CGI is how information from a form is urlencoded and sent to a web server. This information can also be sent via email with this.
Form encoding is specified in the html specs. No where in the specs is this called CGI.
Re:Microsoft == bad partner, no multimedia savvy
on
Live Streaming Video?
·
· Score: 2
Microsoft also has no multimedia savvy.
Microsoft research has employed and currently employs numerous gods in the world of graphics and multimedia. Graphics gods like Jim Blinn. Realtime gods like Michael Abrash. You can check out all the various research groups, the people involved, and what they do here.
Windows Media is ugly stuff to people who know better. It's unfun, and live streaming video ought to be fun.
Perhaps I'm not one of the people who "knows better", but fun-ness seems like a pretty poor criterion for a critical evaluation of a streaming media product. Clever skins can kiss my ass. Windows Media is pretty decent as far as I'm concerned. MS has put a lot of time and money into crushing Real Networks, and we're beginning to see the fruits of that.
how much are they paying you to spend that kind of time doing a job?
Believe me, I've thought of this many times. I saw a bumper sticker not so long ago that said, "Life's too short to work full time," and I thought it was pretty cool. However, I enjoy my work a lot, so it's not quite as bad as you described; I wouldn't considered an hour of work to be equivalent to ending my life an hour earlier, or, more succinctly, I don't consider work to be equivalent to death. So the defense of my work (in the unlikely case you care;) is:
I like my job. I like coding. What I do is fun and interesting and challenging. I wouldn't be caught dead (pun pun pun) working as much as I do now at a job I didn't like.
I'm a pathetic human being, so if I was working half time, I'd probably be spending the other half stoned and doing something useless.
It's nice to have money. I enjoy music, for instance, and it's nice to be able to buy records and recording equipment and effects and things. What use is working 15 hours a day so your life is more enjoyable if you don't have any money to do the things you enjoy?
I get a lot of vacation time:)
I'm quitting and going to grad school in half a year, so it really doesn't matter much anyway. Of course, grad school is also a lot of work, and research assistantships don't pay much at all, so it seems like money doesn't necessarily control it all. A lot of things are "work", but that doesn't mean they're not worth doing without a fat pay check (triple negative?).
Also, if I work 40 hours a week at $5/hour and you work 20 hours a week at $5/hour and I quit after a year, then after two years we've both had identical "free time", but I have more money (because the extra money I made in the first year was earning interest). Obviously this argument doesn't work if I push my free time until the end of my life when I'm too old to do anything, but, hey, it's worth mentioning.
Ultimately it's all about balance, and each person's balance is a personal choice.
Dude. 60 hour work weeks are not insane. If that's what happens when you take a couple weeks off, so be it.
When I started working my present job, my boss said he expected 50-60 hours per week standard. Right now, under the pressure of a deadline, it's more like 75-80 hours a week. Yeah, it sucks, but it's pretty much the same for friends of mine who work for other startups.
So, go to Morocco for a couple weeks, come back, put in those 12 hour days for a little bit, and don't feel like you're getting too bad a deal...
Stupid Analogy. I think I can trust the coders who put together our missile systems. We have not yet launched a missle do to some glitch in software. Will we ever? Absolutely NOT.
I think you missed the point of my post. I wasn't talking about trust or the competence of coders. I was talking about the fact that lots of software running critical systems is closed source. And you have to deal with it.
However, maybe you recall the NT powered battleship? What did it do on its maiden voyage? Uhuh....
Probably a misuse of the word "however" if your counterexample proves my point exactly. No matter how good of programmers there were writing the quadruple-checked Ada application code for your ship, it was still dependent on closed source, unverified software. And you and I just have to deal.
a) Voting is more importent then all those things.
Yeah, right. Maybe it's just me, but I'd much rather wither under the rule of a despotic moron for four years than be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust.
b) The government has the source to anything it wants, i.e. Windows, AIX, etc.
Uh, yeah. The government controls everything. You're right. I forgot.
c) If it feals the need then the government can require that the company employ people with a security clearence to monitor things.
The government cannot do any such thing. They could make security clearances a requirement for government contracts, but Microsoft is rather different from Lockheed Martin. If the government told Microsoft, "All the programmers in your OS division have to be security cleared or we'll stop running Windows," Microsoft would reply, "Go ahead, quit running Windows, what the hell do we care? We have millions of other customers." And then the government would most likely keep running Windows anyway, as a result of having many of the applications they run dependent on it.
Ballots aren't (generally) counted by hand now. They're counted by machines. Have you ever seen the source code of the machines that are counting those ballots? Me neither. Maybe we should have brought this up years ago.
But what about, for instance, the computers that our controlling our nation's missile defense system? Who knows what they're running? AIX, maybe? Have you seen to source to AIX? Me neither. What about all those Windows desktops on which government employees are viewing highly classified documents? Windows ain't open source, either.
So, ballot counting isn't really something to get your open source panties in a bunch over. Our government (and private sector, for that matter) entrusts critical, highly sensitive operations to closed source third party software everday. They don't get to see the source code. We don't get to see the source code. We all just have to deal with it and hope MS isn't getting mad kickbacks from the Chinese government's intelligence division.
Just because some company came up with something doesn't mean they are automatically good! We need to have more faith in our brothers and sisters that create truly great open source works.
Right on! Some company! Thomson? Fraunhofer? Who the hell do they think they are!?
Oh yeah. The people that revolutionized high quality audio compression with mp3 and paved the way for the rampant online exchange of audio that has changed the music industry forever. Nevermind.
This strikes me as a bunch of malarkey. It just seems a little too conveniently advantageous from an antitrust PR standpoint to publicly say, "Oh yeah, Linux! They're real competition! They scare us!" If Ballmer truly considered Linux to be a threat, why would he air his views publicly? Isn't this a bit akin to Microsoft putting money and app development time into MacOS products so they could point to MacOS and say, "See, no monopoly; we have real competition!"
Sorry, but Flash rocks my ass. What you can do with it is leaps and bounds beyond DHTML. It's pretty. And it doesn't download *that* slowly.
For instance, today we have a digital art exhibition that you wouldn't enjoy too much if you didn't have Flash. In the case of this example, you can rightly say that art "doesn't serve any useful purpose", but it's probably unfair to say that its patrons are "simpletons with the IQ of jello." I, for one, like pretty, entertaining things that don't take too long to download.
Oh my god, a 1 byte buffer overflow!!! How devastating.
"Buffers can be overflowed, and by overwriting critical data stored in the
target process's address space, we can modify its execution flow. This is
old news. This article is not much about how to exploit buffer overflows,
nor does it explain the vulnerability itself. It just demonstrates it is
possible to exploit such a vulnerability even under the worst conditions,
like when the target buffer can only be overflowed by one byte."
So lets see.. to make an exploit all we need to do is get root and modify that/etc/security file...
You don't need to write the file. In theory, if you can read that byte, you know the know the incorrect address at which code will be executed. When the program that you're exploiting takes input from you, give it input that puts the code you want executed in the location in the buffer that will be jumped to.
So, no, it's not trivially exploitable. But, no, it's probably not something to be summarily ignored.
Would you ever know what ELSE the church is filtering besides porn? Considering that independent tests of commercial porn filters generally show them to be hardly better than flipping a coin, but they all do very well at blocking sites that criticize them...
Independent tests of religious ISP filters would likewise expose any "improper" filtering.
This isn't limited to the Church, though; your ISP could obviously do the same thing without your knowledge (until someone found out and got very pissy). Heck, Akamai could selectively edit video feeds that include unfavorable reviews of their stock or technology. There are a lot of hands information passes through before it reaches you, on the Internet and in other aspects of life. At some point you just have to trust your information providers to uphold their end of whatever contract you have with in them (e.g., ISPs) or expectations you have for them (e.g., news broadcasts), with the backup of the specter of legal rememdy and/or public outcry should your trust be misplaced.
Just because it's the largest doesn't mean it has to be the one you choose.
According to the article, the ISP's size wasn't the reason for its popularity. Rather, it was due to the Church bringing Internet access to rural areas where it was previously unavailable (as you point out) and to the low rates the Church charges. I'd imagine the latter reason is the more significant.
Personally, I'd gladly switch to an ISP that charges 5% of what I'm paying now if the only drawback was that I wouldn't be able to view porn. Sure, it would take away one of the greater pleasures I derive from the Internet, but it's a worthwhile choice from a financial and a self-improvement standpoint. Like how I cancelled my cable TV service because of all the crap I found myself watching. Saving $35 a month and forcibly weaning myself off Asian porn really sounds like a nice deal; I only wish the Church operated such an ISP in the US.
Hell, if any religion/cult offered me $100 an hour to sit through a brainwashing-style presentation of their dogma, I'd probably go for that too.
As we all found out with those entertaining hypothetical questions on the elementary school playground, there's a wonderful spectrum of things people are willing to submit to in return for remuneration. Go ahead, offer me a million dollars to sleep with my wife.
Would you ever take the Church seriously again if they were using their resources to make pornography readily available for all who want it?
Well, it's utterly impossible for them to filter all pornography, so they necessarily are using their resources to make porn available to horny Filipinos.
Does this mean I can quit taking the Roman Catholic Church seriously? Am I authorized to walk up to St. Peter's Church and spray paint "Ha-ha" on the front door?
Arent we doing this essentially with out of order instructions to increase speed of operations from ram?
Modern processors (e.g., the Itanium) are moving away from out of order execution. The idea is that compilers can order instructions to maximize parallelism more efficiently than super complicated hardware in the CPU can.
Actually, With Win2K/WinME Microsoft has introduced a centralized "installer" service, using a special package format (MSI) which does library and version tracking, etc etc. You can download the service for Win98 as well..
MSI is a nice alternative to InstallShield and Wise for the installation of complete software packages, but it does nothing for the modular distribution of applications and libraries. I want an installer that will optionally download and install required libraries depending on whether I already have them installed.
The thing does not even ban MS from improving the kernel or any other feature. But this improvement is to be made as an add-on, just as they have in the past, and they have to make the system without the addon available. What it does prevent is MS fostering IE onto everyone as a requirement to have the OS.
But this is the whole point of contention in Microsoft's case! You're saying that Microsoft should be able to distribute a patch to Windows that doesn't involve IE, but Microsoft contends IE is an integral part of their OS. If Microsoft is correct, then you have to deal with IE as part of your OS upgrade. If you choose not to upgrade, tough. Maybe new applications won't work on your computer.
The problem is at some point someone has to step in and say, "Okay, that's allowable to include in your OS." You mention in your solution that "the base Windows product is made available after it meets standards." I can only guess that the approval system you envision would be something akin to the Linux kernel's committee approval process you mentioned. Microsoft is a company, not an open source collective. There is no precedent under antitrust law for the government to force all of a company's products to be approved by an external committee before they are shipped. It seems what you're proposing would amount to a contentious formal review equivalent to the current judicial antitrust review, every time Microsoft has a new version of their software to ship.
Slashdot Mirror
Form encoding is specified in the html specs. No where in the specs is this called CGI.
Microsoft research has employed and currently employs numerous gods in the world of graphics and multimedia. Graphics gods like Jim Blinn. Realtime gods like Michael Abrash. You can check out all the various research groups, the people involved, and what they do here.
Windows Media is ugly stuff to people who know better. It's unfun, and live streaming video ought to be fun.
Perhaps I'm not one of the people who "knows better", but fun-ness seems like a pretty poor criterion for a critical evaluation of a streaming media product. Clever skins can kiss my ass. Windows Media is pretty decent as far as I'm concerned. MS has put a lot of time and money into crushing Real Networks, and we're beginning to see the fruits of that.
Believe me, I've thought of this many times. I saw a bumper sticker not so long ago that said, "Life's too short to work full time," and I thought it was pretty cool. However, I enjoy my work a lot, so it's not quite as bad as you described; I wouldn't considered an hour of work to be equivalent to ending my life an hour earlier, or, more succinctly, I don't consider work to be equivalent to death. So the defense of my work (in the unlikely case you care ;) is:
- I like my job. I like coding. What I do is fun and interesting and challenging. I wouldn't be caught dead (pun pun pun) working as much as I do now at a job I didn't like.
- I'm a pathetic human being, so if I was working half time, I'd probably be spending the other half stoned and doing something useless.
- It's nice to have money. I enjoy music, for instance, and it's nice to be able to buy records and recording equipment and effects and things. What use is working 15 hours a day so your life is more enjoyable if you don't have any money to do the things you enjoy?
- I get a lot of vacation time
:)
- I'm quitting and going to grad school in half a year, so it really doesn't matter much anyway. Of course, grad school is also a lot of work, and research assistantships don't pay much at all, so it seems like money doesn't necessarily control it all. A lot of things are "work", but that doesn't mean they're not worth doing without a fat pay check (triple negative?).
Also, if I work 40 hours a week at $5/hour and you work 20 hours a week at $5/hour and I quit after a year, then after two years we've both had identical "free time", but I have more money (because the extra money I made in the first year was earning interest). Obviously this argument doesn't work if I push my free time until the end of my life when I'm too old to do anything, but, hey, it's worth mentioning.Ultimately it's all about balance, and each person's balance is a personal choice.
Dude. 60 hour work weeks are not insane. If that's what happens when you take a couple weeks off, so be it.
When I started working my present job, my boss said he expected 50-60 hours per week standard. Right now, under the pressure of a deadline, it's more like 75-80 hours a week. Yeah, it sucks, but it's pretty much the same for friends of mine who work for other startups.
So, go to Morocco for a couple weeks, come back, put in those 12 hour days for a little bit, and don't feel like you're getting too bad a deal...
I think you missed the point of my post. I wasn't talking about trust or the competence of coders. I was talking about the fact that lots of software running critical systems is closed source. And you have to deal with it.
However, maybe you recall the NT powered battleship? What did it do on its maiden voyage? Uhuh....
Probably a misuse of the word "however" if your counterexample proves my point exactly. No matter how good of programmers there were writing the quadruple-checked Ada application code for your ship, it was still dependent on closed source, unverified software. And you and I just have to deal.
Yeah, right. Maybe it's just me, but I'd much rather wither under the rule of a despotic moron for four years than be destroyed in a nuclear holocaust.
b) The government has the source to anything it wants, i.e. Windows, AIX, etc.
Uh, yeah. The government controls everything. You're right. I forgot.
c) If it feals the need then the government can require that the company employ people with a security clearence to monitor things.
The government cannot do any such thing. They could make security clearances a requirement for government contracts, but Microsoft is rather different from Lockheed Martin. If the government told Microsoft, "All the programmers in your OS division have to be security cleared or we'll stop running Windows," Microsoft would reply, "Go ahead, quit running Windows, what the hell do we care? We have millions of other customers." And then the government would most likely keep running Windows anyway, as a result of having many of the applications they run dependent on it.
I really don't care if it brings down Linux completely. Just having my window manager crash (which happens constantly, thanks) pisses me off enough.
Ballots aren't (generally) counted by hand now. They're counted by machines. Have you ever seen the source code of the machines that are counting those ballots? Me neither. Maybe we should have brought this up years ago.
But what about, for instance, the computers that our controlling our nation's missile defense system? Who knows what they're running? AIX, maybe? Have you seen to source to AIX? Me neither. What about all those Windows desktops on which government employees are viewing highly classified documents? Windows ain't open source, either.
So, ballot counting isn't really something to get your open source panties in a bunch over. Our government (and private sector, for that matter) entrusts critical, highly sensitive operations to closed source third party software everday. They don't get to see the source code. We don't get to see the source code. We all just have to deal with it and hope MS isn't getting mad kickbacks from the Chinese government's intelligence division.
Right on! Some company! Thomson? Fraunhofer? Who the hell do they think they are!?
Oh yeah. The people that revolutionized high quality audio compression with mp3 and paved the way for the rampant online exchange of audio that has changed the music industry forever. Nevermind.
This strikes me as a bunch of malarkey. It just seems a little too conveniently advantageous from an antitrust PR standpoint to publicly say, "Oh yeah, Linux! They're real competition! They scare us!" If Ballmer truly considered Linux to be a threat, why would he air his views publicly? Isn't this a bit akin to Microsoft putting money and app development time into MacOS products so they could point to MacOS and say, "See, no monopoly; we have real competition!"
Isn't that what the numerous online escrow sites do?
I hear Macromedia has a new license.
Right. I'm sure all the people downloading the kernel got to it by following the Slashdot link. Because Slashdot is the center of the universe.
For instance, today we have a digital art exhibition that you wouldn't enjoy too much if you didn't have Flash. In the case of this example, you can rightly say that art "doesn't serve any useful purpose", but it's probably unfair to say that its patrons are "simpletons with the IQ of jello." I, for one, like pretty, entertaining things that don't take too long to download.
"Buffers can be overflowed, and by overwriting critical data stored in the target process's address space, we can modify its execution flow. This is old news. This article is not much about how to exploit buffer overflows, nor does it explain the vulnerability itself. It just demonstrates it is possible to exploit such a vulnerability even under the worst conditions, like when the target buffer can only be overflowed by one byte."
-- first four sentences of The Frame Pointer Overwrite, Phrack 55
So lets see.. to make an exploit all we need to do is get root and modify that /etc/security file...
You don't need to write the file. In theory, if you can read that byte, you know the know the incorrect address at which code will be executed. When the program that you're exploiting takes input from you, give it input that puts the code you want executed in the location in the buffer that will be jumped to.
So, no, it's not trivially exploitable. But, no, it's probably not something to be summarily ignored.
Electromagnetic pulse pulses? Are they like PIN numbers?
Independent tests of religious ISP filters would likewise expose any "improper" filtering.
This isn't limited to the Church, though; your ISP could obviously do the same thing without your knowledge (until someone found out and got very pissy). Heck, Akamai could selectively edit video feeds that include unfavorable reviews of their stock or technology. There are a lot of hands information passes through before it reaches you, on the Internet and in other aspects of life. At some point you just have to trust your information providers to uphold their end of whatever contract you have with in them (e.g., ISPs) or expectations you have for them (e.g., news broadcasts), with the backup of the specter of legal rememdy and/or public outcry should your trust be misplaced.
I'd let you watch...
According to the article, the ISP's size wasn't the reason for its popularity. Rather, it was due to the Church bringing Internet access to rural areas where it was previously unavailable (as you point out) and to the low rates the Church charges. I'd imagine the latter reason is the more significant.
Personally, I'd gladly switch to an ISP that charges 5% of what I'm paying now if the only drawback was that I wouldn't be able to view porn. Sure, it would take away one of the greater pleasures I derive from the Internet, but it's a worthwhile choice from a financial and a self-improvement standpoint. Like how I cancelled my cable TV service because of all the crap I found myself watching. Saving $35 a month and forcibly weaning myself off Asian porn really sounds like a nice deal; I only wish the Church operated such an ISP in the US.
Hell, if any religion/cult offered me $100 an hour to sit through a brainwashing-style presentation of their dogma, I'd probably go for that too.
As we all found out with those entertaining hypothetical questions on the elementary school playground, there's a wonderful spectrum of things people are willing to submit to in return for remuneration. Go ahead, offer me a million dollars to sleep with my wife.
Well, it's utterly impossible for them to filter all pornography, so they necessarily are using their resources to make porn available to horny Filipinos.
Does this mean I can quit taking the Roman Catholic Church seriously? Am I authorized to walk up to St. Peter's Church and spray paint "Ha-ha" on the front door?
Try calling up HBO and dictating their programming based on the authority that you pay for their service.
Ever heard of Southern California?
Modern processors (e.g., the Itanium) are moving away from out of order execution. The idea is that compilers can order instructions to maximize parallelism more efficiently than super complicated hardware in the CPU can.
MSI is a nice alternative to InstallShield and Wise for the installation of complete software packages, but it does nothing for the modular distribution of applications and libraries. I want an installer that will optionally download and install required libraries depending on whether I already have them installed.
But this is the whole point of contention in Microsoft's case! You're saying that Microsoft should be able to distribute a patch to Windows that doesn't involve IE, but Microsoft contends IE is an integral part of their OS. If Microsoft is correct, then you have to deal with IE as part of your OS upgrade. If you choose not to upgrade, tough. Maybe new applications won't work on your computer.
The problem is at some point someone has to step in and say, "Okay, that's allowable to include in your OS." You mention in your solution that "the base Windows product is made available after it meets standards." I can only guess that the approval system you envision would be something akin to the Linux kernel's committee approval process you mentioned. Microsoft is a company, not an open source collective. There is no precedent under antitrust law for the government to force all of a company's products to be approved by an external committee before they are shipped. It seems what you're proposing would amount to a contentious formal review equivalent to the current judicial antitrust review, every time Microsoft has a new version of their software to ship.