Yeah, but I'll bet the people getting dropped are support people. Which is too bad. IBM had a reputation for expensive but good support, like Sun (again, various mileages may vary). I'm guessing that plenty of suit-wearing manager-types managed to scrable and avoid the layoffs.
singles out commercial releases of Sam N' Max Hit The Road ("has a point n' click interface that would translate well to the GBA"),
Umm...we *are* talking about the device w/o a touchscreen or mouse, right?
Heroes Of Might & Magic III ("its bright and colorful style would make for a beautiful GBA game")
Not quite enough pixels on that little screen, bucko. That'd make for some nasty porting problems. Hard to see what you're doing.
I agree that there's a place for classic games on the GBA (though whoever the idiot was who decided that the GBA shouldn't be as vertically high in pixels as the NES/SNES should have his kneecaps removed), but for old console and arcade games, not so much for old PC games.
I've never quite figured out why there's an "Offtopic" mod. It should really be "Unrelated" or something, if there needs to be a catchall category for GNAA and goat.cx. It's what it's really used to mean on Slashdot. "Offtopic" originated on USENET, where you had tens of thousands of newsgroups -- "topics" -- ecisting at the same time. Posting to the wrong newsgroup *was* the wrong thing to do -- one should post to the right newsgroup. The problem is that this sort of thing doesn't *exist* on Slashdot; you can't just cruise on over to another "newsgroup", since Slashdot stories are of limited duration".
IMHO, "Offtopic" mods should be reserved for posts where the post is not only unrelated to the story, but also unrelated to the parent post. There is little point in attempting to halt productive discussion that has wandered away from the original story submission.
I can live with such a situation. SCO's been getting their money from Microsoft all long -- no reason for them to stop when Microsoft's wallet closes up.
I'm sorry, I've once again managed to muck something up. I really am quite stupid -- one wonders how I can manage to hack code but am utterly unable to deal with something as simple as the Microsoft naming system.
then immediately release one of your prefessional class called "Operating System XP".
In fact, "Operating System XP" is much too simple. It's downright unsophisticated. Instead, *this* product should be split into two -- "Operating System XP Professional" and "Operating System XP Home Edition". You should make some variants, in case the existing system is too simple -- "Operating System XP Professional Corporate Edition" has a lot more flavor to it.
Furthermore, a bit more sophistication is really required. Take your *initial product*, "Operating System 2004". Produce multiple releases, but -- and this is crucial -- call these releases exactly the same thing and do *not* increment a user-obtainable version number *anywhere*. Internally, you can call these "OSR 1", "OSR 2", and "OSR 2.1". These should all have different sets of functionality (USB support, for example, should not be present in the first, and you absolutely should *not* provide a user-accessable upgrade path from OSR 1 to any of the other releases...it's okay to give out the releases to OEMs, though, but be sure that their licenses forbid distribution to customers).
Everything I need to know about how to name a product properly, I learned from Microsoft.
which, naturally, would *differ* from the simultaneous copy of "Operating System Decade Edition" that you allow people to remove chunks from for *heavyweight* embedded use.
My apologies. Despite the incredible simplicity and facility that the Microsoft naming scheme provides to the consumer, I seem to have managed to stupidly confused something. My recommendation for this second embedded system name would not be "Operating System Decade Edition", but in fact be "Operating System XP Embedded".
* "Linux Advanced Server" (Note that Red Hat already sells a "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server", though I doubt they're going to complain about product confusion.)
* Microsoft seems to like the approach of grabbing random words associated with their products and using them as product names ("Word", "Windows"), so what about "Fast" or "Stable"? Or even better, "Advanced", and then they can complain every time Microsft uses "Advanced" in a product name.
* I have always wondered how Microsoft survived the hideous times when it had to have MS-DOS compete against -- wait for it -- IBM's PC-DOS and Caldera's DR-DOS without being crushed by unfair market pressures and mass customer confusion. I've come to two potential conclusions. The first is simply that Microsoft is now a big company and can afford to apply unfair weight to political figures -- but that seems a bit unfairly critical of me. The second possibility is that Microsoft *doesn't* suffer name recognition losses when users use all caps, the unique characteristic of the DOS names. So, while "Lindows" is a strongly damaging and infinitely unfair name, "LINDOWS" should be perfectly acceptable.
* Whatever the name is, I've learned from Microsoft that it should *not* stay the same or follow a consistent versioning scheme, and as I've mentioned above, that generic terms are the best (especially since once *you* establish yourself in place and put a little political pressure down, you can prevent anyone else from using the term. As a matter of fact, an appropriate naming scheme would be calling the first version "Operating System 2004" with a professional class of the product called "Operating System New Technology Workstation" and "Operating System New Technology Server. The second version of the product would be "Operating System 2005" (you might expect the number to be higher, but Linux tends to improve rapidly). Keep in mind that it is *crucial* that customer confusion be avoided, the entire reason for forcing the "Lindows" name to be avoided in the first place. The second version of the professional class (which it's lucrative to move people over to) would be "Operating System 2006 Professional", "Operating System 2006 Server", and "Operating System 2006 Advanced Server". Now, at this point you've established a bit of a pattern, a predictable sequence of name choosing, so you need to quickly scatter before anyone catches on. Call the next version of your consumer line "Operating System Decade Edition", then immediately release one of your prefessional class called "Operating System XP". "XP" doesn't have to stand for anything, but it does a good job of breaking any possible links that your consumer might have made and potentially avoided confusion. Remember that getting people confused and thinking they need to buy the your professional class release *makes you money*. Finally, you should follow up with "Operating System 2003 Server". You absolutely should *not* make a workstation release of this version. In the meantime, you should take a copy of Linux that people have customized for embedded use and call it "Operating System CE", which, naturally, would *differ* from the simultaneous copy of "Operating System Decade Edition" that you allow people to remove chunks from for *heavyweight* embedded use. Finally, people like to play movies, and to ensure that people are *not* confused and know what to purchase *if they want to watch movies on their computer*, you should produce "Operating System XP Media Edition". If only people would act more like ethical, wronged Microsoft, and less like Lindows (which is clearly out to confuse people as much as possible with their product names).
Take a page from Apple -- definitely use "Sosumi". Apple has never trademarked the term.
Or, in the same vein, "BHA Linux". (I'm going to see how many minutes it takes from my post for it to be until someone gets this allusion and posts about it -- I'm guessing less than thirty).:-)
If MS released "Winux" do you think Linus would excercise his TM rights? I do, and he should.
I don't, any more than I think that Linus would go after "Unix", "A/UX", "AIX", or "Minix", or any more than the holders of those trademarks went after Linus. Somehow, everyone managed to get along with vaguely similar names *except* Microsoft and Robertson.
I will grant that Robertson is a terribly antagonizing fellow if you're competing with him (his prize to "port Linux to the X-Box via a hardware and software approach" that essentially subsidized a cracking of Microsoft's DRM scheme and their subsequent loss of a lot more than his $100,000 prize, was a slick strategic move but terribly unfriendly).
In corporations today, over 90% of all clients are Windows computers. Any security course that fails to reflect that reality is pretty unrealistic.
One does wonder about the emphasis on the client -- traditionally, it seems that more emphasis goes into securing the server (of which there is a predominance of *IX boxes) than clients.
I dunno...it just seems that even if people aren't *writing* secure software, learning how a secure architecture works at a high level (rather than learning a bunch of commands to create Windows firewall rules under XP, as he presents in his book), is a better use of college time. I mean, you can teach someone to use a particular version of a program, but if that's all they learn at university they're going to be in an uncomfortable spot five years down the read when all the software they learned operates differently.
Also, my experience has been that closed-source vendors have a stronger tendancy to steal code than open-source types (just because a number of closed-source developers seem to think that they can "get away with it", since few will see their code). I've really seen very little theft of code in open source software, and of the stuff I've run into, it's almost exclusively accidental and minor (like a Linux coder that thought that he didn't have to include copyright notices from a BSD piece of software when incorporating it into the Linux kernel, or someone misinterpreting the GPL (and providing a link to someone else's FTP site for source rather than distributing their source themselves)). If a company is considering relying on the intellectual property purity of a codebase, I'd be more comfortable advising them to bet on an open than a closed codebase (other issues aside, of course).
Ok, I agree with alot of the things you've said here.
I strive to produce constructive controversy.:-)
I do take some serious offense to your carefree attitude towards child pornography though. You should seriously reconsider your thoughts on the matter. The real problem with child porrnography isn't the people who look at it. And just because you can choose not to doesn't change the fact that whoever is taking the pictures is abusing children. I'm all for personal freedoms. I'm getting close to libertarian in the majority of my views. But this is exploitation of individuals who have no choice in the matter, and that is simply unacceptable.
Hmm...well, for starters, it's certainly possible to produce material that is child pornography without sexually abusing children -- painting a portrait intended to incite lust that portrays anyone under the age of consent is child pornography, though it (well, presumably) doesn't involve the abuse of children. A performance of, say, Romeo and Juliet contains nearly all the elements necessary to classify something as child porn (Juliet, you will remember, is thirteen when Romeo is sleeping with her), only lacking proven intent on the part of the producer to incite lust. You know how a lot of people take excerpts from movies, the bits where an actress exposes a nipple or her rear, or something? Doing so to a scene from Romeo and Juliet could quite easily fill in the last bit, and qualify the resultant work as child pornography.
Second of all (and this is where a lot of people start to get royally peeved), I really can't manage to get upset if someone takes a picture of a naked kid. For ages and ages and ages, all of us ran around in the buff. A lot of societies had kids, especially, doing the same up until awfully recently, until Christianity and Victorian values completed a worldwide spread. Aside from some kind of highly artifical Victorian value set (yeah, the one that says that women that have sex before marriage are 'dishonored'), I fail to see how someone suffers damange from having their picture taken.
We can certainly have laws about physical crimes without requiring laws regarding the posession and distribution of pornography. It's quite legal to produce, say, snuff pornography, but it's not legal to kill someone in the production of such material. (This really was a hot topic for the FBI at one point -- the public fear that some snuff films were *real* -- IIRC, Snopes ran a bit on it -- but years of digging didn't turn up a single real lead.)
So then the question becomes...where is the benefit to us in banning this material, to our society? I just can't think of one. The big one might be that sexually-oriented media containing portrayals of children might *inspire* people to run out and commit real crimes that *do* harm a child. That is, IMHO, a pretty legitimate concern, but it doesn't seem that there are any grounds to support a link between looking at content and the actual acting out of something. There is a huge amount of pornography that depicts illegal acts -- snuff, rape, etc, and yet we don't seem to feel that it warrants banning, which seems to be quite inconsistent with our policy on child porn. We allow (in the US) video games, TV shows movies, comic books, and all sorts of media that contain murders, torture, killings...we don't seem to require a ban there.
As far as I can tell, the ban on child porn, very unique as far as bans on pure information goes, doesn't have much rational grounding. It really exists more from fear -- a parent's fear that *anything*, *anything* that might seem a plausible threat to their child *must* be eliminated.
I really like pointing out times when it seems that people are doing something that doesn't seem make all that much sense -- and child porn is a great example.
Child porn seems an awful lot like me to marijuana. Look at marijuana criminalization (and let me preface this by saying that I've oppo
I thought about debating the point, but then I realized that you really didn't write any actual criticism of my point -- just attacked my character -- and I don't really think that it would be fair to put words in your mouth ("Perhaps you mean foo. If so, consider...") for the sake of producing an arguable point.
Well, I've probably got a ton of fans at the NSA due to discussion of privacy issues, security, and how to design systems that disallow monitoring that I've send through AIM/ICQ/mailing lists and other non-secured messaging systems.
Seriously, I'd say that it's a pretty reasonable bet that AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo are routinely monitored. They're easy to data-mine (heck, the commercial data from that *alone* is phenomenal -- if people hear on a show that "Debora Mullins and Sandra Walker will be possibly starring in 'Shredded Metal 2', and there's a mass of messages saying "Debora Mullins sucks", that'd be awfully useful to the production company.
As for the NSA/CIA/FBI, messaging services are frequently used, easy to log and data-mine (no speech recognition necessary) systems that provide no end-to-end encryption that pass through a single point -- in the United States.
Jabber is the only reasonably well-designed IM system I've seen, and nobody *uses* Jabber, sadly enough.
Resident Evil was not a great movie, but I didn't think it was particularly *bad*, either.
Granted, the majority of video-game-themed movies I've seen have really, really sucked. Honestly, I'm pretty biased against any movie that I know to be based on a video game, at this point. Video game story constraints are different from movie story constrants. Usually in a video game, you *are* the character, and suddenly and abruptly you are shifted to *watching* the character, who is someone else (augh, metaphor and immersion breaking...), doing X, Y, and Z.
You know, I had a fair bit of respect for Samus when I was young. She managed to be a female character without being a slut to the viewers (a la Lara Croft) or being some kind of animal/blob thingey (a la Ms. Pac Man, Dixie Kong). I mean sure, a few people played just to see the best ending at under 3 hours, but realistically she wasn't sold on her sex appeal (heck, you wouldn't *believe* how many people I've met who think Samus is male).
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment (see my recent post.
I don't really have a problem with the "exploitation" or "sexual objectification" of women in the media. Hey, if it sells, go for it. Pornographic stuff, hey, even child porn or beastiality, I don't have a particular ethical problem with some publisher running out and doing what they want, because I still get to choose what I look at.
What *does* bother me is when *all* the female characters wind up as sexpots, so that I *don't* have an opportunity to watch a movie with a female character that isn't a carefully made up face on top of two giant and frequently exposed breasts. I *liked* Ripley in Aliens 1 through 3. Not a particularly sexual character, very cool, well-played. Sure enough, come Aliens: Resurrection, they've got her stripped down and squirming around in plastic wrap. I liked Metroid -- yes, there's the swimsuit shot at the end (and it *says* something that even my good examples have such major exceptions), but ultimately, there's not a lot of sexualizing Samus through the game. Sure enough, now we get "Samus the sexy bounty hunter". God *damn* it, I like my sexy characters, but there's a time and a place for it, and I'll go watch porn if I want to watch porn -- I don't like seeing all my favorite characters turned into nothing but sexpots.
And the few times there *isn't* a sexpot female lead, a good, strong character, she's frequently used as a plot device to show how sensitive the male co-lead is ("She wanted to be strong and not need help from anyone, but she learned that she needs to rely on the male lead by the end, who naturally doesn't need to rely on her to anywhere near the same degree.")
This is not for reasons of political correctness, censorship, or even "taste". I just plain find it appealing to have non-sexplot strong female characters, and I'm damned tired of the few characters that *aren't* being given over to some director/game designer who firmly sits in the traditional camp and converts them into one.
The FSF advocates releasing libraries under the GPL, not the LGPL, so the idea that a widget set "should" be released under the LGPL is debateable at best.
The FSF, however, not being stupid, releases fundamental, core libraries as LGPL (see glibc).
The only purpose of the LGPL is to allow code to be exploited for non-free software.
Absolutely not. If you try to push a library as "standard", so that a user expects software to work the way the library does (having Qt widgets), it does not merely "avoid exploitation" -- it establishes a *barrier* to non-GPL (not non-free -- I can make up the 0x0d0a License that is quite libre and gratis, but doesn't work with the FSF's license terms, and I would be barred from using that license.
I fall very firmly into the ESR camp here. If open source really is better, if it's not a lot of lies about "more efficiency" and "better security" being pushed -- then *let open source win on its own merits", not by trying to force non-open source adherents from being able to write non-open-source software. I believe open source really *is* a better approacch. I also think that trying to force people to do something that they *don't* want to do (i.e. make it a pain in the ass to release non-GPL software when it wasn't before) is sure to create friction and pissed-off people that roundly reject open source. If you want to make "Joe's Sockets Library" and make the thing GPL, knock yourself out. A vendor can easily choose not to use your sockets library -- yeah, they have to reimplement that functionality, but there isn't a legal barrier to producing their software. However, with a standard widget set, there is an expectation that things will look and act the same way (as can be seen from complaining by users of GTK and Qt software on one desktop). Distros *ship* Qt.
There are a tiny handful of libraries that can be hijacked in such a manner. There is libc (mixing glibcs on a system is not a great idea and prevents folks from using other systemwide libraries). There is libX11. And there is whatever libraries compose the standard widget set. TrollTech is working very hard to force a massive number of people to "pay the TrollTech tax" in the future, and I am decidedly less-than-happy with their stance. They are *not* doing what they're doing in the interests of good software, they are doing it with an eye to a very lucrative position in the future. It's like Verisign acting as a DNS root -- yes, it's all very convenient now, and they take care of something at the moment...but ten years down the line, they're in a wonderful position to demand money from everyone, and they are *terribly* difficult to extricate.
There are a lot of Open Source companies that I think are quite ethical and do a wonderful job out there without threatening elements of the Open Source community. TrollTech is most definitely *not* one.
Technically, if someone managed to break into Darl's computer and dropped a set of anonymous tips, if Darl is silly enough to keep incriminating evidence that he *knew* he was filing bogus lawsuits, I suppose he could get in trouble.
Note that an anonymous tip would be very different from getting a bunch of (obviously not legitimately obtained) documents and handing them to the police, who then wouldn't be able to use them.
Just that since there aren't so many surgical procedures to practice on, playing games are a means of tuning the hand eye coordination.
Get a collection of Bush administration politicians to use for practice and experimentation. They're cheap, expendable, and they can't get much more screwed up than they are already.
"My God! She's bleeding all over! Smegley, call for an ambulance immediately! Is there a doctor in the house? Anyone?"
[everyone is still sitting in shocked silence -- nobody rises to the occasion]
"Well, anyone with exceptional hand-eye coordination...how about a video game player, then? Surely *someone* among you must have stomped on a few walking mushrooms in your time!"
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but I'll bet the people getting dropped are support people. Which is too bad. IBM had a reputation for expensive but good support, like Sun (again, various mileages may vary). I'm guessing that plenty of suit-wearing manager-types managed to scrable and avoid the layoffs.
is this the latest PC term for 'slaves'?
No, for "pod person". Your replacement will arrive soon.
Sounds kinda cool as slang for getting downsized..."I've been dakshed!"
singles out commercial releases of Sam N' Max Hit The Road ("has a point n' click interface that would translate well to the GBA"),
Umm...we *are* talking about the device w/o a touchscreen or mouse, right?
Heroes Of Might & Magic III ("its bright and colorful style would make for a beautiful GBA game")
Not quite enough pixels on that little screen, bucko. That'd make for some nasty porting problems. Hard to see what you're doing.
I agree that there's a place for classic games on the GBA (though whoever the idiot was who decided that the GBA shouldn't be as vertically high in pixels as the NES/SNES should have his kneecaps removed), but for old console and arcade games, not so much for old PC games.
I've never quite figured out why there's an "Offtopic" mod. It should really be "Unrelated" or something, if there needs to be a catchall category for GNAA and goat.cx. It's what it's really used to mean on Slashdot. "Offtopic" originated on USENET, where you had tens of thousands of newsgroups -- "topics" -- ecisting at the same time. Posting to the wrong newsgroup *was* the wrong thing to do -- one should post to the right newsgroup. The problem is that this sort of thing doesn't *exist* on Slashdot; you can't just cruise on over to another "newsgroup", since Slashdot stories are of limited duration".
IMHO, "Offtopic" mods should be reserved for posts where the post is not only unrelated to the story, but also unrelated to the parent post. There is little point in attempting to halt productive discussion that has wandered away from the original story submission.
Now these guys will want a piece of the action.
I can live with such a situation. SCO's been getting their money from Microsoft all long -- no reason for them to stop when Microsoft's wallet closes up.
*You*, sir, are going, along with that other unsavory 13% of the US population, onto a terrorist watch list for thorough examination.
I'm sorry, I've once again managed to muck something up. I really am quite stupid -- one wonders how I can manage to hack code but am utterly unable to deal with something as simple as the Microsoft naming system.
then immediately release one of your prefessional class called "Operating System XP".
In fact, "Operating System XP" is much too simple. It's downright unsophisticated. Instead, *this* product should be split into two -- "Operating System XP Professional" and "Operating System XP Home Edition". You should make some variants, in case the existing system is too simple -- "Operating System XP Professional Corporate Edition" has a lot more flavor to it.
Furthermore, a bit more sophistication is really required. Take your *initial product*, "Operating System 2004". Produce multiple releases, but -- and this is crucial -- call these releases exactly the same thing and do *not* increment a user-obtainable version number *anywhere*. Internally, you can call these "OSR 1", "OSR 2", and "OSR 2.1". These should all have different sets of functionality (USB support, for example, should not be present in the first, and you absolutely should *not* provide a user-accessable upgrade path from OSR 1 to any of the other releases...it's okay to give out the releases to OEMs, though, but be sure that their licenses forbid distribution to customers).
Everything I need to know about how to name a product properly, I learned from Microsoft.
which, naturally, would *differ* from the simultaneous copy of "Operating System Decade Edition" that you allow people to remove chunks from for *heavyweight* embedded use.
My apologies. Despite the incredible simplicity and facility that the Microsoft naming scheme provides to the consumer, I seem to have managed to stupidly confused something. My recommendation for this second embedded system name would not be "Operating System Decade Edition", but in fact be "Operating System XP Embedded".
Other possibilities:
* "Bob Linux", the boxed version of which could be referred to as the "LinBox".
* "Linux: eXtreme Performance".
* "New Technology Linux" (as long as they don't infringe on extruder replacement wear parts).
* "Linux for Workgroups".
* "Linux Advanced Server" (Note that Red Hat already sells a "Red Hat Enterprise Linux Advanced Server", though I doubt they're going to complain about product confusion.)
* Microsoft seems to like the approach of grabbing random words associated with their products and using them as product names ("Word", "Windows"), so what about "Fast" or "Stable"? Or even better, "Advanced", and then they can complain every time Microsft uses "Advanced" in a product name.
* I have always wondered how Microsoft survived the hideous times when it had to have MS-DOS compete against -- wait for it -- IBM's PC-DOS and Caldera's DR-DOS without being crushed by unfair market pressures and mass customer confusion. I've come to two potential conclusions. The first is simply that Microsoft is now a big company and can afford to apply unfair weight to political figures -- but that seems a bit unfairly critical of me. The second possibility is that Microsoft *doesn't* suffer name recognition losses when users use all caps, the unique characteristic of the DOS names. So, while "Lindows" is a strongly damaging and infinitely unfair name, "LINDOWS" should be perfectly acceptable.
* Whatever the name is, I've learned from Microsoft that it should *not* stay the same or follow a consistent versioning scheme, and as I've mentioned above, that generic terms are the best (especially since once *you* establish yourself in place and put a little political pressure down, you can prevent anyone else from using the term. As a matter of fact, an appropriate naming scheme would be calling the first version "Operating System 2004" with a professional class of the product called "Operating System New Technology Workstation" and "Operating System New Technology Server. The second version of the product would be "Operating System 2005" (you might expect the number to be higher, but Linux tends to improve rapidly). Keep in mind that it is *crucial* that customer confusion be avoided, the entire reason for forcing the "Lindows" name to be avoided in the first place. The second version of the professional class (which it's lucrative to move people over to) would be "Operating System 2006 Professional", "Operating System 2006 Server", and "Operating System 2006 Advanced Server". Now, at this point you've established a bit of a pattern, a predictable sequence of name choosing, so you need to quickly scatter before anyone catches on. Call the next version of your consumer line "Operating System Decade Edition", then immediately release one of your prefessional class called "Operating System XP". "XP" doesn't have to stand for anything, but it does a good job of breaking any possible links that your consumer might have made and potentially avoided confusion. Remember that getting people confused and thinking they need to buy the your professional class release *makes you money*. Finally, you should follow up with "Operating System 2003 Server". You absolutely should *not* make a workstation release of this version. In the meantime, you should take a copy of Linux that people have customized for embedded use and call it "Operating System CE", which, naturally, would *differ* from the simultaneous copy of "Operating System Decade Edition" that you allow people to remove chunks from for *heavyweight* embedded use. Finally, people like to play movies, and to ensure that people are *not* confused and know what to purchase *if they want to watch movies on their computer*, you should produce "Operating System XP Media Edition". If only people would act more like ethical, wronged Microsoft, and less like Lindows (which is clearly out to confuse people as much as possible with their product names).
Take a page from Apple -- definitely use "Sosumi". Apple has never trademarked the term.
:-)
Or, in the same vein, "BHA Linux". (I'm going to see how many minutes it takes from my post for it to be until someone gets this allusion and posts about it -- I'm guessing less than thirty).
If MS released "Winux" do you think Linus would excercise his TM rights? I do, and he should.
I don't, any more than I think that Linus would go after "Unix", "A/UX", "AIX", or "Minix", or any more than the holders of those trademarks went after Linus. Somehow, everyone managed to get along with vaguely similar names *except* Microsoft and Robertson.
I will grant that Robertson is a terribly antagonizing fellow if you're competing with him (his prize to "port Linux to the X-Box via a hardware and software approach" that essentially subsidized a cracking of Microsoft's DRM scheme and their subsequent loss of a lot more than his $100,000 prize, was a slick strategic move but terribly unfriendly).
In corporations today, over 90% of all clients are Windows computers. Any security course that fails to reflect that reality is pretty unrealistic.
One does wonder about the emphasis on the client -- traditionally, it seems that more emphasis goes into securing the server (of which there is a predominance of *IX boxes) than clients.
I dunno...it just seems that even if people aren't *writing* secure software, learning how a secure architecture works at a high level (rather than learning a bunch of commands to create Windows firewall rules under XP, as he presents in his book), is a better use of college time. I mean, you can teach someone to use a particular version of a program, but if that's all they learn at university they're going to be in an uncomfortable spot five years down the read when all the software they learned operates differently.
Also, my experience has been that closed-source vendors have a stronger tendancy to steal code than open-source types (just because a number of closed-source developers seem to think that they can "get away with it", since few will see their code). I've really seen very little theft of code in open source software, and of the stuff I've run into, it's almost exclusively accidental and minor (like a Linux coder that thought that he didn't have to include copyright notices from a BSD piece of software when incorporating it into the Linux kernel, or someone misinterpreting the GPL (and providing a link to someone else's FTP site for source rather than distributing their source themselves)). If a company is considering relying on the intellectual property purity of a codebase, I'd be more comfortable advising them to bet on an open than a closed codebase (other issues aside, of course).
Ok, I agree with alot of the things you've said here.
:-)
I strive to produce constructive controversy.
I do take some serious offense to your carefree attitude towards child pornography though. You should seriously reconsider your thoughts on the matter. The real problem with child porrnography isn't the people who look at it. And just because you can choose not to doesn't change the fact that whoever is taking the pictures is abusing children. I'm all for personal freedoms. I'm getting close to libertarian in the majority of my views. But this is exploitation of individuals who have no choice in the matter, and that is simply unacceptable.
Hmm...well, for starters, it's certainly possible to produce material that is child pornography without sexually abusing children -- painting a portrait intended to incite lust that portrays anyone under the age of consent is child pornography, though it (well, presumably) doesn't involve the abuse of children. A performance of, say, Romeo and Juliet contains nearly all the elements necessary to classify something as child porn (Juliet, you will remember, is thirteen when Romeo is sleeping with her), only lacking proven intent on the part of the producer to incite lust. You know how a lot of people take excerpts from movies, the bits where an actress exposes a nipple or her rear, or something? Doing so to a scene from Romeo and Juliet could quite easily fill in the last bit, and qualify the resultant work as child pornography.
Second of all (and this is where a lot of people start to get royally peeved), I really can't manage to get upset if someone takes a picture of a naked kid. For ages and ages and ages, all of us ran around in the buff. A lot of societies had kids, especially, doing the same up until awfully recently, until Christianity and Victorian values completed a worldwide spread. Aside from some kind of highly artifical Victorian value set (yeah, the one that says that women that have sex before marriage are 'dishonored'), I fail to see how someone suffers damange from having their picture taken.
We can certainly have laws about physical crimes without requiring laws regarding the posession and distribution of pornography. It's quite legal to produce, say, snuff pornography, but it's not legal to kill someone in the production of such material. (This really was a hot topic for the FBI at one point -- the public fear that some snuff films were *real* -- IIRC, Snopes ran a bit on it -- but years of digging didn't turn up a single real lead.)
So then the question becomes...where is the benefit to us in banning this material, to our society? I just can't think of one. The big one might be that sexually-oriented media containing portrayals of children might *inspire* people to run out and commit real crimes that *do* harm a child. That is, IMHO, a pretty legitimate concern, but it doesn't seem that there are any grounds to support a link between looking at content and the actual acting out of something. There is a huge amount of pornography that depicts illegal acts -- snuff, rape, etc, and yet we don't seem to feel that it warrants banning, which seems to be quite inconsistent with our policy on child porn. We allow (in the US) video games, TV shows movies, comic books, and all sorts of media that contain murders, torture, killings...we don't seem to require a ban there.
As far as I can tell, the ban on child porn, very unique as far as bans on pure information goes, doesn't have much rational grounding. It really exists more from fear -- a parent's fear that *anything*, *anything* that might seem a plausible threat to their child *must* be eliminated.
I really like pointing out times when it seems that people are doing something that doesn't seem make all that much sense -- and child porn is a great example.
Child porn seems an awful lot like me to marijuana. Look at marijuana criminalization (and let me preface this by saying that I've oppo
I thought about debating the point, but then I realized that you really didn't write any actual criticism of my point -- just attacked my character -- and I don't really think that it would be fair to put words in your mouth ("Perhaps you mean foo. If so, consider...") for the sake of producing an arguable point.
Well, I've probably got a ton of fans at the NSA due to discussion of privacy issues, security, and how to design systems that disallow monitoring that I've send through AIM/ICQ/mailing lists and other non-secured messaging systems.
Seriously, I'd say that it's a pretty reasonable bet that AIM/ICQ/MSN/Yahoo are routinely monitored. They're easy to data-mine (heck, the commercial data from that *alone* is phenomenal -- if people hear on a show that "Debora Mullins and Sandra Walker will be possibly starring in 'Shredded Metal 2', and there's a mass of messages saying "Debora Mullins sucks", that'd be awfully useful to the production company.
As for the NSA/CIA/FBI, messaging services are frequently used, easy to log and data-mine (no speech recognition necessary) systems that provide no end-to-end encryption that pass through a single point -- in the United States.
Jabber is the only reasonably well-designed IM system I've seen, and nobody *uses* Jabber, sadly enough.
It may be that he's just not a good director any more.
I'm guessing the low budget movies you're thinking of are also his early ones?
People change...
Resident Evil was not a great movie, but I didn't think it was particularly *bad*, either.
Granted, the majority of video-game-themed movies I've seen have really, really sucked. Honestly, I'm pretty biased against any movie that I know to be based on a video game, at this point. Video game story constraints are different from movie story constrants. Usually in a video game, you *are* the character, and suddenly and abruptly you are shifted to *watching* the character, who is someone else (augh, metaphor and immersion breaking...), doing X, Y, and Z.
You know, I had a fair bit of respect for Samus when I was young. She managed to be a female character without being a slut to the viewers (a la Lara Croft) or being some kind of animal/blob thingey (a la Ms. Pac Man, Dixie Kong). I mean sure, a few people played just to see the best ending at under 3 hours, but realistically she wasn't sold on her sex appeal (heck, you wouldn't *believe* how many people I've met who think Samus is male).
I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment (see my recent post.
I don't really have a problem with the "exploitation" or "sexual objectification" of women in the media. Hey, if it sells, go for it. Pornographic stuff, hey, even child porn or beastiality, I don't have a particular ethical problem with some publisher running out and doing what they want, because I still get to choose what I look at.
What *does* bother me is when *all* the female characters wind up as sexpots, so that I *don't* have an opportunity to watch a movie with a female character that isn't a carefully made up face on top of two giant and frequently exposed breasts. I *liked* Ripley in Aliens 1 through 3. Not a particularly sexual character, very cool, well-played. Sure enough, come Aliens: Resurrection, they've got her stripped down and squirming around in plastic wrap. I liked Metroid -- yes, there's the swimsuit shot at the end (and it *says* something that even my good examples have such major exceptions), but ultimately, there's not a lot of sexualizing Samus through the game. Sure enough, now we get "Samus the sexy bounty hunter". God *damn* it, I like my sexy characters, but there's a time and a place for it, and I'll go watch porn if I want to watch porn -- I don't like seeing all my favorite characters turned into nothing but sexpots.
And the few times there *isn't* a sexpot female lead, a good, strong character, she's frequently used as a plot device to show how sensitive the male co-lead is ("She wanted to be strong and not need help from anyone, but she learned that she needs to rely on the male lead by the end, who naturally doesn't need to rely on her to anywhere near the same degree.")
This is not for reasons of political correctness, censorship, or even "taste". I just plain find it appealing to have non-sexplot strong female characters, and I'm damned tired of the few characters that *aren't* being given over to some director/game designer who firmly sits in the traditional camp and converts them into one.
The FSF advocates releasing libraries under the GPL, not the LGPL, so the idea that a widget set "should" be released under the LGPL is debateable at best.
The FSF, however, not being stupid, releases fundamental, core libraries as LGPL (see glibc).
The only purpose of the LGPL is to allow code to be exploited for non-free software.
Absolutely not. If you try to push a library as "standard", so that a user expects software to work the way the library does (having Qt widgets), it does not merely "avoid exploitation" -- it establishes a *barrier* to non-GPL (not non-free -- I can make up the 0x0d0a License that is quite libre and gratis, but doesn't work with the FSF's license terms, and I would be barred from using that license.
I fall very firmly into the ESR camp here. If open source really is better, if it's not a lot of lies about "more efficiency" and "better security" being pushed -- then *let open source win on its own merits", not by trying to force non-open source adherents from being able to write non-open-source software. I believe open source really *is* a better approacch. I also think that trying to force people to do something that they *don't* want to do (i.e. make it a pain in the ass to release non-GPL software when it wasn't before) is sure to create friction and pissed-off people that roundly reject open source. If you want to make "Joe's Sockets Library" and make the thing GPL, knock yourself out. A vendor can easily choose not to use your sockets library -- yeah, they have to reimplement that functionality, but there isn't a legal barrier to producing their software. However, with a standard widget set, there is an expectation that things will look and act the same way (as can be seen from complaining by users of GTK and Qt software on one desktop). Distros *ship* Qt.
There are a tiny handful of libraries that can be hijacked in such a manner. There is libc (mixing glibcs on a system is not a great idea and prevents folks from using other systemwide libraries). There is libX11. And there is whatever libraries compose the standard widget set. TrollTech is working very hard to force a massive number of people to "pay the TrollTech tax" in the future, and I am decidedly less-than-happy with their stance. They are *not* doing what they're doing in the interests of good software, they are doing it with an eye to a very lucrative position in the future. It's like Verisign acting as a DNS root -- yes, it's all very convenient now, and they take care of something at the moment...but ten years down the line, they're in a wonderful position to demand money from everyone, and they are *terribly* difficult to extricate.
There are a lot of Open Source companies that I think are quite ethical and do a wonderful job out there without threatening elements of the Open Source community. TrollTech is most definitely *not* one.
Technically, if someone managed to break into Darl's computer and dropped a set of anonymous tips, if Darl is silly enough to keep incriminating evidence that he *knew* he was filing bogus lawsuits, I suppose he could get in trouble.
Note that an anonymous tip would be very different from getting a bunch of (obviously not legitimately obtained) documents and handing them to the police, who then wouldn't be able to use them.
This sounded kind of interesting, so I googled and quickly found Dr. Panko's website (there aren't many people out there by the name of "Panko").
:-) Very unusual for a security guy.
He's got a number of websites, one of which is here.
He definitely, ah, favors Microsoft.
I am just hoping the next comments that start coming out of surgeons mouthes in surgery is "scapel, forceps, hand grenade"
I need some pads he...AAAAUUUUUGGGGGHHH! LOOK OUT! Wait. Dammit, get that laser pointer *out* of here, Nurse Simmons!
Just that since there aren't so many surgical procedures to practice on, playing games are a means of tuning the hand eye coordination.
Get a collection of Bush administration politicians to use for practice and experimentation. They're cheap, expendable, and they can't get much more screwed up than they are already.
"My God! She's bleeding all over! Smegley, call for an ambulance immediately! Is there a doctor in the house? Anyone?"
[everyone is still sitting in shocked silence -- nobody rises to the occasion]
"Well, anyone with exceptional hand-eye coordination...how about a video game player, then? Surely *someone* among you must have stomped on a few walking mushrooms in your time!"
"Look at Junior, Hubert."
"What's he up to, Nancy? Oh. Wow!"
"Oh, I'm so proud, Hubert. He's sure to grow up to be a world-famous brain surgeon."
*************
or "I *would* be doing my homework, Ma, but I'm busy preparing for a career in the medical sciences!"