That's the best oxymoron I've seen all day! Heck, I thought Microsoft Works was a good one. But now I realize that if you want to find out what an oxymoron is, you'll have a real problem, because if you look in the dictionary, the definition is: Effective C++.
Speaking of which, did you know that naive is not in the dictionary? You: Get a dictionary, find out what this 'closure' is.
I have them on a tabular sheet, slightly encoded in a unique method that I invented for myself. I store this sheet in the safe deposit box at the bank. I am very careful when transporting this information around, but other than that, if the crooks manage to get into the safe deposit box, I've got much bigger problems than some passwords to pr0n sites and such.
Gee, I never would have figured out that you can stick a cottonpickin x86 motherboard into an Apple box! Who'd a thunk it?
This article made it sound as if there were some way you could build a daughterboard with a P4 on it that could plug into where the G3 processor is supposed to go, and with some weird soldering hacks to the chipset, a couple of extra wires added to the motherboard, maybe some resistors, a capacitor or two, adding a pin to the processor, and cutting one of the pins off the RAM and routing it to another location, and all of these weird hacks would cause the Mac to run with a P4 processor.
But no, it's an x86 mb thrown into a Mac box. Really imaginative, guys. Typical Slashdot Slashcrap
I love Google. I worship Google. It is my life. My sun, my moon, my starlit sky. Without Google, I dwell in darkness. Google is everything to me. I am obsessed with Google, true, but there is nothing else for me. Google.
The best thing to do is what I did: Get yourself a T1 connection, which is not quite as expensive today as it used to be. Set up a domain name. Set up a mail server. The way you set it up is as follows: You have a primary account, which you actually check. This is a secret account, and you give it to nobody. Then, to each person who might one day send you email, you give a unique email address. So you'll have thousands of email addresses, one for each person who might send you an email. You set up SpamAssassin. You don't actually check all those inboxes. Instead, mail that gets in and passes through the spam filter is forwarded, so to speak, to your one true email address. If you find crap, you cancel the address that it came in from. This can all be done automatically, with a click of a button, if you set up all the scripts ahead of time. Then, bata bim, bata boom, no more spam.
Or there could be no public outcry because so far, their products are good. Just having some modicum of control does not immediately require public outrage.
Control does immediately require public outrage. See, if an anarchist organization ever manages to overthrow the government, they will immediately dissolve themselves, because otherwise they would be acting against their ideals.
There was a FUD article on one of the PHB-style IT news sites a year or two ago. This article said that new, more complex worms, were emerging, and that these worms could target systems across any processor architecture, any operating system, and with any software running therein, and that the worm could morph itself to get from one system to the next. What a bunch of hogwash. You would need a program that has the ability to search for and take advantages of vulnerabilities unknown at the time of writing (which, in itself, is a task for a very skilled human and outside the realm of computer software), and this program would need to be able to translate itself from one processor architecture instruction set to another as it moves from system to system. Even if it could be done, no 1337 h4x0rz is going to do it, because that much time and effort could be used more wisely. Most worms are written in a matter of hours, not based on years of research into the unknown.
You want a BSOD, eh? How about this: You build a gun that has an actuator attached to the serial port of a computer running Windows NT. The computer sends, via the serial port, a watchdog-style "keep alive" signal, say, every 100 microseconds. The actuator is designed such that once powered on, if the watchdog timer skips a single beat or delivers it too late, the gun is fired.
At this time, a volunteer (say, Gill Bates) would be tied to a chair and placed in front of this gun, while the Windows NT system runs Exchange and IIS, and while a user browses pr0n sites via Internet Explorer. This is, actually, quite a safe experiment, as we all know that Windows NT never crashes.
This article contains an error: It says "Apple's Intel Desktop"... Apple doesn't have an Intel-based desktop. Their computers are based on the IBM/FreeScale processors, formerly made by Motorola. These are the G3, G4, and G5 processors mentioned in their advertisements.
If Apple did have an Intel desktop, it would be quite interesting, as programs made for other x86 OSes could then be made to run on OSX. Imagine, for example, if there were a small compatibility layer, akin to what allows FreeBSD to run Linux binaries, that could run Linux x86 binaries on the Mac. Even cooler still would be the possibility of a Mac OS X compatibility layer in Linux that would allow, for instance, to run Mac-only applications in Linux. The same compatibility layer, made with knowledge of Darwin internals, could allow a Linux system to run the Aqua user interface and other Mac-specific codes. A Mac system on x86 would result in lots of cool hacks that allow you to "install" portions of OS X into your Linux distro via shell scripts that pick and choose the proper files and then bend, fold, spindle, and otherwise mutilate them.
I think that for these reasons, Apple has continuously used the incompatible (and more powerful) Motorola processors. It would not be good for their business if other OSes could run binaries made for their hardware/software combination. So, yes, the title of this article is somehow wrong.
OpenRAW plans to create a RAW repository, a final resting place for RAW file documentations of current and already abandoned digital cameras.
A final resting place, eh? What is OpenRAW, a symlink to/dev/null?
This article should probably say: A place for people to search for RAW file documentations, not a final resting place... Come on guys, be a bit more imaginative!
Political so-called "correctness" was mentioned in this article. I think the topic of political correctness is a bunch of hogwash. Look at the name itself: Political, and correctness. Ok, now go and read 1984, and see how "they" are able to control what people say and think, to the point that you have to walk on eggshells if you want to discuss any group of people. You can't say that certain Jews are more intelligent, or that most of the so-called Palestinians are filled with hatred, or that blacks (African Americans, most of whom have never been to Africa, and neither have any of their immediate ancestors) behave a certain way. Heaven forbid if you should look out for Muslim extremists at airports. No, you have to search grandmothers, nuns, and small children, but let any young man who appears Muslim and has a copy of the Quran through without any search because you might offend him. This political correctness is nothing but part of a system for political control. "They" want to control the population.
Who are "they"? Certain people who are in positions of control, especially teachers and those in academia, and some politicians on the political left. You don't have to believe me, but just pay attention, and be aware that most news and media has a leftist bias.
By the way, my best friend is Jewish. He's not exactly Einstein, so this study is clearly a bunch of hogwash.
The London Evening Standard is reporting that the "worlds biggest computer hacker" has been arrested in London.
Hmmm... All those doughnuts, M&Ms, oversweetened coffee, potato chips, and cokes he ate while hacking have really taken their toll... There's a lesson in there for you folks: Go outside once in a while and take a walk, or go for a jog, or to the beach, or go hiking, or bike riding... exercise, exercise, exercise. Or else you'll end up like this guy. World's biggest hacker... I hope he checks his cholesterol.
I am glad that a company that "does no evil" is better off than a company that does nothing but evil. That only goes to demonstrate the power of good.
Google is truly a remarkable company. Innovation at its best... There's probably not a day in my life that I don't use Google at least ten times. I don't know where I'd be without it. One day, I aspire to work for Google myself... Keep up the good work, guys.
Printers like this are just asking for company pranksters to screw around! In our company, there is this "resident nerd" (I'm the resident "geek"--I suppose there is a difference) who does all kinds of computer pranks. Most are a lot of the usual ones, like taking a screenshot of Windows saying you performed an illegal operation, and then setting that as the wallpaper... But a few were truly original and imaginative. Once, right around the time Windows 95 was coming out and most people still used DOS, he coded up a fake DOS command line interpreter. It looked like the usual DOS screen, black, with a "C:\>"... Any command you typed would return a "Bad command or file name." You type DIR and it says "Bad command or file name." It was in the autoexec file, so if you rebooted, that didn't help. Those kinds of pranks, simple but effective.
I'm mentioning this in a post about fast printers because a year or two ago, he devised a program that sent tons and tons of empty pages to the printer at high speed, as quickly as possible, so that people won't know what's going on. As luck would have it, he owned a laser printer identical to the office printer. He disassembled his own printer and disconnected the power switch so it would be "always on", and he installed a battery in some empty space inside that would allow it to keep running for a minute or two if unplugged, he installed a hidden screw that held the paper tray inside so you couldn't pull it out to "save the paper" (it's stuck!), and somehow he had it so when you try to print a legitimate file, it would just start spitting out the "blank" pages, without printing anything on them. The day before, he collected tons of "scratch" paper that had all kinds of meaningless junk printed on it, and placed it inside the paper tray. He made "the switch", putting his own printer in place of the office one. In the morning, the secretary tried to print something, and from her perception, it appeared that all the data got screwed up on the way to the printer. Random ascii characters were spewing out at high speed. Little did she know it was pre-printed. She tried to pull out the paper tray and when she realized it was stuck, she clicked "cancel printing" and when that didn't work, she turned off the power switch to the printer, and when that didn't work, she turned off the whole UPS that the computer and printer were plugged in to, and when that didn't work (she thought the UPS battery was still powering it), she unplugged the printer from the UPS... She had messed up the whole desk in a matter of minutes, and the printer kept spewing things out! She truly freaked out! But the best part was when the nerd admitted it was a prank... She actually smacked him! It was funny.
Great! Now I can feel so good that I am filling the landfills with yet more junk, which includes electronics, silicon, plastics, glass, and all kinds of chemicals, mixed in such a way as to make sure that they cannot be extracted for reuse at a disposal center. Isn't disposable technology wonderful? I think they need to bring back DiVX, not the file format, but the disposable DVD disc that requires permission through a phone line, and that had "silver" and "gold" subscribers that bought the priviledge of using the disc indefinitely, only to have the company go out of business and render their discs useless.
In fact, I think everything should be made disposable, and we should cancel all recycling programs, and heck, why not bulldoze all of the forests of the world, pile the timber up into mountains of dead wood, and set them on fire, while we're at it?
Environmentalism doesn't have to go to extremes and put us back in the caves like the cave men. But it should at least be moderate, and that means that while we can still use wood for paper, building, etc., and we can still make things that cannot be recycled effectively (yet), such as electronics, we should at least make tools, consumer products, and basically "stuff" that lasts a long time and provides a lot of use, not concentrate our efforts on making yet more disposable stuff to fill the earth with trash.
I have a better idea. Copyright on everything should extend for 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
This will allow corporations a better chance to exercise their right to eternal perpetually increasing profits.
First, Apple switches to Intel. Then, Sarge is released. Hell freezes over and pigs fly. And to make matters worse, Dvorak said that Apple's switch to Intel will harm Linux.
And now, we see that it has come to pass mere hours after that appeared on Slashdot!
Ah, the famous "Longtooth Post" is back! This one is a rerun, folks, but keep your eyes peeled, because I'll be releasing Version 3.0, the Next Generation Longtooth Post, within a week or so.
And now, let us commence, the "Longtooth Post", version 2.89:
Sources whom I consider accurate have told me that despite Microsoft's claims that Longtooth will be released by 2006 or 2007, the planned release date is actually late in 2019. Microsoft's secret goals for this version are:
To reduce the user's perception of the complexity of Windows.
To gain increased security from emerging threats, such as viruses, worms, spam, spyware, adware, malware, hackers, and phreakers, among others.
Microsoft will accomplish these goals through a variety of changes. First, Longtooth will no longer be based on the Windows NT design philosophy, as were Windows 2000 and XP. Instead, Microsoft will release MS-DOS 9.0 2003, a 64-bit multithreaded DOS written in VisualBASIC.Net, and Windows Longtooth will run on top of that. Also, Longtooth will contain more code changes than any previous version of Windows, both in the number of changed source lines of code (SLOCs) and in the percentage of the total Windows codebase changed. Tremendous numbers of new features are being implemented in completely new code.
More importantly, Microsoft employees are combing through the codebase, in a relentless search for code that is mature, stabilized, and proven. This search has proved difficult, but when found, such code will be marked for reimplementation. I'm told that most of this code will be reimplemented in VisualBASIC.NET, even if the prior version was written in another language, such as C or C++. Programmers making the new VisualBasic.NET code are not allowed to look at the code that already exists, so that fixes to known issues will not be known until well after the software is deployed to millions of users.
The reason for these changes is simple: Study after study conducted by Microsoft has proven that security through obscurity is the only way to go, especially in an operating system deployed to millions of users, with many instances running mission critical applications in finance, industry, government, and other sectors. Microsoft has identified that viruses, worms, spam, spyware, adware, malware, hackers, and phreakers are able to compromise Windows security because vulnerabilities in the code are known. By changing much of the codebase, especially the stablest and most proven parts, Microsoft will thwart the efforts of malicious programmers, as it will take time for them to find the new vulnerabilities in the unknown code.
To meet Microsoft's first goal of reducing the user's perception of the complexity of Windows, Microsoft will integrate a new technology, dubbed Microsoft Windows User Simplicity And Security Manager 2003, into Longtooth. This technology will hide all configuration settings from the user. All settings will be completely automatic, and the user will have no need to know or care what is under the hood. In reality, Longtooth will be the most complex version of Windows yet, with thousands of configuration settings controlling nearly every function of the operating system. The settings will be produced by discovery algorithms designed to automatically set a "sane" configuration. Since there will be no interface to modify any setting, the user will have no choice in his configuration, thus simplifying the user's perception of the system's complexity.
To meet the second goal of increased security, these settings will be scattered throughout the OS, its components, and in other areas of the file system. For example, Microsoft knows that viruses, worms, spam, spyware, adware, malware, hackers, and phreakers are interested in moving the icons on user desktops without the user's permission, so settings controlling the number and size of icons appearing on the desktop will be scattered throughout parts of the registry, batch files,.ini files, web
Funny thing. At my company, they're using Linux quite a lot and they don't even know it. Granted, this is an industrial company, but computers are used throughout the company. I slowly switched systems running Windows to Linux and FreeBSD over the years. Currently, all of our networking functions are based on these OSes, as are quite a few applications. While the desktops continue to run Windows, the employees don't know that their files are stored on one of several servers, for example. Even the boss doesn't know. He is always concerned about getting things shipped on time, ensuring high quality output, and that sort of thing, and he has no involvement in the geeky computer stuff, where I take care of everything. Little does he know that half of the computers in his company run free software!
The point is: Many companies say they're not switching or thinking about switching, and many of these same companies have no idea that they use this stuff. The people being asked are not necessarily the ones who know. And as I've shown, not only at my employer's company, but also at some other places I've moonlighted for as a poor-man's IT consultant of sorts, many functions can be switched over to Linux to gain higher robustness. The servers running this stuff can be in a closet somewhere. I install everything, back it up, turn it on, and then they forget that it exists, because it Just Works (tm).
So I'm not too sure that these survey results are meaningful.
Copyright should be abolished. That's all I can say.
Either that, or they should bring it back to the way it used to be, so that the rights of the public and the rights of the copyright holders are balanced. Things should go out of copyright after a good fifteen years or so.
There are many reasons this is so. There have been many books published at the turn of the 1900's that you can buy today, brand new. Books with ingenius information about how various mechanical systems were constructed, etc. This information would be all but missing if these books never went out of copyright, because it would be illegal to reprint them today without the permission of someone who is long dead or a publishing company that long got bought out, shut down, or simply disappeared.
Mechanical books are not the reason. The reason is that too much valuable information gets lost when copyright extends for practically forever. Games for the Atari that nobody cares about anymore and nobody makes a profit off anymore; Software made in the '70's or '80's that some companies are held hostage to because it would literally cost millions to replace them, but when they break down it costs ridiculous quantities in terms of lost uptime, lost production, etc.; books published in the same era that are out of print and impossible to find, yet you wish you could find a copy; television series from the same era that people would like to duplicate, sell, watch, enjoy, etc., but cannot legally do so, while the studio stands to make nothing from it because it has absolutely no interest in doing so... Many things like this that do exist and happen on a daily basis.
It's like this: You have tons of perfectly good food, but you don't want to eat it. So you're going to put it in the trash. Some hungry person comes up and begs for the food. You refuse to give it to him, but since you don't want it, you throw it away anyway. If you give it to him instead of throwing it away, you gain and lose nothing, but the hungry man eats. If you throw it away, you still gain and lose nothing, but the hungry man goes hungry. You don't gain or lose anything either way, but the overall economy benefits, and value is created. Therefore, copyright should expire after a reasonable (and SHORT, meaning 10 to 15 years MAX) amount of time, so that existing information can continue to generate value for the economy. Otherwise, the information is lost, forgotten, deleted, or otherwise destroyed, whether deliberately or simply as a matter of elapsing time, and what could definitely benefit a later generation will be forgotten. Imagine if the classic literature were lost in the same way that out-of-print literature from the 80's is going to be. Yes, you could say it's worthless, and that's why it's out of print. But people thought Moby Dick was worthless until years after the author's death! Copyright is a short sighted thing. It should be balanced.
This is unacceptable. But then, of course, somebody else will figure out how to crack this stuff.
In my opinion, what really needs to be done is this: Someone will design a newsletter of sorts. Call it the Cryptography Journal of Cryptography. (That title is actually an encoded message I designed last year. See if you can figure it out!) This would be an electronic newsletter. Each time something is cracked, the person writes a short "educational" article, sends it to a special site, and from there it will go to everybody else. With complete information on how to do it, even if some specific code is banned, the information will survive. Because they cannot necessarily ban the knowledge, only specific code that uses it.
This is unacceptable. In my opinion, the EU should fine Microsoft double their daily profits each day, and do the following with the money:
Distribute half of it directly to a variety of free software projects that will benefit all of Europe.
Use the other half to buy enormous advertising campaigns all over the world in favor of free software and against proprietary software in general and Microsoft software specifically.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the best oxymoron I've seen all day! Heck, I thought Microsoft Works was a good one. But now I realize that if you want to find out what an oxymoron is, you'll have a real problem, because if you look in the dictionary, the definition is: Effective C++.
Speaking of which, did you know that naive is not in the dictionary? You: Get a dictionary, find out what this 'closure' is.
I have them on a tabular sheet, slightly encoded in a unique method that I invented for myself. I store this sheet in the safe deposit box at the bank. I am very careful when transporting this information around, but other than that, if the crooks manage to get into the safe deposit box, I've got much bigger problems than some passwords to pr0n sites and such.
Where can you get Google stock for so cheap? I just paid $450 to a friend of mine, and I thought that was a bargain!
This article made it sound as if there were some way you could build a daughterboard with a P4 on it that could plug into where the G3 processor is supposed to go, and with some weird soldering hacks to the chipset, a couple of extra wires added to the motherboard, maybe some resistors, a capacitor or two, adding a pin to the processor, and cutting one of the pins off the RAM and routing it to another location, and all of these weird hacks would cause the Mac to run with a P4 processor.
But no, it's an x86 mb thrown into a Mac box. Really imaginative, guys. Typical Slashdot Slashcrap
I love Google. I worship Google. It is my life. My sun, my moon, my starlit sky. Without Google, I dwell in darkness. Google is everything to me. I am obsessed with Google, true, but there is nothing else for me. Google.
The best thing to do is what I did: Get yourself a T1 connection, which is not quite as expensive today as it used to be. Set up a domain name. Set up a mail server. The way you set it up is as follows: You have a primary account, which you actually check. This is a secret account, and you give it to nobody. Then, to each person who might one day send you email, you give a unique email address. So you'll have thousands of email addresses, one for each person who might send you an email. You set up SpamAssassin. You don't actually check all those inboxes. Instead, mail that gets in and passes through the spam filter is forwarded, so to speak, to your one true email address. If you find crap, you cancel the address that it came in from. This can all be done automatically, with a click of a button, if you set up all the scripts ahead of time. Then, bata bim, bata boom, no more spam.
Control does immediately require public outrage. See, if an anarchist organization ever manages to overthrow the government, they will immediately dissolve themselves, because otherwise they would be acting against their ideals.
I'm so glad I'm a woman. :-)
A million billion comedians out of a job and you try to make a joke.
There was a FUD article on one of the PHB-style IT news sites a year or two ago. This article said that new, more complex worms, were emerging, and that these worms could target systems across any processor architecture, any operating system, and with any software running therein, and that the worm could morph itself to get from one system to the next. What a bunch of hogwash. You would need a program that has the ability to search for and take advantages of vulnerabilities unknown at the time of writing (which, in itself, is a task for a very skilled human and outside the realm of computer software), and this program would need to be able to translate itself from one processor architecture instruction set to another as it moves from system to system. Even if it could be done, no 1337 h4x0rz is going to do it, because that much time and effort could be used more wisely. Most worms are written in a matter of hours, not based on years of research into the unknown.
You want a BSOD, eh? How about this: You build a gun that has an actuator attached to the serial port of a computer running Windows NT. The computer sends, via the serial port, a watchdog-style "keep alive" signal, say, every 100 microseconds. The actuator is designed such that once powered on, if the watchdog timer skips a single beat or delivers it too late, the gun is fired.
At this time, a volunteer (say, Gill Bates) would be tied to a chair and placed in front of this gun, while the Windows NT system runs Exchange and IIS, and while a user browses pr0n sites via Internet Explorer. This is, actually, quite a safe experiment, as we all know that Windows NT never crashes.
If Apple did have an Intel desktop, it would be quite interesting, as programs made for other x86 OSes could then be made to run on OSX. Imagine, for example, if there were a small compatibility layer, akin to what allows FreeBSD to run Linux binaries, that could run Linux x86 binaries on the Mac. Even cooler still would be the possibility of a Mac OS X compatibility layer in Linux that would allow, for instance, to run Mac-only applications in Linux. The same compatibility layer, made with knowledge of Darwin internals, could allow a Linux system to run the Aqua user interface and other Mac-specific codes. A Mac system on x86 would result in lots of cool hacks that allow you to "install" portions of OS X into your Linux distro via shell scripts that pick and choose the proper files and then bend, fold, spindle, and otherwise mutilate them.
I think that for these reasons, Apple has continuously used the incompatible (and more powerful) Motorola processors. It would not be good for their business if other OSes could run binaries made for their hardware/software combination. So, yes, the title of this article is somehow wrong.
A final resting place, eh? What is OpenRAW, a symlink to /dev/null?
This article should probably say: A place for people to search for RAW file documentations, not a final resting place... Come on guys, be a bit more imaginative!
RIP, RAW...
Who are "they"? Certain people who are in positions of control, especially teachers and those in academia, and some politicians on the political left. You don't have to believe me, but just pay attention, and be aware that most news and media has a leftist bias.
By the way, my best friend is Jewish. He's not exactly Einstein, so this study is clearly a bunch of hogwash.
Hmmm... All those doughnuts, M&Ms, oversweetened coffee, potato chips, and cokes he ate while hacking have really taken their toll... There's a lesson in there for you folks: Go outside once in a while and take a walk, or go for a jog, or to the beach, or go hiking, or bike riding... exercise, exercise, exercise. Or else you'll end up like this guy. World's biggest hacker... I hope he checks his cholesterol.
Google is truly a remarkable company. Innovation at its best... There's probably not a day in my life that I don't use Google at least ten times. I don't know where I'd be without it. One day, I aspire to work for Google myself... Keep up the good work, guys.
I'm mentioning this in a post about fast printers because a year or two ago, he devised a program that sent tons and tons of empty pages to the printer at high speed, as quickly as possible, so that people won't know what's going on. As luck would have it, he owned a laser printer identical to the office printer. He disassembled his own printer and disconnected the power switch so it would be "always on", and he installed a battery in some empty space inside that would allow it to keep running for a minute or two if unplugged, he installed a hidden screw that held the paper tray inside so you couldn't pull it out to "save the paper" (it's stuck!), and somehow he had it so when you try to print a legitimate file, it would just start spitting out the "blank" pages, without printing anything on them. The day before, he collected tons of "scratch" paper that had all kinds of meaningless junk printed on it, and placed it inside the paper tray. He made "the switch", putting his own printer in place of the office one. In the morning, the secretary tried to print something, and from her perception, it appeared that all the data got screwed up on the way to the printer. Random ascii characters were spewing out at high speed. Little did she know it was pre-printed. She tried to pull out the paper tray and when she realized it was stuck, she clicked "cancel printing" and when that didn't work, she turned off the power switch to the printer, and when that didn't work, she turned off the whole UPS that the computer and printer were plugged in to, and when that didn't work (she thought the UPS battery was still powering it), she unplugged the printer from the UPS... She had messed up the whole desk in a matter of minutes, and the printer kept spewing things out! She truly freaked out! But the best part was when the nerd admitted it was a prank... She actually smacked him! It was funny.
In fact, I think everything should be made disposable, and we should cancel all recycling programs, and heck, why not bulldoze all of the forests of the world, pile the timber up into mountains of dead wood, and set them on fire, while we're at it?
Environmentalism doesn't have to go to extremes and put us back in the caves like the cave men. But it should at least be moderate, and that means that while we can still use wood for paper, building, etc., and we can still make things that cannot be recycled effectively (yet), such as electronics, we should at least make tools, consumer products, and basically "stuff" that lasts a long time and provides a lot of use, not concentrate our efforts on making yet more disposable stuff to fill the earth with trash.
This will allow corporations a better chance to exercise their right to eternal perpetually increasing profits.
And now, we see that it has come to pass mere hours after that appeared on Slashdot!
I guess the Second Coming is happening tomorrow.
And now, let us commence, the "Longtooth Post", version 2.89:
Sources whom I consider accurate have told me that despite Microsoft's claims that Longtooth will be released by 2006 or 2007, the planned release date is actually late in 2019. Microsoft's secret goals for this version are:
Microsoft will accomplish these goals through a variety of changes. First, Longtooth will no longer be based on the Windows NT design philosophy, as were Windows 2000 and XP. Instead, Microsoft will release MS-DOS 9.0 2003, a 64-bit multithreaded DOS written in VisualBASIC.Net, and Windows Longtooth will run on top of that. Also, Longtooth will contain more code changes than any previous version of Windows, both in the number of changed source lines of code (SLOCs) and in the percentage of the total Windows codebase changed. Tremendous numbers of new features are being implemented in completely new code.
More importantly, Microsoft employees are combing through the codebase, in a relentless search for code that is mature, stabilized, and proven. This search has proved difficult, but when found, such code will be marked for reimplementation. I'm told that most of this code will be reimplemented in VisualBASIC.NET, even if the prior version was written in another language, such as C or C++. Programmers making the new VisualBasic.NET code are not allowed to look at the code that already exists, so that fixes to known issues will not be known until well after the software is deployed to millions of users.
The reason for these changes is simple: Study after study conducted by Microsoft has proven that security through obscurity is the only way to go, especially in an operating system deployed to millions of users, with many instances running mission critical applications in finance, industry, government, and other sectors. Microsoft has identified that viruses, worms, spam, spyware, adware, malware, hackers, and phreakers are able to compromise Windows security because vulnerabilities in the code are known. By changing much of the codebase, especially the stablest and most proven parts, Microsoft will thwart the efforts of malicious programmers, as it will take time for them to find the new vulnerabilities in the unknown code.
To meet Microsoft's first goal of reducing the user's perception of the complexity of Windows, Microsoft will integrate a new technology, dubbed Microsoft Windows User Simplicity And Security Manager 2003, into Longtooth. This technology will hide all configuration settings from the user. All settings will be completely automatic, and the user will have no need to know or care what is under the hood. In reality, Longtooth will be the most complex version of Windows yet, with thousands of configuration settings controlling nearly every function of the operating system. The settings will be produced by discovery algorithms designed to automatically set a "sane" configuration. Since there will be no interface to modify any setting, the user will have no choice in his configuration, thus simplifying the user's perception of the system's complexity.
To meet the second goal of increased security, these settings will be scattered throughout the OS, its components, and in other areas of the file system. For example, Microsoft knows that viruses, worms, spam, spyware, adware, malware, hackers, and phreakers are interested in moving the icons on user desktops without the user's permission, so settings controlling the number and size of icons appearing on the desktop will be scattered throughout parts of the registry, batch files, .ini files, web
The point is: Many companies say they're not switching or thinking about switching, and many of these same companies have no idea that they use this stuff. The people being asked are not necessarily the ones who know. And as I've shown, not only at my employer's company, but also at some other places I've moonlighted for as a poor-man's IT consultant of sorts, many functions can be switched over to Linux to gain higher robustness. The servers running this stuff can be in a closet somewhere. I install everything, back it up, turn it on, and then they forget that it exists, because it Just Works (tm).
So I'm not too sure that these survey results are meaningful.
Either that, or they should bring it back to the way it used to be, so that the rights of the public and the rights of the copyright holders are balanced. Things should go out of copyright after a good fifteen years or so.
There are many reasons this is so. There have been many books published at the turn of the 1900's that you can buy today, brand new. Books with ingenius information about how various mechanical systems were constructed, etc. This information would be all but missing if these books never went out of copyright, because it would be illegal to reprint them today without the permission of someone who is long dead or a publishing company that long got bought out, shut down, or simply disappeared.
Mechanical books are not the reason. The reason is that too much valuable information gets lost when copyright extends for practically forever. Games for the Atari that nobody cares about anymore and nobody makes a profit off anymore; Software made in the '70's or '80's that some companies are held hostage to because it would literally cost millions to replace them, but when they break down it costs ridiculous quantities in terms of lost uptime, lost production, etc.; books published in the same era that are out of print and impossible to find, yet you wish you could find a copy; television series from the same era that people would like to duplicate, sell, watch, enjoy, etc., but cannot legally do so, while the studio stands to make nothing from it because it has absolutely no interest in doing so... Many things like this that do exist and happen on a daily basis.
It's like this: You have tons of perfectly good food, but you don't want to eat it. So you're going to put it in the trash. Some hungry person comes up and begs for the food. You refuse to give it to him, but since you don't want it, you throw it away anyway. If you give it to him instead of throwing it away, you gain and lose nothing, but the hungry man eats. If you throw it away, you still gain and lose nothing, but the hungry man goes hungry. You don't gain or lose anything either way, but the overall economy benefits, and value is created. Therefore, copyright should expire after a reasonable (and SHORT, meaning 10 to 15 years MAX) amount of time, so that existing information can continue to generate value for the economy. Otherwise, the information is lost, forgotten, deleted, or otherwise destroyed, whether deliberately or simply as a matter of elapsing time, and what could definitely benefit a later generation will be forgotten. Imagine if the classic literature were lost in the same way that out-of-print literature from the 80's is going to be. Yes, you could say it's worthless, and that's why it's out of print. But people thought Moby Dick was worthless until years after the author's death! Copyright is a short sighted thing. It should be balanced.
Either that, or abolished altogether.
In my opinion, what really needs to be done is this: Someone will design a newsletter of sorts. Call it the Cryptography Journal of Cryptography. (That title is actually an encoded message I designed last year. See if you can figure it out!) This would be an electronic newsletter. Each time something is cracked, the person writes a short "educational" article, sends it to a special site, and from there it will go to everybody else. With complete information on how to do it, even if some specific code is banned, the information will survive. Because they cannot necessarily ban the knowledge, only specific code that uses it.
- Distribute half of it directly to a variety of free software projects that will benefit all of Europe.
- Use the other half to buy enormous advertising campaigns all over the world in favor of free software and against proprietary software in general and Microsoft software specifically.
That would be an acceptable alternative.