Your columnist, Fred Moody, seems to have messed up a bit on his calculations. Now, I could state that famous quote about "lies, damn lies and statistics", but I will Mr. Moody the benefit of the doubt. If you take a look at the following http://www.securityfocus.com/vdb/stats.html You will see Security Focus's statistics page for the BugTraq mailing list. According to this page, the total number of Linux vulnerablities reported is 1999 is 84. The total number of Windows NT vulnerablities is 99. Now I don't know about you, but to me 99 is a larger number than 84. Based upon Mr. Moody's reasoning, he should have picked Linux as a better operating system than Windows NT. But according to his article, there are 122 Linux vulnerablities.
How can the source of his figures state that the number of Linux vulnerablities is 84, but he says it is 122? Well, with a bit of fiddling with math, it looks like Mr Moody added the total count of Red Hat Linux vulnerablities to the aggregate number of Linux vulnerablities. This means that he has counted the Red Hat vulnerablities twice. I am going to assume that this is a mistake on his part. I mean, if he purposely did that, it would be lying. And doing that in a forum as respectable as ABC News will damage your crediblity as an honest news reporting source. I further believe that Mr. Moody should come forward and admit is mistake and appologize. If he doesn't do that, I can then only assume that he purposly "cooked" his numbers to make Microsoft look good. And that is dishonest reporting. And that should be reported to a number of professional associations in the news business, as well as possibly having some bearing on the Department of Justice's case against Microsoft for abusing it's monopoly in the marketplace to decrease innovation in the computer field to reduce competition. I would consider it very damaging to Microsoft's case if it was using people like Mr. Moody to propagate lies to help make them look good against the competition. It has been further suggested that Mr. Moody should appologize to Security Focus for misrepresenting their Data.
I look forward to reading your correction and Mr. Moody's apology in the near future.
Despite advances in fuel-cell technology, pure electric doesn't cut it in Canada's climate. We need what is know as hybrid electric vehicles. These use a storage technology or cheap generation technology for electricity, say a flywheel or fuel-cell, plus a small gasoline engine for getting up hills or recharging the storage technology if there are no plug-ins avalable. There used to be a thriving electric car community in Ottawa, Canada's capital, based around our National Research Council. I hope it still exists...
That is why so many people are home schooling, and why the US/Canadian school system produces so many dunces. The School System Sucks...and these people are like the RIAA...they see the gallows, and will do almost anything, including the harpooning of their industry, to make sure that these new changes don't occur...but the bad news for them is that you can't stop change, and it is only a matter of time before everyone who goes to school will have at *least* one computerwith them.
We would quickly see a round of green, purple and blue skin, with a lot of science fiction themed porn. It would be just like what started the whole Hackerspeak...back in BBS days, some software implemented the ability to filter out swear words, so we started doing things like substituting an * for a some letters like "sh*t", and "F*CK!". This later evolved to using numbers to sub for letters to further get around these "features". And thus, 3l33t and d00dz came into our vocabulary.
It would be interesting to see what other ways, beside coloured skin people would use to get around a "excessive skintone" filter...a return to black and white pictures? Weirdly skewed colour maps? Use of "oil paint" filters to break up the skin-tone areas?
ttyl Farrell (who has been on line far too long...)
Once again, my fav distro beats the others to the punch! I really like the way they are doing things, with a live, ongoing beta (aka slackware-current). Programs are kept current, and you can be on the b/leading edge if you want.
First of all, it SF, not Sci-Fi. Calling "SF" Sci-Fi is like calling a Hacker a Cracker. Something only stupid Media types do. I hope that Slashdot will correct it's usage in the future.
As for the person who said at SF Writers should start recycling ideas...I guess said person hasn't been reading SF for very long...I've been reading SF & F for nearly 30 years, and the Writers are Ecologically Correct...they have been recycling ideas for even longer than that. I do have other credentials for this...I've help run a popular Science Fiction Convention for the better part of the '90s.
I also hope that ICRAVE TV returns soon, I miss CityTV (associate to Much Music, Space, and Much More Music, owned by the CHUM Group). It is TV that has live hosts almost all the time. And like Much Music, things go wrong, much to the delight of the viewers. It is not slickly packaged like US's MTV.
As a security professional (ie, do it for a job), the last thing you want to do is counterattack...as good as that may feel, at best, it will muddy the waters, and at worst, it will hurt innocent, (probably) insecure, bystanders. The most annoying thing you should be doing is contacting the Tech/Admin contact of the domain(s) that are attacking you, and letting them know what is happeneing. And if that is in the middle of the night for the contact person...
Based upon the E.E. Doc Smith books. One of the first animated films to combine CGI with traditional animation. Very cool.
I used to be fond of an Anime series called "Catseye", about 3 sisters who were stealing (back?) artwork, and the boyfriend/cop who was in charge of the case. Lot's of good humour,visuals, and oh, the opening and closing sequences...
Everybody, create an empty file with the band's name, and some song of theirs. Choose randomly from their catalog. Then sue Metallica for falsely accusing you of pirating their "product", when they get Napster to kick you off. Ick, the word "product" tastes offal when used about art.
Because I am a hacker of the old school...I don't throw away hardware...my old house router was a 386sx 16 with two 40 Meg MFM drives. I was running Slackware, of course. I don't there are any other full-featured distros that will fit in that small of space.
To start with, I would guess price. If you are running 3K systems, the cost of buying in batches of 100+ of x86 clones is pretty cheap, and parts are interchangable. If you had bought DEC, oops, COMPAQ Alphas, the design of the case, etc, changes between generations of the product, and you loose hardware interchangablity. Same goes for SUNs, or PPC. ON the other hand, I can *still* put an old MFM hard drive controller in dual PIII 800MHz system at boot off of it. Try getting that level of compatiblity between 15 year old equipment on any other platform that is current today!
We all know something like this was eventually going to happen. As such, we have to admire your courage, and thank your supporters on the corporate side.
The DNS system currently works on consensus, everyone agrees who the Top Level Nameservers are. We should simply say "No More", designate some new TLNs, and tell Network Solutions to stuff it. I am sure that some company, Maybe IBM would donate some computers to run the Database that would feed this. And we should host it outside the USA, since the Internet is International in it's scope today, and NSI has lots of money for lawyers.
Intel did not post the masks for the chip, all they have done is publish the "databook" for the chip on the web. Now, over the years, people have spent good money buying Intel databooks, but most of the time, if you went to the offices of Intel in your city, and many major cities have them, and simply asked for them, chances are, you could get them for free.
Why? It's simple...the more people with the Databook, the more people who can design stuff with it simply by pulling off their shelf. That is part of how they have to build themselves up to the place they are this decade.
One of the problems with the existing standards proejcts is they not only define what the layout is, but they also define the package manager and the init-scripts format..those being rpm and sys V, respectivly. I personlly perfer the non-sysV version of the init files that Slackware uses...but they are someone appaled by posssibly being forcged to use rpm.
Nice to see a few of us still around! We have revived some of the PODSnet Echos as Onelist mailing lists...just go to the site and search for PODSnet...
Phil wrote a better compression program that was compatible with System Enhancements Associates (SEA) program called ARC. So they litigated. And so Phil went off and found a better algorithem for compression, and brought out PKZIP.Many people in the BBS community thought that SEA was a little heavyhanded (Perception, I don't know the reality), and moved to PKZIP. Others moved over for the speed and the better compression. The rest is history.
See also "arc wars"MIT Jargon File ver 299. This story seems to have been dropped from the current Jargon File for some reason.
ttyl Farrell McGovern Former Sysop, Data/SFnet (One of the first few hundred Fidonet BBSs!) and Solsbury Hill, founding member of PODSnet.
Slashdot Mirror
Security Focus should sue both Moody and ABC news for the misrepresenting Security Focus, and for damaging their good name.
ttyl
Farrell
Your columnist, Fred Moody, seems to have messed up a bit on his calculations. Now, I could state that famous quote about "lies, damn lies and statistics", but I will Mr. Moody the benefit of the doubt. If you take a look at the following http://www.securityfocus.com/vdb/stats.html You will see Security Focus's statistics page for the BugTraq mailing list. According to this page, the total number of Linux vulnerablities reported is 1999 is 84. The total number of Windows NT vulnerablities is 99. Now I don't know about you, but to me 99 is a larger number than 84. Based upon Mr. Moody's reasoning, he should have picked Linux as a better operating system than Windows NT. But according to his article, there are 122 Linux vulnerablities.
How can the source of his figures state that the number of Linux vulnerablities is 84, but he says it is 122? Well, with a bit of fiddling with math, it looks like Mr Moody added the total count of Red Hat Linux vulnerablities to the aggregate number of Linux vulnerablities. This means that he has counted the Red Hat vulnerablities twice. I am going to assume that this is a mistake on his part. I mean, if he purposely did that, it would be lying. And doing that in a forum as respectable as ABC News will damage your crediblity as an honest news reporting source. I further believe that Mr. Moody should come forward and admit is mistake and appologize. If he doesn't do that, I can then only assume that he purposly "cooked" his numbers to make Microsoft look good. And that is dishonest reporting. And that should be reported to a number of professional associations in the news business, as well as possibly having some bearing on the Department of Justice's case against Microsoft for abusing it's monopoly in the marketplace to decrease innovation in the computer field to reduce competition. I would consider it very damaging to Microsoft's case if it was using people like Mr. Moody to propagate lies to help make them look good against the competition. It has been further suggested that Mr. Moody should appologize to Security Focus for misrepresenting their Data.
I look forward to reading your correction and Mr. Moody's apology in the near future.
ttyl
Farrell J. McGovern
I tried any number of subjects: Pagan, Eris, Discordia, Wicca, Circle, Craft, Wiccan, Fnord, Palm Pilot, Hacker, Slashdot.org.
Nothing, I got. No channels, no hits, no errors.
ttyl
Farrell
>Or what ever happened to that ".god" TLD idea?
.goddess TLD!
I bet it never gets in because they will never give us a
ttyl
Farrell McGovern
Goddess Worshiper
Member, Ár nDraíocht Féin: A Druid Fellowship
Despite advances in fuel-cell technology, pure electric doesn't cut it in Canada's climate. We need what is know as hybrid electric vehicles. These use a storage technology or cheap generation technology for electricity, say a flywheel or fuel-cell, plus a small gasoline engine for getting up hills or recharging the storage technology if there are no plug-ins avalable. There used to be a thriving electric car community in Ottawa, Canada's capital, based around our National Research Council. I hope it still exists...
ttyl
Farrell
That is why so many people are home schooling, and why the US/Canadian school system produces so many dunces. The School System Sucks...and these people are like the RIAA...they see the gallows, and will do almost anything, including the harpooning of their industry, to make sure that these new changes don't occur...but the bad news for them is that you can't stop change, and it is only a matter of time before everyone who goes to school will have at *least* one computerwith them.
ttyl
Farrell
I know C++ is pronounced "See, Plus, Plus", but do we pronounce C# "See Numbersign"?
Or worse..."See Hash". I think this would be the proper pronounciation for us...
ttyl
Farrell
I once heard a Diablo 630 play Jingle Bells...
Just write a program that does:
cr
cr
BELL
cr
cr
BELL
cr
cr
BELL
lf
And an old Apple ][ that had an animated pornographic line drawing that used the Diskdrive to produce appropriate sound effects...
ttyl
Farrell
We would quickly see a round of green, purple and blue skin, with a lot of science fiction themed porn. It would be just like what started the whole Hackerspeak...back in BBS days, some software implemented the ability to filter out swear words, so we started doing things like substituting an * for a some letters like "sh*t", and "F*CK!". This later evolved to using numbers to sub for letters to further get around these "features". And thus, 3l33t and d00dz came into our vocabulary.
It would be interesting to see what other ways, beside coloured skin people would use to get around a "excessive skintone" filter...a return to black and white pictures? Weirdly skewed colour maps? Use of "oil paint" filters to break up the skin-tone areas?
ttyl
Farrell
(who has been on line far too long...)
Once again, my fav distro beats the others to the punch! I really like the way they are doing things, with a live, ongoing beta (aka slackware-current). Programs are kept current, and you can be on the b/leading edge if you want.
ttyl
Farrell
First of all, it SF, not Sci-Fi. Calling "SF" Sci-Fi is like calling a Hacker a Cracker. Something only stupid Media types do. I hope that Slashdot will correct it's usage in the future.
As for the person who said at SF Writers should start recycling ideas...I guess said person hasn't been reading SF for very long...I've been reading SF & F for nearly 30 years, and the Writers are Ecologically Correct...they have been recycling ideas for even longer than that. I do have other credentials for this...I've help run a popular Science Fiction Convention for the better part of the '90s.
I also hope that ICRAVE TV returns soon, I miss CityTV (associate to Much Music, Space, and Much More Music, owned by the CHUM Group). It is TV that has live hosts almost all the time. And like Much Music, things go wrong, much to the delight of the viewers. It is not slickly packaged like US's MTV.
ttyl
Farrell
As a security professional (ie, do it for a job), the last thing you want to do is counterattack...as good as that may feel, at best, it will muddy the waters, and at worst, it will hurt innocent, (probably) insecure, bystanders. The most annoying thing you should be doing is contacting the Tech/Admin contact of the domain(s) that are attacking you, and letting them know what is happeneing. And if that is in the middle of the night for the contact person...
ttyl
Farrell
Based upon the E.E. Doc Smith books. One of the first animated films to combine CGI with traditional animation. Very cool.
I used to be fond of an Anime series called "Catseye", about 3 sisters who were stealing (back?) artwork, and the boyfriend/cop who was in charge of the case. Lot's of good humour,visuals, and oh, the opening and closing sequences...
ttyl
Farrell
Everybody, create an empty file with the band's name, and some song of theirs. Choose randomly from their catalog. Then sue Metallica for falsely accusing you of pirating their "product", when they get Napster to kick you off. Ick, the word "product" tastes offal when used about art.
ttyl
Farrell
Because I am a hacker of the old school...I don't throw away hardware...my old house router was a 386sx 16 with two 40 Meg MFM drives. I was running Slackware, of course. I don't there are any other full-featured distros that will fit in that small of space.
ttyl
Farrell
To start with, I would guess price. If you are running 3K systems, the cost of buying in batches of 100+ of x86 clones is pretty cheap, and parts are interchangable. If you had bought DEC, oops, COMPAQ Alphas, the design of the case, etc, changes between generations of the product, and you loose hardware interchangablity. Same goes for SUNs, or PPC. ON the other hand, I can *still* put an old MFM hard drive controller in dual PIII 800MHz system at boot off of it. Try getting that level of compatiblity between 15 year old equipment on any other platform that is current today!
ttyl
Farrell
We all know something like this was eventually going to happen. As such, we have to admire your courage, and thank your supporters on the corporate side.
Good luck and may The Force be with you!
ttyl
Farrell
The DNS system currently works on consensus, everyone agrees who the Top Level Nameservers are. We should simply say "No More", designate some new TLNs, and tell Network Solutions to stuff it. I am sure that some company, Maybe IBM would donate some computers to run the Database that would feed this. And we should host it outside the USA, since the Internet is International in it's scope today, and NSI has lots of money for lawyers.
ttyl
Farrell
Intel did not post the masks for the chip, all they have done is publish the "databook" for the chip on the web. Now, over the years, people have spent good money buying Intel databooks, but most of the time, if you went to the offices of Intel in your city, and many major cities have them, and simply asked for them, chances are, you could get them for free.
Why? It's simple...the more people with the Databook, the more people who can design stuff with it simply by pulling off their shelf. That is part of how they have to build themselves up to the place they are this decade.
ttyl
Farrell
One of the problems with the existing standards proejcts is they not only define what the layout is, but they also define the package manager and the init-scripts format..those being rpm and sys V, respectivly. I personlly perfer the non-sysV version of the init files that Slackware uses...but they are someone appaled by posssibly being forcged to use rpm.
ttyl
Farrell
"It only takes 20 years for a Liberal to become a Conservative without changing one idea."
ttyl
Farerll
Nice to hear from you! I'll send you some email with my better email address! BTW, looked at your site, nice!
ttyl
Farrell
Greeting Fellow PODSperson!
Nice to see a few of us still around! We have revived some of the PODSnet Echos as Onelist mailing lists...just go to the site and search for PODSnet...
ttyl
Farrell McGovern
Solsbury Hill BBS
Phil wrote a better compression program that was compatible with System Enhancements Associates (SEA) program called ARC. So they litigated. And so Phil went off and found a better algorithem for compression, and brought out PKZIP.Many people in the BBS community thought that SEA was a little heavyhanded (Perception, I don't know the reality), and moved to PKZIP. Others moved over for the speed and the better compression. The rest is history.
See also "arc wars"MIT Jargon File ver 299. This story seems to have been dropped from the current Jargon File for some reason.
ttyl
Farrell McGovern
Former Sysop, Data/SFnet (One of the first few hundred Fidonet BBSs!) and Solsbury Hill, founding member of PODSnet.
See my tag line!
Hail Eris!
ttyl
Farrell