And don't forget that Firefox 1.03 was just released, fixing these.
Hm. Saturday Firefox tells my laptop at home it has the 1.03 update. I let it download. The install hangs, reporting a corrupt download.
Today, Firefox tells me desktop at work it has the 1.03 update. I let it download. The install completes, but the new browser won't load any pages. Won't let me enter anything in the location bar. I've uninstalled and reinstalled. I've uninstalled and reinstalled *1.02* again. No luck. Dead Firefox. I've had to fall back to NS.
I went to Bugzilla. Someone else had already reported it. I voted for it and added my comments:
Let me know when it is really fixed.:) I really like it. But it has been bugs galore since 1.01.
BTW, that "Quality Feedback Agent" built into Firefox has *never* successfully transmittted even one report for me. And I'm not behind a firewall.
Also BTW, I tried to manually download 1.03 in Netscape in one of my reinstall attempts. Netscape reports the download as corrupt and stops downloading. IE downloads the file.
If I have to _ask_ to community anything, then it has failed.
Then I guess they've all failed. Including CPAN.
I should be able to learn all I need to know by reading the documentation.
You can. People still have questions and work together anyway. Most people who ask questions get pointed at documentation. There are just different ways of doing that pointing.
After 6 yrs as a J2EE developer, I'd say you'd have to be braindead NOT to be using Plone for a web framework these days. It's everything Java was reaching for, all bundled up in a nice usable box.
Python isn't about the elegance of the language or its syntax. It's what can be and has been accomplished with it.
The documentation and ZODB nits are so two years ago. The documentation is great now. Not to mention the documentation did separate the men from the boys for awhile. We read the source code and are the better for it. And ZODB is way more bulletproof than any RDBMSes. Geez, our Oracle "cluster" crashes weekly. Our ZODB has never had a loss of data or unscheduled downtime.
The notion that Zope is monolithic is pretty ignorant, as well. Zope is highly modularized.
CPAN? Give me a break. A more helpful community could not be found than that which I find in Plone. And they aren't a competition to see who can write the most arcane one line program.
good. since allowing the automated agent to upgrade me to ff 1.01, i've been having a crash a day. apparently this is not just happening to me, because the automated bug collector is having trouble connecting home when the crashes occur. i'v since turned the collector agent off.
That's not going to win a Nobel prize, but it's still technical in my book.
The point is not that it isn't technical. The point is, the technical part, and the management thereof, isn't done by IBM. IBM have become simply the brand manager.
Which, no, won't win a Nobel prize.
And as often as not, that rebranding can become predatory. For every open source developer getting funded by writing DeveloperWorks articles, there's a company getting bought out in order to raid their technology.
Things like Power and Cell and Grid wouldn't happen today if it were up to IBM's own abilities. It's a shell game now. Which shell corporation holds the goods.
If you want to insist that making products out of appropriated technology is an innovation, I'd say sure. It's just a business innovation rather than a technical innovation. And likely that last innovation they will make. It's too easily imitated, so other business 'innovators' will cherry pick it as well. The ultimate innovation in this view seems to be to make commodities out of technical innovators. Whether that's good for business in the long run or not, I can't say.
You know, the idea with open source was the people who did that inventing would be able to add the value in order to get paid. But if you've ever worked for a company that did business with IBM as a supplier of innovations, you know how that works. There won't be another Microsoft on IBM's acccount.
But I can say, my point is, the reason IBM is in this spot is because they lost their technical management expertise. They lost interest in making money by their own work. And Lou Gerstner, the master corporate raider, a person who required a technology coach when he got to IBM, was very much the leader in that. Nobody with any sense wanted to work for that guy. If you were working on a technical innovation on his watch, more than likely a supporting division got sold out from under you. (For me it was the IBM Global Network, the only truly global network other than super low bandwidth Iridium. A former IBM counsel and another executive got rich off the sale and then bailed in true raider fashion.) So the talent went elsewhere. It was interested in seeing sustainable innovation.
Where's your evidence for this assertion that IBM is weaker technically now than then?
My own eyes.
When I got to that place, the halls were just full of scientists (before Akers, that's for sure). It was like a refuge for folks from NASA after the Apollo program fell apart.
When I left, it was full of middle managers who couldn't even spell and and had no idea of basic geography (actual manager quotes: "How do you spell 'difficult'," and "Is Singapore a country?"). Anything they've got going on comes from the relatively few open source kids they fund. Websphere has some management screens tacked onto a Tomcat base, on which they have advisory oversight. Even with that, they seemed to make it dog slow and crash a lot.
They have to extend ideas not invented there because they couldn't invent much anymore except software patents. The Research Division never seems to come out with anything benefiting the business units. My last project threw a million bucks their way every year and never saw anything from it. We called it the research tax.
The Power PC started up there in 1990 based on Cooke's work from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Eclipse came from the purchase of another company to get technology for Visual Age. Cell is Sony and Toshiba avoiding a patent war with IBM. Grid is United Devices, into which IBM pumps lots of machines and money.
It's great that IBM pumps so much money into open source. I do love that. There wouldn't be a Gentoo today if IBM hadn't paid Daniel Robbins to write so many DeveloperWorks articles. But it's more of a way to pick off things not invented there than to have any sustained efforts of their own. You can argue that it's smart management to "play with others" but it is others who are doing *and managing* the technical work these days, which is the topic of this thread. IBM just brands it. They've become brand managers, not technical managers. The technical talent is long gone. IBM just "plays with" them.
I guess it's a fitting way to spend the earnings from the empire. Might as well. It does create a benefit few other companies provide in that quantity.
If IBM's got any innovation going on, it's still in chip technologies, and that's still a ghost of its former technical self there. Copper on silicon (1997) was the last really big innovation. And people had been working on that for 30 years.
You don't want to brag about game technology and IBM in the same sentence. I know people who still haven't recovered from working on Jaguar.
Look, go ahead and cite recent IBM accomplishments by playing with others. But you are making the case that nontechnical management means the technology will have to come from somehwere else.
In your experience, can managers with little technical knowledge successfully run a technically-oriented company?
No.
I worked for Lou Gestner. His talent was making money by laying off people, selling off divisions, and making loans to other transnational companies. IBM is a ghost of its former technical self as a result.
While the people who support CivicSpace mean well, I ran it for several months and found it all bark and no bite. PHP apps are so brittle, it is foolhardy to attempt to run large scale projects on them. And too many PHP libraries are not threadsafe. Although it seems more and more (I would assume inexperienced) democratically oriented political organizations are starting to use CivicSpace. This concerns me.
I think the main reason CivicSpace has caught on is that it takes little skill to set up. That part of it is extremely democratic, and first impressions are everything. Then folks start doing the things it can do out of the box, like blog, and blogging a campaign does not make (actually, it distracts from an actual campaign).
Note that although CivicSpace came out of the Dean *grassroots* campaign, it took nearly the whole campaign to make it even minimally usable (although there were a lot of "skins" for it early on to make it look nice), and even then not many sites of any consequence were running it. The actual Dean *professional* campaign ran on a grab bag of proprietary and open source software (Convio, Moveable Type, roll your own PHP) that never had a single sign on and seemed to change every few months as a new person would get an audience in front of the right campaign official and convince them that some new software would solve all the problems of the old software, which had been the new software only a few months before. Each successive generation seemed to go downhill a bit as folks who were supposed to be more qualified took over from folks who had supposedly reached the limits of their usefulness.
At one point there was a tour by some software folks from the professional Dean campaign office that claimed they would come to your town and talk about open source software and leveraging technology to people interested in it. I was too busy with CivicSpace (then DeanSpace) at the time to mess with being a host, but I went to the whistle stop functions for the tour in my town when some other people did host it. There wasn't much talk about actual software or content management or leveraging technology. Just a lot of jumping up and down about what a good time the campaign people were having on tour.
Be forewarned, when I used CivicSpace, it required PHP Safe Mode to be turned off and would not run in a PHP hardened environment. It is not secure enough for real campaigns.
If anyone reading this is a CivicSpace advocate, this is not meant to discourage you. If CivicSpace is serving your needs, by all means have at it. This is just my experience. Dealing with the hype and pressure to use CivicSpace in my activist network pretty much set us back the entire campaign.
Also, avoid Voter Activation Network at all costs. It's.Net, so you probably won't even consider it to begin with. Slow. Inflexible.
Anyway, I've found that rolling your own with a *robust and scalabe* open source CMS like Plone works best for me. There are value add companies that have very quick (< 2 month) turn around to provide something custom built on top of open source platforms to your needs. This is going to take you a lot farther than something free out of the box, supported by college students on Instant Messenger when they happen to be around, with a smorgasboard of common PHP message board functions.
Finally, remember that althought CMSes sound democratic, there are complex social patterns to successfully deploying a CMS your community will actually use and contribute content to. People will fuss to get things on the web. Then when you actually give them the tools to do so, they will still try to pass all the content creation off on the webmaster, creating both a bottleneck and a political problems (why is a webmaster the most qualified person to shape political messages? why is the webmaster supposed to know finance law? why is the webmaster suddenly in charge of scheduling and managing your rally?). You will need to devise a
See, I appreciate this explanation, and the one below which reframes the explanation as occuring on the stack. These are the explanations I've always understood. And which, frankly, didn't fully cut it with me.
*Many* moons ago, I took an OS writing course from Intel, on the 80286. The way I was taught, a buffer overflow is something that would not have been possible in the processor architecture. There were code segments, and data segments. If ever the twain should overlap, processor exceptions occur, whether on the heap on in the stack. Just intercepting these faults took a major act of god on the part of the processor's primary process.
The, a few years later, I got a reeducation in the same coure, only on the 80386. Heck, there was even more protection for processes on that processor. A lot of stuff that had to be implemented in software before, like determining which process caused the fault above would be done in hardware.
OS2 2.2 was so bullet proof mainly because it took such good advantage of these hardware protective mechanisms. When I read Gates's screeds against OS2, I find myself either laughing hysterically or yelling "liar" (because he tells some pretty huge whoppers about the development).
Add to all this, most OSes dynamically allocate memory to processes, so even if you could overlay code with data and manage to get it executed, getting it to overlay in the right place and on the right byte boundardy without causing a fault would seem pretty unlikely.
I guess as one who doesn't try to write malware, just the very idea of these overflow explanations seems so unlikely that even if I were wanting to write such programs, I wouldn't consider buffer or stack overflow as an idea.
I suppose I'm saying, the explanations I've heard about buffer overflow make sense to a point. And then they seem to run up against facts as I know them. I'd like to see explanations of buffer overflow that make complete sense.
i386 architecture as I understand it allows the OS programmer to place the processor in a mode which basically defeats all the code vs data and process control mechanisms in the hardware. In my understanding, this is something done only at boot time, and only for the period of time necessary to set up the code which kicks the processor into a hardware mode which supports memory and process partitioning for multitasking. Please don't tell me, not even as some karma raising "funny" joke, that Microsoft doesn't even use the hardware modes which I would presume would prevent buffer overflow from ever occuring?
That was exactly what I was going to post before scanning the thread for "money."
This even goes for programming competitions, though.
Rather than competitions, where you attempt to get something *out* of students rather than put something in, go for some experience to *give* some science knowledge to kids
In just about any field of scientific endeavor, there is an association of educators for that field who can provide pretty great guidance with this sort of thing.
That's all well and good. But with several friends working at SAS, this is what I've observed: non-technical personnel have the 35 hours per week rule enforced. Secretaries, receptionists, etc. work 35 hours per week at SAS and are told to go home after that. Technical personnel, however, appear to be somehow exempt from this rule and work the usual industry standard 60 hour weeks with the usual rubrics of project deadlines and special one time (but perpetually repeating) requirements used as justifications.
IBM has document retention policies specifically to limit liabilities. Or more like document destruction policies. All emails have to be wiped after two years. They probably truly don't have the code anymore.
Recently I had the misfortune of Microsoft trying to find some include files from an Embedded Win CE V3 platform builder (don't ask, it wasn't my decision to use that crap) for me for an older single board computer. They no longer had the source, either. And it would have been very *good* for them if they'd been able to come up with it. They literally didn't have it anymore.
Throwing company materials away as early as possible is the newest predefensive corporate legal maneuver. If tobacco companies had done that, they'd have saved a lot of money. Probably watching the tobacco companies is what gave other companies the idea.
Have you ever examined systems like ASCAP? They don't get significant money to the overwhelming number of their members. It's set up to fund just a few artists and ASCAP itself.
It would be prohibitively expensive just like the system of payments set up for simulcasting broadcasters. And again, nothing worth mentioning from that system goes to the artists, either.
Please comment on the prospects for the convergence of Plone/CMF/Zope as the application server/framework for Ingres.
Re:Supported by IBM who supports Sen Hatch ...
on
IT, Be Free!
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· Score: 1
Thanks for the reply, Morgaine. Thanks for the cite. And no need to apologize. I just wanted to know "sponsor" how. If I were a moderator, I'd say, "+1, please," to your reply.
If it means donate, IBM doesn't even have a PAC. It doesn't want one. It goes back to the 70s when the entire IBM board came pretty close to being indicted for illegal campaign contributions to CREEP. Somehow, they got off. But entire boards like for RJ Reynolds went to jail for doing pretty much the same thing IBM's board did.
About trusting opensecrets.org, though...
Actually, you have to be very careful with opensecrets.org. It is very misleading to the casual user. They only take public information from the FEC, process it by their own methodology, and then present it through their own special lens:
If opensecrets.org were to say IBM were a top contributor to Hatch, it would only mean individual IBM employees were contributing. That could mean some sort of illegal corporate pressure on employees to donate. Or it could mean a number of individial employeers were moved by personal conviction to contribute. Opensecrets.org can only suggest a pattern, not confirm. If all those contributors were secretaries making $17,000 per year while contributing $2000 to a candidate, a good journalist might have reason to start calling up those secretaries to ask questions to see who injudiciously replies with the right kind of too much information.
That's the kind of information opensecrets.org is good for: suggesting patterns which must be confirmed. And it's amazing how many $2000 dollar contributing secretaries, when called up by a journalist, will say, "Oh, of course I can't afford it; but my boss said he'd pay me back," (illegal money laundering).
In fact, the only candidate where IBM, through its employees, comes out on top as a contributor, is to Howard Dean:
Opensecrets.org has been used very badly by the press. You might read something to the effect that a certain candidate is beholding to the "education lobby" when what that means is opensecrets.org globbed every teacher and librarian who gave money to a candidate into the "education industry" category which opensecrets.org compiles.
There was even a paperback book published last year with some brisk sales for a couple of months, which purported to be a citizen's guide to candidates' finances, following the money. It was nothing more than a bunch of misfires from relying on opensecrets.org to summarize contributions. Some candidates and parties actually had big contributions from certain industry sectors and individual corporations. Other candidates were only reported to have; but the truth was again, employees giving at their own discretion.
The result was your couldn't tell the good guys from the bad guys. But if you took the book at its word and went around citing it as an authority, you might look like you knew what you were talking about to the uninformed. The suitably uninformed would then come away thinking all the candidates are on the take instead of just some, and thinking it's our political system that's failing rather than our "free" (i.e., freely owned by corporate interests) press that's failing us.
What's needed is something like opensecrets.org where we can separate the good guys from the bad guys. The public really needs that kind of summary more than it needs these pretty misleading methods. There are candidates running this year who have never in their lives taken a corporate contribution, and yet have still managed to break fundraising records. And they've done this while other candidates have also m
Re:Supported by IBM who supports Sen Hatch ...
on
IT, Be Free!
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· Score: 1
IBM directly sponsors Sen Hatch
Cite please. "Sponsor" how? Hatch's son is suing IBM as an attorney for SCO.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, the responsible poor.
And don't forget that Firefox 1.03 was just released, fixing these.
0 64 0
:) I really like it. But it has been bugs galore since 1.01.
Hm. Saturday Firefox tells my laptop at home it has the 1.03 update. I let it download. The install hangs, reporting a corrupt download.
Today, Firefox tells me desktop at work it has the 1.03 update. I let it download. The install completes, but the new browser won't load any pages. Won't let me enter anything in the location bar. I've uninstalled and reinstalled. I've uninstalled and reinstalled *1.02* again. No luck. Dead Firefox. I've had to fall back to NS.
I went to Bugzilla. Someone else had already reported it. I voted for it and added my comments:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=29
It looks like it's being watched by 11 people.
Let me know when it is really fixed.
BTW, that "Quality Feedback Agent" built into Firefox has *never* successfully transmittted even one report for me. And I'm not behind a firewall.
Also BTW, I tried to manually download 1.03 in Netscape in one of my reinstall attempts. Netscape reports the download as corrupt and stops downloading. IE downloads the file.
Ah. You went to zope.com.
Go to http://zope.org. You will find nary a drop down menu there.
If I have to _ask_ to community anything, then it has failed.
Then I guess they've all failed. Including CPAN.
I should be able to learn all I need to know by reading the documentation.
You can. People still have questions and work together anyway. Most people who ask questions get pointed at documentation. There are just different ways of doing that pointing.
After 6 yrs as a J2EE developer, I'd say you'd have to be braindead NOT to be using Plone for a web framework these days. It's everything Java was reaching for, all bundled up in a nice usable box.
Python isn't about the elegance of the language or its syntax. It's what can be and has been accomplished with it.
The documentation and ZODB nits are so two years ago. The documentation is great now. Not to mention the documentation did separate the men from the boys for awhile. We read the source code and are the better for it. And ZODB is way more bulletproof than any RDBMSes. Geez, our Oracle "cluster" crashes weekly. Our ZODB has never had a loss of data or unscheduled downtime.
The notion that Zope is monolithic is pretty ignorant, as well. Zope is highly modularized.
CPAN? Give me a break. A more helpful community could not be found than that which I find in Plone. And they aren't a competition to see who can write the most arcane one line program.
good. since allowing the automated agent to upgrade me to ff 1.01, i've been having a crash a day. apparently this is not just happening to me, because the automated bug collector is having trouble connecting home when the crashes occur. i'v since turned the collector agent off.
The point is not that it isn't technical. The point is, the technical part, and the management thereof, isn't done by IBM. IBM have become simply the brand manager.
Which, no, won't win a Nobel prize.
And as often as not, that rebranding can become predatory. For every open source developer getting funded by writing DeveloperWorks articles, there's a company getting bought out in order to raid their technology.
Things like Power and Cell and Grid wouldn't happen today if it were up to IBM's own abilities. It's a shell game now. Which shell corporation holds the goods.
If you want to insist that making products out of appropriated technology is an innovation, I'd say sure. It's just a business innovation rather than a technical innovation. And likely that last innovation they will make. It's too easily imitated, so other business 'innovators' will cherry pick it as well. The ultimate innovation in this view seems to be to make commodities out of technical innovators. Whether that's good for business in the long run or not, I can't say.
You know, the idea with open source was the people who did that inventing would be able to add the value in order to get paid. But if you've ever worked for a company that did business with IBM as a supplier of innovations, you know how that works. There won't be another Microsoft on IBM's acccount.
But I can say, my point is, the reason IBM is in this spot is because they lost their technical management expertise. They lost interest in making money by their own work. And Lou Gerstner, the master corporate raider, a person who required a technology coach when he got to IBM, was very much the leader in that. Nobody with any sense wanted to work for that guy. If you were working on a technical innovation on his watch, more than likely a supporting division got sold out from under you. (For me it was the IBM Global Network, the only truly global network other than super low bandwidth Iridium. A former IBM counsel and another executive got rich off the sale and then bailed in true raider fashion.) So the talent went elsewhere. It was interested in seeing sustainable innovation.
My own eyes.
When I got to that place, the halls were just full of scientists (before Akers, that's for sure). It was like a refuge for folks from NASA after the Apollo program fell apart.
When I left, it was full of middle managers who couldn't even spell and and had no idea of basic geography (actual manager quotes: "How do you spell 'difficult'," and "Is Singapore a country?"). Anything they've got going on comes from the relatively few open source kids they fund. Websphere has some management screens tacked onto a Tomcat base, on which they have advisory oversight. Even with that, they seemed to make it dog slow and crash a lot.
They have to extend ideas not invented there because they couldn't invent much anymore except software patents. The Research Division never seems to come out with anything benefiting the business units. My last project threw a million bucks their way every year and never saw anything from it. We called it the research tax.
The Power PC started up there in 1990 based on Cooke's work from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Eclipse came from the purchase of another company to get technology for Visual Age. Cell is Sony and Toshiba avoiding a patent war with IBM. Grid is United Devices, into which IBM pumps lots of machines and money.
It's great that IBM pumps so much money into open source. I do love that. There wouldn't be a Gentoo today if IBM hadn't paid Daniel Robbins to write so many DeveloperWorks articles. But it's more of a way to pick off things not invented there than to have any sustained efforts of their own. You can argue that it's smart management to "play with others" but it is others who are doing *and managing* the technical work these days, which is the topic of this thread. IBM just brands it. They've become brand managers, not technical managers. The technical talent is long gone. IBM just "plays with" them.
I guess it's a fitting way to spend the earnings from the empire. Might as well. It does create a benefit few other companies provide in that quantity.
If IBM's got any innovation going on, it's still in chip technologies, and that's still a ghost of its former technical self there. Copper on silicon (1997) was the last really big innovation. And people had been working on that for 30 years.
You don't want to brag about game technology and IBM in the same sentence. I know people who still haven't recovered from working on Jaguar.
Look, go ahead and cite recent IBM accomplishments by playing with others. But you are making the case that nontechnical management means the technology will have to come from somehwere else.
No.
I worked for Lou Gestner. His talent was making money by laying off people, selling off divisions, and making loans to other transnational companies. IBM is a ghost of its former technical self as a result.
While the people who support CivicSpace mean well, I ran it for several months and found it all bark and no bite. PHP apps are so brittle, it is foolhardy to attempt to run large scale projects on them. And too many PHP libraries are not threadsafe. Although it seems more and more (I would assume inexperienced) democratically oriented political organizations are starting to use CivicSpace. This concerns me.
I think the main reason CivicSpace has caught on is that it takes little skill to set up. That part of it is extremely democratic, and first impressions are everything. Then folks start doing the things it can do out of the box, like blog, and blogging a campaign does not make (actually, it distracts from an actual campaign).
Note that although CivicSpace came out of the Dean *grassroots* campaign, it took nearly the whole campaign to make it even minimally usable (although there were a lot of "skins" for it early on to make it look nice), and even then not many sites of any consequence were running it. The actual Dean *professional* campaign ran on a grab bag of proprietary and open source software (Convio, Moveable Type, roll your own PHP) that never had a single sign on and seemed to change every few months as a new person would get an audience in front of the right campaign official and convince them that some new software would solve all the problems of the old software, which had been the new software only a few months before. Each successive generation seemed to go downhill a bit as folks who were supposed to be more qualified took over from folks who had supposedly reached the limits of their usefulness.
At one point there was a tour by some software folks from the professional Dean campaign office that claimed they would come to your town and talk about open source software and leveraging technology to people interested in it. I was too busy with CivicSpace (then DeanSpace) at the time to mess with being a host, but I went to the whistle stop functions for the tour in my town when some other people did host it. There wasn't much talk about actual software or content management or leveraging technology. Just a lot of jumping up and down about what a good time the campaign people were having on tour.
Be forewarned, when I used CivicSpace, it required PHP Safe Mode to be turned off and would not run in a PHP hardened environment. It is not secure enough for real campaigns.
If anyone reading this is a CivicSpace advocate, this is not meant to discourage you. If CivicSpace is serving your needs, by all means have at it. This is just my experience. Dealing with the hype and pressure to use CivicSpace in my activist network pretty much set us back the entire campaign.
Also, avoid Voter Activation Network at all costs. It's .Net, so you probably won't even consider it to begin with. Slow. Inflexible.
Anyway, I've found that rolling your own with a *robust and scalabe* open source CMS like Plone works best for me. There are value add companies that have very quick (< 2 month) turn around to provide something custom built on top of open source platforms to your needs. This is going to take you a lot farther than something free out of the box, supported by college students on Instant Messenger when they happen to be around, with a smorgasboard of common PHP message board functions.
Finally, remember that althought CMSes sound democratic, there are complex social patterns to successfully deploying a CMS your community will actually use and contribute content to. People will fuss to get things on the web. Then when you actually give them the tools to do so, they will still try to pass all the content creation off on the webmaster, creating both a bottleneck and a political problems (why is a webmaster the most qualified person to shape political messages? why is the webmaster supposed to know finance law? why is the webmaster suddenly in charge of scheduling and managing your rally?). You will need to devise a
See, I appreciate this explanation, and the one below which reframes the explanation as occuring on the stack. These are the explanations I've always understood. And which, frankly, didn't fully cut it with me.
*Many* moons ago, I took an OS writing course from Intel, on the 80286. The way I was taught, a buffer overflow is something that would not have been possible in the processor architecture. There were code segments, and data segments. If ever the twain should overlap, processor exceptions occur, whether on the heap on in the stack. Just intercepting these faults took a major act of god on the part of the processor's primary process.
The, a few years later, I got a reeducation in the same coure, only on the 80386. Heck, there was even more protection for processes on that processor. A lot of stuff that had to be implemented in software before, like determining which process caused the fault above would be done in hardware.
OS2 2.2 was so bullet proof mainly because it took such good advantage of these hardware protective mechanisms. When I read Gates's screeds against OS2, I find myself either laughing hysterically or yelling "liar" (because he tells some pretty huge whoppers about the development).
Add to all this, most OSes dynamically allocate memory to processes, so even if you could overlay code with data and manage to get it executed, getting it to overlay in the right place and on the right byte boundardy without causing a fault would seem pretty unlikely.
I guess as one who doesn't try to write malware, just the very idea of these overflow explanations seems so unlikely that even if I were wanting to write such programs, I wouldn't consider buffer or stack overflow as an idea.
I suppose I'm saying, the explanations I've heard about buffer overflow make sense to a point. And then they seem to run up against facts as I know them. I'd like to see explanations of buffer overflow that make complete sense.
i386 architecture as I understand it allows the OS programmer to place the processor in a mode which basically defeats all the code vs data and process control mechanisms in the hardware. In my understanding, this is something done only at boot time, and only for the period of time necessary to set up the code which kicks the processor into a hardware mode which supports memory and process partitioning for multitasking. Please don't tell me, not even as some karma raising "funny" joke, that Microsoft doesn't even use the hardware modes which I would presume would prevent buffer overflow from ever occuring?
Bob.
actively be part of a conversation
So, if I'm having a conversation while driving, no cell phone involved, I'm drunk?
I enjoyed the show.
I don't know if I'd like it or not. I live in a metro area population 1.5 million, but our UPN affiliate doesn't even carry it. I've never seen it.
Mod up parent.
That was exactly what I was going to post before scanning the thread for "money."
This even goes for programming competitions, though.
Rather than competitions, where you attempt to get something *out* of students rather than put something in, go for some experience to *give* some science knowledge to kids
These people can help:
Centers for Ocean Sciences Education Excellence
The COSEEs are all the time sponsoring field trips for kids and special training opportunities for teachers.
Here's an example:
Boats, Buoys, and Science Teachers
In just about any field of scientific endeavor, there is an association of educators for that field who can provide pretty great guidance with this sort of thing.
Unpaid overtime.
35 hours per week
That's all well and good. But with several friends working at SAS, this is what I've observed: non-technical personnel have the 35 hours per week rule enforced. Secretaries, receptionists, etc. work 35 hours per week at SAS and are told to go home after that. Technical personnel, however, appear to be somehow exempt from this rule and work the usual industry standard 60 hour weeks with the usual rubrics of project deadlines and special one time (but perpetually repeating) requirements used as justifications.
IBM has document retention policies specifically to limit liabilities. Or more like document destruction policies. All emails have to be wiped after two years. They probably truly don't have the code anymore.
Recently I had the misfortune of Microsoft trying to find some include files from an Embedded Win CE V3 platform builder (don't ask, it wasn't my decision to use that crap) for me for an older single board computer. They no longer had the source, either. And it would have been very *good* for them if they'd been able to come up with it. They literally didn't have it anymore.
Throwing company materials away as early as possible is the newest predefensive corporate legal maneuver. If tobacco companies had done that, they'd have saved a lot of money. Probably watching the tobacco companies is what gave other companies the idea.
Competition? Does Yoper have Portage? Gentoo's edge isn't a custom compile, which many distros have out of the box. It's Portage.
Yoper's an i686 only distro.
There's no competition here.
Here's what would await you on first login:
cold fusion errorNot only that, the login isn't even secure. Clear text http.
The dmail press release talks about a PR firm they hired to promote dmail. Looks like Techworld is nothing but a stringer.
...for the new wall paper. Fits across two monitors like a glove.
Please comment on the prospects for the convergence of Plone/CMF/Zope as the application server/framework for Ingres.
Thanks for the reply, Morgaine. Thanks for the cite. And no need to apologize. I just wanted to know "sponsor" how. If I were a moderator, I'd say, "+1, please," to your reply.
If it means donate, IBM doesn't even have a PAC. It doesn't want one. It goes back to the 70s when the entire IBM board came pretty close to being indicted for illegal campaign contributions to CREEP. Somehow, they got off. But entire boards like for RJ Reynolds went to jail for doing pretty much the same thing IBM's board did.
About trusting opensecrets.org, though...
Actually, you have to be very careful with opensecrets.org. It is very misleading to the casual user. They only take public information from the FEC, process it by their own methodology, and then present it through their own special lens:
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/methodology .asp?CID=N00009869&Cycle=2002
If opensecrets.org were to say IBM were a top contributor to Hatch, it would only mean individual IBM employees were contributing. That could mean some sort of illegal corporate pressure on employees to donate. Or it could mean a number of individial employeers were moved by personal conviction to contribute. Opensecrets.org can only suggest a pattern, not confirm. If all those contributors were secretaries making $17,000 per year while contributing $2000 to a candidate, a good journalist might have reason to start calling up those secretaries to ask questions to see who injudiciously replies with the right kind of too much information.
That's the kind of information opensecrets.org is good for: suggesting patterns which must be confirmed. And it's amazing how many $2000 dollar contributing secretaries, when called up by a journalist, will say, "Oh, of course I can't afford it; but my boss said he'd pay me back," (illegal money laundering).
In fact, the only candidate where IBM, through its employees, comes out on top as a contributor, is to Howard Dean:
http://www.opensecrets.org/presidential/contriball .asp
Opensecrets.org has been used very badly by the press. You might read something to the effect that a certain candidate is beholding to the "education lobby" when what that means is opensecrets.org globbed every teacher and librarian who gave money to a candidate into the "education industry" category which opensecrets.org compiles.
There was even a paperback book published last year with some brisk sales for a couple of months, which purported to be a citizen's guide to candidates' finances, following the money. It was nothing more than a bunch of misfires from relying on opensecrets.org to summarize contributions. Some candidates and parties actually had big contributions from certain industry sectors and individual corporations. Other candidates were only reported to have; but the truth was again, employees giving at their own discretion.
The result was your couldn't tell the good guys from the bad guys. But if you took the book at its word and went around citing it as an authority, you might look like you knew what you were talking about to the uninformed. The suitably uninformed would then come away thinking all the candidates are on the take instead of just some, and thinking it's our political system that's failing rather than our "free" (i.e., freely owned by corporate interests) press that's failing us.
What's needed is something like opensecrets.org where we can separate the good guys from the bad guys. The public really needs that kind of summary more than it needs these pretty misleading methods. There are candidates running this year who have never in their lives taken a corporate contribution, and yet have still managed to break fundraising records. And they've done this while other candidates have also m
Cite please. "Sponsor" how? Hatch's son is suing IBM as an attorney for SCO.