I am so fed up with large corporations stepping over the bounderies of fair use. Excuse my language but F$#@ this! Television is so full of aweful rehash junk, there very little I want to watch. If they don't like it, then shutdown ABC, CBS, NBC and only have cable television.
I watch more cable now anyways, since the major channels have forgotten how to make a really good show, besides West Wing, I can't think of a show that kicks butt.
This half @$$ bs is just annoying and a slap in the face. If they don't like the current advertising model, then change to a pay channel.
I'll get modded down:), so what. atleast I'm not a blood sucking tv exec
I live to code, therefore I will never work for the government, unless it's for some psycho, super secret, carnivor/quantum computing project. I personally don't see the transitory nature of private labor a bad thing. I happen to like that unstable environment. Stability for me breeds complacency and laziness. It's not for everyone, but I like it. Being out of work every now and then tends to keep one honest and hungry for knowledge. To each it's own. If you code just to pay the bill, government jobs are great. There are plenty of excellent people working for the government.
There's no need to bag on government employees as a whole, the same stupid paperwork and heirarchy also exists in the private sector. To paraphrase Melibae in book 6 of Spenser's faerie queen, "each person has to find their own path."
First off, books like these are rehash of old ideas in philosophy. Only reason authors of these books make money is because very few people bother to read Marx, Sarte, Neitsche, Kant, Aristotle or any of the other great thinkers.
Yeah, so the world is changing and change is accelerating. People should realize by now, most of these books recurr in cycles, and amount to "take old ideas and use contemporary language."
I have nothing against authors rehashing philosophy and putting a new contemporary spin on it. Authors have to make money too. The reviewer should take time to research the topic deeper and realize, "hey this is just a paraphrase of...."
I'll probably get modded down, but reviewers and reporters are getting to0 lazy to research
I've never tried running Oracle with the data file owned by Root, but I do remember solaris installation requires oracle/dba user/group. My guess wasn't such a good guess.
When I've worked with oracle in production environments, it was behind two firewalls, so it would be pretty hard to get in the first place. One firewall between net and webserver, then a second one between webserver and appserver w/oracle. If the cracker got in that far, I deserved to hacked and fired for not being more cautious. With regular incremental backups, the chances of catastrophic data loss would be unlikey, unless the cracker set off a couple hundred pounds of TNT.
Ok, I read the article and here's my thoughts as worthless as they are:
revealed that a common programming error -- a buffer overflow -- was present in Oracle's application server, potentially allowing hackers to gain remote access to the system over the Internet.
If the researcher is referring to Oracle 9i application server, it's really Orion Server. Since Orion is pure Java implementation, the threat is pretty low. Reguardless, the Orion developers will fix it. They're pretty quick about bug fixes.
We
can actually interject ourselves in between that communications process and run commands as SYSTEM on Windows NT or 2000. If it's running on a Unix system, we can run commands as the Oracle user remotely
I'm not sure what this bug is referring to specifically, but it most likely is related to Oracle's GUI administration tool. If the user can run Unix commands, that doesn't necessarily mean a person can erase all the data. The suggested installation is to have the server run under the Oracle user. If ownership is root and the priv. is execute only, an instance would only be vulnerable to "kill -9". To erase the actual data, the cracker would have to login to the instance and delete the data.
I've done some crazy tests with sql server 6 and oracle 8i on low end hardware and I have to say oracle out performs sql server hands down. This is no excuse for Oracle though. They still need to back up that slogan with real blood.
The only thing this tells me about Georgia Tech is a lot of their students are lazy and don't deserve to be there. People who are stupid and lazy enough to cheat on simple labs/assignments in intro classes don't deserve to be there. Sure lots of universities use programs to scan for cheating, no news there. I can think of plenty of people that are far more deserving and hard working that should be in college but can't afford it. I seriously doubt this will change much. Rich kids go to school and do the absolute minimum to get their degrees, because they are raised with a certain set of values. Poor kids fight too and nail to earn a living. Sure these are generalizations, but there is some truth to it.
mod me down if you like, but I've seen it happen in college. No rich kid I ever met worked 40hr/wk and took extra classes
I doubt the actual DX API would have to change much, since most of the changes would be in the guts, OS and hardware. I'm no expert on DX API, so others will have to clue me in.
If the architecture changes drastically to say 256bit for everything, the API should change to take advantage of it no? Or say the architecture changes such that the average system has 8 CPU and the OS doesn't employ pervasive multithreading/processing, the API would need to change to ease development and see performance improvement? Or what happens when a researcher wants to hook up say 1100 CPU's and GPU's to do realtime high res visualization that's taking data from say 2K instruments? I doubt DX API's implementation can handle it. In theory, one should be able to use parts of the API and change the implementation to handle different situations, but some change would be needed. All the wonderful things like sound and synchronization of video and sound would be useless overhead. But then again, by the time that happens DX will be replaced by something else.
There's obviously some truth the last paragraph, and without a doubt Microsoft is no friend of open source. All of that is old news. It doesn't necessarily mean DX will win or that hardware manufacturers will just roll over.
There is a heck of a lot more to 3D that just games. There will always be a need for research and engineering related 3D visualization and some one will provide the products. DirectX still isn't going to cut it for hardcore 3D work that requires realtime high res applications. It's one thing to render a couple megs of textures and low res models quickly. It's another to render 300mb of textures on a high res (100million polygons) object in realtime. Having the IP from SGI will help microsoft get there, but it takes a heck of a lot more than just patents to get there. A lot of blood, sweat, tears and long hours are required. There's still plenty of room for open source to come up with a competing API that works better.
The answer I was told by the staff lawyer was basically, "I have a template boiler plate from the past." Legally, it can't be exactly the same as one they wrote for a previous employer, but there are only so many ways to say the same thing in legal terms, so lawyers copy/paste text from an older example and change it slightly. I don't know how many lawyers do that, but the four that I have worked with all did it. By no means does that mean all lawyers do that, just the ones I've worked with.
Then developers will go some place else and microsoft will loose market share. What company is gonna want to fork over say 500K to get developer access, if they are servicing a nitch market. With Balmer at the head, I doubt that will happen, since he's been screaming "developers, developers, developers." Microsoft is greedy, but not stupid. I doubt they'll price themselves out of competition.
This action in and of itself is not bad, it all depends on the wording of the actual law. I think there are enough laws already, so unless it is absolutely necessary, don't bother. The whole point of a free market is the people will choose. Government has it roles, like enforcing the laws, but often politicians think their job is to come up with as many laws as possible.
The researchers have good concerns and the idea isn't inherently bad. It's what happens between politicians and in the offices that worries me. What starts out as a way to make companies more responsible easily slips into quick sand. How in the world do you enforce security and by what standard. You can't say it's just about making it so consumers can sue big corporations, without a meaningful discussion about what constitutes good security in the first place.
It would appear this is all part of a broader change at Microsoft led by Balmer? These kinds of development could be an indication of where PC technology is going in the future and how it will infiltrate other markets.
Personally, I like this movement for several reasons.
for a PC to become a consumer product, the operating system has to be rock solid
for PC hardware manufacturers it means more markets and therefore possibility lower the cost of production and development
for the consumer, the PC-ness of computers will begin to disappear and become transparent
If this trend is for real and the drive is more than just fad, it bodes well for computer users. Not only will this mean better stability, but lower prices.
On the otherhand, microsoft could hit a huge wall and realize how hard it is to build a truly reliable operating system and decide to back out. I doubt that will happen for a couple reasons. Microsoft's goals are to maximize share holder value and please the analysts. In order to do that, they have to diversify and expand the markets to minimize the impact of PC consumer demands. Considering the resources Microsoft has at its' disposal, it just might pull it off.
If you're really a patent examiner, I have a few questions reguarding the process as related to me by two separate lawyers. I just to see if what they told me is close to how it really happens. As the lawyers told me the process for filing a patent is the following:
inventer and lawyer meet to discuss the merits of the invention.
lawyer performs patent search or inventor does, depending on how much money and time the inventor has.
inventor write the details of the patent and goes through several revisions with the lawyer
lawyer files the patent submission. A related note, the lawyers generally said the time it takes from filing to getting the patent at minimum takes 1.5-2 years
patent is turned down for being either not novel, too broad or unclear
inventor and lawyer revise the filing and resubmit. this process can occur numerous times. how many times is the actual limit?
patent is granted
inventor(s) sign the form and are granted the patent.
The advice I was given by the lawyers was "make it as general as possible." Their thinking was, "make it more general so it is more valuable to the company. If it isn't turned down atleast once, it means it wasn't general enough. The lawyer also had the perspective that patent examiners get paid by the number of claims processed, so most patents are turned down by patent examiners for that purpose. I can see reasons for automatically turning down the first filing. What is the average number of times a patent is denied before it is granted?
Malicious intent or laziness
on
Borland Backs Down
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Having worked a few lawyers in the past for things like press releases, terms of service and other related legal bs, I'm guessing laziness. There are plenty of good lawyers, but often things like writing boilerplate stuff is cut/paste jobs. In a lawyer's mind (the ones I've met), it was the very last thing on their list of priorities.
Typically, it is up to the staff to catch those mistakes and argue with the staff lawyer to make sure it applies to situation. That rarely happens for a lot of reasons. Often I would get press releases for 5a.m. the next morning at 7a.m. the day of.
How in the world are developers, staff writers supposed to read it thoroughly? They can't. The mentality of the lawyers I've met is "be more restrictive" and ease up if people complain vs "be less restrictive." It's good the community spoke up and complained. That's part of the natural process. If all licenses were not restrictive, how would lawyers make a living or warrant their services:)
use the right tool. As the post stated, they chose to use C when LISP would incure a performance hit. Loading all the data into memory statically makes a lot of sense, considering how many searches it has to support.
advanced topics like algorithms are good tools for solving challenging problems
try to maximize your knowledge of the system. This is probably one of the hardest, since most projects are under "I want it yesterday" schedules. When it was necessary, they looked at how LISP compiles the code and weighed the benefit of optimization or using C. Realistically, most projects don't have the time for this step, but it is still worth while to attempt it.
Reguardless of the language, I found the post insightful and informative. All of the techniques and decisions described in the post can be applied to most projects. Sure, most websites don't need to support the massive number of searches like Sabre, but programmers can apply those principles. Keeping a balanced foot isn't easy and there's always politics added to the brew, but with perseverance, programming can be something that provides a great service and tremendous personal pride.
Aside from all the math, there are other reasons why P2P programs will fail. If the financial analysts are right and unlimited bandwidth is coming, then P2P will happen. On the otherhand, there have been a lot of articles about obstacles preventing broadband.
From a financial perspective, analysts believe unlimited bandwidth is coming because it typically costs the phone company about 40 bucks to service an account. For a typical low end cellular account ($20/month), the company looses money. The same rules apply to cable, dsl and normal phone line. If the progress of broadband comes to a halt and reverses, all of that math means absolutely nothing.
Who care is Napster scales better when no one has broadband access. Really people, P2P technology is heavily dependent on broadband access to a large percentage of the population. If broadband gets priced above the average Joe's budget, do you think it will really matter? If only the top 5% of the population have broadband, the numbers cited in the article are meaningless.
Time to look beyond the statistical FUD and look at the real issue at hand. The architecture of gnutella will only be a factor if unlimited bandwidth comes to the masses.
I personally wouldn't take the open source angle. I would rather a candidate be knowledgeable and show they can do the job. That ranges from knowing technology to pedestrian things. I could give a (fill in your explitive) if a candidate loves open source. I only care about their ability to do what is in the best interest for the city in both long and short term.
Other issues like property tax, school funding, public works and libraries mean heck of alot more than just open source. That doesn't stop you from artfully inserting open source values into your explanations and approach to civic policy. You want to come across as some one highly qualified who happens to understand open source vs an open source advocate running for city council.
It sounds like they are using this as an excuse to not pay. I doubt they really care, but it is a convienant excuse to use, since they know ICANN can't come up with a solution and implement it rapidly due to politics.
Having used UML at my last two jobs. UML is pretty, but I personally prefer plain old text descriptions. The thing is, UML tends to be used in projects with CTO's or managers who don't understand high, medium or low level view of the architecture. I've seen UML used by technical people to facilitate quick design meetings, but more often it is used to explain technical details to non-technical people. Rational and Togethersoft have some nice tools to generate source from UML diagrams, but it tends to foster laziness.
In the hands of an experienced programmer it saves a lot of time. In the hands of a junior/mid level developer it tends to foster laziness. CTO's and managers that have good technical skills rarely need an UML diagram. UML is no replacement for good communication skills and tech savy management. A 24hr book is stupid, because you can't teach practicle usage. The only thing it does is put money in the author's pocket. The time spent reading the book would be better spent thinking about why the management doesn't already understand from previous meetings.
Lets get real for a second. The linux community isn't the only OS with politics behind it. God knows there's probably more politics behind IRIX, Windows and AIX.
I strongly feel that honesty wins in the end, because people aren't stupid. No one believes that IBM or Microsoft is one happy camp singing "we are the world."
It's great there is a lot of attention on the VM and intense effort to make it better. I have no doubt linux and Rik are professionals and have no problems putting politics aside to get the job done. That is after all part of being a professional. Rik makes some good argument and given enough time and money he'll build the VM of his design. Will it matter 10 years from now? Most likely not. Development will continue and linux will get better. Butting heads is part of the fun, because without conflict people tend to stagnate.
Having dealt with security issues and tried to fight for tighter security vs convienance, management always choose convienance. I'm sure others have seen the same problem, but I'll say it anyways.
To really implement tight security (the only kind that will prevent 95% of viruses) means a drastic change in microsoft's entire line of products. The fact is most people know better, but when they sit down at a computer their brains turn off and click everything. Only way microsoft can prevent all these email viruses isn't to turn off "launch attachment", because people will turn it on the first time they get an attachment. It's to require users save the file, scan the file and limit user account in windows. That means users have to login as the administrator to install programs and do updates. I'm sure people are saying, "just like unix."
Will people put up with less convienance after they've had it for 8 years? My guess is probably not. In the best case scenario, people will slowly get used it and take 25 years to replace all the old software. Short of giving away their software, microsoft will have a huge headache of replacing all the outdated version with hacker friendly features.
Slashdot Mirror
I watch more cable now anyways, since the major channels have forgotten how to make a really good show, besides West Wing, I can't think of a show that kicks butt.
This half @$$ bs is just annoying and a slap in the face. If they don't like the current advertising model, then change to a pay channel.
I'll get modded down :), so what. atleast I'm not a blood sucking tv exec
Bart, pick up my finger before the dog eats. This liquid nitrogen stuff makes great frosting.
There's no need to bag on government employees as a whole, the same stupid paperwork and heirarchy also exists in the private sector. To paraphrase Melibae in book 6 of Spenser's faerie queen, "each person has to find their own path."
Yeah, so the world is changing and change is accelerating. People should realize by now, most of these books recurr in cycles, and amount to "take old ideas and use contemporary language."
I have nothing against authors rehashing philosophy and putting a new contemporary spin on it. Authors have to make money too. The reviewer should take time to research the topic deeper and realize, "hey this is just a paraphrase of ...."
I'll probably get modded down, but reviewers and reporters are getting to0 lazy to research
When I've worked with oracle in production environments, it was behind two firewalls, so it would be pretty hard to get in the first place. One firewall between net and webserver, then a second one between webserver and appserver w/oracle. If the cracker got in that far, I deserved to hacked and fired for not being more cautious. With regular incremental backups, the chances of catastrophic data loss would be unlikey, unless the cracker set off a couple hundred pounds of TNT.
revealed that a common programming error -- a buffer overflow -- was present in Oracle's application server, potentially allowing hackers to gain remote access to the system over the Internet.
If the researcher is referring to Oracle 9i application server, it's really Orion Server. Since Orion is pure Java implementation, the threat is pretty low. Reguardless, the Orion developers will fix it. They're pretty quick about bug fixes.
We can actually interject ourselves in between that communications process and run commands as SYSTEM on Windows NT or 2000. If it's running on a Unix system, we can run commands as the Oracle user remotely
I'm not sure what this bug is referring to specifically, but it most likely is related to Oracle's GUI administration tool. If the user can run Unix commands, that doesn't necessarily mean a person can erase all the data. The suggested installation is to have the server run under the Oracle user. If ownership is root and the priv. is execute only, an instance would only be vulnerable to "kill -9". To erase the actual data, the cracker would have to login to the instance and delete the data.
I've done some crazy tests with sql server 6 and oracle 8i on low end hardware and I have to say oracle out performs sql server hands down. This is no excuse for Oracle though. They still need to back up that slogan with real blood.
mod me down if you like, but I've seen it happen in college. No rich kid I ever met worked 40hr/wk and took extra classes
If the architecture changes drastically to say 256bit for everything, the API should change to take advantage of it no? Or say the architecture changes such that the average system has 8 CPU and the OS doesn't employ pervasive multithreading/processing, the API would need to change to ease development and see performance improvement? Or what happens when a researcher wants to hook up say 1100 CPU's and GPU's to do realtime high res visualization that's taking data from say 2K instruments? I doubt DX API's implementation can handle it. In theory, one should be able to use parts of the API and change the implementation to handle different situations, but some change would be needed. All the wonderful things like sound and synchronization of video and sound would be useless overhead. But then again, by the time that happens DX will be replaced by something else.
There is a heck of a lot more to 3D that just games. There will always be a need for research and engineering related 3D visualization and some one will provide the products. DirectX still isn't going to cut it for hardcore 3D work that requires realtime high res applications. It's one thing to render a couple megs of textures and low res models quickly. It's another to render 300mb of textures on a high res (100million polygons) object in realtime. Having the IP from SGI will help microsoft get there, but it takes a heck of a lot more than just patents to get there. A lot of blood, sweat, tears and long hours are required. There's still plenty of room for open source to come up with a competing API that works better.
The answer I was told by the staff lawyer was basically, "I have a template boiler plate from the past." Legally, it can't be exactly the same as one they wrote for a previous employer, but there are only so many ways to say the same thing in legal terms, so lawyers copy/paste text from an older example and change it slightly. I don't know how many lawyers do that, but the four that I have worked with all did it. By no means does that mean all lawyers do that, just the ones I've worked with.
Then developers will go some place else and microsoft will loose market share. What company is gonna want to fork over say 500K to get developer access, if they are servicing a nitch market. With Balmer at the head, I doubt that will happen, since he's been screaming "developers, developers, developers." Microsoft is greedy, but not stupid. I doubt they'll price themselves out of competition.
The researchers have good concerns and the idea isn't inherently bad. It's what happens between politicians and in the offices that worries me. What starts out as a way to make companies more responsible easily slips into quick sand. How in the world do you enforce security and by what standard. You can't say it's just about making it so consumers can sue big corporations, without a meaningful discussion about what constitutes good security in the first place.
Personally, I like this movement for several reasons.
If this trend is for real and the drive is more than just fad, it bodes well for computer users. Not only will this mean better stability, but lower prices.
On the otherhand, microsoft could hit a huge wall and realize how hard it is to build a truly reliable operating system and decide to back out. I doubt that will happen for a couple reasons. Microsoft's goals are to maximize share holder value and please the analysts. In order to do that, they have to diversify and expand the markets to minimize the impact of PC consumer demands. Considering the resources Microsoft has at its' disposal, it just might pull it off.
The advice I was given by the lawyers was "make it as general as possible." Their thinking was, "make it more general so it is more valuable to the company. If it isn't turned down atleast once, it means it wasn't general enough. The lawyer also had the perspective that patent examiners get paid by the number of claims processed, so most patents are turned down by patent examiners for that purpose. I can see reasons for automatically turning down the first filing. What is the average number of times a patent is denied before it is granted?
Typically, it is up to the staff to catch those mistakes and argue with the staff lawyer to make sure it applies to situation. That rarely happens for a lot of reasons. Often I would get press releases for 5a.m. the next morning at 7a.m. the day of.
How in the world are developers, staff writers supposed to read it thoroughly? They can't. The mentality of the lawyers I've met is "be more restrictive" and ease up if people complain vs "be less restrictive." It's good the community spoke up and complained. That's part of the natural process. If all licenses were not restrictive, how would lawyers make a living or warrant their services :)
Reguardless of the language, I found the post insightful and informative. All of the techniques and decisions described in the post can be applied to most projects. Sure, most websites don't need to support the massive number of searches like Sabre, but programmers can apply those principles. Keeping a balanced foot isn't easy and there's always politics added to the brew, but with perseverance, programming can be something that provides a great service and tremendous personal pride.
Agree completely, though there is a slight difference between UN and ICANN. A couple hundred planes and a few thousand soldiers :)
From a financial perspective, analysts believe unlimited bandwidth is coming because it typically costs the phone company about 40 bucks to service an account. For a typical low end cellular account ($20/month), the company looses money. The same rules apply to cable, dsl and normal phone line. If the progress of broadband comes to a halt and reverses, all of that math means absolutely nothing.
Who care is Napster scales better when no one has broadband access. Really people, P2P technology is heavily dependent on broadband access to a large percentage of the population. If broadband gets priced above the average Joe's budget, do you think it will really matter? If only the top 5% of the population have broadband, the numbers cited in the article are meaningless.
Time to look beyond the statistical FUD and look at the real issue at hand. The architecture of gnutella will only be a factor if unlimited bandwidth comes to the masses.
great point, now if only management would use it that way :)
Other issues like property tax, school funding, public works and libraries mean heck of alot more than just open source. That doesn't stop you from artfully inserting open source values into your explanations and approach to civic policy. You want to come across as some one highly qualified who happens to understand open source vs an open source advocate running for city council.
kerneltrap is /.ed and I'd like to read it.
It's all about money, pure and simple.
In the hands of an experienced programmer it saves a lot of time. In the hands of a junior/mid level developer it tends to foster laziness. CTO's and managers that have good technical skills rarely need an UML diagram. UML is no replacement for good communication skills and tech savy management. A 24hr book is stupid, because you can't teach practicle usage. The only thing it does is put money in the author's pocket. The time spent reading the book would be better spent thinking about why the management doesn't already understand from previous meetings.
I strongly feel that honesty wins in the end, because people aren't stupid. No one believes that IBM or Microsoft is one happy camp singing "we are the world."
It's great there is a lot of attention on the VM and intense effort to make it better. I have no doubt linux and Rik are professionals and have no problems putting politics aside to get the job done. That is after all part of being a professional. Rik makes some good argument and given enough time and money he'll build the VM of his design. Will it matter 10 years from now? Most likely not. Development will continue and linux will get better. Butting heads is part of the fun, because without conflict people tend to stagnate.
To really implement tight security (the only kind that will prevent 95% of viruses) means a drastic change in microsoft's entire line of products. The fact is most people know better, but when they sit down at a computer their brains turn off and click everything. Only way microsoft can prevent all these email viruses isn't to turn off "launch attachment", because people will turn it on the first time they get an attachment. It's to require users save the file, scan the file and limit user account in windows. That means users have to login as the administrator to install programs and do updates. I'm sure people are saying, "just like unix."
Will people put up with less convienance after they've had it for 8 years? My guess is probably not. In the best case scenario, people will slowly get used it and take 25 years to replace all the old software. Short of giving away their software, microsoft will have a huge headache of replacing all the outdated version with hacker friendly features.