There were two personnel in each launch control room with keys which had to be turned simultaneously. They both had pistols. The pistols were to shoot the other one if he went insane.
Nope. Actually, Wargames showed that the pistols were for shooting people that wouldn't cooperate and launch their missile. That wasn't actually the case, though.
Here's the relevant text:
Contrary to the myth peddled by the movie "Wargames," we were not issued sidearms for the purpose of shooting a fellow crew member in the event he refused to turn his launch key. Rather, we were armed so that we might defend the LCC and protect the documents and launch keys from unauthorized individuals. There was no provision for warning shots. We would shoot to kill.
ICANN doesn't run the DNS servers -- it's just reponsible for policy, assigning numbers and address ranges to avoid conflict, etc.
I would guess that the costs go to pay for engineers who know what they're talking about.
Of course, the ICANN meeting locations look like the typical VP-wants-to-tour-the-world-on-the-company-dollar deal.
However, in general, while ICANN isn't perfect, I'd have to say that they're a lot more The Good Guys than, say, certain other folks...and their entire yearly budget is probably less than what certain other folks (*cough* Verisign) pick up through misleading or netabuse-encouraging sales in a week.
Maybe we should execute politicians whose districts receive more money than average (say $4.5 million more than average, since that was the "value" of a white-collar worker in the article).
The "trick" to the "value of a human life" point in the paper is that humans do not assign value linearly. The author simply converted a point on a value curve into a dollar amount. Dollars are normally valued linearly with risk (.1 chance of 10 == 1 chance of 1), so he started doing linear calculations, then converted back into value. This does not work.
It's very clear that the author is wrong. For example, we may pay a dollar to avoid a one-in-ten-million chance in being killed. However, if someone offers me $10 million dollars to be killed, I wouldn't take it -- simply taking what I would be willing to pay and multiplying it by ten million does not correctly predict my actions. My value/risk curve is not linear (and isn't likely to be, until we turn into perfectly rational beings).
Your house, unless it's behind a fence, is already accessible visually to the public. I can walk out my door right now, with my camera, and snap pictures of every house on my street.
This is common privacy logic ("The information is public, and all I'm doing is databasing it"), but it's incorrect.
Laws regarding privacy were produced in an environment *without* computers and en-masse databasing. For example, a phone book contains publically available data. On a computer, it's the work of a few seconds to sort and reverse. However, reverse phonebooks were traditionally considered invasive of privacy, and restricted to people like police. In the era of computers, anyone can have a reverse phone book.
When we decide that any pictures can be taken from public locations because, given the environment fifty years ago, there was no privacy violation, we cannot extrapolate to today's environment. If I use the growing number of camera feeds available and use image recognition to build up a map, I can track people's whereabouts throughout the day.
Once my exams are over, I plan to look through the KDE ioslaves (at least the common ones in kdebase, kdenetwork etc.) and check what standards they comply with, and whether they appear to be exploitable. I'm not a security expert, but hey, many eyes, right?
That's very kind of you. I'm sure that many KDE users, whether they know it or not, will be very much happier not having their system being attacked.
- Auto-registering protocols from all mounted images, while having URLs that mount a disk image with no user interaction.
Apple need to decide where to put the security barrier - either mounting a.dmg is an expression of trust by the user, in which case Apple should never do it automatically (or at least have an unavoidable prompt before mounting remote.dmg files), or it's not, in which case newly mounted.dmg files should be considered to be untrusted and shouldn't be able to autorun anything. (Or both, of course.)
Right.
- Some protocol handlers are mis-implemented, like the telnet one which accepts telnet:-nfoo (or telnet://-nfoo?) as a request to telnet to the host -nfoo, but naively invokes telnet with the argument -nfoo (which doesn't do what you want).
If Mac OS X telnet used GNU-style arguments, invoking telnet -- -nfoo would be sufficient to get the desired behaviour, but since it presumably doesn't, the telnet: protocol handler should be responsible for filtering out harmful hostnames.
(I observe that a non-GNUish telnet will be unable to connect to certain hosts via command-line arguments: if you actually have a host called -nfoo, it appears that at least Debian's Netkit telnet can only connect by running with no host parameter and instead using the command "open -nfoo")
This (supporting hostnames of the form "-nfoo") is not required. I quote from RFC 952:
You have *got* to be kidding me. You do realize that the worst radiation you are producing (and it's *not* much) is no worse than the radiation near the wireless adaptor without any Chinese cookware attached? And your laptop's wireless adaptor is pretty likely to sit right next to your testicles when it's on your lap, so if you're worried about this guy's project, you're most certainly already screwed.
The guy isn't amplifying the signal. He's just directing it and filtering out outside crap.
Linus recieved a large chunk of Red Hat stock, which he promptly sold off and got a decent nest egg with.
He is now one of the most famous software developers in the world and has extensive operating system, Linux and x86 knowledge. He has a graduate degree. He speaks English. He's not an asshole (blunt, yes, but not an asshole). I do not think that Linus needs to worry about his children starving any time soon.
Or that Red Hat fired him and Microsoft can only get their leavings.
But much, much more probable than the above theory, or the parent's, or the grandparent's is that Microsoft just offered him more money (remember, this is a sales guy, not a coder, and he'd probably be just as happy organizing sales campaigns of toilet paper) in the hopes of bringing in more people who know what Red Hat is up to from a sales perspective.
It's a pretty safe bet that there are people that work at Red Hat that used to work at Microsoft. And the same with IBM. Hiring people away is much safer than corporate espionage, and par for the course for large companies.
Steve Jobs made a really good point about Microsoft, he said that after Apple forced him out in the 80's they person in charge was a salesman.
(a) Steve Jobs brought said person into the company (rather famously, as well). I'm not sure how he can blame anyone but himself for that person being there.
(b) Steve Jobs is also a salesman. He's no Woz or Atkinson.
That being said, the weaker Microsoft is from many *IX firms nibbling away at their market share, the happier I am.
Sparkz, your post theoretically is true. I think the problem is that you're making an invalid assumption.
I have yet to find phone support of any kind that's worth a damn, and have long since given up on it, and solved problems myself. (Well, "myself", as Google/Google Groups/IRC are valid resources in solving it myself.)
As long as there are no good systems in place for evaluating the quality of support and publically rating companies on them, I suspect that the quality of support will continue to be abysmal, and a primary area used to cost-cut. If calling up put someone in touch with the developer of the software, that's a totally different story -- but it generally doesn't.
Support is a really strange thing - on one hand, you've got the users who say "fsck support, it works!" and on the other, you've got people who say "I don't care if it 'just works', I want someone to cover my ass if it doesn't work!"
This is a huge, huge, huge deal.
In many cases, much of business lies in separating the interests of an exec at a client from the interests of the business he works at. That may take the form of something as simple as wining and dining them. It may be because vendors can take advantage of imperfect reward systems at companies -- execs generally recieve little or no reward for doing something slightly better than expected (Windows works, Linux works better, the exec isn't getting a bonus for going to Linux) and tremendous punishment for anything going wrong when a finger can be pointed at them. Official support is rarely worth the money it costs (especially if you are a large company with a skilled in-house IT staff) unless you are working with some very specialized software. However, if something goes wrong and a support contract is present, the exec can just say "I did my job". He won't get nailed if it's widely known that this software has caused problems before, but he *will* get nailed if something goes wrong and there is no support contract in place.
"Cover my ass" is one of the inefficiencies in business, and something that businesses should (hard as it is) work to eliminate.
Its NOT funny that he came from Red Hat. It will lend some 'creditability' to his words, in the public's eye.
If you work at or visit a Fortune 500, I think you'll be astounded how many people previously worked at other companies in the same industry. This is not abnormal behavior in the least.
I further remember the uncomfortable look I got when I asked the pantsuited sales lady if it was okay if I made copies of my Red Hat 5.0 CDs to share with friends.
Meh, 'sokay. As long as Red Hat's actual content producers are those unwashed hackers and don't start ignoring unwashed hackers like me, I'll be happy.
To be honest, I don't envy those Red Hat business types. They are quite literally forging new ground and having to produce and test new business models for a changed market, all while fighting one of the largest companies in the world. This is not a position that implies survival -- usually it's companies that *follow* companies like these and can tread on the dead bodies of the companies that made mistakes before them that end up making it big.
The Red Hat hackers, on the other hand, get dream jobs. They get paid to hack on OSS.
Microsoft seems to be operating under the delusion that the only thing a government should care about is growing a local software industry.
I disagree.
Open Source is one of the primary things that allow the software industry to spread into areas where it is not currently present. The GPL is one of the most competetion-enabling systems in *existence*, prohibiting the use of any patent that is not freely licensed for use (and derivative use) in a GPLed product. In a system of people using Open Source (and particularly the GPL), there is an extremely low barrier to entry. We do not currently know of any way (and if there was, it would probably be a bug fixed in GPL v3) to raise the barrier to entry with the GPL. Established software companies (and especially monopolistic ones like Microsoft) obviously lose out in such a scenerio. However, new companies (in places like China and Vietnam) and software consumers clearly win in a more competitive environment.
Taxes are always harmful (at least directly) to an economy, because it's wasted money...profit that didn't get reinvested.
Not necessarily. Taxes *tend* to get re-distributed at least somewhat evenly. A few poor states like West Virginia get disproproportionate amounts of funding (due to the powerful Senator Byrd).
Taxes are very useful from an economic standpoint for some things. They solve the public-good problem, for one. Probably the biggest example of this is roads. The US road system would never exist if people had to privately fund the whole thing -- there would be tollbooths all over in the best case. I'm not willing to pay for twenty feet of highway (20' of highway does me no good), but I *am* willing to put in money if it means that everyone else does as well and I get to use the resulting road system to transport myself and goods.
Price discrimination is bad for people that do not get significant money back from the company that gets more money (if I ran a restauraunt chain in Seattle, I could benefit, but if I'm a barber in Kansas, I wouldn't) and end up having to pay more.
For example, most people on Slashdot are probably abnormally heavy users of network bandwidth. They aren't the little old lady that gets on to check the news and her email. They benefit *greatly* from their ISP not being able to effectively and efficiently discriminate between that little old lady and them. If it could, they'd be paying more.
In the system as a whole, I agree that price discrimination is generally a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
There were two personnel in each launch control room with keys which had to be turned simultaneously. They both had pistols. The pistols were to shoot the other one if he went insane.
Nope. Actually, Wargames showed that the pistols were for shooting people that wouldn't cooperate and launch their missile. That wasn't actually the case, though.
Here's the relevant text:
Contrary to the myth peddled by the movie "Wargames," we were not issued sidearms for the purpose of shooting a fellow crew member in the event he refused to turn his launch key. Rather, we were armed so that we might defend the LCC and protect the documents and launch keys from unauthorized individuals. There was no provision for warning shots. We would shoot to kill.
ICANN doesn't run the DNS servers -- it's just reponsible for policy, assigning numbers and address ranges to avoid conflict, etc.
I would guess that the costs go to pay for engineers who know what they're talking about.
Of course, the ICANN meeting locations look like the typical VP-wants-to-tour-the-world-on-the-company-dollar deal.
However, in general, while ICANN isn't perfect, I'd have to say that they're a lot more The Good Guys than, say, certain other folks...and their entire yearly budget is probably less than what certain other folks (*cough* Verisign) pick up through misleading or netabuse-encouraging sales in a week.
My value/risk curve is not linear (and isn't likely to be, until we turn into perfectly rational beings).
Actually, I take this back. Even being perfectly rational doesn't mean we'll have a linear value/risk curve.
Probably about the same, but it would pop up error dialogs occasionally, based on kiosks running Windows that I've seen.
Maybe we should execute politicians whose districts receive more money than average (say $4.5 million more than average, since that was the "value" of a white-collar worker in the article).
The "trick" to the "value of a human life" point in the paper is that humans do not assign value linearly. The author simply converted a point on a value curve into a dollar amount. Dollars are normally valued linearly with risk (.1 chance of 10 == 1 chance of 1), so he started doing linear calculations, then converted back into value. This does not work.
It's very clear that the author is wrong. For example, we may pay a dollar to avoid a one-in-ten-million chance in being killed. However, if someone offers me $10 million dollars to be killed, I wouldn't take it -- simply taking what I would be willing to pay and multiplying it by ten million does not correctly predict my actions. My value/risk curve is not linear (and isn't likely to be, until we turn into perfectly rational beings).
Your house, unless it's behind a fence, is already accessible visually to the public. I can walk out my door right now, with my camera, and snap pictures of every house on my street.
This is common privacy logic ("The information is public, and all I'm doing is databasing it"), but it's incorrect.
Laws regarding privacy were produced in an environment *without* computers and en-masse databasing. For example, a phone book contains publically available data. On a computer, it's the work of a few seconds to sort and reverse. However, reverse phonebooks were traditionally considered invasive of privacy, and restricted to people like police. In the era of computers, anyone can have a reverse phone book.
When we decide that any pictures can be taken from public locations because, given the environment fifty years ago, there was no privacy violation, we cannot extrapolate to today's environment. If I use the growing number of camera feeds available and use image recognition to build up a map, I can track people's whereabouts throughout the day.
Once my exams are over, I plan to look through the KDE ioslaves (at least the common ones in kdebase, kdenetwork etc.) and check what standards they comply with, and whether they appear to be exploitable. I'm not a security expert, but hey, many eyes, right?
.dmg is an expression of trust by the user, in which case Apple should never do it automatically (or at least have an unavoidable prompt before mounting remote .dmg files), or it's not, in which case newly mounted .dmg files should be considered to be untrusted and shouldn't be able to autorun anything. (Or both, of course.)
That's very kind of you. I'm sure that many KDE users, whether they know it or not, will be very much happier not having their system being attacked.
- Auto-registering protocols from all mounted images, while having URLs that mount a disk image with no user interaction.
Apple need to decide where to put the security barrier - either mounting a
Right.
- Some protocol handlers are mis-implemented, like the telnet one which accepts telnet:-nfoo (or telnet://-nfoo?) as a request to telnet to the host -nfoo, but naively invokes telnet with the argument -nfoo (which doesn't do what you want).
If Mac OS X telnet used GNU-style arguments, invoking telnet -- -nfoo would be sufficient to get the desired behaviour, but since it presumably doesn't, the telnet: protocol handler should be responsible for filtering out harmful hostnames.
(I observe that a non-GNUish telnet will be unable to connect to certain hosts via command-line arguments: if you actually have a host called -nfoo, it appears that at least Debian's Netkit telnet can only connect by running with no host parameter and instead using the command "open -nfoo")
This (supporting hostnames of the form "-nfoo") is not required. I quote from RFC 952:
The first character must be an alpha character.
You have *got* to be kidding me. You do realize that the worst radiation you are producing (and it's *not* much) is no worse than the radiation near the wireless adaptor without any Chinese cookware attached? And your laptop's wireless adaptor is pretty likely to sit right next to your testicles when it's on your lap, so if you're worried about this guy's project, you're most certainly already screwed.
The guy isn't amplifying the signal. He's just directing it and filtering out outside crap.
For the freedom loving ppl of the world
I was just thinking how much I could go for a nice batch of freedom fries right now.
Really, though, it's infinitely neater to have your ultra-modern bleeding-edge geek network constructed out of ancient Chinese cooking gear.
You're about to sell a whole hell of a lot more.
I also don't get as much pleasure playing online first-person shooters.
Play cooperative multiplayer games. It's much more fun.
Thanks for the link. That is a great resource.
Linus recieved a large chunk of Red Hat stock, which he promptly sold off and got a decent nest egg with.
He is now one of the most famous software developers in the world and has extensive operating system, Linux and x86 knowledge. He has a graduate degree. He speaks English. He's not an asshole (blunt, yes, but not an asshole). I do not think that Linus needs to worry about his children starving any time soon.
It's a good bet that there's a lot of disagreement at upper levels about how to try to cope with open source.
Or that Red Hat fired him and Microsoft can only get their leavings.
But much, much more probable than the above theory, or the parent's, or the grandparent's is that Microsoft just offered him more money (remember, this is a sales guy, not a coder, and he'd probably be just as happy organizing sales campaigns of toilet paper) in the hopes of bringing in more people who know what Red Hat is up to from a sales perspective.
It's a pretty safe bet that there are people that work at Red Hat that used to work at Microsoft. And the same with IBM. Hiring people away is much safer than corporate espionage, and par for the course for large companies.
Steve Jobs made a really good point about Microsoft, he said that after Apple forced him out in the 80's they person in charge was a salesman.
(a) Steve Jobs brought said person into the company (rather famously, as well). I'm not sure how he can blame anyone but himself for that person being there.
(b) Steve Jobs is also a salesman. He's no Woz or Atkinson.
That being said, the weaker Microsoft is from many *IX firms nibbling away at their market share, the happier I am.
Sparkz, your post theoretically is true. I think the problem is that you're making an invalid assumption.
I have yet to find phone support of any kind that's worth a damn, and have long since given up on it, and solved problems myself. (Well, "myself", as Google/Google Groups/IRC are valid resources in solving it myself.)
As long as there are no good systems in place for evaluating the quality of support and publically rating companies on them, I suspect that the quality of support will continue to be abysmal, and a primary area used to cost-cut. If calling up put someone in touch with the developer of the software, that's a totally different story -- but it generally doesn't.
Support is a really strange thing - on one hand, you've got the users who say "fsck support, it works!" and on the other, you've got people who say "I don't care if it 'just works', I want someone to cover my ass if it doesn't work!"
This is a huge, huge, huge deal.
In many cases, much of business lies in separating the interests of an exec at a client from the interests of the business he works at. That may take the form of something as simple as wining and dining them. It may be because vendors can take advantage of imperfect reward systems at companies -- execs generally recieve little or no reward for doing something slightly better than expected (Windows works, Linux works better, the exec isn't getting a bonus for going to Linux) and tremendous punishment for anything going wrong when a finger can be pointed at them. Official support is rarely worth the money it costs (especially if you are a large company with a skilled in-house IT staff) unless you are working with some very specialized software. However, if something goes wrong and a support contract is present, the exec can just say "I did my job". He won't get nailed if it's widely known that this software has caused problems before, but he *will* get nailed if something goes wrong and there is no support contract in place.
"Cover my ass" is one of the inefficiencies in business, and something that businesses should (hard as it is) work to eliminate.
Its NOT funny that he came from Red Hat. It will lend some 'creditability' to his words, in the public's eye.
If you work at or visit a Fortune 500, I think you'll be astounded how many people previously worked at other companies in the same industry. This is not abnormal behavior in the least.
I further remember the uncomfortable look I got when I asked the pantsuited sales lady if it was okay if I made copies of my Red Hat 5.0 CDs to share with friends.
Meh, 'sokay. As long as Red Hat's actual content producers are those unwashed hackers and don't start ignoring unwashed hackers like me, I'll be happy.
To be honest, I don't envy those Red Hat business types. They are quite literally forging new ground and having to produce and test new business models for a changed market, all while fighting one of the largest companies in the world. This is not a position that implies survival -- usually it's companies that *follow* companies like these and can tread on the dead bodies of the companies that made mistakes before them that end up making it big.
The Red Hat hackers, on the other hand, get dream jobs. They get paid to hack on OSS.
SPF is broken as a spam-prevention system, and Microsoft's Caller ID is only slightly improved.
Microsoft seems to be operating under the delusion that the only thing a government should care about is growing a local software industry.
I disagree.
Open Source is one of the primary things that allow the software industry to spread into areas where it is not currently present. The GPL is one of the most competetion-enabling systems in *existence*, prohibiting the use of any patent that is not freely licensed for use (and derivative use) in a GPLed product. In a system of people using Open Source (and particularly the GPL), there is an extremely low barrier to entry. We do not currently know of any way (and if there was, it would probably be a bug fixed in GPL v3) to raise the barrier to entry with the GPL. Established software companies (and especially monopolistic ones like Microsoft) obviously lose out in such a scenerio. However, new companies (in places like China and Vietnam) and software consumers clearly win in a more competitive environment.
Taxes are always harmful (at least directly) to an economy, because it's wasted money...profit that didn't get reinvested.
Not necessarily. Taxes *tend* to get re-distributed at least somewhat evenly. A few poor states like West Virginia get disproproportionate amounts of funding (due to the powerful Senator Byrd).
Taxes are very useful from an economic standpoint for some things. They solve the public-good problem, for one. Probably the biggest example of this is roads. The US road system would never exist if people had to privately fund the whole thing -- there would be tollbooths all over in the best case. I'm not willing to pay for twenty feet of highway (20' of highway does me no good), but I *am* willing to put in money if it means that everyone else does as well and I get to use the resulting road system to transport myself and goods.
Price discrimination is good.
.
Not for everyone.
Price discrimination is bad for people that do not get significant money back from the company that gets more money (if I ran a restauraunt chain in Seattle, I could benefit, but if I'm a barber in Kansas, I wouldn't) and end up having to pay more.
For example, most people on Slashdot are probably abnormally heavy users of network bandwidth. They aren't the little old lady that gets on to check the news and her email. They benefit *greatly* from their ISP not being able to effectively and efficiently discriminate between that little old lady and them. If it could, they'd be paying more
In the system as a whole, I agree that price discrimination is generally a good thing.