I'm wondering if the drive by the major distributors to release a new version every 6 days or so is to blame for the problem. Most of the bugtraq exploits seem to involve redhat based distro's. I don't see very many for debian or slackware.
Somebody's gotta go first. With a lead in installations and a tendency to be an early adopter, bugs in a component that's used in all three will tend to be reported against RH. If you break down the bugs against the actual programs and match that to the distros that use them, it looks different.
And what you want is technology that basically examines an open MP3 file that's being transferred to a portable device and decides whether or not it should be admitted to the portable device.
That's not watermarking. That's copy protection by another name. This, with the "secure wire" and "secure codec" comments, indicate that the objective is to produce music which gets marked up at each transfer stage and becomes unusable after a limited number of transfers.
That's the same method that they tried to apply to DAT -- make the hardware OEMs build transcription security into each step. Remember DAT?
They're planning to charge $0.41 per message. That should weed out the chickenbone spammers, leaving only the big boys (read DMA). The DMA loves this; they've been trying to get rid of the chickenboners for quite a while. Until the chickenboners are gone, sending spam is marketing suicide. The DMA hopes that without them stinking up the place they can make spam as respectable (and profitable) as telemarketing.
The first was when USPS became the owner of the.us TLD. The last will be when they become the only legal carrier of e-mail.
Somewhere in the middle will be the point when they are declared to be sufficient for legal notice such as jury summons, certified mail, utility and tax bills, etc. This is a necessary step, since without this nobody with half a brain will use them.
Once they are declared to be official e-mail, they will discover that (gasp!) messages get lost as long as people are still collecting mail through ISPs. So, obviously, the ISPs have to go. We will then have reached Nirvana, with the USPS charging $0.50 or so to the sender for all e-mail.
Chickenbone spam will be a thing of the past! Oh, we'll still get Wonderful Offers in the (e-)mail, but they'll be from Our Elected Representatives and Important Companies who can afford the wonders of Targeted E-Mail Marketing. (Of course, they'll get a discount.) And we'll all be grateful, because without the bulk e-mailers subsidizing the system we'd no doubt have to pay much more to send a message.
Unix was designed for programmers, scientists, and engineers. It works for them rather well. It was not designed for PHBs and their secretaries.
So, the question. Is adapting Unix for this last category of people is the right thing to do?
Well, maybe because what engineers do is produce documentation?
Where the Hell do you think that all of those standards published by outfits like IEEE, JEDEC, EIA, EIAJ, ISO, and other alphabet outfits come from? The stork? Or do you think that the PHBs do all of that stuff and then leave the implemetation details up to grunts like me?
Are you under the charming impression that teams of tens of engineers work out projects like 5 million gate ICs based on whiteboard sketches? Office automation is one of the indispensible tools of engineering, and it's getting harder and harder to get by with the Solaris box at work and the Linux network at home without adding a W2K notebook or some other Redmondian puspocket. At which point the IT crowd and PHBs suggest that we don't need the workstation any more since we can use an X terminal package to connect to The Server from the LoseDoze box.
Damn straight we need office tools, and yesterday wouldn't be too soon.
The Company has a product that we really want to open up. Unfortunately, there are parts of the technology that we don't own and can't disclose in source. The compromise that we're trying to reach is to have the low-level stuff that contains black magic released as binary-only libraries (very much independent of the operating system, much less the release level) and open up the higher levels of the drivers.
This has been in the suits vs. suits stage for over a year now. The lawyers are running the show.
does anyone else find it exceedingly odd that an OS that's older than 95, 98, and the majority of the NT strain of Winvirus is the new OS on the block?!?!
Wouldn't that make Windows 2000 some sort of embryonic OS???
No, that makes 95 a new kid on the block. It makes 98 a source of noise and vile messes. And it makes W2K packaging resemble a condom.
Well, we don't have standards committee meetings in Quebec because most of the attendees couldn't translate the handouts. That aside, one wonders
Is it legal to link to English-only sites?
Does Babelfish count?
Quite a few Internet protocols rely on English keywords, notably HTML itself. Does Quebec also require that the tags in a webpage be translated to the French equivalents?
Hint for the humor-impaired: don't take this too seriously.
Why should WINE be used to run Office? It requires the X86 architecture, so, it's not going to run Office on a computer that CAN'T run office. I think that GAMES should be first. If you want to run M$ products, you might as well run them under their operating system.
Two reasons:
No matter how the crew tries, there will be a lot of games that suck regardless.
The game API functions are quirky, and put the minimum of overhead between the application and the hardware.
Hardware actually is designed with the Windows API in mind, so sticking X11 or any other layer in there is going to cost double.
Games are extreme performance stressors, so any of these added costs will be noticed.
Finally, too many games still expect unrestricted access to the hardware, and giving Wine kernel access is a price a lot of us aren't willing to pay.
Office, on the other hand, is for better or worse
the Windows app.
What with all of its backdoor system accesses and the APIs that it exports, if the Wine crew can get it working well they will have indisputable claim to have nailed Windows workalikehood.
MICROS~1 will have an absolute bitch of a time revving Win32 to break Wine without cutting their own throat.
It's the #1 obstacle to acceptance of Linux on corporate desktops.
AMD has disclosed specifications to the major OS vendors and Microsoft so that they may ensure that their operating systems and tools will be AMD x86 64-bit aware
Emphasis added...
Interesting way of putting it, don't y'all think? Seems someone doesn't think MICROS~1 isn't covered by "major OS vendors."
If you want to see something really interesting, have a look at some of the data sheets for synchronous memory dating back to about 1990. SDRAM advanced data was starting to show up in the early '90s and there are data sheets out there that predate Rambus' original filings, and which clearly show programmable CAS latency.
(And before you ask for more detail on this, keep in mind that a lot of this is in litigation. Do your own research.)
As for double-clocked differential memory busses, I could be mistaken but I believe that IBM was using them in their mainframes before most/. readers were born. In any case, substituting a differential signal for a single-ended signal is very far into the range of "obvious to those of moderate skill in the Art."
jbarnett wanted to know: Seriously though, this isn't meant as a flame, but why do you *HAVE* to upgrade *RIGHT NOW*? If KDE (whatever version you are using) works for you, why not stick with it? Wait till KDE 2.0 gets tested and debugged by more users, and wait till you almost have to upgrade. (this advice is only toward desktops, other software may differ)
Just a wild guess here, but -- maybe to test the silly thing? Remember, this is open-source software. We don't pay for it in cash, and not everyone can add code, but we can all add eyeball time. Which is the coin of the open-source world.
Of course they are. This is nothing new; it's implicit in ESR's Bazaar model of open software development. The conflicts under discusssion right now are with corporate interests, but if every corporation on Earth went dark it wouldn't change anything because conflict is the heart and soul of creative collaboration.
The tug of war between conflicting interests is what makes for careful scrutiny, the "many eyes" that we're so proud of. Attempts to resolve conflicts are often the seed of brilliant innovations which make previous trade-offs moot.
By all means suspect Corel's UI suggestions, but keep in mind that many of them (such as deprecating inconsistent dialog button labels) are derived from very sound UI principles. We will need to provide Win-flavored UIs as learning aids, if nothing else; if this is anathema to the purists (perhaps including myself) then let's find a way to gracefully theme the problem away.
Not that I disagree with the basic notion that the internet should remain free, but free speech has never been absolute and unfettered. Libel, copyright violation, broadcasting military secrets, and the like have never been protected. And well that some forms of speech shouldn't be protected. After all, those DoS packets could be considered a form of free speech and we want them silenced!
This issue isn't libel per se but the practice of including the ISP as a co-defendent. If ISPs are held legally responsible for the content of speech transmitted via their systems they have little alternative but to act as censors, and prudence dictates that they act as overzealous censors. That is the nightmare scenario, not because it restricts libel but because it stifles wholly legitimate expression.
on any rpm-based system. It does a quickie RC5 checksum check on the executables (which shouldn't change from installation). Obviously this only works for rpm-based systems, but there are a lot of them.
And, no, this is not a substitute for real tripwire-type watchdog security. But don't knock it, either.
The system logic for all of the Mac G4 machines shipped since last summer (about 2 million units so far) have been designed for MP operation.
Whether you got a motherboard with two CPU slots, or a motherboard with one slot holding two CPUs, or a motherboard with one single-CPU slot was quite another matter, of course.
The same system logic was used in all of the Apples shipped, whether high- or low-end, desktop or laptop. Have a look under the hood and check out the part number on the north bridge to see for yourself.
For all of those pointing out that ILOVEYOU requires the luser to actively open the attachment, keep some things in mind:
Outlook's file extension hiding means that the attachment showed as.TXT, not.vbs
It's a truly bizarre world where viewing a document executes that document.
That was just this time. Bubbleboy proved that you can make the code launch as soon as the message comes up.
It doesn't take rocket science. HTML formatted messages render IMG= objects quite promiscuously; VBS is one of the options.
Personally, I'm really interested in seeing if it's possible to add a 'graphic' to a vCard which is actually disguised VBscript. Malware that propogates via infected vCards should be able to fly under the radar for quite a while. Certainly long enough to become very, very widespread.
What's the downside? Simple. Lack of tool support. There are lots of portable document formats out there already. MIF is published, WordPerfect doc format is published, even RTF is supposedly for portability, etc. Why not send your customers docs in these formats? Because the word processor that has 94% of the market has no incentive to enable competitors by supporting them, and even has a great deal of incentive to minimize compatibility between its own generations (as you found out.)
Assuming that any open document standard emerges, you can pretty well bet that saving from the market leader to that format will be an ugly process (have you looked at the HTML that that turkey produces? Blech!) You can also bet that imports from it will be better but still a pain. For real fun, try repetitive translations between the native format and the portable one and compare the starting and end results.
The sad fact is that monopolists have a huge stake in incompatibility (read the Halloween Documents) and every reason to maintain it. The rest of us will just have to survive in that environment until it changes. Changing it is another topic entirely, but for once I'll say, Vive le France!
RMS: We can also expect to see fierce attempts to catch individuals who use Napster and imprison them. The War on Copying will become more vicious.
And that would be a Good Thing. The French Revolutionaries used to say "The worse, the better." Most people, frankly, don't get too worked up over the oppression so long as it doesn't hit too close to home. (Which is why the War on Drugs is tolerated: it is, in effect, class warfare and most voters don't identify enough with Them to bother.)
Setting aside the ethical dimension, technology has pretty much made a great deal of copyright law unenforcable, which is the real comparison with the "War on Drugs." Data replication and drug use are both going to happen regardless of how much effort goes into stopping them. The difference is that unlike the drug underclass, the beneficiaries of copying have no stake in keeping it illegal (face it, drug laws are a form of price support) and the copiers can't be marginalized.
Efforts to "crack down" on copying will fail, and the more they fail the more Draconian they'll become. Eventually, they'll become enough of a problem for enough people with enough influence that, like Prohibition (and MICROS~1 ?) the balance will tip against them.
Again, this is without regard to the ethics of the matter, both wrt drugs and copying. Some people get seriously motivated by ethics. Others don't. RMS may not like ESR's attempts to get people to do things for what RMS sees as the wrong reasons, but one reason that we have laws at all is to make ethical behavior a prudent choice as well as an ethical one. If that means that some people do the right thing for the wrong reasons, so be it; it beats having them do the wrong thing (except perhaps in some religious sense.) Let's not forget that ESR is also enabling people who want to do the Right Thing but are concerned about the cost.
It will be interesting to see how the Alpha 21364 performs, putting the controler on the chip might sort out some of the latency issues, but something will still need to be done about the heat (perhaps a shrink).
Shrinking RDRAM doesn't do that much for the power consumption. That's because the worst of the power is in the RAC, which sucks (apt term in this case) so much (juice) because it's an open-drain constant-current analog interface driving many milliamps onto the I/O lines. The DLL also gobbles electrons. Neither of these get smaller or less power-hungry with process technology, which puts RDRAM on a nasty track in cost and yield terms. (And no, I really don't want to go into why they don't scale.)
As for Sony, the situation has changed. Obviously a different system controller would be needed, but present DDR parts provide more bandwidth than the RDRAMs do with about the same pincount, less power, and fewer external components. Check out the memory on the GeForce boards.
So you're saying that a company that manages to make, say, 50 million dollars a year is completely worthless, and that you have to make billions a year in order to be a *real* company?
Dunno where you got that. What I am saying is that the relatively small volumes Sony commands aren't going to be enough to materially alter the market economics of scale. In DRAM, ( volume => low cost ) and ( low cost => volume ) which should be recognizable as positive feedback. Whoever loses the edge in volume will effectively disappear, and you can bet that Sony engineers are furiously preparing a contingency product using DDR SDRAM.
Slashdot Mirror
Somebody's gotta go first. With a lead in installations and a tendency to be an early adopter, bugs in a component that's used in all three will tend to be reported against RH. If you break down the bugs against the actual programs and match that to the distros that use them, it looks different.
And what you want is technology that basically examines an open MP3 file that's being transferred to a portable device and decides whether or not it should be admitted to the portable device.
That's not watermarking. That's copy protection by another name. This, with the "secure wire" and "secure codec" comments, indicate that the objective is to produce music which gets marked up at each transfer stage and becomes unusable after a limited number of transfers.
That's the same method that they tried to apply to DAT -- make the hardware OEMs build transcription security into each step. Remember DAT?
Nope, charge the sender. That's what will keep the chickenboners out and the volume low enough to prevent revoltuion.
They're planning to charge $0.41 per message. That should weed out the chickenbone spammers, leaving only the big boys (read DMA). The DMA loves this; they've been trying to get rid of the chickenboners for quite a while. Until the chickenboners are gone, sending spam is marketing suicide. The DMA hopes that without them stinking up the place they can make spam as respectable (and profitable) as telemarketing.
The first was when USPS became the owner of the .us TLD. The last will be when they become the only legal carrier of e-mail.
Somewhere in the middle will be the point when they are declared to be sufficient for legal notice such as jury summons, certified mail, utility and tax bills, etc. This is a necessary step, since without this nobody with half a brain will use them.
Once they are declared to be official e-mail, they will discover that (gasp!) messages get lost as long as people are still collecting mail through ISPs. So, obviously, the ISPs have to go. We will then have reached Nirvana, with the USPS charging $0.50 or so to the sender for all e-mail.
Chickenbone spam will be a thing of the past! Oh, we'll still get Wonderful Offers in the (e-)mail, but they'll be from Our Elected Representatives and Important Companies who can afford the wonders of Targeted E-Mail Marketing. (Of course, they'll get a discount.) And we'll all be grateful, because without the bulk e-mailers subsidizing the system we'd no doubt have to pay much more to send a message.
Unix was designed for programmers, scientists, and engineers. It works for them rather well. It was not designed for PHBs and their secretaries.
So, the question. Is adapting Unix for this last category of people is the right thing to do?
Well, maybe because what engineers do is produce documentation?
Where the Hell do you think that all of those standards published by outfits like IEEE, JEDEC, EIA, EIAJ, ISO, and other alphabet outfits come from? The stork? Or do you think that the PHBs do all of that stuff and then leave the implemetation details up to grunts like me?
Are you under the charming impression that teams of tens of engineers work out projects like 5 million gate ICs based on whiteboard sketches? Office automation is one of the indispensible tools of engineering, and it's getting harder and harder to get by with the Solaris box at work and the Linux network at home without adding a W2K notebook or some other Redmondian puspocket. At which point the IT crowd and PHBs suggest that we don't need the workstation any more since we can use an X terminal package to connect to The Server from the LoseDoze box.
Damn straight we need office tools, and yesterday wouldn't be too soon.
The Company has a product that we really want to open up. Unfortunately, there are parts of the technology that we don't own and can't disclose in source. The compromise that we're trying to reach is to have the low-level stuff that contains black magic released as binary-only libraries (very much independent of the operating system, much less the release level) and open up the higher levels of the drivers.
This has been in the suits vs. suits stage for over a year now. The lawyers are running the show.
does anyone else find it exceedingly odd that an OS that's older than 95, 98, and the majority of the NT strain of Winvirus is the new OS on the block?!?!
Wouldn't that make Windows 2000 some sort of embryonic OS???
No, that makes 95 a new kid on the block. It makes 98 a source of noise and vile messes. And it makes W2K packaging resemble a condom.
- Is it legal to link to English-only sites?
- Does Babelfish count?
- Quite a few Internet protocols rely on English keywords, notably HTML itself. Does Quebec also require that the tags in a webpage be translated to the French equivalents?
Hint for the humor-impaired: don't take this too seriously.AMD has disclosed specifications to the major OS vendors and Microsoft so that they may ensure that their operating systems and tools will be AMD x86 64-bit aware
Emphasis added...
Interesting way of putting it, don't y'all think? Seems someone doesn't think MICROS~1 isn't covered by "major OS vendors."
If you want to see something really interesting, have a look at some of the data sheets for synchronous memory dating back to about 1990. SDRAM advanced data was starting to show up in the early '90s and there are data sheets out there that predate Rambus' original filings, and which clearly show programmable CAS latency.
/. readers were born. In any case, substituting a differential signal for a single-ended signal is very far into the range of "obvious to those of moderate skill in the Art."
(And before you ask for more detail on this, keep in mind that a lot of this is in litigation. Do your own research.)
As for double-clocked differential memory busses, I could be mistaken but I believe that IBM was using them in their mainframes before most
jbarnett wanted to know:
Seriously though, this isn't meant as a flame, but why do you *HAVE* to upgrade *RIGHT NOW*? If KDE (whatever version you are using) works for you, why not stick with it? Wait till KDE 2.0 gets tested and debugged by more users, and wait till you almost have to upgrade. (this advice is only toward desktops, other software may differ)
Just a wild guess here, but -- maybe to test the silly thing? Remember, this is open-source software. We don't pay for it in cash, and not everyone can add code, but we can all add eyeball time. Which is the coin of the open-source world.
You do intend to pay your dues, don't you?
Of course they are. This is nothing new; it's implicit in ESR's Bazaar model of open software development. The conflicts under discusssion right now are with corporate interests, but if every corporation on Earth went dark it wouldn't change anything because conflict is the heart and soul of creative collaboration.
The tug of war between conflicting interests is what makes for careful scrutiny, the "many eyes" that we're so proud of. Attempts to resolve conflicts are often the seed of brilliant innovations which make previous trade-offs moot.
By all means suspect Corel's UI suggestions, but keep in mind that many of them (such as deprecating inconsistent dialog button labels) are derived from very sound UI principles. We will need to provide Win-flavored UIs as learning aids, if nothing else; if this is anathema to the purists (perhaps including myself) then let's find a way to gracefully theme the problem away.
Peace and harmony are BOR-ING!
Ed Avis:
BTW anyone know how many copies of Corel Linux, WordPerfect and so on are being sold?
Point datum: The local Frys stores say that they can't keep Corel Office for Linux on the shelves, and the channel seems to be dry.
Was anyone else amused by the Microsoft copyright notice on the web page with the Court's order?
Not that I disagree with the basic notion that the internet should remain free, but free speech has never been absolute and unfettered. Libel, copyright violation, broadcasting military secrets, and the like have never been protected. And well that some forms of speech shouldn't be protected. After all, those DoS packets could be considered a form of free speech and we want them silenced!
This issue isn't libel per se but the practice of including the ISP as a co-defendent. If ISPs are held legally responsible for the content of speech transmitted via their systems they have little alternative but to act as censors, and prudence dictates that they act as overzealous censors. That is the nightmare scenario, not because it restricts libel but because it stifles wholly legitimate expression.
Quick & Dirty: run
/sbin/*
/usr/sbin or whatever)
rpm -Vf
(or
on any rpm-based system. It does a quickie RC5 checksum check on the executables (which shouldn't change from installation). Obviously this only works for rpm-based systems, but there are a lot of them.
And, no, this is not a substitute for real tripwire-type watchdog security. But don't knock it, either.
Whether you got a motherboard with two CPU slots, or a motherboard with one slot holding two CPUs, or a motherboard with one single-CPU slot was quite another matter, of course.
The same system logic was used in all of the Apples shipped, whether high- or low-end, desktop or laptop. Have a look under the hood and check out the part number on the north bridge to see for yourself.
Personally, I'm really interested in seeing if it's possible to add a 'graphic' to a vCard which is actually disguised VBscript. Malware that propogates via infected vCards should be able to fly under the radar for quite a while. Certainly long enough to become very, very widespread.
What's the downside? Simple. Lack of tool support. There are lots of portable document formats out there already. MIF is published, WordPerfect doc format is published, even RTF is supposedly for portability, etc. Why not send your customers docs in these formats? Because the word processor that has 94% of the market has no incentive to enable competitors by supporting them, and even has a great deal of incentive to minimize compatibility between its own generations (as you found out.)
Assuming that any open document standard emerges, you can pretty well bet that saving from the market leader to that format will be an ugly process (have you looked at the HTML that that turkey produces? Blech!) You can also bet that imports from it will be better but still a pain. For real fun, try repetitive translations between the native format and the portable one and compare the starting and end results.
The sad fact is that monopolists have a huge stake in incompatibility (read the Halloween Documents) and every reason to maintain it. The rest of us will just have to survive in that environment until it changes. Changing it is another topic entirely, but for once I'll say, Vive le France!
RMS: We can also expect to see fierce attempts to catch individuals who use Napster and imprison them. The War on Copying will become more vicious.
And that would be a Good Thing. The French Revolutionaries used to say "The worse, the better." Most people, frankly, don't get too worked up over the oppression so long as it doesn't hit too close to home. (Which is why the War on Drugs is tolerated: it is, in effect, class warfare and most voters don't identify enough with Them to bother.)
Setting aside the ethical dimension, technology has pretty much made a great deal of copyright law unenforcable, which is the real comparison with the "War on Drugs." Data replication and drug use are both going to happen regardless of how much effort goes into stopping them. The difference is that unlike the drug underclass, the beneficiaries of copying have no stake in keeping it illegal (face it, drug laws are a form of price support) and the copiers can't be marginalized.
Efforts to "crack down" on copying will fail, and the more they fail the more Draconian they'll become. Eventually, they'll become enough of a problem for enough people with enough influence that, like Prohibition (and MICROS~1 ?) the balance will tip against them.
Again, this is without regard to the ethics of the matter, both wrt drugs and copying. Some people get seriously motivated by ethics. Others don't. RMS may not like ESR's attempts to get people to do things for what RMS sees as the wrong reasons, but one reason that we have laws at all is to make ethical behavior a prudent choice as well as an ethical one. If that means that some people do the right thing for the wrong reasons, so be it; it beats having them do the wrong thing (except perhaps in some religious sense.) Let's not forget that ESR is also enabling people who want to do the Right Thing but are concerned about the cost.
Looks like smooth sailing to me!
It will be interesting to see how the Alpha 21364 performs, putting the controler on the chip might sort out some of the latency issues, but something will still need to be done about the heat (perhaps a shrink).
Shrinking RDRAM doesn't do that much for the power consumption. That's because the worst of the power is in the RAC, which sucks (apt term in this case) so much (juice) because it's an open-drain constant-current analog interface driving many milliamps onto the I/O lines. The DLL also gobbles electrons. Neither of these get smaller or less power-hungry with process technology, which puts RDRAM on a nasty track in cost and yield terms. (And no, I really don't want to go into why they don't scale.)
As for Sony, the situation has changed. Obviously a different system controller would be needed, but present DDR parts provide more bandwidth than the RDRAMs do with about the same pincount, less power, and fewer external components. Check out the memory on the GeForce boards.
So you're saying that a company that manages to make, say, 50 million dollars a year is completely worthless, and that you have to make billions a year in order to be a *real* company?
Dunno where you got that. What I am saying is that the relatively small volumes Sony commands aren't going to be enough to materially alter the market economics of scale. In DRAM, ( volume => low cost ) and ( low cost => volume ) which should be recognizable as positive feedback. Whoever loses the edge in volume will effectively disappear, and you can bet that Sony engineers are furiously preparing a contingency product using DDR SDRAM.