If it was open source, other people would be able to check it, test it and hopefully find serious flaws like this before much damage is made.
When you have source available during the beta stages, the "first release" should be infinitely more secure than any proprietary program ever could hope to be.
Now consider the damage done when MacOS is infact shipped with this flawed version of IE pre-installed...
Im sure that anyone who designs such a system to take over in case of emergency or hijacking would have the common sense to remove any easy overrides such as a simple flipping the switch.
The autopilot itself is not a problem, you just need some measure of equipment to safely determine wether there is an emergency or not.
I recall a TV show some time ago where they explained that there wouldnt be any pilots on todays planes if it werent for peoples supersticions about robots. It makes the passengers feel better to know that its a human flying the plane, even tho its not safer!
Maybe its time to make that transition. If its a robot flying the plane, there is no opportunity for hijacking at all! And there certainly wouldnt be any chance for a hijacker to take the con and fly the plane into <your-favourite-landmark>.
Alot of the submission-friendliness depends on the ego of the maintainer. If its a person who wants to head up the project just for the fame of it, you'll probably find it hard to submit good high quality code.
Such maintainers are probably more likely to take the ideas from your code and implement it themselves, for better or worse...
I am a maintainer of a project myself, and I know that any submissions that come to be will be scrutinized quite harshly for quality. If they're not up to my own standards then I wont accept them. My project is rather small tho, and very focused.
I've also submitted code to other projects. In one instance the code was completely ignored. In the other instance the ideas of the code was implemented and I was credited for it, but it still wasnt my code that was accepted.
For those who wants to contribute code, the most valuable code you can give is probably that which is nonexistant. Code that offers functionality that is wanted but for which code doesnt exist yet.
Code that simply tweaks currently existing functionality will have less chance of getting accepted I think.
If all else fails, you can always look into forking the project. If you are unhappy with the current maintainer, maybe there are other people who are aswell? Can you do a better job? If so, dont be afraid of forking, thats what free software is for I think. Letting the best man do the job.
Im not supporting spam in any way, but if the goal is to reduce spam, maybe the way to go is to legalise it and regulate it?
Suppose its legal to send commercial offerings to people by email, lets say we add a tax of 1 cent per email. Tax would go towards enforcing the law.
The tax would make it unattractive to send to just any email address there is. They'd do more targetted stuff and use more opt-in lists, simply cuz they would be paying for it. They dont pay now, so why would they care that their spam hits half a million burmese farmers whose english is limited to "fack joo".
You wouldnt need any new laws to cover spam specifically either, it'd simply become tax evasion and you'd be invaded by the IRS (in the states atleast) if you did anything naughty.
Ofcourse, it wouldnt completely stop spam, but do you think anything could?
If less tax dollars are spent on patent license fees and medicine subsidies (read==overpriced drugs), more tax dollars can be spent on research.
Research done in a public institution is preferred over corporate ditto, I would dare say. Atleast thats how it works here (in Sweden, a truly Free country unlike the US of A).
I wish Brazil and their citizens the best of luck and I hope they all get better soon.
And ofcourse, a slower release rate would also slow the entire development process.
Has anyone observed the GCC development? People say that Red Hat did a good thing by releasing a development snapshot as 2.96 (altho I dont agree with the version number, I agree with the release).
If a kernel patchlevel (remember v Major.Minor.Patchlevel?) breaks your application, then I am led to believe that your application is very poorly programmed...
The web is not at all about stylized content. It's about content. Period.
I read slashdot every day, often many times a day, and I really dont give a hoot about how it looks. I even elected to use the lynx-friendly version so it'd be easier to read and faster to download. "Just the facts, ma'am".
If you're a designer yuppie who wants to charge by the hour to make some lousy flash animation, fine. Just dont force me to look at it, because I wont. And while you're at it, delete that snippet of javascript too, cuz I flipped the switch on that one too. I dont flip it on unless I really must (and tragically enough, it happens a couple of times per week (*sigh*.. javascript logins on government sites... whats next, javascript voting?))
No matter how much hi-tech features and fancy graphics you put on your page, I still wont go there unless it holds some valuable content. Once you get some content, you'll notice that you really dont need all that fancy stuff anymore.
/proton, CEO of the "Ban CSS, Java and Flash" campaign.
Actually we (us earthlings) have sent such signals out into space.
I only recall some specifics about one such transmission. They sent a basic prime X prime grid of ones and zeroes off to some cluster of stars that were much like our own sun. I think it was about 40,000 lightyears away tho, so dont hold your breath...
Actually, no. ld.so does the dynamic linking, attaching calls to their respective routines, but
the loading of the library itself is handled by a library loader in the kernel.
I know exactly how shared libraries work. What you're saying about beos updating libraries while they are running is utter madness. Updating a library means that a program that start after the update is made will use the updated library. Those already running will not, they will keep using the old ones as long as they run. What ldconfig does is simply updating the name cache (/etc/ld.so.cache) which points to which file contains library X of version Y. The actual loading is done by the kernel and while most (all) libraries today are ELF they also share loading routines with the normal programs (ELF).
Whats the point tho? Why should the kernel have any support for refreshing library name caches? It's not like you automatically update libraries every 5 minutes and need a performance boost by including it into the kernel. Admin jobs should stay out of the kernel. If any code can be done easily outside the kernel it should be that way.
Next thing you know the argument will be that Linux kernel should include a GUI and a browser, simply because every other OS has it...
If microsoft says that Win2K is the most stable release of their server OS to date, and that the 63,000 bugs are `few' -- then how many bugs does WinNT 4 have? 100,000? A million?
I think its rather irrelevant what the FSF/GNU Project charge for their products since if you're the cheap type you can always pick it up from their ftp or one of their many mirrors.
Their sales of software is simply a way of raising money to continue the development of more GNU software, which they can later release under the GNU GPL -- for FREE!
I cant think of a bigger `donation' than the giving out of source code. In that regard the FSF is the largest doner the community has ever seen to date.
I would think that the Free Software/Open Source communities would have been severely hampered in development without GNU's Compiler tools and all of the basic system tools they have developed..
My vote for best charity will most likely go to the GNU Project & FSF.
My 2 cents. * proton puts on his asbestos suite...
Slashdot Mirror
If it was open source, other people would be able to check it, test it and hopefully find serious flaws like this before much damage is made.
When you have source available during the beta stages, the "first release" should be infinitely more secure than any proprietary program ever could hope to be.
Now consider the damage done when MacOS is infact shipped with this flawed version of IE pre-installed...
/proton
Im sure that anyone who designs such a system to take over in case of emergency or hijacking would have the common sense to remove any easy overrides such as a simple flipping the switch.
The autopilot itself is not a problem, you just need some measure of equipment to safely determine wether there is an emergency or not.
I recall a TV show some time ago where they explained that there wouldnt be any pilots on todays planes if it werent for peoples supersticions about robots. It makes the passengers feel better to know that its a human flying the plane, even tho its not safer!
Maybe its time to make that transition. If its a robot flying the plane, there is no opportunity for hijacking at all! And there certainly wouldnt be any chance for a hijacker to take the con and fly the plane into <your-favourite-landmark>.
/proton
Alot of the submission-friendliness depends on the ego of the maintainer. If its a person who wants to head up the project just for the fame of it, you'll probably find it hard to submit good high quality code.
Such maintainers are probably more likely to take the ideas from your code and implement it themselves, for better or worse...
I am a maintainer of a project myself, and I know that any submissions that come to be will be scrutinized quite harshly for quality. If they're not up to my own standards then I wont accept them. My project is rather small tho, and very focused.
I've also submitted code to other projects. In one instance the code was completely ignored. In the other instance the ideas of the code was implemented and I was credited for it, but it still wasnt my code that was accepted.
For those who wants to contribute code, the most valuable code you can give is probably that which is nonexistant. Code that offers functionality that is wanted but for which code doesnt exist yet.
Code that simply tweaks currently existing functionality will have less chance of getting accepted I think.
If all else fails, you can always look into forking the project. If you are unhappy with the current maintainer, maybe there are other people who are aswell? Can you do a better job? If so, dont be afraid of forking, thats what free software is for I think. Letting the best man do the job.
/proton
Im not supporting spam in any way, but if the goal is to reduce spam, maybe the way to go is to legalise it and regulate it?
Suppose its legal to send commercial offerings to people by email, lets say we add a tax of 1 cent per email. Tax would go towards enforcing the law.
The tax would make it unattractive to send to just any email address there is. They'd do more targetted stuff and use more opt-in lists, simply cuz they would be paying for it. They dont pay now, so why would they care that their spam hits half a million burmese farmers whose english is limited to "fack joo".
You wouldnt need any new laws to cover spam specifically either, it'd simply become tax evasion and you'd be invaded by the IRS (in the states atleast) if you did anything naughty.
Ofcourse, it wouldnt completely stop spam, but do you think anything could?
/proton
If less tax dollars are spent on patent license fees and medicine subsidies (read==overpriced drugs), more tax dollars can be spent on research.
Research done in a public institution is preferred over corporate ditto, I would dare say. Atleast thats how it works here (in Sweden, a truly Free country unlike the US of A).
I wish Brazil and their citizens the best of luck and I hope they all get better soon.
And ofcourse, a slower release rate would also slow the entire development process.
Has anyone observed the GCC development? People say that Red Hat did a good thing by releasing a development snapshot as 2.96 (altho I dont agree with the version number, I agree with the release).
If a kernel patchlevel (remember v Major.Minor.Patchlevel?) breaks your application, then I am led to believe that your application is very poorly programmed...
The web is not at all about stylized content. It's about content. Period.
.. javascript logins on government sites... whats next, javascript voting?))
I read slashdot every day, often many times a day, and I really dont give a hoot about how it looks. I even elected to use the lynx-friendly version so it'd be easier to read and faster to download. "Just the facts, ma'am".
If you're a designer yuppie who wants to charge by the hour to make some lousy flash animation, fine. Just dont force me to look at it, because I wont. And while you're at it, delete that snippet of javascript too, cuz I flipped the switch on that one too. I dont flip it on unless I really must (and tragically enough, it happens a couple of times per week (*sigh*
No matter how much hi-tech features and fancy graphics you put on your page, I still wont go there unless it holds some valuable content. Once you get some content, you'll notice that you really dont need all that fancy stuff anymore.
/proton, CEO of the "Ban CSS, Java and Flash" campaign.
Actually we (us earthlings) have sent such signals out into space.
I only recall some specifics about one such transmission. They sent a basic prime X prime grid of ones and zeroes off to some cluster of stars that were much like our own sun. I think it was about 40,000 lightyears away tho, so dont hold your breath...
Actually, no. ld.so does the dynamic linking, attaching calls to their respective routines, but
the loading of the library itself is handled by a library loader in the kernel.
I know exactly how shared libraries work. What you're saying about beos updating libraries while they are running is utter madness. Updating a library means that a program that start after the update is made will use the updated library. Those already running will not, they will keep using the old ones as long as they run. What ldconfig does is simply updating the name cache (/etc/ld.so.cache) which points to which file contains library X of version Y. The actual loading is done by the kernel and while most (all) libraries today are ELF they also share loading routines with the normal programs (ELF).
Whats the point tho? Why should the kernel have any support for refreshing library name caches? It's not like you automatically update libraries every 5 minutes and need a performance boost by including it into the kernel. Admin jobs should stay out of the kernel. If any code can be done easily outside the kernel it should be that way.
Next thing you know the argument will be that Linux kernel should include a GUI and a browser, simply because every other OS has it...
Couldn't it possibly be argued that CSS is not an effective copy control mechanism, but in fact only a playback control mechanism?
It doesnt seem to me like CSS stops anyone from copying anything and playing it with DVD CCA licensed hard/soft-ware.
If microsoft says that Win2K is the most stable release of their server OS to date, and that the 63,000 bugs are `few' -- then how many bugs does WinNT 4 have? 100,000? A million?
I think its rather irrelevant what the FSF/GNU Project charge for their products since if you're the cheap type you can always pick it up from their ftp or one of their many mirrors.
Their sales of software is simply a way of raising money to continue the development of more GNU software, which they can later release under the GNU GPL -- for FREE!
I cant think of a bigger `donation' than the giving out of source code. In that regard the FSF is the largest doner the community has ever seen to date.
I would think that the Free Software/Open Source communities would have been severely hampered in development without GNU's Compiler tools and all of the basic system tools they have developed..
My vote for best charity will most likely go to the GNU Project & FSF.
My 2 cents.
* proton puts on his asbestos suite...