NOT creating viruses would be short-sighted. They're like an inoculation- without the constant minor threat to keep us alert on security, we'd grow complacent and vulnerable.
One of the great myths that the early internet and oopen source software debunked was this very issue. The early internet was open and standards compliant. Nothing was private. If you misbehaved, you could be easily discovered. Commercial entities, coming from the conservative privacy-for-themselves-only club are fostering closed systems that enable people to misbehave without detection. This is MUCH worse.
Social vulerabilities like SPAM derive from flaws in the system, not the the openness. If the global email system were closed, nothing could be done to fix it. Since it is open, a lot of ideas and work is going on to fix the 'problem' of Unsolicited Commercial (for certain values of commercial) Email. This work is the only hope we have as citizens of a global Internet.
If there were no viruses, worms, or hackers in general, then the software running the internet would stay insecure, and would accumulate more and more holes over time.
Hackers are good, proactive explorers that usually help the system. Crakers are the people we would like to see put behind bars. They neigther help nor seek to improve software. Crackers want your software to be buggy and develop more holes over time. Fortunately for them, the closed commercial world group-thinks the same things (Cost, lock-in and forced obselecence verses un-upgraded 'stable' platforms and no money from accounting to develop fixes for which customers won't pay.)
Some people are reactive. Some are proactive. People who are proactive seek to improve and repair the systems they own. In the past companies and people who are too lazy or scared to upgrade or invest in the future dot the roadside. The only forces needed are the only forces that work: internal motiviation like mores, morals and personal values.
With or without 'virus writers' and their ilk, the proactive people will continue to survive and excel. The reactive people would die by natural selection without the need for the 'virus writers.' These people certainly aren't doing much now with them.
Then someday, a homicidal maniac with nothing to lose would find it easy to take over the world' computers and begin a reign of terror.
You cannot plan and execute theft or damage in public (doesn't stop the stupid from trying, but hey.) You need a private place to ensure surprise. Without surprise, you planning only serves, much like the super-virus discussions at securityfocus.com, as a way to proactively improve software and systems. It is a foolish baker who leaves bread in front of children who talk of nothing by stealing that bread.
Without surprise, the flight attandants would only have to take YOUR box cutters away before the flight begins. Everyone else, who weren't planning a highjacking, could keep their own.
The need for privacy of the individual and the need for publicity of the group is a complex matter. Reasons for privacy exist outside of any argument based on genetic traits for territoriality or fear-responses. Unforuntately, we need to make mistakes to learn. Often this as to take place in private, otherwise penalties imposed by 'well meaning' passerbys will effectily pervert or terminate the lesson. Other times it is too difficult to filter the outside world. Thus we turn to private comtemplation.
Why doesn't Microsoft release security patches to prevent obvious security problems?
Because doing business that way costs money.
Reacting may cost more than proactive solutions, but without management buy-in on the front, you have no way of convincing the people with the money (management) to pay up for the 'extra' work.
Look at the airline industry in the United States of America. The airplane construction business opperates on the principle that ANo Safety Feature will be implemented until a disaster of cost equal to that of implementation happens. Fortunately, a lot of safety features come standard on modern aircraft - like a trained pilot.
People in the airline industry blame this in razor thin margins. The margins for Microsoft and many other major industry dominators are huge. Yet they follow the same 'dark path.' There is no excuse, but they continue to fail at doing the Right Thing.
Google has been doing the Right Thing for a lot of projects. And, now that they have posted their principles, we can see why.
Police, FBI and other law enforcement agencies seize computer equipment *all the time*. [snip] The police who arrive at the office/your house/whatever know what computers look like, and might have one 'expert' with them, but they will never just take copies of your data, they will take whole machines, even whole networks.
Hmmmm...
If a computer has had kiddy porn on it, they typically destroy the computer.
So, the key is to get a bunch of old, empty 486 boxen for a font job and build your cases out of non-computer like stuff. Funiture. Lamps. Microwaves.
Cops come in a size everything 'computer like' while you hide the power cord running into your wi-fi enabled lay-z-boy.
I see a lot of people on Slashdot getting frustruated with "supid users," usually because the users ask what the techie hears as "stupid questions."
There are no 'stupid' questions. There are only basic questions and not basic questions. (This is seperate from bad vs. good questions.) The distinction that technical people miss is that the not basic are questions that assume or depend upon the basic questions. At some point, someone has to ask the basic questions.
The level of assumption and dependancy is directly porpotional to the level of technical complexity of the discussion. Some strictly not basic questions (that is, questions built on lots of assumptions and information from other questions) become basic. It is a matter of context.
This is like someone on irc asking for how to match configurations for xdm and X when a particular vendor's video driver install tool didn't handle it properly. This person assumes a lot of knowledge about the system that most people in #linux-basic won't know. On #x-video-drivers he or she might get flamed for not already knowing the answer or not providing sufficient information to deterime if this is a question for a simplier forum or really on the level of discourse for the moment.
When faced with a new person, the question a techie should ask him or herself is: at what level is this person? Is this person 'basic' to me (knows less) or 'not-basic' (knows equal or more)? Where does that person fit on the very wide (I hope) and non-linear scale of basic to expert for the topic at hand? Answering these questions will permit me to shape my language is usefull ways, if I choose to do so.
The article is highlighting an interesting aspect of this dicotomy about computers, cars and anything complex. Since the computer responses back to us, by design, a social model fits better than a tool-use model. However, any tool with complex parts also communicates back to its user. With continual use, the user learns the 'language' of their boat, car, et cetera and migrates from tool-use to social models of behaviour. At several of my workplaces, any office product of size larger than a human head had an informal name given to it by the secretary (even if it frequently starts 'that piece-of-shit'.)
For people, the most basic interactions are tool-use and social. We are a tool using species and tend to use tools so solve many of our problems (excepting the occasional 'real man' verses a stuck jar lid.) These tools do not talk to us. With anything that responds, pets, threats and people, we form complex social interactions. We have complex societies and engage in many-layers conversaion other people. Even if those people do not respond back.
At a basic level, the computer user may migrate from a tool use model to social model to deal with complexity and the communication originated from the computer. At a more expert level, the user can learn the 'language' of a particular machine and then generalize this to all computers. This process can involve complex factors such as location in space and time, mental and physical context, and history. It also may appear, to someone at a level not as basic as the humanizer, that this simplification from tool to person is to hide complexity only.
Of anyone making that mistake I should warn that doctors learn the machine of the human body as well as they can. The best doctors can use the human body as a tool to fight disease in the same way that they can use a stethoscope. This does not mean that that sick human has become a lesser 'tool' to help fix itself. The sick person is still a social person who interacts with people via social paths.
Your computer may not (at this time) care about how you feel, think or wish about it as a person. But knowing how you feel about that computer enables me, the techie, to gauge your level of jargon and level of expertise about the
Stress is what we feel when our current abilities are being challenged.
Pure myth.
I had trouble with stress in high school. I was recommended to take a college class on stress management. The class covered such things as what stress is and how to cope with it. I would say that, based on my current reactions to the world, it was very helpful.
Stress is not challenge. Life is anything that happens to you. The physical response to this is usually what the layman refers to as 'stress' even though this is calling the disease after the symptoms. This response, the stress response or fight-or-flight response, is usually seen in wild animals and plans only when Bad things happen. It's supposed to go away once the threat causing the stress goes away, in other words: closure. We, especially in IT, like to make high stress the Norm.
That tight, uncomfortable feeling is what happens when you are distressed.
[Note: I am not a medical doctor. If you are having serious problems at work/home/school seek help. Especially if it is impacting your health, causing impotence, weight problems, etc.]
You have a minimum level of loading that makes you happy. You also have a maximum. This loading is multi-dimensional. It can be intellectual, emotional, psychological, etc. Getting outside that range, either below (I'm soooo bored with these classes) or above (arg! I can't take these 80 hour weeks) causes your stress response to break down. When you can't respond to the distress anymore, YOU break down. You burn out.
Just calling it 'responsibility' is irresponsible and hides the true, killing nature of stress. When you are distressed for a long time, your body does a lot of bad things. One of the most popular is the massive midriff of fat that the body likes to accumulate when distressed. Another 'coping mechanism' is a heart attack.
Fathers get closure every time their little one walks, talks or moves on to college. You might need to teach your boss how to close a project without leaving dangling requests or unfulfilled garbage, intellectual or emotional, around. Having a boss who can do this is one sign you have a manager that knows how to manage people (vs. a canned MBA with little in the way of social skills who 'allocates resources.')
However, the only way to survive is to learn to relax. This is inducing the relaxation response instead of the fight-or-flight response. (Unless you are really allowed to punch out you boss at work and thus get closure by resolving a 'fight.' A major factor in post-fight male friendships.)
Use breathing techniques. Use visualization. Learn to quit while you're ahead. Learn to label things for what they are: distress that kills not 'responsibility' or some other Ward Cleaver crap. Exercise (ooh! there goes the karma.)
Joe doesn't know any local linux geeks that'll come fix something for a 6 pack of Duff
Maybe if he tried offering Gunniess instead, he would get a better reception?
Oh come on, it's not like you haven't sat down with $RELATIVE_FROM_USA to fix $COMPUTER_PROBLEM and been offered something like crudwiser. Ick.
Refined tastes on technology need not imply a favoritism to non-domestic American beverages. But this is an important facet of software that people leave out: culture.
I view that whole problem with software is not about the number of machines installed. The problem is about people, attitudes and perceptions.
I feel that addressing the difference of community will be the single most challenging task facing popular adoption of tools like Linux. The OS installed on a user's computer is a choice of that user. It is up to you to change that user's attitude. They will put up with horrid quality when they don't know of a better alternative.
In my opinion culture clash between 'Joe Sixpack Windows-User' and everybody else is dramatic. Both the Apple and $FREE_OS communities like to view themselves as fringe or special groups. They celebrate their difference from the mainstream. Pure and unadulterated Windows users form a different community than the users of Apple or $FREE_OS products. They belive the tools they have work and work adequately. The common users are people who are sufficiently content with their pre-packaged choice to not look outside the beige box. Due to bad practices by Microsoft, they also form the largest community of individual personal computer users.
It has been said that the I.Q. of a group is the lowest I.Q. of the members of the group divided by the number of members of that group (think communication overhead when talking with slow people.) Fortunately for the 'Aunt Tillies' of the world, individual users can have quite a solid grasp of basic computer skills. Unfortunately, confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance imply a lot of ineria.
While 'Aunt Tillie, CTO/CFO' grasps software quality, their grasp may be of the level of the average car buyer. This is a person who only needs to know about various cars during the rare purchase of a car. In the M$ dominated media of software boxes at your local $MEGA_MART, communicating the benefits of something like Linux or Apple over Microsoft products will require overcoming the established noise level of $ billions in marketing
This is why Microsoft is 50% marketing. This is why commercial Linux distributions are a Good Thing. This is why Apple is still here. The best hackers of the world have been excellent social engineers before anything else. It's time to put that 'social' part to a very good use.
Social engineering of the common man to want quality in software, rather than just settling for third best is possible. After helping run a student organization for Linux users for a few years, I have seen remarkable progress in the quality of various distributions. However, problems with GUI's, driver availability and application compatibility are but small technical hurdles that can be solved with adequate coding.
If you care about software quality then talk to you neighbor. Show off your computers. Maybe even offer them a Guinness while you watch DVDs on your PC with those neighbors. Get the word out.
Lindos? So this is the BEST they can do?: Ask the community or drop the 'W'? Come on, guys. You came up with the software, why not make a legitimate effort to take the name seriously?
I don't know how serious the discussion were for the name change. However, I do know that around the southwest of the U.S.A., Lindos would be pronounced the same as Lindows [1]. Phonetically, at least, the name hasn't changed.
1. I suspect this is due to the frequent [vowel]+'s' -> [vowel]+'es' problem with native English teachers (e.g. hick mom, hick dad, that lady/guy at school with 60 hrs of community college "children's education" classes who's being paid less than the janitor). Even with words that are not being pluralized ('Lindoses' anyone?), the 'es' pronunciation is pronunced.
talking about software like P2P file sharing, or freeware DVD drivers, or software that opens Adobe files for backups, the Slashdot crowd tends to be firmly in the "don't punish the technology for abuse by the users" camp.
And then we have these PowerPoint, Excel, yada yada threads where the Slashdot crowd tends to be firmly in the "don't punish the users, it's the fault of these evil software applications" camp.
Flaws in use in both cases. Bad p2p users. Bad Excel users. If one wanted to debate how slashdot stories claim that the UI in Excel sucks, then you should compare it with stories that praise or vilify the user interface of common p2p applications, not the group of protocols and technologies called 'p2p file sharing'.
<rant> Here we have an article, likeseveralbefore, that find issue with the faulty mental models of software user interfaces. People using tools for jobs they were never intened. Like a script kiddie with a p2p aplication pirating iscoroft Server 2003, the value of the tool is decreased by this use. If such increased its value, it would probably be recognised as useful - in other words, a hack - rather than as an drek clogging up the world.
Conversely, severalarticles on slashdot are very technophilic (okay, you try finding a recent article about P2P on slashdot without the subject 'RIAA sues X' or 'Congresscirtter with music industry soft money denouces denouces P2P'.) The technology itself is not at fault for the miss-use. It is not the existance of spreadsheets ( a fine way of laying out a table) or serial presentation tools (a simple way of backing a presentation with fancy electronic billboards.)
This issue at hand for slashdot is that Powerpoint and Excel encourage 'thinking in bullets and lists' verses meaningful, whole statements. This is not so much an innate result of presentation applications and spreadsheets as the way in which they are taught to be used. Additionally, this is a affect of how the developer's mental models are overlaying the user interface for these domain specific applications.
One wonders if the common 'middle class' man is getting his analytical skills and his critical reading skills from Microsoft. If so, it sounds to frequently (as in this case) like the registration on M$ Basic Reading Skills 2003 has expired. </rant>
...Mr. Williamson needs to spend more time in the U.S. this year.
I don't know how much good that would do.
Oh sure...we'll ignore the blocking of indie sites and people who have [not corporate approved and polically correct] content. But, block somebody's income stream and Woa Boy are we gonna kick someone in the head.
Somedays I just love living the U.S. of Americash, where we're all equal under the dollar.
As voters you chose bush and must live with that untill Novemember.
If I remember corectly, voters didn't choose Bush. A judge did.
Still, politics are money are behind everything that happens at NASA. Not everyone gets to be an astronaut, after all. But every politician needs the good PR of a good boondogle^H^H^H^H^Hspace adventure.
--- This comment brought to you be the number 6, the letter B and an old woman's dimpled chad in Florida.
I think Davies has come up with a good idea, but it needs one thing - property rights. A development regime which provides some form of property rights will become increasingly necessary as space develops
Land property rights are different that plain, ordinary property rights.
Why is it that people think that you can't have capitalism without land property rights? Why do otherwise educated people from the west seem to fixate on this Medieval Idea of land ownership? Is it just because it is old and widespread in the west? Well, so is syphilis, but I don't think that makes syphilis a good thing.
The argument that it's the most efficient way to allocate scarce or valuable resources is bunk. Ever had to drive around an American city founded by a 'land run'? The number of ex-squatter 's houses that force otherwise useful through roads to dead-end is amazing (as well as other interesting geopolitical features.) Several slums exist in these cities where people refused to sell or improve the large tracts of land they got from the government at pennies on the dollar. These people forestalled development often just because they liked owning an (unused) farm.
With the exception of the freeloader and the tragedy of the commons, shared resources have many less problems than the 'stay off my land' model. (Including limiting NIMBY.) Look at the difference in progress in Open Source programming and the Intellectual-Property bound proprietary software.
I argue that space is much like the mental space or algorithms, programs and computer science/math theory. It is not like 'airable land' on the surface of the earth. The size of space is huge - and NONE of it is airable. The use of 'land' is ambiguous: your 'land claim' on a patch of surface on an asteroid is debatable if the whole asteroid is to be chewed up and used for raw materials to build something (like whole towns that are submerged under artificial damns that power serveral other towns and a small city or two and provide a conrolled body of water.) There is an inherent violation of use for natural resources in space, there's a reason NASA sterilizes spacecraft. And high cost of getting there, although it is cheap to move around once there. If you don't like IP patents like one-click or the DNS patent, I think you should object just as strongly to some one saying that they own the moon anymore than anyone else.
I'm no communist, but you can have capitalism without depending on property ownership! If the government must blow money to support and guard your property with troops and lawyers, they'll never be able to pay for important things for other people. Let the government 'own it' and everybody else use it just like any other public utility. It's just abstracting the ownsership problem back a level to force people to deal with affecting their neighboors with their so-called 'private' activities (you try living near people who plant weeds to which you and several other neighbors are dangerously allergic.)
He's been working on this for at least 3 years, probably longer, and hasn't produced a single paper?
There are several reasons people fail to publish, including:
Not knowing they must (uneducated, beat over head with deadline until educated)
Trying to make a profit off of public money refusing to acknowledge they must - AKA ignorance, refuse to fund until they get dollar/pund signs out of eyes)
Unable to write such papers (unqualified/scared, hire a secretary/technical writer/real researcher)
Unmotivated (see uneducated)
We have a name for people like this, though: failures. Then, there are a lot of small companies (like Creatures Labs, the original makers of Creatures and Dockingstation) that do this. Many get started by mooching off of government grants. They turn in their reports regularly. Then the keep the product/software/system or develop a remarkably similar (i.e. changed logos/packaging) product in a very short amount of time.
Not that it's bad, the government sponsoring the development MUST specify the conditions in the funding contract ahead of time. Often the bean counters just ignore the fact they are giving away (publicly paid for) innovation to the private sector. Often, though the majority of the tax funding does comme from company taxes. To top it all off, a lot of the smaller companies just go off and die, leaving the (paid for with tax money) products abandoned in some IP limbo or warehouse.
Personally, I would have loved to get a hold of the software behind the chaos engine (a big part of the AI system in Creatures and Dockingstation for Windows and Linux.) But, those programs were created by a 1980's-style, proprietary, we-know-better-than-you and pay-us-just-to-be-near-it company. When that company died, the software (until recently bought by a 3rd party) died with it.
Shred all bank statements and whatnot before you throw them out.
You throw these out!?!? Never, in my wildest imagination would I consider taking such critical records and disposing of them. I've got my account histories (at the touch of a lock) form three banks over 15 year - I've even got records fom companies that closed, long before the whole 'get it online' rush. This is why I request paper copies of those records: so I can keep them.
Certainly, someone can break into my house, ignore all the shiny, expensive and portable things and got straight for the heavy, ugly, locked boxes obviously full of useless paper that are being used as a table for dirty laundry and AOL CD's (same really). But I degress.
No, seriously? Windows GUIs suck... compared to what?
Compared to X? The same X where every single programmer just _has_ to use a different layout, different shortcuts, different menu structure, and for bonus points his own widgets?
Not to make you sound like a newbie in the world of computing, but what you are railing against isn't the 'ease of use' of UNIX/GNU/Linux GUIs.
Many, many people fall into this trap. What you are proposing is the adoption of something both unessecary (and in many cases) Evil, Bad and Wrong. This thing is called an SAA CUA. They were practically invented by IBM in the 50s and 60s. These ideas are simple: do something one way and only one way.
From the user's perspective, this is okay. I only have to learn quaduple-double-bucky-shift-Q to print once.
From the UI designer's point of view this is crap. Look at video games. Many custom, learn once and use once indterfaces. Games deal with this by being on the cutting edge of computer-assisted education. They have dollars and reputations staked in 'playability' and 'ease of use' so they do the Right Thing.
Wrong Thing: pick standard, crappy global contants, enforce those on everyone. Aribitrary user interfaces are just as bad as random interfaces.
Right Thing: common core behavior in frameworks that act AS EXPECTED, customized application interfaces to the TASK that the application SOLVES or DOES. Show and Walk users through the non-standard parts with HOW-TOs, demos and trainers.
The Right Way is more work for the lazy, boring person who wouldn't write documentation anyway. The Wrong Way means that you probably will guess correctly on the first try, but the application programmer still didn't do his job.
This is a very important sticking point with the Aunt Mable newbie computer user argument as well. If good ol' Auntie has never used a computer, learning a KDE (GNOME) desktop or the UNIX command line will be as EQUALLY challenging as learning a WIMP like Windows. MACs were/are easily learned because of some UI choices that favor new users without bothering experienced users (of those UI's).
Finally, like in the world of video games, with the diversity of UIs in Linux/GNU/Unix I can select those features/interfaces that work best and use them. With a system like Windows, some people won't buy/sell your software unless is meets the criteria in the SAA CUA.
I appologise for the grammar. I need more sleep and less Trolls.
No, the slashdot crowd is going to have to start playing football and wearing letter jackets everywhere
That's Funny, because I actually lettered in Academics.
My high school's fixation with those letterman jackets and the years of academic awards including everything from taking 2nd place in state for Reading and 2nd place Science in Oklahoma to many years of T.E.A.M.S. [1] was rewarded, in a way. The athletes got whole jackets; all I got was a letter. They took a little football and added a base and flame to make it look like one of those cheesy academic lamps.
I just need to get a jacket on which to put that Tuttle [2] Tigers double-T. Of course, now I just keep it in a drawer below my wall-hanging Bachelors of Science sheepskin.
---
1. Test of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics and Science. You and your nerd buddies sit down and solve real world problems from engineers in various industries. It pays off to be the only one on your team who knows vectors, has basic draftsmanship skills and can check (other people's) grammar.
2. Yes, the same Tuttle, Oklahoma that is home to Ryan White of OU fame.
The only problem: with or without computers, 3. ?????? is still 3. LOTs and LOTs of HARD WORK by Teachers who care.
And honestly, a teacher who doesn't care deeply about teaching his/her subject (not just the subject itself) is what produces a third rate education. The teacher also comes off as a hack/fraud/joke, too.
One would like to just throw money at people every month and expect these (frequently) warm bodies to
produce Shakespeares and Rocket Scientists and Politicians Who Solve World Hunger. It is too bad that real (internal) motivation is needed to get people to do hard work. It's also too bad that the work has to be hard, but that's for the pediologists.
1) Find hole. 2) Write n1fty 'pl0its. 3) Show 'pl0its in IRC, l33t h4>0r lists, local group email for k1cls. 4) Someone releases Blaster Mk II. 5) Watch as companies try to fend off Blaster Mk II. 6) Anonymously report to Boring Rest of World (tm). 7) Watch people scream about *public* disclosure w/o company contact and grace period.
Everyday, black hats are trying their best to do (1) to (5), not too many are interested in (6) or (7).
It's like cold war thinking: you don't know if your enemy has $dollar;weapon. YET.
Grace periods only work if the stringy management at companies make patching and regression testing[1] a priority. Those companies that do, or those that also use OSS (so you can release a patch with your exploit code by yourself) get serious props. The rest will, and probably should, burn in the marketplace as bad models of development.
Every hacked box is a lost sale.
Time is not on your side.
1. "What's that? Additional costs and slipped rlease dates? Eliminate those jobs so my stock will go up," said the PHB.
I see two lines running from Linux to Unixware, but none in the other direction.
You think that's bad? follow the line from Apple's OS X all the way back to Unix V7.
If SCO's claims (beyond the assertion that IBM improperly used SCO code against the license) are with any merit, then BSD and any Mach kernel derivative (GNU/Hurd anyone?) like OS X is equally a 'UNIX' and thus SCO property. Many of these 'linked' kernels are still individual, differentiatable products that can be and are owned by seperate entities - espetially those like Minix and Linux that were created 'from the ground up.' Like generic chocolate-chip cookies or knock-off designer jeans, they only LOOK similar but in reality are quite different.
Due to this alone, I say this chart sucks. It is no better than collecting all the types of cars on the market today and comparing them based upon how many wheels they have. To put SCO's claims in this persepctive (so that average joe would unerstand,) we would then have to claim that obviously all cars today are derivates of the first (4 wheeled) motor coaches, thus all car owners owe $669 to who ever now owns that first garage.
SCO is pointless. Even if they claim rights to the kernel, none absolutely none of the GNU tools that make Linux (and Unix) useful (and which comprise some 80-98% of each Linux install) belong to them. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't really read the GPL. IANAL, but it's pretty explicit about who and when copies can be made and/or how they can be 'charged for.' And strangely enough, it never mentions SCO - no TM, SM or Copy. Kind of odd for something that 'came right out of SCO labs.'
Additionally, the last time I checked, refusing the GPL leaves you with normal government-protected copyright in the U.S.A. This implies that if SCO invalidates the GPL on the kernel and/or the GNU tools, they own a LOT of money to a LOT of software developers that they have been mooching off of for a long time. I don't know about you, but any $669 bill from SCO is getting a $50/hr bill from me for any of my tools anyone has installed on any Linux box. (Hell, charging only at $0.25/hr, I bet ESR could take out SCO's investment capital by himself, let alone Torvalds or Wall.)
--- Re: All this becuase one bored grad student wanted to play games on his (AT&T's) PDP-11. Well, at least we got C out of it. Oh...wait a minute...
The idea is that folders, whether they be in the context of an email program or a filesystem, are actively updated searches.
This is a Good Thing IMHO. But, I find that abstract views are almost as good. I'd love spend my time contriving useful query-based views of my mail (e.g. select * from ~/mail where address like family and pr0n = false and spam = no) rather than doing some other things [1] but alas. Fortunately there is the 'in the file system' approach that Hans Reiser and crew are working toward. Files as directories of content/properties, indexes built from custom searches on transactional filesystems. And all of it open to tinkering and improvement. The UNIX 'file-os-ophy' of text files and meta-data would make my ideal open and convoluted mail storage system trivial.
Worried about space? Run it through transparent filesystem level compression. Worried about security? Gpg ain't exactly new. Want more meta data? No problem: the filesystem of the future has plenty of flexibility for your X-Hot-Natalie-Portman-With-Grits field.
[1] One of the few things tying me to M$ right now is the preponderance of custom sorted, property-extended email stuck in M$ proprietary formats. If I have to write another shell script to parse MBX, PST or OST formats...I think I'll scream.
It's a lot easier to just use 96 bits now, than switching to 64 now, and then having to switch to 96 again in a few (or many) years.
Then why not just use numbers from IPv6? I'd make it easier to ping my RFID tagged, samrt dust imbued shorts from bed. In the mornings I could find out whether it's time to put them out to the wash or give em' just a little more 'hang time' on the back of the chair.
It's not like they couldn't start allocating disposable and perminate addresses from opposite ends of the address space.
Slashdot Mirror
This looks like Natural Selection to me
I wouldn't know as this looks like Slashdot Swarm Add-on for Black-Cat Studio's webserver is the #1 showstopper for May 2004.
The poster is arguing from the faulty logic that runs counter to both OSS and the facts of the Internet's history.
I invoke the Penny Arcade 'Greater Internet Fuckwad' theory.
NOT creating viruses would be short-sighted. They're like an inoculation- without the constant minor threat to keep us alert on security, we'd grow complacent and vulnerable.
One of the great myths that the early internet and oopen source software debunked was this very issue. The early internet was open and standards compliant. Nothing was private. If you misbehaved, you could be easily discovered. Commercial entities, coming from the conservative privacy-for-themselves-only club are fostering closed systems that enable people to misbehave without detection. This is MUCH worse.
Social vulerabilities like SPAM derive from flaws in the system, not the the openness. If the global email system were closed, nothing could be done to fix it. Since it is open, a lot of ideas and work is going on to fix the 'problem' of Unsolicited Commercial (for certain values of commercial) Email. This work is the only hope we have as citizens of a global Internet.
If there were no viruses, worms, or hackers in general, then the software running the internet would stay insecure, and would accumulate more and more holes over time.
Hackers are good, proactive explorers that usually help the system. Crakers are the people we would like to see put behind bars. They neigther help nor seek to improve software. Crackers want your software to be buggy and develop more holes over time. Fortunately for them, the closed commercial world group-thinks the same things (Cost, lock-in and forced obselecence verses un-upgraded 'stable' platforms and no money from accounting to develop fixes for which customers won't pay.)
Some people are reactive. Some are proactive. People who are proactive seek to improve and repair the systems they own. In the past companies and people who are too lazy or scared to upgrade or invest in the future dot the roadside. The only forces needed are the only forces that work: internal motiviation like mores, morals and personal values.
With or without 'virus writers' and their ilk, the proactive people will continue to survive and excel. The reactive people would die by natural selection without the need for the 'virus writers.' These people certainly aren't doing much now with them.
Then someday, a homicidal maniac with nothing to lose would find it easy to take over the world' computers and begin a reign of terror.
You cannot plan and execute theft or damage in public (doesn't stop the stupid from trying, but hey.) You need a private place to ensure surprise. Without surprise, you planning only serves, much like the super-virus discussions at securityfocus.com, as a way to proactively improve software and systems. It is a foolish baker who leaves bread in front of children who talk of nothing by stealing that bread.
Without surprise, the flight attandants would only have to take YOUR box cutters away before the flight begins. Everyone else, who weren't planning a highjacking, could keep their own.
The need for privacy of the individual and the need for publicity of the group is a complex matter. Reasons for privacy exist outside of any argument based on genetic traits for territoriality or fear-responses. Unforuntately, we need to make mistakes to learn. Often this as to take place in private, otherwise penalties imposed by 'well meaning' passerbys will effectily pervert or terminate the lesson. Other times it is too difficult to filter the outside world. Thus we turn to private comtemplation.
Why doesn't Microsoft release security patches to prevent obvious security problems?
Because doing business that way costs money.
Reacting may cost more than proactive solutions, but without management buy-in on the front, you have no way of convincing the people with the money (management) to pay up for the 'extra' work.
Look at the airline industry in the United States of America. The airplane construction business opperates on the principle that ANo Safety Feature will be implemented until a disaster of cost equal to that of implementation happens. Fortunately, a lot of safety features come standard on modern aircraft - like a trained pilot.
People in the airline industry blame this in razor thin margins. The margins for Microsoft and many other major industry dominators are huge. Yet they follow the same 'dark path.' There is no excuse, but they continue to fail at doing the Right Thing.
Google has been doing the Right Thing for a lot of projects. And, now that they have posted their principles, we can see why.
When you have ideology that tells you to do the Right Thing, there is automatic buy-in by management. (Otherwise it is better to get new managment who will toe the line.)
Police, FBI and other law enforcement agencies seize computer equipment *all the time*.
[snip]
The police who arrive at the office/your house/whatever know what computers look like, and might have one 'expert' with them, but they will never just take copies of your data, they will take whole machines, even whole networks.
Hmmmm...
If a computer has had kiddy porn on it, they typically destroy the computer.
So, the key is to get a bunch of old, empty 486 boxen for a font job and build your cases out of non-computer like stuff. Funiture. Lamps. Microwaves.
Cops come in a size everything 'computer like' while you hide the power cord running into your wi-fi enabled lay-z-boy.
I guess Extreme Case modding can pay off.
I see a lot of people on Slashdot getting frustruated with "supid users," usually because the users ask what the techie hears as "stupid questions."
There are no 'stupid' questions. There are only basic questions and not basic questions. (This is seperate from bad vs. good questions.) The distinction that technical people miss is that the not basic are questions that assume or depend upon the basic questions. At some point, someone has to ask the basic questions.
The level of assumption and dependancy is directly porpotional to the level of technical complexity of the discussion. Some strictly not basic questions (that is, questions built on lots of assumptions and information from other questions) become basic. It is a matter of context.
This is like someone on irc asking for how to match configurations for xdm and X when a particular vendor's video driver install tool didn't handle it properly. This person assumes a lot of knowledge about the system that most people in #linux-basic won't know. On #x-video-drivers he or she might get flamed for not already knowing the answer or not providing sufficient information to deterime if this is a question for a simplier forum or really on the level of discourse for the moment.
When faced with a new person, the question a techie should ask him or herself is: at what level is this person? Is this person 'basic' to me (knows less) or 'not-basic' (knows equal or more)? Where does that person fit on the very wide (I hope) and non-linear scale of basic to expert for the topic at hand? Answering these questions will permit me to shape my language is usefull ways, if I choose to do so.
The article is highlighting an interesting aspect of this dicotomy about computers, cars and anything complex. Since the computer responses back to us, by design, a social model fits better than a tool-use model. However, any tool with complex parts also communicates back to its user. With continual use, the user learns the 'language' of their boat, car, et cetera and migrates from tool-use to social models of behaviour. At several of my workplaces, any office product of size larger than a human head had an informal name given to it by the secretary (even if it frequently starts 'that piece-of-shit'.)
For people, the most basic interactions are tool-use and social. We are a tool using species and tend to use tools so solve many of our problems (excepting the occasional 'real man' verses a stuck jar lid.) These tools do not talk to us. With anything that responds, pets, threats and people, we form complex social interactions. We have complex societies and engage in many-layers conversaion other people. Even if those people do not respond back.
At a basic level, the computer user may migrate from a tool use model to social model to deal with complexity and the communication originated from the computer. At a more expert level, the user can learn the 'language' of a particular machine and then generalize this to all computers. This process can involve complex factors such as location in space and time, mental and physical context, and history. It also may appear, to someone at a level not as basic as the humanizer, that this simplification from tool to person is to hide complexity only.
Of anyone making that mistake I should warn that doctors learn the machine of the human body as well as they can. The best doctors can use the human body as a tool to fight disease in the same way that they can use a stethoscope. This does not mean that that sick human has become a lesser 'tool' to help fix itself. The sick person is still a social person who interacts with people via social paths.
Your computer may not (at this time) care about how you feel, think or wish about it as a person. But knowing how you feel about that computer enables me, the techie, to gauge your level of jargon and level of expertise about the
Stress is what we feel when our current abilities are being challenged.
Pure myth.
I had trouble with stress in high school. I was recommended to take a college class on stress management. The class covered such things as what stress is and how to cope with it. I would say that, based on my current reactions to the world, it was very helpful.
Stress is not challenge. Life is anything that happens to you. The physical response to this is usually what the layman refers to as 'stress' even though this is calling the disease after the symptoms. This response, the stress response or fight-or-flight response, is usually seen in wild animals and plans only when Bad things happen. It's supposed to go away once the threat causing the stress goes away, in other words: closure. We, especially in IT, like to make high stress the Norm.
That tight, uncomfortable feeling is what happens when you are distressed.
[Note: I am not a medical doctor. If you are having serious problems at work/home/school seek help. Especially if it is impacting your health, causing impotence, weight problems, etc.]
You have a minimum level of loading that makes you happy. You also have a maximum. This loading is multi-dimensional. It can be intellectual, emotional, psychological, etc. Getting outside that range, either below (I'm soooo bored with these classes) or above (arg! I can't take these 80 hour weeks) causes your stress response to break down. When you can't respond to the distress anymore, YOU break down. You burn out.
Just calling it 'responsibility' is irresponsible and hides the true, killing nature of stress. When you are distressed for a long time, your body does a lot of bad things. One of the most popular is the massive midriff of fat that the body likes to accumulate when distressed. Another 'coping mechanism' is a heart attack.
Fathers get closure every time their little one walks, talks or moves on to college. You might need to teach your boss how to close a project without leaving dangling requests or unfulfilled garbage, intellectual or emotional, around. Having a boss who can do this is one sign you have a manager that knows how to manage people (vs. a canned MBA with little in the way of social skills who 'allocates resources.')
However, the only way to survive is to learn to relax. This is inducing the relaxation response instead of the fight-or-flight response. (Unless you are really allowed to punch out you boss at work and thus get closure by resolving a 'fight.' A major factor in post-fight male friendships.)
Use breathing techniques. Use visualization. Learn to quit while you're ahead. Learn to label things for what they are: distress that kills not 'responsibility' or some other Ward Cleaver crap. Exercise (ooh! there goes the karma.)
Real life: it's not just for hippies.
Joe doesn't know any local linux geeks that'll come fix something for a 6 pack of Duff
Maybe if he tried offering Gunniess instead, he would get a better reception?
Oh come on, it's not like you haven't sat down with $RELATIVE_FROM_USA to fix $COMPUTER_PROBLEM and been offered something like crudwiser. Ick.
Refined tastes on technology need not imply a favoritism to non-domestic American beverages. But this is an important facet of software that people leave out: culture.
I view that whole problem with software is not about the number of machines installed. The problem is about people, attitudes and perceptions.
I feel that addressing the difference of community will be the single most challenging task facing popular adoption of tools like Linux. The OS installed on a user's computer is a choice of that user. It is up to you to change that user's attitude. They will put up with horrid quality when they don't know of a better alternative.
In my opinion culture clash between 'Joe Sixpack Windows-User' and everybody else is dramatic. Both the Apple and $FREE_OS communities like to view themselves as fringe or special groups. They celebrate their difference from the mainstream. Pure and unadulterated Windows users form a different community than the users of Apple or $FREE_OS products. They belive the tools they have work and work adequately. The common users are people who are sufficiently content with their pre-packaged choice to not look outside the beige box. Due to bad practices by Microsoft, they also form the largest community of individual personal computer users.
It has been said that the I.Q. of a group is the lowest I.Q. of the members of the group divided by the number of members of that group (think communication overhead when talking with slow people.) Fortunately for the 'Aunt Tillies' of the world, individual users can have quite a solid grasp of basic computer skills. Unfortunately, confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance imply a lot of ineria.
While 'Aunt Tillie, CTO/CFO' grasps software quality, their grasp may be of the level of the average car buyer. This is a person who only needs to know about various cars during the rare purchase of a car. In the M$ dominated media of software boxes at your local $MEGA_MART, communicating the benefits of something like Linux or Apple over Microsoft products will require overcoming the established noise level of $ billions in marketing
This is why Microsoft is 50% marketing. This is why commercial Linux distributions are a Good Thing. This is why Apple is still here. The best hackers of the world have been excellent social engineers before anything else. It's time to put that 'social' part to a very good use.
Social engineering of the common man to want quality in software, rather than just settling for third best is possible. After helping run a student organization for Linux users for a few years, I have seen remarkable progress in the quality of various distributions. However, problems with GUI's, driver availability and application compatibility are but small technical hurdles that can be solved with adequate coding.
If you care about software quality then talk to you neighbor. Show off your computers. Maybe even offer them a Guinness while you watch DVDs on your PC with those neighbors. Get the word out.
any cargo which hits the moon at that speed...
Darn. There goes my bucket o' nanites idea.
Lindos? So this is the BEST they can do?: Ask the community or drop the 'W'? Come on, guys. You came up with the software, why not make a legitimate effort to take the name seriously?
I don't know how serious the discussion were for the name change. However, I do know that around the southwest of the U.S.A., Lindos would be pronounced the same as Lindows [1]. Phonetically, at least, the name hasn't changed.
1. I suspect this is due to the frequent [vowel]+'s' -> [vowel]+'es' problem with native English teachers (e.g. hick mom, hick dad, that lady/guy at school with 60 hrs of community college "children's education" classes who's being paid less than the janitor). Even with words that are not being pluralized ('Lindoses' anyone?), the 'es' pronunciation is pronunced.
talking about software like P2P file sharing, or freeware DVD drivers, or software that opens Adobe files for backups, the Slashdot crowd tends to be firmly in the "don't punish the technology for abuse by the users" camp.
And then we have these PowerPoint, Excel, yada yada threads where the Slashdot crowd tends to be firmly in the "don't punish the users, it's the fault of these evil software applications" camp.
Flaws in use in both cases. Bad p2p users. Bad Excel users. If one wanted to debate how slashdot stories claim that the UI in Excel sucks, then you should compare it with stories that praise or vilify the user interface of common p2p applications, not the group of protocols and technologies called 'p2p file sharing'.
<rant>
Here we have an article, like several before, that find issue with the faulty mental models of software user interfaces. People using tools for jobs they were never intened. Like a script kiddie with a p2p aplication pirating iscoroft Server 2003, the value of the tool is decreased by this use. If such increased its value, it would probably be recognised as useful - in other words, a hack - rather than as an drek clogging up the world.
Conversely, several articles on slashdot are very technophilic (okay, you try finding a recent article about P2P on slashdot without the subject 'RIAA sues X' or 'Congresscirtter with music industry soft money denouces denouces P2P'.) The technology itself is not at fault for the miss-use. It is not the existance of spreadsheets ( a fine way of laying out a table) or serial presentation tools (a simple way of backing a presentation with fancy electronic billboards.)
This issue at hand for slashdot is that Powerpoint and Excel encourage 'thinking in bullets and lists' verses meaningful, whole statements. This is not so much an innate result of presentation applications and spreadsheets as the way in which they are taught to be used. Additionally, this is a affect of how the developer's mental models are overlaying the user interface for these domain specific applications.
One wonders if the common 'middle class' man is getting his analytical skills and his critical reading skills from Microsoft. If so, it sounds to frequently (as in this case) like the registration on M$ Basic Reading Skills 2003 has expired.
</rant>
I don't know how much good that would do.
Oh sure...we'll ignore the blocking of indie sites and people who have [not corporate approved and polically correct] content. But, block somebody's income stream and Woa Boy are we gonna kick someone in the head.
Somedays I just love living the U.S. of Americash, where we're all equal under the dollar.
As voters you chose bush and must live with that untill Novemember.
If I remember corectly, voters didn't choose Bush. A judge did.
Still, politics are money are behind everything that happens at NASA. Not everyone gets to be an astronaut, after all. But every politician needs the good PR of a good boondogle^H^H^H^H^Hspace adventure.
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This comment brought to you be the number 6, the letter B and an old woman's dimpled chad in Florida.
I can't believe he is saying that slashdot is unbiased.
/.?
Hey, you knockin' ol'
This is my bazzar of bizzare for my Nerd-News needs.
Woa...
Maybe I do need a morewell-rounded and wholesome news feed.
[Quickly loads unsenet reader...]
[..and eyebrows burnt off by 3 simultanious, realtime, cross-posted flame wars about relgious floor tiles.]
Maybe not...
I think Davies has come up with a good idea, but it needs one thing - property rights. A development regime which provides some form of property rights will become increasingly necessary as space develops
Land property rights are different that plain, ordinary property rights.
Why is it that people think that you can't have capitalism without land property rights? Why do otherwise educated people from the west seem to fixate on this Medieval Idea of land ownership? Is it just because it is old and widespread in the west? Well, so is syphilis, but I don't think that makes syphilis a good thing.
The argument that it's the most efficient way to allocate scarce or valuable resources is bunk. Ever had to drive around an American city founded by a 'land run'? The number of ex-squatter 's houses that force otherwise useful through roads to dead-end is amazing (as well as other interesting geopolitical features.) Several slums exist in these cities where people refused to sell or improve the large tracts of land they got from the government at pennies on the dollar. These people forestalled development often just because they liked owning an (unused) farm.
With the exception of the freeloader and the tragedy of the commons, shared resources have many less problems than the 'stay off my land' model. (Including limiting NIMBY.) Look at the difference in progress in Open Source programming and the Intellectual-Property bound proprietary software.
I argue that space is much like the mental space or algorithms, programs and computer science/math theory. It is not like 'airable land' on the surface of the earth. The size of space is huge - and NONE of it is airable. The use of 'land' is ambiguous: your 'land claim' on a patch of surface on an asteroid is debatable if the whole asteroid is to be chewed up and used for raw materials to build something (like whole towns that are submerged under artificial damns that power serveral other towns and a small city or two and provide a conrolled body of water.) There is an inherent violation of use for natural resources in space, there's a reason NASA sterilizes spacecraft. And high cost of getting there, although it is cheap to move around once there. If you don't like IP patents like one-click or the DNS patent, I think you should object just as strongly to some one saying that they own the moon anymore than anyone else.
I'm no communist, but you can have capitalism without depending on property ownership! If the government must blow money to support and guard your property with troops and lawyers, they'll never be able to pay for important things for other people. Let the government 'own it' and everybody else use it just like any other public utility. It's just abstracting the ownsership problem back a level to force people to deal with affecting their neighboors with their so-called 'private' activities (you try living near people who plant weeds to which you and several other neighbors are dangerously allergic.)
There are several reasons people fail to publish, including:
Not knowing they must (uneducated, beat over head with deadline until educated)
Trying to make a profit off of public money refusing to acknowledge they must - AKA ignorance, refuse to fund until they get dollar/pund signs out of eyes)
Unable to write such papers (unqualified/scared, hire a secretary/technical writer/real researcher)
Unmotivated (see uneducated)
We have a name for people like this, though: failures.
Then, there are a lot of small companies (like Creatures Labs, the original makers of Creatures and Dockingstation) that do this. Many get
started by mooching off of government grants. They turn in their reports regularly. Then the keep the product/software/system or develop a remarkably similar (i.e. changed logos/packaging) product in a very short amount of time.
Not that it's bad, the government sponsoring the development MUST specify the conditions in the funding contract ahead of time. Often the bean counters just ignore the fact they are giving away (publicly paid for) innovation to the private sector. Often, though the majority of the tax funding does comme from company taxes. To top it all off, a lot of the smaller companies just go off and die, leaving the (paid for with tax money) products abandoned in some IP limbo or warehouse.
Personally, I would have loved to get a hold of the software behind the chaos engine (a big part of the AI system in Creatures and Dockingstation
for Windows and Linux.) But, those programs were created by a 1980's-style, proprietary, we-know-better-than-you and pay-us-just-to-be-near-it company. When that company died, the software (until recently bought by a 3rd party) died with it.
Shred all bank statements and whatnot before you throw them out.
You throw these out!?!? Never, in my wildest imagination would I consider taking such critical records and disposing of them. I've got my account histories (at the touch of a lock) form three banks over 15 year - I've even got records fom companies that closed, long before the whole 'get it online' rush. This is why I request paper copies of those records: so I can keep them.
Certainly, someone can break into my house, ignore all the shiny, expensive and portable things and got straight for the heavy, ugly, locked boxes obviously full of useless paper that are being used as a table for dirty laundry and AOL CD's (same really). But I degress.
No, seriously? Windows GUIs suck... compared to what?
Compared to X? The same X where every single programmer just _has_ to use a different layout, different shortcuts, different menu structure, and for bonus points his own widgets?
Not to make you sound like a newbie in the world of computing, but what you are railing against isn't the 'ease of use' of UNIX/GNU/Linux GUIs.
Many, many people fall into this trap. What you are proposing is the adoption of something both unessecary (and in many cases) Evil, Bad and Wrong. This thing is called an SAA CUA. They were practically invented by IBM in the 50s and 60s. These ideas are simple: do something one way and only one way.
From the user's perspective, this is okay. I only have to learn quaduple-double-bucky-shift-Q to print once.
From the UI designer's point of view this is crap. Look at video games. Many custom, learn once and use once indterfaces. Games deal with this by being on the cutting edge of computer-assisted education. They have dollars and reputations staked in 'playability' and 'ease of use' so they do the Right Thing.
Wrong Thing: pick standard, crappy global contants, enforce those on everyone. Aribitrary user interfaces are just as bad as random interfaces.
Right Thing: common core behavior in frameworks that act AS EXPECTED, customized application interfaces to the TASK that the application SOLVES or DOES. Show and Walk users through the non-standard parts with HOW-TOs, demos and trainers.
The Right Way is more work for the lazy, boring person who wouldn't write documentation anyway. The Wrong Way means that you probably will guess correctly on the first try, but the application programmer still didn't do his job.
This is a very important sticking point with the Aunt Mable newbie computer user argument as well. If good ol' Auntie has never used a computer, learning a KDE (GNOME) desktop or the UNIX command line will be as EQUALLY challenging as learning a WIMP like Windows. MACs were/are easily learned because of some UI choices that favor new users without bothering experienced users (of those UI's).
Finally, like in the world of video games, with the diversity of UIs in Linux/GNU/Unix I can select those features/interfaces that work best and use them. With a system like Windows, some people won't buy/sell your software unless is meets the criteria in the SAA CUA.
I appologise for the grammar. I need more sleep and less Trolls.
No, the slashdot crowd is going to have to start playing football and wearing letter jackets everywhere
That's Funny, because I actually lettered in Academics.
My high school's fixation with those letterman jackets and the years of academic awards including everything from taking 2nd place in state for Reading and 2nd place Science in Oklahoma to many years of T.E.A.M.S. [1] was rewarded, in a way. The athletes got whole jackets; all I got was a letter. They took a little football and added a base and flame to make it look like one of those cheesy academic lamps.
I just need to get a jacket on which to put that Tuttle [2] Tigers double-T. Of course, now I just keep it in a drawer below my wall-hanging Bachelors of Science sheepskin.
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1. Test of Engineering Aptitude, Mathematics and Science. You and your nerd buddies sit down and solve real world problems from engineers in various industries. It pays off to be the only one on your team who knows vectors, has basic draftsmanship skills and can check (other people's) grammar.
2. Yes, the same Tuttle, Oklahoma that is home to Ryan White of OU fame.
The only problem: with or without computers,
3. ??????
is still
3. LOTs and LOTs of HARD WORK by Teachers who care.
And honestly, a teacher who doesn't care deeply about teaching his/her subject (not just the subject itself) is what produces a third rate education. The teacher also comes off as a hack/fraud/joke, too.
One would like to just throw money at people every month and expect these (frequently) warm bodies to
produce Shakespeares and Rocket Scientists and Politicians Who Solve World Hunger. It is too bad that real (internal) motivation is needed to get people to do hard work. It's also too bad that the work has to be hard, but that's for the pediologists.
Would you rather have -
Real World (black hat) scenario:
1) Find hole.
2) Write n1fty 'pl0its.
3) Show 'pl0its in IRC, l33t h4>0r lists, local group email for k1cls.
4) Someone releases Blaster Mk II.
5) Watch as companies try to fend off Blaster Mk II.
6) Anonymously report to Boring Rest of World (tm).
7) Watch people scream about *public* disclosure w/o company contact and grace period.
Everyday, black hats are trying their best to do (1) to (5), not too many are interested in (6) or (7).
It's like cold war thinking: you don't know if your enemy has $dollar;weapon. YET.
Grace periods only work if the stringy management at companies make patching and regression testing[1] a priority. Those companies that do, or those that also use OSS (so you can release a patch with your exploit code by yourself) get serious props. The rest will, and probably should, burn in the marketplace as bad models of development.
Every hacked box is a lost sale.
Time is not on your side.
1. "What's that? Additional costs and slipped rlease dates? Eliminate those jobs so my stock will go up," said the PHB.
Ecclesiastes 1:9
<OB_SOUTHPARK:BUTTERS>
Translation into American:
"the Simpson's did it."
</OB_SOUTHPARK:BUTTERS>
a nuclear reactor on an oil rig in international waters
Little Jane Smith: "Oooh! Mommy look a three-eyed fishey!"
Big Momy Smith: "No honey, whales aren't fisheys."
Big Daddy Smith: "Nice glow on that one, tho."
I see two lines running from Linux to Unixware, but none in the other direction.
You think that's bad? follow the line from Apple's OS X all the way back to Unix V7.
If SCO's claims (beyond the assertion that IBM improperly used SCO code against the license) are with any merit, then BSD and any Mach kernel derivative (GNU/Hurd anyone?) like OS X is equally a 'UNIX' and thus SCO property. Many of these 'linked' kernels are still individual, differentiatable products that can be and are owned by seperate entities - espetially those like Minix and Linux that were created 'from the ground up.' Like generic chocolate-chip cookies or knock-off designer jeans, they only LOOK similar but in reality are quite different.
Due to this alone, I say this chart sucks. It is no better than collecting all the types of cars on the market today and comparing them based upon how many wheels they have. To put SCO's claims in this persepctive (so that average joe would unerstand,) we would then have to claim that obviously all cars today are derivates of the first (4 wheeled) motor coaches, thus all car owners owe $669 to who ever now owns that first garage.
SCO is pointless. Even if they claim rights to the kernel, none absolutely none of the GNU tools that make Linux (and Unix) useful (and which comprise some 80-98% of each Linux install) belong to them. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn't really read the GPL. IANAL, but it's pretty explicit about who and when copies can be made and/or how they can be 'charged for.' And strangely enough, it never mentions SCO - no TM, SM or Copy. Kind of odd for something that 'came right out of SCO labs.'
Additionally, the last time I checked, refusing the GPL leaves you with normal government-protected copyright in the U.S.A. This implies that if SCO invalidates the GPL on the kernel and/or the GNU tools, they own a LOT of money to a LOT of software developers that they have been mooching off of for a long time. I don't know about you, but any $669 bill from SCO is getting a $50/hr bill from me for any of my tools anyone has installed on any Linux box. (Hell, charging only at $0.25/hr, I bet ESR could take out SCO's investment capital by himself, let alone Torvalds or Wall.)
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Re: All this becuase one bored grad student wanted to play games on his (AT&T's) PDP-11. Well, at least we got C out of it. Oh...wait a minute...
The idea is that folders, whether they be in the context of an email program or a filesystem, are actively updated searches.
This is a Good Thing IMHO. But, I find that abstract views are almost as good. I'd love spend my time contriving useful query-based views of my mail (e.g. select * from ~/mail where address like family and pr0n = false and spam = no) rather than doing some other things [1] but alas. Fortunately there is the 'in the file system' approach that Hans Reiser and crew are working toward. Files as directories of content/properties, indexes built from custom searches on transactional filesystems. And all of it open to tinkering and improvement. The UNIX 'file-os-ophy' of text files and meta-data would make my ideal open and convoluted mail storage system trivial.
Worried about space? Run it through transparent filesystem level compression. Worried about security? Gpg ain't exactly new. Want more meta data? No problem: the filesystem of the future has plenty of flexibility for your X-Hot-Natalie-Portman-With-Grits field.
[1] One of the few things tying me to M$ right now is the preponderance of custom sorted, property-extended email stuck in M$ proprietary formats. If I have to write another shell script to parse MBX, PST or OST formats...I think I'll scream.
It's a lot easier to just use 96 bits now, than switching to 64 now, and then having to switch to 96 again in a few (or many) years.
Then why not just use numbers from IPv6? I'd make it easier to ping my RFID tagged, samrt dust imbued shorts from bed. In the mornings I could find out whether it's time to put them out to the wash or give em' just a little more 'hang time' on the back of the chair.
It's not like they couldn't start allocating disposable and perminate addresses from opposite ends of the address space.