bought Great Plains.. that's a different story.
Due to legacy concerns, they aren't likely to convert from p4 for a very long time, although the beauty of git is that in workgroups you can use git and push changes upstream. If anything, they're most likely to convert to TFS, for long term overall project.. Already most of the tools development, web development, etc.. is done on TFS.
Well, it's gotten better, that's for sure.
I mean, come on.. they just FINALLY added on-the-fly error checking in the latest version? That's been in VS for many years. Interface builder *finally* part of the IDE? sheesh.
Most people wouldn't. It's only if you're connected to a Windows domain network that becomes a requirement (Part of that whole Common Criteria secure attention sequence bit).
However, it's also used for features things like locking your display, and accessing the task manager.