Read mostly books from authors which have gone more than 70 years ago. There is lot of nice stuff written that time.
Read only those more recent (and living) authors, who explicitely allow distributing digital versions of their works. Buy their books in paper form whenever you like them.
No, it is not an option. They can use some magnitometer or radio-wave detector to find out that here is operating electronic equipment inside the wall.
There is much better thing to do - if you are high-profile OpenSource developer, you obvoisly have people all around the world, which know you and respect you.
So, just ask some of them, who are living in different jurisdictions (preferrably reasonable powerful countries, like Russia, China or India, where US wouldn't risk to send naval squadron just to seize your data) to keep your backups. Do the same for them. Of course, backup files should be encrypted and secret keys kept in the pocket of data owner, so if US police seizes you computer, they wouldn't get hold of my implementation of Russian cryptoalgorithms.
Keys should be backed up in different jurisdiction too. Say, you are in US, your data in Russia and your key to access them - in China.
Are you implying that movie trailers and Linux distributions are not copyrighted?
No, he just states that sharing/copiing of copyrighted material is not always an infrigment.
There can be cases (and Linux distributions is one of them) when copiing and distributing of this material is explicitely permitted by copyright holders.
Title is correct. Developing of new features before code architecture is cleaned up (including verifying that this architecture is suitable for every platform around there) is harmful.
It produces unmaintainable mess of code, and many opensource projects, like Gnome, KDE and OpenOffice have already fallen in this pit.
Better to stop adding features an concentrate on making these projects developer-friendly.
Once they are developer-friendly features can be added easily and quickly and after few years of developing we would have more features than other way around.
Oh, no! Using a brain is a crime by itself in modern advertisment-based society.
Read Fahrenheit 451 or many other stories by American SF writers. They warn you 50 years ago that this would end with that - having encyption software is a crime, having gun is a crime, thinking independently is a crime too.
It is fine. Next time we should make a law which makes user responcible for all spam from his hijacked machine. This would motivite user to learn and think about what he is going to confirm in this dialog box.
What IT industry need is the end of principle "NO WARRANTY".
They create very big market for powerful 32-bit PC. If anybody still use 8-bit CP/M machines, I doubd that I could afford dual PIV with 1Gb RAM at home to run real OS on it. It seems good. But I suspect that i could be just as happy with some 300Mhz UltraSparc.
They create potential market for software I write. But really I make my living from market where computers was used long before PC era.
What bad they did for me:
They are ultimate cause of spam, adware and other crap which fills my internet channels now. They give millions of uneducated users access f\to internet by selling internet-enabled OS and telling that no education is required to use it.
They pushed their complex and closed document formats as standard de-facto. Yeh, I got some pride from community for writing catdoc, but I'd rather live in the world where I don't need to write such strange thing just to read price-lists downloaded from Internet.
They are hugely responsible for degradation of computer science education. They created so big demand for second-class coders, that no one teaches good programmers nowadays. It is quite hard to us to find new employees. And this is in Russia. I think in US it is much worse.
They also create demand for IE-only internet sites, and encourage uneducated webmasters to do this silly designs, which render blinking pages almost unreadble.
It is interesting - which is psychologically simplier - install Linux and willingly restrict yourself just to opensource programs, or install Windows and willingly restrict yourself just to programs which are well-written enough to allow work as user (I suspect that in later case you end up using software which is available for Linux anyway).
In the "Foundation and empire" Asimov depicts the de clining Galactic Empire, where they decide to restrict use of nuclear energy when there was a shortage of competent techincans. Not to rise salaries, not to start education programs - just close down some nuclear plants and leave surroundings without energy.
Idea to cut the nuclear plants from external networks looks quite simular.
I serve just about hundred users in the big appartment building.
So, I can deal with those effects. Just give your users some options
Pay for static IP, and you can even run your own MX for your own domain. You can be responsible for yourself, if it is your choice.
You just want to connect several external mailservers? OK. Here is web form, you type name of mail servers here and we would let you out. I doubt that some mail worm would be sufficiently clever to find out were this form is located and what password user have to enter. Of course some slashdot user can try to write special worm to hack just my users. I'd give away address of the web server where this form is located: 192.168.216.1. One have to click just few links to find this from from start page.
You want just browser the internet and don't want to bother with securing your machine? OK, we'll do our best to save world from you.
People have known how to slice up rocks for millenia. Egyptian pyramides are build from sliced up rocks, pre-Columb Peruvian cities build from sliced up rocks, and even Great Chinese wall is build from sliced up rocks.
And in XIX century one guy have invented much better tool to slice up rocks. He got so rich that he have established an annual prize for advance in science. His name was Alfred Nobel.
This was long before first laser was even thought of.
Really they use both ways at the same time. Probably there are several types of spammer's viruses/worms and some of them use relays and some direct sending. Later is quite easy to cope with from ISP side. Just block all outgoing connections to port 25 besides ones originated from legitimate mail servers.
But if you want to stop all the abuses of mail relays, you should monitor your mail server constantly. And it is not something ISP admins are paid for.
It is good idea to use dog catchers in anti-spam process. Send them to arrest spammers with all their equipment. They'd catch spammers with their nets, put them in cages and bring to the jail. There should be couple of TV operators send along to broadcast the action.
People should see that spammers are treated no better than rabid dogs.
Just don't write on C++. You would have a lot of advantages - you can use time-proven compilers, you have stable ABI and can link objects produced by different compilers, you have no mangling problems in shared libraries interface.
Unfortunately, code I've mentioned was C++. But we do test at least two major releases of each supported compiler - 2.95 and 3.something for gcc, and 6 and 7 for MSVC. Things are bit worse with Sun compiler. They don't keep older versions available. Recently they removed compler collections from download at all and distribute only big and bloated IDEs.
If lot of time and engergy is spent porting code, it means that code would be reviewed, cleaned up, and restructured to have layers of abstraction clearly defined.
If people would try out different compilers they would eliminate non-portable constructs.
BTW, just today I've found a bug in our (proprietary) code which show itself up in tests only using MSVC 6.0. With GCC on various platform and MSVC 7.1 it wasn't caught by tests, but potentially it can cause app to crash. And we have reports from our testers about misterious crashes.
So, putting effort into porting code to as many platforms as possible would undoubtely lead to better code.
It is also possible that there would came bunch of developers who know at least two operationg system s - Linux and Windows. Most messed up code is written by people who never programmed for more than one OS.
Learn Russian. People who live on Ukraine typically speak Russian or Polish better than Ukrainian. And most of Ukrainian programmers know Russian. Because there are a lot more technical literature published in Russian than in the Ukrainian.
Ukrainian language is more or less invention of nationalists politics from West Ukraine. And most educated people are located in the East part (Kharkov region) where Russian was always native language.
Slashdot Mirror
Read mostly books from authors which have gone more than 70 years ago. There is lot of nice stuff written that time.
Read only those more recent (and living) authors, who explicitely allow distributing digital versions of their works. Buy their books in paper form whenever you like them.
The Dutch don't get hurricanes.
They call it "just a small gale", because they have them once a week and are used to it.
No, it is not an option. They can use some magnitometer or radio-wave detector to find out that here is operating electronic equipment inside the wall.
There is much better thing to do - if you are high-profile OpenSource developer, you obvoisly have people all around the world, which know you and respect you.
So, just ask some of them, who are living in different jurisdictions (preferrably reasonable powerful countries, like Russia, China or India, where US wouldn't risk to send naval squadron just to seize your data) to keep your backups. Do the same for them. Of course, backup files should be encrypted and secret keys kept in the pocket of data owner, so if US police seizes you computer, they wouldn't get hold of my implementation of Russian cryptoalgorithms.
Keys should be backed up in different jurisdiction too. Say, you are in US, your data in Russia and your key to access them - in China.
Are you implying that movie trailers and Linux distributions are not copyrighted?
No, he just states that sharing/copiing of copyrighted material is not always an infrigment.
There can be cases (and Linux distributions is one of them) when copiing and distributing of this material is explicitely permitted by copyright holders.
Title is correct. Developing of new features before code architecture is cleaned up (including verifying that this architecture is suitable for every platform around there) is harmful.
It produces unmaintainable mess of code, and many opensource projects, like Gnome, KDE and OpenOffice have already fallen in this pit.
Better to stop adding features an concentrate on making these projects developer-friendly.
Once they are developer-friendly features can be added easily and quickly and after few years of developing we would have more features than other way around.
Use your brain.
Oh, no! Using a brain is a crime by itself in modern advertisment-based society.
Read Fahrenheit 451 or many other stories by American SF writers. They warn you 50 years ago that this would end with that - having encyption software is a crime, having gun is a crime, thinking independently is a crime too.
It is fine. Next time we should make a law which makes user responcible for all spam from his hijacked machine. This would motivite user to learn and think about what he is going to confirm in this dialog box.
What IT industry need is the end of principle "NO WARRANTY".
And phone number to call is not printed on the installation media.
It is a second and separate decision.
What good they did to me?
What bad they did for me:
It is interesting - which is psychologically simplier - install Linux and willingly restrict yourself just to opensource programs, or install Windows and willingly restrict yourself just to programs which are well-written enough to allow work as user (I suspect that in later case you end up using software which is available for Linux anyway).
In the "Foundation and empire" Asimov depicts the de clining Galactic Empire, where they decide to restrict use of nuclear energy when there was a shortage of competent techincans. Not to rise salaries, not to start education programs - just close down some nuclear plants and leave surroundings without energy.
Idea to cut the nuclear plants from external networks looks quite simular.
Russia (as well as China) is not sort of a country, which can be accused of terrorism.
US goverment and press make quite a clear distiction in this area - if country has some nuclear missiles, it couldn't be blamed for terrorism.
Maximum crime is violation of human rights. And maximum punishment allowed is an embargo, not bombardments.
So, lets see if we would read that evil Russians violate a basic human right of american astronauts to ride to ISS free of charge.
How the hell you would rename it? You got no vehicle to get there and paint new name on the board?
Next time we fly Soyuz there, we would get some red paint with us and paint big letters MIR-2 there
So, I can deal with those effects. Just give your users some options
I'm curious how they plan to "slice it up."
People have known how to slice up rocks for millenia. Egyptian pyramides are build from sliced up rocks, pre-Columb Peruvian cities build from sliced up rocks, and even Great Chinese wall is build from sliced up rocks.
And in XIX century one guy have invented much better tool to slice up rocks. He got so rich that he have established an annual prize for advance in science. His name was Alfred Nobel.
This was long before first laser was even thought of.
If it would be January 19, 2038, I would believe that something should hit Earth that day. But 2037 it is definitely an error.
Really they use both ways at the same time. Probably there are several types of spammer's viruses/worms and some of them use relays and some direct sending. Later is quite easy to cope with from ISP side. Just block all outgoing connections to port 25 besides ones originated from legitimate mail servers.
But if you want to stop all the abuses of mail relays, you should monitor your mail server constantly. And it is not something ISP admins are paid for.
It is good idea to use dog catchers in anti-spam process. Send them to arrest spammers with all their equipment. They'd catch spammers with their nets, put them in cages and bring to the jail. There should be couple of TV operators send along to broadcast the action.
People should see that spammers are treated no better than rabid dogs.
Just don't write on C++. You would have a lot of advantages - you can use time-proven compilers, you have stable ABI and can link objects produced by different compilers, you have no mangling problems in shared libraries interface.
Unfortunately, code I've mentioned was C++. But we do test at least two major releases of each supported compiler - 2.95 and 3.something for gcc, and 6 and 7 for MSVC. Things are bit worse with Sun compiler. They don't keep older versions available. Recently they removed compler collections from download at all and distribute only big and bloated IDEs.
If lot of time and engergy is spent porting code, it means that code would be reviewed, cleaned up, and restructured to have layers of abstraction clearly defined.
If people would try out different compilers they would eliminate non-portable constructs.
BTW, just today I've found a bug in our (proprietary) code which show itself up in tests only using MSVC 6.0. With GCC on various platform and MSVC 7.1 it wasn't caught by tests, but potentially it can cause app to crash. And we have reports from our testers about misterious crashes.
So, putting effort into porting code to as many platforms as possible would undoubtely lead to better code.
It is also possible that there would came bunch of developers who know at least two operationg system s - Linux and Windows. Most messed up code is written by people who never programmed for more than one OS.
I prefer to use scissors to ad-block. It is much more effective. And you even can find some uses for scarps of paper.
Learn Russian. People who live on Ukraine typically speak Russian or Polish better than Ukrainian. And most of Ukrainian programmers know Russian. Because there are a lot more technical literature published in Russian than in the Ukrainian.
Ukrainian language is more or less invention of nationalists politics from West Ukraine. And most educated people are located in the East part (Kharkov region) where Russian was always native language.
Ash nazg durbatuluk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatuluk, agh burzum-ishi krimpatul.
Is this a password which was engraved on this sticker? And was admin's name Sauron?
Debian people prefer to fix the bugs without updating to new upstream version whenever possible.
I suppose that apache_1.3.31-7 package would soon hit the repository and it would have this bug fixed