Excellent! At least some people realize that HTML-encoded messages are used for Phishing. Many banks however, like Citibank, are just waiting for more disasters to happen. I doubt the banks understand security, because if they would understand what they do, then they would not send HTML-encoded messages to their customers! Instead they would encourage every customer NOT to use HTML-based e-mail software. Below is an example. Notice that they use "Windows-1252" as character-set, something you may not find on secure computers, and they send the message as "multipart/alternative", means users of insecure HTML-based webbrowser-style e-mail software get what is also good for phishing. It is ironic that the folks at Citibank dare to talk about "Email Security Zone". (More below...)
Want more? OK, there are those nice virtual account numbers. The idea is simple: you request a virtual credit card number for a specific transaction or dealer. You can also specify the expiration date and set a maximum credit limit. Very nice, indeed. But what do the experts at Citibank use to send you the virtual account number? Macromedia Flash! Do they ever check mailing lists like Bugtraq at SecurityFocus? Maybe not!
80% of the market price for DVD's is profit for the distributers [PBS], not the copyright owners. This is why the MPAA, RIAA and similar interest groups are not interested in the distribution of movies through new channels, unless their members control these channels.
Apropos compiler incompatibilities: do the new GNU compilers still add funny things like useless trailing underscores for non-C routines by default? And how about Fortran character strings, are they still passed with a hidden argument for the length in addition to the formally declared argument (address) or have the GNU people by now figured out why, for example, VMS compilers use a descriptor (structure) to describe complex arguments?
Re:What we need is configure & make optimizati
on
GCC 4.0 Preview
·
· Score: 1
The fact that almost all Unix C/C++ software requires something like autoconf or imake says everything about the software development environment, doesn't it? IMHO it stinks like rotten eggs from the 60's.
Too bad they don't make them anymore! The future for a new OpenVMS/Itanium notebook looks extremely bad. HP does not want to kick Microsoft's a$$ with a real good operating system for the desktop and notebook market. And Intel dropped all plans to produce an Itanium for desktop machines (Itanium was suppose to be The 64-bit replacement for the Pentium!), not to mention any plans for a notebook version of the Itanium. AMD understands that a processor has to cover a broad market. Well done, AMD!
NASA is terminating and postponing a lot of project. The two Voyager missions are just better known to the public. Remember the Mach-10 project X-43A? NASA planned two further generations of this experimental plane. Canceled. Take the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) mission. Canceled. How about the Hubble Space Telescope? On death row. Other scientific communities are affected, too. You know things went south when National Labs face a 60% cut in running time (e.g. AGS at BNL). Imagine companies would have to turn off their production lines for 60% of the time... Biology - same story. Stem cell research, AIDS research, heck, even travel money is cut for political reasons (remember the HIV/AIDS conference in Bangladesh, with US scientists stranded at home). Here are a few more NASA projects hit by budget cuts: http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nasa-05c.htm l
Now, where does the money go? Well, some of it has been accounted for at http://www.theocracywatch.org/faith_base.htm Compare how much is missing for scientific projects and how much has been redirected. You may have voted for this policy!
Actually UPN never showed anybody nude in Star Trek. All these cowards can do is show someone from behind. Isn't Star Trek suppose to be an open society? Typical double moral standard on US TV. For the folks in Europe: the US TV stations even conceal nudity in cartoons! LOL.
What really pissed me off is that Star Trek was taken over by the religious propagandy machine after Roddenberry's death. Just watching most of the DSN episodes or listening to the Enterprise theme makes me feel sick. Star Trek put into the Dark Ages. Glad it's over!
You have no clue. Posix is part of VMS since more than a decade. Besides, if you had read recent announcements from HP, then you would understand that OpenVMS also covers DII COE.
Of course real VMS users first look at VMS as VMS, not as Unix. VMS was designed to be better than Unix. Unix was and still is too primitive. There was no significant progress. That is why people had enough and designed VMS after a decade of suffering with Unix. Design, that is what makes the difference between VMS and Unix. VMS is designed. Unix started as an accident at Bell Labs, became chaos, and never recovered from this trauma. Why do you think Unix was ditched by AT&T with SYSV and by the Berkeley University with BSD 4.4? These were the makers of Unix! VMS was owned by three companies, namely Digital, Compaq and now HP. And it is still supported. All three companies had various Unix distributions, all which were scrapped. TRU64 became the latest Unix victim, with only HP/UX left as survivor. Talk about uninstalling...
It is quite obvious that you never worked with VMS. And you do not understand its internals. Otherwise you would not compare it with Windows NT.
Now, is your favorite Unix flavor also VMS "complient"? Can you run a VMS spell checker on your Linux or Solaris?
Some of us remember when students spent often months or years to port their thesis project from one unix to another one. BSD, Ultrix, Digital Unix, OSF/1, Tru64, now HP/UX or maybe Solaris, SunOS, AIX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, or Linux. You name it. Even two Linux versions from different distributors are not compatible. Not to mention the time wasted with miserable tools like gdb, dbx etc.. Every time the new system was The Future system. And every time it was migration season, followed by a rude awakening. Not only did the names change. Even most simple things like string manipulation changed. Sure you can write an ANSI C application, but unfortunately that is not always Posix compatible. Remember Posix? THE unix standard - dream. How much frustration. If you spend your valuable time on doing the Unix-to-Unix migration yourself, then you will find out the truth! There are research projects which spent years just on porting their software from one unix to another unix flavor, just to realize that the funding agencies had enough.
(Open)VMS is and will always be VMS, not Unix. There is only one VMS standard. That is good! It saved many smart people a lot of time.
Remember what was one of the most important reasons for universities to drop VMS in the past? Licenses! But let's do a reality check: today universities and labs pay tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for RedHat Linux. They really do! Sure, some students know they can download Linux for free. But do they tell their advisor that they spend weeks and months on installation, configuration, updates and other daily trouble? Let's be honest!
Did you know that you can get a VMS compatible computer with Alpha processor at eBay for cheap and, the VMS licenses from HP even for free? VMS is professional software. That includes compilers and many other first class tools. VMS software tools are excellent. And if you want it really cheap, then replace the hardware with an emulator for free (like SIMH), just to get started today. So you get all you need to study a modern alternative. For free!
Why would any student want to miss what experts appreciate at stock exchanges, agencies like the NSA, health care providers, and many other places were performance, reliability, security and organization is everything? These experts know why they use VMS. Do you know what you are missing? The lemmings follow the lemmings who have seen only one system, or maybe two, and pretend to be experts. If Linux Master Installer or MCSE and an average curriculum vitae is not good enough for you, then have a look at VMS.
One more question for the women among the students here: would you ever call for a "man" or even type "man" into a computer to get help?:-) Well, on a VMS system you enter HELP and help is what you get. A lot of excellent help!
Now, move your mouse cursor to http://www.openvmsedu.com/ if you are a student or teacher. Talk to your school! And those of you who like to be more than dead meat at the weekend go to http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/ This is cool free stuff from experts.
Now, is the IRS going to accept that you cannot complete the PDF junk because of the Adobe update games? I would be happy with the Wintel crap à la Adobe if the IRS would send me a blank check in return for a blank PDF file.
Adobe focuses their efforts on Wintel. If you use different software or hardware, then there is no solution from Adobe. And forget about the open source stuff, it only works 90%, thanks to Adobe's update games. So much about "portable". That is fine for Adobe. But why should that be good enough for the IRS? I doubt that the IRS would seriously argue only 95% people of all tax payers have to file their tax return.
PDF printer on the market? I mean a printer that understands PDF directly, not to be confused with proprietary PC converter software ("reader"), or a more or less working open source replica. Personally I am sick and tired of mixed results, not to mention that the converters blow up the data size easily by a factor of 20 (e.g. PDF to PS). And that keeps a printer busy for several minutes per page. It's not the fault of the printer's format, it's this stupid conversion from PDF.
Years ago people were quite happy when PostScript showed up. But apparently did not like the idea that other parties would implement the PostScript language, too. The PC market gave them the perfect opportunity to monopolize the market with constant updates. Problem is that printer manufacturers cannot play this game. Too bad for Adobe. But why does the IRS play favors for Adobe?
Is everybody happy with Adobe's update games and endless security problems (see security focus, bugtraq)?
Is the IRS just following a stupid idea? Stupid ideas, especially PC ideas, do spread like the plague.
Why should there be no RFID tag in your driver's license? The current administration is working hard to get RFID tags into the passport of every foreigner. Worldwide. Nobody cares about that in the US. Same about fingerprinting etc..
Novell did fine on the server market, too. But many of us knew from day one that a limited server solution is braindead. Novell's OS is no real dead, and so will be Itanium and OpenVMS/Itanium. It sucks, because the folks at HP do everything to sponsor Billy boxes.
The difference between the AMD64 processors and the Itanium processors is that AMD64 offers a broad choice, namely mobile versions, cheap desktop CPU's up to versions for multi-CPU system. That makes them popular. One CPU architecture, one software. And who cares about a few percent of performance advantage for the Itanium when you can buy five AMD64's for the price of one Itanium. Maybe Itanium is the better heater, but it still is just a heater and we just lost the best option to heat our office with an Itanium.
... and while OpenVMS has gotten the job done for quite some time now, unix has not and people started to fix unix design flaws 10 years before OpenVMS was developed...
Everybody, get your CAT scan, scan your dog, too, and support OpenVMS, the best there is.
BTW, I used more than 32 bit address space for some scientific research program. Glad that I had OpenVMS/Alpha available. Students, researchers: wake up, there is more than just linux in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent! At least some people realize that HTML-encoded messages are used for Phishing. Many banks however, like Citibank, are just waiting for more disasters to happen. I doubt the banks understand security, because if they would understand what they do, then they would not send HTML-encoded messages to their customers! Instead they would encourage every customer NOT to use HTML-based e-mail software. Below is an example. Notice that they use "Windows-1252" as character-set, something you may not find on secure computers, and they send the message as "multipart/alternative", means users of insecure HTML-based webbrowser-style e-mail software get what is also good for phishing. It is ironic that the folks at Citibank dare to talk about "Email Security Zone". (More below...)
e rsion: 1.0; Windows-1252 ...
d vice/safe_email.htm">h /citi_logo.gif" align="right" border="0">/a>/td>d vice/safe_email.htm">Email Security Zone/a>: ...
Subject: Your Online Activity Confirmation
From: "Citi Cards"
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
boundary="______BoundaryOfDocument______"
MIME-V
--______BoundaryOfDocument______
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
HTML>
body>
table width="600" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
tr>
td>a href="http://www.citibank.com/us/cards/cardserv/a
img src="http://emailimages.citicards.com/images/phis
td width="150" nowrap>table cellspacing="1" cellpadding="1" border="0" align="right" bgcolor="#C0C0C0">
td bgcolor="#FFFFFF">
table border="0" width="150" cellspacing="3" align="right">/tr>
tr>
td bgcolor="#C0C0C0" nowrap>font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="1">
b>a href="http://www.citibank.com/us/cards/cardserv/a
/b>/font>/td>
Want more? OK, there are those nice virtual account numbers. The idea is simple: you request a virtual credit card number for a specific transaction or dealer. You can also specify the expiration date and set a maximum credit limit. Very nice, indeed. But what do the experts at Citibank use to send you the virtual account number? Macromedia Flash! Do they ever check mailing lists like Bugtraq at SecurityFocus? Maybe not!
80% of the market price for DVD's is profit for the distributers [PBS], not the copyright owners. This is why the MPAA, RIAA and similar interest groups are not interested in the distribution of movies through new channels, unless their members control these channels.
SPARC is old stuff. Itanium has much more potential than SPARC. And Intel has more money than Sun.
You certainly won't see the Sun when you get too close to Niagara. Nomen est omen.
Two half compilers are not the same as one complete compiler.
Apropos compiler incompatibilities: do the new GNU compilers still add funny things like useless trailing underscores for non-C routines by default? And how about Fortran character strings, are they still passed with a hidden argument for the length in addition to the formally declared argument (address) or have the GNU people by now figured out why, for example, VMS compilers use a descriptor (structure) to describe complex arguments?
The fact that almost all Unix C/C++ software requires something like autoconf or imake says everything about the software development environment, doesn't it? IMHO it stinks like rotten eggs from the 60's.
Too bad they don't make them anymore! The future for a new OpenVMS/Itanium notebook looks extremely bad. HP does not want to kick Microsoft's a$$ with a real good operating system for the desktop and notebook market. And Intel dropped all plans to produce an Itanium for desktop machines (Itanium was suppose to be The 64-bit replacement for the Pentium!), not to mention any plans for a notebook version of the Itanium. AMD understands that a processor has to cover a broad market. Well done, AMD!
NASA is terminating and postponing a lot of project. The two Voyager missions are just better known to the public. Remember the Mach-10 project X-43A? NASA planned two further generations of this experimental plane. Canceled. Take the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter (JIMO) mission. Canceled. How about the Hubble Space Telescope? On death row. Other scientific communities are affected, too. You know things went south when National Labs face a 60% cut in running time (e.g. AGS at BNL). Imagine companies would have to turn off their production lines for 60% of the time... Biology - same story. Stem cell research, AIDS research, heck, even travel money is cut for political reasons (remember the HIV/AIDS conference in Bangladesh, with US scientists stranded at home). Here are a few more NASA projects hit by budget cuts:m l
Compare how much is missing for scientific projects and how much has been redirected. You may have voted for this policy!
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/nasa-05c.ht
Now, where does the money go? Well, some of it has been accounted for at
http://www.theocracywatch.org/faith_base.htm
Actually UPN never showed anybody nude in Star Trek. All these cowards can do is show someone from behind. Isn't Star Trek suppose to be an open society? Typical double moral standard on US TV. For the folks in Europe: the US TV stations even conceal nudity in cartoons! LOL. What really pissed me off is that Star Trek was taken over by the religious propagandy machine after Roddenberry's death. Just watching most of the DSN episodes or listening to the Enterprise theme makes me feel sick. Star Trek put into the Dark Ages. Glad it's over!
You have no clue. Posix is part of VMS since more than a decade. Besides, if you had read recent announcements from HP, then you would understand that OpenVMS also covers DII COE.
Of course real VMS users first look at VMS as VMS, not as Unix. VMS was designed to be better than Unix. Unix was and still is too primitive. There was no significant progress. That is why people had enough and designed VMS after a decade of suffering with Unix. Design, that is what makes the difference between VMS and Unix. VMS is designed. Unix started as an accident at Bell Labs, became chaos, and never recovered from this trauma. Why do you think Unix was ditched by AT&T with SYSV and by the Berkeley University with BSD 4.4? These were the makers of Unix! VMS was owned by three companies, namely Digital, Compaq and now HP. And it is still supported. All three companies had various Unix distributions, all which were scrapped. TRU64 became the latest Unix victim, with only HP/UX left as survivor. Talk about uninstalling...
It is quite obvious that you never worked with VMS. And you do not understand its internals. Otherwise you would not compare it with Windows NT.
Now, is your favorite Unix flavor also VMS "complient"? Can you run a VMS spell checker on your Linux or Solaris?
Indeed, the 'manual' pages have often little to do with 'help'. ;-) VMS HELP however is extactly what you expect.
Some of us remember when students spent often months or years to port their thesis project from one unix to another one. BSD, Ultrix, Digital Unix, OSF/1, Tru64, now HP/UX or maybe Solaris, SunOS, AIX, FreeBSD, NetBSD, or Linux. You name it. Even two Linux versions from different distributors are not compatible. Not to mention the time wasted with miserable tools like gdb, dbx etc.. Every time the new system was The Future system. And every time it was migration season, followed by a rude awakening. Not only did the names change. Even most simple things like string manipulation changed. Sure you can write an ANSI C application, but unfortunately that is not always Posix compatible. Remember Posix? THE unix standard - dream. How much frustration. If you spend your valuable time on doing the Unix-to-Unix migration yourself, then you will find out the truth! There are research projects which spent years just on porting their software from one unix to another unix flavor, just to realize that the funding agencies had enough.
(Open)VMS is and will always be VMS, not Unix. There is only one VMS standard. That is good! It saved many smart people a lot of time.
Remember what was one of the most important reasons for universities to drop VMS in the past? Licenses! But let's do a reality check: today universities and labs pay tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars per year for RedHat Linux. They really do! Sure, some students know they can download Linux for free. But do they tell their advisor that they spend weeks and months on installation, configuration, updates and other daily trouble? Let's be honest!
Did you know that you can get a VMS compatible computer with Alpha processor at eBay for cheap and, the VMS licenses from HP even for free? VMS is professional software. That includes compilers and many other first class tools. VMS software tools are excellent. And if you want it really cheap, then replace the hardware with an emulator for free (like SIMH), just to get started today. So you get all you need to study a modern alternative. For free!
Why would any student want to miss what experts appreciate at stock exchanges, agencies like the NSA, health care providers, and many other places were performance, reliability, security and organization is everything? These experts know why they use VMS. Do you know what you are missing? The lemmings follow the lemmings who have seen only one system, or maybe two, and pretend to be experts. If Linux Master Installer or MCSE and an average curriculum vitae is not good enough for you, then have a look at VMS.
Remember why people ditched VMS? That's right. Licenses. Ironical, isn't it?
One more question for the women among the students here: would you ever call for a "man" or even type "man" into a computer to get help? :-) Well, on a VMS system you enter HELP and help is what you get. A lot of excellent help!
Now, move your mouse cursor to http://www.openvmsedu.com/ if you are a student or teacher. Talk to your school! And those of you who like to be more than dead meat at the weekend go to http://www.openvmshobbyist.com/ This is cool free stuff from experts.
Oh, and of course the Bill Gates followers find themselves home at http://www.trustworthycomputing.com/
Cheers!
Now, is the IRS going to accept that you cannot complete the PDF junk because of the Adobe update games? I would be happy with the Wintel crap à la Adobe if the IRS would send me a blank check in return for a blank PDF file.
Adobe focuses their efforts on Wintel. If you use different software or hardware, then there is no solution from Adobe. And forget about the open source stuff, it only works 90%, thanks to Adobe's update games. So much about "portable". That is fine for Adobe. But why should that be good enough for the IRS? I doubt that the IRS would seriously argue only 95% people of all tax payers have to file their tax return.
The Linux people do not have to pay their taxes, because they do not earn a buck with Linux.
- any
PDF printer on the market? I mean a printer that understands PDF directly, not to be confused with proprietary PC converter software ("reader"), or a more or less working open source replica. Personally I am sick and tired of mixed results, not to mention that the converters blow up the data size easily by a factor of 20 (e.g. PDF to PS). And that keeps a printer busy for several minutes per page. It's not the fault of the printer's format, it's this stupid conversion from PDF. Years ago people were quite happy when PostScript showed up. But apparently did not like the idea that other parties would implement the PostScript language, too. The PC market gave them the perfect opportunity to monopolize the market with constant updates. Problem is that printer manufacturers cannot play this game. Too bad for Adobe. But why does the IRS play favors for Adobe? Is everybody happy with Adobe's update games and endless security problems (see security focus, bugtraq)? Is the IRS just following a stupid idea? Stupid ideas, especially PC ideas, do spread like the plague.Check your local book store. They have enough literature about the Alpha processor.
Why should there be no RFID tag in your driver's license? The current administration is working hard to get RFID tags into the passport of every foreigner. Worldwide. Nobody cares about that in the US. Same about fingerprinting etc..
And HP is now going to sell Itanium server. At least they won't have to worry about those graphics adapters anymore. An RS-232 will do.
Novell did fine on the server market, too. But many of us knew from day one that a limited server solution is braindead. Novell's OS is no real dead, and so will be Itanium and OpenVMS/Itanium. It sucks, because the folks at HP do everything to sponsor Billy boxes.
The difference between the AMD64 processors and the Itanium processors is that AMD64 offers a broad choice, namely mobile versions, cheap desktop CPU's up to versions for multi-CPU system. That makes them popular. One CPU architecture, one software. And who cares about a few percent of performance advantage for the Itanium when you can buy five AMD64's for the price of one Itanium. Maybe Itanium is the better heater, but it still is just a heater and we just lost the best option to heat our office with an Itanium.
Without workstations, how do people develop software for OpenVMS? How do they run OpenVMS applications? On Billy boxes à la Novell? GIVE ME A BREAK!
HP KILLED VMS! CAN YOU SAY BETRAYAL? F***
Everybody, get your CAT scan, scan your dog, too, and support OpenVMS, the best there is.
BTW, I used more than 32 bit address space for some scientific research program. Glad that I had OpenVMS/Alpha available. Students, researchers: wake up, there is more than just linux in the world.