It's probably a good thing they set a cap on the bandwidth. I think one of the reasons that @home went bankrupt is because they didn't have such restrictions. Bandwith costs money...
And what about windows! Think if all the people who use windows for free had to start paying, microsoft might make a little money, but they'd lose huge market share.
Ummm...last time I checked, nearly everyone who buys a new computer is also paying a "tax" to Microsoft. Windows isn't free. Sure, in some contries where piracy is widespread they don't pay for it, but almost everywhere else you don't have a choice--unless you are one of the few that buys the parts and assembles the computer yourself or you buy a Mac.
If you don't happen to have $2500 lying around how are you supposed to learn lightwave. If there was no piracy then the industry would be either spending a lot on training or would be using cheaper software that everybody knows.
Which is a good argument against piracy. If you use software that you are licenced to use (either by paying or freeware), then you reduce the market for those companies that charge such huge fees. The same goes for shitware. If it isn't good enough to buy, then why run a pirated version??? If you look for good products and support them, then the companies that produce those types of programs will be pressured into improving their products.
He sounds like my kind of programmer. Two thumbs up!
Skipstone (was Re:a little correction)
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Galeon 1.0 Released
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I fell for that, but looking at their site's FAQ pointed me to SkipStone. (I'm not really a fan of GNOME and I didn't want to install the endless GNOME dependencies.)
Skipstone is great! I just installed it, and I'm using it to make this post. One of my problems with Mozilla is that it takes so long to load or for dialog boxes to pop up. No such problems with Skipstone...it only takes a few seconds to start and dialogs come up instantly.
It doesn't appear to have as many settings as Mozilla (although I don't think I'll need the extra ones), and it doesn't appear to have a menu option to bring a file dialog up, so I have to type in the full pathname to look at files, but this appears to be a very nice browser suited for my resource conservative tastes.
Actually, in the US, that may not be too far from reality. I do remember reading about an anti-terrorist law in the works that would categorize any sort of computer attack as "terrorism." I don't think it would be too far of a streach to classify spamming as a "distributed denial of service" attack under this law...
Don't forget about those important emails that are mistaked for spam, deleted, and never recovered. For example, I'm sure quite a few employees get emails from potential customers and accidently delete them. How many disappear do to spam filters? What about lost productivity due to server crashes? Spam contributes to that last one too doesn't it?
How much money do you think this causes your company to lose (on average)? A hundred dollars per day? A thousand? Ten thousand? I'm not trying to argue, just trying help you get a more accurate estimate.
And exactly how would they keep track of you saying "no, thanks"???? If saying "no" disallows them from using cookies, how could they possibly keep track of the people who say no??? I would say a cookie, but that leads to a recursive situation.
That sort of feature would be easy to create in a browser, but not a website. In fact, I know of at least one browser that already handles cookies in this way--Lynx. Everytime there is a cookie, it asks me whether to accept it with: "yes,no,always,never", and choosing "never" bans cookies from that site.
What if some guy's nickname was "slashdot" all his life? So that means he isn't allowed to have a domain name that reflects a nickname he's had his entire life (long before this site was even conceived of) because someone might confuse it with this site?
An ip address is just like a telephone number, and the domain name is similar to the lettered version of the telephone number. This situation is just like if some company has 1(800) 555-ACME as their number, and they think they have to get 555-ACME on every interchange--like (801)555-ACME, (201)555-ACME, &etc--because someone might accidently dial the wrong number. What about private individuals or companies that happen to have the number 555-2263 (spelling a c m e) should they be forced to give up their number? And what will happen when these stupid companies take all the numbers in every interchange? Will the telephone companies then have to expand the number base? Ahh, but then you will have the exact same problem. 1(801)4555-ACME will turn up and Acme just has to have that number right? It's the same way with domain names--if all companies claim the exclusive rights to specific letter sequences, then all possible combinations of domain names will be taken, and no one else will be allowed to have one.
DNS is just a system to make it easier to enter the address of a particular computer on the internet. So that instead of having to remember and type 127.245.76.138, you can just type www.acme.com to get their website. There is nothing special about it. It is not real estate, just a system to make network addresses easier to handle, and registering a name under every TLD is just namespace pollution, and unnessesarily increases load on DNS servers. (They have to retrieve and keep track of every name their users will look up--even multiple entries for the same place.)
Maybe it should be banned for an individual/organization to have more than one domain name. Then it'll stop the spamming of the DNS system with way to many silly domain names. I mean it's just absurd to have hundreds of names for just one company... Hollywood is one of the worst. They'll make a domain name for every movie. They should be doing moviecompany.com/themoviename instead of themoviename.com. That is one reason why some ISPs DNS systems are so slow. All those extra names are a drain on the server's resources. Not to mention it results in bigger domain names because all the small ones are taken, eventually it may get to the point of being eaiser just to type the IP address.
Ugh. Anyone who already owns
Acme.com and is serious about protecting Acme as a trade name is going to now have to buy Acme.us and Acme.com.us, just like they have to buy Acme.info, Acme.biz...
You can't be serious! That's like saying if the company's name is Jones, they have to buy every address with the word "jones" in it. What about people who have the last name "Jones" or have some other legitimate reason for wanting a site named "Jones" or "Acme"??? (Or even ihateacme.com--what, are people who have a reason to hate a company not allowed to speak?)
The only way companies need to protect their names on the internet is if someone is attempting to misrepresent themselves as being the company or agents of the company. That is the reason tradmarks were created. If a company's site is acme.com, and someone else owns acme.us or acme.org, the Acme company still doesn't have a real reason to be threated by those websites unless they claim to be part of the Acme company!
Re:How to write tiny applications
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Tiny Apps
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· Score: 1
Assembly does have it's place, but you don't have to resort to it to write small Linux applications.
In Linux, you should try the system functions listed in <asm/unistd.h>, use void _start() instead of int main(int argc, char **argv), and add the linker flags '-nostdlib -nostartfiles'. gcc seems to have some include file as <asm/posix_types.h>, so you'll have to add a -I/usr/include flag to the compiler's options.
Doing this will produce a C program that is staticly linked, and small, and it should compile for any Linux system regardless of the processor type it is using. This was a really quick run down of how to do it, but it is possible.
I'm sure there is an equivalent for FreeBSD, but I haven't studied FreeBSD at all, so I can't tell you what it is...
By the way, assembly is probably also avoided because it is more time consuming and cumbersome than C... Why worry about mov dx,[variable_a] add dx,[variable_b] mov [variable_a],dx
According to my web design book, there are already rating tags. <meta name="rating" content="mature"> would mark your site as "adult" or "porn" according to the book. It's in "Web Design in a nutshell" by Jennifer Niederst (an O'Reilly book) p 101, and was published in 1999, so these tags have been around for at least two years. I imagine if you dig through the WWW Consortium's site, you'll probably find it...
Didn't he say he lost the 3 hours on repeating crashes? Sometimes a problem occurs that doesn't get fixed with a reboot, and you have to fix it before you can get any work done...in fact Microsoft mandates that everyone using their software has to lose at least 3 hours/day to fixing stupid problems.;-)
The lower price reflects how much money someone is willing to pay for marketing data.
No it's not. A few months before they started the card program at my local store, the prices gradually were increased over time to about 30% higher. I didn't understand why. Guess what happened next? They come out with the card, and anyone using it got a "discount" on the item so that it cost about the same price as before the price increase, and everyone without a card had to pay the inflated prices.
Reptile certainly sounds like usenet, with digital signatures and xml. Everyone posting in html (or xml) on usenet gets flamed...wonder how that will work on this system.
The government's report seemed to hit on the fact that many child filtering products didn't filter out the P2P stuff, so maybe they'll just lean on those companies to make their programs either filter this type of protocol, or completely disable it.
Hopefully some idiot won't change it to "we have to make all ISPs filter out all non-web based traffic" like you said. The US government is dumb enough to do it though.
And what is up with all the government web sites using.pdf format? It's the web they should be using html.
I wonder if those vehicles would have to conform to the existing air traffic regulations as far as ID, communication, flight patters, or if new ones would be created.
I imagine they would lighten the rules a bit, and add new ones--if enough people bought these things. Imagine a specified roadway for flying personal vehicles such as in "Back to the Future II".
Would there be police patrols on the same vehicles to enforce them?
Naw, they wouldn't need to use these cars, they could just equip all patrol cars with surface to air missiles for the more unruly drivers;)
Just like we were all promised! Flying cars, like in that IBM commercial.
This sounds kind of like a virus I heard about around 10 years ago.
The virus would encrypt all the files on infected machines, and the only way to get their data back was to pay the virus writers.
It didn't work out very well for the virus writers--a bunch of programmers got together and figured out how to decrypt the files and gave the key/code away so that anyone infected could get their data back.
Could you imagine if this were an email virus/worm launched today (especially with the better encryption methods)?
Now before any of you go yelling "we can't allow this to happen! Make encryption illegal!"
You should realize that if someone is going to do something like make a virus and send it out, they probably won't care about breaking any laws. This attitude reminds me of companies requiring signing a paper that said: (paraphrasing) "I certify under penalties of perjury that this package doesn't contain a bomb" To that the shipping manager said: "Oh yeah, if I'm sending a bomb, I'll really be afraid of adding perjury to the list of charges"
And why do people refuse to take time to learn, anyway? You have to learn how to drive a car, but people refuse to learn how to use their computers. Seriously, take 30 minutes and figure out the basics, and the rest will come in time.
They act this way because of years of marketing from Microsoft and Apple saying "Any idiot who doesn't even know how to read should be able to sit in front of a computer and know how to use it right away." It is completely absurd, but it's the way things are now.
Then these systems designed that way are really non-intuitive and cumbersome in the long run because so many features are taken away and so many menus are hidden (as to not confuse new users or allow them to do anything harmful). Yes, software should be made as easy as possible for new users, however the users that already know the system should be considered as well.
It's an old version right? Who knows how long this vulnerability has existed, so Personal Web Server probably is vulnerable.
I guess this worm explains why my workstation received several hits on port 80 today, but I've also got several on port 27374. Anyone know what this might be? I usually don't get this much traffic except for my ISP portscanning me. Is there some other worm/trojan horse that operates on 27374 or could this have something to do with the IIS worm?
If you ever study law you will study the tort issues of Strict Liability. Strict Liability laws mandate that companies that deal in extremely dangerous businesses (Extremely dangerous businesses could be considered flying people through the air, nuclear industries, fireworks - see below for my rebuttal on medical issues) are fully liable for any injury without exception or fault.
I wasn't talking about how things are, but how they should be. Strict liablilty just seems like another way of saying: "We don't want to put any real effort to fix any problems, so we'll lay the blame in the easiest place." Anything could be considered extremely dangerous--driving over 50 mph, pumping gasoline, or even soda pop. Does that mean the manufacturer should be responsible everytime there is a 100 car pile-up on the freeway, someone throws a burning cigarette down at a gas pump, or a stupid old lady shakes up a bottle of 7-UP that explodes?
From what I understand (at least in the US were I'm from), all of the industries you mentioned have governing agencies that regulate what companies are allowed to do. They have the power to shut down a company or even put people in jail that aren't following proper safety procedures. So if the corresponding agency is doing it's job, it's industry should be reasonably safe.
By being a software company that takes on the job of writing systems for industries with such Strict Liabilty issues, you should be CLEAR that your software will be held to the same regard. Any company that engages in a Strcit Liability industry is aware of the expected 100% success rate and the risk (and cost) of even being %.0001 wrong must be considered the risk and cost of doing business.
What about software that wasn't written for use in such industries? Does this mean everyone writing software should be concerned about strict liabilty hanging over their heads? Both the BSD and GNU licenses have clauses that say they have no warranties, however from what I've heard it sounds as though some company can just install the software and the original author is responsible reguardless of any warranties because of strict liability! Is it the programmer's/software company's responsiblity to make sure their software isn't installed in a nuclear plant, hostpital, or airline? That kind of situation cannot be anticipated by an open source developer. Because the software is freely distributed, they don't have much control where it goes or how it is used. The same can be said of many software companies too. It is quite unreasonable that they be expected to control every aspect of how their software is used--and I'm not just referring to use in said industries-- if they become liable for this, they will become liable for every possible misuse of their software. "Someone used Mr. X's version of ftp to illegally copy music? Let's send Mr. X to jail!"
it raises rates - but wait until the surgeon srews up on a loved one and your tune will change
Just wait until you or your loved contracts an easy to cure, but serious illness, and you cannot afford even basic treatment, I think your tune would change.
Let's face the truth here, in a capitalist society - companies will reduce the cost of operating as much as possible at all times.
It may work that way in communist countries pretending to be free market (like the United States), but in real capitalist societies, if companies behave this way (especially those that disregard the public safety), large groups of people form to raise(9) on such places. Most people don't tolerate that kind of crap--unless they've been beaten down by some evil power, and no amount of laws can protect them if that is the case.
A failure rate of only %.001 (that is one thousandth of a percent) would mean 56 airplanes would crash EVERY YEAR!!! Companies that make software for issues that are so dangerous that they have millions of lives at stake should be finacialy and criminally liable for any mistakes they make that put anyone in danger..
What you are talking about is not reasonable. No matter how careful a programmer is, no matter how much testing the code goes through, no matter how many experts scan through the code, there is always the possiblity of a bug or design flaw. It cannot be expected that code written in the real world for use on real devices will be 100% fault tolerant. The same goes for anything else.
Why do you think there are so many problems with getting good, decently priced healthcare in the US? It is exactly because the doctors have to pay settlements in the millions if they make a very small mistake or a dying patient doesn't survive a very risky surgery (which the patient and family were informed of the risks). What is the result of this? Doctors/hospitals have to pay massive malpractice insurance premiums. HMOs were created, which makes getting serously ill worse, because your provider will hide possible treatments, refuse to pay for critical operations, use accountants to make decisions that only doctors should. And so on, and so on...
That is just for finacial liability. How would it be if an industry were criminally liable for not being 100.00000% perfect and 100.00000% successful at everything? I imagine it would end up like this: most of the people who are knowledgeable would run away screaming from their job, realizing they could not possibly live up to the standard and would end up in jail. Then you would only be left with clueless idiots, arrogant bastards, and con-artists. After a short time, the idiots and bastards would be in jail because they made some sort of mistake, and the con-artists would be in the Bahamas or somewhere with the millions of dollars they stole from desperate organizations trying to fill in the essential gaps in labor caused by this law. What does that leave us with? Nothing! Because we are talking about critcal industries, what would happen? I don't want to find out.
People or organizations should be punished if they hide problems or don't use resonable care, however saying that someone must be punished for everything that goes wrong is complete idiocy and shows total disregard for reality.
Could you give us some ideas of where to buy the parts for the cooling system? Also what you normally use? What are waterblocks? Some sort of plumbing equipment? My computer seems to run hot even with three fans...maybe a water colling system is what I need. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Here I thought I was updated with 7.1. Oh well, I don't see a reason to upgrade. I just installed xfree86 4.1 last week. Everything seems to work fine, so why upgrade?
Are you nuts ? You expect people to type tar -zxvf blabla_11.12.232__bin_i486.tar.gz ???
It can be automated...what I meant was, if they didn't have the packaging program, the format should be designed so they can get by without it.
In fact, what I had in mind was to put specific files in the tarball that informed the package manager program of all the dependancies (and where to find them). The install script would handle moving binaries to the correct locations and could be as smart or dumb as the package mantainer wants and it wouldn't just dump everything in the specified directory--like most package manager programs do.
It would be simple to design, simple to create packages, simple to install packages, and simple to create a decent package manager program (even if it's a shell script).
This would make it possible for anyone to install a package--unlike RPMs, where you have to install the package program. Since your system wasn't installed using RPMs, you don't have a proper database and you end up using --nodeps all the time or searching the net trying to find a way to populate the database (which I gave up on).
Not to mention I ran into a few RPMs that won't install because the package manager says only package with major numbers <= 3 are supported by this version of RPM. I have the most current version for my distro (Slackware 7.1). Do I have to search the net to find the most recent version of rpm everytime I want to install a program without having to compile it?
With source packages, one usually just has to untar, cd to directory, and type./configure; make; make install. Why can't it be that way for binary packages as well? Sure, it's fine for individual distros to have their own formats, but a package format that is used by those releasing binaries for a specific program should use something that is more compatible with as many distros as possible. Not just one.
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably a good thing they set a cap on the bandwidth. I think one of the reasons that @home went bankrupt is because they didn't have such restrictions. Bandwith costs money...
Ummm...last time I checked, nearly everyone who buys a new computer is also paying a "tax" to Microsoft. Windows isn't free. Sure, in some contries where piracy is widespread they don't pay for it, but almost everywhere else you don't have a choice--unless you are one of the few that buys the parts and assembles the computer yourself or you buy a Mac.
Which is a good argument against piracy. If you use software that you are licenced to use (either by paying or freeware), then you reduce the market for those companies that charge such huge fees. The same goes for shitware. If it isn't good enough to buy, then why run a pirated version??? If you look for good products and support them, then the companies that produce those types of programs will be pressured into improving their products.
He sounds like my kind of programmer. Two thumbs up!
I fell for that, but looking at their site's FAQ pointed me to SkipStone. (I'm not really a fan of GNOME and I didn't want to install the endless GNOME dependencies.)
Skipstone is great! I just installed it, and I'm using it to make this post. One of my problems with Mozilla is that it takes so long to load or for dialog boxes to pop up. No such problems with Skipstone...it only takes a few seconds to start and dialogs come up instantly.
It doesn't appear to have as many settings as Mozilla (although I don't think I'll need the extra ones), and it doesn't appear to have a menu option to bring a file dialog up, so I have to type in the full pathname to look at files, but this appears to be a very nice browser suited for my resource conservative tastes.
Actually, in the US, that may not be too far from reality. I do remember reading about an anti-terrorist law in the works that would categorize any sort of computer attack as "terrorism." I don't think it would be too far of a streach to classify spamming as a "distributed denial of service" attack under this law...
Don't forget about those important emails that are mistaked for spam, deleted, and never recovered. For example, I'm sure quite a few employees get emails from potential customers and accidently delete them. How many disappear do to spam filters? What about lost productivity due to server crashes? Spam contributes to that last one too doesn't it?
How much money do you think this causes your company to lose (on average)? A hundred dollars per day? A thousand? Ten thousand? I'm not trying to argue, just trying help you get a more accurate estimate.
And exactly how would they keep track of you saying "no, thanks"???? If saying "no" disallows them from using cookies, how could they possibly keep track of the people who say no??? I would say a cookie, but that leads to a recursive situation.
That sort of feature would be easy to create in a browser, but not a website. In fact, I know of at least one browser that already handles cookies in this way--Lynx. Everytime there is a cookie, it asks me whether to accept it with: "yes,no,always,never", and choosing "never" bans cookies from that site.
What if some guy's nickname was "slashdot" all his life? So that means he isn't allowed to have a domain name that reflects a nickname he's had his entire life (long before this site was even conceived of) because someone might confuse it with this site?
An ip address is just like a telephone number, and the domain name is similar to the lettered version of the telephone number. This situation is just like if some company has 1(800) 555-ACME as their number, and they think they have to get 555-ACME on every interchange--like (801)555-ACME, (201)555-ACME, &etc--because someone might accidently dial the wrong number. What about private individuals or companies that happen to have the number 555-2263 (spelling a c m e) should they be forced to give up their number? And what will happen when these stupid companies take all the numbers in every interchange? Will the telephone companies then have to expand the number base? Ahh, but then you will have the exact same problem. 1(801)4555-ACME will turn up and Acme just has to have that number right? It's the same way with domain names--if all companies claim the exclusive rights to specific letter sequences, then all possible combinations of domain names will be taken, and no one else will be allowed to have one.
DNS is just a system to make it easier to enter the address of a particular computer on the internet. So that instead of having to remember and type 127.245.76.138, you can just type www.acme.com to get their website. There is nothing special about it. It is not real estate, just a system to make network addresses easier to handle, and registering a name under every TLD is just namespace pollution, and unnessesarily increases load on DNS servers. (They have to retrieve and keep track of every name their users will look up--even multiple entries for the same place.)
Maybe it should be banned for an individual/organization to have more than one domain name. Then it'll stop the spamming of the DNS system with way to many silly domain names. I mean it's just absurd to have hundreds of names for just one company... Hollywood is one of the worst. They'll make a domain name for every movie. They should be doing moviecompany.com/themoviename instead of themoviename.com. That is one reason why some ISPs DNS systems are so slow. All those extra names are a drain on the server's resources. Not to mention it results in bigger domain names because all the small ones are taken, eventually it may get to the point of being eaiser just to type the IP address.
You can't be serious! That's like saying if the company's name is Jones, they have to buy every address with the word "jones" in it. What about people who have the last name "Jones" or have some other legitimate reason for wanting a site named "Jones" or "Acme"??? (Or even ihateacme.com--what, are people who have a reason to hate a company not allowed to speak?)
The only way companies need to protect their names on the internet is if someone is attempting to misrepresent themselves as being the company or agents of the company. That is the reason tradmarks were created. If a company's site is acme.com, and someone else owns acme.us or acme.org, the Acme company still doesn't have a real reason to be threated by those websites unless they claim to be part of the Acme company!
Assembly does have it's place, but you don't have to resort to it to write small Linux applications.
In Linux, you should try the system functions listed in <asm/unistd.h>, use void _start() instead of int main(int argc, char **argv), and add the linker flags '-nostdlib -nostartfiles'. gcc seems to have some include file as <asm/posix_types.h>, so you'll have to add a -I/usr/include flag to the compiler's options.
Doing this will produce a C program that is staticly linked, and small, and it should compile for any Linux system regardless of the processor type it is using. This was a really quick run down of how to do it, but it is possible.
I'm sure there is an equivalent for FreeBSD, but I haven't studied FreeBSD at all, so I can't tell you what it is...
By the way, assembly is probably also avoided because it is more time consuming and cumbersome than C... Why worry about
mov dx,[variable_a]
add dx,[variable_b]
mov [variable_a],dx
When
variable_a+=variable_b;
does just fine?
According to my web design book, there are already rating tags. <meta name="rating" content="mature"> would mark your site as "adult" or "porn" according to the book. It's in "Web Design in a nutshell" by Jennifer Niederst (an O'Reilly book) p 101, and was published in 1999, so these tags have been around for at least two years. I imagine if you dig through the WWW Consortium's site, you'll probably find it...
Didn't he say he lost the 3 hours on repeating crashes? Sometimes a problem occurs that doesn't get fixed with a reboot, and you have to fix it before you can get any work done...in fact Microsoft mandates that everyone using their software has to lose at least 3 hours/day to fixing stupid problems. ;-)
No it's not. A few months before they started the card program at my local store, the prices gradually were increased over time to about 30% higher. I didn't understand why. Guess what happened next? They come out with the card, and anyone using it got a "discount" on the item so that it cost about the same price as before the price increase, and everyone without a card had to pay the inflated prices.
Reptile certainly sounds like usenet, with digital signatures and xml. Everyone posting in html (or xml) on usenet gets flamed...wonder how that will work on this system.
Annoucing Reptile: the new flamewar generator!
The government's report seemed to hit on the fact that many child filtering products didn't filter out the P2P stuff, so maybe they'll just lean on those companies to make their programs either filter this type of protocol, or completely disable it.
Hopefully some idiot won't change it to "we have to make all ISPs filter out all non-web based traffic" like you said. The US government is dumb enough to do it though.
And what is up with all the government web sites using .pdf format? It's the web they should be using html.
I imagine they would lighten the rules a bit, and add new ones--if enough people bought these things. Imagine a specified roadway for flying personal vehicles such as in "Back to the Future II".
Naw, they wouldn't need to use these cars, they could just equip all patrol cars with surface to air missiles for the more unruly drivers ;)
Just like we were all promised! Flying cars, like in that IBM commercial.
This sounds kind of like a virus I heard about around 10 years ago.
The virus would encrypt all the files on infected machines, and the only way to get their data back was to pay the virus writers. It didn't work out very well for the virus writers--a bunch of programmers got together and figured out how to decrypt the files and gave the key/code away so that anyone infected could get their data back.
Could you imagine if this were an email virus/worm launched today (especially with the better encryption methods)?
Now before any of you go yelling "we can't allow this to happen! Make encryption illegal!" You should realize that if someone is going to do something like make a virus and send it out, they probably won't care about breaking any laws. This attitude reminds me of companies requiring signing a paper that said: (paraphrasing) "I certify under penalties of perjury that this package doesn't contain a bomb" To that the shipping manager said: "Oh yeah, if I'm sending a bomb, I'll really be afraid of adding perjury to the list of charges"
They act this way because of years of marketing from Microsoft and Apple saying "Any idiot who doesn't even know how to read should be able to sit in front of a computer and know how to use it right away." It is completely absurd, but it's the way things are now.
Then these systems designed that way are really non-intuitive and cumbersome in the long run because so many features are taken away and so many menus are hidden (as to not confuse new users or allow them to do anything harmful). Yes, software should be made as easy as possible for new users, however the users that already know the system should be considered as well.
It's an old version right? Who knows how long this vulnerability has existed, so Personal Web Server probably is vulnerable.
I guess this worm explains why my workstation received several hits on port 80 today, but I've also got several on port 27374. Anyone know what this might be? I usually don't get this much traffic except for my ISP portscanning me. Is there some other worm/trojan horse that operates on 27374 or could this have something to do with the IIS worm?
I wasn't talking about how things are, but how they should be. Strict liablilty just seems like another way of saying: "We don't want to put any real effort to fix any problems, so we'll lay the blame in the easiest place." Anything could be considered extremely dangerous--driving over 50 mph, pumping gasoline, or even soda pop. Does that mean the manufacturer should be responsible everytime there is a 100 car pile-up on the freeway, someone throws a burning cigarette down at a gas pump, or a stupid old lady shakes up a bottle of 7-UP that explodes?
From what I understand (at least in the US were I'm from), all of the industries you mentioned have governing agencies that regulate what companies are allowed to do. They have the power to shut down a company or even put people in jail that aren't following proper safety procedures. So if the corresponding agency is doing it's job, it's industry should be reasonably safe.
What about software that wasn't written for use in such industries? Does this mean everyone writing software should be concerned about strict liabilty hanging over their heads? Both the BSD and GNU licenses have clauses that say they have no warranties, however from what I've heard it sounds as though some company can just install the software and the original author is responsible reguardless of any warranties because of strict liability! Is it the programmer's/software company's responsiblity to make sure their software isn't installed in a nuclear plant, hostpital, or airline? That kind of situation cannot be anticipated by an open source developer. Because the software is freely distributed, they don't have much control where it goes or how it is used. The same can be said of many software companies too. It is quite unreasonable that they be expected to control every aspect of how their software is used--and I'm not just referring to use in said industries-- if they become liable for this, they will become liable for every possible misuse of their software. "Someone used Mr. X's version of ftp to illegally copy music? Let's send Mr. X to jail!"
Just wait until you or your loved contracts an easy to cure, but serious illness, and you cannot afford even basic treatment, I think your tune would change.
It may work that way in communist countries pretending to be free market (like the United States), but in real capitalist societies, if companies behave this way (especially those that disregard the public safety), large groups of people form to raise(9) on such places. Most people don't tolerate that kind of crap--unless they've been beaten down by some evil power, and no amount of laws can protect them if that is the case.
Being /.ed is a DoS attack! ;)
What you are talking about is not reasonable. No matter how careful a programmer is, no matter how much testing the code goes through, no matter how many experts scan through the code, there is always the possiblity of a bug or design flaw. It cannot be expected that code written in the real world for use on real devices will be 100% fault tolerant. The same goes for anything else.
Why do you think there are so many problems with getting good, decently priced healthcare in the US? It is exactly because the doctors have to pay settlements in the millions if they make a very small mistake or a dying patient doesn't survive a very risky surgery (which the patient and family were informed of the risks). What is the result of this? Doctors/hospitals have to pay massive malpractice insurance premiums. HMOs were created, which makes getting serously ill worse, because your provider will hide possible treatments, refuse to pay for critical operations, use accountants to make decisions that only doctors should. And so on, and so on...
That is just for finacial liability. How would it be if an industry were criminally liable for not being 100.00000% perfect and 100.00000% successful at everything? I imagine it would end up like this: most of the people who are knowledgeable would run away screaming from their job, realizing they could not possibly live up to the standard and would end up in jail. Then you would only be left with clueless idiots, arrogant bastards, and con-artists. After a short time, the idiots and bastards would be in jail because they made some sort of mistake, and the con-artists would be in the Bahamas or somewhere with the millions of dollars they stole from desperate organizations trying to fill in the essential gaps in labor caused by this law. What does that leave us with? Nothing! Because we are talking about critcal industries, what would happen? I don't want to find out.
People or organizations should be punished if they hide problems or don't use resonable care, however saying that someone must be punished for everything that goes wrong is complete idiocy and shows total disregard for reality.
Could you give us some ideas of where to buy the parts for the cooling system? Also what you normally use? What are waterblocks? Some sort of plumbing equipment? My computer seems to run hot even with three fans...maybe a water colling system is what I need. Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Here I thought I was updated with 7.1. Oh well, I don't see a reason to upgrade. I just installed xfree86 4.1 last week. Everything seems to work fine, so why upgrade?
It can be automated...what I meant was, if they didn't have the packaging program, the format should be designed so they can get by without it.
In fact, what I had in mind was to put specific files in the tarball that informed the package manager program of all the dependancies (and where to find them). The install script would handle moving binaries to the correct locations and could be as smart or dumb as the package mantainer wants and it wouldn't just dump everything in the specified directory--like most package manager programs do.
It would be simple to design, simple to create packages, simple to install packages, and simple to create a decent package manager program (even if it's a shell script).
This would make it possible for anyone to install a package--unlike RPMs, where you have to install the package program. Since your system wasn't installed using RPMs, you don't have a proper database and you end up using --nodeps all the time or searching the net trying to find a way to populate the database (which I gave up on).
Not to mention I ran into a few RPMs that won't install because the package manager says only package with major numbers <= 3 are supported by this version of RPM. I have the most current version for my distro (Slackware 7.1). Do I have to search the net to find the most recent version of rpm everytime I want to install a program without having to compile it?
With source packages, one usually just has to untar, cd to directory, and type ./configure; make; make install. Why can't it be that way for binary packages as well? Sure, it's fine for individual distros to have their own formats, but a package format that is used by those releasing binaries for a specific program should use something that is more compatible with as many distros as possible. Not just one.