In my opinion (which is a synonym for FACT), Star Trek: The Next Generation is the very best Star Trek series ever produced.
What about Wesley? How can the TNG be the best series when you take his annoying, wussy character into account?
It used to annoy me to no end. A typical Wesley story involves Wesley causing some crisis, Wesley doing something to avert the crisis that he caused, and the Captain and crew thanking Wesley for his efforts. Geez...
If surveillance can invade a judge's workplace, it's for damnsure there's nothing keeping it out of yours.
Well, if I could play the role of devil's advocate for a moment:
It is more significant if a judge is surfing for illegal pr0n or warez on the job than some average luser. Is it so wrong to hold the guarantors of justice to a higher standard?
The question is, will the Hailstorm and Passport EULA protect MS when it comes to legal liability for a) lost data, and b) copied or stolen data (loss of intellectual property, etc...)
Their existing EULA's absolve them of all responsibility now, so I suspect that the answer to your question is yes.
If HailStorm gets hacked and your confidential data is posted on some 1337 h8>
Quality assurance at Microsoft is better than this when it comes to other areas.
What other areas?
I don't know this to be true, but I was told this by a person I know who used to work as a programmer for m$:
Contrary to popular belief, they spend a lot of time testing individual modules in isolation, but they don't spend much time with integration testing. Worse still, when a bug is located, the original programmer who wrote the module has been re-assigned to some other project so someone else who is not so familiar with the code will be responsible for fixing it, and this can take more time than should be necessary.
Personally, I think that m$ is more of a marketing company than a software company. The shots are called by the marketing team and not the software engineers. The marketing people force products out the door early so that they can be first to market, and usually by about version three, it works more-or-less as it was originally intended to.
I agree with everything you said but I have a question about this:
Reason being is most of the security issues with M$ products stem from their desire to give users the so-called usability features that they scream for, usually at the expense of security.
Who asked for email attachments to launch automatically? Who asked for all processes to effectively run as root? Who asked IIS to install and run without the user being explicitly informed?
Who asked for any of these "features" on a desktop, much less a server?
I think the problem is that server and system administration is a non-trivial task, and m$ has tried to dumb-down administering an NT server to the point where anyone can do it.
Who needs to pay for a skilled, experienced SysAdmin when Joe from accounting can press the reset button whenever something goes wrong?
I'm not saying that Microsoft or Bill Gates aren't inovative
There are a lot of people out there who would suggest that rather than innovate, m$ tends to copy what other people are doing and integrate that into their OS.
Can someone provide examples of things m$ did that constitute original, innovative work?
...most notably, Red Hat Linux 7.1 and 7.2 (beta) default to setting up a packet filter (albeit a somewhat lame ipchains-based filter even though they could have used iptables/netfilter) at install time
A packet filter is better than nothing, but it is not the answer. One should not assume that because they are "protected" by a packet filter that they are secure.
IMHO, I think that it can be argued that a proxy firewall solution is the most secure. With a proxy, there is no direct connection between a host on the secure network and the internet. The downside of course is that proxy solutions are not transparent.
The next best alternative would be a firewall that does stateful inspection. That is transparent to the user, but is not a secure as a proxy-based one.
I think it's important that we consider the DMCA not only an affront to our traditional rights as consumers (i.e. Fair Use), but a danger to national security.
But has been pointed out in previous articles, the copyright holders have not raised any complaints about the DMCA, and they are the folks that bought and paid for it...
While I agree with you totally, I am reminded of a passage from a Douglas Adams novel that goes something like this:
"Deciding that just as discretion is the better part of valour, so is cowardice the better part of discretion and Zaphod Beelbebrox valiantly hid himself in a cupboard."
this guy should upload the code to freenet where, hopefully, it is impossible to remove the program or discover the author. This is the exact kind of thing freenet was designed for, so if the author is out there in slashland, go for it! Civil Disobedience ra ra ra!
No. The whole point of civil disobedience is that a law or regulation is openly defied in a very public manner, and the transgressors challenge the authorities to enforce the law. The belief is that should the larger public become aware of the law and the inappropriate punishment that comes from breaking it, the government will feel compelled to change the law. As well, if enough people are openly breaking this law, the system will get clogged up with trivialities.
Civil disobedience is not hiding in the shadows and skulking around under cover of anonymity.
Read at -1. Find out what THEY don't want you to know!
Actually, if I read/. at -1, I get to see some totally lame first posts (and other gramatically incorrect derivations), goatse links, racial slurs, and generally pointless off-topic remarks.
True, I have not been around here forever, but in the time that I have been reading/. I have only seen a few posts I would have thought were interesting get moderated down as flamebait. I never seem to have any moderator points at the time to do anything about it. If anything, I have found that interesting comments are not moderated up at all and stay at the level they were originally posted at.
While we are sort of on the topic, what is the significance of combining hot grits with Natalie Portman anyways?
LEGOs were such an integral part of my growing up, I can't imagine growing up without them.
Lego was my favourite toy growing up, until I discovered computers. I would encourage all parents to supply their kids with Lego as a way to enhance their creativity and imaginations.
My favourite thing to do with Lego was to try to construct Lego versions of things I saw in the world around me. Since I grew up on a farm, made Lego tractors and farm implements and things. Since I only had the basic Lego sets, things were primitive, but they looked (to me) like an accurate representation.
Nowadays, it seems hard to find basic sets, everything is designed to build specific things for a theme. While the Star Wars lego is way cool, there is something to be said for the simplicity of the standard bricks.
BTW what is it with the cost of Lego now? The stuff is really expensive. Was it always that way? Same thing with D&D books, how can kids afford this stuff?
I have to admit I don't understand why Sun is resisting the switch to Linux. I'm not saying they should dump Solaris over night, but a two or three year transition plan would make a lot of sense.
I think there are a few reason why they want to stick with their own OS:
* They have invested a lot of time and money in Solaris and there is a large install base for the OS.
* They make money by offering Solaris training and certification.
* As was stated in a recent article concerning IBM and the future of AIX, Linux is not designed to run on enterprise level hardware or run enterprise wide applications yet.
* At this point in time, Solaris on SPARC is more stable than Linux on SPARC.
Why would Sun give up when Linux is not yet ready for the task? So in the meantime, they release Solaris for x86 and give it away in the hopes that some people will download it and give it a try.
Furthermore: Solaris on x86 is slow. It flies on Sparc, but the x86 port just isn't speedy enough to me.
I think that is more a function of the hardware than the OS. Sun hardware is a lot more efficient than the generic PC. Of course, it is more expensive too.
Great - the ability to personalize one's cubicle is now a reward rather than a norm?
Talk to some people who worked for old-school IBM. At the end of the day, you completely cleared your desk off and the only thing left was the phone, monitor and docking station.
"Scott Adams is out of touch with the white collar working community, and it shows both in the article and in his comic strip. "
Actually, I still find Dilbert to be really funny, and I have a white collar job. I have spoken to a lot of people who worked for major telcos or very large multinational corporations that are identified by their initials, and the belief was that Scott Adams had to have worked for the same company because there were many elements in his cartoons that were so similar to things that they experienced in their jobs.
As it turns out, he did not work for the same company, but what he wrote about was relevant and familiar to people who worked for large corporations. If you work for a smaller firm, then Dilbert might not have the same appeal. But since I started working at one of those large multinationals, Dilbert is a lot funnier because I have met the clueless (but highly over-paid) executives, the sleazy consultants, the pointy-haired bosses, and the annoying cow-orkers.
Don't get me wrong, there are also some incredibly smart people who work with me, but they tend not to be in management...
Some people might object that Scott Adams has sold out and gone corporate, but IMHO it is still funny. Keep in mind that it was never as cutting edge as something like South Park anyways. No way is Scott out-of-touch. I still read the cartoon, and if my PHB would spring for one of those cubicles, I would definitely take it!
in the long run, education will save a lot more people than this drug.
But instead of educating and changing killer lifestyle habits, their government steals IP. This world is going to shit.
So screw the people who are already infected. They are going to die anyways (they cannot afford the treatment), and will not be able to afford the cure when one becomes available. By all means let us work to protect the rights of the shareholders. Who cares about some poor people who live in some third-world nation anyways.
Geez, some people think that simply because they are human, they have some inherent rights and deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.
I suspect that if you were living in those slums in Brazil, you might have a slightly different opinion...
A high percentage of those infected became that way by choices they made in regard to sexual activity and sharing of needles. In this age of education, AIDS is generally acquired do to ignoring precautions. Ignorance is no answer.
Where the population is literate, educated and well-informed, this *might* be true. However, I would think that in the slums of Brazil where these conditions are not met, and the government of Brazil is correct in being more concerned about the health and welfare of their citizens than the profits of some multinational.
if people circumvent the intellectual property rights of drug companies, the result is less money for research, less new drugs, and ultimately less lives saved.
If we respect the intellectual property rights of Big Pharma, the result will be huge dividends for their shareholders and the deaths of many innocent people who just could not afford to stay alive...
Naturally the rights of the shareholders to expect a good return on investment must trump the rights of the impoverished...
Pharaceutical R&D is intensely expensive. Screwing the companies that fund research is a bad solution to what is at heart a political problem.
How is AIDS a political problem?
And while R&D might be expensive, Big Pharma is still making coin hand over fist, and none of the drug companies are getting out of that industry because it is not financially viable
The issue is that Roche (et.al.) want to charge more for a few doses of drugs than people in third world countries can expect to make in a year. This is clearly unacceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
In my opinion (which is a synonym for FACT), Star Trek: The Next Generation is the very best Star Trek series ever produced.
What about Wesley? How can the TNG be the best series when you take his annoying, wussy character into account?
It used to annoy me to no end. A typical Wesley story involves Wesley causing some crisis, Wesley doing something to avert the crisis that he caused, and the Captain and crew thanking Wesley for his efforts. Geez...
Layoffs are part of the normal business cycle.
Since when did this become true?
I can see how some economists would claim this, and some would even suggest that this is a Good Thing(tm), but call me skeptical, I don't see it.
I suppose that grossly inflated share prices compared to earnings is a normal part of the business cycle too...
It's the lawyers who need keeping an eye on.
Dude, I thought that judges were also lawyers...
If surveillance can invade a judge's workplace, it's for damnsure there's nothing keeping it out of yours.
Well, if I could play the role of devil's advocate for a moment:
It is more significant if a judge is surfing for illegal pr0n or warez on the job than some average luser. Is it so wrong to hold the guarantors of justice to a higher standard?
Who guards the guards?
The question is, will the Hailstorm and Passport EULA protect MS when it comes to legal liability for a) lost data, and b) copied or stolen data (loss of intellectual property, etc...)
Their existing EULA's absolve them of all responsibility now, so I suspect that the answer to your question is yes.
If HailStorm gets hacked and your confidential data is posted on some 1337 h8>
Quality assurance at Microsoft is better than this when it comes to other areas.
What other areas?
I don't know this to be true, but I was told this by a person I know who used to work as a programmer for m$:
Contrary to popular belief, they spend a lot of time testing individual modules in isolation, but they don't spend much time with integration testing. Worse still, when a bug is located, the original programmer who wrote the module has been re-assigned to some other project so someone else who is not so familiar with the code will be responsible for fixing it, and this can take more time than should be necessary.
Personally, I think that m$ is more of a marketing company than a software company. The shots are called by the marketing team and not the software engineers. The marketing people force products out the door early so that they can be first to market, and usually by about version three, it works more-or-less as it was originally intended to.
I agree with everything you said but I have a question about this:
Reason being is most of the security issues with M$ products stem from their desire to give users the so-called usability features that they scream for, usually at the expense of security.
Who asked for email attachments to launch automatically? Who asked for all processes to effectively run as root? Who asked IIS to install and run without the user being explicitly informed?
Who asked for any of these "features" on a desktop, much less a server?
I think the problem is that server and system administration is a non-trivial task, and m$ has tried to dumb-down administering an NT server to the point where anyone can do it.
Who needs to pay for a skilled, experienced SysAdmin when Joe from accounting can press the reset button whenever something goes wrong?
I'm not saying that Microsoft or Bill Gates aren't inovative
There are a lot of people out there who would suggest that rather than innovate, m$ tends to copy what other people are doing and integrate that into their OS.
Can someone provide examples of things m$ did that constitute original, innovative work?
A packet filter is better than nothing, but it is not the answer. One should not assume that because they are "protected" by a packet filter that they are secure.
IMHO, I think that it can be argued that a proxy firewall solution is the most secure. With a proxy, there is no direct connection between a host on the secure network and the internet. The downside of course is that proxy solutions are not transparent.
The next best alternative would be a firewall that does stateful inspection. That is transparent to the user, but is not a secure as a proxy-based one.
I think it's important that we consider the DMCA not only an affront to our traditional rights as consumers (i.e. Fair Use), but a danger to national security.
But has been pointed out in previous articles, the copyright holders have not raised any complaints about the DMCA, and they are the folks that bought and paid for it...
You are mistaking cowardice with discretion.
While I agree with you totally, I am reminded of a passage from a Douglas Adams novel that goes something like this:
"Deciding that just as discretion is the better part of valour, so is cowardice the better part of discretion and Zaphod Beelbebrox valiantly hid himself in a cupboard."
this guy should upload the code to freenet where, hopefully, it is impossible to remove the program or discover the author. This is the exact kind of thing freenet was designed for, so if the author is out there in slashland, go for it! Civil Disobedience ra ra ra!
No. The whole point of civil disobedience is that a law or regulation is openly defied in a very public manner, and the transgressors challenge the authorities to enforce the law. The belief is that should the larger public become aware of the law and the inappropriate punishment that comes from breaking it, the government will feel compelled to change the law. As well, if enough people are openly breaking this law, the system will get clogged up with trivialities.
Civil disobedience is not hiding in the shadows and skulking around under cover of anonymity.
And this gets a +5 insightful? WTF?
Read at -1. Find out what THEY don't want you to know!
/. at -1, I get to see some totally lame first posts (and other gramatically incorrect derivations), goatse links, racial slurs, and generally pointless off-topic remarks.
/. I have only seen a few posts I would have thought were interesting get moderated down as flamebait. I never seem to have any moderator points at the time to do anything about it. If anything, I have found that interesting comments are not moderated up at all and stay at the level they were originally posted at.
Actually, if I read
True, I have not been around here forever, but in the time that I have been reading
While we are sort of on the topic, what is the significance of combining hot grits with Natalie Portman anyways?
LEGOs were such an integral part of my growing up, I can't imagine growing up without them.
Lego was my favourite toy growing up, until I discovered computers. I would encourage all parents to supply their kids with Lego as a way to enhance their creativity and imaginations.
My favourite thing to do with Lego was to try to construct Lego versions of things I saw in the world around me. Since I grew up on a farm, made Lego tractors and farm implements and things. Since I only had the basic Lego sets, things were primitive, but they looked (to me) like an accurate representation.
Nowadays, it seems hard to find basic sets, everything is designed to build specific things for a theme. While the Star Wars lego is way cool, there is something to be said for the simplicity of the standard bricks.
BTW what is it with the cost of Lego now? The stuff is really expensive. Was it always that way? Same thing with D&D books, how can kids afford this stuff?
I have to admit I don't understand why Sun is resisting the switch to Linux. I'm not saying they should dump Solaris over night, but a two or three year transition plan would make a lot of sense.
I think there are a few reason why they want to stick with their own OS:
* They have invested a lot of time and money in Solaris and there is a large install base for the OS.
* They make money by offering Solaris training and certification.
* As was stated in a recent article concerning IBM and the future of AIX, Linux is not designed to run on enterprise level hardware or run enterprise wide applications yet.
* At this point in time, Solaris on SPARC is more stable than Linux on SPARC.
Why would Sun give up when Linux is not yet ready for the task? So in the meantime, they release Solaris for x86 and give it away in the hopes that some people will download it and give it a try.
Furthermore: Solaris on x86 is slow. It flies on Sparc, but the x86 port just isn't speedy enough to me.
I think that is more a function of the hardware than the OS. Sun hardware is a lot more efficient than the generic PC. Of course, it is more expensive too.
Great - the ability to personalize one's cubicle is now a reward rather than a norm?
Talk to some people who worked for old-school IBM. At the end of the day, you completely cleared your desk off and the only thing left was the phone, monitor and docking station.
"Scott Adams is out of touch with the white collar working community, and it shows both in the article and in his comic strip. "
Actually, I still find Dilbert to be really funny, and I have a white collar job. I have spoken to a lot of people who worked for major telcos or very large multinational corporations that are identified by their initials, and the belief was that Scott Adams had to have worked for the same company because there were many elements in his cartoons that were so similar to things that they experienced in their jobs.
As it turns out, he did not work for the same company, but what he wrote about was relevant and familiar to people who worked for large corporations. If you work for a smaller firm, then Dilbert might not have the same appeal. But since I started working at one of those large multinationals, Dilbert is a lot funnier because I have met the clueless (but highly over-paid) executives, the sleazy consultants, the pointy-haired bosses, and the annoying cow-orkers.
Don't get me wrong, there are also some incredibly smart people who work with me, but they tend not to be in management...
Some people might object that Scott Adams has sold out and gone corporate, but IMHO it is still funny. Keep in mind that it was never as cutting edge as something like South Park anyways. No way is Scott out-of-touch. I still read the cartoon, and if my PHB would spring for one of those cubicles, I would definitely take it!
The original schweet desktop toys: Mindstorms
as long as you are not a fedral criminal you have nothing to worry about.
I belive that this was the mantra of the fascists in the earlier part of this century as well.
how many people do you think would donate money to pharmaceutical companies for research?
By extension, how many people would donate money to micro$oft for software research?
in the long run, education will save a lot more people than this drug.
But instead of educating and changing killer lifestyle habits, their government steals IP. This world is going to shit.
So screw the people who are already infected. They are going to die anyways (they cannot afford the treatment), and will not be able to afford the cure when one becomes available. By all means let us work to protect the rights of the shareholders. Who cares about some poor people who live in some third-world nation anyways.
Geez, some people think that simply because they are human, they have some inherent rights and deserve to be treated with respect and dignity.
I suspect that if you were living in those slums in Brazil, you might have a slightly different opinion...
A high percentage of those infected became that way by choices they made in regard to sexual activity and sharing of needles. In this age of education, AIDS is generally acquired do to ignoring precautions. Ignorance is no answer.
Where the population is literate, educated and well-informed, this *might* be true. However, I would think that in the slums of Brazil where these conditions are not met, and the government of Brazil is correct in being more concerned about the health and welfare of their citizens than the profits of some multinational.
if people circumvent the intellectual property rights of drug companies, the result is less money for research, less new drugs, and ultimately less lives saved.
If we respect the intellectual property rights of Big Pharma, the result will be huge dividends for their shareholders and the deaths of many innocent people who just could not afford to stay alive...
Naturally the rights of the shareholders to expect a good return on investment must trump the rights of the impoverished...
Pharaceutical R&D is intensely expensive. Screwing the companies that fund research is a bad solution to what is at heart a political problem.
How is AIDS a political problem?
And while R&D might be expensive, Big Pharma is still making coin hand over fist, and none of the drug companies are getting out of that industry because it is not financially viable
The issue is that Roche (et.al.) want to charge more for a few doses of drugs than people in third world countries can expect to make in a year. This is clearly unacceptable.