THe MS spokesperson said that a "comprehensive" security pack for I.E. will be out later this summer. You gotta love this. You just cannot make stuff up like this!
The Master was pretty fantastic: always on the verge of total defeat and total success, such as when he almost destroyed the universe (at least once or twice) in his attempt to control it. Actually, Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter books has a clear lineage in the Master.
The other parallel is coming back from the almost dead.
But if Nation was pissed off with the BBC, why did his lawyers (Roger Hancock) allow the VHS and DVD releases of Blakes 7?
There are a couple of differences. One is that Nation wrote the entire first series of B7. The other is that it was about 12 years later. So the arrangements between Nation and the BBC are probably different.
The daleks trundling about would look pretty pathetic to modern kids.
Which version of the daleks? The design changed thoughout the series, especially the weapons effects. To make them scary all you need to show is that they arn't the slighest bit bothered by most human weapons.
What benefit is it to society to have copyright so long that the great grandchildren of the authors have say over the work?
There is also the matter of how broad a copyright is. Here the copyright isn't about a specific story e.g. "The Daleks" or "Remembrance of the Daleks" nor a specific character e.g. "Black Dalek" or "Davros". Instead it covers the concept of the Daleks, a fictional race in a fictional universe. Does this really make much sense...
I think the reason would be they'd then be held responsible for those apps by users. And they can't possibly be held accountable for software they didn't write.
Thing is that Microsoft isn't held accountable for anything anyway. That's what the Windows EULA says:) Quite a few parts of Windows most definitly were not written by Microsoft in the first place. With proprietary software it's never that obvious if a vendor actually wrote any of it...
Can't you see the inherent flaw here, that the best way to match the power of the command prompt is to download a unix subsystem for windows? If the windows philosophy were a good one - building large monolithic applications - then there would be a better way to match the power of the command line than to use unix.
In some cases Windows is even more monolithic than just big applications (using threading). Due to Microsoft making a deliberate decision to blur the boundries between "OS" and "application". There are GUI programs (including GUI wrappers for command line programs) which also follow the "unix principle" of many small(ish) processes.
Remember, when a business purchases Windows, they're also purchasing support from Microsoft.
Possibly. Frequently Microsoft will expect whoever sold the computer to provide "support".
Just the same, a business using Linux is likely to purchase a distribution for exactly the same reason. They want a guarantee that if something breaks, it'll get fixed and it won't be their responsibility to fix it.
If this is the service you want then the vast majority of "support contracts" won't provide this in the first place. What you want is an "it's broken, here is X amount of money to fix it" kind of service. Unless you have the budget of a large transnational corporation or a reasonably sized nation state to hand you have no chance at all of getting such a service from Microsoft.
You DO NOT OWN M$ Windows! It should be called TCL (Total Cost of Licensing, etc.)
How about TCU (Total Cost of Usage)? Which includes both purchase and administration of licences where applicable.
You just have the very restricted rights to use M$ Windows in a very restricted, limited way, which makes M$ Windows incredibly expensive compared to Linux/BSD et al.
Especially if you need a lawyer to interpret an EULA. In a corporate environment where the person using a piece of software is unlikely to be the person who installed it and accepted the EULA you probably need a lawyer. If contractors are involved in the usage or installation of such software you almost definitly need a lawyer.
(The article says about the GPL that it "obligates developers to make their modifications available to the public." That is incorrect. If you distribute a GPL-licensed program to someone, you have to make sure that the recipient can get the source code.
The most important word here is if. You are under no obligation to distribute any GPL program at all. Also you are under no obligation to make the source available to to anyone other than a party you have supplied the binary to. The specific point is that binary only distribution is forbidden.
You are however not required to make modifications available to the public. In practice, modifications are very often made available to the public,
The reason for this is that there advantages in doing so. In that making the software widely available increases the chance of bug fixes and other improvements.
especially when thinking about privacy issues,
The only possible privacy issues would be the identity of the programmers. GPL code does not "taint" data, which is not always the case with proprietary software.
To get the benefits of "open source", you have to develop using the methodology, not just slap an "open source" license on it and expect it to magickly get better.
Even in cases where a previously proprietary product has been "open sourced" it can take quite a bit of time before the result is truely OSS. Various coding styles and methodologies which may work fine in the proprietary environment are not much good in an open environment.
Diamonds can be manufactured indistinguishable from mined diamonds (arguably better, the environmental impact of diamond mines is presently offloaded to the commons (yes, i know making diamonds require energy etc)
Quite a lot of work has been invested in being able to distinguish a mined and manufactured gem diamond. For industrial diamonds there is less of a fuss to be made.
Diamonds are a scam in every way... mostly, I feel sorry for people who spend money thinking its an investment, when really, it is the ultimate testiment to consumer culture and shallowness.
The idea "a diamond is forever" was though up specifically to prevent a second hand gem market.
The indisputable fact is that one day there will be no more oil left in the ground.
Things are unlikely to get to that point. Before then will come the point where there is no easily extractable oil. With the oil which remains far to precious as a source of organic chemicals to use as a fuel.
The first phase should be to develop a "drop-in" replacement for petroleum fuels, manufactured from plants and waste products, and usable in existing engines with little to no alteration.
Rudolph Diesel and Frank Whittle ran their prototype engines on vegetable oil anyway. Thing is that oil isn't just used for fueling internal combustion engines. You'd need to find alternatives for the entire petro-chemical industry. This includes methane which is often found with oil.
I don't think there is anything which makes microsoft software "inherently" more insecure.
Microsoft tends to like big programs which try to do lots of things, with lots of threading for multi-tasking. IIS does plenty of things other than web serving... On top of this there is Microsoft deliberatly writing "sphagetti code" in the name of "integration".
Given enough time and effort microsoft products, like any piece of software has the potential to be bullet proof.
It would be a case of rewriting more or less from scratch.
I wouldn't say better. More technically adept, maybe. Understand the technology behind the software better, maybe. But let's take a Unix admin and stick them in a MS environment, and poof. Suddenly their Unix skills are irrelevant.
Most likely they get very frustrated by the way Windows trys to hide things, which unix makes easily accessable. e.g. the actual UIDs and GIDs.
It should also be noted that Apache is open source, meaning you can actually go look at the code to look for possible ways to exploit possible bugs/security flaws.
Except that there are also people looking to fix bugs and security flaws. Typically there are more "white hat" than "black hats".
The same doesn't happen with Microsoft's IIS and yet it is still more vulnerable than Apache is...
This also means that only Microsoft can fix any bugs. Any third party attempting to fix bugs in IIS can find themselves in trouble for violating Microsoft's copyright. To the "black hats" not having the source code isn't much of a handicap, since they can examine the binary quite easily. Having only Microsoft build the program means that there isn't much variation in different copies of the program. If an exploit works against a few copies of IIS then it will probably work against most of them.
My understanding is that yes, there are different levels. If I recall correctly, it stems from the lack of a particular enzyme, so it probably depends on how much of that enzyme your body produces.
In most mammals lactose digesting enzymes cease to be produced after infancy. With some humans a mutation has occured which means the the apropriate enzymes continue to be produced into adulthood. To some extent the presence of this mutation is cultural (as is that for detoxifying alcohol) since milk products were only used extensivly as food products in some parts of the world. IIRC a similar mutation also exists in domestic cats.
The goverment does have a duty to (and tries to) protect it's citizens even from suspected "criminals", and maybe those standards should be applied to companies too.
Either that or stop pretending that companies are "people".
Criminal masterminds with access to a duplication unit capable of running off millions of DVDs do not sit in cinemas with camcorders. They hand that job off to an underling.
The easiest way would be to bribe a factory to produce extra disks.
It involves taking something that someone else has a property right in. That's stealing.
Except that theft deprives the original owner of their property.
It is irrelevant that the property right is an abstract one created by law.
It's highly relevent, because "intellectual property" differs from real property in that it can be trivially duplicated. Pretending that the concepts are equivalent is a fiction.
Slashdot Mirror
You need multiple layers of defence: give everyone Firefox, but use a proxy server
:)
You need one which will use a combination of URL and browser identification
Which proxies have ACLs for the latter?
in case someone decides to use IE anyway. (Some sites still need it,
e.g. windowsupdate.microsoft.com
THe MS spokesperson said that a "comprehensive" security pack for I.E. will be out later this summer. You gotta love this. You just cannot make stuff up like this!
:)
Give them until the end of August
The Master was pretty fantastic: always on the verge of total defeat and total success, such as when he almost destroyed the universe (at least once or twice) in his attempt to control it. Actually, Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter books has a clear lineage in the Master.
The other parallel is coming back from the almost dead.
But if Nation was pissed off with the BBC, why did his lawyers (Roger Hancock) allow the VHS and DVD releases of Blakes 7?
There are a couple of differences. One is that Nation wrote the entire first series of B7. The other is that it was about 12 years later. So the arrangements between Nation and the BBC are probably different.
The daleks trundling about would look pretty pathetic to modern kids.
Which version of the daleks? The design changed thoughout the series, especially the weapons effects.
To make them scary all you need to show is that they arn't the slighest bit bothered by most human weapons.
the only problem with this comment is it was modded Funny, not insightful.
Probably because there isn't an "ironic" moderation.
What benefit is it to society to have copyright so long that the great grandchildren of the authors have say over the work?
There is also the matter of how broad a copyright is. Here the copyright isn't about a specific story e.g. "The Daleks" or "Remembrance of the Daleks" nor a specific character e.g. "Black Dalek" or "Davros". Instead it covers the concept of the Daleks, a fictional race in a fictional universe. Does this really make much sense...
The main problem with an estate wanting to editorial control is that there isn't a tenth of the talent in there as was in the person who died.
Even if they do they are too busy with their ancestor's works to create anything of their own.
I think the reason would be they'd then be held responsible for those apps by users. And they can't possibly be held accountable for software they didn't write.
:)
Thing is that Microsoft isn't held accountable for anything anyway. That's what the Windows EULA says
Quite a few parts of Windows most definitly were not written by Microsoft in the first place. With proprietary software it's never that obvious if a vendor actually wrote any of it...
Can't you see the inherent flaw here, that the best way to match the power of the command prompt is to download a unix subsystem for windows? If the windows philosophy were a good one - building large monolithic applications - then there would be a better way to match the power of the command line than to use unix.
In some cases Windows is even more monolithic than just big applications (using threading). Due to Microsoft making a deliberate decision to blur the boundries between "OS" and "application".
There are GUI programs (including GUI wrappers for command line programs) which also follow the "unix principle" of many small(ish) processes.
Remember, when a business purchases Windows, they're also purchasing support from Microsoft.
Possibly. Frequently Microsoft will expect whoever sold the computer to provide "support".
Just the same, a business using Linux is likely to purchase a distribution for exactly the same reason. They want a guarantee that if something breaks, it'll get fixed and it won't be their responsibility to fix it.
If this is the service you want then the vast majority of "support contracts" won't provide this in the first place.
What you want is an "it's broken, here is X amount of money to fix it" kind of service. Unless you have the budget of a large transnational corporation or a reasonably sized nation state to hand you have no chance at all of getting such a service from Microsoft.
You DO NOT OWN M$ Windows! It should be called TCL (Total Cost of Licensing, etc.)
How about TCU (Total Cost of Usage)? Which includes both purchase and administration of licences where applicable.
You just have the very restricted rights to use M$ Windows in a very restricted, limited way, which makes M$ Windows incredibly expensive compared to Linux/BSD et al.
Especially if you need a lawyer to interpret an EULA. In a corporate environment where the person using a piece of software is unlikely to be the person who installed it and accepted the EULA you probably need a lawyer. If contractors are involved in the usage or installation of such software you almost definitly need a lawyer.
(The article says about the GPL that it "obligates developers to make their modifications available to the public." That is incorrect. If you distribute a GPL-licensed program to someone, you have to make sure that the recipient can get the source code.
The most important word here is if. You are under no obligation to distribute any GPL program at all. Also you are under no obligation to make the source available to to anyone other than a party you have supplied the binary to. The specific point is that binary only distribution is forbidden.
You are however not required to make modifications available to the public. In practice, modifications are very often made available to the public,
The reason for this is that there advantages in doing so. In that making the software widely available increases the chance of bug fixes and other improvements.
especially when thinking about privacy issues,
The only possible privacy issues would be the identity of the programmers. GPL code does not "taint" data, which is not always the case with proprietary software.
To get the benefits of "open source", you have to develop using the methodology, not just slap an "open source" license on it and expect it to magickly get better.
Even in cases where a previously proprietary product has been "open sourced" it can take quite a bit of time before the result is truely OSS. Various coding styles and methodologies which may work fine in the proprietary environment are not much good in an open environment.
Diamonds are note really rare.
Just well controlled by a cartel.
Diamonds can be manufactured indistinguishable from mined diamonds (arguably better, the environmental impact of diamond mines is presently offloaded to the commons (yes, i know making diamonds require energy etc)
Quite a lot of work has been invested in being able to distinguish a mined and manufactured gem diamond. For industrial diamonds there is less of a fuss to be made.
Diamonds are a scam in every way... mostly, I feel sorry for people who spend money thinking its an investment, when really, it is the ultimate testiment to consumer culture and shallowness.
The idea "a diamond is forever" was though up specifically to prevent a second hand gem market.
The indisputable fact is that one day there will be no more oil left in the ground.
Things are unlikely to get to that point. Before then will come the point where there is no easily extractable oil. With the oil which remains far to precious as a source of organic chemicals to use as a fuel.
The first phase should be to develop a "drop-in" replacement for petroleum fuels, manufactured from plants and waste products, and usable in existing engines with little to no alteration.
Rudolph Diesel and Frank Whittle ran their prototype engines on vegetable oil anyway.
Thing is that oil isn't just used for fueling internal combustion engines. You'd need to find alternatives for the entire petro-chemical industry. This includes methane which is often found with oil.
I don't think there is anything which makes microsoft software "inherently" more insecure.
Microsoft tends to like big programs which try to do lots of things, with lots of threading for multi-tasking. IIS does plenty of things other than web serving... On top of this there is Microsoft deliberatly writing "sphagetti code" in the name of "integration".
Given enough time and effort microsoft products, like any piece of software has the potential to be bullet proof.
It would be a case of rewriting more or less from scratch.
I wouldn't say better. More technically adept, maybe. Understand the technology behind the software better, maybe. But let's take a Unix admin and stick them in a MS environment, and poof. Suddenly their Unix skills are irrelevant.
Most likely they get very frustrated by the way Windows trys to hide things, which unix makes easily accessable. e.g. the actual UIDs and GIDs.
It should also be noted that Apache is open source, meaning you can actually go look at the code to look for possible ways to exploit possible bugs/security flaws.
Except that there are also people looking to fix bugs and security flaws. Typically there are more "white hat" than "black hats".
The same doesn't happen with Microsoft's IIS and yet it is still more vulnerable than Apache is...
This also means that only Microsoft can fix any bugs. Any third party attempting to fix bugs in IIS can find themselves in trouble for violating Microsoft's copyright. To the "black hats" not having the source code isn't much of a handicap, since they can examine the binary quite easily. Having only Microsoft build the program means that there isn't much variation in different copies of the program. If an exploit works against a few copies of IIS then it will probably work against most of them.
Actually, IIS isn't being attacked -- it's an RPC hole in Windows that some large sites apparenlty neglected to firewall/patch/etc.
Given Microsoft's "integration" it's not obviouse where IIS ends and Windows begins anyway.
Perhaps if a large ad network had Linux/Apache set up in an insecure way, the Evil Doers would have gone that route.
Having many distributions means that even if all of them were insecure they probably wouldn't have the same insecurity.
My understanding is that yes, there are different levels. If I recall correctly, it stems from the lack of a particular enzyme, so it probably depends on how much of that enzyme your body produces.
In most mammals lactose digesting enzymes cease to be produced after infancy. With some humans a mutation has occured which means the the apropriate enzymes continue to be produced into adulthood. To some extent the presence of this mutation is cultural (as is that for detoxifying alcohol) since milk products were only used extensivly as food products in some parts of the world.
IIRC a similar mutation also exists in domestic cats.
The goverment does have a duty to (and tries to) protect it's citizens even from suspected "criminals", and maybe those standards should be applied to companies too.
Either that or stop pretending that companies are "people".
Criminal masterminds with access to a duplication unit capable of running off millions of DVDs do not sit in cinemas with camcorders. They hand that job off to an underling.
The easiest way would be to bribe a factory to produce extra disks.
It involves taking something that someone else has a property right in. That's stealing.
Except that theft deprives the original owner of their property.
It is irrelevant that the property right is an abstract one created by law.
It's highly relevent, because "intellectual property" differs from real property in that it can be trivially duplicated. Pretending that the concepts are equivalent is a fiction.