May I kindly suggest that you research the facts more carefully before you accuse others of heresy?
The earth is flat.
Voilà, I give you The Flat Earth Society - quote: "Deprogramming the masses since 1547". Granted, those dudes are a little short on evidence right now, but I'm sure they'll come up with something as soon as they find a way to escape their comfortably padded cells.
The moon is cheese.
Green cheese, to be exact. Here's the scientific evidence, complete with lots of important looking numbers.
Pi is 3.
"Scripture (I Kings 7:23) clearly declares that the value of pi (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter) is 3, not the secular humanist value of 3.14 taught in every school in Lawrence." Source: this page. (I believe the author might be counseling the prestigious Kansas Education Board. He also has something to say about that ridiculous round earth theory)
By the way, in my day we didn't have those newfangled processors with floating point units you kids have today, so we had to make do with "PI EQU 3" and we got along with it just fine, thank you very much.
And whales are fish.
Yeah, and spiders are not insects, right? Let me quote from this page: "Pure nonsense. Either whales are fish or sharks aren't. I'd say whales are fish." There are more interestings facts to be found on this page, but I have to take my medication now.
I look at this article and feel slightly dismayed, The reason for this is because I really would like to have a small/quite PC or my lounge room to plug into my TV set and clearly we are there with the technology of the hardware.
If you have cash to spare, some skill with power tools, lots of spare time and a German-English dictionary, the German c't magazine may have what you're looking for:
The c't S.V.P. is a multifunctional "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" living-room device which can record and play music in nearly any format known to geekdom, is a digital video recorder, plays DVDs and VCDs, has network connectivity, supports a plethora of IR remotes and whatnot. Geek heaven!
The original article appeared in c't magazine 20/2001, p. 146. Here's the link to a shorter online version (in German, and unfortunately they left out the images). Use WorldLingo to translate into English (although poor Christof Windeck will probably cringe at seeing his last name machine-translated to "Christof wind-hit a corner":)
Keep in mind that it is remarkably easy for an administrator, either for the local machine or the whole network, to specify.NET security policies that cannot be overriden.
You are, in my opinion, pointing out one of the fundamental flaws about the way Microsoft (and some other major software developers, too) think about security. They design with features and ease of use in mind, but make security opt-in because it generally gets in the user's (and the administrator's) way.
The problem with this approach is that no matter how easy it is to enable the security features, many people will not know about the process or just be too lazy or whatever. Maybe just one percent or less, but given the overall population of, for example, Windows, that's quite a lot of users. The "opt-in security" approach practically guarantees that the internet is going to be plagued by the offspring of CodeRed, Nimda and ILU for years to come.
I like OpenBSD's way of doing things better (at least as far as I can tell, I'm not using it myself): Start with a rather minimal, peer reviewed feature set. If the administrator adds an insecure application to it, he'll still get owned - but that will be fewer people than with the opt-in approach.
Version 2.0 of SKB's out-of-print "The Devil's DP Dictionary" is called "The Computer Contradictionary", (MIT Press; ISBN: 0262611120). An essential element of every geek's library, it's inspired by Ambrose Bierce's cynic masterpiece.
"...The Cactus Data Shield proprietary technology was developed in-house by a multidisciplinary team of experts in the fields of information security, physics, mathematics, electronics, cryptography and algorithms." (Midbar Technologies, cited from the linked article at cdrinfo.com)
1. Midbar should make sure there's a graphics designer on the team next time. This is the ugliest player skin I've seen in a long time. Gaaaack.
2. If they're so smart, why didn't they think of actually including the track names instead of just "Track 01", "Track 02" and so on? Get a fucking clue, guys.
3. Somebody please explain to me how to issue the Prodigy's "Music for a Jilted Generation" (playing time over 78 minutes) using their fscked scheme. Answer, probably: it isn't possible - so what we get is shiny silver discs at the same price as before, but with less total playing time.
4. Including a player which relies on a proprietary and soon-to-be-obsolete software and hardware platform is simply brain-damaged.
5. "Nobody has ever won an argument against a customer."
Who says they were the "good" old days? I just seem to recall spending a lot of time debugging tweaky problems that had nothing to do with getting the actual work done!
Things haven't really changed much since the "good" old days, have they?
- Maybe the mouse pointer will start moving by itself
You know, every time I told my coworkers that the mouse pointer scuttles across the screen by itself at odd intervals on my PC, they would give me odd looks and walk away from me. Now I can show them your post and get back some social respectibility - thank you!
The usual political guerrilla tactics, I guess. The theory is that even if nothing can ever be proved, the smell of a possible scandal will cling to the other person/party and lower its credibility. The Republicans tried the same tactics with mixed results (Whitewater, Monicagate) - which doesn't excuse the Democrats trying the same stunt now.
By the way, I misspelled "Post hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" in my first reply, sorry.
The point is that one of the fundamental features of the IP suite is that unique services should run over unique ports.
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who gets the creeps seeing the abuse of port 80 we're getting nowadays (not only from Microsoft, mind you). Consider this post virtually modded up +1, insightful.
Strong reaction, I didn't intend to upset you - attack the facts, not the person, please.
My points were
1. That the article you've linked to comes from a source who may (!) have some bias in favor of Microsoft
2. That the logic in the argument is faulty (the "tu quoque" argument part)
3. That the "Oh well, I'll probably be modded down for going against groupthink" is a form of social engineering and, unfortunately, gets rewarded a little too often on slashdot.
Just because I disagreed with your original post doesn't prove that I'm "clouded by my hatred for MS" as you say - I make a comfortable living in a big Microsoft shop.
I'm also a member or the local IRT, and believe me, sleeping in the office for three nights straight while mopping up behind the ILOVEYOU disaster is an experience I don't want to repeat (yeah, we really got caught, the experience has made us wiser).
If they really succeed in making their products more secure, I'll be more than happy. As I said, I prefer my bed to a sleeping bag in the office.
>> You mean the company that was such a major D party contributor?
According to this and to the major national newspapers in Switzerland, they certainly were not choosy when it came to brib^H^H^H^Hcontributing to the other party as well.
>>Ahh -- the one who found they could not bribe W as easily as Clinton and was exposed?
Without supporting facts, this looks like a "Post Hoc, Ergo Poster Hoc" fallacy (Enron got busted under the Bush administration, therefore the Clinton administration was corrupt and the Bush administration is not). I'm not saying that there is no causality, only that without solid facts, it's just wishful thinking.
"Roger Sessions is highly respected within Microsoft. He has given many keynote talks at Microsoft sponsored conferences. Thousands of copies of his book have been given away by Microsoft."
That alone is of course not sufficient to question Mr. Session's bias or professional qualifications, but let's just say I got a little bit leery after reading this.
Furthermore, your logic seems fundamentally flawed to me. According to your chain of reasoning:
1. Microsoft has security problems
2. Other's have security problems, too
therefore
3. Microsoft is not so bad as everybody says.
This looks to me like a classical "tu quoque" fallacy. I see it again and again on/., and when I have modpoints I always mod those posts down as trolls - not because they're contrarian to/. groupthink but because they're using faulty logic and are either trolls or just clueless.
>> I'll probably be modded down as troll or flaimbait, but then it just shows the/. mentality.
Moderators, whenever you see a sentence similar to the above ("C'mon, mod me down, I have karma to burn..."), please think hard if the poster really made a soundproof argument or is just doing some social engineering on you by doing an appeal to pity in order to gather/avoid losing some karma.
IMHO, No. Unrealistic circumstances = Fear Mongering
It sure drew a lot of attention, though (and I bet AMD was not happy about this kind of publicity). If anyone from AMD listens: "cracked die" and "fire hazard" are two words we geeks don't want to hear when it comes to our processors.
#3 however, has to do with an industry standard. AMD can't really change it much.
I just wish they tried a little harder. Some clip design I've seen suck toxic waste, some boards have capacitors that come too close to the CPU etc. Unfortunately, Intel is in the better position when it comes to tell motherboard and heatsink designers what to do.
The chance of a heatsink falling off completely is pretty small.
Depends on how you use your PC, IMO. It's not a problem with my 1.4 TBird at home, because I assembled the system at home and do not plan to move it around.
If you want to ship the box, or even take it to a LAN party in your car over bumpy roads, you better think about removing the heatsink - especially if you have one as heavy as this beast or one with a high center of gravity like this one. Unfortunately, removing the heat sink without damaging the processor die or popping off a few SMD resistors with a badly designed clip isn't exactly trivial in many cases, not to mention that there's also the issue of correct handling of thermal paste/tape involved.
In my PC, there are only two flimsy plastic noses on the CPU socket securing the heat sink clip, and the sink is quite heavy. I shudder at the thought of the havoc the heat sink could wreak if it should come loose during transport. And should I inadvertently turn on the system without heat sink in place, the CPU would be toast before I even had time to notice something is wrong (the BIOS doesn't start at a 'safe speed' for all I know).
AMD has to do three things in my opinion:
1. Provide an internal (fast) thermal diode similar to the one used in the P4, throttling the CPU down to a safe speed if temperatures get too high.
2. Provide a heat-spreader which protects the CPU die. My local PC parts dealer has half a shoebox full of AMD CPUs with broken dies. It's not really a problem for him, because it's not the dealer who pays for a new CPU if the customer screws up heatsink assembly, but it doesn't generate happy AMD customers.
3. Redesign and standardize the heat-sink/motherboard attachment and provide mandatory design guides for mainboard manufacturers. There are too many clip designs around, some sinks cannot be mounted at all in some motherboards, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
May I kindly suggest that you research the facts more carefully before you accuse others of heresy?
The earth is flat.
Voilà, I give you The Flat Earth Society - quote: "Deprogramming the masses since 1547". Granted, those dudes are a little short on evidence right now, but I'm sure they'll come up with something as soon as they find a way to escape their comfortably padded cells.
The moon is cheese.
Green cheese, to be exact. Here's the scientific evidence, complete with lots of important looking numbers.
Pi is 3.
"Scripture (I Kings 7:23) clearly declares that the value of pi (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter) is 3, not the secular humanist value of 3.14 taught in every school in Lawrence." Source: this page. (I believe the author might be counseling the prestigious Kansas Education Board. He also has something to say about that ridiculous round earth theory)
By the way, in my day we didn't have those newfangled processors with floating point units you kids have today, so we had to make do with "PI EQU 3" and we got along with it just fine, thank you very much.
And whales are fish.
Yeah, and spiders are not insects, right? Let me quote from this page: "Pure nonsense. Either whales are fish or sharks aren't. I'd say whales are fish." There are more interestings facts to be found on this page, but I have to take my medication now.
The deep irony of the situation is that I don't even know what irony is.
Apparently, she doesn't either. Isn't it ironic... don't you think?
...congratulations, Taco and Kathleen!
Greetings from Switzerland,
Raymond
P.S. - I must admit I'm jealous. Some guys really have it all: UID 1 on Slashdot AND Kathleen as a wife.
P.P.S. - Imagine a beowulf cluster of kids...
... is here, sorry.
Raymond
I look at this article and feel slightly dismayed, The reason for this is because I really would like to have a small/quite PC or my lounge room to plug into my TV set and clearly we are there with the technology of the hardware.
:)
If you have cash to spare, some skill with power tools, lots of spare time and a German-English dictionary, the German c't magazine may have what you're looking for:
The c't S.V.P. is a multifunctional "everything-but-the-kitchen-sink" living-room device which can record and play music in nearly any format known to geekdom, is a digital video recorder, plays DVDs and VCDs, has network connectivity, supports a plethora of IR remotes and whatnot. Geek heaven!
The original article appeared in c't magazine 20/2001, p. 146. Here's the link to a shorter online version (in German, and unfortunately they left out the images). Use WorldLingo to translate into English (although poor Christof Windeck will probably cringe at seeing his last name machine-translated to "Christof wind-hit a corner"
Raymond
Keep in mind that it is remarkably easy for an administrator, either for the local machine or the whole network, to specify .NET security policies that cannot be overriden.
You are, in my opinion, pointing out one of the fundamental flaws about the way Microsoft (and some other major software developers, too) think about security. They design with features and ease of use in mind, but make security opt-in because it generally gets in the user's (and the administrator's) way.
The problem with this approach is that no matter how easy it is to enable the security features, many people will not know about the process or just be too lazy or whatever. Maybe just one percent or less, but given the overall population of, for example, Windows, that's quite a lot of users. The "opt-in security" approach practically guarantees that the internet is going to be plagued by the offspring of CodeRed, Nimda and ILU for years to come.
I like OpenBSD's way of doing things better (at least as far as I can tell, I'm not using it myself): Start with a rather minimal, peer reviewed feature set. If the administrator adds an insecure application to it, he'll still get owned - but that will be fewer people than with the opt-in approach.
Raymond
The wisenut search engine tries to do a categorization which is quite helpful with some ambiguous queries.
Raymond
Version 2.0 of SKB's out-of-print "The Devil's DP Dictionary" is called "The Computer Contradictionary" , (MIT Press; ISBN: 0262611120). An essential element of every geek's library, it's inspired by Ambrose Bierce's cynic masterpiece.
Raymond
About that "irreducibly complex" moustrap...
:)
For those who think this is no problem, since the copy "protection" is easy to circumvent:
Read this patent application by Microsoft.
Scary stuff, really.
"...The Cactus Data Shield proprietary technology was developed in-house by a multidisciplinary team of experts in the fields of information security, physics, mathematics, electronics, cryptography and algorithms." (Midbar Technologies, cited from the linked article at cdrinfo.com)
1. Midbar should make sure there's a graphics designer on the team next time. This is the ugliest player skin I've seen in a long time. Gaaaack.
2. If they're so smart, why didn't they think of actually including the track names instead of just "Track 01", "Track 02" and so on? Get a fucking clue, guys.
3. Somebody please explain to me how to issue the Prodigy's "Music for a Jilted Generation" (playing time over 78 minutes) using their fscked scheme. Answer, probably: it isn't possible - so what we get is shiny silver discs at the same price as before, but with less total playing time.
4. Including a player which relies on a proprietary and soon-to-be-obsolete software and hardware platform is simply brain-damaged.
5. "Nobody has ever won an argument against a customer."
Raymond
...that this thing might hit Redmond?
Hey, this is slashdot!
By the way, I like the following quote from Mr. Tanenbaum:
"As a result of my occupation, I think I know a bit about where operating [systems?]
are going in the next decade or so."
Making predictions about the future is a risky proposition and may force one to eat one's words.
Here's the corrected link.
Linux is a huge development project (I mean, come on, it's an OS), [...]
Dood, you better not be caught saying that aloud while Richard Stallman is nearby.
(rimshot)
Who says they were the "good" old days? I just seem to recall spending a lot of time debugging tweaky problems that had nothing to do with getting the actual work done!
Things haven't really changed much since the "good" old days, have they?
Raymond
- Maybe the mouse pointer will start moving by itself
You know, every time I told my coworkers that the mouse pointer scuttles across the screen by itself at odd intervals on my PC, they would give me odd looks and walk away from me. Now I can show them your post and get back some social respectibility - thank you!
The usual political guerrilla tactics, I guess. The theory is that even if nothing can ever be proved, the smell of a possible scandal will cling to the other person/party and lower its credibility. The Republicans tried the same tactics with mixed results (Whitewater, Monicagate) - which doesn't excuse the Democrats trying the same stunt now.
By the way, I misspelled "Post hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc" in my first reply, sorry.
Raymond
but you're right, i was being a weenie ;->
... but kudos to you for admitting it. I wish this were more common here on slashdot (and on usenet, and in the newspapers etc.)
Have a nice weekend,
Raymond
I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who gets the creeps seeing the abuse of port 80 we're getting nowadays (not only from Microsoft, mind you). Consider this post virtually modded up +1, insightful.
Raymond
Archanagor,
Strong reaction, I didn't intend to upset you - attack the facts, not the person, please.
My points were
1. That the article you've linked to comes from a source who may (!) have some bias in favor of Microsoft
2. That the logic in the argument is faulty (the "tu quoque" argument part)
3. That the "Oh well, I'll probably be modded down for going against groupthink" is a form of social engineering and, unfortunately, gets rewarded a little too often on slashdot.
Just because I disagreed with your original post doesn't prove that I'm "clouded by my hatred for MS" as you say - I make a comfortable living in a big Microsoft shop.
I'm also a member or the local IRT, and believe me, sleeping in the office for three nights straight while mopping up behind the ILOVEYOU disaster is an experience I don't want to repeat (yeah, we really got caught, the experience has made us wiser).
If they really succeed in making their products more secure, I'll be more than happy. As I said, I prefer my bed to a sleeping bag in the office.
Raymond
>> You mean the company that was such a major D party contributor?
According to this and to the major national newspapers in Switzerland, they certainly were not choosy when it came to brib^H^H^H^Hcontributing to the other party as well.
>>Ahh -- the one who found they could not bribe W as easily as Clinton and was exposed?
Without supporting facts, this looks like a "Post Hoc, Ergo Poster Hoc" fallacy (Enron got busted under the Bush administration, therefore the Clinton administration was corrupt and the Bush administration is not). I'm not saying that there is no causality, only that without solid facts, it's just wishful thinking.
Raymond
>> As it turns out, MS Security is not as bad as Sun's or IBM's [objectwatch.com]
/., and when I have modpoints I always mod those posts down as trolls - not because they're contrarian to /. groupthink but because they're using faulty logic and are either trolls or just clueless.
/. mentality.
I think that's not a very good example you're giving to support your argument. From the website you're linking to:
"Roger Sessions is highly respected within Microsoft. He has given many keynote talks at Microsoft sponsored conferences. Thousands of copies of his book have been given away by Microsoft."
That alone is of course not sufficient to question Mr. Session's bias or professional qualifications, but let's just say I got a little bit leery after reading this.
Furthermore, your logic seems fundamentally flawed to me. According to your chain of reasoning:
1. Microsoft has security problems
2. Other's have security problems, too
therefore
3. Microsoft is not so bad as everybody says.
This looks to me like a classical "tu quoque" fallacy. I see it again and again on
>> I'll probably be modded down as troll or flaimbait, but then it just shows the
Moderators, whenever you see a sentence similar to the above ("C'mon, mod me down, I have karma to burn..."), please think hard if the poster really made a soundproof argument or is just doing some social engineering on you by doing an appeal to pity in order to gather/avoid losing some karma.
Raymond
1) Was Tom's video a fair representation.
IMHO, No. Unrealistic circumstances = Fear Mongering
It sure drew a lot of attention, though (and I bet AMD was not happy about this kind of publicity). If anyone from AMD listens: "cracked die" and "fire hazard" are two words we geeks don't want to hear when it comes to our processors.
#3 however, has to do with an industry standard. AMD can't really change it much.
I just wish they tried a little harder. Some clip design I've seen suck toxic waste, some boards have capacitors that come too close to the CPU etc. Unfortunately, Intel is in the better position when it comes to tell motherboard and heatsink designers what to do.
Raymond
The chance of a heatsink falling off completely is pretty small.
Depends on how you use your PC, IMO. It's not a problem with my 1.4 TBird at home, because I assembled the system at home and do not plan to move it around.
If you want to ship the box, or even take it to a LAN party in your car over bumpy roads, you better think about removing the heatsink - especially if you have one as heavy as this beast or one with a high center of gravity like this one. Unfortunately, removing the heat sink without damaging the processor die or popping off a few SMD resistors with a badly designed clip isn't exactly trivial in many cases, not to mention that there's also the issue of correct handling of thermal paste/tape involved.
In my PC, there are only two flimsy plastic noses on the CPU socket securing the heat sink clip, and the sink is quite heavy. I shudder at the thought of the havoc the heat sink could wreak if it should come loose during transport. And should I inadvertently turn on the system without heat sink in place, the CPU would be toast before I even had time to notice something is wrong (the BIOS doesn't start at a 'safe speed' for all I know).
AMD has to do three things in my opinion:
1. Provide an internal (fast) thermal diode similar to the one used in the P4, throttling the CPU down to a safe speed if temperatures get too high.
2. Provide a heat-spreader which protects the CPU die. My local PC parts dealer has half a shoebox full of AMD CPUs with broken dies. It's not really a problem for him, because it's not the dealer who pays for a new CPU if the customer screws up heatsink assembly, but it doesn't generate happy AMD customers.
3. Redesign and standardize the heat-sink/motherboard attachment and provide mandatory design guides for mainboard manufacturers. There are too many clip designs around, some sinks cannot be mounted at all in some motherboards, etc.
Raymond