Um, any reason the logo is of a pentagram and satanic goat. Just wondering...you'd think a standard medieval icon like a warrior or wizard or castle or something would do.
1) The victory is that the problem was found. It was found quickly, before any damage was done, and it was found expressly because a member of the community had free and easy access to the code.
Is there really a difference between this and a company coder finding the bug? There is something to be said for a constant number of eyeballs being paid to stare at and stress the code all day long. A million open source developers won't help much if any one of them doesn't analyse the code for more than say, 30 minutes, or whatever their personal interest level or attention span is. The difference is purely philosophical.
The gentleman who found the flaw frets that "Anybody else who's viewed the source code could have found the vulnerability and been exploiting it all along," but this ignores the community-spiritedness of opensource as well as the loose lips of most crackers. Things like this go public. And. ..
Well thank god crackers have such big mouths. That really saved us. Again, how does this differ from a cracker finding it in a proprietary product and blabbing about it? The only difference in this case is that, while we all agree that security through obscurity is EVIL and anyone who relies solely on it should be ashamed and flogged with wet noodles, it DOES have the effect of slightly lowering the chance it would be found by black hats in the first place. Thus technically the closed-source product has an edge here. No, put down the flame thrower, I STILL agree that there are fundamental philosophical virtues of open source, but I think technically the closed source product has the slight edge at this point. (the sin of the closed source product being that maybe you don't WANT to rely on them to find and fix it before the crackers do something bad...I'm talking about an ideal universe here)
2) The problem can be fixed, in a variety of ways, by anyone. No waiting for patches from The Source.
This is a concrete benefit of Open Source. While a company coder can probably whip up a fix and distribute very fast, it most probably will not be as fast as the person who just found the bug. But again, Open Source puts the burden on the user (user in whatever sense the person is using the product...could be a developer) to have the knowledge and skills (and time!) to actually fix the bug.
3) This reflects very well on open source. But it is a blow to Redhat.
I think this reflects ambiguously on open source. It just proves what we thought all along. YES, bugs are easier to find and exploit. YES, bugs are easier to find and fix. Net gain: 0 Net loss: 0
Yes it is a blow to Redhat. Distros are basically for packaging/quality assurance/testing. So they better damn well be sure there are no glaring, Microsoft-sized, holes in their distros. That's just plain careless.
I don't think this is such a glowing testimony to open source as it is a lukewarm observation of fact. They staple-gunned themselves in the foot and someone bandaged them. *applause*
Or at least hit reload every once in a while to make sure the site isn't financially supported by one of the card companies reviewed. Let's not forget the fiasco where a chip company's ads were running on "you know who's" Hardware Guide a few months back when they were trying to do an "unbiased" review.
Well, a healthy dose of skepticism is a good thing, but don't get paranoid. The media has always been in a struggle to both advertise but maintain integrity and independence. I'd say on most respectable sites they are entirely fair and will burn a product of a company that advertises with them if it really sucks. The only reason people go to these site are their credibility. Once they blow that it's over. You can only do something stupid like that in the Windows propaganda magazines (which have all those stupid ads with some schmucks shoe business).
So how come this "good news" when it is Open Source software, but had it been a closed source application for which the vendor made a release we'd all be badmouthing them? I don't see how recovering from a stupid mistake is such "good news" or even that open-source specific.
This is a non-debate. I don't have an extra CRT to lug around with me to read manuals and I'm not going to waste my time with stupid window and web page metaphors when I can just flip through a damn book. Reading documentation on a CRT is awful. The necessity of paper documentation should be proportional to the complexity of the program. No, don't print out the man page for ls, but I'll be damned if I can't find a book on the OS I use.
I would also like to personally throttle cheapskate game developers who only include documentation in an electronic form - I'm not going to friggin flip back and forth between a damn PDF file in the middle of a game.
Somebody moderate the parent of this up, so people can see the type of idiots we have out there. I can't bring myself to waste my time responding to this crud.
"I wish this forum were less bigoted and I could post this with my real name. Too bad, really..."
Well, I/specifically/ post controversial, flamage, or even stupid posts under my real account just to stand up to criticism. If I have something to say I'm not going to sulk and mumble in the shadows. You could find out if your ideas hold water if you actually expose them to scrutiny. Otherwise you just look like another ignorant AC troll.
Do we need a little "confidence" rating or something in the title bar of some of these stories for the link-following and research impaired, like me, who don't want to spend all day verifying slashdot stories? A bar or percentage maybe...going to 100% when actually confirmed for a fact. Something like this might have dispelled some of the hype over the "phantom" Frontpage security hole, e.g.
Grow up Apple. First it's other people's computers look too much like yours. Then it's other people's skins look too much like yours. Stop pretending colored cases and skinned ui is some fscking brilliant thing. Begone UI troll. The whole computer industry was based on copying and sharing of ideas. Innovation is what keeps you a step/ahead/ of people. It is not a guarantee that nobody else will follow you.
And by the way, why the heck is the CDROM on this fish thing sideways, eating up the surface space of the case? Do too many people really think the CDROM is a mug holder or something?
I/know/. Computer games get me so mad. Sometimes I'm playing the Sims, and my character gets hungry, and there is NO FOOD in the pantry, so I have to go to the store but I don't have any money because I blew it on a car. That pisses me off SO MUCH. And also sometimes when I'm playing Dune 2000, I select a unit and tell him to go somewhere, but he is dumb and goes on some little trip through the enemy's base! I get SO MAD! I feel, like, I want to break stuff! Man, these computer games make me so violent!
Newtonian physics are great and all, but going at the speeds these things are going, wouldn't you have to toss in some relativity, or some fudge factor or something? I mean, blast off in some direction in your hottest ship and things start LOOKING different (cubes start getting concave, etc., becuase of the bending of light) as you get closer to the speed of light. Or does this only apply to speeds really close to the speed of light that are not possible in this game?
I just watched In&Out last night. It's a movie where Keven Kline (great actor, IMO, love his movies), plays an English teacher who has been accused of being (GASP!) gay. Of course you can imagine what follows in the little town he lives in...rumors, weird looks, etc. It results in his being fired from his school position ostensibly "because the community feels that the influence is not right" whatever that means. The gist was that if they had a gay teacher that it would "rub off" on the kids. Gayness of course being evil they would never want this to happen, so logically had to fire him. No wonder so many people grow up with wierd perceptions of homosexuals...all exposure to them is limited and warped. I wonder how children who actually ARE or will be gay can ever grow up right when everybody around them is taking all role models away and telling them it is BAD. Anyway, the last scene in the movie, the graduation, results in one student standing up and saying "Well,/I'm/ gay, it must have really rubbed off!" (to everyone's shock). Then another student stands up and proclaims they're also gay. Then another and another. Then parents stand up and say they're gay too. All the firemen stand up and say they're gay. Until the whole room is standing and saying they're gay.
Anyway, I'm also reminded of the Ebert & the movies show I watched this weekend, about a movie called "Pups" in which a young kid, 13 or so, gets a gun, and holds up the school, and later a bank. Ebert mentions that nobody knows about this movie because it had a very limited release because it was supposedly controversial. He says, and I agree, that it is amazing that a show about kids and guns cannot be allowed to be seen by kids, but any action flic in which people blast each other to pieces gets a wide distribution.
No wonder kids are so screwed up.
So, hey, let's hide "sex" from them and pretend it doesn't exist. That way when they discover it they'll be MUCH better prepared, right? gag
I believe I heard/read/saw this long ago (don't know why the story would just come out now). Why would they need an operating system though? To play quake during the journey or something?
"My GeForce 256 requires alot more wattage than the PCI bus wants to give it so I had to up the voltage on that, but other than that it is rock stable under both operating systems."
How exactly would I go about determining something like that? Would a card just fail if there was not enough wattage? And forgive me if I'm EE clueless, but if it wanted more wattage, how did turning up the voltage help?
Didn't CmdrTaco say that they'd be adding a feature whereby people could opt-in or out of having comments reproduced? Then they could simply say "Comments are owned by poster. Slashdot reserves the right to post comments with the "Reproduce Me" flag on".
Then we could set a universal "Allow comment reproduction" option, which we could optionally override at the comment level. E.g., in most cases I want to allow my comments to be reproduced elsewhere, except those comments in which I make an ass of myself, for which I should be able to turn the "Reproduce Me" flag off (or the "Don't reproduce me" flag on).
In dynamic sites the bottleneck is generating the content (running servlets, accessing databases, etc.), so it makes sense to optimize there. Unless your pages is/really/ complex, or the browser/really/ stupid, rendering time is negigable. And in any case, you can't do much about it even if you/do/ have the best code. Pure HTML just isn't that much of an issue. Moving into XML and XSL, and DOM manipulations, though, client-side performance may become more of an issue.
Copyrights are not mutually exclusive!! (right lawyers???) I can have copyright on something, and SO CAN somebody else. It gives me the right to copy or reproduce something. If I spray paint some stuff on an overpass I certainly wouldn't expect to be able to retain copyright when somebody photographs and publishes the writing. That's what this is. A public forum. We are all writing on a big public wall. Why aren't you afraid some people who just found Slashdot will take all these messages and publish them some place? There is certainly nothing stopping them.
Indeed, "What the fnar?". (what the hell does that mean?)
I posted a reply to JonKatz's message asking this, and also asked in #slashdot...but apparently some invisible genie just conjured up this book all by himself.
"Not true! Who is more impressed by graphics-heavy web sites, and who is just as happy reading text with minimal formatting? Who sends email attachements as uncompressed.bmp because he can't figure out WinZip, and who religiously gzips every outgoing file? Who watches streaming video? Who listens to steaming audio? Who actually likes shocked and/or flashed websites?"
And who religiously downloads the latest Linux minor revisions or does FTP installs? Who actually run and patronize the sites with the most hits? Who is running Napster and Gnutella? Who is running Freenet? Who is watching streaming audio and video? Well, Slashdot Radio fans and audiophile geeks at least. If AOLers are driving up bandwidth it is only because of the NUMBER of them. Bandwidth desire and usage per capita is much higher in the geek population, I'd say: witness geeks who run and patronize sites on T1's and then go home to cable modems and personal internet servers and do even more stuff on the net. How about geeks with portables, cell phones, etc? AOLers all thought the internet was AOL's network. It was only when the web and other internet applications became big and ubiquitous did AOL open up to the whizbang stuff.
Couldn't this be circumvented by a simple wire encryption protocol like SSL or something? Or are they actually sniffing packet destinations, etc? I can see web sites with logos proclaiming "Secure Anonymity Site". I would certainly avoid sites which would allow snooping of traffic and move to the more "secure" sites. But then again it is business itself that is doing this. Also, not everybody has an SSL capable browser or server.
I'm surprised that they're presenting this as "the dinosaur with a heart". I'm sure some people somewhere will make the assumption that all previous finds had no hearts and this was the first dinosaur with an actual heart.
"But they really are doing the world a favor by getting everyone hooked up."
You mean they're doing/online business/ a favor by getting people hooked up. Who else is benefitting? Not I. (Unless of course more people are forcing higher bandwidth...but I think it is the clueful people, not the clueless people, which are really pushing that).
"The real tragedy of Columbine is that it was entirely avoidable and some of the victims must share a little responsibility for what happend to them (though, to be clear, not as much as the two killers - NOBODY deserves the the treatment they got but NOBODY deserves to die because of it)."
Perhaps I'm more vitriolic than the rest but my opinion can be summed up by the Malcom X quote:
"The chickens have come home to roost. Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad."
**HELLO** Did you miss the whole intellectual property controversy? It is possible for two different people to "own" the same thing. I.e., I have copyright to programs I put under the GPL - but/so does everybody else/. How do you even think software and technology licensing work? A company/sells/ the rights to other companies. BOTH can "own" the same thing. So in this case, the poster has copyright on their post, but/so does the public/. Right?
Slashdot Mirror
Um, any reason the logo is of a pentagram and satanic goat. Just wondering...you'd think a standard medieval icon like a warrior or wizard or castle or something would do.
Is there really a difference between this and a company coder finding the bug? There is something to be said for a constant number of eyeballs being paid to stare at and stress the code all day long. A million open source developers won't help much if any one of them doesn't analyse the code for more than say, 30 minutes, or whatever their personal interest level or attention span is. The difference is purely philosophical.
Well thank god crackers have such big mouths. That really saved us. Again, how does this differ from a cracker finding it in a proprietary product and blabbing about it? The only difference in this case is that, while we all agree that security through obscurity is EVIL and anyone who relies solely on it should be ashamed and flogged with wet noodles, it DOES have the effect of slightly lowering the chance it would be found by black hats in the first place. Thus technically the closed-source product has an edge here. No, put down the flame thrower, I STILL agree that there are fundamental philosophical virtues of open source, but I think technically the closed source product has the slight edge at this point. (the sin of the closed source product being that maybe you don't WANT to rely on them to find and fix it before the crackers do something bad...I'm talking about an ideal universe here)
This is a concrete benefit of Open Source. While a company coder can probably whip up a fix and distribute very fast, it most probably will not be as fast as the person who just found the bug. But again, Open Source puts the burden on the user (user in whatever sense the person is using the product...could be a developer) to have the knowledge and skills (and time!) to actually fix the bug.
I think this reflects ambiguously on open source. It just proves what we thought all along. YES, bugs are easier to find and exploit. YES, bugs are easier to find and fix. Net gain: 0 Net loss: 0
Yes it is a blow to Redhat. Distros are basically for packaging/quality assurance/testing. So they better damn well be sure there are no glaring, Microsoft-sized, holes in their distros. That's just plain careless.
I don't think this is such a glowing testimony to open source as it is a lukewarm observation of fact. They staple-gunned themselves in the foot and someone bandaged them. *applause*
There is room for both cathedrals and bazaars.
Well, a healthy dose of skepticism is a good thing, but don't get paranoid. The media has always been in a struggle to both advertise but maintain integrity and independence. I'd say on most respectable sites they are entirely fair and will burn a product of a company that advertises with them if it really sucks. The only reason people go to these site are their credibility. Once they blow that it's over. You can only do something stupid like that in the Windows propaganda magazines (which have all those stupid ads with some schmucks shoe business).
So how come this "good news" when it is Open Source software, but had it been a closed source application for which the vendor made a release we'd all be badmouthing them? I don't see how recovering from a stupid mistake is such "good news" or even that open-source specific.
duh
This is a non-debate. I don't have an extra CRT to lug around with me to read manuals and I'm not going to waste my time with stupid window and web page metaphors when I can just flip through a damn book. Reading documentation on a CRT is awful. The necessity of paper documentation should be proportional to the complexity of the program. No, don't print out the man page for ls, but I'll be damned if I can't find a book on the OS I use.
I would also like to personally throttle cheapskate game developers who only include documentation in an electronic form - I'm not going to friggin flip back and forth between a damn PDF file in the middle of a game.
Somebody moderate the parent of this up, so people can see the type of idiots we have out there. I can't bring myself to waste my time responding to this crud.
/specifically/ post controversial, flamage, or even stupid posts under my real account just to stand up to criticism. If I have something to say I'm not going to sulk and mumble in the shadows. You could find out if your ideas hold water if you actually expose them to scrutiny. Otherwise you just look like another ignorant AC troll.
"I wish this forum were less bigoted and I could post this with my real name. Too bad, really..."
Well, I
Do we need a little "confidence" rating or something in the title bar of some of these stories for the link-following and research impaired, like me, who don't want to spend all day verifying slashdot stories? A bar or percentage maybe...going to 100% when actually confirmed for a fact. Something like this might have dispelled some of the hype over the "phantom" Frontpage security hole, e.g.
Grow up Apple. First it's other people's computers look too much like yours. Then it's other people's skins look too much like yours. Stop pretending colored cases and skinned ui is some fscking brilliant thing. Begone UI troll. The whole computer industry was based on copying and sharing of ideas. Innovation is what keeps you a step /ahead/ of people. It is not a guarantee that nobody else will follow you.
And by the way, why the heck is the CDROM on this fish thing sideways, eating up the surface space of the case? Do too many people really think the CDROM is a mug holder or something?
I /know/. Computer games get me so mad. Sometimes I'm playing the Sims, and my character gets hungry, and there is NO FOOD in the pantry, so I have to go to the store but I don't have any money because I blew it on a car. That pisses me off SO MUCH. And also sometimes when I'm playing Dune 2000, I select a unit and tell him to go somewhere, but he is dumb and goes on some little trip through the enemy's base! I get SO MAD! I feel, like, I want to break stuff! Man, these computer games make me so violent!
Newtonian physics are great and all, but going at the speeds these things are going, wouldn't you have to toss in some relativity, or some fudge factor or something? I mean, blast off in some direction in your hottest ship and things start LOOKING different (cubes start getting concave, etc., becuase of the bending of light) as you get closer to the speed of light. Or does this only apply to speeds really close to the speed of light that are not possible in this game?
I just watched In&Out last night. It's a movie where Keven Kline (great actor, IMO, love his movies), plays an English teacher who has been accused of being (GASP!) gay. Of course you can imagine what follows in the little town he lives in...rumors, weird looks, etc. It results in his being fired from his school position ostensibly "because the community feels that the influence is not right" whatever that means. The gist was that if they had a gay teacher that it would "rub off" on the kids. Gayness of course being evil they would never want this to happen, so logically had to fire him. No wonder so many people grow up with wierd perceptions of homosexuals...all exposure to them is limited and warped. I wonder how children who actually ARE or will be gay can ever grow up right when everybody around them is taking all role models away and telling them it is BAD. Anyway, the last scene in the movie, the graduation, results in one student standing up and saying "Well, /I'm/ gay, it must have really rubbed off!" (to everyone's shock). Then another student stands up and proclaims they're also gay. Then another and another. Then parents stand up and say they're gay too. All the firemen stand up and say they're gay. Until the whole room is standing and saying they're gay.
Anyway, I'm also reminded of the Ebert & the movies show I watched this weekend, about a movie called "Pups" in which a young kid, 13 or so, gets a gun, and holds up the school, and later a bank. Ebert mentions that nobody knows about this movie because it had a very limited release because it was supposedly controversial. He says, and I agree, that it is amazing that a show about kids and guns cannot be allowed to be seen by kids, but any action flic in which people blast each other to pieces gets a wide distribution.
No wonder kids are so screwed up.
So, hey, let's hide "sex" from them and pretend it doesn't exist. That way when they discover it they'll be MUCH better prepared, right? gag
I believe I heard/read/saw this long ago (don't know why the story would just come out now). Why would they need an operating system though? To play quake during the journey or something?
"My GeForce 256 requires alot more wattage than the PCI bus wants to give it so I had to up the voltage on that, but other than that it is rock stable under both operating systems."
How exactly would I go about determining something like that? Would a card just fail if there was not enough wattage? And forgive me if I'm EE clueless, but if it wanted more wattage, how did turning up the voltage help?
Didn't CmdrTaco say that they'd be adding a feature whereby people could opt-in or out of having comments reproduced? Then they could simply say "Comments are owned by poster. Slashdot reserves the right to post comments with the "Reproduce Me" flag on".
Then we could set a universal "Allow comment reproduction" option, which we could optionally override at the comment level. E.g., in most cases I want to allow my comments to be reproduced elsewhere, except those comments in which I make an ass of myself, for which I should be able to turn the "Reproduce Me" flag off (or the "Don't reproduce me" flag on).
yes, I can't spell
effeciency=efficiency
In dynamic sites the bottleneck is generating the content (running servlets, accessing databases, etc.), so it makes sense to optimize there. Unless your pages is /really/ complex, or the browser /really/ stupid, rendering time is negigable. And in any case, you can't do much about it even if you /do/ have the best code. Pure HTML just isn't that much of an issue. Moving into XML and XSL, and DOM manipulations, though, client-side performance may become more of an issue.
Copyrights are not mutually exclusive!! (right lawyers???) I can have copyright on something, and SO CAN somebody else. It gives me the right to copy or reproduce something. If I spray paint some stuff on an overpass I certainly wouldn't expect to be able to retain copyright when somebody photographs and publishes the writing. That's what this is. A public forum. We are all writing on a big public wall. Why aren't you afraid some people who just found Slashdot will take all these messages and publish them some place? There is certainly nothing stopping them.
Indeed, "What the fnar?". (what the hell does that mean?)
I posted a reply to JonKatz's message asking this, and also asked in #slashdot...but apparently some invisible genie just conjured up this book all by himself.
"Not true! Who is more impressed by graphics-heavy web sites, and who is just as happy reading text with minimal formatting? Who sends email attachements as uncompressed .bmp because he can't figure out WinZip, and who religiously gzips every outgoing file? Who watches streaming video? Who listens to steaming audio? Who actually likes shocked and/or flashed websites?"
And who religiously downloads the latest Linux minor revisions or does FTP installs? Who actually run and patronize the sites with the most hits? Who is running Napster and Gnutella? Who is running Freenet? Who is watching streaming audio and video? Well, Slashdot Radio fans and audiophile geeks at least. If AOLers are driving up bandwidth it is only because of the NUMBER of them. Bandwidth desire and usage per capita is much higher in the geek population, I'd say: witness geeks who run and patronize sites on T1's and then go home to cable modems and personal internet servers and do even more stuff on the net. How about geeks with portables, cell phones, etc? AOLers all thought the internet was AOL's network. It was only when the web and other internet applications became big and ubiquitous did AOL open up to the whizbang stuff.
Couldn't this be circumvented by a simple wire encryption protocol like SSL or something? Or are they actually sniffing packet destinations, etc? I can see web sites with logos proclaiming "Secure Anonymity Site". I would certainly avoid sites which would allow snooping of traffic and move to the more "secure" sites. But then again it is business itself that is doing this. Also, not everybody has an SSL capable browser or server.
I'm surprised that they're presenting this as "the dinosaur with a heart". I'm sure some people somewhere will make the assumption that all previous finds had no hearts and this was the first dinosaur with an actual heart.
"But they really are doing the world a favor by getting everyone hooked up."
/online business/ a favor by getting people hooked up. Who else is benefitting? Not I. (Unless of course more people are forcing higher bandwidth...but I think it is the clueful people, not the clueless people, which are really pushing that).
You mean they're doing
"The real tragedy of Columbine is that it was entirely avoidable and some of the victims must share a little responsibility for what happend to them (though, to be clear, not as much as the two killers - NOBODY deserves the the treatment they got but NOBODY deserves to die because of it)."
Perhaps I'm more vitriolic than the rest but my opinion can be summed up by the Malcom X quote:
"The chickens have come home to roost. Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad."
You reap what you sow.
'"Comments are owned by the Poster."'
/so does everybody else/. How do you even think software and technology licensing work? A company /sells/ the rights to other companies. BOTH can "own" the same thing. So in this case, the poster has copyright on their post, but /so does the public/. Right?
IANAL, but...
**HELLO** Did you miss the whole intellectual property controversy? It is possible for two different people to "own" the same thing. I.e., I have copyright to programs I put under the GPL - but