Strange bedfellows. Enterprise legacy software and masochistic hobbyists.
In both cases, you have to run with what you've got. In both cases, you can't get any help. You can't even get any sympathy.
You fix one thing that's vital and maybe break half a dozen things you neither know nor care about. This is where the value of Open Source really lies.
Even better maybe, perpetrate a hoax. Things like "bteubu zkflmwiglmu b d x mmtr" just have to be some terrorist code. The media will be a problem. The media, spam, Microsoft worms. All on the same side, really.
This is key, we don't just want to control the desktops but also the software running on them.
Which is nice.
Good, if you have succeeded, you are safe from Microsoft worms and viruses running unpatched software. If the systems aren't safe, then you're just fooling yourself and your clients.
as soon as they're aware of an issue, they fix it.
<sarcasm>Right, like Microsoft patched all the holes in their own systems.</sarcasm>
Microsoft issued a patch.
Fixing involves a bit more than somebody puts up a patch somewhere.
Besides, every time I see an exploit, it's after Microsoft has already issued a patch. Everytime I see a Microsoft exploit, it's after Microsoft has already issued a patch. It moves too fast, but I think I've seen signs or rumors of OSS exploits before patches have been issued. This tells me that OSS, particularly the BSDs, are pretty well hardened and that the window of opportunity for attack is extremely small. Microsoft, on the other hand, is extremely easy to attack, even with very old and stale intelligence.
Stop using it if it's a problem. There are alternatives now. Good advice. Now if we can just get the Microsoft roadkill off of the Information Superhighway,...
This is what you get from "all your eggs in one basket". You do not get this from a lot of smaller baskets. Furthermore, for either definition of free, there is some kind of community responsibility (other than the author(s)) to ensure that it does not produce massive cascading failures.
I buy a gallon of milk from a local farmer or from a local gocery store. Tracing back that gallon of milk from the local grocer to the milk processing plant to the dairy farms, all of that has to be extremely sanitary and everything has to be very well tested to make that gallon of milk as safe as the gallon of milk from the local farmer. You can get whole unpasteurized milk from a local farmer. You won't get it from you grocer, far too risky. Furthermore, if there's a problem with that gallon, it's just me and mine, not the whole town or county.
What you forget is that it would be in IBM's interest to let SCO kill SGI, and all of its other competitors.
In a word, no!
It is to IBM's interest to be Number One. In a world with very strong and healthy numbers 2,3,4,... So much better than being number one in a game nobody else wants to play.
With strong and healthy competition, IBM is a very safe bet. Without the competition, Information Technology is something you want less of, not more of.
Right. It's fairly certain that SCO will go down. Hard. But exactly how, when, where and why do matter. And all of the suff that leads up to it does matter. It may be repeats. It may be boring. But it does matter. (And I'm being boring.) But it still matters. My crystal ball is pretty murky, but it looks like a number of things will change significantly from pre-SCO to post-SCO. Historians will explain it 50 years from now. It's a lot like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
It's also a good idea to look at what the software is doing. Some things are much easier to secure than others. You could spend you life (imprisoned) in a fortress, but you'd miss out on too many things if you do.
Methinks the point is that if you must trust one single source, that source has to be you. It does not go into the standard mechanism of having a cashier trading tickets for cash and a doorman accepting the tickets for entry. The system is fairly trustworthy as long as the two are not in cahoots. It certainly does not mean that you trust either of them individually.
Also, if they find out about the existence of any exploits like this, they would blab. That's where you get the security. Too many points for finding even a hint of some funny business. This is also why you can't really be concerned about flame wars.
Blind men and elephant time. Truth is the elephant (whatever that is) *A* truth is a part of the elephant a blind man grabs and feels. The trap is in grabbing part and thinking you've go the whole thing.
Me, I'm convinced there *is* something that can be called truth. Sometimes I can even get a bit of a glimpse of it. Explaining the truth is, methinks, a *hard* problem. Chardin's Phenomenon of Man contains much truth, but any paraphrase or explanation of it that I am capable of would be loaded with untruth.
Drivel is assuning that the calibre of each component must be observed only in isolation. The reality is that people observe the components together and this drives people in a position to do something about it to bring up the calibre of anything that is lagging behind. It's not immediate, but it is persistent. Try painting one wall of your house or apartment and leave it alone.
Not when the prank and the victim are properly chosen.
An audience doesn't hurt either.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that the pranks tend to generate a healthy degree of mistrust in computers and programs. I would expect that offices with practical jokers have much less problem with Microsoft worms and viruses. "Trusted Computing"? Not on my watch!
From a bit of speed-reading, I suspect that there are several things going on in parallel, among them a breakdown from phrase to words to letters. Ever flipped a page and finished reading the page you just turned over? Ever go back to make sure you read that correctly? A key question would be just when does a copywriter recognize a typo. Also critical would be the speeds for comprehension and for copywriting.
My "other" computer is a 2.25GHz Dell Dimension 2200 with 512Meg memory, XP Pro, and a 20" monitor. My "this is mine" computer is a 400MHz Gateway E-4200 with 128Meg memory, NT Workstation and a 19" monitor.
Aim outlook.pst and the swap-file to a new 80g drive and the older system is for most everything essentially as fast and responsive and a tad less annoying than the new system. The exception? Some long runs of dBASE/DOS are almost 3 times faster on the new system. Go figure.
The high quality of one open source product has zero to do with the quality of another.
Rubbish. That's like saying the quality and landscaping of one house in a neighborhood has zero to do with the quality and landscaping of its neighbors. The reality is that the quality of Apache does say a lot about what one should be able to expect from Open Source.
Nobody is debating that IIS is feature bloated hacker friendly piece of garbage. But that has nothing to do with Windows. Comes from the same neighborhood.
If there's anything Hollywood fears more than piracy, it's the possibility that their audience might develop the ability to delay gratification.
Dunno if they do, but they should.
If I develop the ability to delay gratification, I also develop the ability to question that gratification and in the cold light of reason decide that it is not worthwhile. Watch the hot new movie on TV when it comes to TV and you will discover that it never was that hot. Just the hype and the excitement of the moment made it seem that way.
return to my insistence that TeX was an incremental improvement.
Oh yes, in the larger sense, that's all it can be.
Systems evolve. This can happen even if the people and the infrastructure does not change in the slightest. If you have a perfect model of the world, the world will take that into cognizance and change itself, thereby rendering your perfect model wrong! I think that while it's impossible or not worthwhile to eliminate all bugs, it's both possible and worthwhile to ensure that the consequences of bugs are not all out of proportion to the causes. Lots of stuff seems to be like a fender-bender in Dallas completely stops traffic in Boston. There has to be a better way than that. Me, I like the ability to throw untested stuff into a production system with impunity. About half the time I get it right without having to think.
What does that button do again? Redirects directly to the first result of the search instead of returning a set of search results. Took some guts to even consider doing that, particularly when you consider that it first appeared when everybody was trying to keep everyone's attention of their stuff as long as possible.
Which bugs in nroff/troff/tbl/eqn/etc are you referring to? I neither know nor care. My not knowing does not make anything bug-free. My knowledge is essentially that Knuth got diverted from finishing the Art of Computer Programming because he got hung up in something to do with typesetting.
General Rule: All programs past a certain size have bugs. Footnote: With the possible exception of something written by Knuth. Observation: It may be possible to create bug-free programs, but it's probably much more trouble than it's worth.
Note: Having a bug does not imply that you can get it to exhibit buggy behavior. In many cases it take two bugs to get together before you can notice anything. I've even seen a triple.
Constructing a nuclear power facility is "design improvements" over a caveman piling rocks on top of each other to make some sort of shelter.
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Strange bedfellows. Enterprise legacy software and masochistic hobbyists.
In both cases, you have to run with what you've got. In both cases, you can't get any help. You can't even get any sympathy.
You fix one thing that's vital and maybe break half a dozen things you neither know nor care about. This is where the value of Open Source really lies.
Even better maybe, perpetrate a hoax.
Things like "bteubu zkflmwiglmu b d x mmtr" just have to be some terrorist code.
The media will be a problem. The media, spam, Microsoft worms. All on the same side, really.
This is key, we don't just want to control the desktops but also the software running on them.
Which is nice.
Good, if you have succeeded, you are safe from Microsoft worms and viruses running unpatched software.
If the systems aren't safe, then you're just fooling yourself and your clients.
as soon as they're aware of an issue, they fix it.
...
<sarcasm>Right, like Microsoft patched all the holes in their own systems.</sarcasm>
Microsoft issued a patch.
Fixing involves a bit more than somebody puts up a patch somewhere.
Besides, every time I see an exploit, it's after Microsoft has already issued a patch.
Everytime I see a Microsoft exploit, it's after Microsoft has already issued a patch. It moves too fast, but I think I've seen signs or rumors of OSS exploits before patches have been issued. This tells me that OSS, particularly the BSDs, are pretty well hardened and that the window of opportunity for attack is extremely small. Microsoft, on the other hand, is extremely easy to attack, even with very old and stale intelligence.
Stop using it if it's a problem. There are alternatives now.
Good advice. Now if we can just get the Microsoft roadkill off of the Information Superhighway,
"massive, cascading failure"
This is what you get from "all your eggs in one basket". You do not get this from a lot of smaller baskets.
Furthermore, for either definition of free, there is some kind of community responsibility (other than the author(s)) to ensure that it does not produce massive cascading failures.
I buy a gallon of milk from a local farmer or from a local gocery store. Tracing back that gallon of milk from the local grocer to the milk processing plant to the dairy farms, all of that has to be extremely sanitary and everything has to be very well tested to make that gallon of milk as safe as the gallon of milk from the local farmer. You can get whole unpasteurized milk from a local farmer. You won't get it from you grocer, far too risky. Furthermore, if there's a problem with that gallon, it's just me and mine, not the whole town or county.
So you are saying there should be 50 slighly different distros?
50? Far too few. The states by themselves would rack up a few hundred.
What you forget is that it would be in IBM's interest to let SCO kill SGI, and all of its other competitors.
In a word, no!
It is to IBM's interest to be Number One.
In a world with very strong and healthy numbers 2,3,4,...
So much better than being number one in a game nobody else wants to play.
With strong and healthy competition, IBM is a very safe bet. Without the competition, Information Technology is something you want less of, not more of.
Right. It's fairly certain that SCO will go down. Hard.
But exactly how, when, where and why do matter. And all of the suff that leads up to it does matter.
It may be repeats. It may be boring. But it does matter. (And I'm being boring.) But it still matters.
My crystal ball is pretty murky, but it looks like a number of things will change significantly from pre-SCO to post-SCO. Historians will explain it 50 years from now.
It's a lot like watching a train wreck in slow motion.
It's also a good idea to look at what the software is doing.
Some things are much easier to secure than others.
You could spend you life (imprisoned) in a fortress, but you'd miss out on too many things if you do.
Methinks the point is that if you must trust one single source, that source has to be you. It does not go into the standard mechanism of having a cashier trading tickets for cash and a doorman accepting the tickets for entry. The system is fairly trustworthy as long as the two are not in cahoots. It certainly does not mean that you trust either of them individually.
Also, if they find out about the existence of any exploits like this, they would blab.
That's where you get the security. Too many points for finding even a hint of some funny business. This is also why you can't really be concerned about flame wars.
Being a monopoly has absolutely nothing to do with this discussion, this is about trustworthiness in the OS we run everyday.
Actually being a monopoly has a lot to do with trustworthiness, or more accurately, the lack thereof.
nametags with "Agents name - CIA AGENT"
I'm sure they exist, called personnel files or dossiers or some such. Preferably very well secured.
well known - by their press releases
in a context that mentions security????
While I don't know that Microsoft is up to something nefarious, waiting until it has been incontrovertably proven is waiting a wee bit too much.
Blind men and elephant time.
Truth is the elephant (whatever that is)
*A* truth is a part of the elephant a blind man grabs and feels.
The trap is in grabbing part and thinking you've go the whole thing.
Me, I'm convinced there *is* something that can be called truth. Sometimes I can even get a bit of a glimpse of it. Explaining the truth is, methinks, a *hard* problem. Chardin's Phenomenon of Man contains much truth, but any paraphrase or explanation of it that I am capable of would be loaded with untruth.
Drivel is assuning that the calibre of each component must be observed only in isolation. The reality is that people observe the components together and this drives people in a position to do something about it to bring up the calibre of anything that is lagging behind. It's not immediate, but it is persistent. Try painting one wall of your house or apartment and leave it alone.
Not when the prank and the victim are properly chosen.
An audience doesn't hurt either.
One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that the pranks tend to generate a healthy degree of mistrust in computers and programs. I would expect that offices with practical jokers have much less problem with Microsoft worms and viruses. "Trusted Computing"? Not on my watch!
From a bit of speed-reading, I suspect that there are several things going on in parallel, among them a breakdown from phrase to words to letters. Ever flipped a page and finished reading the page you just turned over? Ever go back to make sure you read that correctly? A key question would be just when does a copywriter recognize a typo. Also critical would be the speeds for comprehension and for copywriting.
Probably not. (actually mostly not)
My "other" computer is a 2.25GHz Dell Dimension 2200 with 512Meg memory, XP Pro, and a 20" monitor.
My "this is mine" computer is a 400MHz Gateway E-4200 with 128Meg memory, NT Workstation and a 19" monitor.
Aim outlook.pst and the swap-file to a new 80g drive and the older system is for most everything essentially as fast and responsive and a tad less annoying than the new system. The exception? Some long runs of dBASE/DOS are almost 3 times faster on the new system. Go figure.
The high quality of one open source product has zero to do with the quality of another.
Rubbish. That's like saying the quality and landscaping of one house in a neighborhood has zero to do with the quality and landscaping of its neighbors. The reality is that the quality of Apache does say a lot about what one should be able to expect from Open Source.
Nobody is debating that IIS is feature bloated hacker friendly piece of garbage. But that has nothing to do with Windows.
Comes from the same neighborhood.
If there's anything Hollywood fears more than piracy, it's the possibility that their audience might develop the ability to delay gratification.
Dunno if they do, but they should.
If I develop the ability to delay gratification, I also develop the ability to question that gratification and in the cold light of reason decide that it is not worthwhile. Watch the hot new movie on TV when it comes to TV and you will discover that it never was that hot. Just the hype and the excitement of the moment made it seem that way.
Right.
Basic rules of humor.
Street urchin lobs a snowball at silk hat. Funny.
Silk hat lobs a snowball at street urchin. Not funny.
Users hoax the IT guy. Funny.
IT guy hoaxes the users. Not funny.
Not really. Microsoft's success is more about being in the right place at the right time to take advantage of the situation.
return to my insistence that TeX was an incremental improvement.
Oh yes, in the larger sense, that's all it can be.
Systems evolve. This can happen even if the people and the infrastructure does not change in the slightest. If you have a perfect model of the world, the world will take that into cognizance and change itself, thereby rendering your perfect model wrong! I think that while it's impossible or not worthwhile to eliminate all bugs, it's both possible and worthwhile to ensure that the consequences of bugs are not all out of proportion to the causes. Lots of stuff seems to be like a fender-bender in Dallas completely stops traffic in Boston. There has to be a better way than that. Me, I like the ability to throw untested stuff into a production system with impunity. About half the time I get it right without having to think.
What does that button do again?
Redirects directly to the first result of the search instead of returning a set of search results. Took some guts to even consider doing that, particularly when you consider that it first appeared when everybody was trying to keep everyone's attention of their stuff as long as possible.
Which bugs in nroff/troff/tbl/eqn/etc are you referring to?
I neither know nor care. My not knowing does not make anything bug-free. My knowledge is essentially that Knuth got diverted from finishing the Art of Computer Programming because he got hung up in something to do with typesetting.
General Rule: All programs past a certain size have bugs.
Footnote: With the possible exception of something written by Knuth.
Observation: It may be possible to create bug-free programs, but it's probably much more trouble than it's worth.
Note: Having a bug does not imply that you can get it to exhibit buggy behavior. In many cases it take two bugs to get together before you can notice anything. I've even seen a triple.
Constructing a nuclear power facility is "design improvements" over a caveman piling rocks on top of each other to make some sort of shelter.
XML is Lisp, reimplemented badly. Again.
;-)
But the parentheses are marked, so the COBOL programmers can keep up with them
P.S. pet peeve...people credit Knuth (admittedly an amazing guy for the Art of Computer Programming) for reinventing typesetting with TeX.
not reinventing typesetting, but inventing non-buggy typesetting.
And I'm still waiting for volume 4.
(Probably the only case where the "of what" needn't be specified;)