How about this? When distributing Open Source software comment out one line. Let's say the int main(... The program will not compile. The user needs to MODIFY the source code (even if it's a trivial modification) and thus take responsibility for it. I'd agree to that. Problem is that most companies would much rather prefer to have someone to sue for damages than to have a nearly perfect security.
First. You do not BUY software. You buy the license to use - like a service. If you hire a company to provide support or to manufacture something for you they're responsible. There is a related story that happened a couple of years ago (don't remember exactly). Tim Hortons is haveing a Roll Up the Rim to Win promotion every year. When you buy a coffee - you can roll up the rim of the cup to see if you won a prize (all I ever got was donuts and more coffee - go figure!). Well.. It came out that some of the people who worked at the company that was manufacturing those cups were cheating by unwrapping those rims and stealing prizes. I know that that company lost the contract - I do not remember if they were sued for damages as well. I think they did - they failed to provide a resonable service they were contracted out for.
OSS is a bit different. It's public domain. Everyone owns it - therefore if you choose to use it, and if it breaks you yourself are responsible for damages.
That's what I think - I don't know how accurate this is, but I do realize that it's not such a great thing. If a company has to choose between OSS and proprietary solution then they will choose the proprietary one. Simply because IF something goes wrong - they have a chance of getting some recompensation.
It's a simple choice - do you buy a reliable car, or one less reliable with insurance?
Technology is great, but sometimes we all need a bit of peace and quiet. Am I the only one who actually unpluggs his phone, set the answering machine to silent and simpy read a book in peace? I find that haveing too many gadgets all around you makes for a stressfull time, something is always beeping at you. It's like haveing 5 kids continously asking for attention. I propose a petition. There should be one room in every house without ANY computers, telephones, or other devices that need "attention" of any kind. Keep computers out of my bathroom!
Is this really such a bad thing? They DO allow licenses. The product is not free and they have a right to make money off of the research. I think they made a better choice for the consumer. Who really pays when the "big fish" starts changing the standarts? By releasing disks that are not compatible with non-licensed machines they make it more difficult for the consumer.
We all know how annoying it can be for a company to keep on changing their "standart" all the time. They decided to go after the guys who steal their business and possibly make inferior product. It's their technology/research. They have a right no protect it.
Microsoft's direct lobbying has also grown out of all proportion, so that it now retains more lobbyists than the handful of companies with more than 300,000 employees. Microsoft has just 30,000 employees. Part of the reasoning for extensive use of retainers, says Roeder, citing a Business Week article, is to "suck all the oxygen out".
Who finds this surprising? Even in politics Microsoft still tries to be a monopoly.
You're absolutely right.
I once had to write a.tiff decoder. I was very impressed with the thought put in to make it extendible, work on big endian and little endian, etc... I especially liked the version number....
We allready have a LOT of experience in things like that. HTML, VRML, XML, TIFF (they're all tag based languages). It should not be that difficult to create an XML based document format. In fact, I think it's allready being done. Now... What we have to do is make sure that there is support for that format in every OSS out there.
This is getting more and more disturbing. I know I probably get modded down for this, but do we REALLY need to save people from themselves? Why bother?
Playing video games for 7 hours/day caused a problem. I say the problem was there before that. What's next? A label on coffee saying that drinking more than 8 liters will probably kill you? If you're interested, it's about 18 liters for WATER.
I think that we can proove the existence of evolution now (It is still technically a theory). We can see what happens to human race right now. We no longer need to fight for food, survival. We, as a species, live a sheltered life. More than that - we are now forced to protect people from THEMSELVES!
That's right! I have two hotmail accounts. I guess that also means that I have two Passport accounts.
As for not using them, I can't. They're extremely valuable. You see - this way ALL the spam I would get in my primary account - goes to Hotmail. It's kinda fitting, don't you think?
As to why I have two? About two months ago I received almost 1,200 spam messages over a 24 hour period. that's NOT a joke. I abandoned rspy@homail.com and switched to a new one. I figure I'll give this one 6-12 months;-)
Honestly though. There are VALID reasons for using Hotmail and other Microsoft services. This is one of them.
I don't know what the issue is. *nix can swap processes to disk. It'll save all of the info in a file (just like a core dump). Solaris can suspend everything (it's entire state) and recover that later. I'm pretty sure I've heard my friends talk about the same feature under Linux as well...
Saving a process (all of it's pages) has been around for a very long time.
On the other hand. If you have a program that takes days/weeks/months to finish (I do quite frequently) you need periodic checkpoints. There is no way around it. If you're talking about weeks/months - upload those checkpoints to another computer over the net - or burn a CD. The cost of $.50/CD disk is nothing to the loss of a month of computation.
There is a fundamental difference between a "real" signature and a digital signature. Anyone can copy a "real" signature, with practice anyone can do it fairly well. In 99.9% of cases an expert can still say it is fake. Thus it is really difficult to do it well.
With digital signatures... well... all it is is just a number. The security is only as good as the security of your card (microchip, whatever). If someone has that, their "fake" signature is IDENTICAL to your own.
In one case the security is based on something that took years in all of us to develop. It's based on one of our characteristics that we are hard pressed to CHANGE. In another it's simply a number.
Allright. I'm replying to my own message... Hmmm....
Here are some quotes from Windows XP EULA
* Installation and use. You may install, use, access, display and run one copy of the Product on a single computer, such as a workstation, terminal or other device ("Workstation Computer"). The Product may not be used by more than two (2) processors at any one time on any single Workstation Computer.
I am trying to figure out what that means in this case. You can install, use, access, etc one copy of this product on a single computer... Assuming you could set up the VM's to READ from the same install of the software, but WRITE to different dirs - that part should be allright (hey! I'm not saying it would be EASY, but it's doable - Unix does something similar when forking). The other sentence would limit the user to two versions running at the same time (I assume as many as you'd like could be LOADED in memory - ready to be used). I don't know of many hardware that could run multiple copies of windowsXP at the same time (well.. just one - I think it's running Unix though), but with the advances in servers/computers a large company could reduce the windows licensing costs by half!
I can't remember my windows days all that well, but doesn't the Microsoft Windows license apply to a single computer??? Wouldn't that mean you can run as many copies of windows, as long as they are on the same computer, as you want?
Who knows? Maybe Micro$$oft did shoot themselves in a foot?
IF the compilation of a new kernel can be made easy and foolproof enough - I do not see the problem. It's just a different label on a progress bar, instead of "copying files" to "compiling kernel". The problem is if it goes wrong. Of course updating a distro *might* go wrong as well and leave your system in non-bootable state (not that I've seen that happen - ever). Compiling a kernel for a specific machine might have some special advantages (speed/memory optimizations, modules support)...
I work in a research environment. A few months ago I was introduced to Latex. I am NOT going back. Ever. I can type out a formula just as easy as typing out a sentence. I can specify formatting external to the document itself. I can include other documents, update references automagically, use a database of references.
I can do ALL that in either Windows, Linux, or Unix. (I think there is a Mac version as well). If you'd like a wysiwyg editor - try Lyx.
Why create a NEW file format? One allready exists.
This post is for everyone who asks: "Why bother?" I've seen some other answers as well, but they did not really say anything. How about this:
This little piece of cosmos is the only one we have fairly accurate information about. We can measure the orbits of the planets, their masses, mass of the sun, etc. with a high degree of accuracy. This makes it usefull in verifying theories. Which in turn helps us understand what is going on in other parts of the universe (since we assume that we're nowhere special and everywhere is pretty much the same).
How do we look for planets? One way is to put a spectrometer on a light comming from a distant star and measure the shift in wavelength due to orbiting mass. You need to ask yourself - how did we know THAT would work??? Any ideas?
Just as a note. I have Mandrake and Windows XP. I boot into Mandrake 95% of the time. It's only when I play games, or need to program for Windows that I boot into it. So over the last 3 weeks that I've had WindowsXP I used it maybe for a total of 20 hours or so.(never more than 2-3 hours at a time).
Over that time, I had a Windows warn me when I tried to install an OpenGL driver (cause it wasn't written by Microsoft and therefore it was probably an inferior product that WOULD.. ehh. COULD cause my computer to crash...)... I have also had the Explorer cause a fault - it had to restart.
By the way... As far as Windows is concerned - Internet does not exist. It never will for windows - if I want to surf the web - that's what's Linux is for.
I've seen LOTR three times. H.P. twice (I have too many friends;-) ) I've read LOTR about a year ago. I just picked up Harry Potter (the first book) on Friday. It's sunday and I'm half way through the second book. Read them. The movie did have some pieces missing, but they're right there in the books.
As for being for kids... Well.. There are some parts that never made it into the movie that are quite funny for adults as well... Humor you would not expect a 7 year old to understand, but it would make the parent who's reading it smile. That's why the books are so appealing.
It is quite rare for me to see a movie based on a book(s). Usually they SUCK big time. Both LOTR and HP are well worth being put in my dvd collection.
Why not write a few viruses for Linux?
on
Linux Virus Alert
·
· Score: 1
Before you all tag me as a Flamebait listen up.
Some time ago I've actually heard of a "virus" that exploited a hole and then all it did - was to close it up. It actually made the systems it infected a little bit more secure. I don't remember which OS it was for but I'm pretty sure it was *nix. (sorry, being redundant here, I did say OS).
Could this idea be taken a bit further?
With relatively few viruses and few security holes, this idea might be possible.
This may be a little crazy, but is there a patent on SPAM? I was just reading a few stories, and... well.. it sort of fits doesn't it?
Pattenting SPAM would immediately increse it's cost. Of course you'd need to call it something other than spam, any ideas?
eg. electronic form based message sent out to multiple (>10) recipients for the purpose of advertisment.
In order to have secure passwords, they have to be more or less random. It is, however, very difficult to remember long passwords.
I was once toying with the idea of trying to have a computer learn how we type the passoword in, instead of just the password itself. Do you have a favorite password you've been using for a very long time? Do you always type it in the same way (timings between keystokes, optimally the pressure on each key as well). That way passwords would become more secure with age!
Of course, there would be the difficulty of repeating the keystokes under great stress and so forth....
Synchronizing those beast must be a @$$#. Trackers are also important. For a really immersive environment you basically need to respond to the user within 2-3 frames (MAX). I'm working at U of Alberta (Canada). We're running Onyx 2 with 6 processors (it has a fiberoptic connection to our supercomputer - 128 processors/ I think between 512M - 1Gig Ram/processor). 3 screens refreshed at 60 frames a second (although in a real 3d mode they're effectively refreshed 30 times/second/eye). Not only do you get it to fill almost all of your vision, it also LOOKS 3d.
As a side note. I've talked to one of the profs in charge of our CAVE. He plans to write a game for it in his grad level VR class. (I couldn't get in that - it was allready full - I guess there is always next year). The possibilities are endless. How would you like to play a first person shooter where you have a sensor in the gun that tracks where you're actually poining? As well as tracking where you're looking at, (movement is always difficult in a CAVE environment), optical tracking that can recognize the 3d shape of your body so when you duck - you duck! Enough processing power to easily calculate whether the incoming ray/bullet/whatever intesected with your body in realtime. Nearly unlimited memory for levels/details. Possibly even sattelite connection to another CAVE system to make it multiplayer!
Anyone drooling yet?
One benefit of haveing programs (including installations) easy to use is that *ANYONE* can do it. For some things that might be an extremely BAD idea.
Ease of use if great for end users. Not for administrators. I believe that making software which makes administering computers/networks/databases trivially easy for administrators is just asking for it.
Slashdot Mirror
How about this?
When distributing Open Source software comment out one line. Let's say the
int main(...
The program will not compile. The user needs to MODIFY the source code (even if it's a trivial modification) and thus take responsibility for it. I'd agree to that.
Problem is that most companies would much rather prefer to have someone to sue for damages than to have a nearly perfect security.
If anything proves Microsoft's bully mentality is this. Let me paraphrase: "If you try to force me to play fair, I won't play with you anymore."
First. You do not BUY software. You buy the license to use - like a service. If you hire a company to provide support or to manufacture something for you they're responsible.
There is a related story that happened a couple of years ago (don't remember exactly). Tim Hortons is haveing a Roll Up the Rim to Win promotion every year. When you buy a coffee - you can roll up the rim of the cup to see if you won a prize (all I ever got was donuts and more coffee - go figure!). Well.. It came out that some of the people who worked at the company that was manufacturing those cups were cheating by unwrapping those rims and stealing prizes. I know that that company lost the contract - I do not remember if they were sued for damages as well. I think they did - they failed to provide a resonable service they were contracted out for.
OSS is a bit different. It's public domain. Everyone owns it - therefore if you choose to use it, and if it breaks you yourself are responsible for damages.
That's what I think - I don't know how accurate this is, but I do realize that it's not such a great thing. If a company has to choose between OSS and proprietary solution then they will choose the proprietary one. Simply because IF something goes wrong - they have a chance of getting some recompensation.
It's a simple choice - do you buy a reliable car, or one less reliable with insurance?
Technology is great, but sometimes we all need a bit of peace and quiet. Am I the only one who actually unpluggs his phone, set the answering machine to silent and simpy read a book in peace? I find that haveing too many gadgets all around you makes for a stressfull time, something is always beeping at you. It's like haveing 5 kids continously asking for attention.
I propose a petition. There should be one room in every house without ANY computers, telephones, or other devices that need "attention" of any kind. Keep computers out of my bathroom!
Is this really such a bad thing? They DO allow licenses. The product is not free and they have a right to make money off of the research. I think they made a better choice for the consumer. Who really pays when the "big fish" starts changing the standarts? By releasing disks that are not compatible with non-licensed machines they make it more difficult for the consumer.
We all know how annoying it can be for a company to keep on changing their "standart" all the time. They decided to go after the guys who steal their business and possibly make inferior product. It's their technology/research. They have a right no protect it.
Microsoft's direct lobbying has also grown out of all proportion, so that it now retains more lobbyists than the handful of companies with more than 300,000 employees. Microsoft has just 30,000 employees. Part of the reasoning for extensive use of retainers, says Roeder, citing a Business Week article, is to "suck all the oxygen out".
Who finds this surprising? Even in politics Microsoft still tries to be a monopoly.
You're absolutely right. .tiff decoder. I was very impressed with the thought put in to make it extendible, work on big endian and little endian, etc... I especially liked the version number....
I once had to write a
We allready have a LOT of experience in things like that. HTML, VRML, XML, TIFF (they're all tag based languages). It should not be that difficult to create an XML based document format. In fact, I think it's allready being done. Now... What we have to do is make sure that there is support for that format in every OSS out there.
They do. Read the guide. You can include parethesis, AND, and OR. I don't remember if they allow XOR and others. Oh... They allow negation as well.
This is getting more and more disturbing. I know I probably get modded down for this, but do we REALLY need to save people from themselves? Why bother?
Playing video games for 7 hours/day caused a problem. I say the problem was there before that. What's next? A label on coffee saying that drinking more than 8 liters will probably kill you? If you're interested, it's about 18 liters for WATER.
I think that we can proove the existence of evolution now (It is still technically a theory). We can see what happens to human race right now. We no longer need to fight for food, survival. We, as a species, live a sheltered life. More than that - we are now forced to protect people from THEMSELVES!
Right now I am ashamed to be human.
That's right! I have two hotmail accounts. I guess that also means that I have two Passport accounts. ;-)
As for not using them, I can't. They're extremely valuable. You see - this way ALL the spam I would get in my primary account - goes to Hotmail. It's kinda fitting, don't you think?
As to why I have two? About two months ago I received almost 1,200 spam messages over a 24 hour period. that's NOT a joke. I abandoned rspy@homail.com and switched to a new one. I figure I'll give this one 6-12 months
Honestly though. There are VALID reasons for using Hotmail and other Microsoft services. This is one of them.
I don't know what the issue is. *nix can swap processes to disk. It'll save all of the info in a file (just like a core dump). Solaris can suspend everything (it's entire state) and recover that later. I'm pretty sure I've heard my friends talk about the same feature under Linux as well...
Saving a process (all of it's pages) has been around for a very long time.
On the other hand. If you have a program that takes days/weeks/months to finish (I do quite frequently) you need periodic checkpoints. There is no way around it. If you're talking about weeks/months - upload those checkpoints to another computer over the net - or burn a CD. The cost of $.50/CD disk is nothing to the loss of a month of computation.
Can you imagine a Beowulf cluste... err. I think they allready have.
There is a fundamental difference between a "real" signature and a digital signature. Anyone can copy a "real" signature, with practice anyone can do it fairly well. In 99.9% of cases an expert can still say it is fake. Thus it is really difficult to do it well.
With digital signatures... well... all it is is just a number. The security is only as good as the security of your card (microchip, whatever). If someone has that, their "fake" signature is IDENTICAL to your own.
In one case the security is based on something that took years in all of us to develop. It's based on one of our characteristics that we are hard pressed to CHANGE. In another it's simply a number.
Allright. I'm replying to my own message... Hmmm....
Here are some quotes from Windows XP EULA
* Installation and use. You may install, use, access, display and run one copy of the Product on a single computer, such as a workstation, terminal or other device ("Workstation Computer"). The Product may not be used by more than two (2) processors at any one time on any single Workstation Computer.
I am trying to figure out what that means in this case. You can install, use, access, etc one copy of this product on a single computer... Assuming you could set up the VM's to READ from the same install of the software, but WRITE to different dirs - that part should be allright (hey! I'm not saying it would be EASY, but it's doable - Unix does something similar when forking). The other sentence would limit the user to two versions running at the same time (I assume as many as you'd like could be LOADED in memory - ready to be used). I don't know of many hardware that could run multiple copies of windowsXP at the same time (well.. just one - I think it's running Unix though), but with the advances in servers/computers a large company could reduce the windows licensing costs by half!
I can't remember my windows days all that well, but doesn't the Microsoft Windows license apply to a single computer??? Wouldn't that mean you can run as many copies of windows, as long as they are on the same computer, as you want?
Who knows? Maybe Micro$$oft did shoot themselves in a foot?
IF the compilation of a new kernel can be made easy and foolproof enough - I do not see the problem. It's just a different label on a progress bar, instead of "copying files" to "compiling kernel". The problem is if it goes wrong. Of course updating a distro *might* go wrong as well and leave your system in non-bootable state (not that I've seen that happen - ever). Compiling a kernel for a specific machine might have some special advantages (speed/memory optimizations, modules support)...
I work in a research environment. A few months ago I was introduced to Latex. I am NOT going back. Ever. I can type out a formula just as easy as typing out a sentence. I can specify formatting external to the document itself. I can include other documents, update references automagically, use a database of references.
I can do ALL that in either Windows, Linux, or Unix. (I think there is a Mac version as well). If you'd like a wysiwyg editor - try Lyx.
Why create a NEW file format? One allready exists.
This post is for everyone who asks: "Why bother?" I've seen some other answers as well, but they did not really say anything. How about this:
This little piece of cosmos is the only one we have fairly accurate information about. We can measure the orbits of the planets, their masses, mass of the sun, etc. with a high degree of accuracy. This makes it usefull in verifying theories. Which in turn helps us understand what is going on in other parts of the universe (since we assume that we're nowhere special and everywhere is pretty much the same).
How do we look for planets? One way is to put a spectrometer on a light comming from a distant star and measure the shift in wavelength due to orbiting mass. You need to ask yourself - how did we know THAT would work??? Any ideas?
Just as a note. I have Mandrake and Windows XP. I boot into Mandrake 95% of the time. It's only when I play games, or need to program for Windows that I boot into it. So over the last 3 weeks that I've had WindowsXP I used it maybe for a total of 20 hours or so.(never more than 2-3 hours at a time).
.. ehh. COULD cause my computer to crash...)... I have also had the Explorer cause a fault - it had to restart.
Over that time, I had a Windows warn me when I tried to install an OpenGL driver (cause it wasn't written by Microsoft and therefore it was probably an inferior product that WOULD
By the way... As far as Windows is concerned - Internet does not exist. It never will for windows - if I want to surf the web - that's what's Linux is for.
I've seen LOTR three times. H.P. twice (I have too many friends ;-) ) I've read LOTR about a year ago. I just picked up Harry Potter (the first book) on Friday. It's sunday and I'm half way through the second book. Read them. The movie did have some pieces missing, but they're right there in the books.
As for being for kids... Well.. There are some parts that never made it into the movie that are quite funny for adults as well... Humor you would not expect a 7 year old to understand, but it would make the parent who's reading it smile. That's why the books are so appealing.
It is quite rare for me to see a movie based on a book(s). Usually they SUCK big time. Both LOTR and HP are well worth being put in my dvd collection.
Before you all tag me as a Flamebait listen up.
Some time ago I've actually heard of a "virus" that exploited a hole and then all it did - was to close it up. It actually made the systems it infected a little bit more secure. I don't remember which OS it was for but I'm pretty sure it was *nix. (sorry, being redundant here, I did say OS).
Could this idea be taken a bit further?
With relatively few viruses and few security holes, this idea might be possible.
This may be a little crazy, but is there a patent on SPAM? I was just reading a few stories, and... well.. it sort of fits doesn't it?
Pattenting SPAM would immediately increse it's cost. Of course you'd need to call it something other than spam, any ideas?
eg. electronic form based message sent out to multiple (>10) recipients for the purpose of advertisment.
In order to have secure passwords, they have to be more or less random. It is, however, very difficult to remember long passwords.
I was once toying with the idea of trying to have a computer learn how we type the passoword in, instead of just the password itself. Do you have a favorite password you've been using for a very long time? Do you always type it in the same way (timings between keystokes, optimally the pressure on each key as well). That way passwords would become more secure with age!
Of course, there would be the difficulty of repeating the keystokes under great stress and so forth....
Synchronizing those beast must be a @$$#. Trackers are also important. For a really immersive environment you basically need to respond to the user within 2-3 frames (MAX). I'm working at U of Alberta (Canada). We're running Onyx 2 with 6 processors (it has a fiberoptic connection to our supercomputer - 128 processors/ I think between 512M - 1Gig Ram/processor). 3 screens refreshed at 60 frames a second (although in a real 3d mode they're effectively refreshed 30 times/second/eye). Not only do you get it to fill almost all of your vision, it also LOOKS 3d.
As a side note. I've talked to one of the profs in charge of our CAVE. He plans to write a game for it in his grad level VR class. (I couldn't get in that - it was allready full - I guess there is always next year). The possibilities are endless. How would you like to play a first person shooter where you have a sensor in the gun that tracks where you're actually poining? As well as tracking where you're looking at, (movement is always difficult in a CAVE environment), optical tracking that can recognize the 3d shape of your body so when you duck - you duck! Enough processing power to easily calculate whether the incoming ray/bullet/whatever intesected with your body in realtime. Nearly unlimited memory for levels/details. Possibly even sattelite connection to another CAVE system to make it multiplayer!
Anyone drooling yet?
One benefit of haveing programs (including installations) easy to use is that *ANYONE* can do it. For some things that might be an extremely BAD idea.
Ease of use if great for end users. Not for administrators. I believe that making software which makes administering computers/networks/databases trivially easy for administrators is just asking for it.