To make things even more fun I just received a CueCat in the mail from Forbes magazne... seems they are sending them to all their subscribers and are going to include barcodes in future issues.
I think that the debate over the linux desktop is the same as the debate over religeon. Which one is the correct/best one? Protestant, Roman Catholic, Jewish Orthodox, KDE, Gnome, or for that matter, Mac OS, M$ Windows of Linux?
I found my desktop much quieter once I recompiled the kernel with the JIHAD option disabled;)
The only reason I didn't is that I'd already made the decision a long time ago to let my CPA handle my taxes. It's well worth the money to not have to pollute my mind with all the complexities, particularly when you mix together personal, business personal, and corporate taxes.
My solution was just to marry an acountant.
Of course I think even she will agree I'm probably paying more than I would have to just get my taxes done and learning more about about taxes then I ever wanted to know... so this might be an ideal solution for everyone.
I don't know if they will but I remember back when the Seamonkey project (Mozilla free browser) started they were talking about how bloated web browsers had become, and one of the goals was to produce a Web browser install that could fit on a single floppy disk.... I miss that idea.
I work for a company in corporate america. I HAVE to use Lotus Notes for my e-mail/PIM. The company dictates IE as the 'standard' browser (although they have recently started to move away from this). I'm running windows at work becuase I don't have a choice, and I'm writting this on Netscape Navigator 4.08. Considering how many people like me there are out there (quite a few judging by those I've talked to), I would have thought a fast, small, standards complient browser would have been their first priority. Like it or not, alternative O.S.'s are not on the majority of end-user desktops, and most people don't need YAMA (Yet Another Mail Application).
It seems to me only the wall street jopuranl would make a point of that fact he is getting rich through stocks....
Every news source has a bias (wether they admit it or not). One of the reasons I like to get 'news' from places like The Wall Street Journal and Slashdot is that I usually have a preaty good idea what the biases are (Money in the case of the journal, and linux/open source/tech in the case of Slashdot).
Okay... so instead of seeing headlines of '5000 Linux machines taken down by Word macro virus' you'll see '10000 Linux User accounts taken down by Word macro virus'. Gee there is a step up. If we get Word, and VBS, do we get a virus scanner that can check for these things also?
Its true that its nice malicious code can be contained, but as Linux moves toward the desktop, while the OS may be safe behind file permissions, the users files (and there will be more and more machines with only one or two users) will be equally critical if not more so (I'm sure most users would prefer having their OS crash horibly and need to be reinstalled then have their personal files deleted). Security against one kind of threat should not make us cocky about the other kind.
As of the +3 patch to Windows 95 maybe, but trust me, I've hosed a registry on my windows 95 machine once or twice and the system is unusable until you either fix the individual setting (good luck if you know how, and where to make the correction... and I won't even get into the time I recently had a bad sector crop up in the middle of the registry file). I've recently upgraded to Windows 98 and seen it 'recover' the registry once or twice... usually shortly after I installed a new piece of hardware and its recovery conveniently removed the settings that the hardware installation made. I still haven't been able to get anything to realize I've got a SoundBlaster Live on my machine because of this little problem.
If it was enough of an issue to people, then it becomes an issue to polititian. (sort of like why Rent Control keeps getting renewed in New York, there many more Renters then Landlords, and this is an issue that _IS_ near and dear to the voting public's heart).
Don't laugh. A company I worked with recently tossed around the idea of a space based off-site recovery installation. (of course just what they would would be left to recover with if it got THAT serious I'm not sure).
On the other hand, if the website was directly profitting from those pictures (i.e. selling the pictures themselves) I think they could be in trouble (I don't think that happened though).
Is advertising revenue generated by page hits considered 'directly profiting'?
MS Marketing Manager: This is terrible! Everyone is so concerned about DoS attacks! (turning to engineer) do we have DOS available in Windows?
Engineer: Well... sure... We've had the ability to run exclusively in DOS since Windows 95.
MS Marketing Manager: ARG!! Well... as of the next version you must remove the ability to run in DOS mode! That way we can be DOS free in our marketting literature!
The limit ultimately is what the users are willing to accept, and what the current level of technology can provide. Within those two boundries the limits are infinate.
Personally I forsee us heading more and more toward a device like the 'Earth:Final Conflict' 'Globals'. A single deivce with an integrated pullout high resolution screen/touchpad, a camera (for stills or videoconferencing) and a transmitter/receiver (wireless/satellite/ whatever). With a flexable enough architecture that programs for additional functionality can be added by the users (ala Palm).
Note that what I don't see them replacing are laptops. Either for security or battery life I don't see those being joined into your 'Digital Associate', but with current tech you could use a flexable keyboard, and a head mounted display, and then put the laptop itself into a package the sizeof a CD player... usefull if you need to read external media by incorporating a CD/DVD drive into the packaging. If they DID build something like this, and then went on to build the above type of communication device, then I wouldn't be surprised if there was some way to plug one into the other to either transfer data or give the 'laptop' instantaneous wireless communications ability.
Plus... there will ALWAYS be people demanding that things be as small and compact as possible (the same people who demand Sony VIAOs, and Newest generation Motorola Startak). As long asthat demand is there, someone will combine all the ideas I just mentioned into one all inclusive package. So long as it has good encryption, decent battery life, and a way to backup and restore data... it shouldn't be too painful:)
(note also that this all is precluding the development of new advances in holographic displays and mind-machine interfaces, while expecting the further developement of morphic plastics and battery technology)
What if the code was released under the GPL by someone who had no right to do it?
Lots of companies at this point seem to make you sign away all rights to _anything_ you produce while working for the company (note: I don't say 'on company time, or with company equipment'). If they have all rights to the work you produce, then you, releasing the code under the GPL, without consulting them, might be like someone who works as a programmer at Macromedia, taking the source code to Pagemaker and releasing it under the GPL.
A nice thought if the owners of the copyright are willing to do it, but illegal if done by the wrong people.
Or perhaps your even better off getting another screw.
If what you're trying to do seems too difficult in the languages you know, maybe your not looking at the problem right, and another perspective might make it all work (then again you could be equally fscked).
Any customer, and any person, will be able to license the ECMA C# standard, subset it, superset it, and they won't have to pay royalties.
So, as he says, and your article quotes, once ECMA makes a standard, _anyone_ can make a superset of it. Gee... I wonder what Microsoft will do (especially given their past histories).
I forsee them being C# compliant much the same way they are XML compliant in Office2000 (binary object code wrapped inside opening and closing tags for XML)
As a consultant I've had to deal with a major app of ours (nameless to preserve the guilty). The app was written in Java (presumably for portability). This is all fine and well, but it has memory leaks up the wazoo (that the vendor acknologes). They blame it on the Java Runtime (the platform is Solaris). Given their history on other apps, I blame them. I think its possible to mess up memory collection in any language, heck, I'd even seen someone blow up a perl script running on a Sun Ultra 1 with 256Meg of memory (to be fair the script was running against a 400meg data file). The point is, bad programmers write bad code, regardless of the language. Good programmers write better code. Code from both is likely to be buggy and needs to be checked.
I heard one of the reasons the US has yet to impliment SmartCard technology are its patents.
The US companies refuse to pay the royalties involved in the patents, and so have been slow to roll them out (as far as I know there have been a few pilot programs and I believe American Express's new 'BLUE' card is based on the technology, but otherwise its been silent here in the U.S.).
I've heard a prediction that as the patents (French I believe) expire over the next few years (can't remember the timetable unfortunately) expect to see more companies in the U.S. start to look at this 'new' technology.
Oh god... please don't tell me we've reached the point that we're going to start seeing things like the the "Pepsi Supercolider -- The choice of the next generation of physics majors" or Wendy's logo emblazoned on the side of the Space Shuttle next?!?
Already sent one in. " I am deeply concerned about the lack of fact checking that Mr. Moody's article shows.
First he lists Mission Critical Linux as a comptetitor to Red Hat Linux. They are not. They do not even destribute a Linux distribution but rather, they offer services and products that work with other distributions. Second, If he had bothered to actually read his source material ( http://www.securityfocus.com/vdb/stats.html ), the BugTraq Statistics page he mentions ("BugTraq is careful to preface its list with a long list of qualifiers, noting that systems that enjoy less widespread deployment may have many discovered vulnerabilities, or that many of the vulnerabilities listed may have subsequently been repaired. It also does not distinguish between minor and major vulnerabilities. ") says "Were we display aggregate number of vulnerabilities (Linux and BSD) the number is the size of the set that results from the union of all vulnerabilities for the components without duplication. Vulnerabilities are not counted twice. "
He must have bored by words and decided to skip that bit at the end as he then goes on to say that "In 1999, the year it took over the server market in earnest, Windows NT totaled 99 new vulnerabilities on the BugTraq list. (So far in 2000, the count stands at 37.) This looks like an alarmingly high number in comparison with Solaris' 34 or NetBSD's 10, but it is significantly less than the 122 racked up by Red Hat and the other Linuxes (their 2000 count stands at 47)."
According to the statistics page the aggregate for all LINUXes was 84. The total for JUST Red Hat was 38. In order for his 122 number to make sense he would have had to deliberately add the two together thereby double count 38 vulnerabilities.
If this is a typical example of the stories your site chooses to run, and the fact checking involved, where your reporters blatantly manipulate facts to further their own agenda, then I am going to have to get my news from somewhere else, both on-line and off. "
Were we display aggregate number of vulnerabilities (Linux and BSD) the number is the size of the set that results from the union of all vulnerabilities for the components without duplication. Vulnerabilities are not counted twice.
Geee... despite a minor problem at the beginning the numbers look a little different... don't they? In fact evem the agregate Linux numbers come up better then NT (while not a benchmark I would like to use, its the one he seems to be using). To compare the Unix agregate number properly to Windows, we would have to include the Win9x statistics also... right? Somehow I doubt he'd want to do that.
Slashdot Mirror
>Actually it's easy enough to check for. Living tissues conducts differently than dead tissue, so you run a small current and watch what happens.
Wow... you mean 'Demolition Man' got it wrong but 'Spaceballs: The Movie' got it right?
My faith in the mauve side of the Force has been restored.
:)
To make things even more fun I just received a CueCat in the mail from Forbes magazne... seems they are sending them to all their subscribers and are going to include barcodes in future issues.
<sarcasm>YIPPEE</sarcasm>
I found my desktop much quieter once I recompiled the kernel with the JIHAD option disabled ;)
The only reason I didn't is that I'd already made the decision a long time ago to let my CPA handle my taxes. It's well worth the money to not have to pollute my mind with all the complexities, particularly when you mix together personal, business personal, and corporate taxes.
My solution was just to marry an acountant.
Of course I think even she will agree I'm probably paying more than I would have to just get my taxes done and learning more about about taxes then I ever wanted to know... so this might be an ideal solution for everyone.
:)
I don't know if they will but I remember back when the Seamonkey project (Mozilla free browser) started they were talking about how bloated web browsers had become, and one of the goals was to produce a Web browser install that could fit on a single floppy disk. ... I miss that idea.
I work for a company in corporate america. I HAVE to use Lotus Notes for my e-mail/PIM. The company dictates IE as the 'standard' browser (although they have recently started to move away from this). I'm running windows at work becuase I don't have a choice, and I'm writting this on Netscape Navigator 4.08. Considering how many people like me there are out there (quite a few judging by those I've talked to), I would have thought a fast, small, standards complient browser would have been their first priority. Like it or not, alternative O.S.'s are not on the majority of end-user desktops, and most people don't need YAMA (Yet Another Mail Application).
It seems to me only the wall street jopuranl would make a point of that fact he is getting rich through stocks....
Every news source has a bias (wether they admit it or not). One of the reasons I like to get 'news' from places like The Wall Street Journal and Slashdot is that I usually have a preaty good idea what the biases are (Money in the case of the journal, and linux/open source/tech in the case of Slashdot).
Funny... I always called Episode I the 'Fandom Menace' but thats just me.
Okay... so instead of seeing headlines of '5000 Linux machines taken down by Word macro virus' you'll see '10000 Linux User accounts taken down by Word macro virus'. Gee there is a step up. If we get Word, and VBS, do we get a virus scanner that can check for these things also?
Its true that its nice malicious code can be contained, but as Linux moves toward the desktop, while the OS may be safe behind file permissions, the users files (and there will be more and more machines with only one or two users) will be equally critical if not more so (I'm sure most users would prefer having their OS crash horibly and need to be reinstalled then have their personal files deleted). Security against one kind of threat should not make us cocky about the other kind.
With the speed that MS adds 'features' there is no chance that anyone else can catch up with the 'feature creep' or 'bloatware'.
As of the +3 patch to Windows 95 maybe, but trust me, I've hosed a registry on my windows 95 machine once or twice and the system is unusable until you either fix the individual setting (good luck if you know how, and where to make the correction... and I won't even get into the time I recently had a bad sector crop up in the middle of the registry file). I've recently upgraded to Windows 98 and seen it 'recover' the registry once or twice... usually shortly after I installed a new piece of hardware and its recovery conveniently removed the settings that the hardware installation made. I still haven't been able to get anything to realize I've got a SoundBlaster Live on my machine because of this little problem.
Yet there are more of us then them.
If it was enough of an issue to people, then it becomes an issue to polititian. (sort of like why Rent Control keeps getting renewed in New York, there many more Renters then Landlords, and this is an issue that _IS_ near and dear to the voting public's heart).
Don't laugh. A company I worked with recently tossed around the idea of a space based off-site recovery installation. (of course just what they would would be left to recover with if it got THAT serious I'm not sure).
On the other hand, if the website was directly profitting from those pictures (i.e. selling the pictures themselves) I think they could be in trouble (I don't think that happened though).
Is advertising revenue generated by page hits considered 'directly profiting'?
MS Marketing Manager: This is terrible! Everyone is so concerned about DoS attacks! (turning to engineer) do we have DOS available in Windows?
Engineer: Well... sure... We've had the ability to run exclusively in DOS since Windows 95.
MS Marketing Manager: ARG!! Well... as of the next version you must remove the ability to run in DOS mode! That way we can be DOS free in our marketting literature!
;)
The limit ultimately is what the users are willing to accept, and what the current level of technology can provide. Within those two boundries the limits are infinate.
:)
Personally I forsee us heading more and more toward a device like the 'Earth:Final Conflict' 'Globals'. A single deivce with an integrated pullout high resolution screen/touchpad, a camera (for stills or videoconferencing) and a transmitter/receiver (wireless/satellite/ whatever). With a flexable enough architecture that programs for additional functionality can be added by the users (ala Palm).
Note that what I don't see them replacing are laptops. Either for security or battery life I don't see those being joined into your 'Digital Associate', but with current tech you could use a flexable keyboard, and a head mounted display, and then put the laptop itself into a package the sizeof a CD player... usefull if you need to read external media by incorporating a CD/DVD drive into the packaging. If they DID build something like this, and then went on to build the above type of communication device, then I wouldn't be surprised if there was some way to plug one into the other to either transfer data or give the 'laptop' instantaneous wireless communications ability.
Plus... there will ALWAYS be people demanding that things be as small and compact as possible (the same people who demand Sony VIAOs, and Newest generation Motorola Startak). As long asthat demand is there, someone will combine all the ideas I just mentioned into one all inclusive package. So long as it has good encryption, decent battery life, and a way to backup and restore data... it shouldn't be too painful
(note also that this all is precluding the development of new advances in holographic displays and mind-machine interfaces, while expecting the further developement of morphic plastics and battery technology)
What if the code was released under the GPL by someone who had no right to do it?
Lots of companies at this point seem to make you sign away all rights to _anything_ you produce while working for the company (note: I don't say 'on company time, or with company equipment'). If they have all rights to the work you produce, then you, releasing the code under the GPL, without consulting them, might be like someone who works as a programmer at Macromedia, taking the source code to Pagemaker and releasing it under the GPL.
A nice thought if the owners of the copyright are willing to do it, but illegal if done by the wrong people.
well.... wasn't the original version of NT basta^H^H^H^H^Hported from VMS?
;)
Maybe that was the plan all along
Or perhaps your even better off getting another screw.
If what you're trying to do seems too difficult in the languages you know, maybe your not looking at the problem right, and another perspective might make it all work (then again you could be equally fscked).
Any customer, and any person, will be able to license the ECMA C# standard, subset it, superset it, and they won't have to pay royalties.
So, as he says, and your article quotes, once ECMA makes a standard, _anyone_ can make a superset of it. Gee... I wonder what Microsoft will do (especially given their past histories).
I forsee them being C# compliant much the same way they are XML compliant in Office2000 (binary object code wrapped inside opening and closing tags for XML)
As a consultant I've had to deal with a major app of ours (nameless to preserve the guilty). The app was written in Java (presumably for portability). This is all fine and well, but it has memory leaks up the wazoo (that the vendor acknologes). They blame it on the Java Runtime (the platform is Solaris). Given their history on other apps, I blame them. I think its possible to mess up memory collection in any language, heck, I'd even seen someone blow up a perl script running on a Sun Ultra 1 with 256Meg of memory (to be fair the script was running against a 400meg data file). The point is, bad programmers write bad code, regardless of the language. Good programmers write better code. Code from both is likely to be buggy and needs to be checked.
I heard one of the reasons the US has yet to impliment SmartCard technology are its patents.
The US companies refuse to pay the royalties involved in the patents, and so have been slow to roll them out (as far as I know there have been a few pilot programs and I believe American Express's new 'BLUE' card is based on the technology, but otherwise its been silent here in the U.S.).
I've heard a prediction that as the patents (French I believe) expire over the next few years (can't remember the timetable unfortunately) expect to see more companies in the U.S. start to look at this 'new' technology.
No silly! IE isn't a package... its part of the Operating System.
Hasn't all that MicroSquish marketspeak taught you anything?
;)
Oh god... please don't tell me we've reached the point that we're going to start seeing things like the the "Pepsi Supercolider -- The choice of the next generation of physics majors" or Wendy's logo emblazoned on the side of the Space Shuttle next?!?
;)
Already sent one in.
"
I am deeply concerned about the lack of fact checking that Mr. Moody's article shows.
First he lists Mission Critical Linux as a comptetitor to Red Hat Linux. They are not. They do not even destribute a Linux distribution but rather, they offer services and products that work with other distributions. Second, If he had bothered to actually read his source material ( http://www.securityfocus.com/vdb/stats.html ), the BugTraq Statistics page he mentions ("BugTraq is careful to preface its list with a long list of qualifiers, noting that systems that enjoy less widespread deployment may have many discovered vulnerabilities, or that many of the vulnerabilities listed may have subsequently been repaired. It also does not distinguish between minor and major vulnerabilities. ") says
"Were we display aggregate number of vulnerabilities (Linux and BSD) the number is the size of the set that results
from the union of all vulnerabilities for the components without duplication. Vulnerabilities are not counted twice. "
He must have bored by words and decided to skip that bit at the end as he then goes on to say that "In 1999, the year it took over the server market in earnest, Windows NT totaled 99 new vulnerabilities on the BugTraq list. (So far in 2000, the count stands at 37.) This looks like an alarmingly high number in comparison with Solaris' 34 or NetBSD's 10, but it is significantly less than the 122 racked up by Red Hat and the other Linuxes (their 2000 count stands at 47)."
According to the statistics page the aggregate for all LINUXes was 84. The total for JUST Red Hat was 38. In order for his 122 number to make sense he would have had to deliberately add the two together thereby double count 38 vulnerabilities.
If this is a typical example of the stories your site chooses to run, and the fact checking involved, where your reporters blatantly manipulate facts to further their own agenda, then I am going to have to get my news from somewhere else, both on-line and off.
"
Were we display aggregate number of vulnerabilities (Linux and BSD) the number is
the size of the set that results from the union of all vulnerabilities for the components
without duplication. Vulnerabilities are not counted twice.
(quoted from the introduction at the top of the stats page he used http://www.securityfocus.com/vdb/stats. html)
Okay, lets for a moment assume that we want to go distro for distro... and most people believe that RedHat is one of the more insecure of them...
Vendor, Bugs in 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000 (so far)
LINUX (all), 10, 23, 84, 30
RedHat, 5, 10, 38, 17
WinNT, 4, 6, 99, 37
Geee... despite a minor problem at the beginning the numbers look a little different... don't they? In fact evem the agregate Linux numbers come up better then NT (while not a benchmark I would like to use, its the one he seems to be using). To compare the Unix agregate number properly to Windows, we would have to include the Win9x statistics also... right? Somehow I doubt he'd want to do that.