That's why modern scanners use hueristics to detect virus. Instead of just looking for signatures, they also look for general behavioral patterns from the virus. That behavior is not found in a typical non-viral program, but is common in viral programs. That's why today's virus scanners sometimes flag a program as a virus incorrectly. But the grandparent is right. You have to make changes that modify the detected *behavior* in some way. Changing the signatures is not usually enough.
Any business is built one customer at a time. I promise you every business is always looking for a way to pull a few more customers into their store...
I'm not saying it has to make sense. If we are speculating, note that many people see a connection between the current SCO lawsuit and Microsoft's goals. Viewed in that light, a lawsuit filed for the reasons I suggest would not really look that different...
I'm not trying to avoid liability by ignorance. Instead, I'm suggesting that we should make every effort to safeguard our community.
You are completely right about patent infringment not being escapable by ignoring the code. OTOH, it's probably more effective to use standard methods of patent infringement research rather than poking through their source. If the patent is filed, you have to be careful not to infringe. If you see a useful idea that's not patented yet, you could still get shafted for copying it...
The whole proof thing requires a court process... IBM is able to handle crap like that. If MS attacked my little company, I don't think I could do anything but fold. Circumstantial evidence is enough sometimes....
It's certainly conspiracy theory, but imagine that this is simply another step in the annoyance that is the SCO lawsuit. Imagine that MS could prove Linus downloaded a copy of the source and took a peek.... Or that someone who contributes code to the kernel looked at the Windows source....
What I'm worried about is the implication this has in tainting developers of open source projects... If I *had* downloaded the source when it was available and my IP was logged as a result, MS could easily claim that new code I write is taking advantages of things I learned by reading their source even though I might not have ever opened the zip file.
Several people have already posted replies to this article saying that they downloaded it or that they found these cool comments or..... Please, do me a favor and never come close to one of my projects.
While the performance gains are impressive (about 5 times as many pages under 2.6) it also shows that 2.6 used 5.6 times more RAM to serve the increased number of pages. If RAM on the system isn't limited, the performance gain is insane. If the system is already overloaded w/respect to RAM, it likely won't help much and there's a *slight* chance it would actually perform worse.
I had 5 completely reproducable hard lock bugs that wouldn't even produce a blue screen with Win 98 SE on my machine. Hard lock meaning hitting the caps lock key doesn't change the indicator light on the keyboard... In addition, I would get random crashes at both the app and OS level several times per week. If I didn't shut my machine down each night or at least reboot in the morning, I would get a crash before 10AM.
One of my current clients has several Windows machines including 98, ME, 2000, and XP. The 2000 machine must be shut down each evening or it will hard lock in the morning. ME is a known bad apple so I'll ignore it. Of the XP machines, I've routinely locked several up while switching the systems from static to dynamic IPs. The XP machines generally don't crash though so times have gotten better in the Windows world...
You ask what I did? I used my machine... A lot... To keep the crashes down to a minimum, I did a full reinstall every six months and that seemed to cut my problems at least in half. No, I didn't delete random dlls. No, I didn't have a bunch of extra crap running (ICQ was the only thing in the task tray).
Maybe I had bad hardware, but there was no way for me to work around it with Windows.
Since switching to Linux, I've had 1 lockup that isn't directly explained by bad hardware and that includes an installed base of about 35 Linux systems. My current primary system is a dual MP 2400 and my hardware seems to have a serious problem. When booting, I have to tell my kernel to disable a high performance memory mode and I have to turn DMA off after I'm done booting or my kernel randomly locks. I assume one of my MP chips is slightly defective, but a similar bug exists in a whole revision of the MPs. Hopefully a switch to 2.6 will make the problem go away. If not, I'll probably end up replacing the processors.
The thing is, Linux doesn't crash and at the time I switched, Windows would crash all the time. And, when I run into a hardware problem, it's not impossible to work around.
RPMs can be a problem, but if you understand how they are built, it's possible to remedy situations created by a retarded RPM. A reinstall isn't necessary if you've just messed up xmms. You simply need to understand how everything fits together. Although Gentoo is a little tough to get setup initially, it does a pretty nice job of solving those sorts of issues. Debian is another possibility if you aren't able to deal with the dependency problems RPMs can create.
btw, I started off administering a lab of 60 DOS 3.2 machines on Netware a long time ago and I now own a business doing consulting, software development, system administration/installs, etc. I understand that plenty of the/. crowd isn't as qualified as they believe, but you can chalk this story up as one from a person who pushed his systems too hard...
FYI, you might want to change a few of the comments on your website. Some of that can get you tossed in jail...
Don't incorporate then. If you all trust one another, form a bunch of one man companies and subcontract the work out to each other.
Travel is one you can't get around, but if you're smart, it doesn't have to be that costly. (ie, don't pick up your first client 500 miles away from home)
Totally true about the salary though. The trick is to find a company that is willing to contract a large project and then pay at periodic points during the project rather than a lump sum at the beginning or end. If the project is large (12 month project for 5 people? That's fairly large), it shouldn't be impossible to set some milestones say every 3 months and collect a portion of the total at that time.
If you can afford to live on a very meager salary and budget the money you recieve to last over the 3 month period between "paychecks", it doesn't work out too bad. With a large project behind you to point at as a portfolio, you can negotiate will a little more power on the next project.
Agreed. They are certainly ethically responsible to make every attempt to notify the customer they they have a potentially dangerous product. The legality of them not doing so and someone dieing would be crippling.
I imagine the court room appearance would go something like:
Lawyer: So, you knew there was a chance that the food was contaminated? Supermarket: Yes, but the chance of someone getting sick was so small...... Lawyer: Yes or no Supermarket: Yes Lawyer: And you had an available means to attempt contacting each buyer who purchased from the store during that time? Supermarket:....Yes, but... Lawyer: And you chose not to contact the families who purchased the infected beef? Supermarket:....Well, yes..... Lawyer: Are you aware this little girl lost her father because you chose not to put forth the extra effort to inform your customers of a risk?
Yeah, that's not a court case I would want to be involved in:)
Although you say that comparisons between languages can't be made, we *must* do so as one of the metrics used to choose a language is speed. Realistically, the best we can do is pick the fastest compilers from each language at an instant in time and use those as a basis for comparing languages. Unless you expect signifigant advances to be made in the compiler front in some of the languages in the very near future, this should be reasonably accurate in practice.
Exactly. Google is probably a good enterprise example where throwing hardware at a problem rather than a bunch of programmers and complex algorithms can provide an effective result.
And for those of us who aren't writing enterprise apps, labor cost is King. When the application is a GUI front end used in a small/medium sized business, the cost effectiveness of a language like Python is amazing even when used on 5 year old machines.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why modern scanners use hueristics to detect virus. Instead of just looking for signatures, they also look for general behavioral patterns from the virus. That behavior is not found in a typical non-viral program, but is common in viral programs. That's why today's virus scanners sometimes flag a program as a virus incorrectly. But the grandparent is right. You have to make changes that modify the detected *behavior* in some way. Changing the signatures is not usually enough.
That's what they wanted you to think. In truth, it was just the coffee.
Dude... Don't bother reading the article, but at least skim the /. blurb. The book is called The Terminal Man.
"x free 86" returns xfree.org as the first search result. Something funky is going on..
Correct, but if you could pull a few more people in by taking advantage of your current software setup, would you pass that up?
Any business is built one customer at a time. I promise you every business is always looking for a way to pull a few more customers into their store...
I wonder hot is compares?
;o)
Now that's sneaky!!
I'm not saying it has to make sense. If we are speculating, note that many people see a connection between the current SCO lawsuit and Microsoft's goals. Viewed in that light, a lawsuit filed for the reasons I suggest would not really look that different...
I'm not trying to avoid liability by ignorance. Instead, I'm suggesting that we should make every effort to safeguard our community.
You are completely right about patent infringment not being escapable by ignoring the code. OTOH, it's probably more effective to use standard methods of patent infringement research rather than poking through their source. If the patent is filed, you have to be careful not to infringe. If you see a useful idea that's not patented yet, you could still get shafted for copying it...
The whole proof thing requires a court process... IBM is able to handle crap like that. If MS attacked my little company, I don't think I could do anything but fold. Circumstantial evidence is enough sometimes....
Crap... What did you do that for? Now I can't write a single line of code without MS claiming credit for it... Hateful, wicked person...
Why oh why didn't you have to decency to post fake source instead!!!
BG, is that you?
Exactly. Isn't this the basis for the whole blasted SCO lawsuit?
It's certainly conspiracy theory, but imagine that this is simply another step in the annoyance that is the SCO lawsuit. Imagine that MS could prove Linus downloaded a copy of the source and took a peek.... Or that someone who contributes code to the kernel looked at the Windows source....
Frankly, I *hope* it's completely conspiracy.
What I'm worried about is the implication this has in tainting developers of open source projects... If I *had* downloaded the source when it was available and my IP was logged as a result, MS could easily claim that new code I write is taking advantages of things I learned by reading their source even though I might not have ever opened the zip file.
..... Please, do me a favor and never come close to one of my projects.
Several people have already posted replies to this article saying that they downloaded it or that they found these cool comments or
You download it, they own you.
While the performance gains are impressive (about 5 times as many pages under 2.6) it also shows that 2.6 used 5.6 times more RAM to serve the increased number of pages. If RAM on the system isn't limited, the performance gain is insane. If the system is already overloaded w/respect to RAM, it likely won't help much and there's a *slight* chance it would actually perform worse.
;o)
Of course, this is just a benchmark
Open a console (Start -> Run -> cmd) and type
java
That should list off some help options if it is found in the path.
Then, run
java -version
(note the space...) That should tell you what version is running. My guess is that you *do* have another JVM installed somewhere.
I'd say you're new here, but that's a pretty low uid. What's *your* excuse? :)
I had 5 completely reproducable hard lock bugs that wouldn't even produce a blue screen with Win 98 SE on my machine. Hard lock meaning hitting the caps lock key doesn't change the indicator light on the keyboard... In addition, I would get random crashes at both the app and OS level several times per week. If I didn't shut my machine down each night or at least reboot in the morning, I would get a crash before 10AM.
/. crowd isn't as qualified as they believe, but you can chalk this story up as one from a person who pushed his systems too hard...
One of my current clients has several Windows machines including 98, ME, 2000, and XP. The 2000 machine must be shut down each evening or it will hard lock in the morning. ME is a known bad apple so I'll ignore it. Of the XP machines, I've routinely locked several up while switching the systems from static to dynamic IPs. The XP machines generally don't crash though so times have gotten better in the Windows world...
You ask what I did? I used my machine... A lot... To keep the crashes down to a minimum, I did a full reinstall every six months and that seemed to cut my problems at least in half. No, I didn't delete random dlls. No, I didn't have a bunch of extra crap running (ICQ was the only thing in the task tray).
Maybe I had bad hardware, but there was no way for me to work around it with Windows.
Since switching to Linux, I've had 1 lockup that isn't directly explained by bad hardware and that includes an installed base of about 35 Linux systems. My current primary system is a dual MP 2400 and my hardware seems to have a serious problem. When booting, I have to tell my kernel to disable a high performance memory mode and I have to turn DMA off after I'm done booting or my kernel randomly locks. I assume one of my MP chips is slightly defective, but a similar bug exists in a whole revision of the MPs. Hopefully a switch to 2.6 will make the problem go away. If not, I'll probably end up replacing the processors.
The thing is, Linux doesn't crash and at the time I switched, Windows would crash all the time. And, when I run into a hardware problem, it's not impossible to work around.
RPMs can be a problem, but if you understand how they are built, it's possible to remedy situations created by a retarded RPM. A reinstall isn't necessary if you've just messed up xmms. You simply need to understand how everything fits together. Although Gentoo is a little tough to get setup initially, it does a pretty nice job of solving those sorts of issues. Debian is another possibility if you aren't able to deal with the dependency problems RPMs can create.
btw, I started off administering a lab of 60 DOS 3.2 machines on Netware a long time ago and I now own a business doing consulting, software development, system administration/installs, etc. I understand that plenty of the
FYI, you might want to change a few of the comments on your website. Some of that can get you tossed in jail...
Only Linux for 3 years with the exception of an extra machine to play games on. Even the 1.x series for KDE was pretty sweet.
Why did I switch 3 years ago?
Install Driver. Reboot
Bluescreen. Reboot. Safemode. Reboot. Bluescreen. Sigh.
Install new software. Reboot. Bluescreen Reboot.
Configure Themes. Bluescreen. Reboot.
That was my "desktop experience" and I didn't enjoy it one bit. For a technical user, Linux has been "there" on the desktop for quite a while.
Don't incorporate then. If you all trust one another, form a bunch of one man companies and subcontract the work out to each other.
Travel is one you can't get around, but if you're smart, it doesn't have to be that costly. (ie, don't pick up your first client 500 miles away from home)
Totally true about the salary though. The trick is to find a company that is willing to contract a large project and then pay at periodic points during the project rather than a lump sum at the beginning or end. If the project is large (12 month project for 5 people? That's fairly large), it shouldn't be impossible to set some milestones say every 3 months and collect a portion of the total at that time.
If you can afford to live on a very meager salary and budget the money you recieve to last over the 3 month period between "paychecks", it doesn't work out too bad. With a large project behind you to point at as a portfolio, you can negotiate will a little more power on the next project.
You've *got* to know there is prior art on this one ;o)
Agreed. They are certainly ethically responsible to make every attempt to notify the customer they they have a potentially dangerous product. The legality of them not doing so and someone dieing would be crippling.
....Yes, but... ....Well, yes.....
:)
I imagine the court room appearance would go something like:
Lawyer: So, you knew there was a chance that the food was contaminated?
Supermarket: Yes, but the chance of someone getting sick was so small......
Lawyer: Yes or no
Supermarket: Yes
Lawyer: And you had an available means to attempt contacting each buyer who purchased from the store during that time?
Supermarket:
Lawyer: And you chose not to contact the families who purchased the infected beef?
Supermarket:
Lawyer: Are you aware this little girl lost her father because you chose not to put forth the extra effort to inform your customers of a risk?
Yeah, that's not a court case I would want to be involved in
Go right ahead and use VB then :)
Although you say that comparisons between languages can't be made, we *must* do so as one of the metrics used to choose a language is speed. Realistically, the best we can do is pick the fastest compilers from each language at an instant in time and use those as a basis for comparing languages. Unless you expect signifigant advances to be made in the compiler front in some of the languages in the very near future, this should be reasonably accurate in practice.
Exactly. Google is probably a good enterprise example where throwing hardware at a problem rather than a bunch of programmers and complex algorithms can provide an effective result.
And for those of us who aren't writing enterprise apps, labor cost is King. When the application is a GUI front end used in a small/medium sized business, the cost effectiveness of a language like Python is amazing even when used on 5 year old machines.
No kidding! Do tell! That's, what, 25 or 30 million lines of equivelent C++? What in the world are you doing with a million lines of Perl?