Don't blink yet. I do expert witness work in cases like this. The software was written by (or for) the RCMP. I don't see what Microsoft has to do with any of this.
You might be better served by doing business with a more reputable ISP. I'm not sure what "a few spam complaints that weren't dealt with quickly enough" means, but I imagine there's a large other side of this story. If your ISP's inability to follow the rules impacts your business, it seems more reasonable to me for you to have taken the matter up with them all weekend long, rather than spending it trying to fix what they screwed up.
Come on people, you have had time to get ready for this.
Microsoft releases a "patch", the ramifications of which are sufficiently severe that the idea of being forced to prepare for it as a destructive event is a universally accepted premise. We, as Microsoft customers are so inured to the idea that we do not control our own systems that the implicit suggestion of that already accepted premise is actually used as a platform from which to shame those who have not implemented (known harmful!) Microsoft enforced changes to their computer systems. Why is this situation considered to be rational and fair?
I've been a sysadmin for years. I know a good sysadmin is responsible for patching systems. Windows XP SP2 is NOT a maintenance item! It is a fundamental change in the way the operating system works, with documented destructive effects by the actual vendor! Can anyone explain to me how a Microsoft service pack is now considered in the same way that taxes are? Has the legacy of the screaming 90's - when technology came and went within the time frame of months - been to create a state of mind where everyone feels like they don't have time or expertise to actually exercise freedom of choice with regard to technology and instead cling mindlessly to whatever everyone else seems to be doing?
Active directory is nothing like NDS. NDS is a real, hierarchical, partionable directory services system. It was powerful, extensible, and scalable long before any of those words became empty buzzwords. Active directory is and has always been a train wreck compared to NDS. It is all smoke and mirrors. The only resemblance AD has to a hierarchical system is when the management tool applies an "inherited" permission to each and every object in the directory below the level you want to change. There is no native, internal directory structure.
It seems incredible, but millions of families and thousands of businesses have no-one to turn to but a bunch of unqualified amateurs to fix the most complicated pieces of equipment that have probably ever existed.
I've always heard that the UK is culturally very hostile to IT. I guess now I know for sure.
A lot of people go on and on about how Gentoo "teaches" them about Linux due to the install process, but what exactly are you learning?
Look at it from the perspective of someone who got on board the linux train during Red Hat 5.x. If everything in the world on a linux system were only visible within a menu interface, having access to make.conf, fstab, and a hundred other such system-critical files is really quite eye-opening. All you learn in Debian/Red Hat/etc. is "Do Not Edit This File Directly! Use the poorly documented and inconsistent management utility to control whatever it is you are trying to control. Move along!"
I never learned to FIX linux systems by knowing how to install Debian. When I started installing using a Gentoo stage 1 installation, I learned, for the first time, how to repair a damaged or malfunctioning Linux system.
sorry, but there are many more Americans than US citizens
An interesting semantic point. Reality, however, is that everyone understands that people from the US are Americans. If you tell some German you meet in a bar in Hamburg that you are a USian, he will think you are an idiot. Until I meet a Brazilian who introduces themselves as an American, or until someone from Italy asks me what country I am from after I introduce myself as such, I will consider this to be a stupid, meaningless semantic peice of white guilt that I, and certainly none of the actual people I meet overseas, have time for.
Or, it could be that they wrote the exploit in java without any knowledge or intention that non-IE users would infect their IE installations, which would mean that none of this has anything to do with Firefox.
So you are telling me that someone found a way to get into a system with java, and - once there, found that it was actually more effective to try to break IE than the browser actually being used? Doesn't that sort of blow the popularity vs. intrinsic insecurity argument out of the water? I mean, the user is running firefox, right? The argument of what they are likely to use (and therefore be affected by) has pretty much been resolved at that point.
This sounds like a FUD factory somewhere is trying to come up with vulnerabilities against Firefox. Interesting that the best they can come up with so far is an exploit of IE. "Hey, wait, guys, we can make this one run with another browser! Let's run with that!"
Actually, the title of tfa should be "Firefox vulnerability could provide access to IE". The problem is Firefox or Java, not IE.
So if I have 600 pounds of nitroglycerin (IE) in my home, and it explodes due to the deliberate misuse of an automatic nailgun (Sun JVM), the resulting devastation is the fault of the mailman (Firefox) who delivered the nailgun?
(Disclaimer - Do not to operate your nailgun in close proximity to explosives!)
Sigh. Keep sliding those goalposts around all you want. If you want to alter the parameters until we get to a point where there's simply no way to discuss the question, fine. Go ahead.
What goalposts? I have pointed out the long-term insignificance of Windows. I never suggested that Linux's market presence vs. Apple had anything to do with it. That was your statement, not mine. There are no goalposts. There is no game. Reread the root post.
What does that have to do with anything? That doesn't relate in any way to what we were talking about.
Well, let's see here - people who actually do spend a lot of time worrying about Apple's market presence vs. Linux ripped the guts out of their system and totally rebuilt it from the ground up. Could it be that Apple, who looks at more than market share or stock price, thought that the concept of free software was so important in the IT world that they had to become it (in functionality and interoperability, if not in actual fact of the OS)? If Microsoft is smart, they already have MS Linux sitting in a lab somewhere ready to deploy when it (yet again) becomes obvious that they have to follow Apple's lead. According to your astute economic analysis, Apple should have been busy counting money and smoking cigars, not reinventing the technical core of their system. The point, therefore, is that Apple put a hell of a lot of money where your mouth is not.
What planet are you from, exactly? Here on Earth, you can't throw a rock without hitting two Windows computers, an embedded point-of-sale system and a guy who gets paid to take care of Windows computers. If we're going to talk about the standard, simple intellectual honesty demands that we acknowledge that Windows is it.
Fine. Try to install the same piece of software on the PC and the (Windows point of sale system? What planet are you on?). You can't install the same damn app on 98, 2000, and XP. Windows isn't a standard because it isn't standard! Ubiquity, however transient, is NOT a standard.
Yes, "like wildfire." Didn't we just learn a few weeks ago that unit sales went up by something like 30% for the last quarter year-over-year? Good for Linux... until you read the article and discover that total unit sales still only accounted for something like 9% of the worldwide market. That's less than the Mac, man, and all anybody talks about is how marginalized that platform is. Linux is small compared to the thing that everybody thinks of as small.
Are you talking about shipments of systems that come preinstalled with Linux? Do you even know what Linux is? If you think it competes with Mac in the PC space, you clearly have no idea. A better question to ask is why Apple uprooted their O/S and went to a Unix-based system. That at least has some bearing on this argument.
Um. Nooooo. If you want to talk about the standard, you're going to have to talk about Windows.
We're talking about the standard of 2005, not 1995. The NT inevitibility argument is invalid. It was supposed to have happened by now, and it hasn't. Windows is not the standard, and indeed, it never really was. Think about it. What has Windows been over the past 10 years? In 1995, it was IE as a unified application client platform. In 1998, it was activeX. Then it was active directory. Then it was.NET. And one by one, each one of those meaningless marketing efforts died. Each and every one of those technological initiatives went straight to shit, even though, at the time they were foisted, they were THE standard. Java is a standard. TCPIP is a standard. Windows was never anything but smoke and mirrors, and now, in 2005, it isn't even that.
When I read this, I actually, no shit, yawned out loud. This sentiment is as old as the hills. The minute the first caveman chiseled the first wheel out of granite, another caveman standing behind him grunted, "Og think someday wheels be free."
Windows came into being because it was cheaper than mainframes. It became popular because it was pirated. Pure and simple. It was easy to pirate, and everything ran on it, and that was that. It didn't become popular because it was better, it became popular because it was (effectively) free. Now with online phone home registration making Windows effectively impossible to pirate, look at what is happening. Linux is growing like wildfire. Why? Because the marketplace holds absolutely no value for an operating system. The only way to make the money is to dominate the supply side of the PC hardware industry and force people to buy the OS bundled with the system. How many people actually pay money for Windows itself? I would wager that it is a hell of a lot less than the number of people who run Linux. The market has decided that software is a service, not a product. The value is in the service of making the software work. That may not currently be the law, but that is and has always been the market.
In summary, Windows is not and has never been a unifying technological standard around which anything has ever revolved, and any popularity it ever enjoyed was a result of having been free.
You are proceeding from a false assumption. That is - that the government is actually trying to act in some semblence of interest for the people.
Ohio has a powerful auctioneer or more probably retailer lobby. This was probably a back room deal in exchange for support of some tax program yet to come. Normal government business.
sources.redhat.com hosts GNU packages and other outside projects as a favor to the developers. These are not Red Hat products, and Red Hat doesn't decide what to put in them, but Red Hat is proud to help them out with facilities and, in some cases, by contributions of code.
Looks like the code contributions are at best a secondary function of that site. What contributions of code, exactly?
So if one assumes that RHEL4 was based off rawhide and rawhide had progressed past FC3 then you would wind up with later packages in RHEL4. No conspiracy I'm afraid (try a different studying technique next time;).
If RHEL draws its lineage from rawhide rather than Fedora, then what exactly is Fedora?
Fortunately, Fedora (and the last two RH versions) also DO HAVE such a system. Yum from FC1 onward, and up2date in RH8 & 9.
Oh, OK, so I can type something like "up2date horribly_linked_gtk++app_0.8.45.3 and up2date will automatically resolve the library requirements from the original distribution? Or did you just never realize that up2date was never actually doing *anything* to resolve dependencies because you didn't realize that it was updating packages whose dependencies you already happen to have met - because they were already installed?
Looks like you need to get a bit of a clue as to dependency management and packaging before you ask someone if they "know a fuck of what they are talking about". It might make the answer easier to understand.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't blink yet. I do expert witness work in cases like this. The software was written by (or for) the RCMP. I don't see what Microsoft has to do with any of this.
So what were the details of the problems that gave rise to all of this in the first place?
You might be better served by doing business with a more reputable ISP. I'm not sure what "a few spam complaints that weren't dealt with quickly enough" means, but I imagine there's a large other side of this story. If your ISP's inability to follow the rules impacts your business, it seems more reasonable to me for you to have taken the matter up with them all weekend long, rather than spending it trying to fix what they screwed up.
Come on people, you have had time to get ready for this.
Microsoft releases a "patch", the ramifications of which are sufficiently severe that the idea of being forced to prepare for it as a destructive event is a universally accepted premise. We, as Microsoft customers are so inured to the idea that we do not control our own systems that the implicit suggestion of that already accepted premise is actually used as a platform from which to shame those who have not implemented (known harmful!) Microsoft enforced changes to their computer systems. Why is this situation considered to be rational and fair?
I've been a sysadmin for years. I know a good sysadmin is responsible for patching systems. Windows XP SP2 is NOT a maintenance item! It is a fundamental change in the way the operating system works, with documented destructive effects by the actual vendor! Can anyone explain to me how a Microsoft service pack is now considered in the same way that taxes are? Has the legacy of the screaming 90's - when technology came and went within the time frame of months - been to create a state of mind where everyone feels like they don't have time or expertise to actually exercise freedom of choice with regard to technology and instead cling mindlessly to whatever everyone else seems to be doing?
When does enough become enough?
Active directory is nothing like NDS. NDS is a real, hierarchical, partionable directory services system. It was powerful, extensible, and scalable long before any of those words became empty buzzwords. Active directory is and has always been a train wreck compared to NDS. It is all smoke and mirrors. The only resemblance AD has to a hierarchical system is when the management tool applies an "inherited" permission to each and every object in the directory below the level you want to change. There is no native, internal directory structure.
One word:
Chicken.
It seems incredible, but millions of families and thousands of businesses have no-one to turn to but a bunch of unqualified amateurs to fix the most complicated pieces of equipment that have probably ever existed.
I've always heard that the UK is culturally very hostile to IT. I guess now I know for sure.
apt-get install packageyouwanttoupgrade
I keep trying that, but it hasn't worked since 2002.
A lot of people go on and on about how Gentoo "teaches" them about Linux due to the install process, but what exactly are you learning?
Look at it from the perspective of someone who got on board the linux train during Red Hat 5.x. If everything in the world on a linux system were only visible within a menu interface, having access to make.conf, fstab, and a hundred other such system-critical files is really quite eye-opening. All you learn in Debian/Red Hat/etc. is "Do Not Edit This File Directly! Use the poorly documented and inconsistent management utility to control whatever it is you are trying to control. Move along!"
I never learned to FIX linux systems by knowing how to install Debian. When I started installing using a Gentoo stage 1 installation, I learned, for the first time, how to repair a damaged or malfunctioning Linux system.
(l)users
I think you just hit upon the real reason Debian is losing users and/or failing to attract new ones.
Firefox isn't the mailman, its the operator
Oh, OK, so firefox clicked the "do not click yes" JAVA security prompt. Got it.
sorry, but there are many more Americans than US citizens
An interesting semantic point. Reality, however, is that everyone understands that people from the US are Americans. If you tell some German you meet in a bar in Hamburg that you are a USian, he will think you are an idiot. Until I meet a Brazilian who introduces themselves as an American, or until someone from Italy asks me what country I am from after I introduce myself as such, I will consider this to be a stupid, meaningless semantic peice of white guilt that I, and certainly none of the actual people I meet overseas, have time for.
Or, it could be that they wrote the exploit in java without any knowledge or intention that non-IE users would infect their IE installations, which would mean that none of this has anything to do with Firefox.
So you are telling me that someone found a way to get into a system with java, and - once there, found that it was actually more effective to try to break IE than the browser actually being used? Doesn't that sort of blow the popularity vs. intrinsic insecurity argument out of the water? I mean, the user is running firefox, right? The argument of what they are likely to use (and therefore be affected by) has pretty much been resolved at that point.
This sounds like a FUD factory somewhere is trying to come up with vulnerabilities against Firefox. Interesting that the best they can come up with so far is an exploit of IE. "Hey, wait, guys, we can make this one run with another browser! Let's run with that!"
Actually, the title of tfa should be "Firefox vulnerability could provide access to IE". The problem is Firefox or Java, not IE.
So if I have 600 pounds of nitroglycerin (IE) in my home, and it explodes due to the deliberate misuse of an automatic nailgun (Sun JVM), the resulting devastation is the fault of the mailman (Firefox) who delivered the nailgun?
(Disclaimer - Do not to operate your nailgun in close proximity to explosives!)
Shouldn't we be seeing this in 3 weeks?
Sigh. Keep sliding those goalposts around all you want. If you want to alter the parameters until we get to a point where there's simply no way to discuss the question, fine. Go ahead.
What goalposts? I have pointed out the long-term insignificance of Windows. I never suggested that Linux's market presence vs. Apple had anything to do with it. That was your statement, not mine. There are no goalposts. There is no game. Reread the root post.
What does that have to do with anything? That doesn't relate in any way to what we were talking about.
Well, let's see here - people who actually do spend a lot of time worrying about Apple's market presence vs. Linux ripped the guts out of their system and totally rebuilt it from the ground up. Could it be that Apple, who looks at more than market share or stock price, thought that the concept of free software was so important in the IT world that they had to become it (in functionality and interoperability, if not in actual fact of the OS)? If Microsoft is smart, they already have MS Linux sitting in a lab somewhere ready to deploy when it (yet again) becomes obvious that they have to follow Apple's lead. According to your astute economic analysis, Apple should have been busy counting money and smoking cigars, not reinventing the technical core of their system. The point, therefore, is that Apple put a hell of a lot of money where your mouth is not.
i'm forced into doing tech support earning peanuts while CTOs of major corperations get multimillion dollar bonuses for cutting their software budget.
Unless you are in Bangalore, this has already happened to you. If you are in Bangalore, save some money - it's a short ride.
What planet are you from, exactly? Here on Earth, you can't throw a rock without hitting two Windows computers, an embedded point-of-sale system and a guy who gets paid to take care of Windows computers. If we're going to talk about the standard, simple intellectual honesty demands that we acknowledge that Windows is it.
... until you read the article and discover that total unit sales still only accounted for something like 9% of the worldwide market. That's less than the Mac, man, and all anybody talks about is how marginalized that platform is. Linux is small compared to the thing that everybody thinks of as small.
Fine. Try to install the same piece of software on the PC and the (Windows point of sale system? What planet are you on?). You can't install the same damn app on 98, 2000, and XP. Windows isn't a standard because it isn't standard! Ubiquity, however transient, is NOT a standard.
Yes, "like wildfire." Didn't we just learn a few weeks ago that unit sales went up by something like 30% for the last quarter year-over-year? Good for Linux
Are you talking about shipments of systems that come preinstalled with Linux? Do you even know what Linux is? If you think it competes with Mac in the PC space, you clearly have no idea. A better question to ask is why Apple uprooted their O/S and went to a Unix-based system. That at least has some bearing on this argument.
Um. Nooooo. If you want to talk about the standard, you're going to have to talk about Windows.
.NET. And one by one, each one of those meaningless marketing efforts died. Each and every one of those technological initiatives went straight to shit, even though, at the time they were foisted, they were THE standard. Java is a standard. TCPIP is a standard. Windows was never anything but smoke and mirrors, and now, in 2005, it isn't even that.
We're talking about the standard of 2005, not 1995. The NT inevitibility argument is invalid. It was supposed to have happened by now, and it hasn't. Windows is not the standard, and indeed, it never really was. Think about it. What has Windows been over the past 10 years? In 1995, it was IE as a unified application client platform. In 1998, it was activeX. Then it was active directory. Then it was
When I read this, I actually, no shit, yawned out loud. This sentiment is as old as the hills. The minute the first caveman chiseled the first wheel out of granite, another caveman standing behind him grunted, "Og think someday wheels be free."
Windows came into being because it was cheaper than mainframes. It became popular because it was pirated. Pure and simple. It was easy to pirate, and everything ran on it, and that was that. It didn't become popular because it was better, it became popular because it was (effectively) free. Now with online phone home registration making Windows effectively impossible to pirate, look at what is happening. Linux is growing like wildfire. Why? Because the marketplace holds absolutely no value for an operating system. The only way to make the money is to dominate the supply side of the PC hardware industry and force people to buy the OS bundled with the system. How many people actually pay money for Windows itself? I would wager that it is a hell of a lot less than the number of people who run Linux. The market has decided that software is a service, not a product. The value is in the service of making the software work. That may not currently be the law, but that is and has always been the market.
In summary, Windows is not and has never been a unifying technological standard around which anything has ever revolved, and any popularity it ever enjoyed was a result of having been free.
Apparently not - a good number of moderators appear to agree that bringing up a forbidden and evil topic negates the value of whatever else you said.
This is just like abortion.
You are proceeding from a false assumption. That is - that the government is actually trying to act in some semblence of interest for the people.
Ohio has a powerful auctioneer or more probably retailer lobby. This was probably a back room deal in exchange for support of some tax program yet to come. Normal government business.
The site appears to be a hosting site:
sources.redhat.com hosts GNU packages and other outside projects as a favor to the developers. These are not Red Hat products, and Red Hat doesn't decide what to put in them, but Red Hat is proud to help them out with facilities and, in some cases, by contributions of code.
Looks like the code contributions are at best a secondary function of that site. What contributions of code, exactly?
So if one assumes that RHEL4 was based off rawhide and rawhide had progressed past FC3 then you would wind up with later packages in RHEL4. No conspiracy I'm afraid (try a different studying technique next time ;).
If RHEL draws its lineage from rawhide rather than Fedora, then what exactly is Fedora?
Fortunately, Fedora (and the last two RH versions) also DO HAVE such a system. Yum from FC1 onward, and up2date in RH8 & 9.
Oh, OK, so I can type something like "up2date horribly_linked_gtk++app_0.8.45.3 and up2date will automatically resolve the library requirements from the original distribution? Or did you just never realize that up2date was never actually doing *anything* to resolve dependencies because you didn't realize that it was updating packages whose dependencies you already happen to have met - because they were already installed?
Looks like you need to get a bit of a clue as to dependency management and packaging before you ask someone if they "know a fuck of what they are talking about". It might make the answer easier to understand.