Re:The power you speak of is the power of the GNU
on
NYSE Moves to Linux
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· Score: 1
Where did people get the idea to re-brand "free software" as "open source"
You can blame/credit Eric S Raymond for that one. IMO he correctly identified that calling it "Free Software" was an appearance problem for a lot of people. People inherently distrust anything that says "free" (as in beer), as there's almost always a catch. I think he may have even coined "open source", but at the very least he's one of the larger pushers of that term. Geeeks don't like to think language matters, but in the rest of the world it does.
Anyway, I have to disagree with your categorization of the GPL as the power of open source. It's just one license among many. I use software that's under the GPL, under the Apache License, and under the BSD license. I really don't care which one it is.
Re:Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (as in bee
on
NYSE Moves to Linux
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· Score: 2, Informative
I didn't get any of what you're saying from the article. When I see statements like:
"We're trying to be as independent of any technologies as we can be."
and:
Rubinow acknowledged that Solaris has the ability to run on multiple hardware platforms, including x86-based systems from Sun server rivals such as HP. But he added that he thinks Linux "affords us a lot of flexibility."
I take that to mean exactly what I just said. If you have any references to more information to support what you're saying about hardware, please reveal them. Otherwise I'll trust the article, and the implications of the statements.
Re:So they moved from UNIX to Linux
on
NYSE Moves to Linux
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· Score: 4, Insightful
And who wins? HP of course. Who loses? Sun.
Don't kid yourself. Microsoft is also a competitor to Sun, HP, and the Linux OS. Microsoft would have killed to get the freaking NYSE, if for no other reason that it'd be a feather in their cap.
As it stands, the NYSE partially running on Linux is quite a major deal, at least to the Big Business Guys who like to follow what other Big Business Guys are doing.
Guarantee of Reliability is not Free (as in beer)
on
NYSE Moves to Linux
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Very few businesses really care much about the sticker price of an operating system. What many businesses are catching on to is that Linux has little to no vendor lock-in. It goes something like this:
Develop all your software and systems on one Linux. Then find out you don't like HP? Fine.. take your business to Dell. The distribution they're running on starts to suck rocks? No problem, switch to RHEL. RHEL starts to not meet your needs? Customize your own distribution.
Not being tying your business to the whims of whatever company you're dealing with is truly powerful. If you ask me, that's the real power of Linux, and open source software. Linux makes operating systems into a true commodity like grain, where switching to another vendor is low cost.
You seem to have a strange miss-conception that all hackers are 13 year olds that only want to deface websites.
You have to look no further than the legion of spammers that assemble botnets to send out spam/DOS/whatever to know that's simply not the case.
Keeping out the 13 year olds isn't too hard, it just takes some diligence. They're dumb enough to announce their presence by defacing, etc. It's the other guys that are smart enough to stay hidden I'm referring to.
Perhaps it is -- when was the last time microsoft.com was taken down by malevolent hackers?
This is rather poor evidence that the Microsoft software is stable and secure. It assumes that a hacker would want to take down Microsoft.com. Sure, there's some jerkoffs that want to pull a big publicity stunt like that. But a smarter hacker would want to lie a LOT more low than that.
Also, as pointed out by someone else, Any large site like this is run on multiple servers. Even a malevolent hacker bent on taking down microsoft.com would have to take down a significant amount of them to affect the whole website.
off to tag the front-page article with "badsummary"
How is this a bad summary? The summary says that ogg/theora is no longer in the HTML 5 spec. The story is largely about just that. No, it doesn't include all the details about the HTML 5 spec.. but that's why we call it a "summary".
I kind of doubt anyone likes their website to have content in it inserted by an ISP. The big sites like Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, etc, will just turn on HTTPS for all content. The only reason they haven't done it yet is because there's little reason to do so, and it takes some extra processing time.
Come on. When was the last time you had anything good to say about anybody else's code? Ever?
I've seen lots of good code. I've also seen some incredibly horrendous code, on multiple different levels. Until you've seen extremely poorly architected code, it's hard to appreciate just what bad code is.
Does the good code have flaws in it? Of course. Does the good code always do things the way I would have? Of course not. Good code isn't code that's perfect. The distinction has more to do with how maintainable the code is, how secure it is, etc. Basically the big picture and not individual lines, functions, objects, etc.
I felt this comment was very funny: It was widely considered clunky, its BASIC outdated and graphics weak in comparison to the Apple II and Atari 800, according to McCracken
So the VP and editor of "PC World" still had to get a few licks in. I just have to laugh. Personally I always thought the Apple II crowd was secretly jealous of the better games, and FAR better sound on a C64. They felt they paid a lot of money for their machines, but didn't get as good a quality out of it. (hey, I gotta get my licks in as well)
but until the full version of Adobe is available for free, or even less expensive, to the masses, it seems to be not quite right
Why does the full version of Adobe need to be free? There's many free utilities that create PDFs, there's multiple free APIs to manipulate PDFs. There's plenty of free, open source readers. What is it about the full version of Acrobat that's so special?
i guess the question is how are you sure - like in bet a months salary sure ?
Depends on what the conditions are. Recovering a single bit on the whole hard drive sure? No. Recover anything meaningful? Sure. (BTW, with shredding the harddrive, A determined attacker would most certainly be able to recover something meaningful). Those bits are packed tight. software methods always leave a doubt
It seems like this attitude persists, but I've never heard of anyone recovering anything after a full wipe.
Notice the wording: _nearly_ impossible. But not impossible, huh?
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but in case you aren't, do you really trust the some dumb WSJ journalist over what HD experts have been saying for years? What likely happened is said dumb WSJ journalist asked the local tech guy about wipes, he said "yah, if you do it right it can't be recovered..", so that became "nearly impossible".
HD technology isn't secret. There may be some techniques the HD makers don't like to share, but the technology itself is well known, and well understood. If it were possible to recover data from a complete wipe, we'd know about it.
sounds like there is a business selling physically destructable drives - a drive witha an easy open case, and a method to physcially damage the platter
Why do that? Just buy a large amount of flash ram. It can be erased rather quickly, and isn't recoverable. If you want to be "extra paranoid", do the 7 pass thing.
If you have a HD, just download, boot, and run dban on it. It's not all that difficult, even for a neophyte.
No, me neither. Guess crack dealers are smarter than the Writers Guild.
I guess you don't consider that the producers have a lot more to lose than the writers guild. The writers can always find some other medium to write for, or if worse comes to worse, become truck drivers, or whatever. If the producers lose the audience, they're quite screwed.
But with South Park you can buy the DVDs, so making them available for free online would only hurt their DVD sales
I doubt it, or at best it would affect them only a little. People don't buy the DVDs because they haven't seen the show, those people will just rent it. The people who buy the DVD want to watch it over and over.
The other thing is, the episodes are still going to contain ads. Ads which you can't easily skip over. Comedy Central is going to make direct profits from those ads. The people who buy DVDs buy them partially because they don't contain ads. Even if it does make a small dent in DVD sales, the profits from selling ads will likely make up for that.
This will lead to non-compliant network stacks which attempt to detect "bogus" RSTs and ignore them. And that cannot be allowed to happen at any cost.
Why? Just ignore all RST packets for bittotent ports, and timeout any connections. Do it at the NAT level, and you don't have to modify the OS. It leads to some extra open connections, but big deal. Comcast can just plain old block the connections anyway, the only reason they're not is because it takes more router resources than they have.
Hmm. If someone could explain to me how that isn't a factually correct statement, I'm all ears.
Also, if someone could explain how that implies that the "Internet" is exclusively defined as a terrorist tool, as is the implication of the summary, that'd be great.
There's a larger premise here. If you mention anything specifically as "aiding/creating/whatever terrorists", it must mean it's some kind of special class of thing that's doing that. I'd say that the interstate highway system "has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process", so has the phone system. Neither of those are mentioned. Ryder trucks rented a truck to the first bombing of the WTC. How come they're not mentioned? The statement is just as "factual" if you ignore the whole premise it's trying to convey.
So we're left to think that "the internet" must go above and beyond the normal infra-structure that everyone uses (including the bad guys). You might as well say the water distribution system "aids in facilitating violent radicalization.. blah blah blah".
I'm sure he's set up his test network appropriately (hubs not switches, no VLANs in sight
If you think a switch protects you from sniffing, thing again. There's several ways to sniff switch traffic, arp poisoning, faking dhcp responses, etc. VLANs might be a bit trickier, but it isn't always practical to have a separate network for just the voip traffic. The general rule is to not rely on your traffic being kept secret if someone can get inside your network.
We used to be the best tic-tac-toe and checkers players too. Tic-tac-toe of course was the first to go, and I don't know when checkers fell, but it had to be quite a long time ago.
Maybe Chess is just a hell of a lot closer to those two games than anyone thought.
Don't get in over your head...
on
Head First SQL
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· Score: 4, Insightful
On a Sunday, a fellow user-group member suggested I learn SQL...
Now, I can design and create databases
Database design and creation isn't something you pick up over 3 days. Sure, you can make something that works very quickly, but that doesn't mean it's a good design and isn't flawed. Designing a good database structure takes experience with the tradeoffs between full normalazation and added complexity, forseeing future needs, etc.
This is really nothing new, Windows 9x, 2k, and XP were all turds when they were first released.
I have to completely disagree. Windows 95 was decent, at least 10 times beter than windows 3.1. Windows 2000 was several times better than 98, though it suffered from some lack of driver support. I never liked XP over 2000, and ran into some issues with it.
Compared to the above, Vista isn't really worth it. Sleep mode doesn't work properly, I still experience crashes, and some of my hardware STILL isn't fully supported.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did people get the idea to re-brand "free software" as "open source"
You can blame/credit Eric S Raymond for that one. IMO he correctly identified that calling it "Free Software" was an appearance problem for a lot of people. People inherently distrust anything that says "free" (as in beer), as there's almost always a catch. I think he may have even coined "open source", but at the very least he's one of the larger pushers of that term. Geeeks don't like to think language matters, but in the rest of the world it does.
Anyway, I have to disagree with your categorization of the GPL as the power of open source. It's just one license among many. I use software that's under the GPL, under the Apache License, and under the BSD license. I really don't care which one it is.
and:
I take that to mean exactly what I just said. If you have any references to more information to support what you're saying about hardware, please reveal them. Otherwise I'll trust the article, and the implications of the statements.
And who wins? HP of course. Who loses? Sun.
Don't kid yourself. Microsoft is also a competitor to Sun, HP, and the Linux OS. Microsoft would have killed to get the freaking NYSE, if for no other reason that it'd be a feather in their cap.
As it stands, the NYSE partially running on Linux is quite a major deal, at least to the Big Business Guys who like to follow what other Big Business Guys are doing.
Very few businesses really care much about the sticker price of an operating system. What many businesses are catching on to is that Linux has little to no vendor lock-in. It goes something like this:
Develop all your software and systems on one Linux. Then find out you don't like HP? Fine.. take your business to Dell. The distribution they're running on starts to suck rocks? No problem, switch to RHEL. RHEL starts to not meet your needs? Customize your own distribution.
Not being tying your business to the whims of whatever company you're dealing with is truly powerful. If you ask me, that's the real power of Linux, and open source software. Linux makes operating systems into a true commodity like grain, where switching to another vendor is low cost.
You seem to have a strange miss-conception that all hackers are 13 year olds that only want to deface websites.
You have to look no further than the legion of spammers that assemble botnets to send out spam/DOS/whatever to know that's simply not the case.
Keeping out the 13 year olds isn't too hard, it just takes some diligence. They're dumb enough to announce their presence by defacing, etc. It's the other guys that are smart enough to stay hidden I'm referring to.
Perhaps it is -- when was the last time microsoft.com was taken down by malevolent hackers?
This is rather poor evidence that the Microsoft software is stable and secure. It assumes that a hacker would want to take down Microsoft.com. Sure, there's some jerkoffs that want to pull a big publicity stunt like that. But a smarter hacker would want to lie a LOT more low than that.
Also, as pointed out by someone else, Any large site like this is run on multiple servers. Even a malevolent hacker bent on taking down microsoft.com would have to take down a significant amount of them to affect the whole website.
off to tag the front-page article with "badsummary"
How is this a bad summary? The summary says that ogg/theora is no longer in the HTML 5 spec. The story is largely about just that. No, it doesn't include all the details about the HTML 5 spec.. but that's why we call it a "summary".
Is the moment websites start going to all HTTPS.
I kind of doubt anyone likes their website to have content in it inserted by an ISP. The big sites like Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, etc, will just turn on HTTPS for all content. The only reason they haven't done it yet is because there's little reason to do so, and it takes some extra processing time.
Come on. When was the last time you had anything good to say about anybody else's code? Ever?
I've seen lots of good code. I've also seen some incredibly horrendous code, on multiple different levels. Until you've seen extremely poorly architected code, it's hard to appreciate just what bad code is.
Does the good code have flaws in it? Of course. Does the good code always do things the way I would have? Of course not. Good code isn't code that's perfect. The distinction has more to do with how maintainable the code is, how secure it is, etc. Basically the big picture and not individual lines, functions, objects, etc.
I just think it's fascinating how viruses occupy this gray area between our definitions of living and non-living.
Life or living is just a word, not reality. If a virus is alive or not alive is about as interesting a question as asking if submarines swim or not.
I felt this comment was very funny:
It was widely considered clunky, its BASIC outdated and graphics weak in comparison to the Apple II and Atari 800, according to McCracken
So the VP and editor of "PC World" still had to get a few licks in. I just have to laugh. Personally I always thought the Apple II crowd was secretly jealous of the better games, and FAR better sound on a C64. They felt they paid a lot of money for their machines, but didn't get as good a quality out of it. (hey, I gotta get my licks in as well)
but until the full version of Adobe is available for free, or even less expensive, to the masses, it seems to be not quite right
Why does the full version of Adobe need to be free? There's many free utilities that create PDFs, there's multiple free APIs to manipulate PDFs. There's plenty of free, open source readers. What is it about the full version of Acrobat that's so special?
i guess the question is how are you sure - like in bet a months salary sure ?
Depends on what the conditions are. Recovering a single bit on the whole hard drive sure? No. Recover anything meaningful? Sure. (BTW, with shredding the harddrive, A determined attacker would most certainly be able to recover something meaningful). Those bits are packed tight.
software methods always leave a doubt
It seems like this attitude persists, but I've never heard of anyone recovering anything after a full wipe.
Notice the wording: _nearly_ impossible. But not impossible, huh?
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but in case you aren't, do you really trust the some dumb WSJ journalist over what HD experts have been saying for years? What likely happened is said dumb WSJ journalist asked the local tech guy about wipes, he said "yah, if you do it right it can't be recovered..", so that became "nearly impossible".
HD technology isn't secret. There may be some techniques the HD makers don't like to share, but the technology itself is well known, and well understood. If it were possible to recover data from a complete wipe, we'd know about it.
sounds like there is a business selling physically destructable drives - a drive witha an easy open case, and a method to physcially damage the platter
Why do that? Just buy a large amount of flash ram. It can be erased rather quickly, and isn't recoverable. If you want to be "extra paranoid", do the 7 pass thing.
If you have a HD, just download, boot, and run dban on it. It's not all that difficult, even for a neophyte.
No, me neither. Guess crack dealers are smarter than the Writers Guild.
I guess you don't consider that the producers have a lot more to lose than the writers guild. The writers can always find some other medium to write for, or if worse comes to worse, become truck drivers, or whatever. If the producers lose the audience, they're quite screwed.
But with South Park you can buy the DVDs, so making them available for free online would only hurt their DVD sales
I doubt it, or at best it would affect them only a little. People don't buy the DVDs because they haven't seen the show, those people will just rent it. The people who buy the DVD want to watch it over and over.
The other thing is, the episodes are still going to contain ads. Ads which you can't easily skip over. Comedy Central is going to make direct profits from those ads. The people who buy DVDs buy them partially because they don't contain ads. Even if it does make a small dent in DVD sales, the profits from selling ads will likely make up for that.
This will lead to non-compliant network stacks which attempt to detect "bogus" RSTs and ignore them. And that cannot be allowed to happen at any cost.
Why? Just ignore all RST packets for bittotent ports, and timeout any connections. Do it at the NAT level, and you don't have to modify the OS. It leads to some extra open connections, but big deal. Comcast can just plain old block the connections anyway, the only reason they're not is because it takes more router resources than they have.
Hmm. If someone could explain to me how that isn't a factually correct statement, I'm all ears.
Also, if someone could explain how that implies that the "Internet" is exclusively defined as a terrorist tool, as is the implication of the summary, that'd be great.
There's a larger premise here. If you mention anything specifically as "aiding/creating/whatever terrorists", it must mean it's some kind of special class of thing that's doing that. I'd say that the interstate highway system "has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process", so has the phone system. Neither of those are mentioned. Ryder trucks rented a truck to the first bombing of the WTC. How come they're not mentioned? The statement is just as "factual" if you ignore the whole premise it's trying to convey.
So we're left to think that "the internet" must go above and beyond the normal infra-structure that everyone uses (including the bad guys). You might as well say the water distribution system "aids in facilitating violent radicalization.. blah blah blah".
The TCO will be interesting to see. I would be surprised if it was any better than a wash in savings.
Based upon what? Idle armchair speculation? I sure don't have any feel for the fuel costs of a freighter, or the cost of a sail. Do you?
I'm sure he's set up his test network appropriately (hubs not switches, no VLANs in sight
If you think a switch protects you from sniffing, thing again. There's several ways to sniff switch traffic, arp poisoning, faking dhcp responses, etc. VLANs might be a bit trickier, but it isn't always practical to have a separate network for just the voip traffic. The general rule is to not rely on your traffic being kept secret if someone can get inside your network.
But we were the best chess players.
We used to be the best tic-tac-toe and checkers players too. Tic-tac-toe of course was the first to go, and I don't know when checkers fell, but it had to be quite a long time ago.
Maybe Chess is just a hell of a lot closer to those two games than anyone thought.
On a Sunday, a fellow user-group member suggested I learn SQL...
Now, I can design and create databases
Database design and creation isn't something you pick up over 3 days. Sure, you can make something that works very quickly, but that doesn't mean it's a good design and isn't flawed. Designing a good database structure takes experience with the tradeoffs between full normalazation and added complexity, forseeing future needs, etc.
Or TAFKAP
I believe he's now changed his name to TAFKATAFKAP
or
The artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as prince.
get it right.
This is really nothing new, Windows 9x, 2k, and XP were all turds when they were first released.
I have to completely disagree. Windows 95 was decent, at least 10 times beter than windows 3.1. Windows 2000 was several times better than 98, though it suffered from some lack of driver support. I never liked XP over 2000, and ran into some issues with it.
Compared to the above, Vista isn't really worth it. Sleep mode doesn't work properly, I still experience crashes, and some of my hardware STILL isn't fully supported.