People seem to assume that because there has historically been a dominating power, that there must always be one.
By way of fluffy example, take this: 1950s - Elvis Presley 1960s - The Beatles 1970s - ???
Record labels spent much of the 1970s trying to mint "the next Beatles". There was no obvious artist/group that could claim that title -- pop music diversified to the point where there were many big artists, but no dominating one.
I suspect that in the likely case the U.S. isn't still considered the big superpower by the end of this century, that there just won't be one. Barring a big shift in the geopolitical landscape, I suspect China, India, the E.U., and the U.S. (among others) will be big players in their own right. Of course, it would be entirely unprecedented for an entire century to pass without a big geopolitical shift, and I dare not predict what that would be, other than it'll probably be ugly.
Tanenbaum wrote (in TFA):The average user does not care about even more features or squeezing the last drop of performance out of the hardware, but cares a lot about having the computer work flawlessly 100% of the time and never crashing. Ask your grandma.
Interesting. My mom recently bought a computer for my grandma. Grandma doesn't have a problem with the computer crashing at all. Her secret? She never turns it on.
...to enforce their "copy right". The users can alert the copyright holders of potential violations, but unless the copyright holders take action, nothing happens.
...on who sent the email as to whether or not this is truly a significant event. While the person emailing may have a point (IANAL, so I dunno, the devil is in the messy details), it's a little melodramatic to make a big fuss out of this unless the person making the complaint is a copyright holder in the kernel and is issuing a cease and desist.
What IS surprising, is that there is no image - not even the obligatory 100-pixel-across thumbnail, which links to a lame-ass 200-pixel-across "Large Picture".
That qualifies as the missing link then, doesn't it.
Few people actually saw what happened live on television. The flight occurred during the early years of cable news, and although CNN was indeed carrying the launch when the shuttle was destroyed, all major broadcast stations had cut away -- only to quickly return with taped relays.
I admit I wasn't watching (I was off at school), but my mom was watching the Today show (Pacific Timezone) when it happened, and that's not consistent with how she told it. She said that it was a reasonably routine "let's cut away to Florida, where the first teacher in space is about to launch". She saw the "explosion" (or whatever actually happened), totally sans commentary. Then things went black, and eventually, some stunned newscasters came on.
Now, it may be that other timezones weren't running news shows, and so they didn't break coverage, but at least on the PST feed of Today, they showed it live.
If there were someone running an OpenID site that had an accessible but spammer-unfriendly login mechanism, that site could serve as an alternative login for visually-impaired users. That admittedly just punts the issue, but the nice thing about that solution is that if there was a trusted site that most blind people would feel comfortable registering with, that site could vet the visually impaired. The OpenID solution wouldn't have to be limited to the blind, but that seems the easiest bootstrapping mechanism, as the blind are probably more motivated to promote/use something like OpenID than people who are perfectly happy with Captcha.
Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Real employee and still own stock. However, no one is paying me to say this.
Subscription music occupies an interesting niche for the way I listen to music. I've got several levels of music: 1. Stuff I need to own: this is the music I can listen to a lot, and not get sick of it quickly. Even when I do get sick of it, I can put it away for a while, come back in 6 months and like it again. 2. Stuff it's nice to own: good tunes that I may or may not get sick of, but I want to be able to listen to wherever I want 3. Stuff I'd never buy (for much), but still have fun listening to: I have a very large collection of vinyl, most of which I picked up in the late 1980s/early 1990s for 99c an album when everyone was moving to CD. I would have/never/ paid full price for a lot of it, but it is fun to be able to pull it out. Still, it's a PITA to deal with vinyl. 4. Novelty items that I listen to once or twice 5. Stuff that I never knew I'd want, but if I could listen to it in the course of the day, I'd buy.
Rhapsody is not a good choice for #1 or #2. However, I've found it great for #3-#5. I've discovered a lot of music that I never would have without Rhapsody, since it really encourages exploration. I can grab my tattered Billboard Top 40 book, and look for old sludgey hits and occassionally have one of those "oh my god...I remember/that/" moments. Generally, those songs are not the type of songs that I then get all uppity about needing to own.
Since I use Linux on my desktop, I've had to use my wife's Windows box to listen to/use Rhapsody, which irritates me, but I'll survive. The bad news is that it doesn't look like there's/quite/ enough there yet for me to switch over to using it primarily on Linux (unless I'm missing something...I need to access my private playlists), but I understand it'll get there.
I would much rather see them make the point in a clear, concise and conspicuous fashion than have an article resembling an Oscar speech. It's rather ironic that you are asking them to acknowledge Stallman's ownership of the ideas they are presenting. Most people don't understand that this is a problem yet; let the fact that they have a problem sink in before evangelizing the solution.
Time Warner "acquired" AOL in an all-stock deal, and now has something that's only worth a fraction of the price at the merger. I can understand why the TW execs and stockholders are a little skittish about accepting stock in lieu of cash.
Why is it that you consider an all-volunteer effort inherently more robust? Key volunteers can have life changes (job change, health, etc) that cause their involvement to change. VC projects have the benefit of providing dedicated staff, professional project management, business development and marketing to keep momentum alive.
It's harder to enforce separation without something like Smarty. Disclaimer: I haven't used Smarty, but I've used a homegrown templating system with PHP.
It's nice to be able to give the people responsible for content and layout access to the files of the website, without giving them access to the code that actually contacts the database, has access to server globals, etc. You can enforce that sort of separation via policy rather than code, but if its only policy, there's a temptation to bend the rules, especially if you have a page designer who knows just enough PHP to be dangerous. Better to have a template system that doesn't give raw database access, and then have a backend that exposes the pieces of database data to the designers that they need.
Good to hear from a source of authority on the subject. Security scanners aren't my thing, so other than the basic licensing issues, I don't know the qualitative difference between Sourcefire and Nessus. However, if the Debian maintainer (ehem) is less than enthusiastic about Nessus, that's a pretty strong statement about the future prognosis of "Gnessus".
Re:nessus is dead, long live gnessus?
on
Nessus Closes Source
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
> So a project which was getting very little contribution from the OSS community is going to be forked into a different project that will get all sorts of support from the OSS community?
Yup. Funny how that works. It happened that way with SourceForge/GForge. It sorta happened with NCSA httpd -> Apache. Probably a handful of other examples out there.
It'll probably evolve from the needs of the Debian package maintainer needing an "upstream" for security patches, etc. Or maybe Gentoo, Fedora, etc. You get the idea. I use Debian as an example because of they'll need something that continues to satisfy the DFSG. Thus, if Nessus is still going to remain, it'll eventually need to be updated.
This house isn't even the cheapest I found that meets/exceeds the spec, at $85k. However, I took something from near the middle of the list to avoid trotting out this 5 bedroom house selling for $35k and claiming it was representitive.
I agree: "hacker" and "cracker" are synonymous, despite what ye olde hackers believe. It seems that this happened so long ago, that it's way beyond quixotic to keep up the fight now:
Brad Templeton wrote: It is with regret that I have to say that this fight has been lost. "Hacker" and "computer criminal" are now equated in the public mind, to the extent that this use of "hacker" now appears in newspaper headlines. The German Spy breakins confirm this in papers all over the world.
The article is really a reasonably interesting puff piece for SAS. While SAS seems like a very cool company (I'm guessing Google modeled themselves partly after SAS), the article stresses the reasons why you should offer lots of intrinsic perks (such as a ton of onsite services, such as medical staff, massages, dry cleaning, haircuts, and auto detailing), and doesn't talk much at all about avoiding extrinsic perks. So, if you are hoping to find the juicy bits about why stock options aren't very effective, well, don't look here.
Incidently, if you saw the 60 Minutes story about SAS, you can probably save yourself the time of reading this article. There doesn't appear to be much that wasn't covered on 60 Minutes. However, if you haven't heard of SAS, it is a very interesting summary. Perhaps this is a more accurate teaser, quoted straight from the article:
Based in Cary, North Carolina, SAS has been in the top 20 of Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list every year it's been published. The employee turnover rate hovers between 3% and 5%, compared with the industry average of nearly 20%. The governments and global corporations that rely on SAS's sophisticated business-intelligence software are overwhelmingly satisfied: The subscription renewal rate is an astounding 98%.
Amazon may actually be in violation of Cendant's patents. If you think that Cendant's patents are obvious bullshit, then do you think that Amazon should cheerily take it on the chin, or do you think they should fight back?
This is quite possibly very different than the SCO case. It would appear that SCO has little legal ground to stand on, let alone moral ground. So, IBM might very well be effective in asking the suit be dropped. If you believe that business practice patents are bullshit (I do), then you probably believe that Cendant doesn't have moral grounds to sue Amazon, but they may very well have legal grounds. That makes the defense very, very different.
My first thought was that this seems like a classic case of defensive patent action, and is fair game in my book. Cendant was the company that fired first when they hauled Amazon into court, so it's only fair that Amazon return the favor.
However, it appears that Cendent withdrew its lawsuit in February, so I'm not sure what to make of it. I suppose that if someone draws a gun on you, and then says, "heh heh...just kidding", you wouldn't necessarily be inclined to stop reaching for your own gun. So I can't say that I can muster a lot of pity for Cendant.
Cendant essentially forced Amazon to look in their patent portfolio to find what they could nail Cendant to the wall with. After having done all of the expensive homework, it seems that Amazon needed to at least recoup those costs.
The author is envisioning a utopian world where/everyone/ sets aside their differences and comes together to build something great.
It never happens that way. What typically happens is accidental successes, such as the success of Linux over Hurd. Someone comes up with a better way of working, whether intentional or not (e.g. Linus and "the bazaar"), and it wins in the marketplace of ideas.
While there's a lot of distributions out there, I'd argue that the important benefits of consolidation are being recognized. Many are derivatives of other distros, with Debian being one of the most popular starting points. Alternate distributions serve as a development ground for mainstream distributions - e.g. there's a lot of great hardware detection code from Knoppix that is getting pulled into many other distributions. The "yum" component of Fedora is pulled out of Yellow Dog.
I imagine after Linux goes mainstream, there will be one or two dominant distributions. At least one of them will probably have a very "standard" feel to it, i.e. it'll be hard to imagine that the desire for a "community" distribution will ever go away (hence the new trend toward foundations such as Fedora and Ubuntu foundations). I'm just not going to make any bets on who comes out on top, though I am writing this from a laptop with Ubuntu on it.;-)
When Apple switches to Intel, it'll likely become practical for Linspire and Xandros to make their distributions work on Apple hardware, since it'll be Linux/x86 (which they already support) whereas now they would have to maintain and test a completely separate set of binaries. Their market just got a little bigger.
The same holds true for ISVs. It's a huge pain to have to maintain separate binaries for Linux/PPC; for most proprietary software makers, this type of thing falls below the cut line. However, it's a constant source of irritation, because there are enough Linux/PPC users out there (especially Linux on iBook/PowerBook) that it is a tough call. Once Apple makes the switch to Intel, a single binary should be able to work on Apple hardware as well as cheap beige boxes.
Slashdot Mirror
People seem to assume that because there has historically been a dominating power, that there must always be one.
By way of fluffy example, take this:
1950s - Elvis Presley
1960s - The Beatles
1970s - ???
Record labels spent much of the 1970s trying to mint "the next Beatles". There was no obvious artist/group that could claim that title -- pop music diversified to the point where there were many big artists, but no dominating one.
I suspect that in the likely case the U.S. isn't still considered the big superpower by the end of this century, that there just won't be one. Barring a big shift in the geopolitical landscape, I suspect China, India, the E.U., and the U.S. (among others) will be big players in their own right. Of course, it would be entirely unprecedented for an entire century to pass without a big geopolitical shift, and I dare not predict what that would be, other than it'll probably be ugly.
For the record, I've opposed Bush since the 2000 election. I was a McCain man ...
So does that mean you voted for McCain in the general election in 2000?
Somebody can enligth me about Andy Tanenbaum ?
Read Tanenbaum's Wikipedia bio.
Tanenbaum wrote (in TFA):The average user does not care about even more features or squeezing the last drop of performance out of the hardware, but cares a lot about having the computer work flawlessly 100% of the time and never crashing. Ask your grandma.
Interesting. My mom recently bought a computer for my grandma. Grandma doesn't have a problem with the computer crashing at all. Her secret? She never turns it on.
...to enforce their "copy right". The users can alert the copyright holders of potential violations, but unless the copyright holders take action, nothing happens.
Only copyright holders have standing to bring suit.
...on who sent the email as to whether or not this is truly a significant event. While the person emailing may have a point (IANAL, so I dunno, the devil is in the messy details), it's a little melodramatic to make a big fuss out of this unless the person making the complaint is a copyright holder in the kernel and is issuing a cease and desist.
What IS surprising, is that there is no image - not even the obligatory 100-pixel-across thumbnail, which links to a lame-ass 200-pixel-across "Large Picture".
That qualifies as the missing link then, doesn't it.
I admit I wasn't watching (I was off at school), but my mom was watching the Today show (Pacific Timezone) when it happened, and that's not consistent with how she told it. She said that it was a reasonably routine "let's cut away to Florida, where the first teacher in space is about to launch". She saw the "explosion" (or whatever actually happened), totally sans commentary. Then things went black, and eventually, some stunned newscasters came on.
Now, it may be that other timezones weren't running news shows, and so they didn't break coverage, but at least on the PST feed of Today, they showed it live.
If there were someone running an OpenID site that had an accessible but spammer-unfriendly login mechanism, that site could serve as an alternative login for visually-impaired users. That admittedly just punts the issue, but the nice thing about that solution is that if there was a trusted site that most blind people would feel comfortable registering with, that site could vet the visually impaired. The OpenID solution wouldn't have to be limited to the blind, but that seems the easiest bootstrapping mechanism, as the blind are probably more motivated to promote/use something like OpenID than people who are perfectly happy with Captcha.
Rob
Disclaimer: I'm an ex-Real employee and still own stock. However, no one is paying me to say this.
/never/ paid full price for a lot of it, but it is fun to be able to pull it out. Still, it's a PITA to deal with vinyl.
/that/" moments. Generally, those songs are not the type of songs that I then get all uppity about needing to own.
/quite/ enough there yet for me to switch over to using it primarily on Linux (unless I'm missing something...I need to access my private playlists), but I understand it'll get there.
Subscription music occupies an interesting niche for the way I listen to music. I've got several levels of music:
1. Stuff I need to own: this is the music I can listen to a lot, and not get sick of it quickly. Even when I do get sick of it, I can put it away for a while, come back in 6 months and like it again.
2. Stuff it's nice to own: good tunes that I may or may not get sick of, but I want to be able to listen to wherever I want
3. Stuff I'd never buy (for much), but still have fun listening to: I have a very large collection of vinyl, most of which I picked up in the late 1980s/early 1990s for 99c an album when everyone was moving to CD. I would have
4. Novelty items that I listen to once or twice
5. Stuff that I never knew I'd want, but if I could listen to it in the course of the day, I'd buy.
Rhapsody is not a good choice for #1 or #2. However, I've found it great for #3-#5. I've discovered a lot of music that I never would have without Rhapsody, since it really encourages exploration. I can grab my tattered Billboard Top 40 book, and look for old sludgey hits and occassionally have one of those "oh my god...I remember
Since I use Linux on my desktop, I've had to use my wife's Windows box to listen to/use Rhapsody, which irritates me, but I'll survive. The bad news is that it doesn't look like there's
Rob
Perhaps you should read my post:
"Most people don't understand that this is a problem yet; let the fact that they have a problem sink in before evangelizing the solution."
Incidently, do you have any idea what my position is vis a vis Stallman? I didn't think so.
I would much rather see them make the point in a clear, concise and conspicuous fashion than have an article resembling an Oscar speech. It's rather ironic that you are asking them to acknowledge Stallman's ownership of the ideas they are presenting. Most people don't understand that this is a problem yet; let the fact that they have a problem sink in before evangelizing the solution.
Time Warner "acquired" AOL in an all-stock deal, and now has something that's only worth a fraction of the price at the merger. I can understand why the TW execs and stockholders are a little skittish about accepting stock in lieu of cash.
Why is it that you consider an all-volunteer effort inherently more robust? Key volunteers can have life changes (job change, health, etc) that cause their involvement to change. VC projects have the benefit of providing dedicated staff, professional project management, business development and marketing to keep momentum alive.
It's harder to enforce separation without something like Smarty. Disclaimer: I haven't used Smarty, but I've used a homegrown templating system with PHP.
It's nice to be able to give the people responsible for content and layout access to the files of the website, without giving them access to the code that actually contacts the database, has access to server globals, etc. You can enforce that sort of separation via policy rather than code, but if its only policy, there's a temptation to bend the rules, especially if you have a page designer who knows just enough PHP to be dangerous. Better to have a template system that doesn't give raw database access, and then have a backend that exposes the pieces of database data to the designers that they need.
EBay is acquiring the payment processing unit of VeriSign. The headline on this story (as of this writing) is HORRIBLY misleading.
Good to hear from a source of authority on the subject. Security scanners aren't my thing, so other than the basic licensing issues, I don't know the qualitative difference between Sourcefire and Nessus. However, if the Debian maintainer (ehem) is less than enthusiastic about Nessus, that's a pretty strong statement about the future prognosis of "Gnessus".
> So a project which was getting very little contribution from the OSS community is going to be forked into a different project that will get all sorts of support from the OSS community?
Yup. Funny how that works. It happened that way with SourceForge/GForge. It sorta happened with NCSA httpd -> Apache. Probably a handful of other examples out there.
It'll probably evolve from the needs of the Debian package maintainer needing an "upstream" for security patches, etc. Or maybe Gentoo, Fedora, etc. You get the idea. I use Debian as an example because of they'll need something that continues to satisfy the DFSG. Thus, if Nessus is still going to remain, it'll eventually need to be updated.
This house isn't even the cheapest I found that meets/exceeds the spec, at $85k. However, I took something from near the middle of the list to avoid trotting out this 5 bedroom house selling for $35k and claiming it was representitive.
I agree: "hacker" and "cracker" are synonymous, despite what ye olde hackers believe. It seems that this happened so long ago, that it's way beyond quixotic to keep up the fight now:
Check out this thread, dated March 7, 1989:
http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/8.36.html#subj3
Brad Templeton wrote: It is with regret that I have to say that this fight has been lost. "Hacker" and "computer criminal" are now equated in the public mind, to the extent that this use of "hacker" now appears in newspaper headlines. The German Spy breakins confirm this in papers all over the world.
Rob
The article is really a reasonably interesting puff piece for SAS. While SAS seems like a very cool company (I'm guessing Google modeled themselves partly after SAS), the article stresses the reasons why you should offer lots of intrinsic perks (such as a ton of onsite services, such as medical staff, massages, dry cleaning, haircuts, and auto detailing), and doesn't talk much at all about avoiding extrinsic perks. So, if you are hoping to find the juicy bits about why stock options aren't very effective, well, don't look here.
Incidently, if you saw the 60 Minutes story about SAS, you can probably save yourself the time of reading this article. There doesn't appear to be much that wasn't covered on 60 Minutes. However, if you haven't heard of SAS, it is a very interesting summary. Perhaps this is a more accurate teaser, quoted straight from the article:
Based in Cary, North Carolina, SAS has been in the top 20 of Fortune's 100 Best Companies to Work For list every year it's been published. The employee turnover rate hovers between 3% and 5%, compared with the industry average of nearly 20%. The governments and global corporations that rely on SAS's sophisticated business-intelligence software are overwhelmingly satisfied: The subscription renewal rate is an astounding 98%.
Rob
Oh, yes, you're right. Amazon should do exactly what IBM is doing to defend against SCO. Oh wait, they are.
Amazon may actually be in violation of Cendant's patents. If you think that Cendant's patents are obvious bullshit, then do you think that Amazon should cheerily take it on the chin, or do you think they should fight back?
This is quite possibly very different than the SCO case. It would appear that SCO has little legal ground to stand on, let alone moral ground. So, IBM might very well be effective in asking the suit be dropped. If you believe that business practice patents are bullshit (I do), then you probably believe that Cendant doesn't have moral grounds to sue Amazon, but they may very well have legal grounds. That makes the defense very, very different.
Rob
My first thought was that this seems like a classic case of defensive patent action, and is fair game in my book. Cendant was the company that fired first when they hauled Amazon into court, so it's only fair that Amazon return the favor.
However, it appears that Cendent withdrew its lawsuit in February, so I'm not sure what to make of it. I suppose that if someone draws a gun on you, and then says, "heh heh...just kidding", you wouldn't necessarily be inclined to stop reaching for your own gun. So I can't say that I can muster a lot of pity for Cendant.
Cendant essentially forced Amazon to look in their patent portfolio to find what they could nail Cendant to the wall with. After having done all of the expensive homework, it seems that Amazon needed to at least recoup those costs.
Rob
The author is envisioning a utopian world where /everyone/ sets aside their differences and comes together to build something great.
;-)
It never happens that way. What typically happens is accidental successes, such as the success of Linux over Hurd. Someone comes up with a better way of working, whether intentional or not (e.g. Linus and "the bazaar"), and it wins in the marketplace of ideas.
While there's a lot of distributions out there, I'd argue that the important benefits of consolidation are being recognized. Many are derivatives of other distros, with Debian being one of the most popular starting points. Alternate distributions serve as a development ground for mainstream distributions - e.g. there's a lot of great hardware detection code from Knoppix that is getting pulled into many other distributions. The "yum" component of Fedora is pulled out of Yellow Dog.
I imagine after Linux goes mainstream, there will be one or two dominant distributions. At least one of them will probably have a very "standard" feel to it, i.e. it'll be hard to imagine that the desire for a "community" distribution will ever go away (hence the new trend toward foundations such as Fedora and Ubuntu foundations). I'm just not going to make any bets on who comes out on top, though I am writing this from a laptop with Ubuntu on it.
Rob
When Apple switches to Intel, it'll likely become practical for Linspire and Xandros to make their distributions work on Apple hardware, since it'll be Linux/x86 (which they already support) whereas now they would have to maintain and test a completely separate set of binaries. Their market just got a little bigger.
The same holds true for ISVs. It's a huge pain to have to maintain separate binaries for Linux/PPC; for most proprietary software makers, this type of thing falls below the cut line. However, it's a constant source of irritation, because there are enough Linux/PPC users out there (especially Linux on iBook/PowerBook) that it is a tough call. Once Apple makes the switch to Intel, a single binary should be able to work on Apple hardware as well as cheap beige boxes.
Rob