It's SGML, not XML. Unless you insist on doing it the hard way with a real SGML parser, I can't see what's wrong with using your own hand-rolled one. As you've already recognized yourself, it shouldn't be too hard.
A lot gets wrong with a hand-rolled one: SGML is a huge standard and there are a number of constructs that can be used while still adhering to the DTD.
A better suggestion would be to use e.g. J. Clark's superb-complete sp SGML parser (nsgmls) to read the DTDs and parse the SGML files: nsgmls is able to dump the resulting document tree in easily parsable linear stream (conceptually in SAX fashion).
Re:Finally ready for the main stream
on
TCPA Support in Linux
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It really makes me happy to see that Linux distributers are finally seeing the light and providing the community with things we need in an Operating System. Hopefully this will lead to other advances in the wonderful world of DRM.
It has been my understanding that trusted computing equals not DRM automatically. Trusted computing is initially neutral technology: the barriers are built up only after the chip gets to choose a side. You can let Microsoft turn your PC into a DRM environment using TCPA's technology but that's the Microsoftish / {MP,RI,??}AA'ish approach. You can also use TCPA to turn your Linux box into a hardware-reinforced installation of your choice. If TCPA was widespread, you could for example control how the bastard big co. digitally uses, views and copies personal information when you buy something on their website.
...on why anti-spyware is different from browsers or office suites (both of which MS has gained a monopoly):
Microsoft might have an opinion or two about which software should be considered "spyware" (a competitor's product that "happens" to end up on their spyware list for a few critical months) and "not spyware" (Microsoft's or their partners' products that talk back home);
The extreme example would be that Microsoft Windows natively allowed installation of "approved" and digitally signed software only: an anti-spyware program is essentially just that but in a disguise, and less radical. The former would be shot down by monopoly legislation today, but there might be a time when installing non-approved non-signed non-bundled software would be considered "hacking" and be possibly forbidden except for authorized retailers;
Microsoft has even less incentive to actually fix any of their problems now: it'll be better PR for them if they systematically squash each symptom (e.g. a trojan) instead of rooting out the problems (e.g. IE holes).
Also, since the anti-spyware will be branded by Microsoft, it might help in creating a notion that there is always spyware everywhere regardless of the operating system or Windows version, just like every car gets dusty over time. That would be so, because if Microsoft could stop spyware in the first place they of course would do that, just like car manufacturers would produce cars that don't gather dust or need washing, if they only could. So spyware isn't Microsoft's fault, just like dirty cars aren't GM's fault. Right?
Mozilla is for the power users who want to tweak every portion of their browser. I for one hope no one ever replaces Mozilla with Firefox, because although I like Firefox, I don't enjoy being restricted on what I can tweak.
Exactly. You always have about:config, but that's as bad user interface as there can be for things you really need to and want to change.
More importantly, I like the Mozilla suite better because it's monolithic: when the browser and the mail client come from the same runtime, the overall experience is faster and smoother. I tried running TB and FF concurrently, but they were slower together, didn't interoperate as nicely and they lacked all the additional features that Mozilla has on top of Navigator and MailNews.
And last, I have a working Mozilla config dating back many years. It's all there, I don't want to reconfigure and re-tune everything again.
I don't think Vorbis' tiny advantage in sound quality (which would be easily overcome just by using a higher bit rate) outweighs MP3's standardization. I mean argue all you want about open-source, about patents or whatever, I'm talking about practical usage here. I can buy any device out there - even Sony, soon - and know that it plays MP3 files. I don't know why you'd use anything else given how close most of these codecs are to each other.
I thought that even the 128kbit/s mp3's in the mid-90's when all this started were about good enough. I usually encode music to whatever bitrate is the default for the given encoder, as it's good enough for me. Usually I just say oggenc * or something -- it works for me.
The reason I switched from mp3s to ogg a few years ago is both philosophical and practical. First, I appreciate freedom, all in copyright-wise, license-wise and patent-wise. If I can encode all my music with a software and algorithms that I'm liberated to use freely, I certainly have no reason to support non-free algorithms, even if I can use them beer-freely for personal purposes. Secondly, if technology is encumbered, you never know when things change. It happened to GIFs. Nor you'll find an mp3 encoder in the base (free) Debian distribution at all! I want to be entitled to encode and decode my music also ten years from now, hence I require that the codec software can be freely re-ported and re-written for future platforms.
Sure, some greedy corporation might sco the Ogg Vorbis project, claiming it breaks against their patents. But it's still another barrier, and litigation is always a risk, even with commercial products so starting from a supposedly clean table is far better anyway.
Awww, I really hope IronPython evolves into something usable. (I miss Jython already, as it seems to be mostly dead.) Or that a good Common Lisp implementation turns into GNG/CLisp# (GNG == GNU or Not GNU).
I'm not particularly interested in C#, as far as I know there's nothing new in that language.
Then again, I'm somehow thrilled by the CLR and the libraries. I feel that'll be a major step forward in terms of a programming environment. I sometimes see it as the i386 of the future: a common machine to write programs for but just way higher level than machine language. It was about time: we've been compiling C and other languages to machine code for decades. It's about a time to upgrade to "future hardware" that'll handle all basics from memory management and GC to run-time optimization.
There will be Gnome# libraries and Windows Forms# libraries, as we now have Gnome and Windows. However, they'd share much more in common than their i386 counterparts. I believe the CLR runtime environment will eventually be what JRE never achieved. Java failed because of the JRE was tied to Java, and often vice versa. It's like bundling a processor family to a specific assembly syntax: "sure, but what'd be the point?".
Please note that I don't consider posting this touting MS technologies. I've seen quite a many things: I very rarely get excited about "new" software or technology. In fact, even CLR isn't new in technological sense: the new thing is that it has a huge probability of rolling over to everywhere. It's not only pushed out by Microsoft but also adopted by FOSS folks (Mono, Gnome#, Gtk#, QT#..)
I've been dreaming of a Python bytecode/Lisp bytecode desktop where all applications would be written for a virtual machine, and possibly JITted to machine code if ever needed. With the advent of CLR and Python#/CLisp#, and access to one's favorite widget sets, that'd be closer to reality than ever on a general-purpose PC. (Since there used to be these dedicated Lisp machines back in time..)
Here in Canada, cars sometimes rust before they wear out their engine. That's the consequence of having 4 REAL seasons.
This begins with offtopic, but since I'm a great fan of affording to buy durable items with maximized life-span, I decided to throw in my two cents.
About the lasting of cars: especially if you drive good cars that are built to last, the engine usually doesn't fail (unless improperly serviced). With a good car I mean a recognized (usually) European car like Mercedes-Benz, Saab, Volvo etc. which are known to hit half-a-million kilometers more than a few times. My experiences are limited, but AFAIK most cars start scaring the owner after 100 thousand miles in the odometer.
Now, cars have parts that wear (timing belt, ball joints, brake pads, rubber bushings, distributor, charger etc.) but by replacing those (which is called "maintenance", for the less educated), a good car, like above, can easily handle 300-400 thousand miles. If I was buying a new car, I'd expect it to be usable for 15 years or so for all the money. (Which, probably, is why I usually don't bother to invest in a new car.)
However, if only things were that rosy. Like the parent said, if you live up North, rust often does get in your way before any technical failure. You could spend USD600-1000 for a good rust prevention service, but even that isn't everything. In Europe, some countries sow _salt_ on the roads in winter time to prevent icing. Now that really puts the cars in bed with corrosion.
I've seen new cars getting rust only after 3-4 years of use. Usually on the bottom side, which you can't wax. One could even expect _some_ rust in cars older than 10 years or so. But less than five years of use shouldn't be anywhere near visible!
Now back to the topic: computers are in a much better position here: they're operated indoors with favorable humidity etc. The lifespan of a general purpose desktop box is far less than I've had my components last, physically. I sold my -90 Amiga 3000 a year ago and it was in fully working condition: I had only cleaned the motherboard a few times. My trusty 486 kept going until 2002 when the memory chips failed: I couldn't find any new memory chips of that age (nearly 10 years ago) for a reasonable price, so it was (sadly) more economical to dump the working motherboard and components in favor of newer, and better supported, hardware.
They are doing to us IT workers what they did to advanced, capital-intensive manufacturing jobs in America (as opposed to "assembly jobs"): they spirited it away to Asia. And we could have stopped it with trade barriers. But they sold us on neoliberal trade policies with $24 worth of trinkets.
But isn't this how free markets work? I'm not an economist and I'm not generally biased to right but isn't that just what global economy is?
Production moves to the place where it's most economical to do. This is good in overall economy since the market is global, even if it is bad for a certain part of the world. Not paying extra for producing something leaves the saved money for other investments. Raising trade barriers would distort the markets, yielding lower overall gain even if a certain part of the world would gain more now.
The problem is that there seem to be many people who want a global market with their own rules, not the rules of a free market. They want to ensure that they won't ever lose, that it's always the others that lose (developing countries, other low-economy countries with poor standard of living). But it's not a free market anymore, if such intents realize.
Call me old school, but remember back in the day when opening e-mail was ok, and that executable attachments were what we watched out for? Images were ok, MIDI files were ok, and a bit later, even MP3 files were ok.
Call me old school but before somebody invented attachments, MIME parts, and HTML messages, everything was cool. If you wanted to include a binary file, you'd uuencode it and include the text in the message (or use base64): point being that no email client didn't try to execute anything in the email. It was just plain text and plain text if viewed as such can't contain viruses[1]. If you uudecoded (or had your email client uudecode) the file yourself and then shot your feet manually, fine. But it wasn't tied to some semi-automatic receiving/previewing/clicking/opening of an email.
[1] Except that I've been waiting for a UTF-8 text decoding bug to appear in Windows. UTF-8 is trivial, but not that trivial.
This is not the same as a filesystem itself being implemented in an easily searchable fashion, getting rid of the static directory tree structures altogether, or just having it as an option for backwards compatibility as one of the properties.
Now, that's all up to the implementation. It doesn't matter if it's a native filesystem or a bunch of shell scripts using thousands of text files as the database, on top of N other hacks served over a Python based userspace VFS module implementation, as long as it works. In other words, we can always improve and rework the implementation later, when more scalability, speed or beauty is required.
The big problem is in the shifting of the desktop paradigm. Most people are so used to the way computers work now, and they're reluctant enough to learn that it'd take another decade to re-teach them. Conversely, there are also the nerds who absolutely want to know where their data is actually stored, instead of accepting a mere result set of a database. They want to run Unix scripts on the files, so the abstraction must be backwards compatible with the notion of traditional path names. (E.g. "grep frobnicated/sysdb/files/of/type/tex/*")
Even the current desktop paradigm is unintentionally abused: many still have problems with creating file system hierarchies, putting all files to the same flat directory -- or desktop directory. A "more intuitive" file system might help these people, or just let them not take advantage of a more sophisticated system instead.
Roughly, most people who can organize things can do it already and those who don't, will always fail (overstatement intended). Since file access is such a fundamental part of any computer user interface, this thing must be really thought of and weaved into the whole operating system, rather than just writing a new FS and going for the shortest route to enable the new features in traditional user interfaces.
If you write your comment more than an hour after the thread was created, noone will read you. Everybody's moved on to the next topic.
I do that all the time. I rarely get modded up, but I never write to get karma: I write if I have something to say. (And that something may not always be particularly insightful or witty -- more often misunderstood or just ignored.)
But, this is not all of it.
Most of the comments I write to Slashdot or of the posts I send out to Usenet never get sent. Maybe a tenth of what I write ever gets submitted. (Or posted, if on Usenet.)
Why is that, then?
It's not particularly about not caring much about what others would think of my article rather than the fact that writing simply helps me think. As P.G. wrote, writing forces you to think in more detail than just, well, thinking. When I have a need to reply to someone it usually means that actually I feel there's something about that issue that I haven't clarified enough to myself, yet. It may not mean not having enough knowledge (sometimes that too) but having not worked my brain to gain enough insight on the issue to satisfy my curiosity.
Having finished the comment or posting, the need to reply disappears as I've discussed through the issue with myself. Being an introverted soul, there's no need to finalize the session and post it out to the world.
It'd be logical for me to close the window now, but perhaps just because of that I'll do the exact opposite. Perhaps someone similar reads this one day?
Patents are meant to protect the investment required to create a brand-new thing and the ability to recoup those costs. That fundamental concept can still apply to software, if not in its present broken form.
Very true. The ultimate motivation is to support development of technology and sciences. Software development has one thing different: techniques are easy and cheap to implement (hacking for a while instead of building new machinery to use the patented manufacturing technique) and software lives short: after the first invention, a company must make new inventions in a couple of years already, just to maintain the lead position in the market.
Because applying software techniques is easy and cheap, it gets normally done a lot. This is new. Copying, modifying and redistributing itself greatly supports development of technology and sciences (ultimate motivation).
Because new software inventions get out-invented with rival techniques in few years or sometimes even in months, the ROI must be made very quickly. The growth of the ROI quickly goes down after the invention has lost its 'edge' on the market, so the invention would technically lose most of its value in that time. To support development of technology and sciences, it'd be best to invalidate the patent at that point: doing so wouldn't lessen the original incentive of the inventor to innovate, as he has already got most of the money he'll ever get. (If he's allowed to continue holding the patent, he'll get a little more money but the overall development becomes stalled which contradicts the ultimate motivation.)
Therefore, I propose that software patents should be licensed in two ways:
Licensing a software patent would require either the licensee to GPL their source code, or pay for the right to not do so. This leads to two clans:
Closed-source software vendor would need to pay license fees and get access to the technology, as they can make their own software better which pays them the license fees and continuing development => it supports the ultimate motivation.
Open-source software would need to 'pay' the licensor by keeping the source code open. The value of OSS is in the software itself. The lesser incentive of one vendor/author to innovate and patent technology (by not getting paid in money) would be compensated by the overall number of further inventions made by the community that duplicates, enhances and reuses the source code. Again, this strongly supports the ultimate motivation.
I don't have internet at home, so I occasionally print out copies of interesting articles on dead trees at work and read them home when I have more time. And just like regular laptops, the trees seem to survive my toilet, too. (That's probably because they're already dead.)
Now, I often reuse the pages for writing down shopping lists so I've more than once found myself diverted to reading an article (or a piece of it, rather..) in the super market when I was supposed to check the list for any remaining unpicked items.
I realize RMS has good intentions but I don't see any point to this. It's a BIOS. What good would making it GNU/BIOS do? More importantly, what good will it do for the motherboard companies? The current system works fine, they will need incentive to switch over to something new.
With all the DRM-lock hype, will we take a "general purpose computer" for granted after a few years? If we're only sold special purpose multimedia computers, business computers and communication computers?
Given a few years, are you expected to be able to modify and hack on your not-a-computer but a-computing-appliance? Minding the copyright controls, hacking hardware or commercializing hacking tools might be as illegal as modchipping PlayStations in the UK currently.
Example: similarly to selling non-general purpose gaming computers (XBox), MS could stop selling Windows for "general purpose computers" and only license it to "advanced multimedia and business computer(tm)" manufacturers. The strategy would be enforced with the latest whizbang-DRMized TCPA BIOS. Want to buy general computing hardware after that? It'll be as easy and cheap as buying a BeBox or Amiga ten years ago.
Enhanced SMTP better known as ESMTP is not hypothetical. It's out there, it works, mail clients know about it. It's optional and most ISP's I've used don't have strong authentication.
How about a PKI authenticated mail protocol that only allows the message sent to one recipient per each successful authentication? This would
force a spammer to do N million bignum computations (e.g. a simple RSA challenge) per each N million spam sent;
form a network of mail servers that support PK authentication which could be used to:
reject mail from unknown servers;
support for undeniable and unforgeable tracing of return-paths (in case someone sent spam);
support an automatically propagating revocation scheme to block out servers that have gone "bad".
These have been speculated before, but they'd nail primarily at the two worst problems of email: capability to handle a large volume (of spam) and the lack of any "trust" network.
Seriously, though, this is really about elitism. What's important is the quality of the result, not the language used.
The language typically has a say about part of the quality of the result. That comes from the fact that some languages+environments attract people who can write quality code, other languages and environments are used by the rest of the people.
Sure there are people who don't mind the tools as long as they get paid for the job, but there's a minority of them among those who can write quality code. If you love hacking, you want the best tools to help you hack better and faster.
AFAIK they make most of their money by selling licenses/customized versions for embed systems or to be integrated. That goes more to the "non-commodity" category, though you're right about that (a minority of) people has indeed bought Opera for their desktops, too.
Still, Opera is pretty much the *only* browser vendor viably in business, so we're not talking about a notable market here.
Yep, Microsoft is really unable to make a living out of Windows and Office.... Get real.
But he's true. Microsoft would have a hard time selling commodities like O/S + bundled software, Office etc. if we were to start from scratch, without the huge momentum and inertia involved in the 10 years of monopolist tradition of using vendor-locking MS products. There are few competitors in commercial desktop O/S + Office department not only because MS is practicing tough monopolism but also because the market has stagnated, saturated. When was the last time you waited for the next version of your favorite word processor, like in the 80's/90's? Now people implement O/S's and office suites in their spare time and they make it open source.
Do you remember when Netscape was selling their browser? I guess they made a few dimes during the first years but nobody does make money off web browsers anymore, not even from companies. Same goes for making web pages: only a little money is paid for writing HTML, unlike in the late 90's. Web and HTML are commodities. These days companies buy meta software like a CMS instead of web pages. They buy customized software solutions instead of retail products. They don't buy Apache or IIS (if both were on sale as separate products) but a web application framework and custom development on that.
OSS fits the scheme perfectly, where companies only want to pay for their part and get standard software on the basis of their solution. CSS fits in less perfectly but it's still drifting towards the same situation, anyway.
Microsoft is encrypting the data that SQL Server stores so that WHEN someone breaks in to the server they cannot steal the data. Technically the interesting thing is that they have to encrypt the data keys in the indexes as well.
So how does this differ from running the database on an encrypted device (loop, dmcrypt)?
While the system is running, you'll need access to the unencrypted data anyway. If the SQL server can access it, the attacker can also. (I doubt a DBA would like to type passphrases every five minutes.)
Now, perhaps a shady DRM scheme can theoretically isolate the SQL server so that other processes have limited access to the data on the disk or memory. Even that still doesn't help a bit as soon as the attacker exploits the latest MSSQL security hole and runs hiz c0d3 in SQL server context, or breaks through another hole and runs a database client application directly -- at least DB administrators must have regular access to the tables and contents anyway.
It's an interesting thing, nevertheless. It's just not very clear (as of yet, after RTFA) that what issues the scheme will address, how well and what will be the tradeoff.
I haven't noticed a need for CSS2 and PNG but SVG comes via a plugin. I don't see why you think that MS should support it natively.
Because SVG can be embed into XHTML directly. SVG is not only yet another vector graphics format, it's a language for describing vector graphics within the document's markup. It's similar to MathML in concept, just that it's graphics primitives that you can use in documents and script them like any DOM elements. So, a plugin greatly limits the power of SVG.
Get a Mozilla SVG build and try it out with some sample documents (Mozilla's SVG is incomplete and buggy, but you'll get the idea).
Electronic formats are good, and hard-copies are good too. What really needs to happen is that the cost of the textbooks, the hardcopy textbooks, need to come down by at least 50%.
Print the PDFs two-sided and put them in binders. Works like a charm and doesn't cost that much, if you have access to a good laser printer.
don't use msie, ms-mediaplayer, outlook, outlook-express, kazaa, morpheous, or any other software that's well known to invite adware/spyware. Plenty of free alternatives to all that.
keep a linux livecd handy.
delete all spam before while it's still on the server (I use ultrafunk popcorn).
never open email attachments from unknown sources.
Do that, and you won't have much trouble. Probabably something I'm forgeting, but that's a good start.
A good start? To me, that looks like a long list, and it's even longer for random folks. It's also the reason that I suspect it'll be a matter of few years until consumers' computers will become "trusted". People are facing even a worse computing experience than a decade ago. It used to be mostly about a crashing and tad slow Windows installation.
No, "trusted" computing won't root out the security problems. It'll actually make them saturate the market as any competitors shrink to a marginal. I bet that market for certified computer security instructors will emerge in the following years.
Slashdot Mirror
A lot gets wrong with a hand-rolled one: SGML is a huge standard and there are a number of constructs that can be used while still adhering to the DTD.
A better suggestion would be to use e.g. J. Clark's superb-complete sp SGML parser (nsgmls) to read the DTDs and parse the SGML files: nsgmls is able to dump the resulting document tree in easily parsable linear stream (conceptually in SAX fashion).
It has been my understanding that trusted computing equals not DRM automatically. Trusted computing is initially neutral technology: the barriers are built up only after the chip gets to choose a side. You can let Microsoft turn your PC into a DRM environment using TCPA's technology but that's the Microsoftish / {MP,RI,??}AA'ish approach. You can also use TCPA to turn your Linux box into a hardware-reinforced installation of your choice. If TCPA was widespread, you could for example control how the bastard big co. digitally uses, views and copies personal information when you buy something on their website.
I don't think Vorbis' tiny advantage in sound quality (which would be easily overcome just by using a higher bit rate) outweighs MP3's standardization. I mean argue all you want about open-source, about patents or whatever, I'm talking about practical usage here. I can buy any device out there - even Sony, soon - and know that it plays MP3 files. I don't know why you'd use anything else given how close most of these codecs are to each other.
I thought that even the 128kbit/s mp3's in the mid-90's when all this started were about good enough. I usually encode music to whatever bitrate is the default for the given encoder, as it's good enough for me. Usually I just say oggenc * or something -- it works for me.
The reason I switched from mp3s to ogg a few years ago is both philosophical and practical. First, I appreciate freedom, all in copyright-wise, license-wise and patent-wise. If I can encode all my music with a software and algorithms that I'm liberated to use freely, I certainly have no reason to support non-free algorithms, even if I can use them beer-freely for personal purposes. Secondly, if technology is encumbered, you never know when things change. It happened to GIFs. Nor you'll find an mp3 encoder in the base (free) Debian distribution at all! I want to be entitled to encode and decode my music also ten years from now, hence I require that the codec software can be freely re-ported and re-written for future platforms.
Sure, some greedy corporation might sco the Ogg Vorbis project, claiming it breaks against their patents. But it's still another barrier, and litigation is always a risk, even with commercial products so starting from a supposedly clean table is far better anyway.
Awww, I really hope IronPython evolves into something usable. (I miss Jython already, as it seems to be mostly dead.) Or that a good Common Lisp implementation turns into GNG/CLisp# (GNG == GNU or Not GNU).
I'm not particularly interested in C#, as far as I know there's nothing new in that language.
Then again, I'm somehow thrilled by the CLR and the libraries. I feel that'll be a major step forward in terms of a programming environment. I sometimes see it as the i386 of the future: a common machine to write programs for but just way higher level than machine language. It was about time: we've been compiling C and other languages to machine code for decades. It's about a time to upgrade to "future hardware" that'll handle all basics from memory management and GC to run-time optimization.
There will be Gnome# libraries and Windows Forms# libraries, as we now have Gnome and Windows. However, they'd share much more in common than their i386 counterparts. I believe the CLR runtime environment will eventually be what JRE never achieved. Java failed because of the JRE was tied to Java, and often vice versa. It's like bundling a processor family to a specific assembly syntax: "sure, but what'd be the point?".
Please note that I don't consider posting this touting MS technologies. I've seen quite a many things: I very rarely get excited about "new" software or technology. In fact, even CLR isn't new in technological sense: the new thing is that it has a huge probability of rolling over to everywhere. It's not only pushed out by Microsoft but also adopted by FOSS folks (Mono, Gnome#, Gtk#, QT#..)
I've been dreaming of a Python bytecode/Lisp bytecode desktop where all applications would be written for a virtual machine, and possibly JITted to machine code if ever needed. With the advent of CLR and Python#/CLisp#, and access to one's favorite widget sets, that'd be closer to reality than ever on a general-purpose PC. (Since there used to be these dedicated Lisp machines back in time..)
But isn't this how free markets work? I'm not an economist and I'm not generally biased to right but isn't that just what global economy is?
Production moves to the place where it's most economical to do. This is good in overall economy since the market is global, even if it is bad for a certain part of the world. Not paying extra for producing something leaves the saved money for other investments. Raising trade barriers would distort the markets, yielding lower overall gain even if a certain part of the world would gain more now.
The problem is that there seem to be many people who want a global market with their own rules, not the rules of a free market. They want to ensure that they won't ever lose, that it's always the others that lose (developing countries, other low-economy countries with poor standard of living). But it's not a free market anymore, if such intents realize.
Call me old school, but remember back in the day when opening e-mail was ok, and that executable attachments were what we watched out for? Images were ok, MIDI files were ok, and a bit later, even MP3 files were ok.
Call me old school but before somebody invented attachments, MIME parts, and HTML messages, everything was cool. If you wanted to include a binary file, you'd uuencode it and include the text in the message (or use base64): point being that no email client didn't try to execute anything in the email. It was just plain text and plain text if viewed as such can't contain viruses[1]. If you uudecoded (or had your email client uudecode) the file yourself and then shot your feet manually, fine. But it wasn't tied to some semi-automatic receiving/previewing/clicking/opening of an email.
[1] Except that I've been waiting for a UTF-8 text decoding bug to appear in Windows. UTF-8 is trivial, but not that trivial.
I emailed the editors to tell 'em it was a dupe, but I guess I wass too late. The original story had better info.
Maybe we should ask the editors to start up a new section called dupes.slashdot.org to better let people to ignore them :)
Following the insanity of /., that'd probably soon be the place where we'd actually get to read all the real news.
Now, that's all up to the implementation. It doesn't matter if it's a native filesystem or a bunch of shell scripts using thousands of text files as the database, on top of N other hacks served over a Python based userspace VFS module implementation, as long as it works. In other words, we can always improve and rework the implementation later, when more scalability, speed or beauty is required.
The big problem is in the shifting of the desktop paradigm. Most people are so used to the way computers work now, and they're reluctant enough to learn that it'd take another decade to re-teach them. Conversely, there are also the nerds who absolutely want to know where their data is actually stored, instead of accepting a mere result set of a database. They want to run Unix scripts on the files, so the abstraction must be backwards compatible with the notion of traditional path names. (E.g. "grep frobnicated /sysdb/files/of/type/tex/*")
Even the current desktop paradigm is unintentionally abused: many still have problems with creating file system hierarchies, putting all files to the same flat directory -- or desktop directory. A "more intuitive" file system might help these people, or just let them not take advantage of a more sophisticated system instead.
Roughly, most people who can organize things can do it already and those who don't, will always fail (overstatement intended). Since file access is such a fundamental part of any computer user interface, this thing must be really thought of and weaved into the whole operating system, rather than just writing a new FS and going for the shortest route to enable the new features in traditional user interfaces.
I do that all the time. I rarely get modded up, but I never write to get karma: I write if I have something to say. (And that something may not always be particularly insightful or witty -- more often misunderstood or just ignored.)
But, this is not all of it.
Most of the comments I write to Slashdot or of the posts I send out to Usenet never get sent. Maybe a tenth of what I write ever gets submitted. (Or posted, if on Usenet.)
Why is that, then?
It's not particularly about not caring much about what others would think of my article rather than the fact that writing simply helps me think. As P.G. wrote, writing forces you to think in more detail than just, well, thinking. When I have a need to reply to someone it usually means that actually I feel there's something about that issue that I haven't clarified enough to myself, yet. It may not mean not having enough knowledge (sometimes that too) but having not worked my brain to gain enough insight on the issue to satisfy my curiosity.
Having finished the comment or posting, the need to reply disappears as I've discussed through the issue with myself. Being an introverted soul, there's no need to finalize the session and post it out to the world.
It'd be logical for me to close the window now, but perhaps just because of that I'll do the exact opposite. Perhaps someone similar reads this one day?
Patents are meant to protect the investment required to create a brand-new thing and the ability to recoup those costs. That fundamental concept can still apply to software, if not in its present broken form.
Very true. The ultimate motivation is to support development of technology and sciences. Software development has one thing different: techniques are easy and cheap to implement (hacking for a while instead of building new machinery to use the patented manufacturing technique) and software lives short: after the first invention, a company must make new inventions in a couple of years already, just to maintain the lead position in the market.
Because applying software techniques is easy and cheap, it gets normally done a lot. This is new. Copying, modifying and redistributing itself greatly supports development of technology and sciences (ultimate motivation).
Because new software inventions get out-invented with rival techniques in few years or sometimes even in months, the ROI must be made very quickly. The growth of the ROI quickly goes down after the invention has lost its 'edge' on the market, so the invention would technically lose most of its value in that time. To support development of technology and sciences, it'd be best to invalidate the patent at that point: doing so wouldn't lessen the original incentive of the inventor to innovate, as he has already got most of the money he'll ever get. (If he's allowed to continue holding the patent, he'll get a little more money but the overall development becomes stalled which contradicts the ultimate motivation.)
Therefore, I propose that software patents should be licensed in two ways:
Licensing a software patent would require either the licensee to GPL their source code, or pay for the right to not do so. This leads to two clans:
Closed-source software vendor would need to pay license fees and get access to the technology, as they can make their own software better which pays them the license fees and continuing development => it supports the ultimate motivation.
Open-source software would need to 'pay' the licensor by keeping the source code open. The value of OSS is in the software itself. The lesser incentive of one vendor/author to innovate and patent technology (by not getting paid in money) would be compensated by the overall number of further inventions made by the community that duplicates, enhances and reuses the source code. Again, this strongly supports the ultimate motivation.
Goes a bit indirect, but...
I don't have internet at home, so I occasionally print out copies of interesting articles on dead trees at work and read them home when I have more time. And just like regular laptops, the trees seem to survive my toilet, too. (That's probably because they're already dead.)
Now, I often reuse the pages for writing down shopping lists so I've more than once found myself diverted to reading an article (or a piece of it, rather..) in the super market when I was supposed to check the list for any remaining unpicked items.
I realize RMS has good intentions but I don't see any point to this. It's a BIOS. What good would making it GNU/BIOS do? More importantly, what good will it do for the motherboard companies? The current system works fine, they will need incentive to switch over to something new.
If you don't have control, you'll have to hack proprietary. It might lead to a high court ruling that modding is illegal but this time for your PC.
With all the DRM-lock hype, will we take a "general purpose computer" for granted after a few years? If we're only sold special purpose multimedia computers, business computers and communication computers?
Given a few years, are you expected to be able to modify and hack on your not-a-computer but a-computing-appliance? Minding the copyright controls, hacking hardware or commercializing hacking tools might be as illegal as modchipping PlayStations in the UK currently.
Example: similarly to selling non-general purpose gaming computers (XBox), MS could stop selling Windows for "general purpose computers" and only license it to "advanced multimedia and business computer(tm)" manufacturers. The strategy would be enforced with the latest whizbang-DRMized TCPA BIOS. Want to buy general computing hardware after that? It'll be as easy and cheap as buying a BeBox or Amiga ten years ago.
Enhanced SMTP better known as ESMTP is not hypothetical. It's out there, it works, mail clients know about it. It's optional and most ISP's I've used don't have strong authentication.
How about a PKI authenticated mail protocol that only allows the message sent to one recipient per each successful authentication? This would
These have been speculated before, but they'd nail primarily at the two worst problems of email: capability to handle a large volume (of spam) and the lack of any "trust" network.
Seriously, though, this is really about elitism. What's important is the quality of the result, not the language used.
The language typically has a say about part of the quality of the result. That comes from the fact that some languages+environments attract people who can write quality code, other languages and environments are used by the rest of the people.
Sure there are people who don't mind the tools as long as they get paid for the job, but there's a minority of them among those who can write quality code. If you love hacking, you want the best tools to help you hack better and faster.
What languages can I currently use to write production quality CLR programs that run on Mono (and its libraries like GTK#/Gnome#) ?
(Except for C#, of course.)
Don't Opera make money from web browsers?
AFAIK they make most of their money by selling licenses/customized versions for embed systems or to be integrated. That goes more to the "non-commodity" category, though you're right about that (a minority of) people has indeed bought Opera for their desktops, too.
Still, Opera is pretty much the *only* browser vendor viably in business, so we're not talking about a notable market here.
Yep, Microsoft is really unable to make a living out of Windows and Office.... Get real.
But he's true. Microsoft would have a hard time selling commodities like O/S + bundled software, Office etc. if we were to start from scratch, without the huge momentum and inertia involved in the 10 years of monopolist tradition of using vendor-locking MS products. There are few competitors in commercial desktop O/S + Office department not only because MS is practicing tough monopolism but also because the market has stagnated, saturated. When was the last time you waited for the next version of your favorite word processor, like in the 80's/90's? Now people implement O/S's and office suites in their spare time and they make it open source.
Do you remember when Netscape was selling their browser? I guess they made a few dimes during the first years but nobody does make money off web browsers anymore, not even from companies. Same goes for making web pages: only a little money is paid for writing HTML, unlike in the late 90's. Web and HTML are commodities. These days companies buy meta software like a CMS instead of web pages. They buy customized software solutions instead of retail products. They don't buy Apache or IIS (if both were on sale as separate products) but a web application framework and custom development on that.
OSS fits the scheme perfectly, where companies only want to pay for their part and get standard software on the basis of their solution. CSS fits in less perfectly but it's still drifting towards the same situation, anyway.
Microsoft is encrypting the data that SQL Server stores so that WHEN someone breaks in to the server they cannot steal the data. Technically the interesting thing is that they have to encrypt the data keys in the indexes as well.
So how does this differ from running the database on an encrypted device (loop, dmcrypt)?
While the system is running, you'll need access to the unencrypted data anyway. If the SQL server can access it, the attacker can also. (I doubt a DBA would like to type passphrases every five minutes.)
Now, perhaps a shady DRM scheme can theoretically isolate the SQL server so that other processes have limited access to the data on the disk or memory. Even that still doesn't help a bit as soon as the attacker exploits the latest MSSQL security hole and runs hiz c0d3 in SQL server context, or breaks through another hole and runs a database client application directly -- at least DB administrators must have regular access to the tables and contents anyway.
It's an interesting thing, nevertheless. It's just not very clear (as of yet, after RTFA) that what issues the scheme will address, how well and what will be the tradeoff.
LISP.
Reading the fscking article now; oh, he did say that already.
Good stuff.
I haven't noticed a need for CSS2 and PNG but SVG comes via a plugin. I don't see why you think that MS should support it natively.
Because SVG can be embed into XHTML directly. SVG is not only yet another vector graphics format, it's a language for describing vector graphics within the document's markup. It's similar to MathML in concept, just that it's graphics primitives that you can use in documents and script them like any DOM elements. So, a plugin greatly limits the power of SVG.
Get a Mozilla SVG build and try it out with some sample documents (Mozilla's SVG is incomplete and buggy, but you'll get the idea).
Electronic formats are good, and hard-copies are good too. What really needs to happen is that the cost of the textbooks, the hardcopy textbooks, need to come down by at least 50%.
Print the PDFs two-sided and put them in binders. Works like a charm and doesn't cost that much, if you have access to a good laser printer.
A good start? To me, that looks like a long list, and it's even longer for random folks. It's also the reason that I suspect it'll be a matter of few years until consumers' computers will become "trusted". People are facing even a worse computing experience than a decade ago. It used to be mostly about a crashing and tad slow Windows installation.
No, "trusted" computing won't root out the security problems. It'll actually make them saturate the market as any competitors shrink to a marginal. I bet that market for certified computer security instructors will emerge in the following years.