I think it could actually be argued that crappy software helps the economy since software is not regulated by the government. That way, you have LOTS of companies paying lots of people to either fix problems, or create a new product that works better. It's called competition, and it's been occuring for hundreds of years before Microsoft came into existence. It's just taking longer to weed things out than in other industries.
Ummm, might be good for the software industry's economy, but it is without a doubt quite WASTEFUL for the rest of the economy, which could certainly put money to better use than flushing it down the bugfix/upgrade blackhole.
Haven't seen the movie, but I can't say that I plan to, either, especially after reading
this StarTribune review...
quote:
Wilson and Hackman certainly should be able to relate to Burnett's plight: They're stuck in a movie from which they need to be rescued. But no help is coming, so they push on like good soldiers.
Get some perspective and learn to keep your hands to yourself. You have no legal or moral recourse if you get busted intruding on someone elses property, regardless of how lax their security is.
Well, I haven't broken into (or even trespassed) into any systems, and I'm *NOT* making excuses for those who do. I'm just trying to point out that when actual damage occurs from these break-ins (ie, l33tH4x0r stumbles across thousands of credit-card numbers), *SOME* of the blame must be put on the negligence of the computer's owner, at least where it can be determined that not even minimal due effort was made to secure things.
Basicly the laws should be equilivant for what they do and to make the laws easer what ever they due remotly they should be charges as if they broke in to the building and did the same info to your records. With the extra charge of bandwith used.
Amen. And, how 'bout we make the maroons who fail to take *reasonable* steps to secure their computers (ie, at least keep up with patches), responsible for their own messes? Is that too much to ask?
i wonder how much sympathy the HALF MILLION CHILDREN that died from '91-'98 because of US sanctions (famine, disease) would have for us.
If Saddam in Iraq would start spending the money his country does get from oil on food and medicines for his people, instead of new castles and weapons, there wouldn't be anywhere near the suffering that there currently is, and the sanctions would likely be dropped quickly as well (though that has been tied to them allowing UN inspectors back into the country).
UPS is pretty notorious for breaking monitors and other fragile stuff around here. Company policy has been to use FedEx exclusively for anything breakable for a couple of years now. Even when you have insured with UPS, they don't seem to make it very simple to collect.
I've yet to receive any assistance from AT&T's tech-support -- I'll get a blinking WAN connect-light (which means the modem ain't talking to their network), and invariably, they don't want to let me just report a freakin' outage, they want to talk me through reinstalling my network drivers. (Uhm, my modem's connected to a freebsd natbox). Gah, they drive me nuts. Thankfully, the service is awesome 97% of the time.
Geez, this has been hashed out repeatedly over on rec.photo.digital. (Though, to my knowledge, there's never been a real consensus [but hey, that's usenet]).
I agree about the archiving issue, however. While actual prints do have a limited lifespan, that lifespan is assuredly longer than the lifespan of CDROM media being a widely-used format, which is what most people are currently using to back up their photos. I'm not saying that the cd's themselves will decay prematurely, just that it's silly to presume that cdrom devices will be around in 30 years.
I hope that some organization comes up with a service that will let me send my datafiles that I wish to preserve long-term (via 'net, cdrom, whatever is current), and do the hard part of data preservation and backups for me.
I know in the Minneapolis region Qwest sold all their DSL customers to MSN, but gave the people running non-MS operating systems a delay in the switch -- presumably to give them time to switch over to a competitor. Of course, everyone knows that cancelling their Qwest DSL and starting it new at another ISP is fraught with peril.
"You know the Panasonic or Yamaha CD burners you want to get this Christmas? Well, I've got news for you - save your money. After Christmas all new releases will be encoded and you won't be able to burn your own - and it's about time"
Bah, CloneCD will do let you make copies without a hitch. What you won't be able to do, is rip the.wav files directly. But then, if you are interested in more than just a backup of the disk itself (ie, tunes for your portable mp3 player, or just reduced space on your hard disk), you can still, (and ALWAYS, I might add) go the old-fashioned route and record the meat-space analog sound-waves.
But the people reading this have a much better than average grasp of these tech issues.
Well, you're asking a software geek, but I'm not about to let my lack of expertise hold me back!;-)
I've been reading and listening to just about everything I possibly can on this, and the more I learn, the more hopeless it looks. Sure, maybe we can take out most of al-Qaida, but then what? I am gladdened to see the US govm't responding in ways that are not strictly military, I believe that's necessary. But, I worry that crazies around the world with grudges have seen that they have the power to cause great harm to just about any nation they choose. To truly combat that will require privacy for none.:-(
Oh, I also like how Theo sounds like a jerk, as usual, LOL.
I don't get it (and I've seen a couple of comments slamming Theo already). Sure, he can write some pretty flammible stuff at times, but none of his answers seemed remotely "jerk"-like.
That's the sad part, that there really isn't anything new -- everyone KNOWS what needs to be done, but so many people just don't follow through.
(/me hangs head in shame at not having patched his freebsd box against the telnet exploit in time. Luckily, it was just a personal mess-around project, so recovery was just a matter of re-install, and it didn't appear that anything truly malicious had been done).
Another website with not only tips on how to plan/organize your party, but a big list of parties in towns that might be near you, is
www.lanparty.com.
Personally, I'm getting too old to cart my 'puter across town and hook it up just to play games, but I sure had fun at the parties I did make it to.
What programs would I seriously want to run that are of FreeBSD fame only? None that I know of.
Good point, but I think the point of this exercise was that FreeBSD ports are a handy utility for installing software packages from source, handling all sorts of crazy dependencies for you automagically. The only things I'm not crazy about are: the port-maintainers sometimes pick some pretty weird locations to store things, and: things can get pretty confusing when you upgrade.
You should also run mergemaster after make installworld, or else you'll get weird errors (like the PAM errors from 4.2->4.3)
Mergemaster fscked my box over real well going from 4.0 to 4.1 (I can't say that I truly knew what I was doing back then), and ever since, I've religiously avoided mergemaster.
FTP upgrade? Use cvsup, it fetches all the changed source files for you.
When it's done, you'll want to take a look at your/usr/src/UPDATING file, which will describe the significant things that have changed.
After that, it's just a matter of doing a:
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or whichever kernel you are building, if you have a custom one)
make installworld
make installkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or whatever)
reboot
When will people decide to make certain iso's small enough for dial-up users to be able to download it in a reasonable period of time (say 24 hours) These iso's are getting far too huge for most of us to dl anymore where some can reach as much as a gig or so. Because of this I've taken to buying certain distro's, but when does this 'freeware' become costly, the moment that they start getting rediculously huge.
Well, you could just download the boot floppies, and then install from them (it'll only pull down the stuff you actually intend to install, so you can say skip X and save a ton of downloaded code).
And, once you've got FreeBSD installed, as long as you stay relatively current (very easy to do), you won't ever need to do a full reinstall again!
They should either offer: a free cd burn (either they provide the cd, or you send them one of yours), or put it in stores and have them give the email of people who want their software ( these people have pre-signed up on their site and they submit it to the store along with a shipment). I'd prefer the first one myself, of sending them a cd. It would cost maybe 66 cents to send a cd back and forth, vs the $20+ people charge. Anyways feel free to flame.
I'm sure you won't find any volunteers on the 'BSD team willing to open snail-mailed cdroms of varying characteristics (rated 2x/4x/8x/etc), pop them individually into a cd-burner, start the burn, verify, and send them back. That'd be a huge pain-in-da-butt.
Thanks, that was interesting. (Just spent a really long time reading that article by the Iranian film-maker -- man, that entire region is a complete mess).
I highly doubt that any law/regulation on encryption could ever work (well, the ones who'd abide by said law *probably* wouldn't be the ones to worry about anyways).
That said, Carnivore gives the authorities a very easy way to determine those people who *are* using encryption (seems reasonable to me, it's a public internet, no?) and then use that information to: obtain warrants, flag them for further investigation, etc... Seems like the only realistic way to go about things.
Of course, I'm saying this from the vantage point of someone who still trusts his government to do the right thing (most of the time, anyways). Am I too naive?
Written back in '98 apparently, it gives some good insight into plans for dealing with this sort of thing -- I suspect that the "monitoring" aspect of it will get a huge boost from yesterday's attacks.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it could actually be argued that crappy software helps the economy since software is not regulated by the government. That way, you have LOTS of companies paying lots of people to either fix problems, or create a new product that works better. It's called competition, and it's been occuring for hundreds of years before Microsoft came into existence. It's just taking longer to weed things out than in other industries.
Ummm, might be good for the software industry's economy, but it is without a doubt quite WASTEFUL for the rest of the economy, which could certainly put money to better use than flushing it down the bugfix/upgrade blackhole.
quote:
Get some perspective and learn to keep your hands to yourself. You have no legal or moral recourse if you get busted intruding on someone elses property, regardless of how lax their security is.
Well, I haven't broken into (or even trespassed) into any systems, and I'm *NOT* making excuses for those who do. I'm just trying to point out that when actual damage occurs from these break-ins (ie, l33tH4x0r stumbles across thousands of credit-card numbers), *SOME* of the blame must be put on the negligence of the computer's owner, at least where it can be determined that not even minimal due effort was made to secure things.
Basicly the laws should be equilivant for what they do and to make the laws easer what ever they due remotly they should be charges as if they broke in to the building and did the same info to your records. With the extra charge of bandwith used.
Amen. And, how 'bout we make the maroons who fail to take *reasonable* steps to secure their computers (ie, at least keep up with patches), responsible for their own messes? Is that too much to ask?
i wonder how much sympathy the HALF MILLION CHILDREN that died from '91-'98 because of US sanctions (famine, disease) would have for us.
If Saddam in Iraq would start spending the money his country does get from oil on food and medicines for his people, instead of new castles and weapons, there wouldn't be anywhere near the suffering that there currently is, and the sanctions would likely be dropped quickly as well (though that has been tied to them allowing UN inspectors back into the country).
UPS is pretty notorious for breaking monitors and other fragile stuff around here. Company policy has been to use FedEx exclusively for anything breakable for a couple of years now. Even when you have insured with UPS, they don't seem to make it very simple to collect.
I want to know what ideas you all can come up with for a stronger one.
I think the best suggestion that I've come across is this one:
Force microsoft to open up their API, both for networking protocols *and* office documents.
I've yet to receive any assistance from AT&T's tech-support -- I'll get a blinking WAN connect-light (which means the modem ain't talking to their network), and invariably, they don't want to let me just report a freakin' outage, they want to talk me through reinstalling my network drivers. (Uhm, my modem's connected to a freebsd natbox). Gah, they drive me nuts. Thankfully, the service is awesome 97% of the time.
Geez, this has been hashed out repeatedly over on rec.photo.digital. (Though, to my knowledge, there's never been a real consensus [but hey, that's usenet]).
I agree about the archiving issue, however. While actual prints do have a limited lifespan, that lifespan is assuredly longer than the lifespan of CDROM media being a widely-used format, which is what most people are currently using to back up their photos. I'm not saying that the cd's themselves will decay prematurely, just that it's silly to presume that cdrom devices will be around in 30 years.
I hope that some organization comes up with a service that will let me send my datafiles that I wish to preserve long-term (via 'net, cdrom, whatever is current), and do the hard part of data preservation and backups for me.
I know in the Minneapolis region Qwest sold all their DSL customers to MSN, but gave the people running non-MS operating systems a delay in the switch -- presumably to give them time to switch over to a competitor. Of course, everyone knows that cancelling their Qwest DSL and starting it new at another ISP is fraught with peril.
I've been reading and listening to just about everything I possibly can on this, and the more I learn, the more hopeless it looks. Sure, maybe we can take out most of al-Qaida, but then what? I am gladdened to see the US govm't responding in ways that are not strictly military, I believe that's necessary. But, I worry that crazies around the world with grudges have seen that they have the power to cause great harm to just about any nation they choose. To truly combat that will require privacy for none.
That's the sad part, that there really isn't anything new -- everyone KNOWS what needs to be done, but so many people just don't follow through. (/me hangs head in shame at not having patched his freebsd box against the telnet exploit in time. Luckily, it was just a personal mess-around project, so recovery was just a matter of re-install, and it didn't appear that anything truly malicious had been done).
Another website with not only tips on how to plan/organize your party, but a big list of parties in towns that might be near you, is www.lanparty.com.
Personally, I'm getting too old to cart my 'puter across town and hook it up just to play games, but I sure had fun at the parties I did make it to.
An equally non-informative article is here: http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20010926/sc/scienc e_quantum_dc_1.html
/me hopes they perfect teleporting that delicious Danish beer real soon now! :-)
FTP upgrade? Use cvsup, it fetches all the changed source files for you.
/usr/src/UPDATING file, which will describe the significant things that have changed.
When it's done, you'll want to take a look at your
After that, it's just a matter of doing a:
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or whichever kernel you are building, if you have a custom one)
make installworld
make installkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or whatever)
reboot
Well, you could just download the boot floppies, and then install from them (it'll only pull down the stuff you actually intend to install, so you can say skip X and save a ton of downloaded code).
And, once you've got FreeBSD installed, as long as you stay relatively current (very easy to do), you won't ever need to do a full reinstall again!
I'm sure you won't find any volunteers on the 'BSD team willing to open snail-mailed cdroms of varying characteristics (rated 2x/4x/8x/etc), pop them individually into a cd-burner, start the burn, verify, and send them back. That'd be a huge pain-in-da-butt.
Thanks, that was interesting. (Just spent a really long time reading that article by the Iranian film-maker -- man, that entire region is a complete mess).
I highly doubt that any law/regulation on encryption could ever work (well, the ones who'd abide by said law *probably* wouldn't be the ones to worry about anyways).
That said, Carnivore gives the authorities a very easy way to determine those people who *are* using encryption (seems reasonable to me, it's a public internet, no?) and then use that information to: obtain warrants, flag them for further investigation, etc... Seems like the only realistic way to go about things.
Of course, I'm saying this from the vantage point of someone who still trusts his government to do the right thing (most of the time, anyways). Am I too naive?
Found this link on Slate:
e rrorism.htm
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/visions/Publications/t
Written back in '98 apparently, it gives some good insight into plans for dealing with this sort of thing -- I suspect that the "monitoring" aspect of it will get a huge boost from yesterday's attacks.