Imagine there exists at least one serious vulnerability in Microsoft's
Windows-family OSes. Imagine that at there exists at least one major
adversary ready and willing to exploit such a vulnerability.
If you can imagine those two things, then you can imagine all of Microsoft's
computers failing or being taken over at the same time. Right now I think
that means about 90% of the computers in the world might potentially be
affected by a single vulnerability. Several of the patches released this
month seem to have that much coverage, since the underlying vulnerabilities
spanned a number of Microsoft OSes.
In our highly networked and increasingly computer-dependent world, can you
imagine how much economic damage that could cause? I really can't. At some
point my imagination fails me.
Even if the odds are very small, how can we continue to live with that
threat?
No, he's telling you that pudge is a moron--and I confirm that on my own experience with him. That fool is probably the #1 reason/. has been going to hell.
Please god, you fucking moron. Please designate me as your foe so I won't see any more of your god damned crap. I've seen quite enough of your presidential stupidity over the last going on eight years.
Actually, Lisp is quite similar to some natural language, depending on the value of "natural language". I'm actually thinking of Japanese, where a lot of thing just default backwards from English...
Reminds me of some C code I wrote after after I'd been working in Lisp for a while. Main piece involved two loops, nested and recursing, with one going forwards and the other going backwards. Very small piece of code, and it seemed to run quite well--though I never actually investigated the memory footprint. Probably horrendous. However, it seemed like the natural thing to do at the time for that sort of compressed image transmission.
In conclusion, Lisp gives you an interesting perspective on the solutions of many problems.
I feel like I'm being trolled into arguing with a fool. You mean you really think you know what you paid for when you fork over to Microsoft? Heck most of the time you can't even see the fork, as when Windows and Office were bundled in the machine. You get what they throw at you, including lots of features you probably aren't interested in--and all the bugs, too. Not that you or *ANYONE* on the outside can actually look at the source code.
Perhaps I should have emphasized the "charity" aspect in my description. Right now the OSS financial model is mostly an after the fact charity, and what I am proposing is a way to take some of the gambling out of the charitable aspects. I really do think there are some excellent coders who contribute OSS just because they're legitimately nice guys--but even those nice guys need to eat. There are also some wild-eyed hot-shot gold miners who are hoping to strike it rich. There are even a few out-and-out scam artists who are pulling stunts like reselling someone else's code.
To make the charity shares reverse auction work, it would actually be rather important to track the programming history of the participants. If someone is bidding for a software project, they normally have to demonstrate their competence and show that they can deliver the goods. This approach would actually allow quite a bit of wiggle room for young and unproven coders--but they wouldn't be able to keep wiggling for very long, while the contributors' risk would be constrained by the bidding parameters. Of course, an experienced programmer would have a big advantage in selling their projects by pointing at data like "5 completed projects and 20% repeat sponsors".
Here's a simplified example: The bid is to add a feature to an existing product, and the initial status is 100 shares at $10 per share, so it's supposed to be worth $1,000 in total. If 100 people like the idea, then it's funded, but if those hundred people then get a friend to join in, the price has dropped to $5 per share--and you've almost doubled the user base. You probably want to put a floor price under it and immediately close the auction and start work when the "bidding" for shares has reached that point.
Another aspect of the charity is that the OSS products then become shared by everyone and the developer has already been paid up front. I'd actually expect a good and experienced developer to bid at a high rate--and still sell the shares on the track record and reputation of prior products.
How about a financial model of bidding to develop software, functional modules, or related services such as security upgrades and support by 'selling shares'? The developers would specify what they propose to develop or offer and describe how much time and other resources would be involved--and thereby set a value on the project. People who wanted the proposed software would buy shares in the development project, and when they get enough people, then they commit, collect the money, and start doing the work.
Oh yeah, the "reverse auction" part. They shouldn't cut the auction off right away, but allow some extra time for getting more people to buy into the project. That would reduce the per share cost while also increasing the user base.
After the project is completed successfully, the shareholders should get some recognition, perhaps being listed on the project website. If the developers don't succeed in delivering what they promised, then they should be remembered unfavorably. Essentially the developers would be gambling their reputations.
Lots of variations possible. For example, a developer could release already developed software and set up the share auction for the next version or the ongoing support.
I highly appreciate a good joke. Your attempt was not, inane moderation notwithstanding.
I really don't feel like my sense of humor has changed that much over the years, even though I'd like to think I've learned a bit along the way. My main point is that a visit to/. used to find some humorous posts, and now it rarely does. Just to check, I went through all of the posts modded "funny" in this topic and in the comments to the current poll. I found one fat cow joke that was rather funny, two "+5, funny" comments that actually were slightly funny, and the rest were un peu drôle, at best.
Of course, another possibility is that the humor is still there and the moderation has simply become so bad that the humor doesn't show up with the search algorithm of looking for "funny".
No, it seems the professional researchers I work with highly value constructive criticism before they send papers to the referees. We're basically on the same team, but specialists in different areas. My pitch is that it's a LCD thing. First-class research with a third-class description does not get averaged to second class.
However,/. is not to be confused with a prestigious international conference.
I used to visit/. because a reasonable percentage of the +5 funny posts actually were funny. A smaller (but still respectable) percentage of the +5 insightful posts were insightful. The polls were often interesting and especially likely to contain humorous posts--which is why it's especially annoying to see what hard times the polls have fallen on.
By the way, I actually did offer constructive criticisms a few times over the years, but mostly wound up in "dialogs" with Taco defensively explaining why he thought/. was good enough for his purposes, though he never clearly stated what those purposes were. I can't pretend I actually care much, though at least Taco pretends to care. It appears my best suggestions are often five to fifteen years too early, and I've gotten used to waiting.
This is/., remember? You're asking far too much to expect the so-called editors to use a spelling checker. Which came first,/. or the toilet?
(I'm just extra annoyed since I've been a professional technical editor and rewriter for some years. Now after the nameless morons get through playing their moderation games I'll probably be seriously pissed--but that's the primary reaction I ever have to/. these days. I'm convinced that/. is just another interesting idea run into the ground.)
Typical for the current mental state of/. Apparently only a single mention of "spam" and in an irrelevant sense.
Wouldn't it be nice if Google would use their so-called gatekeeper status to discourage spammers? Many options and many points of attack, but I'll just mention the nuclear one that is most convenient for Google: If an webhosting persists in spammer-friendly policies, then Google can stop indexing *ALL* of the websites hosted by that webhost. (Actually, even that wouldn't be sufficient for a webhosting service that only served spammers and had no legitimate customers--but it would be a good starting point.)
What I can't understand is how Google thinks they can compete with free. The spammers so-called advertising is "free" from Google's perspective, but it only destroys the value of all Web-based advertising, including the advertising that is supposed to sustain Google over the longer term.
The OP left out a number of interesting details. My first guess is that the school at which she graduated is some kind of Bible thumpers college. You can sort of guess she would have mentioned if it was Harvard--or even accredited to offer real degrees.
Actually it is quite possible for parents to do a good job of home schooling their children--but not very likely. The economics simply don't make sense. How much time do two parents have for their child. Now add in the time to master all of the subjects that should be taught. Now add in the time to catch up with the latest developments in each of those subjects. It just doesn't make sense as a rational division of labor.
To do it effectively, we need specialists in education, both in teaching techniques and in the subjects being taught. Economically, you want to use those experts with as many students as possible. In addition, advanced societies also need *ALL* of the citizens to be as well educated as possible. Public education makes good sense.
Of course, morons like the OP can skip a lot of those steps. For example, in most cases they don't have to study anything beyond the Bible--and that doesn't get updated, except for the latest spinning interpretations.
By the way, I actually think the German education system is well worth considering--but many students in Germany don't finish their studies until their late 20s. I've even known a number of people who managed to skip years or otherwise get ahead of their peers. In most cases it didn't work out well. There are a number of aspects of maturity...
Not sure if the OP is a crazed Bible thumper, but if so, I wish she would designate me as "foe"--along with all of her proudly ignorant peers. Yes, I still have plenty of regions of ignorance, but I'm never proud of them.
I'm not interested in your chickenshit cowardly abuse of anonymity. However, I am interested in the chickenshit cowardly abuse of anonymity by the moderator who modded your crap as insightful.
If the whole thing is a joke, it's too stupid and sick to be funny. It's not even up to troll level.
I read all of the so-called funny posts. This one was as witty as any = not so much.
Then I read all of the +5 insightful--and still not so much, though a couple of them were at least looking in the right direction. The most insightful one was actually a comment about abuse of/. moderation.
Next I searched for various relevant key words on the assumption the mods are bungled as usual, and still didn't find anything worth reading. That supports my growing belief that/. has already lost the funny and insightful people.
Anyway, to state the obvious: Microsoft sees the OS as a weapon, and of course you build weapons as big as possible. Too bad if the little old lady just wants a little car for church on Sundays. MS insists on giving her a mobile trench mortar with the aircraft carrier interface. MS design philosophy? Is there any more blood money to squeeze out of that turnip?
The OS should be small and lean--and helpful in finding the applications you need to install for what you actually want to do. MS will never voluntarily travel down that path.
Actually, I don't think the governor of Texas is in the top five for actual power in the state. They wanted a very weak executive, and they hard-coded things that way in the state's constitution. I think the railroad commissioner might be #2. Or maybe it was the agricultural commissioner?
Not that the/. people are interested, but I actually suggested multidimensional modding long ago, with feedback linkage to multidimensional karma. In that approach, I think there should not be a single dimension of "troll", but rather troll would probably best be represented as -polite -sincere -true. Actually, it would probably be necessary to examine the multidimensional space to recognize the regions that were associated with trolling behavior, but I definitely suspect that there are certain personality types involved, and that their trolling posts should therefore be clustered... For example, I think it would be possible to compose troll posts that would be +true by going far enough -polite.
Why wasn't/. interested? My current belief is that one of the primary coders is a kind of troll, and of course his primary concern is in gaming the system to sustain his leverage. Unfortunately, I already forgot who he is. (He isn't worth the time to check on, and I'd had to make a false accusation of someone else.)
(Actually, one of my friends was part of the team that recently got a strong patent on high dimension cluster analysis. Unfortunately, my math skills aren't nearly deep enough to follow what they did...)
Obviously, I meant the parenthetic comment to be "(and executive branch)", but my fingers were doing their things again. The legislative branch has mostly run away from their designated powers, and the judicial branch has been subverted by the deliberate executive nomination of extremists, preferably young extremists.
Here, here. My form of the same question would be:
Do you feel that the presidency (and legislative branch) has become too powerful relative to the other branches of government? If so, what would you do to weaken the presidency? If not, what would do to strengthen it?
Starting with the obligatory poor joke: The Russian spies who have been reading her Yahoo email are quite annoyed that someone else figured out her password. They were sure that no one else could have possibly discovered her original middle name...
On a serious note, the authenticity has already been attested to by at least one of the correspondents. There has also been independent verification that she and her staff deliberately used nonofficial email for official business to try to protect themselves from public disclosure laws.
At this point I'm only mildly curious about what she was hiding or planning to hide. The outrageous part is that she and her staff felt they needed to hide their government work from prying eyes in the first place. We don't need another Cheney, and especially not with an old and sickly McCain in Dubya's place.
It just doesn't hold that believing in some crazy religious BS entails being stupid in other areas.
The battle is not always to the strong, and the race is not always to the swift--but that's the way to bet. (Sorry, but I don't know the source, or even if I've gotten the quote exactly right.)
Ergo, I'd bed she has plenty of other strange beliefs. Actually it wouldn't be a fair bet based on what I have already learned about her in her brief period of being a national politician. So do you want to argue about how many is "plenty"?
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine there exists at least one serious vulnerability in Microsoft's Windows-family OSes. Imagine that at there exists at least one major adversary ready and willing to exploit such a vulnerability.
If you can imagine those two things, then you can imagine all of Microsoft's computers failing or being taken over at the same time. Right now I think that means about 90% of the computers in the world might potentially be affected by a single vulnerability. Several of the patches released this month seem to have that much coverage, since the underlying vulnerabilities spanned a number of Microsoft OSes.
In our highly networked and increasingly computer-dependent world, can you imagine how much economic damage that could cause? I really can't. At some point my imagination fails me.
Even if the odds are very small, how can we continue to live with that threat?
No, he's telling you that pudge is a moron--and I confirm that on my own experience with him. That fool is probably the #1 reason /. has been going to hell.
Please god, you fucking moron. Please designate me as your foe so I won't see any more of your god damned crap. I've seen quite enough of your presidential stupidity over the last going on eight years.
Actually, Lisp is quite similar to some natural language, depending on the value of "natural language". I'm actually thinking of Japanese, where a lot of thing just default backwards from English...
Reminds me of some C code I wrote after after I'd been working in Lisp for a while. Main piece involved two loops, nested and recursing, with one going forwards and the other going backwards. Very small piece of code, and it seemed to run quite well--though I never actually investigated the memory footprint. Probably horrendous. However, it seemed like the natural thing to do at the time for that sort of compressed image transmission.
In conclusion, Lisp gives you an interesting perspective on the solutions of many problems.
I feel like I'm being trolled into arguing with a fool. You mean you really think you know what you paid for when you fork over to Microsoft? Heck most of the time you can't even see the fork, as when Windows and Office were bundled in the machine. You get what they throw at you, including lots of features you probably aren't interested in--and all the bugs, too. Not that you or *ANYONE* on the outside can actually look at the source code.
Perhaps I should have emphasized the "charity" aspect in my description. Right now the OSS financial model is mostly an after the fact charity, and what I am proposing is a way to take some of the gambling out of the charitable aspects. I really do think there are some excellent coders who contribute OSS just because they're legitimately nice guys--but even those nice guys need to eat. There are also some wild-eyed hot-shot gold miners who are hoping to strike it rich. There are even a few out-and-out scam artists who are pulling stunts like reselling someone else's code.
To make the charity shares reverse auction work, it would actually be rather important to track the programming history of the participants. If someone is bidding for a software project, they normally have to demonstrate their competence and show that they can deliver the goods. This approach would actually allow quite a bit of wiggle room for young and unproven coders--but they wouldn't be able to keep wiggling for very long, while the contributors' risk would be constrained by the bidding parameters. Of course, an experienced programmer would have a big advantage in selling their projects by pointing at data like "5 completed projects and 20% repeat sponsors".
Here's a simplified example: The bid is to add a feature to an existing product, and the initial status is 100 shares at $10 per share, so it's supposed to be worth $1,000 in total. If 100 people like the idea, then it's funded, but if those hundred people then get a friend to join in, the price has dropped to $5 per share--and you've almost doubled the user base. You probably want to put a floor price under it and immediately close the auction and start work when the "bidding" for shares has reached that point.
Another aspect of the charity is that the OSS products then become shared by everyone and the developer has already been paid up front. I'd actually expect a good and experienced developer to bid at a high rate--and still sell the shares on the track record and reputation of prior products.
How about a financial model of bidding to develop software, functional modules, or related services such as security upgrades and support by 'selling shares'? The developers would specify what they propose to develop or offer and describe how much time and other resources would be involved--and thereby set a value on the project. People who wanted the proposed software would buy shares in the development project, and when they get enough people, then they commit, collect the money, and start doing the work.
Oh yeah, the "reverse auction" part. They shouldn't cut the auction off right away, but allow some extra time for getting more people to buy into the project. That would reduce the per share cost while also increasing the user base.
After the project is completed successfully, the shareholders should get some recognition, perhaps being listed on the project website. If the developers don't succeed in delivering what they promised, then they should be remembered unfavorably. Essentially the developers would be gambling their reputations.
Lots of variations possible. For example, a developer could release already developed software and set up the share auction for the next version or the ongoing support.
I highly appreciate a good joke. Your attempt was not, inane moderation notwithstanding.
I really don't feel like my sense of humor has changed that much over the years, even though I'd like to think I've learned a bit along the way. My main point is that a visit to /. used to find some humorous posts, and now it rarely does. Just to check, I went through all of the posts modded "funny" in this topic and in the comments to the current poll. I found one fat cow joke that was rather funny, two "+5, funny" comments that actually were slightly funny, and the rest were un peu drôle, at best.
Of course, another possibility is that the humor is still there and the moderation has simply become so bad that the humor doesn't show up with the search algorithm of looking for "funny".
No, it seems the professional researchers I work with highly value constructive criticism before they send papers to the referees. We're basically on the same team, but specialists in different areas. My pitch is that it's a LCD thing. First-class research with a third-class description does not get averaged to second class.
However, /. is not to be confused with a prestigious international conference.
I used to visit /. because a reasonable percentage of the +5 funny posts actually were funny. A smaller (but still respectable) percentage of the +5 insightful posts were insightful. The polls were often interesting and especially likely to contain humorous posts--which is why it's especially annoying to see what hard times the polls have fallen on.
By the way, I actually did offer constructive criticisms a few times over the years, but mostly wound up in "dialogs" with Taco defensively explaining why he thought /. was good enough for his purposes, though he never clearly stated what those purposes were. I can't pretend I actually care much, though at least Taco pretends to care. It appears my best suggestions are often five to fifteen years too early, and I've gotten used to waiting.
This is /., remember? You're asking far too much to expect the so-called editors to use a spelling checker. Which came first, /. or the toilet?
(I'm just extra annoyed since I've been a professional technical editor and rewriter for some years. Now after the nameless morons get through playing their moderation games I'll probably be seriously pissed--but that's the primary reaction I ever have to /. these days. I'm convinced that /. is just another interesting idea run into the ground.)
Typical for the current mental state of /. Apparently only a single mention of "spam" and in an irrelevant sense.
Wouldn't it be nice if Google would use their so-called gatekeeper status to discourage spammers? Many options and many points of attack, but I'll just mention the nuclear one that is most convenient for Google: If an webhosting persists in spammer-friendly policies, then Google can stop indexing *ALL* of the websites hosted by that webhost. (Actually, even that wouldn't be sufficient for a webhosting service that only served spammers and had no legitimate customers--but it would be a good starting point.)
What I can't understand is how Google thinks they can compete with free. The spammers so-called advertising is "free" from Google's perspective, but it only destroys the value of all Web-based advertising, including the advertising that is supposed to sustain Google over the longer term.
Please designate me as your foe. There are too many morons around here for me to remember to ignore you individually.
Please designateme as your foe. Too many morons to remember.
The OP left out a number of interesting details. My first guess is that the school at which she graduated is some kind of Bible thumpers college. You can sort of guess she would have mentioned if it was Harvard--or even accredited to offer real degrees.
Actually it is quite possible for parents to do a good job of home schooling their children--but not very likely. The economics simply don't make sense. How much time do two parents have for their child. Now add in the time to master all of the subjects that should be taught. Now add in the time to catch up with the latest developments in each of those subjects. It just doesn't make sense as a rational division of labor.
To do it effectively, we need specialists in education, both in teaching techniques and in the subjects being taught. Economically, you want to use those experts with as many students as possible. In addition, advanced societies also need *ALL* of the citizens to be as well educated as possible. Public education makes good sense.
Of course, morons like the OP can skip a lot of those steps. For example, in most cases they don't have to study anything beyond the Bible--and that doesn't get updated, except for the latest spinning interpretations.
By the way, I actually think the German education system is well worth considering--but many students in Germany don't finish their studies until their late 20s. I've even known a number of people who managed to skip years or otherwise get ahead of their peers. In most cases it didn't work out well. There are a number of aspects of maturity...
Not sure if the OP is a crazed Bible thumper, but if so, I wish she would designate me as "foe"--along with all of her proudly ignorant peers. Yes, I still have plenty of regions of ignorance, but I'm never proud of them.
I'm not interested in your chickenshit cowardly abuse of anonymity. However, I am interested in the chickenshit cowardly abuse of anonymity by the moderator who modded your crap as insightful.
If the whole thing is a joke, it's too stupid and sick to be funny. It's not even up to troll level.
I read all of the so-called funny posts. This one was as witty as any = not so much.
Then I read all of the +5 insightful--and still not so much, though a couple of them were at least looking in the right direction. The most insightful one was actually a comment about abuse of /. moderation.
Next I searched for various relevant key words on the assumption the mods are bungled as usual, and still didn't find anything worth reading. That supports my growing belief that /. has already lost the funny and insightful people.
Anyway, to state the obvious: Microsoft sees the OS as a weapon, and of course you build weapons as big as possible. Too bad if the little old lady just wants a little car for church on Sundays. MS insists on giving her a mobile trench mortar with the aircraft carrier interface. MS design philosophy? Is there any more blood money to squeeze out of that turnip?
The OS should be small and lean--and helpful in finding the applications you need to install for what you actually want to do. MS will never voluntarily travel down that path.
Comments on shitty mods are *NEVER* off topic, but thanks for helping to make my point, whoever you are, you spineless names piece of garbage.
Actually, I don't think the governor of Texas is in the top five for actual power in the state. They wanted a very weak executive, and they hard-coded things that way in the state's constitution. I think the railroad commissioner might be #2. Or maybe it was the agricultural commissioner?
Generally it's the negative mods that are abusing the anonymity, but occasionally there's a bit of positive abuse.
Not that the /. people are interested, but I actually suggested multidimensional modding long ago, with feedback linkage to multidimensional karma. In that approach, I think there should not be a single dimension of "troll", but rather troll would probably best be represented as -polite -sincere -true. Actually, it would probably be necessary to examine the multidimensional space to recognize the regions that were associated with trolling behavior, but I definitely suspect that there are certain personality types involved, and that their trolling posts should therefore be clustered... For example, I think it would be possible to compose troll posts that would be +true by going far enough -polite.
Why wasn't /. interested? My current belief is that one of the primary coders is a kind of troll, and of course his primary concern is in gaming the system to sustain his leverage. Unfortunately, I already forgot who he is. (He isn't worth the time to check on, and I'd had to make a false accusation of someone else.)
(Actually, one of my friends was part of the team that recently got a strong patent on high dimension cluster analysis. Unfortunately, my math skills aren't nearly deep enough to follow what they did...)
I must be more tired. Shouldn't that be "Hear, hear"?
Okay, that gives me the excuse for the old joke:
"I don't worry about talking to myself. I don't even mind it when I argue with myself. However, when I start losing those arguments, then I worry."
I must be tired.
Obviously, I meant the parenthetic comment to be "(and executive branch)", but my fingers were doing their things again. The legislative branch has mostly run away from their designated powers, and the judicial branch has been subverted by the deliberate executive nomination of extremists, preferably young extremists.
Here, here. My form of the same question would be:
Do you feel that the presidency (and legislative branch) has become too powerful relative to the other branches of government? If so, what would you do to weaken the presidency? If not, what would do to strengthen it?
Starting with the obligatory poor joke: The Russian spies who have been reading her Yahoo email are quite annoyed that someone else figured out her password. They were sure that no one else could have possibly discovered her original middle name...
On a serious note, the authenticity has already been attested to by at least one of the correspondents. There has also been independent verification that she and her staff deliberately used nonofficial email for official business to try to protect themselves from public disclosure laws.
At this point I'm only mildly curious about what she was hiding or planning to hide. The outrageous part is that she and her staff felt they needed to hide their government work from prying eyes in the first place. We don't need another Cheney, and especially not with an old and sickly McCain in Dubya's place.
The battle is not always to the strong, and the race is not always to the swift--but that's the way to bet. (Sorry, but I don't know the source, or even if I've gotten the quote exactly right.)
Ergo, I'd bed she has plenty of other strange beliefs. Actually it wouldn't be a fair bet based on what I have already learned about her in her brief period of being a national politician. So do you want to argue about how many is "plenty"?
Hey, stupid. I asked you relatively politely to designate me as a foe. I am *NOT* at all interested in exploring the limits of your stupidity.