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User: Alex+Belits

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  1. Re:New relationship because of the elections on US Removes Piracy Sanctions From Ukraine · · Score: -1, Troll

    "Occupation"? So this is how US propaganda works -- if it worked for Baltic states with their neo-Nazi (literally!) governments, they will try to tell Ukrainians that Ukraine was "occupied" by Russia, and see if this bullshit will stick?

    I recommend US politicians to stick with their strong positions in countries-sycophants such as Poland. Oh, and they can ask Ukraine if it will sell them Lviv (Ukrainian Nationalists central and a constant source of embarrassment) -- apparently US needs it more than Ukraine does.

  2. Re:Can't pay for the damage that he caused on The Softening of a Software Man · · Score: 1

    I don't know, it seems to me that working to cure malaria and HIV, or at the least ease some of the suffering they can cause, pretty much eclipses any history of mediocre software and mean business practice he might have.

    Throwing money at diseases does not seem to achieve anything but publicity -- and most of money usually end up in the hands of wrong people, anyway.

    Fifty years down the line, the world is not going to care very much about Mac vs. Windows as combating some of the world's most widespread diseases.

    It's not "Mac vs. Windows", it's establishment of a software development tradition. No one really cares about Rockefeller's Standard Oil vs. all other oil businesses, however his tradition of operating an industry robber-baron style is still alive, and I have no idea for how long it will last, and what can be done to get rid of it. This is the legacy of Rockefeller that will probably last for centuries and create enormous amount of misery in the path of current and future monopolies.

    Microsoft is worse. It doesn't just run a business that way -- it poisons minds of people who write software, it creates culture of using techniques that Microsoft thought of, and not using anything else because Windows is incapable of supporting them. It limits the capabilities of the programmer's mind, shapes and enslaves it. It's in a stark contrast with everything else, where developers of operating systems and languages intentionally limited the set of features that they set in stone, so others will be able to use their tools in the ways that original authors did not think of. This is why unixlike systems and C are in active use now while Visual Basic is nearly a dead language, and Win32 already exceeded its design's flexibility.

    Without Microsoft people can stand on the shoulders of the whole pyramids of giants, however once a programmer started following Microsoft rules, he will be carefully placed into a ferris wheel gondola -- the wheel may look large, but all it can do is going in circles. DOS 3.30 - DOS 4.0 - DOS 6.22 -- down, Windows 3.1, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME -- down, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP -- looks like another down for Vista. DDE/OLE, down, COM, DCOM, ActiveX, down, dotNet... Programmers mindlessly follow Microsoft's regurgitations of their old ideas, and Microsoft's own developers can't get out of that cycle. In thirty years automatically generated, dynamically re-parallelized, Word 2036 will still take half of average computer's memory to write a plain text document, will be still kinda able to incorpotate a table taken from Excel 2006, will still screw up the layout of documents written in Word 2033, will still have security holes that allow remote installation of spyware, and the procedure of writing a script to filter all lines containing the word "aardvark" in it will be still beyond the capabilities of an average user. The amount of un-thinking and stupidity that Microsoft created can easily negate or prevent from happening many achievement that are necessary to develop better energy sources, space travel, industrial robots, and -- of course -- cure diseases. Pitiful amount of money that Gates can throw at the rest of mankind means nothing compared to this disaster.

  3. Can't pay for the damage that he caused on The Softening of a Software Man · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The problem with ill-gotten gains is that it's a negative-sum game -- for whatever Microsoft gained, everyone else lost incomparably more.

    Gates and Microsoft are responsible for poisoning software development, creating a culture of a complete disregard of quality, turning intellectual pursuit into mindless race for features, destruction of countless good projects, technologies and ideas, turning software development industry into a mix of a Microsoft fan club and a slaughterhouse, and nearly complete destruction of all research that is in any way related to computer science. This will take decades to reverse -- likely our grandkids will still suffer from consequences of this.

    If Microsoft declared Windows to be free, and refunded all its customers, this damage would be still done -- and it's not like Gates has that much money on hand. So there is absolutely nothing Gates can do to go into the history as something other than a bloodthirsty monopolist, and a man who caused a massive noosphere pollution -- what is worse than John D. Rockefeller who is also the first but at least not the second.

    No one but some panderers to the rich consider Rockefeller to be anything but an evil man who caused massive amount of misery, and the same will apply to Gates. How much of their shitty money will be paid for whatever causes, is irrelevant because the damage done is beyond anyone's capabilities to repair it, even if some of that money went into such repair.

  4. Re:Wardriving Police Cars on Unsecured Wi-Fi to Become Illegal? · · Score: 1

    ...in licensed frequency bands.

  5. Re:About Gran on Why Do People Switch To Linux? · · Score: 1

    That's cause "Gran" isn't tech savy enough to know what anti-spyware is or understand the concept of virus pattern updates. "I can clean a toilet, but I can't clean a hard drive".

    You mean, "Get pwn3d, and pray that the damage is reversible"?

  6. Re:It's the applications that make the difference on Why Do People Switch To Linux? · · Score: 1

    I use VariCAD (proprietary, license costs $500) for 3D work and QCad (GPD'ed) for 2D.

  7. Donkey Kong Clone on Interview with Tony 'Say No to Windows' Bove · · Score: 1

    With a bald, sweaty fat man throwing chairs at employees.

  8. Re:Buffer overflow on Unpatched Firefox Flaw May Expose Users · · Score: 1

    This is not true. To be exploitable the buffer overflow should allow the attacker to either supply both address and code, or allow to supply the address of pre-existing code that can be used to complete the attack.

    MANY buffer overflows depend on a particular prefix, and allow arbitrary or nearly-arbitrary code to be appended to it, and those buffer overflow are exploitable if the length of the prefix allows to place the arbitrary address on stack. However in many other cases the whole buffer-overflowing data has to, or is translated to a string with some requirements that prevent placing any exploit-capable value for address or code, and those are DoS-only buffer overflows.

  9. "Active response" is dangerous on Intrusion Prevention and Active Response · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The problem with all those things is that they are only good for making HORRIBLY INSECURE BUT RELIABLE system into KINDA INSECURE AND NOT RELIABLE AT ALL.

    Think of it. Why should a system change its behavior when an attack is detected? Because the normal behavior is not secure enough? But then why should it change back when attack ends? Because the "secure" behavior can possibly include blocking something that should be available. There is no other possibility -- if there was, system would just run in a "secure" mode all the time, and there would be no need to sell a complex product to turn it on and off.

    But then whoever can trigger "secure" mode for any particular set of addresses (what usually can be done blindly), can do it deliberately and cause a massive DoS. But what if "IPS" is smart enough to detect a "blind" attack? Then it's better! The only way to distinguish between "blind" attack from a spoofed address and a real attack is by keeping track of all connections and packet history. Create a horribly confusing sequence of packets, and you have anti-IPS equivalent of SYN flood. And then when "IPS" box is out of its RAM, start a real attack. Because you know that IPS was built for a reason -- someone have left his system insecure.

  10. Re:monkeyboy needs thorazine on Balmer Vows to Kill Google · · Score: 1

    Japanese companies may talk a lot about fighting a war against their competitors, but when I open a Sony laptop I often find a Toshiba LCD panel. Both companies produce laptops, yet Sony can use Toshiba products wherever it makes sense, and neither of them seem to be "crushed" so far.

  11. Quite useful for some purposes on Sharp Zaurus SL-5500 Today? · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I use it as a GPS and a music player in my car, and it works as a SIP phone (though the choice of codecs is limited by a slow CPU, and apparently some people have problems with making it work).

    And, of course, it's a regular PDA with addressbook/calendar/todo/notes, web browser (konqueror), ssh, etc.

  12. Re:Places in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine on Google Adds Satellite Imagery for the World · · Score: 1

    Correction: Red Square.

  13. Places in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine on Google Adds Satellite Imagery for the World · · Score: 1
  14. Usually you don't need it on Building Intelligent, Rule-Based Applications? · · Score: 1

    Very rarely the answer is Prolog.

    For the rest of cases, building your own rule processing engine that serves a particular purpose and interacts with the rest of the system, is such an easy task, it is not worth generalizing.

    For $deity sake, netfilter has some (simple) rule-based processing, and it's merely a small piece of code inside the Linux kernel.

  15. DO NOT REACT TO PORTSCANS. on How Do You Handle Portscanning Attacks? · · Score: 1

    Really.

  16. Re:Bundle MPC, you dumbasses. on PC Makers See Little Reason to Deploy XP N · · Score: 1

    The whole point of Windows with unbundled WMP was to prevent that, so vendors can easily put something else, or leave it up to user, and the system would not try to revert to WMP.

  17. Bundle MPC, you dumbasses. on PC Makers See Little Reason to Deploy XP N · · Score: 1

    There is absolutely nothing that prevents PC vendors to bundle superior players and configure them as default, thus increasing the value for consumers.

  18. Re:Because it would cost them money on Why Don't Companies Release Specs? · · Score: 1

    It's not how many PEOPLE, it's how much is the total cost of equipment that those people buy, or make buying decisions for companies. There are hundreds of millions of people who will buy 1-2 bottom-specs PCs over their lifetimes but won't set a foot in a computer store for anything else, and there are tens of thousands of companies that buy hundreds of rather expensive computers yearly.

  19. Re:Because it would cost them money on Why Don't Companies Release Specs? · · Score: 1

    This would be true if they were selling hardware exclusively office and gaming PCs, the areas, where Windows is really most of the market.

    Usually this is not the case -- the same hardware goes into servers, semi-embedded, handhelds, etc., where Windows is nowhere close to dominance.

  20. Re:Because it would cost them money on Why Don't Companies Release Specs? · · Score: 1

    The only problem is, what sane company will want to compete with a bottom of the barrel product that Smartlink modem is?

  21. Re:Time is money, period on Why Don't Companies Release Specs? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you don't use your own chips, you don't write drivers for them, either.

  22. "Siamese twins" setup on Triple Headed Desktop Display for Fast 3D Apps? · · Score: 1

    I don't have a single desktop in this configuration, as in Xinerama-style single X screen, however I had at some point single kayboard and mouse, and the same computer running applications displayed on three physical screens, mapped to two or three X screens. This is how it looked (laptop's keyboard and trackpad work but aren't used), and this is how it was done. Two monitors are handled by a dual-monitor nvidia card, and can be configured either as two or a single screen spanning both.

    This configuration doesn't allow windows to span between "local" and "remote" screens, however for many purposes this is useful -- in a different setup I often run 3D CAD on one screen, and 2D CAD an the other one, and obviously there is little point in mixing those two. Separate virtual desktops on all monitors also help -- I usually have 4x3 viewports in Sawfish, so with three monitors that would be 36 semi-independent viewports.

  23. Re:First post.... on Russian Firm Pays to Infect PCs with Adware · · Score: 3, Insightful

    1. US government passes a legislation that destroys a profitable business model.

    2. Saudi Arabia develops a housing program that involves building a large number of igloos.

    I would rather bet on the second one.

  24. Re:When will people realize the truth about Carly? on HP Introduces Final Processor in PA-RISC Family · · Score: 1

    Then what was the purpose of Rick Belluzzo? I thought, he was the greatesy companies assassin now, or is he the same thing for Microsoft?

  25. Way to go, team "miss the point by a mile" on Windows to Have Better CLI · · Score: 2, Insightful

    This "shell" has command line input (that is, continuous text that is parsed to determine its meaning and run other executables), yet the communication over "pipes" is in "objects" that have to drag around their methods, so the whole flexibility, simplicity, parsing and isolation of data source from receiver (that, if someone forgot, provides security) go right out of the window. Oh, and it allows to access various system data hierarchies -- too bad, Windows has so many of them.

    The whole Unix design is based on the idea of unified file descriptor and a single filesystem tree. Windows still lacks those, and this shell is not even trying to emulate them (like what cygwin does).