Precisely. The computer is just a tool. If you look at all of the algorithms and iterative techniques out there that traditional artists use, I think you can make a very strong case for computer-generated art being art. There is still a human out there, choosing the direction that the artwork should go.
Boris Verostko is one artist who immediately comes to mind. Assuming that one didn't know about the origins of his artwork, I think that person would be struck by the beauty of it. Some people I talk to about him are turned off when I mention how he makes his art, but I find it fascinating: he retrofitted a pen plotter with a paintbrush, and the plotter is controlled by mathematical algorithms. Now, it's not like a computer would think to do this itself, nor would it write those algorithms to resemble brush text, or whatever. So it is definitely a creative act, and in my mind, art.
But I think all this flap about art is just pretentiousness anyhow. Yes, it is obvious that the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are a masterpiece. It is obvious that Vivaldi's Four Seasons is a beautiful creative work. How does a creation that I find attractive in any way diminish those works of art?
Let's not forget that many of the Old Masters made it clear that they intended to imitate nature. So who's the copycat now?
I'll believe it when it has a proper spin-off name. NVU? Too hackerish. How about Plasmacat, or Waterbanana... Or we can just let Firesomething suggest something.
I work at a small but profitable publishing company. Almost every wall in our offices are lined with bookshelves, very few of which contain books by us. Many of these books have been read and written in to the point of falling apart.
This should be a wake-up call for Microsoft. Reading our competition's books is a stratagem that has served us very well.
Yeah, but there's another area where having ActiveX would be helpful: legacy corporate apps. We have a huge number of them. Actually, I only call them 'legacy' because I'm hoping that someday they'll be replaced with something better, but right now, we're stuck.
Our parent company has spent many millions on the development of in-house apps that depend on ActiveX. They're only just realizing their conundrum now. Because the malware problem was getting so bad, we spent a significant amount of time training our users to use a different web browser for regular internet use, and to use IE for intranet apps. I went so far as to remove all IE shortcuts, and then put shortcut links on the desktop that open those intranet sites directly in IE.
So for us, having selective ActiveX in Netscape/Firefox would be a step in the right direction. It's not the ideal solution, but if you work in IT long enough, you'll find that you can rarely implement an ideal solution anyhow. In the interest of my own mental health, I like to think of it as a challenge to my hacker-fu.
Aside from the fact that there are no references to back up any of the claims that this McGrath fellow is making (I'd even settle for a research firm that was paid-off by Microsoft!), the 'author' of this article wrote a grand total of FIVE sentences. All five of those sentences paraphrase something else that McGrath says. The rest of the article simply quotes McGrath straight.
There's no discussion of the points, no consideration of other factors, and as far as I can tell, no fact-checking. There is simply no journalism happening here. I know I can simply move on, but it irritates me to know that some CIO out there (probably mine) will take this all in without a second-thought.
The shortcomings of the Windows OS are OBVIOUS to anyone who has to admin these systems in a real production environment, and even more apparent to those of us who have the pleasure of also running othersystems. Just imagine what Windows might be like if they spent half of their propaganda budget on fixing the freaking software.
The thing that stood out to me in the article was how billie seems to think people have no other incentive in innovating than profit.
This struck me as odd, too. I mean, if there were no incentives to producing free/open software, then wouldn't there be a paucity of free/open software? He's right, in many cases, the incentive is NOT financial gain.
The thing Gates does not seem to realize (then again, maybe he does, and this is just spin), is that the incentive is better software! The fact that there are so many individuals motivated to produce better software despite the lack of financial gain should be a wake up call to Gates. Your product sucks that badly!
IIRC, Steve Albini also records exclusively with tape. I have no idea what he'll switch to. I remember him saying that the tonal characteristics of tape were desirable.
Listen to some of Albini's recordings with a good set of headphones. They are amazing. Even more amazing was when I was finally able to hear them on studio reference monitors, but they sound great even with a standard stereo setup at home. His attention to detail is amazing.
I'm no electrician, but the traffic light near my apartment went into failsafe mode once (blinking yellow on one side, blinking red on the other). I happened to be waiting for the bus at the time, and when the service guy showed up, he let me look over his shoulder while he worked. I didn't see a single IC in there-- just lots of wires and relays. So I got the impression that traffic lights didn't have any kind of digital circuitry in them, or if they did, nothing as sophisticated as a computer. Surely nothing as sophisticated as a general-purpose computer.
Funny, this reminds of of my next door neighbor in my college dorm during my freshman year. He was an absolute slob. He would munch on cereal all day, straight from the box, and he would drop half-handfuls on the floor around him. In keeping with his crass and careless nature, he would make a point of grinding this cereal into the carpet as he walked around the room.
One day, I came into his room and discovered that all the shit on the floor was gone. "Chris," I said, "you cleaned!" "No," he replied, "I just waited until the cleaning crew arrived." Sure enough, there was a procession of ants carrying the cereal off into his closet.
Re:I'm waiting for missing track #17 - Silent nigh
on
Automatic Christmas Music
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Except that John Cage's version is 4:33. And Silent Night was first performed in it's current form in 1818, so John Cage is the one in trouble. That is, if he weren't already dead.
What percentage of spyware comes in through IE and ActiveX? Seems like they would just fix that. Stop it at the door, don't wait for it to get in and then Try to kill it.
This is exactly the point I've been trying to make within our corporation for the last year. Relatively unsuccessfully, I might add.
Naturally, our office, which I admin and which has about 100 PC users, is almost completely a Firefox shop. Malware was a serious problem when I arrived, and after implementing a centralized antivirus setup and switching everyone to Firefox, support calls have dwindled to nearly nothing, and the few calls I have gotten were those few sneaky users who thought that they could get away with using IE behind my back.
I was in a corporation-wide IT meeting last month, and I brought up using Firefox. Apparently the help desks for other offices are totally swamped. So the head IT guy asks me if switching has affected malware infection rate, so I told him the same thing I mentioned above. The room was totally silent; these guys were shocked. The meeting ended with a decision to start "testing" Firefox, but a few people were outright hostile to the idea at all. As far as I'm aware, they still haven't even given the "testing" idea a second thought, even though their malware problem continues to grow.
But the big thing stopping us from going to Firefox completely is our damn intranet apps. We've poured millions into these half-assed ActiveX programs that require IE. I mean, WTF? Why on Earth would you write a web-based application that requires a specific OS (Windows), a specific browser (IE), and a specific processor (i386)? It's madness! Sure, you could argue that application updates can still be done centrally, but even this they've fucked up-- every time an update comes out, we have to remove the program manually from "C:\windows\downloaded program files". Talk about living in the dark ages!
Anyhow... I'm guessing that this is the big reason why Microsoft doesn't just axe the whole ActiveX thing-- this would be a nightmare for many an IT manager. Not to mention-- look at where ActiveX came from: it started as OLE, became COM, and is now becoming.NET. MS has dumped tons of cash into a flawed piece of software, and thousands of programmers know how to write software for it.
The school will play some minor effect, for example having MIT on your resume will get your future employers/grad school's attention slightly more.
Unfortunately, I have to say that although a degree from a big-name school is not terribly important in the industry as a whole, it does count BIG in some places. My father worked for a company in Cambridge, MA in the early 90's, and as he has his PhD in physics and had much programming experience, he was hired to manage the programmers writing a physics modeling program. He was the only person there without a degree from an Ivy League.
He often interviewed candidates for programming positions who looked extremely capable, but he had to fight tooth-and-nail with the management to hire them unless they had an Ivy League degree (specifically, a degree from MIT). This isn't a little-known company, either... (think Ray Tomlinson)
In my own personal experience, especially in state hiring, you can't even get in the door without a CS degree for many positions. The IT person doing the hiring never sees your resume because the HR drone tosses it out. I am now (happily) a full-time systems administrator at a private company, but a little more than a year ago I was turned down by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for a data-entry position because I didn't have a CS degree!
But heterogenous environments help mitigate security problems. They are harder for a cracker to get through, less susceptible to virii and malware, and when parts fail, they tend to be less catastrophic because you are running different architectures. The trade off, of course, is in ease-of-administration, but in my experience the time spent running heterogenous hardware/environments has paid off big time when there is a problem. Complexity makes things difficult, yes, but that what I'm paid for, no?
OpenBSD needs the firmware included with the OS in this case because of Intel's cheap hardware. This chipset doesn't have true firmware-- meaning that you can't flash the software to ROM and have it stay resident between reboots. What happens is that the driver loads the firmware binary to the card which enables the card to run. Apparently there are some advantages to having software running on the hardware, otherwise I think this would have just been included in Intel's driver itself, but if I understand correctly, the reason for having the driver load the firmware is cost-related. Flash ROMs cost more.
As for GPL contamination, I don't think the BSD developers want GPL code in their tree. It makes the OS less free, since BSD has fewer restrictions on distribution (you can modify and sell BSD-licensed stuff).
But this story has nothing to do with GPL'ed code. The issue is that Intel will not let the BSD folks redistribute their firmware. This is a chunk of binary, not source code, so Intel has nothing to lose-- the BSD folks don't know anything more about the chipset's inner workings than they did before. Intel gains by having a larger userbase, since the firmware would come pre-loaded with the OS.
The decision is pretty simple for me: I won't buy Intel wireless chipsets. There are already alternatives out there anyhow.
One possibility that occurs to me is this: The combination of prolificacy and inattention to accuracy that characterizes this process is highly suggestive of the modern pedagogic technique known as "journaling."
One possibility that occurs to me is this: you are a pompous ass. Oh, excuse me, in Wikipedia-speak that would be fucking asshole.
It's funny, one year, I came downstairs, eagerly awaiting the goodies filling my stocking, and to my dismay it was filled with COAL! After I got over the initial shock (What did I do? Did I pick on my little brother one too many times? Aaaaaagh!!!), I discovered that it was actually licorice-flavored rock candy. Phew!
I'm sure my parents were laughing their asses off. I should ask them about that...
The news media are beholden to sponsors, because sponsors pay the bills.
Reporting "fact" is a political process.
Journalists are sometimes incorrect, and sometimes lazy.
The news media only stay in business as long as people are watching, people watch only when the news is "interesting". Sponsors only pay when people are watching (see #1).
In the end, what we get is a horribly distorted view of the present state of the world. I TA'ed a class about this, and here's an excellent student project that dealt with precisely this issue. These two obviously aced the course.
You need to WORK to stay informed. You need to read and watch a diverse variety of media. If you can read a foreign language, this helps. But even when you do all of these, it's easy to get burned. Look at the issue of WMD's in Iraq. Very few people knew the facts because the facts weren't being reported.
Actually, if you RTFA, several of the advanced worms that this group study affected Linux. Considering how much stuff comes pre-installed on commercial Linux distros, I wouldn't be surprised if a desktop Linux user got hit with one of these:
ETAP/SIMILE [18] - Cross-platform worm that affects both Windows Portable Executable (PE) and Linux Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) executables. Uses an entry-point obscuring technique and sophisticated polymorphic file infector to avoid detection by anti-virus programs.
LION [21] - Linux worm that spreads by using a known flaw in BIND.
RAMEN [22] - Linux worm that bundles together a number of known exploits against Linux services, including: WuFTP, LPRng, and rpc.statd.
Gimme a break. You can download the entire OS via FTP and make your own ISO. Even the OpenBSD installer doesn't care about the files, so you're not dependent on the 'official' ISO at all.
The people who buy OpenBSD CDs don't do it because they're locked in or forced to in any way. We do it because we want to support a high-quality operating system. Considering that OpenBSD has replaced several costly Windows boxes where I work, the $40 for a CD is inconsequential.
And, lest you forget, OpenBSD has a free-er license than Linux (don't get me wrong, I love and use Linux every day). OpenBSD's goal is getting high-quality software out there, not to free the world. You seem to be forgetting Theo's interview on Slashdot:
The licence on our code is pretty clear. We want vendors to use our code. We want commercial operating systems to ship with OpenSSH. Not shipping with an SSH varient causes great grief, and it is time that ends.
Same goes for OpenBSD. We would prefer if companies building commercial network appliances used OpenBSD, rather than writing their own operating systems. Typically, these companies are very comfortable with solving the problems within their application space. Yet, there is a history of these companies writing their own cruddy operating systems, and at the same time writing worse applications.
It would be better if routers, firewalls, telephone switches, fileservers, and whatever else used reliable components, designed by people who care.
So go ahead, use any parts of OpenBSD as parts of commercial systems.
It wasn't unusual to go racing to a programmers cube at 5PM with a programming requirement that had to be finished in 30 minutes or so to go to press.
Unfortunately, I don't think a manager would listen to that argument. I also do in-house programming and support for a publishing company, and I have a feeling that we would be sternly told to "plan ahead" in the future. You must work for a newspaper, right? I've never heard of only having 30 minutes before press in book publishing...
But I think your point is essentially correct. How can we do without in-house programmers? I do a huge amount just as a member of an IT staff. Often people will need a tool, and I can quickly cobble together something from bits and pieces, or if needed, write something from scratch.
For example, our design department was keeping an old Mac around because they needed a program that generated barcodes. Newer barcode programs are expensive and no longer generated the kind they needed anyhow. But I found GNU Barcode, made a few changes so that it generated the barcodes the way our people needed them and wrote a nice Applescript GUI wrapper so they could use it. A few hours of my time. When someone tells me that this kind of thing can be outsourced, I just don't buy it. Most of the time the people I work with can't even verbalize what it is they want! In my experience, you really need a close connection with the work that's actually happening.
I remember hearing somewhere that most of the programming that actually happens is maintenance of legacy in-house code, anyhow. (I couldn't find any facts to back up this claim, though) Is outsourcing really replacing these people?
There's a better way. Granted, it doesn't have the snazziness of stereo presets on your machine, it is more flexible, and cheaper.
Simply hook the audio-in on your computer to an FM receiver. If you have a good quality FM receiver and antenna, you can get very good recordings.
I used to use Audiocorder with OSX. This is a great program, and affordable. As for time-shifting, you should be able to start playing an AIFF or WAV before you're done recording.
Now that I'm on Linux, though, I just use a cron job and arecord, which I think comes with the ALSA drivers; it just takes a little bit more work than Audiocorder to get the levels right.
The nice thing about Linux/OSX, is that you can schedule these things to start encoding into MP3 when you're done recording. I used to use this process to record and encode my radio show, and it was done before I got back home. All I had to do was transfer it to my iPod. I also used this to record NPR's Morning Edition, but now that I have to leave for work before the show starts, there's no real point anymore...
The Berkshire Brewing Company has been using coffee beans as an adjunct for awhile now, and the Dean's Beans Coffeehouse Porter is quite tasty. I doubt they are the first to do this, either.
Actually, this may not be as horrible as everyone makes it out to be.
I disagree. This isn't limited to just Microsoft. Take a look
Microsoft pushes technological solutions to protect data (DRM) with "trusted computing" via "secure BIOS".
RIAA pushes for DMCA-like laws that prevent circumvention of the aforementioned technological solutions by making it unlawful to do so. The RIAA has demonstrated that it is will not hesitate to use these tools to their advantage.
So, you see, there's end-to-end lockout being put in place. If you happen to be smart enough to see through the bullshit, you can't do what you want because the technology stops you. If you happen to be smart enough to circumvent the technology, you can't tell others unless you want to risk going to jail. And even if you were some kind of law-savvy uber-hacker, do you have enough money to survive the SLAPP?
I'm not an alarmist, but come on, folks, this is alarming! Microsoft learned the hard way that their behavior isn't beyond the scope of anti-trust regulation, but they also realized that the government is too damn slow to properly stop them. I don't doubt for an instant that they won't use every competitive advantage available to them. Content producers also learned the hard way about fair use with the Betamax decision; don't fool yourself into thinking that they're going to let the Internet slip past them.
Slashdot Mirror
Precisely. The computer is just a tool. If you look at all of the algorithms and iterative techniques out there that traditional artists use, I think you can make a very strong case for computer-generated art being art. There is still a human out there, choosing the direction that the artwork should go.
Boris Verostko is one artist who immediately comes to mind. Assuming that one didn't know about the origins of his artwork, I think that person would be struck by the beauty of it. Some people I talk to about him are turned off when I mention how he makes his art, but I find it fascinating: he retrofitted a pen plotter with a paintbrush, and the plotter is controlled by mathematical algorithms. Now, it's not like a computer would think to do this itself, nor would it write those algorithms to resemble brush text, or whatever. So it is definitely a creative act, and in my mind, art.
But I think all this flap about art is just pretentiousness anyhow. Yes, it is obvious that the frescoes in the Sistine Chapel are a masterpiece. It is obvious that Vivaldi's Four Seasons is a beautiful creative work. How does a creation that I find attractive in any way diminish those works of art?
Let's not forget that many of the Old Masters made it clear that they intended to imitate nature. So who's the copycat now?
I'll believe it when it has a proper spin-off name. NVU? Too hackerish. How about Plasmacat, or Waterbanana... Or we can just let Firesomething suggest something.
This should be a wake-up call for Microsoft. Reading our competition's books is a stratagem that has served us very well.
Yeah, but there's another area where having ActiveX would be helpful: legacy corporate apps. We have a huge number of them. Actually, I only call them 'legacy' because I'm hoping that someday they'll be replaced with something better, but right now, we're stuck.
Our parent company has spent many millions on the development of in-house apps that depend on ActiveX. They're only just realizing their conundrum now. Because the malware problem was getting so bad, we spent a significant amount of time training our users to use a different web browser for regular internet use, and to use IE for intranet apps. I went so far as to remove all IE shortcuts, and then put shortcut links on the desktop that open those intranet sites directly in IE.
So for us, having selective ActiveX in Netscape/Firefox would be a step in the right direction. It's not the ideal solution, but if you work in IT long enough, you'll find that you can rarely implement an ideal solution anyhow. In the interest of my own mental health, I like to think of it as a challenge to my hacker-fu.
Aside from the fact that there are no references to back up any of the claims that this McGrath fellow is making (I'd even settle for a research firm that was paid-off by Microsoft!), the 'author' of this article wrote a grand total of FIVE sentences. All five of those sentences paraphrase something else that McGrath says. The rest of the article simply quotes McGrath straight.
There's no discussion of the points, no consideration of other factors, and as far as I can tell, no fact-checking. There is simply no journalism happening here. I know I can simply move on, but it irritates me to know that some CIO out there (probably mine) will take this all in without a second-thought.
The shortcomings of the Windows OS are OBVIOUS to anyone who has to admin these systems in a real production environment, and even more apparent to those of us who have the pleasure of also running other systems. Just imagine what Windows might be like if they spent half of their propaganda budget on fixing the freaking software.
This struck me as odd, too. I mean, if there were no incentives to producing free/open software, then wouldn't there be a paucity of free/open software? He's right, in many cases, the incentive is NOT financial gain.
The thing Gates does not seem to realize (then again, maybe he does, and this is just spin), is that the incentive is better software! The fact that there are so many individuals motivated to produce better software despite the lack of financial gain should be a wake up call to Gates. Your product sucks that badly!
And some enterprising Gentoo users found a way to run Linux on an RS6000. Not supported by IBM, of course.
Listen to some of Albini's recordings with a good set of headphones. They are amazing. Even more amazing was when I was finally able to hear them on studio reference monitors, but they sound great even with a standard stereo setup at home. His attention to detail is amazing.
I'm no electrician, but the traffic light near my apartment went into failsafe mode once (blinking yellow on one side, blinking red on the other). I happened to be waiting for the bus at the time, and when the service guy showed up, he let me look over his shoulder while he worked. I didn't see a single IC in there-- just lots of wires and relays. So I got the impression that traffic lights didn't have any kind of digital circuitry in them, or if they did, nothing as sophisticated as a computer. Surely nothing as sophisticated as a general-purpose computer.
One day, I came into his room and discovered that all the shit on the floor was gone. "Chris," I said, "you cleaned!" "No," he replied, "I just waited until the cleaning crew arrived." Sure enough, there was a procession of ants carrying the cereal off into his closet.
Except that John Cage's version is 4:33. And Silent Night was first performed in it's current form in 1818, so John Cage is the one in trouble. That is, if he weren't already dead.
This is exactly the point I've been trying to make within our corporation for the last year. Relatively unsuccessfully, I might add.
Naturally, our office, which I admin and which has about 100 PC users, is almost completely a Firefox shop. Malware was a serious problem when I arrived, and after implementing a centralized antivirus setup and switching everyone to Firefox, support calls have dwindled to nearly nothing, and the few calls I have gotten were those few sneaky users who thought that they could get away with using IE behind my back.
I was in a corporation-wide IT meeting last month, and I brought up using Firefox. Apparently the help desks for other offices are totally swamped. So the head IT guy asks me if switching has affected malware infection rate, so I told him the same thing I mentioned above. The room was totally silent; these guys were shocked. The meeting ended with a decision to start "testing" Firefox, but a few people were outright hostile to the idea at all. As far as I'm aware, they still haven't even given the "testing" idea a second thought, even though their malware problem continues to grow.
But the big thing stopping us from going to Firefox completely is our damn intranet apps. We've poured millions into these half-assed ActiveX programs that require IE. I mean, WTF? Why on Earth would you write a web-based application that requires a specific OS (Windows), a specific browser (IE), and a specific processor (i386)? It's madness! Sure, you could argue that application updates can still be done centrally, but even this they've fucked up-- every time an update comes out, we have to remove the program manually from "C:\windows\downloaded program files". Talk about living in the dark ages!
Anyhow... I'm guessing that this is the big reason why Microsoft doesn't just axe the whole ActiveX thing-- this would be a nightmare for many an IT manager. Not to mention-- look at where ActiveX came from: it started as OLE, became COM, and is now becoming .NET. MS has dumped tons of cash into a flawed piece of software, and thousands of programmers know how to write software for it.
Well, they're all going to be very horny.
Women: if you thought Italy was bad, I suggest avoiding Australia in the future.
Unfortunately, I have to say that although a degree from a big-name school is not terribly important in the industry as a whole, it does count BIG in some places. My father worked for a company in Cambridge, MA in the early 90's, and as he has his PhD in physics and had much programming experience, he was hired to manage the programmers writing a physics modeling program. He was the only person there without a degree from an Ivy League.
He often interviewed candidates for programming positions who looked extremely capable, but he had to fight tooth-and-nail with the management to hire them unless they had an Ivy League degree (specifically, a degree from MIT). This isn't a little-known company, either... (think Ray Tomlinson)
In my own personal experience, especially in state hiring, you can't even get in the door without a CS degree for many positions. The IT person doing the hiring never sees your resume because the HR drone tosses it out. I am now (happily) a full-time systems administrator at a private company, but a little more than a year ago I was turned down by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for a data-entry position because I didn't have a CS degree!
But heterogenous environments help mitigate security problems. They are harder for a cracker to get through, less susceptible to virii and malware, and when parts fail, they tend to be less catastrophic because you are running different architectures. The trade off, of course, is in ease-of-administration, but in my experience the time spent running heterogenous hardware/environments has paid off big time when there is a problem. Complexity makes things difficult, yes, but that what I'm paid for, no?
As for GPL contamination, I don't think the BSD developers want GPL code in their tree. It makes the OS less free, since BSD has fewer restrictions on distribution (you can modify and sell BSD-licensed stuff).
But this story has nothing to do with GPL'ed code. The issue is that Intel will not let the BSD folks redistribute their firmware. This is a chunk of binary, not source code, so Intel has nothing to lose-- the BSD folks don't know anything more about the chipset's inner workings than they did before. Intel gains by having a larger userbase, since the firmware would come pre-loaded with the OS.
The decision is pretty simple for me: I won't buy Intel wireless chipsets. There are already alternatives out there anyhow.
One possibility that occurs to me is this: you are a pompous ass. Oh, excuse me, in Wikipedia-speak that would be fucking asshole.
Ok, I'm done now.
It's funny, one year, I came downstairs, eagerly awaiting the goodies filling my stocking, and to my dismay it was filled with COAL! After I got over the initial shock (What did I do? Did I pick on my little brother one too many times? Aaaaaagh!!!), I discovered that it was actually licorice-flavored rock candy. Phew!
I'm sure my parents were laughing their asses off. I should ask them about that...
In the end, what we get is a horribly distorted view of the present state of the world. I TA'ed a class about this, and here's an excellent student project that dealt with precisely this issue. These two obviously aced the course.
There's a lot of good reading (and viewing) out there on this subject: Trust Us, We're Experts, The Myth of the Liberal Media, Manufacturing Consent, and of course, the classic (fictional but relevant) 1984.
You need to WORK to stay informed. You need to read and watch a diverse variety of media. If you can read a foreign language, this helps. But even when you do all of these, it's easy to get burned. Look at the issue of WMD's in Iraq. Very few people knew the facts because the facts weren't being reported.
Actually, if you RTFA, several of the advanced worms that this group study affected Linux. Considering how much stuff comes pre-installed on commercial Linux distros, I wouldn't be surprised if a desktop Linux user got hit with one of these:
ETAP/SIMILE [18] - Cross-platform worm that affects both Windows Portable Executable (PE) and Linux Executable and Linkable Format (ELF) executables. Uses an entry-point obscuring technique and sophisticated polymorphic file infector to avoid detection by anti-virus programs.
LION [21] - Linux worm that spreads by using a known flaw in BIND.
RAMEN [22] - Linux worm that bundles together a number of known exploits against Linux services, including: WuFTP, LPRng, and rpc.statd.
The people who buy OpenBSD CDs don't do it because they're locked in or forced to in any way. We do it because we want to support a high-quality operating system. Considering that OpenBSD has replaced several costly Windows boxes where I work, the $40 for a CD is inconsequential.
And, lest you forget, OpenBSD has a free-er license than Linux (don't get me wrong, I love and use Linux every day). OpenBSD's goal is getting high-quality software out there, not to free the world. You seem to be forgetting Theo's interview on Slashdot:
The licence on our code is pretty clear. We want vendors to use our code. We want commercial operating systems to ship with OpenSSH. Not shipping with an SSH varient causes great grief, and it is time that ends.
Same goes for OpenBSD. We would prefer if companies building commercial network appliances used OpenBSD, rather than writing their own operating systems. Typically, these companies are very comfortable with solving the problems within their application space. Yet, there is a history of these companies writing their own cruddy operating systems, and at the same time writing worse applications.
It would be better if routers, firewalls, telephone switches, fileservers, and whatever else used reliable components, designed by people who care.
So go ahead, use any parts of OpenBSD as parts of commercial systems.
It wasn't unusual to go racing to a programmers cube at 5PM with a programming requirement that had to be finished in 30 minutes or so to go to press.
Unfortunately, I don't think a manager would listen to that argument. I also do in-house programming and support for a publishing company, and I have a feeling that we would be sternly told to "plan ahead" in the future. You must work for a newspaper, right? I've never heard of only having 30 minutes before press in book publishing...
But I think your point is essentially correct. How can we do without in-house programmers? I do a huge amount just as a member of an IT staff. Often people will need a tool, and I can quickly cobble together something from bits and pieces, or if needed, write something from scratch.
For example, our design department was keeping an old Mac around because they needed a program that generated barcodes. Newer barcode programs are expensive and no longer generated the kind they needed anyhow. But I found GNU Barcode, made a few changes so that it generated the barcodes the way our people needed them and wrote a nice Applescript GUI wrapper so they could use it. A few hours of my time. When someone tells me that this kind of thing can be outsourced, I just don't buy it. Most of the time the people I work with can't even verbalize what it is they want! In my experience, you really need a close connection with the work that's actually happening.
I remember hearing somewhere that most of the programming that actually happens is maintenance of legacy in-house code, anyhow. (I couldn't find any facts to back up this claim, though) Is outsourcing really replacing these people?
Simply hook the audio-in on your computer to an FM receiver. If you have a good quality FM receiver and antenna, you can get very good recordings.
I used to use Audiocorder with OSX. This is a great program, and affordable. As for time-shifting, you should be able to start playing an AIFF or WAV before you're done recording.
Now that I'm on Linux, though, I just use a cron job and arecord, which I think comes with the ALSA drivers; it just takes a little bit more work than Audiocorder to get the levels right.
The nice thing about Linux/OSX, is that you can schedule these things to start encoding into MP3 when you're done recording. I used to use this process to record and encode my radio show, and it was done before I got back home. All I had to do was transfer it to my iPod. I also used this to record NPR's Morning Edition, but now that I have to leave for work before the show starts, there's no real point anymore...
Anyhow, HTH. -d
The Berkshire Brewing Company has been using coffee beans as an adjunct for awhile now, and the Dean's Beans Coffeehouse Porter is quite tasty. I doubt they are the first to do this, either.
Actually, this may not be as horrible as everyone makes it out to be.
I disagree. This isn't limited to just Microsoft. Take a look
So, you see, there's end-to-end lockout being put in place. If you happen to be smart enough to see through the bullshit, you can't do what you want because the technology stops you. If you happen to be smart enough to circumvent the technology, you can't tell others unless you want to risk going to jail. And even if you were some kind of law-savvy uber-hacker, do you have enough money to survive the SLAPP?
I'm not an alarmist, but come on, folks, this is alarming! Microsoft learned the hard way that their behavior isn't beyond the scope of anti-trust regulation, but they also realized that the government is too damn slow to properly stop them. I don't doubt for an instant that they won't use every competitive advantage available to them. Content producers also learned the hard way about fair use with the Betamax decision; don't fool yourself into thinking that they're going to let the Internet slip past them.