Well, there's a difference between private use and "rebroadcasting" the app on a public web server. I would say a web app on the internet is in some ways the equilivalent of distributing a binary... it's allowing use of a program without distributing its inner workings.
As software becomes more server-centric, I think this'll become more and more important. -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
If I release a web app (PHP pages, say) under the GPL, and someone modifies them for their web site, does the GPL obligate them to make the source for their alterations available, since the code isn't distributed, per se?
For example, if a site modifies Slashcode to add functionality to their own site, are they obligated to make the changes available?
-- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
1. Write a JIT compiler for the Microsoft's Intermediate Language (IL) - basically the same as a Java runtime. This was submitted as part of Microsoft's open standard submission, I think.
2. Write a C#-to-IL compiler (or perhaps VB, etc). Specs are also an open standard; I think there are third-party Perl-to-IL compilers already, for example.
3. Write the base classes. I'm not sure how much native code goes into these, but probably quite a bit. A list of the base classes for Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure submission is here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ecma/Allmembers.as p
4. Depending on the functionality you want to enable, write the stuff that isn't part of the standard submission. For example, to copy their server platform, you gotta make the ASP libraries, the data libraries, etc. Copying the GUI elements for desktop apps is probably trickier...
Trying to embrace and extend would probably be difficult with all the catch-up you'd have to do. The appeal of the.NET platform lies not its underlying platform, but in its vast library (think of Win32 but in a nice, neat, powerful object-oriented format) and development environment. Copying the base platform is the easy part, and isn't going to get you very far... copying the library is probably much trickier, but necessary if you want to try to embrace and extend.
If you could get all those steps done, you could achive the ultimate goal of... what? Letting people develop for Linux in Visual Studio? I guess its a step towards weaning Microsofties away from Microsoft servers, but it seems like a lot of effort to do something that'll ultimately still be under Microsoft's control. I don't see WINE doing any embracing-and-extending...
If you want to try to co-opt the.NET initiative, it's probably better to strike at the SOAP objects and.NET authentication, as those are just XML specs. Write some Perl, PHP, and Java modules which can communicate via MS' XML standards... that's a lot more possible, and probably a lot more palatable to the Open Source community. -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Hmm. The Slashdot moderators think a post accusing someone of being a Scientologist (with absolutely no evidence of anything) is worth more than a post outlining the various corporate crimes which are far worse than the much-hated Microsoft.
I can see modding down the original post (Offtopic, perhaps?) but modding up that "you sound like you're from a cult" drivel? What, anything to discredit someone who isn't on the Open Source team?
In many ways, the Open Source movement and the anti-globalization movement are on the same team... fighting corporate abuse, the expansion of corporate beasts that exist only to make more money. Maybe even transforming society into something that isn't based solely on profit.
And as a cog in that movement, the Open Source movement is important as a means to prevent the corporate control of the information infrastructure. But there are a lot of other battles out there, and they're bigger than the OS battles, or even the normal Left-Wing, Right-Wing schizms. Perhaps Slashdotters should try to learn a bit more about this.
No matter if you're Pro-Microsoft, Pro-Linux, Democrat, Republican, there are abuses being carried out by corporate entities that offensive to anyone - and that's what, for example, the Seattle and Quebec City protestors are protesting about. Even if you are staunch Republican, even if you think you think you disagree with the protestors because they're the same people who protest for too much union power or gun control or more welfare, trust me, there are many issues you probably agree with them about. -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
If these 'newbies' you moan about are yuppies who move into your neighborhood and immediately start a campaign to gentrify the area, you are are a spoiled 2-year-old brat who refuses to share his toys.
That analogy doesn't work at all... maybe the 2-year-old who refuses to *give up* his toys. Or maybe the kid who lend out his favorite toy and when he got it back out half the parts were missing. -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
The good thing about VB is, simply by learning a few new objects, you can writing GUI apps, middleware components, server-side scripts, web apps, web services, DB apps, etc....
Possible in C/C++ as well, but not nearly as easy - good if you're into pure performance, not so good if you're mainly concerned with data access, business logic, and usability. And I'm sure other languages have such capabilities, but I doubt any are so well supported.
If you want to switch to a cross-platform language with similar capabilities, I'd recommend Java/Forte. It's capabilities are as broad as VB, the IDE is pretty good, it's a fairly beautiful language, and, job-market-wise, it's hard to beat. -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
If you've got a little mp3 streaming site with a few banner ads to help pay for bandwidth
Who said anything about quality? Who said anything about 24 concurrent connections? I'm just talking little dinky hobbiest sites. Basically, any little guy you just wants to stream a few of his garage band's songs out to a limited audience and has a few banner ads to pay for beer money is supposed (in theory) to pay $2000 bucks.
It doesn't really matter, since (a) Thomson isn't going to bother with little dinky sites, and (b) there are tons of streaming alternatives anyway, but it's just that $2000 could be considered a significant barrier to entry for such things. A more reasonable move on Thomson's part might be to set minimum revenue levels before the payments kick in. -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
It's the $2000 fee that's the main problem. If you've got a little mp3 streaming site with a few banner ads to pay for bandwidth, your revenue isn't even going to add up to $2000 - but you're still supposed to pay the fee. -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
They would never put this feature in say MS Word or Excel.
The Smart Tags are from MS Word and Excel in Office XP. Insert a Stock Symbol into an Excel spreadsheet, it'll offer to get you a live quote to MSN Finance. (So you could track your stocks on an Excel Spreadsheet.) Type stuff into Word, and it'll highlight keywords, offering to get you infomation on places, sports teams, famous people, etc. from MS' web sites.
It's real annoying, but very easy to turn off. I imagine it'll be the same for the IE Smart Tags. (Of course, all the computer-illiterate who don't even think of changing anything are stuck with them...) -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
VCD quality leaves much to be desired and you can make that DVD, but i can't have the level of interactivness of normal DVD's and you are limited to about 1 hour of video. Not exactly a level playing ground.
You're only stuck making VCDs because because DVD writers are still way too expensive. As the price comes down, you'll be able to make full-fledged DVDs, assuming you have the software (and the talent). -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Picture it, all Media and Media creators have copy control built in. Not only that, but it uses a similiar strategy that DVD uses: Licensed keys. Now, what makes you think that some kid working on an album in his basement will be able to create that media so that it plays on standard players? If he could, then the very nature of the key system has been broken.
Anyone can make a VCD or DVD (assuming they can afford the latest PowerMac until the hardware comes down in price) and have it place on ordinary DVD players. Encrypting the content is optional. (As are, BTW, region codes and Macrovision.)
Its possible the next system won't be like that, but for DVDs, encrypted and non-encrypted media can be played on the same player. -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
And since patent offices are unable to distinguish between 'difficult' things like codecs and trivial things like one-click (the criterion of 'obviousness' is not something a patent examiner understands very well), you have to ask whether we wouldn't be better off without patents on any field of software.
Or, er, better trained and more clued-in patent examiners? I mean, throwing out patents because they restrict freedom or whatever is one thing, but throwing them out just because the process needs to be improved a bit is another. -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
His comments are that people aren't doing the research that Dan Goldin promised they would be doing. The reason? Because NASA has decided to cut funding to the CRV that would allow 7 people (enough to do science) to live on the station.
Er, the CRV wouldn't be ready in 3 or 4 years, anyway, so I'm not sure what your point is. No one was expecting to do much research at this stage of construction. (Except, apparently, Tito.) -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
"Any responsible adult doesn't need months of NASA training not to push the wrong button. That's absurd," said Tito, who spent almost one year preparing for the trip with his Russian crewmates. "I was definitely over-trained for this mission."
That's because *nothing went wrong*. If there was an meteor hit, or an oxygen valve broke, or a fuel tank ruptured, or a million other things that could go wrong, you can bet his training would be useful.
Tito said he asked one of the residents how much research she had conducted since arriving at the space station months ago.
"'About two days,' was the answer," Tito told participants at a CNN World Report conference in Atlanta on Tuesday.
Of course. A) the damn thing's still under construction, and B) it's established that three crew members are needed to maintain the thing, that's why the final crew manifest will be seven.
And the CRV will happen, the Europeans are too heavily involved for it to just fall by the waysite due to US budget restrictions:
Yes, there are numerous things that NASA does wrong, and yes, there's a lot of space science that unmanned probes can do, but it's hard to learn about life sciences and what's it really like living in space without having people up there. And that's difficult, dangerous, and expensive. -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
True, now what incentive would companies other than Microsoft have to not support "gnuPassport" ?
Well, let's take an example (this is an example they give on MSDN for Expedia with a few other options added in for good measure)...
You book a flight on Expedia.
The Expedia sites offers to do the following...
- add it to your myFlights service
- add it to your myCalender service
- notify when appropriate with your myNotification service
- send a detailed description to your myInbox service
- get a list of your friends from your myContacts service and add information to their myCalender and myNotification services (assuming they've given you permission to do so)
- add contact information for the airline and travel agent to your myAddressbook service.
Now, to do that, all the services in that list and are going to have to support the authentication you've given them. In addition to making sure all the Passport sites work the way they're supposed to, are you going to want to do all the testing and support for the small subset of the population using the Open alternatives?
Plus, it's going to be very difficult for gnuPassport to be free... the maintain the redundancy and security needed is going to require income, especially if it reaches any sort of scale to be competitive with Microsoft's offering.
I'm not sure how valid the web browser comparison is. Many sites still support Netscape because many users still haven't switched stopped using it yet from back when Netscape was dominant - I'm sure the amount of effort put into making Netscape-compatible sites is doing down every year. And I doubt many commercial sites put too much effort into making sure their sites work with Konquerer or OmniWeb or even Mozilla. Standard mean they generally do, but unless the designer is a Linux person, say, I doubt he's put much effort into testing it with Konquerer. -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Well, I mean HTTP/HTML/etc - the whole "web" thing. Mosiac was just a much more flexible and capable solution for viewing information and communicating with servers (ie. web-like functionality) than its commercial competitors at the time - say, CompuServe.
[That's probably a good point, though, how HTTP is technically a fairly crappy protocol. Nearly ubiquitous despite it's technical flaws... somewhat like Windows. There's something profound in there somewhere...]
-- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
You could emulate the interface, but you wouldn't have the keys to validate your authentication.
So your gnuPassport couldn't be used on sites which only recognize Microsoft's Passport.
And if you can't link up with other sites, you lose a lot of the functionality of Hailstorm and are just left with the.NET XML Web Service spec, which is fine, I suppose, unless you like IBM's or Sun's Web Service ideas better. Without the common Passport authentication, Hailstorm is no longer Hailstorm.
((And if you did get your hands on the keys, it would mean the collapse of the entire Passport security scheme.) -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
It's amazing how the overwhelming impression someone would get from all these slashot discussions is that your typical/.er is a technophobe.
This kind of thing is *cool*.
Should Microsoft control it? Of course not. But there should be a lot more enthusiasm on these boards for the capabilities these things represent; it's this sort of universal capability which is the future.
Is there a security risk? Of course... but you could say the same thing about the postal service, the telephone, credit cards, etc etc. It's *going* to happen.
But the OSS has to stop saying "Boo. Stop Microsoft. They're evil." and start saying "What Microsoft is trying to do is cool, but what we can do is *better*."
That's (partly, anyway) why *nix dominates the web... Apache (and its predecessors) used a protocol (http) which was just plain better than all the commercial alternatives for information dissemmination, and when the commercial companies turned around and came to see how great the whole web concept was, the OSS community was already there.
-- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
It is middle of the road between the far right and far left... compared to many anti-corporate and anti-capitalist sites, it's downright right wing.
It may not be middle of the road politically in the United States, but that's just because in the spectrum of far-left to far-right, even the Democrats are pretty right wing. -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
The problem with most web sites is that their left- or right- wing biases tend to make intelligent appraisal difficult. They've all got facts, statistics, and examples which support their points of view - which just leaves those that already are left-wing to become more left wing, and those that are already right wing to become more right wing. It takes a concerted effort to find the truth (which, like everything, is somewhere in the middle).
It has a good outline of the middle ground between left-wing (socialism) and right-wing (corporate capitalism).
As for the anarchists... they're basically saying ignorance is bliss, and people were happy and generous before civilisation comes around. Which may be true in some ways - since happiness is such a subjective thing, it's difficult to say. Humans are probably happiest when they're in love and are raising kids... but I'm not sure how happy primitives were when they lost one child to the harsh winter, their mate and two of their kids to childbirth, and are blind (no glasses), toothless (no dental care), and dying of appendicitus on their 30th birthday...
Humans tend to find happiness to be a relative thing, and always find fault with their current situation - even in paradise, people would manage to screw it up. But by any objective standard, people today (most especially in 1st-world countries) have the best living conditions of any time in history, and that's due to the whole "civilization" thing... we just don't know how to appreciate it. Before civilization, death was a much more common and bigger worry than anything we've got to worry about today... -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
In my experience, lots of Windows Admins tend to be non-geeks that took a course because getting into computers is a good way to make money. Knowledgable Windows users tend to go into programming/consulting.
OTOH, almost everyone who uses/admins *nix (and especially Open Source) is a computer geek who really likes and is generally interested in computers. So the level of sophistication, on average, for Linux admins would definitely be higher.
In my mind, Windows is just a version or two away from being truly adminstrable by non-computer-geeks... they've got most of the usability down, they just need a few more setup wizards and (most important) security wizards and an MSCE will be able to run a secure shop. And then the people with the computer smarts can do more thought-provoking activities instead of setting up identical workstations, setting up accounts, and fixing printers...
Linux is much further away from being accessible to people that just want to do their job and go home without thinking about it too much. And the non-thinkers are quite a large portion of the workforce.;) -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
There are *loads* of documents on the Microsoft technet site... from checklists to technical articles to searchable lists of downloads...
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/defaul t. asp
Yes, the source isn't available for figuring out your own hacks, but there's a plethora of information for system admins...
In general, it's pretty simple to secure Win2K sites. There are two cardinal rules: 1. Turn off everything you don't need, and 2. keep the patches up to date.
Number 1 involves finding out everything that's running - check your Services listing in control panel and find out what everything does, and turn it off if you don't need it. Use Add/Remove Windows Components to remove things like DNS servers or RRAS if you aren't using them.
Number 2 involves subscribing to the Microsoft Security Bulletin Service (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/notify. asp) and keeping a directory full of all applicable security patches (ie. post-SP2 patches) so you can apply them to new machines as you get them... use the QPatch tool to avoid a million reboots. You can also use the Technet site or corporate.windowsupdate.microsoft.com to download the applicable patches if you're just starting out.
After you're settled with those to, you can then go in to tweaking Security settings on files and the registry.... there are guidelines for that in the Technet site. And then, finally, if you want, you can dig into the registry. But really, to have a secure site, for the most part you can just do everything with the GUI. -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
...from potential lawsuits. Any one of the millions of posters on Usenet could potentially sue them for including their posts in their archives. Including that clause just make it less likely that something like that will happen.
Usenet posts are a fairly grey area when it comes to copyright law... Google's just being safe. Now, they could be planning to take all the Star Trek porn fanfic that's being posted through their interface and make millions selling it in their own compilation, but I think that's unlikely... -- Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there's a difference between private use and "rebroadcasting" the app on a public web server. I would say a web app on the internet is in some ways the equilivalent of distributing a binary... it's allowing use of a program without distributing its inner workings.
As software becomes more server-centric, I think this'll become more and more important.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
If I release a web app (PHP pages, say) under the GPL, and someone modifies them for their web site, does the GPL obligate them to make the source for their alterations available, since the code isn't distributed, per se?
For example, if a site modifies Slashcode to add functionality to their own site, are they obligated to make the changes available?
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
1. Write a JIT compiler for the Microsoft's Intermediate Language (IL) - basically the same as a Java runtime. This was submitted as part of Microsoft's open standard submission, I think.
s p
.NET platform lies not its underlying platform, but in its vast library (think of Win32 but in a nice, neat, powerful object-oriented format) and development environment. Copying the base platform is the easy part, and isn't going to get you very far... copying the library is probably much trickier, but necessary if you want to try to embrace and extend.
.NET initiative, it's probably better to strike at the SOAP objects and .NET authentication, as those are just XML specs. Write some Perl, PHP, and Java modules which can communicate via MS' XML standards... that's a lot more possible, and probably a lot more palatable to the Open Source community.
2. Write a C#-to-IL compiler (or perhaps VB, etc). Specs are also an open standard; I think there are third-party Perl-to-IL compilers already, for example.
3. Write the base classes. I'm not sure how much native code goes into these, but probably quite a bit. A list of the base classes for Microsoft's Common Language Infrastructure submission is here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/ecma/Allmembers.a
4. Depending on the functionality you want to enable, write the stuff that isn't part of the standard submission. For example, to copy their server platform, you gotta make the ASP libraries, the data libraries, etc. Copying the GUI elements for desktop apps is probably trickier...
Trying to embrace and extend would probably be difficult with all the catch-up you'd have to do. The appeal of the
If you could get all those steps done, you could achive the ultimate goal of... what? Letting people develop for Linux in Visual Studio? I guess its a step towards weaning Microsofties away from Microsoft servers, but it seems like a lot of effort to do something that'll ultimately still be under Microsoft's control. I don't see WINE doing any embracing-and-extending...
If you want to try to co-opt the
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Hmm. The Slashdot moderators think a post accusing someone of being a Scientologist (with absolutely no evidence of anything) is worth more than a post outlining the various corporate crimes which are far worse than the much-hated Microsoft.
I can see modding down the original post (Offtopic, perhaps?) but modding up that "you sound like you're from a cult" drivel? What, anything to discredit someone who isn't on the Open Source team?
In many ways, the Open Source movement and the anti-globalization movement are on the same team... fighting corporate abuse, the expansion of corporate beasts that exist only to make more money. Maybe even transforming society into something that isn't based solely on profit.
And as a cog in that movement, the Open Source movement is important as a means to prevent the corporate control of the information infrastructure. But there are a lot of other battles out there, and they're bigger than the OS battles, or even the normal Left-Wing, Right-Wing schizms. Perhaps Slashdotters should try to learn a bit more about this.
No matter if you're Pro-Microsoft, Pro-Linux, Democrat, Republican, there are abuses being carried out by corporate entities that offensive to anyone - and that's what, for example, the Seattle and Quebec City protestors are protesting about. Even if you are staunch Republican, even if you think you think you disagree with the protestors because they're the same people who protest for too much union power or gun control or more welfare, trust me, there are many issues you probably agree with them about.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Good programmers don't reinvent the wheel.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
If these 'newbies' you moan about are yuppies who move into your neighborhood and immediately start a campaign to gentrify the area, you are are a spoiled 2-year-old brat who refuses to share his toys.
That analogy doesn't work at all... maybe the 2-year-old who refuses to *give up* his toys. Or maybe the kid who lend out his favorite toy and when he got it back out half the parts were missing.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
The good thing about VB is, simply by learning a few new objects, you can writing GUI apps, middleware components, server-side scripts, web apps, web services, DB apps, etc....
Possible in C/C++ as well, but not nearly as easy - good if you're into pure performance, not so good if you're mainly concerned with data access, business logic, and usability. And I'm sure other languages have such capabilities, but I doubt any are so well supported.
If you want to switch to a cross-platform language with similar capabilities, I'd recommend Java/Forte. It's capabilities are as broad as VB, the IDE is pretty good, it's a fairly beautiful language, and, job-market-wise, it's hard to beat.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
OK, say I said this:
If you've got a little mp3 streaming site with a few banner ads to help pay for bandwidth
Who said anything about quality? Who said anything about 24 concurrent connections? I'm just talking little dinky hobbiest sites. Basically, any little guy you just wants to stream a few of his garage band's songs out to a limited audience and has a few banner ads to pay for beer money is supposed (in theory) to pay $2000 bucks.
It doesn't really matter, since (a) Thomson isn't going to bother with little dinky sites, and (b) there are tons of streaming alternatives anyway, but it's just that $2000 could be considered a significant barrier to entry for such things. A more reasonable move on Thomson's part might be to set minimum revenue levels before the payments kick in.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
It's the $2000 fee that's the main problem. If you've got a little mp3 streaming site with a few banner ads to pay for bandwidth, your revenue isn't even going to add up to $2000 - but you're still supposed to pay the fee.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
They would never put this feature in say MS Word or Excel.
The Smart Tags are from MS Word and Excel in Office XP. Insert a Stock Symbol into an Excel spreadsheet, it'll offer to get you a live quote to MSN Finance. (So you could track your stocks on an Excel Spreadsheet.) Type stuff into Word, and it'll highlight keywords, offering to get you infomation on places, sports teams, famous people, etc. from MS' web sites.
It's real annoying, but very easy to turn off. I imagine it'll be the same for the IE Smart Tags. (Of course, all the computer-illiterate who don't even think of changing anything are stuck with them...)
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
VCD quality leaves much to be desired and you can make that DVD, but i can't have the level of interactivness of normal DVD's and you are limited to about 1 hour of video. Not exactly a level playing ground.
You're only stuck making VCDs because because DVD writers are still way too expensive. As the price comes down, you'll be able to make full-fledged DVDs, assuming you have the software (and the talent).
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Picture it, all Media and Media creators have copy control built in. Not only that, but it uses a similiar strategy that DVD uses: Licensed keys. Now, what makes you think that some kid working on an album in his basement will be able to create that media so that it plays on standard players? If he could, then the very nature of the key system has been broken.
Anyone can make a VCD or DVD (assuming they can afford the latest PowerMac until the hardware comes down in price) and have it place on ordinary DVD players. Encrypting the content is optional. (As are, BTW, region codes and Macrovision.)
Its possible the next system won't be like that, but for DVDs, encrypted and non-encrypted media can be played on the same player.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
And since patent offices are unable to distinguish between 'difficult' things like codecs and trivial things like one-click (the criterion of 'obviousness' is not something a patent examiner understands very well), you have to ask whether we wouldn't be better off without patents on any field of software.
Or, er, better trained and more clued-in patent examiners? I mean, throwing out patents because they restrict freedom or whatever is one thing, but throwing them out just because the process needs to be improved a bit is another.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
His comments are that people aren't doing the research that Dan Goldin promised they would be doing. The reason? Because NASA has decided to cut funding to the CRV that would allow 7 people (enough to do science) to live on the station.
Er, the CRV wouldn't be ready in 3 or 4 years, anyway, so I'm not sure what your point is. No one was expecting to do much research at this stage of construction. (Except, apparently, Tito.)
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=353
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
"Any responsible adult doesn't need months of NASA training not to push the wrong button. That's absurd," said Tito, who spent almost one year preparing for the trip with his Russian crewmates. "I was definitely over-trained for this mission."
That's because *nothing went wrong*. If there was an meteor hit, or an oxygen valve broke, or a fuel tank ruptured, or a million other things that could go wrong, you can bet his training would be useful.
Tito said he asked one of the residents how much research she had conducted since arriving at the space station months ago.
"'About two days,' was the answer," Tito told participants at a CNN World Report conference in Atlanta on Tuesday.
Of course. A) the damn thing's still under construction, and B) it's established that three crew members are needed to maintain the thing, that's why the final crew manifest will be seven.
And the CRV will happen, the Europeans are too heavily involved for it to just fall by the waysite due to US budget restrictions:
Yes, there are numerous things that NASA does wrong, and yes, there's a lot of space science that unmanned probes can do, but it's hard to learn about life sciences and what's it really like living in space without having people up there. And that's difficult, dangerous, and expensive.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
True, now what incentive would companies other than Microsoft have to not support "gnuPassport" ?
Well, let's take an example (this is an example they give on MSDN for Expedia with a few other options added in for good measure)...
You book a flight on Expedia.
The Expedia sites offers to do the following...
- add it to your myFlights service
- add it to your myCalender service
- notify when appropriate with your myNotification service
- send a detailed description to your myInbox service
- get a list of your friends from your myContacts service and add information to their myCalender and myNotification services (assuming they've given you permission to do so)
- add contact information for the airline and travel agent to your myAddressbook service.
Now, to do that, all the services in that list and are going to have to support the authentication you've given them. In addition to making sure all the Passport sites work the way they're supposed to, are you going to want to do all the testing and support for the small subset of the population using the Open alternatives?
Plus, it's going to be very difficult for gnuPassport to be free... the maintain the redundancy and security needed is going to require income, especially if it reaches any sort of scale to be competitive with Microsoft's offering.
I'm not sure how valid the web browser comparison is. Many sites still support Netscape because many users still haven't switched stopped using it yet from back when Netscape was dominant - I'm sure the amount of effort put into making Netscape-compatible sites is doing down every year. And I doubt many commercial sites put too much effort into making sure their sites work with Konquerer or OmniWeb or even Mozilla. Standard mean they generally do, but unless the designer is a Linux person, say, I doubt he's put much effort into testing it with Konquerer.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Well, I mean HTTP/HTML/etc - the whole "web" thing. Mosiac was just a much more flexible and capable solution for viewing information and communicating with servers (ie. web-like functionality) than its commercial competitors at the time - say, CompuServe.
[That's probably a good point, though, how HTTP is technically a fairly crappy protocol. Nearly ubiquitous despite it's technical flaws... somewhat like Windows. There's something profound in there somewhere...]
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
You could emulate the interface, but you wouldn't have the keys to validate your authentication.
.NET XML Web Service spec, which is fine, I suppose, unless you like IBM's or Sun's Web Service ideas better. Without the common Passport authentication, Hailstorm is no longer Hailstorm.
So your gnuPassport couldn't be used on sites which only recognize Microsoft's Passport.
And if you can't link up with other sites, you lose a lot of the functionality of Hailstorm and are just left with the
((And if you did get your hands on the keys, it would mean the collapse of the entire Passport security scheme.)
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
It's amazing how the overwhelming impression someone would get from all these slashot discussions is that your typical /.er is a technophobe.
This kind of thing is *cool*.
Should Microsoft control it? Of course not. But there should be a lot more enthusiasm on these boards for the capabilities these things represent; it's this sort of universal capability which is the future.
Is there a security risk? Of course... but you could say the same thing about the postal service, the telephone, credit cards, etc etc. It's *going* to happen.
But the OSS has to stop saying "Boo. Stop Microsoft. They're evil." and start saying "What Microsoft is trying to do is cool, but what we can do is *better*."
That's (partly, anyway) why *nix dominates the web... Apache (and its predecessors) used a protocol (http) which was just plain better than all the commercial alternatives for information dissemmination, and when the commercial companies turned around and came to see how great the whole web concept was, the OSS community was already there.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
It is middle of the road between the far right and far left... compared to many anti-corporate and anti-capitalist sites, it's downright right wing.
It may not be middle of the road politically in the United States, but that's just because in the spectrum of far-left to far-right, even the Democrats are pretty right wing.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
The problem with most web sites is that their left- or right- wing biases tend to make intelligent appraisal difficult. They've all got facts, statistics, and examples which support their points of view - which just leaves those that already are left-wing to become more left wing, and those that are already right wing to become more right wing. It takes a concerted effort to find the truth (which, like everything, is somewhere in the middle).
If you want a site which tries to have a practical, middle-of-the-road view of the world, try this one...
http://www.korpios.org/resurgent/tenets.htm
It has a good outline of the middle ground between left-wing (socialism) and right-wing (corporate capitalism).
As for the anarchists... they're basically saying ignorance is bliss, and people were happy and generous before civilisation comes around. Which may be true in some ways - since happiness is such a subjective thing, it's difficult to say. Humans are probably happiest when they're in love and are raising kids... but I'm not sure how happy primitives were when they lost one child to the harsh winter, their mate and two of their kids to childbirth, and are blind (no glasses), toothless (no dental care), and dying of appendicitus on their 30th birthday...
Humans tend to find happiness to be a relative thing, and always find fault with their current situation - even in paradise, people would manage to screw it up. But by any objective standard, people today (most especially in 1st-world countries) have the best living conditions of any time in history, and that's due to the whole "civilization" thing... we just don't know how to appreciate it. Before civilization, death was a much more common and bigger worry than anything we've got to worry about today...
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
In my experience, lots of Windows Admins tend to be non-geeks that took a course because getting into computers is a good way to make money. Knowledgable Windows users tend to go into programming/consulting.
;)
OTOH, almost everyone who uses/admins *nix (and especially Open Source) is a computer geek who really likes and is generally interested in computers. So the level of sophistication, on average, for Linux admins would definitely be higher.
In my mind, Windows is just a version or two away from being truly adminstrable by non-computer-geeks... they've got most of the usability down, they just need a few more setup wizards and (most important) security wizards and an MSCE will be able to run a secure shop. And then the people with the computer smarts can do more thought-provoking activities instead of setting up identical workstations, setting up accounts, and fixing printers...
Linux is much further away from being accessible to people that just want to do their job and go home without thinking about it too much. And the non-thinkers are quite a large portion of the workforce.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
There are *loads* of documents on the Microsoft technet site... from checklists to technical articles to searchable lists of downloads...
l t. asp
. asp) and keeping a directory full of all applicable security patches (ie. post-SP2 patches) so you can apply them to new machines as you get them... use the QPatch tool to avoid a million reboots. You can also use the Technet site or corporate.windowsupdate.microsoft.com to download the applicable patches if you're just starting out.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/defau
Yes, the source isn't available for figuring out your own hacks, but there's a plethora of information for system admins...
In general, it's pretty simple to secure Win2K sites. There are two cardinal rules: 1. Turn off everything you don't need, and 2. keep the patches up to date.
Number 1 involves finding out everything that's running - check your Services listing in control panel and find out what everything does, and turn it off if you don't need it. Use Add/Remove Windows Components to remove things like DNS servers or RRAS if you aren't using them.
Number 2 involves subscribing to the Microsoft Security Bulletin Service (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/notify
After you're settled with those to, you can then go in to tweaking Security settings on files and the registry.... there are guidelines for that in the Technet site. And then, finally, if you want, you can dig into the registry. But really, to have a secure site, for the most part you can just do everything with the GUI.
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
...from potential lawsuits. Any one of the millions of posters on Usenet could potentially sue them for including their posts in their archives. Including that clause just make it less likely that something like that will happen.
Usenet posts are a fairly grey area when it comes to copyright law... Google's just being safe. Now, they could be planning to take all the Star Trek porn fanfic that's being posted through their interface and make millions selling it in their own compilation, but I think that's unlikely...
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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.