You can choose not to install GCC and still have a working, useful system.
That's not even hypothetical. I've done it. My 486 laptop doesn't have gcc on it.
(Mind you, I wish it did... but that puppy's got something like a 300MB hard drive, and in today's day and age there just isn't space for devleopment tools any more (at least without a lot of hand-tuning of exactly what gets installed, rather than just being lazy and installing packages from a distro). Sad. Back in the mid-90's, I remember when a fairly complete Slackware install with gcc and X and everything only tool 120-130MB.)
I'd be willing to change the constitution to get this guy...Wouldn't you? (-:
His birth status may rule him out of being president, but he seems to have a better handle on the ideas behind the US constitution than most of our "legitimately" elected officials.
Sure, many of the tools and core libraries we're running on top of our Linux kernels are GNU based.
But look at anybody running Linux today. What's the first thing you see on their screen? An X sesson; maybe it's running Gnome or KDE, but there's an X session there enabling your desktop. XFree86 is a seriously nontrivial bit of code. So why should the kernel, or the system libraries and tools, be annoited over X? If we're gonna call it GNU/Linux, we also need to call it GNU/XFree86/Linux, to be fair.
Of course it doesn't stop there. You go ad absurdum.
Let's face it. It's a giant collaborative effort. Each individual piece is a giant collaborative effort, indeed, but no one of those pieces lives without any of the others.
Why do we call it Linux? Because that was the cruical bit that allowed it finally to stand alone. Many of us were running lots of GNU tools on Solaris and other OSes before Linux (because we liked them better than the default versions). But that OS was still called Solaris, not GNU/Solaris. The true phase change came about when we could ditch Solaris alltogether because of this new Linux kernel thing. That is historically why we call it Linux. Is it completely fair? No. But that's what it's called.
While RMS's arguments are right, I think that they are very unwise. He would get a lot more mileage out of just embracing the name "Linux", and then trying to help ensure that it stands for what he wants it to stand for. I'm with him on the worries about nonfree software in the Linux kernel; that's the kind of politics that I'm not ready to turn a blind eye to. But his spitting and fussing over the naming makes him look like a spoiled kid in the sandbox who wants everybody to remember "even if you play with it, this toy is MINE!!!" instead of somebody who is trying to push forward the important arguments.
RMS: stick to your guns (or your gnus) with what's important. A name is not important. If it's not too late, embrace and extend the name Linux.
-Rob
I don't even know the situ. and I see the bias!
on
Two Helpings of WINE
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This all came from the Codeweavers-dominated recent licence change (to the LGPL) which was done in an attempt to steal TransGaming's Direct3D code and force them to open up all their work (thus have no means to make money).
<Dripping Sarcasm>
Oh, very well put.
</Dripping Sarcasm>
I don't even know what's going on and I can tell that this is absolutely nothing but a ham-handed attempt to push forward a view of the GPL and LGPL (and/or of Codeweavers) and blame it for things for which it no more responsibility than it does for the crisis in the Middle Eeast.
Licence changes of open code only affect future versions. If an earlier version was out under a different licence you liked better-- fork from there! That's what gave us OpenSSH. It was forked from the last "open enough" version of ssh. Similarly with TuxRacer; it's gone commercial, but the earlier GPLed versions are still GPLed, and nothings to stop anybody from further development of them.
What's more, even if you change your future versions of code, you can't "steal" somebody else's code which uses an older version. The current ssh is under a more restrictive licence... but OpenSSH doesn't have anything to worry about using the older ssh code. Similarly for TuxRacer; if somebody else writes a GPLed extention to it, the proprietary version can't "steal" it simply because it's connected to an earlier version of code that the proprietary version grew out of. (And vice versa. Developers of the GPLed version aren't "stealing" the proprietary code, or preventing it from being sold, by building on the earlier version.)
This statement is little better than Microsoft FUD, and comes across as far less slick than it. If there really is some beef or ethical problem with what Codeweavers has done, I don't know. If there is, it needs to be stated much better than this. This statement here only makes me believe that the poster is a whiner with strong opinions about the GPL that aren't actually based in fact.
There seem to be two camps of Linux users: those who use it because it's Free Software (the RMS camp), and those who use it because it does what we need to do better than Win2k.
I'm both, sorta. I'd prefer to use an OS that's free (in both senses of the word). I also use it because it serves my needs better than Solaris. (Windows doesn't even come into the picture for me. You don't have to be a free software zealot to be one who believes that Microsoft is too big and has too much power and should be eschewed.)
I can't remember which state it was (might even have been here in California) but in the past year or so, one state's courts found use of such cameras to catch redlight runners unlawful, because using the evidence to issue a fine presumed guilt without proper legal procedures. Maybe someone else can recall or unearth the details.
Back in something like 1993, in Pasadena CA, I got a photo-radar speeding ticket. (Note: similar deal, but not specifically WRT running a red light.) I went to look at the picture, and it was clearly me; you could read the licence plate on the car, and the picture of me was better than the one on my drivers licence. I was speeding and knew it, so quietly paid up. Later, I found out that anybody who contested one of those tickets in court would have it removed without question; I guess the legality was on shaky enough ground that they didn't bother defending them. The depended on the sheep like me to make their money....
I read in the newspaper a year or two after I got my ticket that Pasadena had stopped doing it. I don't know if it was declared illegal or not, but I did sort of kick myself for having just blithely paid the ticket. Oh well, it's water well under the bridge by now.
I would say that during my six years in Pasadena (1990-1996), I noticed as a pedestrian that the running of red lights got noticably worse during those six years. By 1996, it seemed that the rule was "if you saw it yellow, you get to go through it." Driving or walking, once my light turned green I would always wait a few seconds to make sure that somebody else wasn't going to blow through the red light the other way. It wasn't that bad in 1990, but by 1996 it had gotten pretty common and pretty ridiculous.
fracturing effort?
on
GeekPAC
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I'm sure there is a good reason-- but I don't see it at the moment, so I'm hoping somebody will enlighten me. Why is trying to get people to put money and energy behind this a better idea than helping to promote the existing organizations working towards similar goas, such as the EFF? My fear is that this effort will dilute some of the broadbased support for the EFF, and instead of one organization which we can hope will become marginally strong enough to perhaps do something, we're going to have two organizations that look really good but aren't nearly beefy enough to compete with the current special interests purchasing legislators.
Microsoft should just go out of business and put us out of their misery. That would be an excellent open source move on their part. But that's my biased and non-objective opinion, so feel free to mod it down to troll.
But, your honor, going to jail for my crimes would mean that I couldn't keep going to my job, and that I couldn't go to baseball games, and gee, it would make my life really hard!
Somehow, it seems to me that inconvenience to a party found guilty of violating the law should be laughed out of court as a defense against a penalty.
lycoris offer desktop LX preinstalled on machines for $449.95 and laptops for $799.99.
I went and looked at that; note that the laptop is actually a dual-boot machine, with some form of Linux and Windows 98. If what you're really looking for is the ability to buy a moderately priced laptop without paying a tax to Microsoft for an OS you won't use, this isn't it.
I've got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, PGP was revolutionary and is probably one of the main reasons encryption is as free and available today as it is. If Phil hadn't released that (at the expense of considerable suffering), I suspect that the governments of the world would have been able to clamp down on encryption big time, and all of us law abiding types would take it as an axiom that none of us really need anything like that, only terrorists do. It's sad to see the company that was carrying that torch give up on it. I fear this is just one more indication that personal encryption of e-mail and such isn't really going to catch on with the masses.
On the other hand, NAI's not been a perfect angel. Phil left them because of differences about releasing (if memory serves) source code-- not because Phil is an open source advocate per se, so much as for reasons of being able to verify the security. And, myself, I'm an open source geek and have been using GnuPG for quite some time as my encryption software of choice. There still is hope that GnuPG will be turned into something that can catch on with the masses (just like there's hope, however faint, that things like GNOME and KDE will catch on with the masses).
But one thing you have to remember: Google is a very simple site. Very little on the screen at a time. On the main page, just a search box and a couple of links. And after that, just a few links a page. When you have realms and realms of content that you have to squeeze into a site, it becomes much more difficult.
True-- but I would counter that squeezing reams and reams of content into one page is part of the problem. If you really do have reams and reams of stuff to squeeze into the site, divided it onto lots of different pages. Make the front page clean, and spend a lot of time thinking about how the materially is organized (logically, not on the screen) and making sure it is indexed and searchable so taht it's findable.
Making your page look good on every browser and platform is impossible. It will take too much work and you probably don't have all the systems.
Or, instead of going into this foolish mindset of thinking that you have to code for every platform, just write your web page using the standards that are out there, and they will render just fine on any standards compliant web browser. It's not that hard!
...to think about. Or rather, they are, but they should be on the list below usability. That is, if your web site is there to store some actual content or information, as opposed to being primarily a work of art in its own right (in which case you should go nuts and ignore the rest of my message).
For instance, just that front wowwebdesigns.com site you point already makes me grouchy. Why? They shrink the font size below the default font size. With my default setup, the page is completely unreadable. Fortunately, with Mozilla I can bump up the fonts for that page, but good web design would mean the user shouldn't have to do that.
The site is also too busy. Too many sites out there clutter the screen up with packed sidebars on both sides and advertisements and flashing animated images and Flash animations and oh my word.
The pages they list as "good" at may be pretty and eye candy, but unless you're trying to make a gallery piece which is supposed to be thrilling in its own right, they are what I would think of as *bad* web design. To my mind, good web design is a design that doesn't get in the way of your reading and getting to the information you want to find on that web site.
My idea of good web design? www.google.org is near the top. Very clean, simple, straightforward, does its job and is readable.
Clean, readable, not sensory-overload inducing, well-organized: all of these things are far more important for 80-90% of the web sites out there than anything having to do with being visually appealing or using creative and fancy new touches.
There's a really nifty place where you can get books for free. The only catch is you have to give them back after a while. It's called a "library." Wonderful for books you want to read once but not spend money to keep.
...at least until the APA manages to get libraries, those government-sponsored dens of intellectual property theft, shut down.
Put this together with the article a while back that AOL/Time/Warner is trying to get "consumers" to accept the idea of paying, what was it, $225 a month or some such for their cable servcies. Which, granted, would be more than just "cable TV" is now, but that's still nearly a factor of 2 over what I pay for cable plus internet plus phone service put together, and those three aren't allcoming from a single point of failure monopoloy at the moment. (At least, not all from the same one:/.)
So you'll start paying much more for your TV service. And you won't be able to tape first run shows or sports broadcasts or what have you. Geeks will crow about the beautiful picture and how it's all worth it, but meanwhile those of us with lives but who still want to (say) keep up with Babylon 5 or the equivalent will no longer be able to; we'll be back to the 70's when we have to schedule our lives around TV broadcasts... unless we want to pay even *more* for pay-per-view or similar.
Personally, if my Chicken Little scenario here is even half true, this will reach a threshold where I'll just say it's not worth the money and hassle to have a TV. American consumerist culture already makes me a bit ill, even though my borderline technophilia makes me a hypocrite for saying that. I'd like to think that sooner or later the megacorps couldn't get away with this, because they will completely alienate an audience who will not like the idea of paying more and more for thins that become less and less usable.
The dark side of the moon does face the earth half the time. Have you ever heard of a new moon?
Bzzzt. But thanks for playing. The Moon rotates at exactly the same rate as it revolves. Thus it always presents the same face to the Earth. That face might be lit (full moon) or might be dark (new moon), but it is the same always.
Uh, I think you lose the semantic battle, even though you don't state anything factually incorrect. Sometimes the "dark side" of the moon is the facing the earth. It is just that the "dark side" of the moon isn't always the same landscape. Sometimes the Sea of Tranquillity is on the dark side, sometimes it's on the light side, but it's always on the side facing Earth.
Of course, back to the relevance of the original post, as far as radio noise goes, the side on the far side from the Earth is the dark side.
Or unless somebody scripting and kiddieish specifically downloaded a port scanner. Are you absolutely sure that said kiddie isn't going to learn anything useful (or do any accidental damage) to your custom server just by sending and observing responses to random data?
No, not absolutely sure, which is why you're better off with real security. On the other hand, most script kiddies don't really know what they're doing, and are quickly scanning lots of computers for known vulnerabilities. Unless you had the very unlikely misfortune of writing something whose protocol exactly mimics the behavior of a well-known server vulnerability, you're just going to get some errors and dropped packets on your server, no security vulnerability.
The "custom server" should have at least enough error checking to ignore something it completely doesn't understand... otherwise it's not very robust at all, and will crash all the time, even if nobody is trying to hack you. However, ignoring what you don't understand is very easy to do; anybody who's ever written a CGI script has done it.
Obscurity really is security, if it is true Obscurity. For instance, if you've written a custom server with a set of commands, and you run it on a single computer somewhere on some random port, chances are it's not going to be hacked unless somebody smart and dedicated specifically targets you. Yes, you'd be more secure if you wrote the thing to encrypt its communications and made damn sure that it was robost-- but saying "probably nobody will notice me" has something to it if really nobody likely will notice you.
The problem with companies like Microsoft arguing that obscurity is security is that they don't have real obscurity. Their operating system is absolutely all over the place, both physically and in terms of network connectivity. As such, there is both ample opportunity and ample motive to find out hidden facts about it. While those facts may be hidden, the OS is not, so there's no real obscurity, just a thin veil of obfuscation.
If you're building one new high-tech stealth bomber, and you do it in a hidden valley in some very remote site, and completely underground, chances are it's not going to be seen. On the other hand, if you build several prototypes in downtown parking lots of major cities, and just drape a cloth over them with a sign "no plane here", that's just the illusion of obscurity (and hence the illusion of security). Major OSes that are widely distributed but which hide their source code are much more in the latter category.
As for Satellites-- their obscurity probably is worth something. It's only one link, and the need to have the broadcasting station is a huge barrier. On the other hand, they can be highly visible targets, and I'd suspect that they aren't as obscure as one would really like to be to think it grants you some security. They probably ought to start using, as a matter of course, real secure protocols.
As long as the web is based on open, broad industry standards (as opposed to de facto Microsoft standards), I don't care what most web users are using. As long as the web and websites are based on open standards, I can use whatever the heck I want. Mozilla and some others have enough impetus now to keep up more or less with the basic standards. If I'm in a tiny minority, so what?
I do care, however, if too many sites use this as a justification to create "IE-only" sites. I've seen a few of those, and those are stupid and annoying.
Slashdot Mirror
You can choose not to install GCC and still have a working, useful system.
That's not even hypothetical. I've done it. My 486 laptop doesn't have gcc on it.
(Mind you, I wish it did... but that puppy's got something like a 300MB hard drive, and in today's day and age there just isn't space for devleopment tools any more (at least without a lot of hand-tuning of exactly what gets installed, rather than just being lazy and installing packages from a distro). Sad. Back in the mid-90's, I remember when a fairly complete Slackware install with gcc and X and everything only tool 120-130MB.)
-Rob
Not on a server. You know, all those HTTP and Samba servers out there?
Oh, right -- those GNU/Linux/Apache and GNU/Linux/Samba servers. The argument still works, even if you take out X.
Yes, thank you, you saved me the trouble of making that point myself. Somebody with moderator points please mod this parent up so it will be seen.
-Rob
I'd be willing to change the constitution to get this guy...Wouldn't you? (-:
His birth status may rule him out of being president, but he seems to have a better handle on the ideas behind the US constitution than most of our "legitimately" elected officials.
-Rob
Sure, many of the tools and core libraries we're running on top of our Linux kernels are GNU based.
But look at anybody running Linux today. What's the first thing you see on their screen? An X sesson; maybe it's running Gnome or KDE, but there's an X session there enabling your desktop. XFree86 is a seriously nontrivial bit of code. So why should the kernel, or the system libraries and tools, be annoited over X? If we're gonna call it GNU/Linux, we also need to call it GNU/XFree86/Linux, to be fair.
Of course it doesn't stop there. You go ad absurdum.
Let's face it. It's a giant collaborative effort. Each individual piece is a giant collaborative effort, indeed, but no one of those pieces lives without any of the others.
Why do we call it Linux? Because that was the cruical bit that allowed it finally to stand alone. Many of us were running lots of GNU tools on Solaris and other OSes before Linux (because we liked them better than the default versions). But that OS was still called Solaris, not GNU/Solaris. The true phase change came about when we could ditch Solaris alltogether because of this new Linux kernel thing. That is historically why we call it Linux. Is it completely fair? No. But that's what it's called.
While RMS's arguments are right, I think that they are very unwise. He would get a lot more mileage out of just embracing the name "Linux", and then trying to help ensure that it stands for what he wants it to stand for. I'm with him on the worries about nonfree software in the Linux kernel; that's the kind of politics that I'm not ready to turn a blind eye to. But his spitting and fussing over the naming makes him look like a spoiled kid in the sandbox who wants everybody to remember "even if you play with it, this toy is MINE!!!" instead of somebody who is trying to push forward the important arguments.
RMS: stick to your guns (or your gnus) with what's important. A name is not important. If it's not too late, embrace and extend the name Linux.
-Rob
This all came from the Codeweavers-dominated recent licence change (to the LGPL) which was done in an attempt to steal TransGaming's Direct3D code and force them to open up all their work (thus have no means to make money).
<Dripping Sarcasm>
Oh, very well put.
</Dripping Sarcasm>
I don't even know what's going on and I can tell that this is absolutely nothing but a ham-handed attempt to push forward a view of the GPL and LGPL (and/or of Codeweavers) and blame it for things for which it no more responsibility than it does for the crisis in the Middle Eeast.
Licence changes of open code only affect future versions. If an earlier version was out under a different licence you liked better-- fork from there! That's what gave us OpenSSH. It was forked from the last "open enough" version of ssh. Similarly with TuxRacer; it's gone commercial, but the earlier GPLed versions are still GPLed, and nothings to stop anybody from further development of them.
What's more, even if you change your future versions of code, you can't "steal" somebody else's code which uses an older version. The current ssh is under a more restrictive licence... but OpenSSH doesn't have anything to worry about using the older ssh code. Similarly for TuxRacer; if somebody else writes a GPLed extention to it, the proprietary version can't "steal" it simply because it's connected to an earlier version of code that the proprietary version grew out of. (And vice versa. Developers of the GPLed version aren't "stealing" the proprietary code, or preventing it from being sold, by building on the earlier version.)
This statement is little better than Microsoft FUD, and comes across as far less slick than it. If there really is some beef or ethical problem with what Codeweavers has done, I don't know. If there is, it needs to be stated much better than this. This statement here only makes me believe that the poster is a whiner with strong opinions about the GPL that aren't actually based in fact.
-Rob
There seem to be two camps of Linux users: those who use it because it's Free Software (the RMS camp), and those who use it because it does what we need to do better than Win2k.
I'm both, sorta. I'd prefer to use an OS that's free (in both senses of the word). I also use it because it serves my needs better than Solaris. (Windows doesn't even come into the picture for me. You don't have to be a free software zealot to be one who believes that Microsoft is too big and has too much power and should be eschewed.)
-Rob
I can't remember which state it was (might even have been here in California) but in the past year or so, one state's courts found use of such cameras to catch redlight runners unlawful, because using the evidence to issue a fine presumed guilt without proper legal procedures. Maybe someone else can recall or unearth the details.
Back in something like 1993, in Pasadena CA, I got a photo-radar speeding ticket. (Note: similar deal, but not specifically WRT running a red light.) I went to look at the picture, and it was clearly me; you could read the licence plate on the car, and the picture of me was better than the one on my drivers licence. I was speeding and knew it, so quietly paid up. Later, I found out that anybody who contested one of those tickets in court would have it removed without question; I guess the legality was on shaky enough ground that they didn't bother defending them. The depended on the sheep like me to make their money....
I read in the newspaper a year or two after I got my ticket that Pasadena had stopped doing it. I don't know if it was declared illegal or not, but I did sort of kick myself for having just blithely paid the ticket. Oh well, it's water well under the bridge by now.
I would say that during my six years in Pasadena (1990-1996), I noticed as a pedestrian that the running of red lights got noticably worse during those six years. By 1996, it seemed that the rule was "if you saw it yellow, you get to go through it." Driving or walking, once my light turned green I would always wait a few seconds to make sure that somebody else wasn't going to blow through the red light the other way. It wasn't that bad in 1990, but by 1996 it had gotten pretty common and pretty ridiculous.
-Rob
As open source Ogg Vorbis is released under the GPL/LGPL. However doesn't this prevent companies to integrate the sources into their software ?
This is wrong.
The spec is public domain-- it's not well documented, evidently, but the format itself is public domain.
The utilities are GPLed, so you have to distribute the source to anything that encompases them.
The libraries themselves, however, are under BSD.
See The Ogg Vorbis FAQ.
-Rob
I'm sure there is a good reason-- but I don't see it at the moment, so I'm hoping somebody will enlighten me. Why is trying to get people to put money and energy behind this a better idea than helping to promote the existing organizations working towards similar goas, such as the EFF? My fear is that this effort will dilute some of the broadbased support for the EFF, and instead of one organization which we can hope will become marginally strong enough to perhaps do something, we're going to have two organizations that look really good but aren't nearly beefy enough to compete with the current special interests purchasing legislators.
-Rob
Microsoft should just go out of business and put us out of their misery. That would be an excellent open source move on their part. But that's my biased and non-objective opinion, so feel free to mod it down to troll.
-Rob
But, your honor, going to jail for my crimes would mean that I couldn't keep going to my job, and that I couldn't go to baseball games, and gee, it would make my life really hard!
Somehow, it seems to me that inconvenience to a party found guilty of violating the law should be laughed out of court as a defense against a penalty.
-Rob
-Rob
lycoris offer desktop LX preinstalled on machines for $449.95 and laptops for $799.99.
I went and looked at that; note that the laptop is actually a dual-boot machine, with some form of Linux and Windows 98. If what you're really looking for is the ability to buy a moderately priced laptop without paying a tax to Microsoft for an OS you won't use, this isn't it.
-Rob
I've got mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, PGP was revolutionary and is probably one of the main reasons encryption is as free and available today as it is. If Phil hadn't released that (at the expense of considerable suffering), I suspect that the governments of the world would have been able to clamp down on encryption big time, and all of us law abiding types would take it as an axiom that none of us really need anything like that, only terrorists do. It's sad to see the company that was carrying that torch give up on it. I fear this is just one more indication that personal encryption of e-mail and such isn't really going to catch on with the masses.
On the other hand, NAI's not been a perfect angel. Phil left them because of differences about releasing (if memory serves) source code-- not because Phil is an open source advocate per se, so much as for reasons of being able to verify the security. And, myself, I'm an open source geek and have been using GnuPG for quite some time as my encryption software of choice. There still is hope that GnuPG will be turned into something that can catch on with the masses (just like there's hope, however faint, that things like GNOME and KDE will catch on with the masses).
-Rob
How many points for stating that your theories were revealed to you directly from God? I'm not making this up, I heard it just today.
-Rob
But one thing you have to remember: Google is a very simple site. Very little on the screen at a time. On the main page, just a search box and a couple of links. And after that, just a few links a page. When you have realms and realms of content that you have to squeeze into a site, it becomes much more difficult.
True-- but I would counter that squeezing reams and reams of content into one page is part of the problem. If you really do have reams and reams of stuff to squeeze into the site, divided it onto lots of different pages. Make the front page clean, and spend a lot of time thinking about how the materially is organized (logically, not on the screen) and making sure it is indexed and searchable so taht it's findable.
-Rob
Making your page look good on every browser and platform is impossible. It will take too much work and you probably don't have all the systems.
Or, instead of going into this foolish mindset of thinking that you have to code for every platform, just write your web page using the standards that are out there, and they will render just fine on any standards compliant web browser. It's not that hard!
-Rob
...to think about. Or rather, they are, but they should be on the list below usability. That is, if your web site is there to store some actual content or information, as opposed to being primarily a work of art in its own right (in which case you should go nuts and ignore the rest of my message).
For instance, just that front wowwebdesigns.com site you point already makes me grouchy. Why? They shrink the font size below the default font size. With my default setup, the page is completely unreadable. Fortunately, with Mozilla I can bump up the fonts for that page, but good web design would mean the user shouldn't have to do that.
The site is also too busy. Too many sites out there clutter the screen up with packed sidebars on both sides and advertisements and flashing animated images and Flash animations and oh my word.
The pages they list as "good" at may be pretty and eye candy, but unless you're trying to make a gallery piece which is supposed to be thrilling in its own right, they are what I would think of as *bad* web design. To my mind, good web design is a design that doesn't get in the way of your reading and getting to the information you want to find on that web site.
My idea of good web design? www.google.org is near the top. Very clean, simple, straightforward, does its job and is readable.
Clean, readable, not sensory-overload inducing, well-organized: all of these things are far more important for 80-90% of the web sites out there than anything having to do with being visually appealing or using creative and fancy new touches.
-Rob
There's a really nifty place where you can get books for free. The only catch is you have to give them back after a while. It's called a "library." Wonderful for books you want to read once but not spend money to keep.
...at least until the APA manages to get libraries, those government-sponsored dens of intellectual property theft, shut down.
-Rob
Put this together with the article a while back that AOL/Time/Warner is trying to get "consumers" to accept the idea of paying, what was it, $225 a month or some such for their cable servcies. Which, granted, would be more than just "cable TV" is now, but that's still nearly a factor of 2 over what I pay for cable plus internet plus phone service put together, and those three aren't allcoming from a single point of failure monopoloy at the moment. (At least, not all from the same one :/ .)
So you'll start paying much more for your TV service. And you won't be able to tape first run shows or sports broadcasts or what have you. Geeks will crow about the beautiful picture and how it's all worth it, but meanwhile those of us with lives but who still want to (say) keep up with Babylon 5 or the equivalent will no longer be able to; we'll be back to the 70's when we have to schedule our lives around TV broadcasts... unless we want to pay even *more* for pay-per-view or similar.
Personally, if my Chicken Little scenario here is even half true, this will reach a threshold where I'll just say it's not worth the money and hassle to have a TV. American consumerist culture already makes me a bit ill, even though my borderline technophilia makes me a hypocrite for saying that. I'd like to think that sooner or later the megacorps couldn't get away with this, because they will completely alienate an audience who will not like the idea of paying more and more for thins that become less and less usable.
-Rob
People will get over the sticker shock when they realize that given a monopoly, they have no choice if they want the service.
-Rob
The dark side of the moon does face the earth half the time. Have you ever heard of a new moon?
Bzzzt. But thanks for playing. The Moon rotates at exactly the same rate as it revolves. Thus it always presents the same face to the Earth. That face might be lit (full moon) or might be dark (new moon), but it is the same always.
Uh, I think you lose the semantic battle, even though you don't state anything factually incorrect. Sometimes the "dark side" of the moon is the facing the earth. It is just that the "dark side" of the moon isn't always the same landscape. Sometimes the Sea of Tranquillity is on the dark side, sometimes it's on the light side, but it's always on the side facing Earth.
Of course, back to the relevance of the original post, as far as radio noise goes, the side on the far side from the Earth is the dark side.
-Rob
Or unless somebody scripting and kiddieish specifically downloaded a port scanner. Are you absolutely sure that said kiddie isn't going to learn anything useful (or do any accidental damage) to your custom server just by sending and observing responses to random data?
No, not absolutely sure, which is why you're better off with real security. On the other hand, most script kiddies don't really know what they're doing, and are quickly scanning lots of computers for known vulnerabilities. Unless you had the very unlikely misfortune of writing something whose protocol exactly mimics the behavior of a well-known server vulnerability, you're just going to get some errors and dropped packets on your server, no security vulnerability.
The "custom server" should have at least enough error checking to ignore something it completely doesn't understand... otherwise it's not very robust at all, and will crash all the time, even if nobody is trying to hack you. However, ignoring what you don't understand is very easy to do; anybody who's ever written a CGI script has done it.
-Rob
Obscurity really is security, if it is true Obscurity. For instance, if you've written a custom server with a set of commands, and you run it on a single computer somewhere on some random port, chances are it's not going to be hacked unless somebody smart and dedicated specifically targets you. Yes, you'd be more secure if you wrote the thing to encrypt its communications and made damn sure that it was robost-- but saying "probably nobody will notice me" has something to it if really nobody likely will notice you.
The problem with companies like Microsoft arguing that obscurity is security is that they don't have real obscurity. Their operating system is absolutely all over the place, both physically and in terms of network connectivity. As such, there is both ample opportunity and ample motive to find out hidden facts about it. While those facts may be hidden, the OS is not, so there's no real obscurity, just a thin veil of obfuscation.
If you're building one new high-tech stealth bomber, and you do it in a hidden valley in some very remote site, and completely underground, chances are it's not going to be seen. On the other hand, if you build several prototypes in downtown parking lots of major cities, and just drape a cloth over them with a sign "no plane here", that's just the illusion of obscurity (and hence the illusion of security). Major OSes that are widely distributed but which hide their source code are much more in the latter category.
As for Satellites-- their obscurity probably is worth something. It's only one link, and the need to have the broadcasting station is a huge barrier. On the other hand, they can be highly visible targets, and I'd suspect that they aren't as obscure as one would really like to be to think it grants you some security. They probably ought to start using, as a matter of course, real secure protocols.
-Rob
As long as the web is based on open, broad industry standards (as opposed to de facto Microsoft standards), I don't care what most web users are using. As long as the web and websites are based on open standards, I can use whatever the heck I want. Mozilla and some others have enough impetus now to keep up more or less with the basic standards. If I'm in a tiny minority, so what?
I do care, however, if too many sites use this as a justification to create "IE-only" sites. I've seen a few of those, and those are stupid and annoying.
-Rob