Interesting. People around here bitch about Microsoft having these "dozens" of "unpatched vulnerabilities" in IE for "years" and "hiding, lying" and "sitting on security issues" and here's a three year old bug in the darling of open source development, who also has a "security classification" for certain bugs that "should not be disclosed" until they are fixed. But it's OK for some dude to publish an IE vuln without first contacting Microsoft and giving them a chance to fix it (which they have been doing very diligently for the past two years), in fact it's fantastic because it makes Microsoft (or "M$") look all the worse. But if it's Mozilla, it's perfectly acceptable. The recent GUI spoofing vuln (related to XUL, I believe) published a few months ago also had a "security classification" and was at least three years old, IIRC. But that's OK, because it's Mozilla.
Fantastic. Talk about having your cake and eating it while telling everyone they can't have any.
Especially funny given that the "perl hackers" have explicitly blocked the W3C validation service from hitting their circa 1997 table-laden crappy HTML and making them look even more stupid.
BTW, this has been active at least for three years, but very few people know about it.
I often wonder what would have been the reaction if some judgement had been passed against, say, the FSF or a contestation of the GPL or something like that, which had been negative, and then we'd seen the presiding judge (the fucking judge) giving interviews to Barb Walters and doing the DC clubscene (well that's a bit too much).
I'm not about to contest the verdict - that a monopoly existed and so on. That's done. But I think the whole thing smacked of a hurried witch hunt decided from the beginning. Back then Microsoft was pretty much apolitical and their legal team was about a fifth of what it is today. Since that case they've wised up to lobbying and campaign contributions as a way to "play" the system, just like any other big corporation in this country.
Windows XP users don't even have the fucking run time installed by default (damn Microsoft!).
Oh wow, this is rich. Everyone cheered when Microsoft was sued and subsequently forced by Sun to remove their VM and subsequently barred from shipping Sun's VM, (though later Sun came begging again) and here you are bitching about it?
And while you're at it, how about you bitch at RH as well? Last I checked RH9 didn't install the JRE on my laptop.
but shouldn't a large company like Microsoft be liable for the cleanup costs associated with their own security bugs?
I like totally agree. When IBM and Novell start selling Linux seats by the millions and someone finds a flaw like this one or like the many sendmail or SSH ones, or like the kernel one not long ago that caused Debian, the GNU FTP servers and Gentoo to be utterly 0wned (and that's just the ones Bashdork reported) then these "big companies" can be held liable for security bugs that are not their own, but were sold along with their "distro" anyway. Hilarity ensues! How does that sound to you? Peachy?
Oh, but wait. Software is sold (and given away) without warranties or guarantees, so that won't work. Your point is pointless and your attempt to suggest that Microsoft is somehow to blame because of what some greasy "hacker" loser in Germany does is stupid, to say the least.
Um, no one can "kick" America's ass, if you mean that in the military sense. Not China, not Russia, and not anyone else in the planet, at least right now.
Now, China's nukes are, realistically not a threat to the US because they'd lose in any meaningful nuclear exchange. By that I mean that in military terms they'd kill a few million people and then their country turns into a sea of glass and they lose 1/3rd of their population. In human terms of course these concepts are not readily expressable, especially if you're one of those few million. But still, that's reality.
China has nuclear weapons, but they are part of the nuclear club, unlike, I presume you are trying to so hilariously suggest, Iraq or Iran.
In the case of North Korea, for example, their nukes (all six of them or whatever) are essentially useless militarily. Their 3,000 artillery pieces pointed at Seoul are not quite so. Even if theoretically the US would want to march to Pyongyang, they still need to deal with the reality of an estimated half million South Korean civilian casualties.
The classic "oh you did it to X so you must do it to Y as well otherwise you're a big fake" argument doesn't quite pan out when you recognize there's something called "reality".
Re:The next great thing?
on
Ballmer on Linux
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
MSFT's gone nowhere fast with XML, while the rest of the developer world embbraced and extended it.
This is interesting. I mean, I understand "arguments" around here are necessarily colored by general hatred of whatever Microsoft does, but Microsoft has been deeply involved in everything that is XML related, and they've been doing it with the W3C, Netscape, IBM, HP, Sun and everyone else.
When Microsoft came up with XDR (data-reduced schema) everyone bitched about "another non-standard from M$" and yet it allowed those of us who were writing XML-enabled apps on Windows to make do until the W3C got their act together and took XSD out of draft. They've been involved in SOAP, MTOM, XHTML, RELAX-NG, all the Ws-* specs and they've implemented (or are in the process of implementing) them into the.NET platform.
So when you say "they're going nowhere fast with XML" and make a snide remark about something that happened 7 years ago, what exactly do you mean? Who is "going somewhere" with XML, in your opinion?
Paths less travelled
on
Internet Babylon
·
· Score: 5, Informative
One way to get to stuff you wouldn't otherwise see on the 'net is to use one of the web site randomizers out there. For example, RandomWebsite will pick one of its archived links and let 'er rip. It's a bit annoying because it works off a.pl script that does the work; pulling up the main page and clicking on the randomizer link will always open a new window. What I've done is to create a FireFox bookmark that links directly to the script so that I can just click on it. Be aware the owner changes the URL every 30 days or so, so you'll have to update your bookmark once in a while.
There are others, of course. But I like RWS because it doesn't contain truly obnoxious crap, scat tentacle anime pr0n or anything like that. Just your collection of normal to uber-weird sites. It has a heavy dosage of garage band sites, but even that's good for the occasional good music discovery. Some domains have expired and parked since they were added to the RWS database, so you will see some of those "SEARCH TEH INTERNET FOR FREE!!!" click-n-annoy pages, but they're the exception. In general (at least in my case) you'll find some interesting stuff, like wacky (and some bad) blogs and things like that. I've been hitting it occasionally for a few months and haven't seen a repeat yet.
Most people don't give a flying fuck if some socially-challenged techie cults decided there was a fundamental difference between "free" and "Free" - for the majority of people "free" means "no cost". Nothing more, nothing less.
Now you might want to try and get the Mozilla folks to evangelize the subtle differences between the two phylosophies, but I don't think you'll have much luck. Still, be my guest and send them a rambling RMS-esque nastygram to see what they do - I mean, if the term "free download" keeps giving you this "bad vibe".
Trolling? I've had zealots suggest that the version tracking functionality built into Word (which a whole bunch of people find priceless) is "useless" or "dumb" and could be "implemented" with a few bash scripts and a CVS server.
The grandparent nailed it - people in this community can't deal with a reality like "AbiWord doesn't have a grammar checker and Word does" so they just sit there, claim the feature is unecessary and make stupid jokes about Clippy.
Self-destructive and childish behavior if I ever did spot it.
There might be pricing pressure on manufacturers to exclude the other, non-mandated codecs.
There might also be dragons here. "Mandated" means that, "mandated". Otherwise the device is non-compliant. It's up to them to decide if they want to support it, and it's up to the content creators to do the same, and it's up to me to decide if I want to buy such a device or software player. If Microsoft's (or, "M$ as you so intelligently put it) codec is "teh sux" then no one will use it - they'll use one of the others. Which require the same licensing fees and are encumbered by the same number of patents. So Microsoft (or "M$") ends up with a codec no one uses. End of story.
By requiring Microsoft's codec, they've pushed Microsoft's monopoly-perpetuation strategy
Blah monopoly blah evil blah blah. So long as they don't require any special licensing beyond the other proprietary codecs then there is no such thing as "monopoly" anything - Sony and Phillips are not about to paint themselves into a corner that will rob them of a couple of billion in revenue because they want to make the Microsoft (or "M$") monopoly bigger for some weird reason that you obviously didn't share with us. Oh and of course they are requiring additional codecs to help Microsoft expand their "monopoly". Yes, I see it! Brilliant conclusion on your part!
Informative indeed. More like clueless "i hateing teh evil M$ this morning" rant.
Well technically that "prostoalex" dude does the same thing, yet the editors love him to death. Probably because he can spell, which is an art that as far as they're concerned went out with punch cards.
Why don't you get a specialized pre-built solution, like a dedicated School Management System (SMS)? There are literally huundreds of those around. No, they're not going to be "free" (or even cheap), but we all know what they say about reinventing the wheel and all that.
Just shop around for one that is well-designed and uses technologies you're ready to support in-house. PHP or Java or.NET or whatever hitting MySQL or Oracle or SQL Server on Windows or Unix. Ask the company how the application is designed. Is it uncoupled from the database? Does it require queuing? Is it a SOA design that can be extended easily? Does it have desktop and web clients? Is it based on one of the open source or commercial portals, like Plone or Content Management Server?
I'd say it's a good bet that you'll find something out there that fits the bill. If anything at least you'll be able to justify writing one because you did your homework.
You can design a better front end as long as you share.
Well, doh.
What is so hard for you to understand about the GPL.
Nothing. It also applies to code generators if you want it to (after all, it's your code), and you made my point by telling me "I have to share".
I'm not saying that's bad - I simply won't use it. It's nothing specifically against the GPL. If this thing was released under a truly free license like BSD or LIBPNG then we woudln't be having this conversation, now would we.
Output from GPL software is *not* constrained by the GPL, only changes to the code generator *itself* would have to be given back to the community, not any project that used generated code
True, however it also means that I can't design a better front end for it - I'm stuck with whatever is released along with the library.
Or has Microsoft etc all done such a good job of convincing people the GPL is evil
Nope, the GPL is viral only if you let it be. It's your responsibility to make sure that it doesn't behave that way. Regardless of what Microsoft says.
The library is released under the GPL. If it were licensed under something else (even the LGPL) I'd actually consider using it, but I have no intention of releasing the source to my applications just to give it a go.
Of course it's the author's call to decide which license they want to use, but even in the open source world less and less "pure" libraries are being released under the GPL to promote their use.
What you described were web services, and I wanted to try and make sure that a thousand slashbots didn't start the rumor that Microsoft was re-designing TCP.
I don't know about you, but when I think "networking" I rarely think of applications.
Indigo will ship way before Longhorn. Originally it was going to be made available only for XP Pro and 2003, but Microsoft agreed to ship it for Windows 2000 as well. Obviously it won't be integrated into the OS as, say, COM+.
I loved how the bangboy submitter called it a "new networking architecture". Indigo is a SOA stack that will bring.NET more into J2EE territory. It has less to do with "networking" than building distributed applications.
That's funny, because I've been hearing the same thing about Linux for the past five years. Except in the context of it being the "Windows killer", of course.
Pull any random Slashdot page or anit-microsoft trade rag or Usenet post and you'll see it for any KDE, GNOME, OO and kernel release for the past five or six years.
Nope, it doesn't. Why should it? I said it was amusing and an indication of a state of mind I find repulsive. But it's not "M$" itself. I have a similar thing with doing "u" instead of "you".
Since I have not noticed anything in your signature about Maytag
I suppose this is the part where I say "welcome to Slashdot".
I was wondering why you chose one corporation to worship
Let's assume for a second that I am bothered by "M$" and I am defending them. At what point did you pop a synapse and equate that with "worship"? Or are you using the phrase "worship Microsoft" as you'd use "I hate Microsoft", as if it was the most important thing in the world to harbor an actual feeling for a corporate entity? You might "hate" Microsoft - that's retarded, but fine. Just don't assume that because I don't "hate" them, I therefore "worship" them.
I don't feel compelled to defend them on slashdot
Ain't that the truth.
Why do you love them over all other corporations of the world?
HP owns HP Unix, they can modify the source any way they want to
It's ridiculous to claim that I can't write an application because I can't see the source to the OS itself. No one would have ever done anything non-trivial for any platform. Heck, I don't want to look at the OS source code, that shouldn't be my concern. That's just another bogus lame complaint about how "Windoze is teh sux".
Funny how no one mentioned the oft-repeated fact that Microsoft "stole" the network stack from BSD. Not in this case, where apparently HP can't write something like Tiny, which as the other reply to your post mentioned, can just as easily throttle instead of just blocking. Apparently the network stack in Windows is crap, which of course explains why in cross-platform libraries (like the Apache Portable Runtime) the networking code almost always ports untouched.
I understand why you want to defend microsoft (well not really) but at least RTFA next time
Oh, your insightful questions. Yes. Well, if I must.
Let's see. First you asked whi I got "riled up" about the "M$" thing. I don't. It's amusing. "Micro~1" and "Micro-Soft" are also amusing in their own way. They all tell me that you have stupid misguided resentments, a pathetic desire to be funny and no life whatsoever.
Now, on the question of my "worship" of a corporation, as you so succintly put it, I can assure you that's not the case. Microsoft is just a company that makes software I happen to use. Your (and your ilk's) insistence on turning them into some evil supernatural entity worthy of being actually hated is laughable and sad at the same time. It's a clear indication that you have no concept of proportion, your priorities are all fucked up and your life revolves around and is defined by your eMachines Celeron boxen running some Leenucks distro that needs to be recompiled every other day. It does however make for great entertainment because wherever it's found it also gives me a chance to interact with people whose IQ is equal or lower to that of a snail.
I do keep a little statue of Cthulhu, where I've been known to impale annoying penguin-humping adolescent retards like yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's why I love Splashdork.
Fantastic. Talk about having your cake and eating it while telling everyone they can't have any.
BTW, this has been active at least for three years, but very few people know about it.
I'm not about to contest the verdict - that a monopoly existed and so on. That's done. But I think the whole thing smacked of a hurried witch hunt decided from the beginning. Back then Microsoft was pretty much apolitical and their legal team was about a fifth of what it is today. Since that case they've wised up to lobbying and campaign contributions as a way to "play" the system, just like any other big corporation in this country.
Ah well.
Oh wow, this is rich. Everyone cheered when Microsoft was sued and subsequently forced by Sun to remove their VM and subsequently barred from shipping Sun's VM, (though later Sun came begging again) and here you are bitching about it?
And while you're at it, how about you bitch at RH as well? Last I checked RH9 didn't install the JRE on my laptop.
I like totally agree. When IBM and Novell start selling Linux seats by the millions and someone finds a flaw like this one or like the many sendmail or SSH ones, or like the kernel one not long ago that caused Debian, the GNU FTP servers and Gentoo to be utterly 0wned (and that's just the ones Bashdork reported) then these "big companies" can be held liable for security bugs that are not their own, but were sold along with their "distro" anyway. Hilarity ensues! How does that sound to you? Peachy?
Oh, but wait. Software is sold (and given away) without warranties or guarantees, so that won't work. Your point is pointless and your attempt to suggest that Microsoft is somehow to blame because of what some greasy "hacker" loser in Germany does is stupid, to say the least.
But hey, you can never have enough karma!
Now, China's nukes are, realistically not a threat to the US because they'd lose in any meaningful nuclear exchange. By that I mean that in military terms they'd kill a few million people and then their country turns into a sea of glass and they lose 1/3rd of their population. In human terms of course these concepts are not readily expressable, especially if you're one of those few million. But still, that's reality.
China has nuclear weapons, but they are part of the nuclear club, unlike, I presume you are trying to so hilariously suggest, Iraq or Iran.
In the case of North Korea, for example, their nukes (all six of them or whatever) are essentially useless militarily. Their 3,000 artillery pieces pointed at Seoul are not quite so. Even if theoretically the US would want to march to Pyongyang, they still need to deal with the reality of an estimated half million South Korean civilian casualties.
The classic "oh you did it to X so you must do it to Y as well otherwise you're a big fake" argument doesn't quite pan out when you recognize there's something called "reality".
This is interesting. I mean, I understand "arguments" around here are necessarily colored by general hatred of whatever Microsoft does, but Microsoft has been deeply involved in everything that is XML related, and they've been doing it with the W3C, Netscape, IBM, HP, Sun and everyone else.
When Microsoft came up with XDR (data-reduced schema) everyone bitched about "another non-standard from M$" and yet it allowed those of us who were writing XML-enabled apps on Windows to make do until the W3C got their act together and took XSD out of draft. They've been involved in SOAP, MTOM, XHTML, RELAX-NG, all the Ws-* specs and they've implemented (or are in the process of implementing) them into the .NET platform.
So when you say "they're going nowhere fast with XML" and make a snide remark about something that happened 7 years ago, what exactly do you mean? Who is "going somewhere" with XML, in your opinion?
There are others, of course. But I like RWS because it doesn't contain truly obnoxious crap, scat tentacle anime pr0n or anything like that. Just your collection of normal to uber-weird sites. It has a heavy dosage of garage band sites, but even that's good for the occasional good music discovery. Some domains have expired and parked since they were added to the RWS database, so you will see some of those "SEARCH TEH INTERNET FOR FREE!!!" click-n-annoy pages, but they're the exception. In general (at least in my case) you'll find some interesting stuff, like wacky (and some bad) blogs and things like that. I've been hitting it occasionally for a few months and haven't seen a repeat yet.
Anyway, good for a boring afternoon.
Now you might want to try and get the Mozilla folks to evangelize the subtle differences between the two phylosophies, but I don't think you'll have much luck. Still, be my guest and send them a rambling RMS-esque nastygram to see what they do - I mean, if the term "free download" keeps giving you this "bad vibe".
The grandparent nailed it - people in this community can't deal with a reality like "AbiWord doesn't have a grammar checker and Word does" so they just sit there, claim the feature is unecessary and make stupid jokes about Clippy.
Self-destructive and childish behavior if I ever did spot it.
There might also be dragons here. "Mandated" means that, "mandated". Otherwise the device is non-compliant. It's up to them to decide if they want to support it, and it's up to the content creators to do the same, and it's up to me to decide if I want to buy such a device or software player. If Microsoft's (or, "M$ as you so intelligently put it) codec is "teh sux" then no one will use it - they'll use one of the others. Which require the same licensing fees and are encumbered by the same number of patents. So Microsoft (or "M$") ends up with a codec no one uses. End of story.
By requiring Microsoft's codec, they've pushed Microsoft's monopoly-perpetuation strategy
Blah monopoly blah evil blah blah. So long as they don't require any special licensing beyond the other proprietary codecs then there is no such thing as "monopoly" anything - Sony and Phillips are not about to paint themselves into a corner that will rob them of a couple of billion in revenue because they want to make the Microsoft (or "M$") monopoly bigger for some weird reason that you obviously didn't share with us. Oh and of course they are requiring additional codecs to help Microsoft expand their "monopoly". Yes, I see it! Brilliant conclusion on your part!
Informative indeed. More like clueless "i hateing teh evil M$ this morning" rant.
Well technically that "prostoalex" dude does the same thing, yet the editors love him to death. Probably because he can spell, which is an art that as far as they're concerned went out with punch cards.
Just shop around for one that is well-designed and uses technologies you're ready to support in-house. PHP or Java or .NET or whatever hitting MySQL or Oracle or SQL Server on Windows or Unix. Ask the company how the application is designed. Is it uncoupled from the database? Does it require queuing? Is it a SOA design that can be extended easily? Does it have desktop and web clients? Is it based on one of the open source or commercial portals, like Plone or Content Management Server?
I'd say it's a good bet that you'll find something out there that fits the bill. If anything at least you'll be able to justify writing one because you did your homework.
This could be a good place to start.
Well, doh.
What is so hard for you to understand about the GPL.
Nothing. It also applies to code generators if you want it to (after all, it's your code), and you made my point by telling me "I have to share".
I'm not saying that's bad - I simply won't use it. It's nothing specifically against the GPL. If this thing was released under a truly free license like BSD or LIBPNG then we woudln't be having this conversation, now would we.
The headers on the source say GPL only. I can't find a reference to the LGPL.
True, however it also means that I can't design a better front end for it - I'm stuck with whatever is released along with the library.
Or has Microsoft etc all done such a good job of convincing people the GPL is evil
Nope, the GPL is viral only if you let it be. It's your responsibility to make sure that it doesn't behave that way. Regardless of what Microsoft says.
Of course it's the author's call to decide which license they want to use, but even in the open source world less and less "pure" libraries are being released under the GPL to promote their use.
Ah well.
What you described were web services, and I wanted to try and make sure that a thousand slashbots didn't start the rumor that Microsoft was re-designing TCP.
I don't know about you, but when I think "networking" I rarely think of applications.
I loved how the bangboy submitter called it a "new networking architecture". Indigo is a SOA stack that will bring .NET more into J2EE territory. It has less to do with "networking" than building distributed applications.
I hope this... ah... helps and all that =)
Pull any random Slashdot page or anit-microsoft trade rag or Usenet post and you'll see it for any KDE, GNOME, OO and kernel release for the past five or six years.
Nope, it doesn't. Why should it? I said it was amusing and an indication of a state of mind I find repulsive. But it's not "M$" itself. I have a similar thing with doing "u" instead of "you".
Since I have not noticed anything in your signature about Maytag
I suppose this is the part where I say "welcome to Slashdot".
I was wondering why you chose one corporation to worship
Let's assume for a second that I am bothered by "M$" and I am defending them. At what point did you pop a synapse and equate that with "worship"? Or are you using the phrase "worship Microsoft" as you'd use "I hate Microsoft", as if it was the most important thing in the world to harbor an actual feeling for a corporate entity? You might "hate" Microsoft - that's retarded, but fine. Just don't assume that because I don't "hate" them, I therefore "worship" them.
I don't feel compelled to defend them on slashdot
Ain't that the truth.
Why do you love them over all other corporations of the world?
Thanks for playing.
It's ridiculous to claim that I can't write an application because I can't see the source to the OS itself. No one would have ever done anything non-trivial for any platform. Heck, I don't want to look at the OS source code, that shouldn't be my concern. That's just another bogus lame complaint about how "Windoze is teh sux".
Funny how no one mentioned the oft-repeated fact that Microsoft "stole" the network stack from BSD. Not in this case, where apparently HP can't write something like Tiny, which as the other reply to your post mentioned, can just as easily throttle instead of just blocking. Apparently the network stack in Windows is crap, which of course explains why in cross-platform libraries (like the Apache Portable Runtime) the networking code almost always ports untouched.
I understand why you want to defend microsoft (well not really) but at least RTFA next time
Right.
Say hi to all your "friend programmers" who code in "Windoze" for me, mmmkay?
Let's see. First you asked whi I got "riled up" about the "M$" thing. I don't. It's amusing. "Micro~1" and "Micro-Soft" are also amusing in their own way. They all tell me that you have stupid misguided resentments, a pathetic desire to be funny and no life whatsoever.
Now, on the question of my "worship" of a corporation, as you so succintly put it, I can assure you that's not the case. Microsoft is just a company that makes software I happen to use. Your (and your ilk's) insistence on turning them into some evil supernatural entity worthy of being actually hated is laughable and sad at the same time. It's a clear indication that you have no concept of proportion, your priorities are all fucked up and your life revolves around and is defined by your eMachines Celeron boxen running some Leenucks distro that needs to be recompiled every other day. It does however make for great entertainment because wherever it's found it also gives me a chance to interact with people whose IQ is equal or lower to that of a snail.
I do keep a little statue of Cthulhu, where I've been known to impale annoying penguin-humping adolescent retards like yourself.
Hope that helps.