..."personal responsibility" is a crock of shit. The people who tout it tend to be highly disconnected from reality. I think what we have here with Devin Thompson is a kid with a serious mental problem. Based on the article that Slashdot had a few months back that indicated that a lot of people are having trouble separating reality from games, I think there is a definite mental issue that needs investigating. I have no problem playing games like Doom 3, Unreal 2004, Quake 3 Arena, etc... and then doing my normal day-to-day stuff without having the urge to "frag" anyone. I'm sure there are a lot of you who can do this as well. The very fact that there are people out there who CANNOT do this is mindboggling, but not unbelievable. I think that there needs to be serious research into the abilities of people to separate virtual/conceptual from real. I am willing to bet that there is a HUGE disconnect for a lot of people and those people should have their video game playing controlled and monitored to prevent tragedies like this. If we don't do this, things like this will happen more and more frequently and get worse and worse. Personal responsibility is a nice idea but only if you're dealing with a full deck. This kid and people like him aren't all there. [grumble] "personal responsibility" my ass [/grumble]
The problem is that users typically don't want to stick with the apps they've got, they want the latest and greatest with the small exception of the business sector. Hell, my dentist still uses DOS 5.0 and an old dental management package. But that's abotu it. Most users (read home users) want access to the newest whizbang software from the big companies solely because they are being told the programs are better, faster or more reliable even if they aren't. So... running a Windows app from 1998 isn't likely to appeal to most users. Microsoft knows this and continues to push the features. Even if the users never actually use them, they still make them shiny and desirable. And since most users aren't smart enough to know what's good for them, they buy in.
An OS is only as secure as it's admin is competent. This will NEVER change no matter what platform you are dealing with.
If you give some RedHat CDs to a complete goof off and have them install it on a system that is going to be directly exposed to the internet, that box is going to get rooted eventually. It might take longer to get rooted than a Windows box, but it will be cracked.
If you give Windows 2003 Server to a knowledgable admin, he will secure the box and make certain that the likelihood of it getting cracked is fairly low. He will know not to put the box on the internet until he's applied all SPs and critical updates. He will know to use an internal SUS or WUS to make sure that the box is updated without exposure to the internet.
If you give a complete moron who *thinks* he knows all about [insert platform] any installation media, you're going to have an insecure box.
It's been my experience that the best people to set up an internet exposed box using any OS are people who are most familiar with all OSes and have a good understanding of how to secure each one. It's not that hard to hit the main security points and still keep on top of all OSes. However, since egos aer so intrinsically tied to how secure a box is, people point the finger at the OS distributor. Sure, they are to blame in many cases, but the implementor is usually far more guilty of being lax. That's the hard truth and it cannot be refuted.
Hmmm... I was not able to install XP Pro on anything lower than a Pentium II. The installer would complain that I needed at least a P II or better. I have no experience with XP Home however. Maybe Home will install on P I.
Certainly an interesting point. But... what backup device out there is affordable to the average person that can backup a terabyte or more of data without human intervention? I think the current answer is: none. At this point, I've relegated my backups to a second set of drives. So far, I've lost 9 gigs of data out of 225 gigs due to simultaneous disk failures on both the/mnt/data and/mnt/backup filesystems. Until there is some way for me to throw at least a terabyte of data onto a tape or some other reliable, inexpensive, removable media, HDs are the best backup method. Keep in mind that many of us have many gigs worth of source code and multimedia that we want to hold onto.
I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. When I first installed Windows Media Player 6 a few years back, I was surprised to see that it was actually downloading codecs from MS. I figured they would have blocked non MS clients from doing this way back then. I can't say this comes as a shock.
On the flipside, I wonder if this means that WINE has moved from the part where MS ignored them and will begin laughing at them.:) I also wonder how much code from the WINE project (and probably DOSBox) made it into Windows XP for backwards compatibility?;P I think DOSBox does a much better job of running old DOS games on XP than XP does.
You have to figure that MS bought Connectix for their virtualization technology so that they could actually dump backwards compatibility from the core OS and just use limited virtualization for better backward compatibility. At the same time by dumping all that cruft from the core OS, they can make the OS something more advanced. XP was a pretty big leap from Win2K in that direction (dropping support for CPUs below P II for example). I would have to guess that Longhorn is going to be an even bigger jump which is why it's taking so long.
You miss the point as did the moderators and pretty much every reply. I don't think it's a good idea to put those kinds of restrictions on software because I support the software business. I think it's a good idea because it will make idiots around the world more aware of just how much they don't understand about what the software business is doing to them. Once they realize that they will look for alternatives. I suggest that free software is a viable alternative to being put in prison for decades or fined a huge sum of money. Then and ONLY then will the software industry buckle under the pressure and give us what we want: inexpensive, good quality software that we can use in any way we please with no restrictions. Until that time, the softwre industry better put on the pressure...
Yes. That is basically the point. You only have yourself to hodl responsible for buying into proprietary software. If you use free software you wouldn't have to worry that because free software allows you to install the software on as many machines as you want. Unless the commercial software vendors are put in a position where they are losing business, they will continue to restrict your freedom in this way. Out of all the commercial products I wasted money on early in my experience with the PC platform, only one had a license that said I could install it on more than one computer as long as only one copy was in use at a time. That was Syntrillium Cool Edit. Now that they have been bought by Adobe and it is now Adobe Audition, I don't think that license model applies anymore. We must force the vendors into ging us what we want and we must do it in a legitimate way. I argue that making the move to free software is the best way to do it.
Slightly off topic, but... Actually, I'm hoping there will be legislation of EULAs with severe penalties. I'm sick of seeing jackasses with unopened copies of Windows XP that were sold with a system installing them on another system. The license for Windows explicitly locks the OS and the hardware it was sold with together permanently. This is a GOOD thing because it prevents assholes from installing the same copy of windows on every machine they own and giving it to their friends and family as well. That's theft and it is inexcusable.
The same goes for applications. If you buy a copy of Office (any version) you should only be allowed to install it on one machine period. The new licensing that Microsoft came up with to register software was another good move. But it doesn't go far enough. I am hoping they'll solve that problem when every PC is addressable by the software publishers. Then, and only then will piracy be stopped.
In the mean time, if you don't want to have to deal with all of that bullshit, then just do what I did and make the move to free software. It's not that hard and it beats the hell out of piracy.
I like to travel in style. My molecular dissassembly and structure protocol works well to move me from place to place over a wire. But the bandwidth just isn't there on the internet yet. It will get there though...
Whuh???? I said that I'm NOT a geek. I don't pretend to be better than anyone else. I'm simply stating a fact. The people still running Win9x and connecting directly to the internet are causing serious problems for everyone else. Their PCs are being used for seding out more worms, spam and the like. This is a statement of fact. You can't refute that because if you know anything about computers, you know it's true. Those people should NOT be allowed to make the internet suck for others. It's fine if they want to do negative things to themselves, but when their actions encroach on other people, it's time to put a stop to it. That's why $299 PCs are a bad thing. Idiotic people buy them expecting to have a machine that will last for years. They don't bother to keep them up to date and they become typhoid Marys. Is that really good? No!
The only solution is for them to turn all systems management over to their ISPs or their thin client supplier. That will reduce the amount of worms, viruses and spam on the internet as the machines that can be used as vectors will be substantially reduced. With the ISPs or thin client vendors bottom line being at risk, you'd better believe that the compute clusters will always be patched, up to date and firewalled off from the "bad guys".
It sounds to me like YOU have the "1337ist" attitude for assuming that I despise all users. I feel for them which is why I am advocating that their keys be taken away. If I could do that for driving as well, I'm sure about 75% of the population would not be allowed to drive either. There are rules for everything we do and they must be followed with a precious few exceptions (where major negative impacts may result). But whether we're talking cars or computers, idiot users don't keep up with their patches and idiot drivers don't follow the speed limit.
Again... you are making the same mis[tt]aken assumption that others appear to. Many of us LIKE working on computers at home. It's not only our day job, but a hobby as well. For me a computer is a tool. Nothing more. I use them to make music and do visual art. Because of that I demand as much power and flexibility as possible. A $299 econobox from Gateway isn't going to get the job done and I don't want to shell out $5000 for a Macintosh G5 with all the bells and whistles. It's much cheaper, simpler and more efficient to set up a cluster of dual processor Opterons running a combination of OpenMosix and Xen + the Planet CCRMA packages for audio work. Come on folks. This stuff ISN'T hard. I'm not a computer geek by any stretch of the imagination and even I can get this stuff up and running in a few nights time!
Yes. And [TT]hose users should be put to death for running such dangerous and detrimental software. They are the ones running trojaned and zombied machines. They need to be protected from themselves by either using Mac Minis or running thin clients that connect to powerful clusters.
Martin: I think a couple of things. One, you know, for the user who really wants to really tear things apart, do things on their own, build their own distribution, they really have, obviously, that level of source code access where they can do things like create a customized distribution with a very, very small footprint with only what they want and not a bunch of other things. You know, Linux is attractive to that class of a user. Linux is attractive to, let's say, Google - a large company that really wants to build a big server farm. They want to hire quite a few very talented engineers to really tune that on a daily basis and things of that nature. So I think that when you get to like specific niche areas and those areas where people really want to get deep on their own and take on a lot of that responsibility on their own, you know, I think Linux is attractive on those scenarios. And obviously that's where you see a lot of the market pick up on Linux on that basis as well.
Most of us here fall into this "niche". But I really don't think it's much of a niche, but more a growing segment of the IT industry. I would even go so far as to say the common home user. My current exploration of AMD Opterons for 64 bit computing in addition to clustering and virtualization with projects like Xen prove that the average home user is moving in this direction. People aren't interested in having plain old PCs that only have a two year lifespan at home anymore. It's inefficien[tt], expensive and limiting. Most home users want clusters with a centralized home application/file server that can suspend and restore virtualized sessions for high availability (HA). HA is not just for "geeks" anymore. After all, I'm not a geek, I'm a musician/artist and I'm working heavily with this stuff because it applies directly to my main interest which is using computers to make music and visual art. There aren't too many people these days that just want to buy a PC that can only run a handful of applications and wastes a lot of CPU cycles doing nothing. For the people who ARE interested in that, there is the Mac Mini (which is the best way to go in terms of being efficient).
Hmmmm... back in 1989 I was working with a friend to try nd find a way to send audio over a modem connection (Atari ST Amiga) so we could share albums with each other. I knew the audio was going to be shitty because it would have to be super low bandwidth, but that didn't matter since he really just wanted to hear the albums and it wouldn't be any different than radio. I told another less technical friend about this endeavor and she stared blankly at me and asked, "Uh... why"? I couldn't believe the question. I could either take a whole bunch of time to record all the albums onto cassette and then take the time to pack it and ship it, or... we could spend time figuring out how to compress and distribute audio over a 9600 baud link and let the machines do all the work. Which seems simpler? She still didn't get it. Today, people doing the same thing are getting the RIAA scared. So, again, I have to point out that sending a PDA with all the text stored on it is the easiest and cheapest thing to do. I mean... what the hell else do you use a computer for if not to automate or virtualize away the limitations of real life?
Slashdot Mirror
..."personal responsibility" is a crock of shit. The people who tout it tend to be highly disconnected from reality. I think what we have here with Devin Thompson is a kid with a serious mental problem. Based on the article that Slashdot had a few months back that indicated that a lot of people are having trouble separating reality from games, I think there is a definite mental issue that needs investigating. I have no problem playing games like Doom 3, Unreal 2004, Quake 3 Arena, etc... and then doing my normal day-to-day stuff without having the urge to "frag" anyone. I'm sure there are a lot of you who can do this as well. The very fact that there are people out there who CANNOT do this is mindboggling, but not unbelievable. I think that there needs to be serious research into the abilities of people to separate virtual/conceptual from real. I am willing to bet that there is a HUGE disconnect for a lot of people and those people should have their video game playing controlled and monitored to prevent tragedies like this. If we don't do this, things like this will happen more and more frequently and get worse and worse. Personal responsibility is a nice idea but only if you're dealing with a full deck. This kid and people like him aren't all there. [grumble] "personal responsibility" my ass [/grumble]
The problem is that users typically don't want to stick with the apps they've got, they want the latest and greatest with the small exception of the business sector. Hell, my dentist still uses DOS 5.0 and an old dental management package. But that's abotu it. Most users (read home users) want access to the newest whizbang software from the big companies solely because they are being told the programs are better, faster or more reliable even if they aren't. So... running a Windows app from 1998 isn't likely to appeal to most users. Microsoft knows this and continues to push the features. Even if the users never actually use them, they still make them shiny and desirable. And since most users aren't smart enough to know what's good for them, they buy in.
...is too hard to handle for most:
An OS is only as secure as it's admin is competent. This will NEVER change no matter what platform you are dealing with.
If you give some RedHat CDs to a complete goof off and have them install it on a system that is going to be directly exposed to the internet, that box is going to get rooted eventually. It might take longer to get rooted than a Windows box, but it will be cracked.
If you give Windows 2003 Server to a knowledgable admin, he will secure the box and make certain that the likelihood of it getting cracked is fairly low. He will know not to put the box on the internet until he's applied all SPs and critical updates. He will know to use an internal SUS or WUS to make sure that the box is updated without exposure to the internet.
If you give a complete moron who *thinks* he knows all about [insert platform] any installation media, you're going to have an insecure box.
It's been my experience that the best people to set up an internet exposed box using any OS are people who are most familiar with all OSes and have a good understanding of how to secure each one. It's not that hard to hit the main security points and still keep on top of all OSes. However, since egos aer so intrinsically tied to how secure a box is, people point the finger at the OS distributor. Sure, they are to blame in many cases, but the implementor is usually far more guilty of being lax. That's the hard truth and it cannot be refuted.
Anonymous Coward pretends to know more than previous Slashdotter by deriding his Phillip Glass observation. Even funnier.
Hmmm... I was not able to install XP Pro on anything lower than a Pentium II. The installer would complain that I needed at least a P II or better. I have no experience with XP Home however. Maybe Home will install on P I.
Down... down... down... down... and... down... down... down... ;P
Certainly an interesting point. But... what backup device out there is affordable to the average person that can backup a terabyte or more of data without human intervention? I think the current answer is: none. At this point, I've relegated my backups to a second set of drives. So far, I've lost 9 gigs of data out of 225 gigs due to simultaneous disk failures on both the /mnt/data and /mnt/backup filesystems. Until there is some way for me to throw at least a terabyte of data onto a tape or some other reliable, inexpensive, removable media, HDs are the best backup method. Keep in mind that many of us have many gigs worth of source code and multimedia that we want to hold onto.
On the flipside, I wonder if this means that WINE has moved from the part where MS ignored them and will begin laughing at them.
You have to figure that MS bought Connectix for their virtualization technology so that they could actually dump backwards compatibility from the core OS and just use limited virtualization for better backward compatibility. At the same time by dumping all that cruft from the core OS, they can make the OS something more advanced. XP was a pretty big leap from Win2K in that direction (dropping support for CPUs below P II for example). I would have to guess that Longhorn is going to be an even bigger jump which is why it's taking so long.
...that BSD is NOT dying: "You can't get rid of it" RE the license. Hahaha... laugh it's funny! ;P
You miss the point as did the moderators and pretty much every reply. I don't think it's a good idea to put those kinds of restrictions on software because I support the software business. I think it's a good idea because it will make idiots around the world more aware of just how much they don't understand about what the software business is doing to them. Once they realize that they will look for alternatives. I suggest that free software is a viable alternative to being put in prison for decades or fined a huge sum of money. Then and ONLY then will the software industry buckle under the pressure and give us what we want: inexpensive, good quality software that we can use in any way we please with no restrictions. Until that time, the softwre industry better put on the pressure...
Yes. That is basically the point. You only have yourself to hodl responsible for buying into proprietary software. If you use free software you wouldn't have to worry that because free software allows you to install the software on as many machines as you want. Unless the commercial software vendors are put in a position where they are losing business, they will continue to restrict your freedom in this way. Out of all the commercial products I wasted money on early in my experience with the PC platform, only one had a license that said I could install it on more than one computer as long as only one copy was in use at a time. That was Syntrillium Cool Edit. Now that they have been bought by Adobe and it is now Adobe Audition, I don't think that license model applies anymore. We must force the vendors into ging us what we want and we must do it in a legitimate way. I argue that making the move to free software is the best way to do it.
Slightly off topic, but... Actually, I'm hoping there will be legislation of EULAs with severe penalties. I'm sick of seeing jackasses with unopened copies of Windows XP that were sold with a system installing them on another system. The license for Windows explicitly locks the OS and the hardware it was sold with together permanently. This is a GOOD thing because it prevents assholes from installing the same copy of windows on every machine they own and giving it to their friends and family as well. That's theft and it is inexcusable.
The same goes for applications. If you buy a copy of Office (any version) you should only be allowed to install it on one machine period. The new licensing that Microsoft came up with to register software was another good move. But it doesn't go far enough. I am hoping they'll solve that problem when every PC is addressable by the software publishers. Then, and only then will piracy be stopped.
In the mean time, if you don't want to have to deal with all of that bullshit, then just do what I did and make the move to free software. It's not that hard and it beats the hell out of piracy.
Mmmwhat? Crazy hippos? Wasn't that a kid's game in the 70s? Oh you meant 'hypocrisy'! LOL!!!111 OK. I gotcha! ;P
I like to travel in style. My molecular dissassembly and structure protocol works well to move me from place to place over a wire. But the bandwidth just isn't there on the internet yet. It will get there though...
jxyama meet Mr. Sarcasm. Mr. Sarcasm, jxyama. Get it now? ;P
DING DING DING DING DING!!!! Mods: Another prize winner. Please mod 'brkello' comment up as +5 Insightful. ;P
Whuh???? I said that I'm NOT a geek. I don't pretend to be better than anyone else. I'm simply stating a fact. The people still running Win9x and connecting directly to the internet are causing serious problems for everyone else. Their PCs are being used for seding out more worms, spam and the like. This is a statement of fact. You can't refute that because if you know anything about computers, you know it's true. Those people should NOT be allowed to make the internet suck for others. It's fine if they want to do negative things to themselves, but when their actions encroach on other people, it's time to put a stop to it. That's why $299 PCs are a bad thing. Idiotic people buy them expecting to have a machine that will last for years. They don't bother to keep them up to date and they become typhoid Marys. Is that really good? No!
The only solution is for them to turn all systems management over to their ISPs or their thin client supplier. That will reduce the amount of worms, viruses and spam on the internet as the machines that can be used as vectors will be substantially reduced. With the ISPs or thin client vendors bottom line being at risk, you'd better believe that the compute clusters will always be patched, up to date and firewalled off from the "bad guys".
It sounds to me like YOU have the "1337ist" attitude for assuming that I despise all users. I feel for them which is why I am advocating that their keys be taken away. If I could do that for driving as well, I'm sure about 75% of the population would not be allowed to drive either. There are rules for everything we do and they must be followed with a precious few exceptions (where major negative impacts may result). But whether we're talking cars or computers, idiot users don't keep up with their patches and idiot drivers don't follow the speed limit.
Someone give this man a CEEGAR and mod him up to +5 Funny!!! :)
Again... you are making the same mis[tt]aken assumption that others appear to. Many of us LIKE working on computers at home. It's not only our day job, but a hobby as well. For me a computer is a tool. Nothing more. I use them to make music and do visual art. Because of that I demand as much power and flexibility as possible. A $299 econobox from Gateway isn't going to get the job done and I don't want to shell out $5000 for a Macintosh G5 with all the bells and whistles. It's much cheaper, simpler and more efficient to set up a cluster of dual processor Opterons running a combination of OpenMosix and Xen + the Planet CCRMA packages for audio work. Come on folks. This stuff ISN'T hard. I'm not a computer geek by any stretch of the imagination and even I can get this stuff up and running in a few nights time!
Yes. And [TT]hose users should be put to death for running such dangerous and detrimental software. They are the ones running trojaned and zombied machines. They need to be protected from themselves by either using Mac Minis or running thin clients that connect to powerful clusters.
Martin: I think a couple of things. One, you know, for the user who really wants to really tear things apart, do things on their own, build their own distribution, they really have, obviously, that level of source code access where they can do things like create a customized distribution with a very, very small footprint with only what they want and not a bunch of other things. You know, Linux is attractive to that class of a user. Linux is attractive to, let's say, Google - a large company that really wants to build a big server farm. They want to hire quite a few very talented engineers to really tune that on a daily basis and things of that nature. So I think that when you get to like specific niche areas and those areas where people really want to get deep on their own and take on a lot of that responsibility on their own, you know, I think Linux is attractive on those scenarios. And obviously that's where you see a lot of the market pick up on Linux on that basis as well.
Most of us here fall into this "niche". But I really don't think it's much of a niche, but more a growing segment of the IT industry. I would even go so far as to say the common home user. My current exploration of AMD Opterons for 64 bit computing in addition to clustering and virtualization with projects like Xen prove that the average home user is moving in this direction. People aren't interested in having plain old PCs that only have a two year lifespan at home anymore. It's inefficien[tt], expensive and limiting. Most home users want clusters with a centralized home application/file server that can suspend and restore virtualized sessions for high availability (HA). HA is not just for "geeks" anymore. After all, I'm not a geek, I'm a musician/artist and I'm working heavily with this stuff because it applies directly to my main interest which is using computers to make music and visual art. There aren't too many people these days that just want to buy a PC that can only run a handful of applications and wastes a lot of CPU cycles doing nothing. For the people who ARE interested in that, there is the Mac Mini (which is the best way to go in terms of being efficient).
Hmmmm... back in 1989 I was working with a friend to try nd find a way to send audio over a modem connection (Atari ST Amiga) so we could share albums with each other. I knew the audio was going to be shitty because it would have to be super low bandwidth, but that didn't matter since he really just wanted to hear the albums and it wouldn't be any different than radio. I told another less technical friend about this endeavor and she stared blankly at me and asked, "Uh... why"? I couldn't believe the question. I could either take a whole bunch of time to record all the albums onto cassette and then take the time to pack it and ship it, or... we could spend time figuring out how to compress and distribute audio over a 9600 baud link and let the machines do all the work. Which seems simpler? She still didn't get it. Today, people doing the same thing are getting the RIAA scared. So, again, I have to point out that sending a PDA with all the text stored on it is the easiest and cheapest thing to do. I mean... what the hell else do you use a computer for if not to automate or virtualize away the limitations of real life?
Diagnosis: Patient has [insert disease]
;P
Prognosis: Not good
Action: Kill patient
Result: Patient no longer has [insert disease]
Victory! Just like Iraq!!! LOL!!!!111
Angry? Nah... Just annoyed with idiots everywhere. They seem to be multiplying. It's disturbing.
...for long. With VoIP+wireless phones coming, the universities will be able to charge for the backbone usage. Networks are the new "cash cow".