We now are, and have been for a very long time, producing more than enough high quality food to feed all of the worlds poor. There are problems with distribution of the available food, but the truth is that much of the world's food is destroyed in order to keep prices up. the only solution to those two problems is not going to be found in patent-burdened trans-genic crops, but through programs like the one written about in the article, that allow greater localization of food production without creating indebtedness of local farmers to a US agro-giant like Monsanto.
oil would no longer have much value, and so the Middle East would no longer be a constant battleground.
Oh yeah, I'm sure the colapse of every economy in the middle East would do wonders to promote peace in the region.
OTOH, without oil, the Western European nations and the United States would have far less motivation to stir up trouble there, and I'm sure that would be a welcome change.
The site which accidently looks a lot like slashdot,
Are you sure that incedentally wouldn't be a better term? Lots of developers start with slashcode when building their forums, and they are not ashamed of the fact (nor should they be.
It only makes sense to use something that works well and is already written if it asddresses your needs and is offered freely by its creators.
no vuln reports people don't care about...
It's nice to know that their knowledge is so complete that they can make that decision for their readers. Even (especially?) obscur vulns and seemingly insignificant theoretical flaws have a tendency to blow up later if they are not addressed in a reasonable time. What makes the vuln appear insignificant is often the failure of anyone (developers, security specialists, and crackers) to understand the ramifications when it is first announced. Just because no-one has posted a "proof of concept" at the moment does not mean that it cannot be exploited or is not already being exploited by someone who is more quiet with their knowledge.
all the latest news and white papers.
The papers are the meat of the subject, if they are well written and thoroughly considered. It's good to someone attempting to provide a central library for the community to access.
It looks like a great site, and I'm sure it'll be quite useful. It would be nice if their readers would step forward and contribute a bit more (most stories on the front page have zero comments), as all security papers and news can use a bit of community criticism to test their theses. It will be interesting to see if the timeliness of their reports can continue to be as good as it is once they start getting the volume of participation that you see here.
Mod me down if you wish, just an honest opinion from someone sick of hearing about Microsoft's monopoly.
Yeh, I'm sick of hearing it too. That Bill Gates guy's always in the news spouting off about how he owns this, and the world owes him that, and the government should regulate the industry and such. For christ sake, that rich asshole makes me sick. Perhaps it wouldn't gall me so much if it weren't that he has bought or outright stolen his success at every turn instead of developing it in-house.
If he wants my 50 bucks for owning a computer, fine. I'll send it to him, but don't ask me to use the crap that Microsoft churns out, and don't ask me to pretend that I think that Bills anything other than what he is, an ass who was lucky enough to be born into the right family that had the right friends, and enough money to buy any competitor that threatened his company or any polititian that could change the direction of the Justice Department when he got caught lying in court.
It's like card games, some like bridge, some like poker.
There will always be those who prefer Peirs Anthony to Italo Calvino.
The subtlties of GO cannot be explained outside of the game itself, and it takes quite a bit of playing until one can fool themselves into believing that they understand it.
I'm thinking they would still have vehicles that must consume this valuable commodity.
I'm sorry, I think I should have mentioned this. It's odd that they are talking about 600 GBP grants for conversions, but the tech might costr a bit more there than it currently does here (around $700 to $900, depending on the make of the car.)
The U.S. gets its power from natural gas, coal, and nuclear fuel.
You are right, the US gets only about 5% of it's energy from oil fired generators. The techs you mention are the root cause of the east-coast blackout that we expirienced last summer due to the need for heavy currents being transmitted at high voltage over long distance power lines. Most of the renewable energy technologies that have been proven to be feasable (wind, solar, renewable natural gas) work as efficiently on a micro-generator scale as they do on a centralized generation model. As we consume more and more energy, it will become necessary to move the production of electrical power closer to the consumer.
If it went completely to renewable energy for power generation, it would still need just as much oil.
If the US went to renewable natural gas generation on its livestock farms and at its sewage treatment plants, the cost of natural gas would drop enough that it would be feasible to run our cars on it.Lubricants and other petroleum based products could easily be made from our domestic oil production or manufactured from vegetablesopurces or meat/poultry rendering waste products.
But the majority of effective R&D that has produced viable alternatives top oil has not come from the oil companies, but from General Electric (fuel cell and wind turbine technology) and a large handful of semiconductor companies (practical and efficient solar cells).
The big energy companies do not consider technologies that are as efficient on a small scale as on a large scale to be viable, because their very existance is dependant on preventing a truly distributed market in energy from forming. Wind, solar, and natural gas (both fossil and renewable) are viable technologies on a micro generation scale. Renewable natural gas has the advantage of working in automobiles (this has already been implemented by many municiple fleets in the US due to both cost-cutting and environmental issues).
but the justification is not fiscal, it's environmental.
The environmental issues will never be addressed until the cost of those solutions are similar or better. The ecconomics of the issue are more than simply cost, but also concerned with the changes that will occur as power production becomes more localized and the ownership of production becomes more distrbuted.
The oil companies will come forward with efficient and implementable technologies they find one that does not disturb their place in the economy.
Quite ironic, as Aberdeen is the oil capital of europe:).
Quite sensible fiscal policy, actually. It seems that you'll soon be in the eviable position of being able to sell a valuable comodity while not consuming any (very little) of it yourselves.
If the US politicians and oil producers could wrap their minds around that concept, there'd be quite a change in the amount of polution produced in the world, as well as curing our horrendous trade deficit, but I'm afraid that there's far too much power politics involved to see any useful change here. The oil conglomerates make far too much off of importing, the politicians use the promise of US dollars far too often as a diplomatic ploy, and the two groups have been in bed together far to long for them to see that the relationship is destructive. (It's somewhat like a couple that are always fighting each other, except when they are fucking, or have allied in order to fight someone else. Their neighbors are suffering from it, their children are suffering from it, they themselves are suffering from it, but they'll be damned if they'll allow anything to change it.)
I am a SAR volunteer, and my cellphone may be how I am notified that there is a lost child that needs to be found.
Why does your org not use the reserved emergency bands for communication. It is rather easy to target specific freqs when desiring to interfere with a service without interupting service to another band.
Those reserved bands are not simply for fire and police personel. Many communities also use the reserved bands for medical pager systems, ambulance comminications, and tow truck raddios (some places even use them for taxicabs, as they might be necessary emergency transport in some extreme events). Even all volunteer clubs, such as the Civil Air Patrol are using the reserved emergency bands in some communities.
There is an added expense for the equipment, but those bands and corresponding communications networks are less likely to become saturated with traffic, like the cell networks tend to during emergencies. It's rather irresponsible for a rescue operation to depend on the standard cell networks. As you said, somebodies life might be at stake, and it would be a sorry excuse to blame a failure to respond on a saturated network.
It's great that the clip is available online, but it has become apparent to me that the knowledge of the voting machine problem is not widely known. Even at the two tech conventions that I recently attended, one of which was oriented to non-profits including political action groups, most of the attendees that I spoke with had little knowledge of who Deibold is, of the problems with computerized voting that have already occurred, or of the inherent design problems that could be used to corrupt the election results using these machines.
What would it take to get that clip televised?
Hmmm, flat tax with a $25,000 personat deduction..
on
No EZ Fix For The IRS
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· Score: 1
Congratulations, you've just invented the graduated tax!
I'm not a RedHat user, but I did find this document for building a custom kernel on RH9. It's not specific to Ferdora, but it should be enough to get you through it. It looks pretty generic and is very similar to what I did before I began using Debian's kernel-package system to manage my custom kernels (which BTW, is one of the best things about using Debian, especially if you are using more than one box).
You may want to familiarize your self with the
lspci
command, and possible with the
/proc/pci
file (use
cat/proc/pci
in an xterm to read it) in order to be sure that you're not leaving out support for some of your hardware. Read the help file for anything you don't know about, and don't hesitate to read the device specific files for items that you might need (if they have them).
Be sure to use the Fedora users list for questions that you can't figure out from the docs. I'm sure there's lots of helpful folk there. If it's anything like debian-user you'll have no problems getting prompt and helpful answers. (If anyone gives you an RTFM, follow the provided link if there is one, if they did not provide one, then list the docs you've already consulted and ask if there's something you've missed and where it might be). Using the lists is not scary and, despite the *ss-hats who think otherwise, RTFM is not an insult. You'll learn much faster if you read the material yourself and ask questions afterward.
Be sure to set up your
/etc/lilo.conf
to boot from more to one kernel (if you're using grub you'll need help from sonmeone else for this). Move your old kernel into the new place (usually, I use
/boot/vmlinuz.old
for this) so you'll have a working alternative if you screw things up.
Be patient, take your time, check everything twice. It take's quite a bit of time to do this the first few times, but once you know your way aroiund the kernel config you realize that it's realy not all that difficult.
do not believe OpenBSD has a software protected stack.
You'd be wrong then. Open BSD has had protected stack for some time now (it looks like FreeBSD will have it by default soon also), and it's not a question of hardware, but a patch to the kernel (StackGuard patch, I believe) just as it is Linux (StackGuard, OpenWall, or the NSA'a SELinux, probably others). There's nothing new in Bill Gate's list of enhancements, just a bunch of ideas he's borrowing from Linux. Microsoft has every right to emulate Linux's security model, but it would do a world of good for his credibility if he'd give props where it's do.
The only place that Windows is leading is in market share, which means a lot to a guy who's in the business of selling software, but the majority of the Linux developers are in the business of *using* the software they write, and could really give a crap about marketshare as long as their box works as advertised and does what they want.
Your questioning of his dictionary is quite apropriate, as there are (severely abridged) dicionaries and economics texts that exclude all economic systems except Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism.
It is an attempt to simplify all debate over the issue and get the reader to adhere to either one ideal or the other, rather than to attempt to figure a solution to common problems that exist in all economic systems.
The United States current economic mode is very much veering toward Mercantilism at the moment, but the promoters of those techniquesand iots inherent philosophy will be damned if they'll let it be labeled anything but Capitalism.
The issue of funding is a difficult one, as departments are not often given the freedom to reject funding from a company if it is offered, even if there are legitimate objections to the terms (this is true of all departments, not just computer or technical, depending on the policies of the university).
These kinds of conflicts of interest are not limited to technical feilds, but to any feild which will be effecting the future of business. Law schools are compelled to teach certain interpretations of copyright, property, or civil law depending on the wishes of their donors. History departments are chastised by donors for being "too liberal" or of "emphisising the negative" when they fail to exclude certain events in American history, ecconomics and business schools are heavily influenced to promote certain theories and to exclude or denegrate others in order to please their sources of funding (a good example of this is the near deification of Donald Trump, a businessman who's record boasts several bankrupcies with at least two bailouts by the federal government as part of the remedies).
Companies recognise that the current batch of students contains the decision makers of tomorrow, and they act accordingly by investing departments that may influence the future of the company. The school administrations recognise the reality that if the donors investments do not pay off (for the donor, to hell with the student) then it is unlikely that the donor will return.
The remedies I describe are not major financial upheavals, nor are they extremely painful to the majority of society (except for the increased tuition option, that would be painful to only the majority).
The return on investment from Eisenhower's extremely expensive college grant programs has been well worth the 70% tax rate that the wealthiest Americans paid in order to support it. (It's funny how those who wish to cut taxes use the Eisenhower years as an example of American prosperity. I don't think they are supporting their arguments too well.) Increased financial aid (grants, not loans) coupled with more stringent requirements to enter full-time study creates greater progress in scientific studies, faster development of technology, and greater growth in the economy along side the inevitable batch of art students and english majors. The taxation of the rich did not have a negative impact on the economy, but the tax-cuts and a war in Viet-Nam nearly spent all the benefits that came afterwards.
Increased endowments need initial large gifts, but soon give the colleges and universities the necessary academic freedom to eductate as the departments see is best without the outside interference of the donors. Math and physics departments often operate under the radar of corporate givers, and thus often have smaller budgets than engineering, CompSci, and business, but are permitted greater freedom in how and what they teach, and in what tools they can choose to conduct their research with.
Many businesses and corporate donors hate these ideas because they wish to look as if they are giving out of kindness (but in reality it is about getting their name on a building) or out of a sense of duty to support our society and it's future, but are unwilling to give up control of how the money is spent and unable to have real faith in the institutions that they are giving to.
I grew up surrounded by academia, and discussions about academic freedom ethics and funding have always been part of that environment. These issues are nothing new, and one has only to look back to the thirties and the days of Carnegie and Morgan to know that corporate giving has always come at a high price.
Or what if the internal diagram of your front door's lock were printed right on your front door, would that be OK.
Bad example for a flawed argument. Knowing the mechanisms in a lock is not what makes them difficult to exploit (most are not), as most designs for the vast majority of locking devices are readily available, or are easily determinable through trial and error (yes, IAALS). Some locks, such as those manufactured by Medico) are extremely difficult to pick even for seasoned professionals with extensive knowledge of their workings.
No lock and no security practices are impossible to compromise, but secrecy does not increase security of a given installation, as it prevents open discovery and discussion of flaws by the owners that may be known by those who are attempting to compromise that security.
Printing the diagram on the door might just be the one method possible to get your allies to discover and reveal a flaw in your security before the compromise happens. In the case of a physical lock, it might just be the one way to make the theif reconsider and look for an easier target.
These text books are supposed to be informing their readership of the relative merits of the various platforms, not equating relative popularity with relative merit.
No, these text books should be teaching about the various designs, implementations, and methods of how computers and operating systems are constructed and work together. The student *should* be able to come to their own decisions about the merits of specifict products based on that knowledge (or, alternatively, decide they are all crap and build a new implementation that avoids the failings he perceives in the available offerings). Anything else is either marketing material or a (possibly advanced) "user course".
The unfortunate truth is that the only method likely to return CompSci departments to a practice of teaching the students to understand (rather that to use) computers would be to wean them off of the corporate teat, but that would require increased taxation, greater endowments, or increased tuition (or a combination of all or some of the above) and those choices are either extremely unpopular, highly unlikely, or rather unfair (and thus unlikely to happen anytime in the near future).
Re:Just to show what professional really means
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
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· Score: 1
It is very sad to see that many professionals in fact do not spend the time to learn about their field outside of what is fed to them in the classroom.
The unfortunate truth is that the only requirement for one to be a professional is that you get paid.
The tradition of being a professional has not developed beyond the simple ethic that was established in the days of the first and oldest profession, the basic requirements of which were mere availability and the willingness to do something distasteful in return for cash.
Re:Of course PHBs fear Linux
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I work at a non-profit, and the donors all have stock in Microsoft, and the board is rather interested in all management decisions that are made. These people would rather see their donations thrown down the Microsoft drain than see their favorite charity using a competing product, even if it is more appropriate for the needs of the organisation.
In section three of the full report there are reccomendations for education requirements for persons going into the IT and programming fields. These include a page long list of what seem to be innocuous and common sense requirements, but when this is coupled with the fact that it is Homeland Security being asked to implement the program, it adds up to background checks for anyone who wishes to learn to program, plus manditory (increasingly expensive) college education requirements.
The suggested requirements are extremely specific, and mostly are the kind of thing that programmers currently learn by doing or from both formal and informal mentoring. Taking this role out of the hands of the user groups and workplaces and placing it in the hands of the authors of standardized tests will not improve the quality of programming or security practices any more than the "No Child Left Behind Act" has improved the quality of public education in this country and will likely eliminate many of those who are capable of creating the next batch "best practices" by discouraging independant thinking, thus reducing most software authoring and administration practices to a set of "acceptable minimum requirements" that is dictated by government bureaucrats instead of determined by the combined expirience of the software community.
Slashdot Mirror
Organic food also isn't sustainable; organic food can't feed the world
Bullshit.
We now are, and have been for a very long time, producing more than enough high quality food to feed all of the worlds poor. There are problems with distribution of the available food, but the truth is that much of the world's food is destroyed in order to keep prices up. the only solution to those two problems is not going to be found in patent-burdened trans-genic crops, but through programs like the one written about in the article, that allow greater localization of food production without creating indebtedness of local farmers to a US agro-giant like Monsanto.
oil would no longer have much value, and so the Middle East would no longer be a constant battleground.
Oh yeah, I'm sure the colapse of every economy in the middle East would do wonders to promote peace in the region.
OTOH, without oil, the Western European nations and the United States would have far less motivation to stir up trouble there, and I'm sure that would be a welcome change.
The site which accidently looks a lot like slashdot,
Are you sure that incedentally wouldn't be a better term? Lots of developers start with slashcode when building their forums, and they are not ashamed of the fact (nor should they be.
It only makes sense to use something that works well and is already written if it asddresses your needs and is offered freely by its creators.
no vuln reports people don't care about...
It's nice to know that their knowledge is so complete that they can make that decision for their readers. Even (especially?) obscur vulns and seemingly insignificant theoretical flaws have a tendency to blow up later if they are not addressed in a reasonable time. What makes the vuln appear insignificant is often the failure of anyone (developers, security specialists, and crackers) to understand the ramifications when it is first announced. Just because no-one has posted a "proof of concept" at the moment does not mean that it cannot be exploited or is not already being exploited by someone who is more quiet with their knowledge.
all the latest news and white papers.
The papers are the meat of the subject, if they are well written and thoroughly considered. It's good to someone attempting to provide a central library for the community to access.
It looks like a great site, and I'm sure it'll be quite useful. It would be nice if their readers would step forward and contribute a bit more (most stories on the front page have zero comments), as all security papers and news can use a bit of community criticism to test their theses. It will be interesting to see if the timeliness of their reports can continue to be as good as it is once they start getting the volume of participation that you see here.
Thanks for the link.
Mod me down if you wish, just an honest opinion from someone sick of hearing about Microsoft's monopoly.
Yeh, I'm sick of hearing it too. That Bill Gates guy's always in the news spouting off about how he owns this, and the world owes him that, and the government should regulate the industry and such. For christ sake, that rich asshole makes me sick. Perhaps it wouldn't gall me so much if it weren't that he has bought or outright stolen his success at every turn instead of developing it in-house.
If he wants my 50 bucks for owning a computer, fine. I'll send it to him, but don't ask me to use the crap that Microsoft churns out, and don't ask me to pretend that I think that Bills anything other than what he is, an ass who was lucky enough to be born into the right family that had the right friends, and enough money to buy any competitor that threatened his company or any polititian that could change the direction of the Justice Department when he got caught lying in court.
With abstractions like "Does the number 12 exist?" I have to wonder why it made the cut to even appear on slashdot.
How can a brace of quail really be said to have something in common with a pair of sandals?
Utter nonsense!
It's only boring if don't know how to play it!
That's not really true.
It's like card games, some like bridge, some like poker.
There will always be those who prefer Peirs Anthony to Italo Calvino.
The subtlties of GO cannot be explained outside of the game itself, and it takes quite a bit of playing until one can fool themselves into believing that they understand it.
Pandanet was formerly known as IGS, and can eat your time worse than /. any day.
I'm thinking they would still have vehicles that must consume this valuable commodity.
I'm sorry, I think I should have mentioned this. It's odd that they are talking about 600 GBP grants for conversions, but the tech might costr a bit more there than it currently does here (around $700 to $900, depending on the make of the car.)
The U.S. gets its power from natural gas, coal, and nuclear fuel.
You are right, the US gets only about 5% of it's energy from oil fired generators. The techs you mention are the root cause of the east-coast blackout that we expirienced last summer due to the need for heavy currents being transmitted at high voltage over long distance power lines. Most of the renewable energy technologies that have been proven to be feasable (wind, solar, renewable natural gas) work as efficiently on a micro-generator scale as they do on a centralized generation model. As we consume more and more energy, it will become necessary to move the production of electrical power closer to the consumer.
If it went completely to renewable energy for power generation, it would still need just as much oil.
If the US went to renewable natural gas generation on its livestock farms and at its sewage treatment plants, the cost of natural gas would drop enough that it would be feasible to run our cars on it.Lubricants and other petroleum based products could easily be made from our domestic oil production or manufactured from vegetablesopurces or meat/poultry rendering waste products.
having provided the world with free R&D
But the majority of effective R&D that has produced viable alternatives top oil has not come from the oil companies, but from General Electric (fuel cell and wind turbine technology) and a large handful of semiconductor companies (practical and efficient solar cells).
The big energy companies do not consider technologies that are as efficient on a small scale as on a large scale to be viable, because their very existance is dependant on preventing a truly distributed market in energy from forming. Wind, solar, and natural gas (both fossil and renewable) are viable technologies on a micro generation scale. Renewable natural gas has the advantage of working in automobiles (this has already been implemented by many municiple fleets in the US due to both cost-cutting and environmental issues).
but the justification is not fiscal, it's environmental.
The environmental issues will never be addressed until the cost of those solutions are similar or better. The ecconomics of the issue are more than simply cost, but also concerned with the changes that will occur as power production becomes more localized and the ownership of production becomes more distrbuted.
The oil companies will come forward with efficient and implementable technologies they find one that does not disturb their place in the economy.
Quite ironic, as Aberdeen is the oil capital of europe :).
Quite sensible fiscal policy, actually. It seems that you'll soon be in the eviable position of being able to sell a valuable comodity while not consuming any (very little) of it yourselves.
If the US politicians and oil producers could wrap their minds around that concept, there'd be quite a change in the amount of polution produced in the world, as well as curing our horrendous trade deficit, but I'm afraid that there's far too much power politics involved to see any useful change here. The oil conglomerates make far too much off of importing, the politicians use the promise of US dollars far too often as a diplomatic ploy, and the two groups have been in bed together far to long for them to see that the relationship is destructive. (It's somewhat like a couple that are always fighting each other, except when they are fucking, or have allied in order to fight someone else. Their neighbors are suffering from it, their children are suffering from it, they themselves are suffering from it, but they'll be damned if they'll allow anything to change it.)
I am a SAR volunteer, and my cellphone may be how I am notified that there is a lost child that needs to be found.
Why does your org not use the reserved emergency bands for communication. It is rather easy to target specific freqs when desiring to interfere with a service without interupting service to another band.
Those reserved bands are not simply for fire and police personel. Many communities also use the reserved bands for medical pager systems, ambulance comminications, and tow truck raddios (some places even use them for taxicabs, as they might be necessary emergency transport in some extreme events). Even all volunteer clubs, such as the Civil Air Patrol are using the reserved emergency bands in some communities.
There is an added expense for the equipment, but those bands and corresponding communications networks are less likely to become saturated with traffic, like the cell networks tend to during emergencies. It's rather irresponsible for a rescue operation to depend on the standard cell networks. As you said, somebodies life might be at stake, and it would be a sorry excuse to blame a failure to respond on a saturated network.
It's great that the clip is available online, but it has become apparent to me that the knowledge of the voting machine problem is not widely known. Even at the two tech conventions that I recently attended, one of which was oriented to non-profits including political action groups, most of the attendees that I spoke with had little knowledge of who Deibold is, of the problems with computerized voting that have already occurred, or of the inherent design problems that could be used to corrupt the election results using these machines.
What would it take to get that clip televised?
Congratulations, you've just invented the graduated tax!
You know what it looks like but you don't know what it's called.
Searching for that doohickey or thingamajig is not going to get you the result that you want.
It's not specific to Ferdora, but it should be enough to get you through it. It looks pretty generic and is very similar to what I did before I began using Debian's kernel-package system to manage my custom kernels (which BTW, is one of the best things about using Debian, especially if you are using more than one box).
You may want to familiarize your self with the command, and possible with the file (use in an xterm to read it) in order to be sure that you're not leaving out support for some of your hardware. Read the help file for anything you don't know about, and don't hesitate to read the device specific files for items that you might need (if they have them).
Be sure to use the Fedora users list for questions that you can't figure out from the docs. I'm sure there's lots of helpful folk there. If it's anything like debian-user you'll have no problems getting prompt and helpful answers. (If anyone gives you an RTFM, follow the provided link if there is one, if they did not provide one, then list the docs you've already consulted and ask if there's something you've missed and where it might be). Using the lists is not scary and, despite the *ss-hats who think otherwise, RTFM is not an insult. You'll learn much faster if you read the material yourself and ask questions afterward.
Be sure to set up your to boot from more to one kernel (if you're using grub you'll need help from sonmeone else for this). Move your old kernel into the new place (usually, I use for this) so you'll have a working alternative if you screw things up.
Be patient, take your time, check everything twice. It take's quite a bit of time to do this the first few times, but once you know your way aroiund the kernel config you realize that it's realy not all that difficult.
someone please tell me why i should use any Microsoft product?
Because your boss decided that's what you must use when at work.
'Easy to use' and 'Secure' are to some extent mutually exclusive.
Yeah, those Macs are real difficult machines to operate. I don't know how anyone manages to figure them out.
do not believe OpenBSD has a software protected stack.
You'd be wrong then. Open BSD has had protected stack for some time now (it looks like FreeBSD will have it by default soon also), and it's not a question of hardware, but a patch to the kernel (StackGuard patch, I believe) just as it is Linux (StackGuard, OpenWall, or the NSA'a SELinux, probably others). There's nothing new in Bill Gate's list of enhancements, just a bunch of ideas he's borrowing from Linux. Microsoft has every right to emulate Linux's security model, but it would do a world of good for his credibility if he'd give props where it's do.
The only place that Windows is leading is in market share, which means a lot to a guy who's in the business of selling software, but the majority of the Linux developers are in the business of *using* the software they write, and could really give a crap about marketshare as long as their box works as advertised and does what they want.
Damn, you beat me to it.
Your questioning of his dictionary is quite apropriate, as there are (severely abridged) dicionaries and economics texts that exclude all economic systems except Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism.
It is an attempt to simplify all debate over the issue and get the reader to adhere to either one ideal or the other, rather than to attempt to figure a solution to common problems that exist in all economic systems.
The United States current economic mode is very much veering toward Mercantilism at the moment, but the promoters of those techniquesand iots inherent philosophy will be damned if they'll let it be labeled anything but Capitalism.
The issue of funding is a difficult one, as departments are not often given the freedom to reject funding from a company if it is offered, even if there are legitimate objections to the terms (this is true of all departments, not just computer or technical, depending on the policies of the university).
These kinds of conflicts of interest are not limited to technical feilds, but to any feild which will be effecting the future of business. Law schools are compelled to teach certain interpretations of copyright, property, or civil law depending on the wishes of their donors. History departments are chastised by donors for being "too liberal" or of "emphisising the negative" when they fail to exclude certain events in American history, ecconomics and business schools are heavily influenced to promote certain theories and to exclude or denegrate others in order to please their sources of funding (a good example of this is the near deification of Donald Trump, a businessman who's record boasts several bankrupcies with at least two bailouts by the federal government as part of the remedies).
Companies recognise that the current batch of students contains the decision makers of tomorrow, and they act accordingly by investing departments that may influence the future of the company. The school administrations recognise the reality that if the donors investments do not pay off (for the donor, to hell with the student) then it is unlikely that the donor will return.
The remedies I describe are not major financial upheavals, nor are they extremely painful to the majority of society (except for the increased tuition option, that would be painful to only the majority).
The return on investment from Eisenhower's extremely expensive college grant programs has been well worth the 70% tax rate that the wealthiest Americans paid in order to support it. (It's funny how those who wish to cut taxes use the Eisenhower years as an example of American prosperity. I don't think they are supporting their arguments too well.) Increased financial aid (grants, not loans) coupled with more stringent requirements to enter full-time study creates greater progress in scientific studies, faster development of technology, and greater growth in the economy along side the inevitable batch of art students and english majors. The taxation of the rich did not have a negative impact on the economy, but the tax-cuts and a war in Viet-Nam nearly spent all the benefits that came afterwards.
Increased endowments need initial large gifts, but soon give the colleges and universities the necessary academic freedom to eductate as the departments see is best without the outside interference of the donors. Math and physics departments often operate under the radar of corporate givers, and thus often have smaller budgets than engineering, CompSci, and business, but are permitted greater freedom in how and what they teach, and in what tools they can choose to conduct their research with.
Many businesses and corporate donors hate these ideas because they wish to look as if they are giving out of kindness (but in reality it is about getting their name on a building) or out of a sense of duty to support our society and it's future, but are unwilling to give up control of how the money is spent and unable to have real faith in the institutions that they are giving to.
I grew up surrounded by academia, and discussions about academic freedom ethics and funding have always been part of that environment. These issues are nothing new, and one has only to look back to the thirties and the days of Carnegie and Morgan to know that corporate giving has always come at a high price.
Or what if the internal diagram of your front door's lock were printed right on your front door, would that be OK.
Bad example for a flawed argument. Knowing the mechanisms in a lock is not what makes them difficult to exploit (most are not), as most designs for the vast majority of locking devices are readily available, or are easily determinable through trial and error (yes, IAALS). Some locks, such as those manufactured by Medico) are extremely difficult to pick even for seasoned professionals with extensive knowledge of their workings.
No lock and no security practices are impossible to compromise, but secrecy does not increase security of a given installation, as it prevents open discovery and discussion of flaws by the owners that may be known by those who are attempting to compromise that security.
Printing the diagram on the door might just be the one method possible to get your allies to discover and reveal a flaw in your security before the compromise happens. In the case of a physical lock, it might just be the one way to make the theif reconsider and look for an easier target.
These text books are supposed to be informing their readership of the relative merits of the various platforms, not equating relative popularity with relative merit.
No, these text books should be teaching about the various designs, implementations, and methods of how computers and operating systems are constructed and work together. The student *should* be able to come to their own decisions about the merits of specifict products based on that knowledge (or, alternatively, decide they are all crap and build a new implementation that avoids the failings he perceives in the available offerings). Anything else is either marketing material or a (possibly advanced) "user course".
The unfortunate truth is that the only method likely to return CompSci departments to a practice of teaching the students to understand (rather that to use) computers would be to wean them off of the corporate teat, but that would require increased taxation, greater endowments, or increased tuition (or a combination of all or some of the above) and those choices are either extremely unpopular, highly unlikely, or rather unfair (and thus unlikely to happen anytime in the near future).
It is very sad to see that many professionals in fact do not spend the time to learn about their field outside of what is fed to them in the classroom.
The unfortunate truth is that the only requirement for one to be a professional is that you get paid.
The tradition of being a professional has not developed beyond the simple ethic that was established in the days of the first and oldest profession, the basic requirements of which were mere availability and the willingness to do something distasteful in return for cash.
I work at a non-profit, and the donors all have stock in Microsoft, and the board is rather interested in all management decisions that are made. These people would rather see their donations thrown down the Microsoft drain than see their favorite charity using a competing product, even if it is more appropriate for the needs of the organisation.
In section three of the full report there are reccomendations for education requirements for persons going into the IT and programming fields. These include a page long list of what seem to be innocuous and common sense requirements, but when this is coupled with the fact that it is Homeland Security being asked to implement the program, it adds up to background checks for anyone who wishes to learn to program, plus manditory (increasingly expensive) college education requirements.
The suggested requirements are extremely specific, and mostly are the kind of thing that programmers currently learn by doing or from both formal and informal mentoring. Taking this role out of the hands of the user groups and workplaces and placing it in the hands of the authors of standardized tests will not improve the quality of programming or security practices any more than the "No Child Left Behind Act" has improved the quality of public education in this country and will likely eliminate many of those who are capable of creating the next batch "best practices" by discouraging independant thinking, thus reducing most software authoring and administration practices to a set of "acceptable minimum requirements" that is dictated by government bureaucrats instead of determined by the combined expirience of the software community.