Good package management is really going to help in competing with the status quo (ahem...Microsoft) and helping open source projects gain mainstream acceptance. If installing software from packages were as easy as everything else on the Mac, then the advantages of the system would sell itself and gain many Windows converts.
Open source software continues to improve by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, the uninitiated tend to be terribly confused about how to get it, install it (including installing dependencies etc), update and maintain it. I think the problem stems from a few things including: - The somewhat archane nature of open source software and unix...keeping out those who aren't in on the joke so-to-speak. And, more importantly, - Competing package management systems I think competition is a great thing. I think it is far to late to advocate the abandoning of the existing ports collection, RPM, deb, etc systems because they are entrenched. But the end result is that a project must have someone who does packaging for all these systems if they want full exposure.
This is why I think we need something like a package repository run by volunteers who create, maintain and store the packages. If it were a single system (distrbuted across many servers around the world of course) then you could have a single, standard interface for searching and downloading packages. This way if someone knows how to use the system on Red Hat, they'll know how to use it on OS X.
Eventually, a dominant package format may emerge. Hubbard has some good suggestions (XML descriptions is a no brainer). Ultimately, the ease of use of this stuff is key. You want developers to be able to serve all package communities with as little effort as possible, and you want the users to have the most comprehensive access to packages available.
Once this happens, people buying Macs or installing Linux will have a huge advantage over their Windows mired breathren because once they log in they'll be a couple of clicks away from thousands of ever evolving applications. While Windows users will be thousands of dollars away from a couple of applications.
I think the answer here is to have a standard interface that everyone will agree to use. This could be a very simple application that would be skinnable/themeable for any distro to add their own personal touch. But at the end of the day, the single standard app should use the same configurations on every platform.
The example, that I think should be followed is that of the Microsoft Management Console. The MMC lets developers provide 'snap-ins' that let you control their apps from within the same console you use to configure Windows itself. Anyone can write a snap-in to do anything you want. The snap-in doesn't dictate how you write your app, or how you store it's configuration info. But because the MMC is used by everyone runnning Win>=2K developers have a standard that is in their best interest to write for.
That's all Unix needs. Then the developers will write their own snap-ins, and you won't have so many different projects trying to build GUIs to configure so many applications that may change their configurations at any rev without notice.
I think I'll stick to regular sized slinkies so I don't have to remember to wear a helmet. The number of slinky related deaths each year is growing. Please remember that playing safe is playing smart.
Why the Mac won't be a good clustering choice
on
Macintosh Clustering
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't think very many people will choose to use the Mac for clustering _even if_ it is easier than other platforms as this article seems to suggest.
Macs are luxury computers. They are generally more expensive than their custom PC counterparts, and Apple limits the BTO options that you can use to reduce the price of their G4 towers.
If you wanted to cluster 10 G4 towers, you'd be paying for 10 superdrives, 10 3d accelerated video cards, 10 snazzy cases etc etc. Most people building a cluster will want each system to only have the components they need: processor, memory, network IO, backplane bandwidth etc. You won't want to pay for components you won't use (like 9 extra superdrives).
So unless Apple decides to offer special deals for those who want clustering, I think the economics of the situation will work against Macs and infavour of x86 PCs running Linux where the economies of scale conspire to lower component costs to the minimum.
Does anyone know what happens to previously released code that then experiences a license change? To use a hypothetical for my question: what happens if you write a program and release it under the GPL. I come along and make modifications of the program and release my new code under the GPL to comply with the GPL from your code. Then you decide to change the license for the original program to something different - say for the sake of being extreme, you close source it. Does that mean that my derivative code is now in violation of your new license change?
I'm again amazed by the comments I read on this site. Perhaps someone could explain the contradiction.
On the one hand people here are great advocates of open source software. Any casual reader will quickly learn the financial and convenience benefits of running programs released under the GPL and such. So one might be left with a feeling that Slashdotters care about things like software licenses and the legal use of software.
On the other hand, everyone gets annoyed when companies who choose not to open source their software try to enforce their commercial license requirements. Why is this wrong? Why does this make them worthy of derision?
Slashdotters seem to be selectively law-abiding. There are complaints about the RIAA's struggle against music piracy, and yet an outcry results whenever anyone violates the GPL.
Frankly I think this is all economics. When the boom was in full swing you could IPO a Linux distro without a business plan and become a millionaire over night. That was great. The suckers in the market were paying you because they didn't understand your product. At the same time big companies didn't care so much about piracy b/c the market was keeping valuations high and profits were rolling in. Now financial times are tougher and those same corporations are trying to get the revenues that are rightfully theirs. I've got to have some respect for that.
Maybe I'm just uninformed, but it seems to me that by leaving space exploration to the egg-heads at these govt science agencies, we are not making the kind of progress a more ambitious goal-oriented approach might produce.
In the 60's man went to the moon. The moon! Many times. We haven't been back in decades.
Why is there no base on the moon? Why aren't there more space stations in orbit? I think part of the reason is that the focus is on doing dumb experiments instead of just building these facilities as rapidly as possible.
The shuttle was a big step forward. Mir was a big step forward. The ISS will benefit from both these achievements. What I object to is reading quotes from guys at McGill University who are getting bucks to do research on reflexes in space. This is idiotic when we still need lots of money to put more facilities and equipment up there.
I figure you could spend all your money every year on pure research science. And I think you'd get a lot out of it. But it should be remembered that it was guys like Columbus, Hudson and Cook who made the big discoveries of the last exploratory period. Guys who went and did what they wanted to do to see if they could. They weren't sailing ships filled with lab rats and experiments. They wanted to see what was around the next corner, see if they could get there, and see if they could settle there. I don't understand why this spirit has been lost.
Goals need to be set. ISS completion by 2005. Base on the moon by 2010. Man on Mars by 2015. Base on Mars by 2020. Let's get a move on.
someone decides to put up a website to demonstrate this vulnerability. the site deletes everything on your harddrive. someone else decides to embed this into an HTML email. this email is sent to lots of people and deletes their harddrives.
will MS be held responsible? will the person who put up a website as a 'proof-of-concept' be held responsible? what about the guy who sends around the email?
ultimately folks, I think the end user is going to be held responsible. i don't know about the rest of you, but the company I work for will hold me responsible if our systems fail. and blaming MS isn't going to help me one bit.
now that this cat is out of the bag...what can we do to protect ourselves if we can't switch from Windows b/c our jobs won't let us?
the more crypto the better. and don't try to legislate backdoors into it or anything.
people need to reliaze that crypto is available to anyone with the ability to use it...it needs help in getting the average joe to use it.
most people won't use PGP or something b/c it is too complicated. crypto needs to be built into office and internet apps from the ground up. strong crypto. stuff that can't be broken.
people need to feel secure about these things. i think the govt has a lot to offer in promoting pki and such to get this in the hands of everyone.
privacy is important. the govt needs to make a proactive effort to show that they believe in personal privacy and are willing to help make it happen online.
Someone said it a few days ago in a discussion on Slashdot regarding console gaming, but I think it's worth saying here again:
It is a good thing that almost all games are written for Windows.
The reason is that we don't want a moving target for developers who are writing commercial titles. In the console gaming market, you can buy a PS2, XBOX, SNES or whatever, and only play games for those platforms on those boxes. Any developer who wants to capture the whole market must port to each platform. This is slow, frustrating and helps neither the game house nor the consumer.
In the PC market on the other hand, you can write only for Windows and not worry b/c you know you'll hit the vast majority of consumers. John Carmack is fond of saying that all Linux game sales ever don't add up to one medium selling Windows title. So people aren't about to write games for Linux unless they want the techincal challenge/fun.
WINEX is great. We need to accept the fact that people will continue to write games exclusively for Windows (and that they should!). And we need to find ways to make those games work on other platforms if we want to use other platforms to play them.
I really don't think this should be a pro/anti Microsoft discussion, just an evaluation of the reality of the situation.
Fact is that running SOAP over port 80 or not doesn't make much difference. Someone once said that IT secuirty is 20% technology and 80% policy and practice. These numbers are debatable, but I agree with the premise.
The problem is that certain things have to be open on a networked computer in order to benefit from the networking in the first place. You need layered security. You can't just secure your physical, network and transport layers and expect everything to be okay. You need to know what's going on all the way up to the application layer.
You need to use DMZs, staggered firewalls, SSL, SSH, applications that force you to login, appropriate file/directory/service security permissions. You need to know at any time what software your boxes are running, and make an effort to understand how that software works and what issues it presents. You need to patch commercial software, read the bug lists and do penetration testing.
There's obviously more that can be added to this list, but the point is that security is process not a technical specification, a device...or a choice of port.
Most organizations don't invest enough in this process because those controlling expenditure tend not to understand the importance. Also, security is one of those things you only notice when it doesn't work, so it is assumed you are doing it, and you'll never shine for doing a great job at it.
I think it will take a much more hostile Internet security environment to wake people up to the need to invest in the most critical security capital of all: talented, educated and dedicated human beings.
'As with most legends, there is some element of truth at the core of this one, but some considerable confusion over the details. This particular confusion traces back to the work of Rand Corporation engineer Paul Baran, one of the three people with some claim to having independently developed the ideas of packet switching. Baran described some of the methods of packet switching in a series of eleven reports published in 1964 with the title "On Distributed Communications."'
'The phrase "packet switching" was coined by Donald Davies, another of the three independent "inventors" of packet switching. Davies was working on designs for distributed computer communications at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in England.'
'The ARPANET development would be closely affected by the third of the independent "inventors" of packet switching--Leonard Kleinrock.... Before he finished his graduate research, Kleinrock learned of Paul Baran's work, and he cites Baran in his dissertation. But, well before he learned of Baran's ideas for a distributed process network, Kleinrock had analyzed the statistical behavior of such networks. Kleinrock has some claim to priority in the concepts of packet switching, in a 1961 quarterly lab report, "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets," and he published the first textbook discussion of packet switching network behaviors in 1964, Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Delay.'
I'm very excited for Gnome 2.0, not the least b/c it will support anti-aliased fonts. I know this is childish and stupid, but nothing makes your GUI look more professional that anti-aliasing. I use KDE for this at the moment, but KDE is lacking in other parts of the visual department. Gnome 2.0 sounds like just what I've been waiting for.
I don't understand the utility in doing this anymore than the libertarian opposition to it.
I would assume that any self-respecting bad guy will be using good strong encryption to protect any sensitive data. That would make the resulting packets read like garbage until decoded, which would make sifting through the data stream very difficult indeed. So widespread, readily available encryption will make this of little use to the Feds.
And I don't really worry about the threat of 'big brother' watching me any more than I currently worry about crackers getting at my stuff. Afterall, the measures one should take to protect yourself today (using SSH instead of telnet for example), will also protect yourself from being snooped upon by the government. So there's nothing new here.
The big concern is the tax dollars will be wasted by the feds to put this in place.
"The GPL allows open-source programs to be changed by users, but those changes aren't official and can't be sold commercially unless they're given back to and accepted by the owner."
That's not exactly how I understood it. My impression was that the GPL was a recursive license allowing the free use and modification of code, but requiring that said modifications also be made freely available under the GPL. I didn't think the person whose code I was modifying had to accept my modifications in any way. Nor did I think it was directly incumbent upon me to send them to him.
I wonder what it is about journalists that makes them so capable of half-understanding so many things?
This kinda raises the issue of how enforcable source code licensing is. I was wondering what people here think about this.
The only reason Soren was able to see his code had been filched was because it was stupidly filched by an open source project that was publishing their code. Most computer programs are commercial proprietary and closed source. How would we ever know if open source code was in use in these programs?
Is there any enforcement effort on this front? Could there be a 3rd party audit of proprietary code from - say for the sake of the zealots here - Microsoft? As far as I can tell at the moment, if someone accused MS of stealing open source code, MS could say simply, "no we aren't" and that you can't look at our code to check b/c it belongs to us.
If you want to talk about doors, why not consider removing the doors to the cockpit of airplanes?
It should be 100% impossible for a passenger to enter the cockpit at any time. Pilots should enter the plane from a different outer door than everyone else.
I'm really getting sick of reading about the failures of airport security, digital security or intelligence efforts when this huge security problem was what actually made it possible for last week's tragedy to occur.
We can't let people take away civil liberties in the name of safety. Last time I checked, I didn't have the god given right to meet the pilot.
We have to assume the bad guys will not follow our rules, so we have to make it harder for them to use our infrastructure to damage our lives.
Not to diminish the importance of this achievement, but I was wondering how far along we are with the development of mouse blood cells from human tissue?
Humans have been donating blood for years, but very few mice donate blood because they can't read. I think they'd like to, but they can never tell where the clinics are or what hours they'll be open. It seems reasonable therefore for the focus to be on creating synthetic mouse blood first.
I'm sure that if they mice out there could read this, they'd agree.
Will They Keep the Compaq Brand Name?
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 1
There's pretty huge brand equity in both HP and Compaq names. Anyone know if they plan to keep both?
Slashdot Mirror
Good package management is really going to help in competing with the status quo (ahem...Microsoft) and helping open source projects gain mainstream acceptance. If installing software from packages were as easy as everything else on the Mac, then the advantages of the system would sell itself and gain many Windows converts.
Open source software continues to improve by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, the uninitiated tend to be terribly confused about how to get it, install it (including installing dependencies etc), update and maintain it. I think the problem stems from a few things including:
- The somewhat archane nature of open source software and unix...keeping out those who aren't in on the joke so-to-speak.
And, more importantly,
- Competing package management systems
I think competition is a great thing. I think it is far to late to advocate the abandoning of the existing ports collection, RPM, deb, etc systems because they are entrenched. But the end result is that a project must have someone who does packaging for all these systems if they want full exposure.
This is why I think we need something like a package repository run by volunteers who create, maintain and store the packages. If it were a single system (distrbuted across many servers around the world of course) then you could have a single, standard interface for searching and downloading packages. This way if someone knows how to use the system on Red Hat, they'll know how to use it on OS X.
Eventually, a dominant package format may emerge. Hubbard has some good suggestions (XML descriptions is a no brainer). Ultimately, the ease of use of this stuff is key. You want developers to be able to serve all package communities with as little effort as possible, and you want the users to have the most comprehensive access to packages available.
Once this happens, people buying Macs or installing Linux will have a huge advantage over their Windows mired breathren because once they log in they'll be a couple of clicks away from thousands of ever evolving applications. While Windows users will be thousands of dollars away from a couple of applications.
I think the answer here is to have a standard interface that everyone will agree to use. This could be a very simple application that would be skinnable/themeable for any distro to add their own personal touch. But at the end of the day, the single standard app should use the same configurations on every platform.
The example, that I think should be followed is that of the Microsoft Management Console. The MMC lets developers provide 'snap-ins' that let you control their apps from within the same console you use to configure Windows itself. Anyone can write a snap-in to do anything you want. The snap-in doesn't dictate how you write your app, or how you store it's configuration info. But because the MMC is used by everyone runnning Win>=2K developers have a standard that is in their best interest to write for.
That's all Unix needs. Then the developers will write their own snap-ins, and you won't have so many different projects trying to build GUIs to configure so many applications that may change their configurations at any rev without notice.
That's a good point Matt.
Is there an alternative service to Sourceforge (free or otherwise) that does the same thing? Anyone know where people would go if SF goes tits up?
I also wonder how much they make from their shrink-wrapped product? Anyone know of organizations that are buying this?
E.
BTW. Matt: Streamsicle looks cool, are you aware that the web-installer craps out on Mandrake 8.1? I guess you get what you pay for.
Why is the girl in this picture wearing a helmet?
I think I'll stick to regular sized slinkies so I don't have to remember to wear a helmet. The number of slinky related deaths each year is growing. Please remember that playing safe is playing smart.
I don't think very many people will choose to use the Mac for clustering _even if_ it is easier than other platforms as this article seems to suggest.
Macs are luxury computers. They are generally more expensive than their custom PC counterparts, and Apple limits the BTO options that you can use to reduce the price of their G4 towers.
If you wanted to cluster 10 G4 towers, you'd be paying for 10 superdrives, 10 3d accelerated video cards, 10 snazzy cases etc etc. Most people building a cluster will want each system to only have the components they need: processor, memory, network IO, backplane bandwidth etc. You won't want to pay for components you won't use (like 9 extra superdrives).
So unless Apple decides to offer special deals for those who want clustering, I think the economics of the situation will work against Macs and infavour of x86 PCs running Linux where the economies of scale conspire to lower component costs to the minimum.
Doesn't "The Spy Who Shagged Me" capitalize on the well-known 007 movie "The Spy Who Loved Me"?
Of course it does. Why no comment from MGM over that one?
Does anyone know what happens to previously released code that then experiences a license change? To use a hypothetical for my question: what happens if you write a program and release it under the GPL. I come along and make modifications of the program and release my new code under the GPL to comply with the GPL from your code. Then you decide to change the license for the original program to something different - say for the sake of being extreme, you close source it. Does that mean that my derivative code is now in violation of your new license change?
I'm again amazed by the comments I read on this site. Perhaps someone could explain the contradiction.
On the one hand people here are great advocates of open source software. Any casual reader will quickly learn the financial and convenience benefits of running programs released under the GPL and such. So one might be left with a feeling that Slashdotters care about things like software licenses and the legal use of software.
On the other hand, everyone gets annoyed when companies who choose not to open source their software try to enforce their commercial license requirements. Why is this wrong? Why does this make them worthy of derision?
Slashdotters seem to be selectively law-abiding. There are complaints about the RIAA's struggle against music piracy, and yet an outcry results whenever anyone violates the GPL.
Frankly I think this is all economics. When the boom was in full swing you could IPO a Linux distro without a business plan and become a millionaire over night. That was great. The suckers in the market were paying you because they didn't understand your product. At the same time big companies didn't care so much about piracy b/c the market was keeping valuations high and profits were rolling in. Now financial times are tougher and those same corporations are trying to get the revenues that are rightfully theirs. I've got to have some respect for that.
Maybe I'm just uninformed, but it seems to me that by leaving space exploration to the egg-heads at these govt science agencies, we are not making the kind of progress a more ambitious goal-oriented approach might produce.
In the 60's man went to the moon. The moon! Many times. We haven't been back in decades.
Why is there no base on the moon? Why aren't there more space stations in orbit? I think part of the reason is that the focus is on doing dumb experiments instead of just building these facilities as rapidly as possible.
The shuttle was a big step forward. Mir was a big step forward. The ISS will benefit from both these achievements. What I object to is reading quotes from guys at McGill University who are getting bucks to do research on reflexes in space. This is idiotic when we still need lots of money to put more facilities and equipment up there.
I figure you could spend all your money every year on pure research science. And I think you'd get a lot out of it. But it should be remembered that it was guys like Columbus, Hudson and Cook who made the big discoveries of the last exploratory period. Guys who went and did what they wanted to do to see if they could. They weren't sailing ships filled with lab rats and experiments. They wanted to see what was around the next corner, see if they could get there, and see if they could settle there. I don't understand why this spirit has been lost.
Goals need to be set. ISS completion by 2005. Base on the moon by 2010. Man on Mars by 2015. Base on Mars by 2020. Let's get a move on.
who would you pick as the other two people for the oversight committee and why?
someone decides to put up a website to demonstrate this vulnerability. the site deletes everything on your harddrive. someone else decides to embed this into an HTML email. this email is sent to lots of people and deletes their harddrives.
will MS be held responsible? will the person who put up a website as a 'proof-of-concept' be held responsible? what about the guy who sends around the email?
ultimately folks, I think the end user is going to be held responsible. i don't know about the rest of you, but the company I work for will hold me responsible if our systems fail. and blaming MS isn't going to help me one bit.
now that this cat is out of the bag...what can we do to protect ourselves if we can't switch from Windows b/c our jobs won't let us?
the more crypto the better. and don't try to legislate backdoors into it or anything.
people need to reliaze that crypto is available to anyone with the ability to use it...it needs help in getting the average joe to use it.
most people won't use PGP or something b/c it is too complicated. crypto needs to be built into office and internet apps from the ground up. strong crypto. stuff that can't be broken.
people need to feel secure about these things. i think the govt has a lot to offer in promoting pki and such to get this in the hands of everyone.
privacy is important. the govt needs to make a proactive effort to show that they believe in personal privacy and are willing to help make it happen online.
Someone said it a few days ago in a discussion on Slashdot regarding console gaming, but I think it's worth saying here again:
It is a good thing that almost all games are written for Windows.
The reason is that we don't want a moving target for developers who are writing commercial titles. In the console gaming market, you can buy a PS2, XBOX, SNES or whatever, and only play games for those platforms on those boxes. Any developer who wants to capture the whole market must port to each platform. This is slow, frustrating and helps neither the game house nor the consumer.
In the PC market on the other hand, you can write only for Windows and not worry b/c you know you'll hit the vast majority of consumers. John Carmack is fond of saying that all Linux game sales ever don't add up to one medium selling Windows title. So people aren't about to write games for Linux unless they want the techincal challenge/fun.
WINEX is great. We need to accept the fact that people will continue to write games exclusively for Windows (and that they should!). And we need to find ways to make those games work on other platforms if we want to use other platforms to play them.
I really don't think this should be a pro/anti Microsoft discussion, just an evaluation of the reality of the situation.
Fact is that running SOAP over port 80 or not doesn't make much difference. Someone once said that IT secuirty is 20% technology and 80% policy and practice. These numbers are debatable, but I agree with the premise.
The problem is that certain things have to be open on a networked computer in order to benefit from the networking in the first place. You need layered security. You can't just secure your physical, network and transport layers and expect everything to be okay. You need to know what's going on all the way up to the application layer.
You need to use DMZs, staggered firewalls, SSL, SSH, applications that force you to login, appropriate file/directory/service security permissions. You need to know at any time what software your boxes are running, and make an effort to understand how that software works and what issues it presents. You need to patch commercial software, read the bug lists and do penetration testing.
There's obviously more that can be added to this list, but the point is that security is process not a technical specification, a device...or a choice of port.
Most organizations don't invest enough in this process because those controlling expenditure tend not to understand the importance. Also, security is one of those things you only notice when it doesn't work, so it is assumed you are doing it, and you'll never shine for doing a great job at it.
I think it will take a much more hostile Internet security environment to wake people up to the need to invest in the most critical security capital of all: talented, educated and dedicated human beings.
'As with most legends, there is some element of truth at the core of this one, but some considerable confusion over the details. This particular confusion traces back to the work of Rand Corporation engineer Paul Baran, one of the three people with some claim to having independently developed the ideas of packet switching. Baran described some of the methods of packet switching in a series of eleven reports published in 1964 with the title "On Distributed Communications."'
... Before he finished his graduate research, Kleinrock learned of Paul Baran's work, and he cites Baran in his dissertation. But, well before he learned of Baran's ideas for a distributed process network, Kleinrock had analyzed the statistical behavior of such networks. Kleinrock has some claim to priority in the concepts of packet switching, in a 1961 quarterly lab report, "Information Flow in Large Communication Nets," and he published the first textbook discussion of packet switching network behaviors in 1964, Communication Nets: Stochastic Message Flow and Delay.'
'The phrase "packet switching" was coined by Donald Davies, another of the three independent "inventors" of packet switching. Davies was working on designs for distributed computer communications at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in England.'
'The ARPANET development would be closely affected by the third of the independent "inventors" of packet switching--Leonard Kleinrock.
-- The Roots of Packet Switching Networks.
I'm very excited for Gnome 2.0, not the least b/c it will support anti-aliased fonts. I know this is childish and stupid, but nothing makes your GUI look more professional that anti-aliasing. I use KDE for this at the moment, but KDE is lacking in other parts of the visual department. Gnome 2.0 sounds like just what I've been waiting for.
Anyone know how far off this really is?
I don't understand the utility in doing this anymore than the libertarian opposition to it.
I would assume that any self-respecting bad guy will be using good strong encryption to protect any sensitive data. That would make the resulting packets read like garbage until decoded, which would make sifting through the data stream very difficult indeed. So widespread, readily available encryption will make this of little use to the Feds.
And I don't really worry about the threat of 'big brother' watching me any more than I currently worry about crackers getting at my stuff. Afterall, the measures one should take to protect yourself today (using SSH instead of telnet for example), will also protect yourself from being snooped upon by the government. So there's nothing new here.
The big concern is the tax dollars will be wasted by the feds to put this in place.
According to the article:
"The GPL allows open-source programs to be changed by users, but those changes aren't official and can't be sold commercially unless they're given back to and accepted by the owner."
That's not exactly how I understood it. My impression was that the GPL was a recursive license allowing the free use and modification of code, but requiring that said modifications also be made freely available under the GPL. I didn't think the person whose code I was modifying had to accept my modifications in any way. Nor did I think it was directly incumbent upon me to send them to him.
I wonder what it is about journalists that makes them so capable of half-understanding so many things?
The study found a high use of very effective steganography...which is why they found a low use of ineffective stego for their study.
Hmm?
This kinda raises the issue of how enforcable source code licensing is. I was wondering what people here think about this.
The only reason Soren was able to see his code had been filched was because it was stupidly filched by an open source project that was publishing their code. Most computer programs are commercial proprietary and closed source. How would we ever know if open source code was in use in these programs?
Is there any enforcement effort on this front? Could there be a 3rd party audit of proprietary code from - say for the sake of the zealots here - Microsoft? As far as I can tell at the moment, if someone accused MS of stealing open source code, MS could say simply, "no we aren't" and that you can't look at our code to check b/c it belongs to us.
How can these things be enforced?
When will I be able to use my MS Passport login to login to Slashdot?
That way MS can post comments for me, and save me the time I spend thinking for myself.
If you want to talk about doors, why not consider removing the doors to the cockpit of airplanes?
It should be 100% impossible for a passenger to enter the cockpit at any time. Pilots should enter the plane from a different outer door than everyone else.
I'm really getting sick of reading about the failures of airport security, digital security or intelligence efforts when this huge security problem was what actually made it possible for last week's tragedy to occur.
We can't let people take away civil liberties in the name of safety. Last time I checked, I didn't have the god given right to meet the pilot.
We have to assume the bad guys will not follow our rules, so we have to make it harder for them to use our infrastructure to damage our lives.
AFAIK:
MMX means multi media extensions
MMC means Microsoft Management Console unless it means other things on a chip.
I'm not a chip guy, so I don't really know much about this stuff.
Just wonderin'
Not to diminish the importance of this achievement, but I was wondering how far along we are with the development of mouse blood cells from human tissue?
Humans have been donating blood for years, but very few mice donate blood because they can't read. I think they'd like to, but they can never tell where the clinics are or what hours they'll be open. It seems reasonable therefore for the focus to be on creating synthetic mouse blood first.
I'm sure that if they mice out there could read this, they'd agree.
There's pretty huge brand equity in both HP and Compaq names. Anyone know if they plan to keep both?