After considering policies like the one below, it is not difficult to imagine
that there may be a U.S. government agency that wants Microsoft software to be
insecure.
If the Open BSD team can make a secure operating system as volunteers,
Microsoft, with a reported $33 billion in the bank, could take one of those
billions and clean up their code.
Microsoft's security problems come partly from feeling that they don't have to
care, apparently.
Also, maybe there is some secret U.S. government surveillance agency that
requires that Microsoft operating systems not be secure. For years the U.S.
government tried to prevent cryptography. For example, see these notes from
the Center for Democracy and Technology: An overview of Clinton
Administration Encryption Policy Initiatives. The notes say, "The
long-standing goal of every major encryption plan by the [U.S. government] has
been to guarantee government access to all encrypted communications and stored
data."
It is not impossible that software insecurity is secret U.S. government
policy. The U.S. government is involved in many hidden activities, as this
collection of links and explanation shows: What should be the Response to Violence?
Let me try: Linux programmers like to make things work. They don't like to
code user interfaces. This is unfortunate, but the result of programmer
preferences not to code tedious interfaces, and not abuse.
(I myself am good at programming user interfaces, and it is easy work for me,
but I still don't like it, so I can sympathize.)
Many people who choose to be programmers are not skilled at interacting with
people. Although they are abusive sometimes, this is not conscious abuse,
usually.
Just the very limited abuses in the U.S. Justice Department
complaints against Microsoft, in which Microsoft was found guilty of
breaking the law, were more than 200 pages. That is conscious, deliberate
abuse.
Keeping known bugs in products so that there will be a reason for users to pay
for upgrades is conscious abuse, also.
--
It would take a lot longer than a month to fix what's wrong with Microsoft and Microsoft products. Their entire attitude is adversarial toward the customer. A month won't fix a company with a history of years of abuse.
I seem to remember: 190 volts minimum at 3 to 5 milliamps. Discouraging if you want to use batteries.
Liquid Crystal Displays: A few volts at almost zero milliamps. If you had designed with Nixies, the discovery of LCDs was like God was giving us a gift.
It's not a troll. I've learned a lot from the responses. Some people seem to
feel that asking their government to be responsible is beyond imagining.
If you are a U.S. citizen, you pay for this attitude. You pay Israel $905 per
year for every man, woman, and child who lives there. Why? Apparently so that
U.S. weapons makers can make more profit.
If you allow your government to lie, you can be sure of two things: 1) You
won't be the one in control. 2) You will pay.
The U.S. government does a lot of things you probably don't suspect and for
which, if you are a U.S. citizen, you probably don't want to pay. For example,
the U.S. government brought Arabs to the U.S. and trained them in terrorism.
The U.S. government was planning to attack Afghanistan long before the
September 11, 2001 terrorism in the U.S. because a profitable oil and gas
pipeline is planned that must go through Afghanistan. The terrorism apparently
gave the government the excuse for which it was looking. For more about this,
see the collection of links in What
should be the Response to Violence?.
It's true, the lies are not intended to be destructive. But I think that they are unintentionally destructive, because they make us all realize that our government cannot be trusted not to lie.
I am very much for educating the public. This, in my opinion, is not the way to do it.
I have a problem with this. The U.S. government is, once again, lying. People
need to be able to trust their government, but the government engages in every
kind of behavior that it calls criminal.
Jon, I know you might think I am being hasty, but I had a look at the Volution web pages. My strong impression is that this product is going nowhere. Those people are not up to the considerable intellectual challenge of making Volution popular. Also, there needs to be a free product that is shipped with every distribution of Linux.
Jon, earlier you told me that Ganymede could not easily be extended to manage
software configurations, because of its lack of ability to cause execution.
Disclaimers and cautions: I respect whatever you say. You certainly know more
than I about management of large networks. I know that it is possible that I
could be wrong because of insufficient appreciation of how things work.
Now that I have said that, I have an opinion:
I think that we should want only ONE repository of information about each
computer. I think that, philosophically, a repository should not be anything
else than a repository. We don't want the database of information to go out
and start changing things. We don't want this because of a realization that
the program that takes action based on information should be different than
the program that contains the information.
I think it is far better that each supplier of software write a configuration
routine that queries the Ganymede repository and makes the necessary changes.
This routine would be a plug-in to Ganymede. Potentially there would be
thousands of plug-ins.
This, to me, seems like the only sensible division of labor. The software
supplier has his or her own preferred language and ways of accomplishing
things, and the configuration repository should not interfere with that.
Once software configuration is managed by Ganymede, it is only another step
toward using Ganymede to manage pre-installation information.
What attracts me to Ganymede is that there seems to be very high quality of
infrastructure. Ganymede has the extensibility to thousands of machines that
is necessary. If we get started down a road toward improving open OS
management the new methods must be extremely extensible.
Conceivably, a software installation routine could do anything it liked, any
way it liked, but it would not get started until it had queried the Ganymede
repository and would not be considered completely finished until what it did
was entered into Ganymede.
There needs to be ONE place for ALL information about each computer on a
network. There needs to be a GUI tool for having a quick look at this
information. Is there a better infrastructure already available than Ganymede?
Ganymede may not be very close to being able to do this, but can you mention a
better starting point?
I think modesty is fine, but not when it becomes misleading. The facts seem to
be that Ganymede is an excellent start on something that needs to be
everywhere.
To make all of this work, Ganymede would have to be such that it could easily
manage any number of computers, from 1 to 100,000.
Is anything here in error?
Don't wait for transparent aluminum.
on
Transparent Concrete
·
· Score: 3, Informative
"Can transparent aluminium be far behind?"
Yes, transparent aluminum can be far behind. Metals like aluminum have free electrons which prevent transmission of light.
First, even Adobe recognized that this was a case of their CEO having little
social sophistication. From the article:
On Monday, Adobe confirmed Chizen's comments but downplayed the potential
of abandoning Asian markets."
"Adobe remains committed to the Chinese market and to developing
Chinese-version products,..."
This was not an issue of Adobe not making money on a Chinese version of its
products, the company is making money. There are Chinese buyers who don't live
in China, for example. This was an issue of a CEO with little social ability.
(Remember the Skylarov incident, and how that was handled in such a way as to
give Adobe millions of dollars worth of bad publicity? What Skylarov did is
legal in his country. He was only here for a technical conference. Also
remember how Adobe treated the author of the program initially called
Killustrator. It was handled with the same self-destructive crudeness.)
As Caudipteryx indicated, you would be amazed at how many of the products you
use every day and find in the stores are made in China for U.S. companies.
The article said, "China's piracy rate is more than 90 percent."
However, China's poverty rate may be (I'm guessing.) about 80 percent. Not all
of the piracy represents lost sales. Although there is very rapid growth, most
of the population are peasants.
Certainly, piracy is bad. However, there are many, many worse things going on
in the world. It is backward to expect that the world be perfect just for
one's own concerns, while ignoring that 20% of the people in the world don't
have enough to eat, for example. It is a very imperfect world. Socially
capable people find creative ways of dealing with this.
Slashdot readers who live in the U.S. should know that arrogance and
insensitivity may cost them real money. Taking too much out of China, and
putting too little in, may start a war between China and the U.S., ostensibly
about Taiwan. The cost of this would come out of your pocket.
I have known Chinese (in China) who own little more than 2 white shirts, a
pair of pants, and a bicycle.
However, they may use a computer at work to do personal jobs. They may run
software on a computer at work that costs, in the U.S., more than their entire
net worth.
This is not lost profit for companies like Adobe. It is free advertising and
free trademark promotion.
No amount of law-making or law enforcement will make these people pay hundreds
of U.S. dollars for Adobe Photoshop. However, advertise that you need someone
who knows how to use Photoshop, and hundreds will apply. Is this a bad thing?
People in the U.S. get little accurate news of other countries. They often
unconsciously make the assumption that other people are as rich as they are.
U.S. Senator Biden, who is an intelligent and educated man, and who is the
Chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, doesn't even
pronounce the words correctly, yet he talks of changing (my article, see the Biden interview) the Saudi
government and controlling the development of the government of Afghanistan.
If Senator Biden is like this, make a guess about the knowledge of other
countries of the average Adobe executive.
Adobe executives should not consider that every pirated copy is a personal
attack on Adobe profitability. There are many social situations that require
more social sophistication than that.
Moderators: The parent post is an important comment. Here's a link to the
article, instead of just a reference:
Lew Platt
began the decline of HP. After several years, he was replaced by Fiorina,
who has also not been able to get HP under control.
Hint to the HP board of directors: The new CEO of HP should be someone who has
a technical understanding of HP's products. Management experience is not
enough.
"Technical understanding" means someone who knows the technology well enough
to predict where it will be in several years.
Also, someone who would actually be able to run HP would put a new HP product on his or her desk, before it was released, and try to install it. HP has sold printer products with buggy or insufficiently capable install software recently.
Moderators: Please make sure you understand a commment before you moderate. The parent posts are saying that Fiorina is not doing a good job at HP. They are expressing in a humorous way what many, many people think.
For the humor challenged: HP should get out of the Fiorina business.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed. All security holes are just that, security holes.
Note that "local" is NOT "remote".
It is assumed that you can trust your own staff more than you can trust all the hackers on the entire Internet.
After considering policies like the one below, it is not difficult to imagine that there may be a U.S. government agency that wants Microsoft software to be insecure.
Page obtained as a result of the Freedom of Information Act.
It says, "I am here as a special envoy appointed by the president and reporting to the special Deputies Committee of the NSC."
"Our goal is a world in which key recovery encryption systems are the dominant form of technology in the commercial market."
At the time, there was no public discussion that the U.S. government was doing this.
In my opinion, the article is extremely badly written. Also, it is nonsense, as is easily proven by giving a link to another operating system:
Open BSD: Four years without a remote hole in the default install!
If the Open BSD team can make a secure operating system as volunteers, Microsoft, with a reported $33 billion in the bank, could take one of those billions and clean up their code.
Microsoft's security problems come partly from feeling that they don't have to care, apparently.
Also, maybe there is some secret U.S. government surveillance agency that requires that Microsoft operating systems not be secure. For years the U.S. government tried to prevent cryptography. For example, see these notes from the Center for Democracy and Technology: An overview of Clinton Administration Encryption Policy Initiatives. The notes say, "The long-standing goal of every major encryption plan by the [U.S. government] has been to guarantee government access to all encrypted communications and stored data."
It is not impossible that software insecurity is secret U.S. government policy. The U.S. government is involved in many hidden activities, as this collection of links and explanation shows: What should be the Response to Violence?
Let me try: Linux programmers like to make things work. They don't like to code user interfaces. This is unfortunate, but the result of programmer preferences not to code tedious interfaces, and not abuse.
(I myself am good at programming user interfaces, and it is easy work for me, but I still don't like it, so I can sympathize.)
Many people who choose to be programmers are not skilled at interacting with people. Although they are abusive sometimes, this is not conscious abuse, usually.
Just the very limited abuses in the U.S. Justice Department complaints against Microsoft, in which Microsoft was found guilty of breaking the law, were more than 200 pages. That is conscious, deliberate abuse.
Keeping known bugs in products so that there will be a reason for users to pay for upgrades is conscious abuse, also.
--
The U.S. government acts as a sales department for weapons manufacturers: What should be the Response to Violence?
I'm a cross compiler. I compile, but I'm angry about it.
It would take a lot longer than a month to fix what's wrong with Microsoft and Microsoft products. Their entire attitude is adversarial toward the customer. A month won't fix a company with a history of years of abuse.
Still, a month is better than nothing.
I seem to remember: 190 volts minimum at 3 to 5 milliamps. Discouraging if you want to use batteries.
Liquid Crystal Displays: A few volts at almost zero milliamps. If you had designed with Nixies, the discovery of LCDs was like God was giving us a gift.
It's not a troll. I've learned a lot from the responses. Some people seem to feel that asking their government to be responsible is beyond imagining.
If you are a U.S. citizen, you pay for this attitude. You pay Israel $905 per year for every man, woman, and child who lives there. Why? Apparently so that U.S. weapons makers can make more profit.
If you allow your government to lie, you can be sure of two things: 1) You won't be the one in control. 2) You will pay.
The U.S. government does a lot of things you probably don't suspect and for which, if you are a U.S. citizen, you probably don't want to pay. For example, the U.S. government brought Arabs to the U.S. and trained them in terrorism. The U.S. government was planning to attack Afghanistan long before the September 11, 2001 terrorism in the U.S. because a profitable oil and gas pipeline is planned that must go through Afghanistan. The terrorism apparently gave the government the excuse for which it was looking. For more about this, see the collection of links in What should be the Response to Violence?.
Easy acceptance that your government lies is acknowledgement that it is not your government.
I will give you half of my share of the planets if you can tell me how to get there and back, safely and for a reasonable price.
It is a good lesson. But it would be extremely valuable if our government was the one that tried honesty.
It's true, the lies are not intended to be destructive. But I think that they are unintentionally destructive, because they make us all realize that our government cannot be trusted not to lie.
I am very much for educating the public. This, in my opinion, is not the way to do it.
I have a problem with this. The U.S. government is, once again, lying. People need to be able to trust their government, but the government engages in every kind of behavior that it calls criminal.
For a small collection of U.S. government lies and misleading behavior, see this collection of links I put together: What should be the Response to Violence?
Jon, I know you might think I am being hasty, but I had a look at the Volution web pages. My strong impression is that this product is going nowhere. Those people are not up to the considerable intellectual challenge of making Volution popular. Also, there needs to be a free product that is shipped with every distribution of Linux.
Jon, earlier you told me that Ganymede could not easily be extended to manage software configurations, because of its lack of ability to cause execution.
Disclaimers and cautions: I respect whatever you say. You certainly know more than I about management of large networks. I know that it is possible that I could be wrong because of insufficient appreciation of how things work.
Now that I have said that, I have an opinion:
I think that we should want only ONE repository of information about each computer. I think that, philosophically, a repository should not be anything else than a repository. We don't want the database of information to go out and start changing things. We don't want this because of a realization that the program that takes action based on information should be different than the program that contains the information.
I think it is far better that each supplier of software write a configuration routine that queries the Ganymede repository and makes the necessary changes. This routine would be a plug-in to Ganymede. Potentially there would be thousands of plug-ins.
This, to me, seems like the only sensible division of labor. The software supplier has his or her own preferred language and ways of accomplishing things, and the configuration repository should not interfere with that.
Once software configuration is managed by Ganymede, it is only another step toward using Ganymede to manage pre-installation information.
What attracts me to Ganymede is that there seems to be very high quality of infrastructure. Ganymede has the extensibility to thousands of machines that is necessary. If we get started down a road toward improving open OS management the new methods must be extremely extensible.
Conceivably, a software installation routine could do anything it liked, any way it liked, but it would not get started until it had queried the Ganymede repository and would not be considered completely finished until what it did was entered into Ganymede.
There needs to be ONE place for ALL information about each computer on a network. There needs to be a GUI tool for having a quick look at this information. Is there a better infrastructure already available than Ganymede? Ganymede may not be very close to being able to do this, but can you mention a better starting point?
I think modesty is fine, but not when it becomes misleading. The facts seem to be that Ganymede is an excellent start on something that needs to be everywhere.
To make all of this work, Ganymede would have to be such that it could easily manage any number of computers, from 1 to 100,000.
Is anything here in error?
"Can transparent aluminium be far behind?"
Yes, transparent aluminum can be far behind. Metals like aluminum have free electrons which prevent transmission of light.
I don't know enough about this, but it seemed to me that Ganymede could be extended to manage everything, not just directories. Ganymede 1.0.9
First, even Adobe recognized that this was a case of their CEO having little social sophistication. From the article:
On Monday, Adobe confirmed Chizen's comments but downplayed the potential of abandoning Asian markets."
"Adobe remains committed to the Chinese market and to developing Chinese-version products,
This was not an issue of Adobe not making money on a Chinese version of its products, the company is making money. There are Chinese buyers who don't live in China, for example. This was an issue of a CEO with little social ability.
(Remember the Skylarov incident, and how that was handled in such a way as to give Adobe millions of dollars worth of bad publicity? What Skylarov did is legal in his country. He was only here for a technical conference. Also remember how Adobe treated the author of the program initially called Killustrator. It was handled with the same self-destructive crudeness.)
As Caudipteryx indicated, you would be amazed at how many of the products you use every day and find in the stores are made in China for U.S. companies.
The article said, "China's piracy rate is more than 90 percent." However, China's poverty rate may be (I'm guessing.) about 80 percent. Not all of the piracy represents lost sales. Although there is very rapid growth, most of the population are peasants.
Certainly, piracy is bad. However, there are many, many worse things going on in the world. It is backward to expect that the world be perfect just for one's own concerns, while ignoring that 20% of the people in the world don't have enough to eat, for example. It is a very imperfect world. Socially capable people find creative ways of dealing with this.
Slashdot readers who live in the U.S. should know that arrogance and insensitivity may cost them real money. Taking too much out of China, and putting too little in, may start a war between China and the U.S., ostensibly about Taiwan. The cost of this would come out of your pocket.
I have known Chinese (in China) who own little more than 2 white shirts, a pair of pants, and a bicycle.
However, they may use a computer at work to do personal jobs. They may run software on a computer at work that costs, in the U.S., more than their entire net worth.
This is not lost profit for companies like Adobe. It is free advertising and free trademark promotion.
No amount of law-making or law enforcement will make these people pay hundreds of U.S. dollars for Adobe Photoshop. However, advertise that you need someone who knows how to use Photoshop, and hundreds will apply. Is this a bad thing?
People in the U.S. get little accurate news of other countries. They often unconsciously make the assumption that other people are as rich as they are.
U.S. Senator Biden, who is an intelligent and educated man, and who is the Chairman of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, doesn't even pronounce the words correctly, yet he talks of changing (my article, see the Biden interview) the Saudi government and controlling the development of the government of Afghanistan. If Senator Biden is like this, make a guess about the knowledge of other countries of the average Adobe executive.
Adobe executives should not consider that every pirated copy is a personal attack on Adobe profitability. There are many social situations that require more social sophistication than that.
"HP has been getting by on reputation for 10 years now."
Exactly. I've experienced similar craziness from HP.
Moderators: The parent post is an important comment. Here's a link to the article, instead of just a reference:
Lew Platt began the decline of HP. After several years, he was replaced by Fiorina, who has also not been able to get HP under control.
Hint to the HP board of directors: The new CEO of HP should be someone who has a technical understanding of HP's products. Management experience is not enough.
"Technical understanding" means someone who knows the technology well enough to predict where it will be in several years.
Also, someone who would actually be able to run HP would put a new HP product on his or her desk, before it was released, and try to install it. HP has sold printer products with buggy or insufficiently capable install software recently.
Moderators: Please make sure you understand a commment before you moderate. The parent posts are saying that Fiorina is not doing a good job at HP. They are expressing in a humorous way what many, many people think.
For the humor challenged: HP should get out of the Fiorina business.
Microsoft Windows XP -- 14 days without a remote hole in the default install!
Often being involved with commercial software makes users the target of aggressive behavior.
This is why Open Source software seems so good.