There is definitely a difference though. It is generally expected that an offer of help to an old lady to put groceries into her trunk is an offer to help for free. However, spending a day troubleshooting a corporate LAN is NOT generally done for free, in fact its practically unheard of. You could argue in the first case that a "reasonable old lady" would not EXPECT to be charged, while a "reasonable manager of a corporation" would most CERTAINLY expect to have to pay for an IT professional to spend a day troubleshooting her LAN.
Of course, the grocery packing and LAN troubleshooting examples are day and night apart. I'm sure there are far more fuzzy, borderline cases. Would like to know what the law generally says about this. I simply cannot believe that the LACK of a formal agreement before a piece of work is done IMPLIES that the work was done for free. Especially if the person doing the work previously was getting paid some specific rate for the same work.
Unreal 2k3: Runs perfectly on linux, the linux native version is in the box you bought at the store
Ha ha.. he probably didn't buy a legal copy.. heres the crux, most people pirate most of their games AND applications. Warez is EASY to get for Windows versions of things, but its much harder to track down Warez for Linux or Mac versions of things.
Take an example, I use Photoshop occasionally. I can get a cracked version of the latest Photoshop from *several* "warez sources" at work (probably shouldn't say this), any time I want to, in under five minutes. I want to "switch to Mac". Now, Photoshop runs on Mac, sure, but damned if I'd have a clue where to find an illegal copy of it.
People say, the reason they use Windows is, "its the applications". What they really mean is, they reason they use Windows is, "its so easy to get cracked versions of the applications I want".
Sounds like something is wrong, I haven't had any problems like that, my PNGs always look exactly like I expect them to look, in both IE and Mozilla (at least the last 1 and a half years of Mozilla releases have been displaying my PNGs correctly). Could be the software you're using to encode is not setting the gamma setting properly. I remember an older version of Photoshop used to make my PNGs always look too dark, for example.
What you are describing will very likely also happen if you are viewing in a 256 colour or 16-bit colour mode. However, that seems unlikely to be the problem in this case, as you describe it, since you've tested on so many systems.
You don't understand anything about economics.
Its simple:
- Microsoft sold XBOX at a loss
- Microsoft is not running at a loss
- Microsoft is making over $1billion profit a month, AFTER deducting the losses from XBOX
I suppose you are also one of those people who think "Internet Explorer is free", because you can download it for free. I don't see MS losing money on it, and yet it does cost them a lot of money to develop it - oh wait, they simply cross-subsidize the development costs from their Windows and Office sales.
Oh wait, I see, you consider "Microsoft Entertainment division" as a separate entity to "Microsoft". Thats moronic, its just a part of Microsoft, if MS XBOX went under now, WHO DO YOU THINK WILL HAVE PAID FOR IT? Thats right, Microsoft, i.e. THE MONEY THEY GOT FROM WINDOWS AND OFFICE. Where do you think that money came from? You don't seem to understand economics.
With one notable exception - animation. There is a related format, MNG, but theres not much support for it (yet?)
Apart from that, PNG is much better than GIF in every way. I converted hundreds of GIF files to PNG files on my web page, and got an average file size reduction of about 20 - 40%. All png files were smaller in filesize than the gifs I made them from. I used ImageMagick to convert them, its very easy, just "convert foo.gif foo.png", change foo.gif in the HTML to foo.png, and thats it.
PNGs are almost always smaller than the same GIF, and usually significantly so, if converted directly. I recommend ImageMagick.
A few notes to be aware of:
- USE 8-BIT PNG. GIF images are 8-bit. Loading them into an image editor and then trying to resave them as 24-bit PNGs will make them bigger.
- Adobe Photoshop adds useless "comment" information into a PNG file that makes all their GIFs slightly larger (something like "created with Adobe").
- Earlier versions of Adobe Photoshop (e.g. 5) did not export PNG correctly, and created overly large PNGs.
ImageMagick consistently produces the smallest PNGs of anything I've tried.
NOTE: If it seems strange to anyone that a PNG file size can differ depending on the program used to create it, but still be a valid PNG, its because of the way PNG compression works. PNG has a number of built-in compressors. It compresses each SCANLINE (row) of an image using the compressor that happens to work best for that particular scanline. So if a scanline compresses best with compressor number 3, the scanline will begin with a value indicating that it uses compressor 3 for that scanline. A PNG file reader then knows how to uncompress that scanline. However, some earlier software did not correctly choose the BEST compressors to use for each scanline, and used unoptimal compressors, but still valid.
Its more complicated than this, but that is the general idea.
Sony does not have a monopoly in the other products they make. Microsoft does. So unfortunately for your childish little outburst/argument, this DOES make it different. Under US law, at any rate. Under the Sherman act, monopolies DO have additional limitations placed on the way they may conduct business, that other companies don't have.
Having a monopoly is not a crime, but abusing it is. The courts have already ruled that Microsoft has a monopoly. That means that all the Sherman regulations apply to them.
The dynamic you are talking about is NOT due to MS being a monopoly. It is because MS has more than one product line.
You've missed the point - Microsofts significant line, desktop operating systems, IS a monopoly. They are funding the XBOX losses from their desktop monopoly. A "normal" company that has competition (e.g. Pepsi) is allowed to do this, but (in the US at least) it IS illegal for a monopoly to do this.
The bottom line is that someone got to pay for the stuff to cover the loss, since the company is definitely not making a loss. So you could, for example, look at this as being that about ten million of the people who bought Windows, were really paying for someone else's XBOX.
Its common knowledge that MS has been losing on the XBOX. I actually thought the figure would be higher.
This may be "conspiracy theoryish", but I've been getting a "subjective feeling" that Windows XP very readily puts Java applications into VM.
Something more concrete that I've noticed on my 512 MB systems, Win2K and WinXP both seem to eagerly start putting stuff into VM at 256MB RAM. Its pretty annoying, the strategy just does NOT work well, at work we write applications that typically need 200 - 300 MB RAM. In theory, we should NEVER need to swop, and yet we end up with easily 100 MB or more of paged memory. Is there somewhere you can configure this 256 MB limit?
quickly put something as fundamental as the user interface into virtual memory unless absolutely necessary
Hmm.. that sentence came out wrong. So before someone jumps down my throat, I meant, putting the *pages associate with a piece of the user interface as fundamental as the task bar* into virtual memory. (Especially if I've just booted a 512 MB RAM system)
The process running the task bar must* store each icon's pixmap in memory
Sure. Do the math. A 16x16 32-bit image in memory (mine are set to 16x16) needs 16*16*4 bytes of memory, which is 1 KB. Lets be generous and assume that you need four times that much memory for "overhead", and we have 4 KB per icon. If my entire task bar and start menu has 100 icons (that figure is high) then we're looking at 400 KB. And I *know* these are not all in memory, because I can SEE its reading them when neccesary from the hard disk. And I have 512 MB RAM, so they sure aren't in virtual memory. Win2K: PIII 667 512 MB RAM, GeForce2. WinXP: P4 1500 512 MB RAM, GeForce4. With 512MB RAM, it would be incredibly stupid for an OS to quickly put something as fundamental as the user interface into virtual memory unless absolutely necessary.
I know I get "start menu" delays from disk swapping if I've been running very memory hungry applications, but you should also be aware that the start menu is generally slow in XP because there is a deliberate built-in delay... there is a setting somewhere in the registry you can set the delay, in milliseconds. Can't remember where it is though.
If you want to make excuses for bad software, you will need to try again, .
I have to wonder though, WHY? Todays software seems to need insane amounts of RAM compared to five or ten or fifteen years ago, and yet we don't seem to be all that much better off. Programmers just seem to squander the RAM faster than the RAM manufacturers can make it. Software expands to fill all available RAM. Its not even a joke. Why should "calc.exe" need 1-3MB RAM? The process running the task bar on my Win2K machine needs about 3MB of RAM, which is ridiculously high since all it has is a few buttons and icons and shows the time and has a menu, and yet the same thing in Windows XP typically needs close to 10 MB RAM. Windows Explorer in XP is MUCH slower than in earlier versions of Windows. Something is wrong with this picture.
I wish programmers would make some effort to optimize the stuff. Perhaps better tools would be useful. As a C++ developer, I would like a tool that shows me a breakdown of how much RAM is being used by which parts of my program. If such tools were commonplace, programmers would be able to quickly isolate the parts of the their programs that are hogging the most memory.
I am sure there are proprietary vendors with backdoors. But I will say this: the biggest vendors have massive incentive to not put a backdoor in the software. A single confirmed backdoor in an MS, Oracle, or Apple product would be devastating to that company. Killer. Seriously.
Apart from Microsoft (*), I tend to agree with this, sure. But I was thinking more along the lines of programmers within corporations doing it without the knowledge or consent of their bosses. I'm sure many do it and never even tell anyone. How many programmers wouldn't at least be even *tempted* to?
Someone on an earlier/. thread the other day (specifically about the trojan found in tcpdump/libpcap) mentioned a backdoor in a major Borland product (forget which now) which had been there, in the product they'd been selling, for SIX YEARS, and was only discovered sometime after they opensourced the software. I'm sure there are many out there that we'll never know about.
Of course, creating a backdoor is one thing. Actually using it without getting caught is another. "Using a backdoor" is likely to imply other suspicuous symptoms, like odd network traffic, and if someone is exploiting a backdoor enough, it is going to be noticed sooner or later, and I guess this applies equally to both proprietary and open systems.
((*) I don't think exposing a backdoor in MS software would have much effect at all on Microsofts sales, because the market forces are not based on competition. People will buy Windows anyway, for other reasons, unless the backdoor was REALLY bad, but even then I doubt it - people don't seem put off by the many security flaws, so why would they care about "another" backdoor? Microsoft takes a LOT of flak in the *public* media these days for security flaws in Windows, and it doesn't seem to even dent their hull one little bit. A few years back they were caught surreptitously sending peoples personal information with the "Windows Update" feature in Win98, and there was a big fuss for a few days in the media, and a few days later everyone goes back to business as usual.)
The bottom line is trust. You have to trust someone at some point.
Not entirely. Although (almost?) nobody is ever going to test every aspect of their system from top to bottom, what is still meaningful is whether or not they at least have the ability to do so (in a reasonable and legal way, i.e. many proprietary systems may even forbid you from "poking around inside").
If you compiled from source but didn't audit it first, it of course does not necessarily mean that you have trustworthy binaries, but at least you CAN look at the source if and when you want to, and that itself means a lot in that it does vastly lower the likelihood the the provider of the source is lying to you in some way. If you have a closed system, you essentially HAVE TO take the vendors word for it. That is, you are essentially forced into *having* to just blindly trust someone, while with opensource, the trust is at any time verifiable by yourself.
I know that with some skill its still possible to hide trojans in OSS, e.g. the compiler itself may be doing so, or the trojan code may be skillfully obfuscated, etc. But you can still look at the source, and so can others, and sooner or later someone will find the trojan. In closed source, you just will never know. I'm sure there must be literally hundreds of trojans/backdoors in proprietary software that people use every day, that we will just never know about - they will forever only be known to a few programmers here and there, and not even to the companies they work(ed) for. Its incredibly easy for a programmer to put a trojan into closed-source software. Anyone can do it, and even be reasonably certain the won't get caught. Putting one into OSS is actually a challenge, and sooner or later it will be found anyway.
OK, that was tangential, but my point was, certain things are just inherently a lot more *trustworthy* than others. The difference lies in *potential* verifiability.
The reliability of TCP is why every exciting email from embezzling East Africans arrives in letter-perfect condition
I assume this is a reference to the abundant "Nigeria scams", however, if you look on a map, you will see that Nigeria is actually in so-called "West Africa".
I count it as "Asian in origina" if ANYTHING on it is Asian (China, Korea, Taiwan etc) in any way, e.g. if it went through an Asian relay server, or if the company spamming me is Asian, or the source email address looks Asian (e.g. chinese or korean suffix) etc, or the referred to website looks Asian. The small bit of Asian spam I have gotten was very obviously from China, they were openly Chinese companies selling openly Chinese products.
Much of my spam is very clearly from the US, and almost all of it is decidedly non-Asian. For most of it, all servers listed in the headers are in the USA, the products or pseudo-products they are selling are being sold out of the USA, the websites being advertised are in the USA, and run by Americans. If its a "hot stock investment advice newsletter" its for a company in the USA. Usually any phone numbers listed are USA phone numbers. Prices are in US$, and in the case of cons like MLM and "work from home" its also usually in US$ (yes I know that doesn't mean anything by itself, but its usually accompanied by other indicators, such as addresses/phone numbers). The text of the email also often indicates that whatever they are marketing, they are marketing at Americans *only* (e.g. they mention/offer things that are only valid in the USA, e.g. things that relate to the American tax system or voting system or American politics, or various other elements of American social infrastructure, or places in the US).
I suppose I shouldn't spend so much time analyzing my spam, but it bugs me that the country that seems to be pointing the most fingers is also (at least in MY mailbox) by far the biggest culprit. Just wanted to know if other people's experiences are similar.
Perhaps it has a lot to do with where you 'leave' your email address. Much of my spam is addressed to email addresses that were almost certainly harvested off websites I maintained or have maintained (a company website and a personal website, both.com domains), or off websites (such as forums) which my email address ended up on. With some of it its obvious its been sold by a company that has my email address (I also tend to sometimes create very specific email addresses that I use only for registering at individual companies.. most of the companies, fortunately, seem to be well behaved). Chatrooms, I don't use.
The/. crowd always seems to be talking about how huge the Asian spam problem is. So as an experiment, I've been keeping my spam in a separate folder for a few months, and less than 3% of it is Asian in origin (counted by relay server used AND the spammer itself). Over 70% of it, originates in the USA, and are mostly USA cons/scams/pseudo-products etc (diplomas, anti-spam software, spam software, porn sites, "hot strock investment advice newsletters", "work at home", MLM etc, "lose weight", search engine 'promote your website' offers etc).
Why the discrepancy, am I just an outlier, or are slashdotters exaggerating the non-US-originating spam problem in relation to the US-originating spam problem?
To me, OpenGL lacks really good object-picking algorithms, has problems with coplanar geometry (lines on top of polygons, for example), and poor typography support
What are you talking about? Lets go one by one:
"Object picking": what are you referring to? If by "object-picking" you mean figuring out what object is (say) under the mouse cursor (in other words, a line intersection test with your 3D geometry), this is not exactly difficult, and if you are writing a 3D app should be less than 1% of your entire work, if you can't even do that, you're not going to get anywhere anyway. Direct3D doesn't have "object picking" either. Or are you talking about something else entirely?
"coplanar geometry (lines on top of polygons)" - uhm, what problems does OpenGL have with this? There are none. Are you perhaps referring to "Z fighting" problems with polys and lines rendered to same Z? Once again, if you're doing this (and not disabling z test for your lines), you are doing something direly wrong. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but hardware like NVIDIA use the SAME internals to draw polys and lines, regardless of whether you are using GL or D3D. If you are seeing Z fighting in GL, you are going to see Z fighting in D3D too. I don't see how this is a "problem with OpenGL", this is a problem with your code.
"Poor typography support".. hello? D3D doesn't have "typography support" either. Unless you're trying to use GDI calls to draw text, which is not only a slow and stupid thing for a 3D programmer to do, it is (thankfully) not even possible anymore since DirectX8 - Microsoft thankfully removed the "GetDC" call from surfaces.
why does OpenGL not specify things like raytraced and radiosity lighting models, along with voxel primitives
Because these are not possible to do quickly on todays hardware in real-time, and if they did this, it would thus kill them. That would be dumb.
features for window and page oriented output of arbitary geometry
As far as I can tell, this statement is meaningless, you're spouting out your nose.
Quit spreading FUD to poor/. readers who don't know better than to mod your post up because it sounds like you know what you're talking about clever. Feel free to call me on anything I've said, I've been working in 3D for many years now.
Never mind the viruses, we've lost at least a few man-days of work to Windows XP service pack 1 - it left a few of the computers round our office dead in the water.
I don't even want to BEGIN to go into how much time I've wasted over the years working around problems in Microsoft APIs, bugs and limitations in their software and APIs, figuring out the hard way that their API documentation is often outright wrong, waiting for reboots from Windows crashing/freezing, restarting MS programs when they crash, re-doing lost work when a MS program crashes.. the fun never ends. Just yesterday I discovered that listboxes in Win9X cannot handle more than 32K entries. The solution? Basically, "write your own listbox control". This alone is likely to blow at least another day of mine, as I HAVE to work around this one. (To be fair, gtk is even more idiotic, with a listbox limit of 2K entries, not sure if thats been fixed yet).
Slashdot Mirror
There is definitely a difference though. It is generally expected that an offer of help to an old lady to put groceries into her trunk is an offer to help for free. However, spending a day troubleshooting a corporate LAN is NOT generally done for free, in fact its practically unheard of. You could argue in the first case that a "reasonable old lady" would not EXPECT to be charged, while a "reasonable manager of a corporation" would most CERTAINLY expect to have to pay for an IT professional to spend a day troubleshooting her LAN.
Of course, the grocery packing and LAN troubleshooting examples are day and night apart. I'm sure there are far more fuzzy, borderline cases. Would like to know what the law generally says about this. I simply cannot believe that the LACK of a formal agreement before a piece of work is done IMPLIES that the work was done for free. Especially if the person doing the work previously was getting paid some specific rate for the same work.
Unreal 2k3: Runs perfectly on linux, the linux native version is in the box you bought at the store
Ha ha .. he probably didn't buy a legal copy .. heres the crux, most people pirate most of their games AND applications. Warez is EASY to get for Windows versions of things, but its much harder to track down Warez for Linux or Mac versions of things.
Take an example, I use Photoshop occasionally. I can get a cracked version of the latest Photoshop from *several* "warez sources" at work (probably shouldn't say this), any time I want to, in under five minutes. I want to "switch to Mac". Now, Photoshop runs on Mac, sure, but damned if I'd have a clue where to find an illegal copy of it.
People say, the reason they use Windows is, "its the applications". What they really mean is, they reason they use Windows is, "its so easy to get cracked versions of the applications I want".
Sounds like something is wrong, I haven't had any problems like that, my PNGs always look exactly like I expect them to look, in both IE and Mozilla (at least the last 1 and a half years of Mozilla releases have been displaying my PNGs correctly). Could be the software you're using to encode is not setting the gamma setting properly. I remember an older version of Photoshop used to make my PNGs always look too dark, for example.
What you are describing will very likely also happen if you are viewing in a 256 colour or 16-bit colour mode. However, that seems unlikely to be the problem in this case, as you describe it, since you've tested on so many systems.
You don't understand anything about economics. Its simple: - Microsoft sold XBOX at a loss - Microsoft is not running at a loss - Microsoft is making over $1billion profit a month, AFTER deducting the losses from XBOX I suppose you are also one of those people who think "Internet Explorer is free", because you can download it for free. I don't see MS losing money on it, and yet it does cost them a lot of money to develop it - oh wait, they simply cross-subsidize the development costs from their Windows and Office sales. Oh wait, I see, you consider "Microsoft Entertainment division" as a separate entity to "Microsoft". Thats moronic, its just a part of Microsoft, if MS XBOX went under now, WHO DO YOU THINK WILL HAVE PAID FOR IT? Thats right, Microsoft, i.e. THE MONEY THEY GOT FROM WINDOWS AND OFFICE. Where do you think that money came from? You don't seem to understand economics.
png does EVERYTHING gif does plus a lot more.
With one notable exception - animation. There is a related format, MNG, but theres not much support for it (yet?)
Apart from that, PNG is much better than GIF in every way. I converted hundreds of GIF files to PNG files on my web page, and got an average file size reduction of about 20 - 40%. All png files were smaller in filesize than the gifs I made them from. I used ImageMagick to convert them, its very easy, just "convert foo.gif foo.png", change foo.gif in the HTML to foo.png, and thats it.
PNGs are almost always smaller than the same GIF, and usually significantly so, if converted directly. I recommend ImageMagick.
A few notes to be aware of:
- USE 8-BIT PNG. GIF images are 8-bit. Loading them into an image editor and then trying to resave them as 24-bit PNGs will make them bigger.
- Adobe Photoshop adds useless "comment" information into a PNG file that makes all their GIFs slightly larger (something like "created with Adobe").
- Earlier versions of Adobe Photoshop (e.g. 5) did not export PNG correctly, and created overly large PNGs.
ImageMagick consistently produces the smallest PNGs of anything I've tried.
NOTE: If it seems strange to anyone that a PNG file size can differ depending on the program used to create it, but still be a valid PNG, its because of the way PNG compression works. PNG has a number of built-in compressors. It compresses each SCANLINE (row) of an image using the compressor that happens to work best for that particular scanline. So if a scanline compresses best with compressor number 3, the scanline will begin with a value indicating that it uses compressor 3 for that scanline. A PNG file reader then knows how to uncompress that scanline. However, some earlier software did not correctly choose the BEST compressors to use for each scanline, and used unoptimal compressors, but still valid.
Its more complicated than this, but that is the general idea.
Sony does not have a monopoly in the other products they make. Microsoft does. So unfortunately for your childish little outburst/argument, this DOES make it different. Under US law, at any rate. Under the Sherman act, monopolies DO have additional limitations placed on the way they may conduct business, that other companies don't have.
Having a monopoly is not a crime, but abusing it is. The courts have already ruled that Microsoft has a monopoly. That means that all the Sherman regulations apply to them.
The dynamic you are talking about is NOT due to MS being a monopoly. It is because MS has more than one product line.
You've missed the point - Microsofts significant line, desktop operating systems, IS a monopoly. They are funding the XBOX losses from their desktop monopoly. A "normal" company that has competition (e.g. Pepsi) is allowed to do this, but (in the US at least) it IS illegal for a monopoly to do this.
The bottom line is that someone got to pay for the stuff to cover the loss, since the company is definitely not making a loss. So you could, for example, look at this as being that about ten million of the people who bought Windows, were really paying for someone else's XBOX.
Its common knowledge that MS has been losing on the XBOX. I actually thought the figure would be higher.
:( You are right!
This may be "conspiracy theoryish", but I've been getting a "subjective feeling" that Windows XP very readily puts Java applications into VM.
Something more concrete that I've noticed on my 512 MB systems, Win2K and WinXP both seem to eagerly start putting stuff into VM at 256MB RAM. Its pretty annoying, the strategy just does NOT work well, at work we write applications that typically need 200 - 300 MB RAM. In theory, we should NEVER need to swop, and yet we end up with easily 100 MB or more of paged memory. Is there somewhere you can configure this 256 MB limit?
quickly put something as fundamental as the user interface into virtual memory unless absolutely necessary
Hmm .. that sentence came out wrong. So before someone jumps down my throat, I meant, putting the *pages associate with a piece of the user interface as fundamental as the task bar* into virtual memory. (Especially if I've just booted a 512 MB RAM system)
The process running the task bar must* store each icon's pixmap in memory
Sure. Do the math. A 16x16 32-bit image in memory (mine are set to 16x16) needs 16*16*4 bytes of memory, which is 1 KB. Lets be generous and assume that you need four times that much memory for "overhead", and we have 4 KB per icon. If my entire task bar and start menu has 100 icons (that figure is high) then we're looking at 400 KB. And I *know* these are not all in memory, because I can SEE its reading them when neccesary from the hard disk. And I have 512 MB RAM, so they sure aren't in virtual memory. Win2K: PIII 667 512 MB RAM, GeForce2. WinXP: P4 1500 512 MB RAM, GeForce4. With 512MB RAM, it would be incredibly stupid for an OS to quickly put something as fundamental as the user interface into virtual memory unless absolutely necessary.
I know I get "start menu" delays from disk swapping if I've been running very memory hungry applications, but you should also be aware that the start menu is generally slow in XP because there is a deliberate built-in delay... there is a setting somewhere in the registry you can set the delay, in milliseconds. Can't remember where it is though.
If you want to make excuses for bad software, you will need to try again, .
I have to wonder though, WHY? Todays software seems to need insane amounts of RAM compared to five or ten or fifteen years ago, and yet we don't seem to be all that much better off. Programmers just seem to squander the RAM faster than the RAM manufacturers can make it. Software expands to fill all available RAM. Its not even a joke. Why should "calc.exe" need 1-3MB RAM? The process running the task bar on my Win2K machine needs about 3MB of RAM, which is ridiculously high since all it has is a few buttons and icons and shows the time and has a menu, and yet the same thing in Windows XP typically needs close to 10 MB RAM. Windows Explorer in XP is MUCH slower than in earlier versions of Windows. Something is wrong with this picture.
I wish programmers would make some effort to optimize the stuff. Perhaps better tools would be useful. As a C++ developer, I would like a tool that shows me a breakdown of how much RAM is being used by which parts of my program. If such tools were commonplace, programmers would be able to quickly isolate the parts of the their programs that are hogging the most memory.
I am sure there are proprietary vendors with backdoors. But I will say this: the biggest vendors have massive incentive to not put a backdoor in the software. A single confirmed backdoor in an MS, Oracle, or Apple product would be devastating to that company. Killer. Seriously.
Apart from Microsoft (*), I tend to agree with this, sure. But I was thinking more along the lines of programmers within corporations doing it without the knowledge or consent of their bosses. I'm sure many do it and never even tell anyone. How many programmers wouldn't at least be even *tempted* to?
Someone on an earlier /. thread the other day (specifically about the trojan found in tcpdump/libpcap) mentioned a backdoor in a major Borland product (forget which now) which had been there, in the product they'd been selling, for SIX YEARS, and was only discovered sometime after they opensourced the software. I'm sure there are many out there that we'll never know about.
Of course, creating a backdoor is one thing. Actually using it without getting caught is another. "Using a backdoor" is likely to imply other suspicuous symptoms, like odd network traffic, and if someone is exploiting a backdoor enough, it is going to be noticed sooner or later, and I guess this applies equally to both proprietary and open systems.
((*) I don't think exposing a backdoor in MS software would have much effect at all on Microsofts sales, because the market forces are not based on competition. People will buy Windows anyway, for other reasons, unless the backdoor was REALLY bad, but even then I doubt it - people don't seem put off by the many security flaws, so why would they care about "another" backdoor? Microsoft takes a LOT of flak in the *public* media these days for security flaws in Windows, and it doesn't seem to even dent their hull one little bit. A few years back they were caught surreptitously sending peoples personal information with the "Windows Update" feature in Win98, and there was a big fuss for a few days in the media, and a few days later everyone goes back to business as usual.)
The bottom line is trust. You have to trust someone at some point.
Not entirely. Although (almost?) nobody is ever going to test every aspect of their system from top to bottom, what is still meaningful is whether or not they at least have the ability to do so (in a reasonable and legal way, i.e. many proprietary systems may even forbid you from "poking around inside").
If you compiled from source but didn't audit it first, it of course does not necessarily mean that you have trustworthy binaries, but at least you CAN look at the source if and when you want to, and that itself means a lot in that it does vastly lower the likelihood the the provider of the source is lying to you in some way. If you have a closed system, you essentially HAVE TO take the vendors word for it. That is, you are essentially forced into *having* to just blindly trust someone, while with opensource, the trust is at any time verifiable by yourself.
I know that with some skill its still possible to hide trojans in OSS, e.g. the compiler itself may be doing so, or the trojan code may be skillfully obfuscated, etc. But you can still look at the source, and so can others, and sooner or later someone will find the trojan. In closed source, you just will never know. I'm sure there must be literally hundreds of trojans/backdoors in proprietary software that people use every day, that we will just never know about - they will forever only be known to a few programmers here and there, and not even to the companies they work(ed) for. Its incredibly easy for a programmer to put a trojan into closed-source software. Anyone can do it, and even be reasonably certain the won't get caught. Putting one into OSS is actually a challenge, and sooner or later it will be found anyway.
OK, that was tangential, but my point was, certain things are just inherently a lot more *trustworthy* than others. The difference lies in *potential* verifiability.
The reliability of TCP is why every exciting email from embezzling East Africans arrives in letter-perfect condition
I assume this is a reference to the abundant "Nigeria scams", however, if you look on a map, you will see that Nigeria is actually in so-called "West Africa".
In case anyones REALLY bored, here are a few examples:
Admittedly, a lot of it seems to repeatedly come from the same offenders.
One of the weirdest ones I've gotten was for some expensive used medical/hospital equipment. Can't seem to find it now.
I count it as "Asian in origina" if ANYTHING on it is Asian (China, Korea, Taiwan etc) in any way, e.g. if it went through an Asian relay server, or if the company spamming me is Asian, or the source email address looks Asian (e.g. chinese or korean suffix) etc, or the referred to website looks Asian. The small bit of Asian spam I have gotten was very obviously from China, they were openly Chinese companies selling openly Chinese products.
Much of my spam is very clearly from the US, and almost all of it is decidedly non-Asian. For most of it, all servers listed in the headers are in the USA, the products or pseudo-products they are selling are being sold out of the USA, the websites being advertised are in the USA, and run by Americans. If its a "hot stock investment advice newsletter" its for a company in the USA. Usually any phone numbers listed are USA phone numbers. Prices are in US$, and in the case of cons like MLM and "work from home" its also usually in US$ (yes I know that doesn't mean anything by itself, but its usually accompanied by other indicators, such as addresses/phone numbers). The text of the email also often indicates that whatever they are marketing, they are marketing at Americans *only* (e.g. they mention/offer things that are only valid in the USA, e.g. things that relate to the American tax system or voting system or American politics, or various other elements of American social infrastructure, or places in the US).
I suppose I shouldn't spend so much time analyzing my spam, but it bugs me that the country that seems to be pointing the most fingers is also (at least in MY mailbox) by far the biggest culprit. Just wanted to know if other people's experiences are similar.
Perhaps it has a lot to do with where you 'leave' your email address. Much of my spam is addressed to email addresses that were almost certainly harvested off websites I maintained or have maintained (a company website and a personal website, both .com domains), or off websites (such as forums) which my email address ended up on. With some of it its obvious its been sold by a company that has my email address (I also tend to sometimes create very specific email addresses that I use only for registering at individual companies .. most of the companies, fortunately, seem to be well behaved). Chatrooms, I don't use.
The /. crowd always seems to be talking about how huge the Asian spam problem is. So as an experiment, I've been keeping my spam in a separate folder for a few months, and less than 3% of it is Asian in origin (counted by relay server used AND the spammer itself). Over 70% of it, originates in the USA, and are mostly USA cons/scams/pseudo-products etc (diplomas, anti-spam software, spam software, porn sites, "hot strock investment advice newsletters", "work at home", MLM etc, "lose weight", search engine 'promote your website' offers etc).
Why the discrepancy, am I just an outlier, or are slashdotters exaggerating the non-US-originating spam problem in relation to the US-originating spam problem?
Parent doesn't know what he's talking about.
I fully agree, he is talking rubbish. Yet it gets modded +5, because he throws around a few random technical-sounding words :/
To me, OpenGL lacks really good object-picking algorithms, has problems with coplanar geometry (lines on top of polygons, for example), and poor typography support
What are you talking about? Lets go one by one:
"Object picking": what are you referring to? If by "object-picking" you mean figuring out what object is (say) under the mouse cursor (in other words, a line intersection test with your 3D geometry), this is not exactly difficult, and if you are writing a 3D app should be less than 1% of your entire work, if you can't even do that, you're not going to get anywhere anyway. Direct3D doesn't have "object picking" either. Or are you talking about something else entirely?
"coplanar geometry (lines on top of polygons)" - uhm, what problems does OpenGL have with this? There are none. Are you perhaps referring to "Z fighting" problems with polys and lines rendered to same Z? Once again, if you're doing this (and not disabling z test for your lines), you are doing something direly wrong. I hate to be the one to break it to you, but hardware like NVIDIA use the SAME internals to draw polys and lines, regardless of whether you are using GL or D3D. If you are seeing Z fighting in GL, you are going to see Z fighting in D3D too. I don't see how this is a "problem with OpenGL", this is a problem with your code.
"Poor typography support" .. hello? D3D doesn't have "typography support" either. Unless you're trying to use GDI calls to draw text, which is not only a slow and stupid thing for a 3D programmer to do, it is (thankfully) not even possible anymore since DirectX8 - Microsoft thankfully removed the "GetDC" call from surfaces.
why does OpenGL not specify things like raytraced and radiosity lighting models, along with voxel primitives
Because these are not possible to do quickly on todays hardware in real-time, and if they did this, it would thus kill them. That would be dumb.
features for window and page oriented output of arbitary geometry
As far as I can tell, this statement is meaningless, you're spouting out your nose.
Quit spreading FUD to poor /. readers who don't know better than to mod your post up because it sounds like you know what you're talking about clever. Feel free to call me on anything I've said, I've been working in 3D for many years now.
Never mind the viruses, we've lost at least a few man-days of work to Windows XP service pack 1 - it left a few of the computers round our office dead in the water.
I don't even want to BEGIN to go into how much time I've wasted over the years working around problems in Microsoft APIs, bugs and limitations in their software and APIs, figuring out the hard way that their API documentation is often outright wrong, waiting for reboots from Windows crashing/freezing, restarting MS programs when they crash, re-doing lost work when a MS program crashes .. the fun never ends. Just yesterday I discovered that listboxes in Win9X cannot handle more than 32K entries. The solution? Basically, "write your own listbox control". This alone is likely to blow at least another day of mine, as I HAVE to work around this one. (To be fair, gtk is even more idiotic, with a listbox limit of 2K entries, not sure if thats been fixed yet).
I know. I agreed with his conclusion but disagreed with the first part. Is that a difficult idea for you to grasp?