Well, duh, we made that choice in the 80s. That's why MS is who they are, and Apple is who they are.
MS wrote an OS for an open hardware platform, Apple decided to create the entire package, hardware and software, themselves.
Heh, I remember as a kid, it was Apple vs Commodore. C64 vs the IIe. The Apple zealots are kind of like I was at 12 - the C64 was the ultimate computing machine, and Commodore was the greatest company, and Jack Tramail was my god. But I was 12 and in retrospect understand I was a moron - these modern day mac people are grown adults, and it boggles the mind.
Of course the choice in hardware for the PC platform made all the difference in the world. Especially in the days when hardware costs still dwarfed software cost. The MS "tax" (run our software) was negligible compared to the Mac "tax" (run our hardware).
I'll tell you which one of those commercials bugged me. Actually, they all bug me, they insult my intelligence, and I want to punch the metrosexual anthropomorphic Mac right in his smug faggy little trendy mczippershirt ironically-listens-to-duran-duran face, but I digress..
The one where "PC" has this bodyguard standing there, and Mac is dissing him (in his smug hip "I'm really being nice" way) for needing a firewall. The whole time the bodyguard is asking "do you want to allow this, yes or no?"
Does OS/X not ship with a firewall? Yes, it does, and it's functionally quite similar to the one in XP. Isn't that just basic common sense for any computer on the internet?
I dunno, it just struck me as especially stupid. But then the "cult of Apple" always has. Faster than light, just works, all that bumper sticker bullshit.
My understanding is that they are still using it because their deal with the record companies, who actually own the rights to the music, won't let them sell it without DRM. If some of the labels don't require DRM, then Apple should definitely not require it either, though.
As DVD Jon pointed out in a/. article yesterday, there are an assload of indie artists who would love to sell their music DRM-less on iTunes right now. Apple could allow this right now, and have it be completely transparent. Right now it's Apple that requires DRM on everything in iTunes, they just turn around and blame it on the media companies.
As long as they follow their business model they've always had - tying software to hardware - they'll never achieve enough market penetration to be Microsoft. For consumer level stuff, if iTunes becomes too cumbersome, people will move on. It's yet to face any serious competition, when it does, it won't seem like such an unstoppable force.
They could have very microsoft-ish market share if they'd sell OS/X for commodity hardware. I'd install it tomorrow if I could (i mean could in a supported way, not a hacky-half-assed way). But they won't, so they're pretty much irrelevant to me as a company. They've never factored into any buying decisions I've been a part of in the business world - I'm sure some businesses love Macs and are all Apple this and Apple that, but that's the exception that proves the rule.
They'll always remain as a sort of a curiosity. A proprietary platform in a world where hardware and the OS is a commodity. As people move towards internet based productivity apps, and towards cheaper purposed appliances for other things (gaming, media), the whole Mac vs PC thing will become less and less relevant. We already talked about this in the "future of OS's" story today - with virtualization, and other technologies, we'll be able to focus on the applications, and less attention to the chunk of code between the hardware and the application.
Bottom line; they just don't have the clout, and never will - short of a total remake of their company from the ground up.
What happened to common sense and the political middle road?
Anything right of center these days is seen as conservative (it is). Thing is, anything left of center is seen as mainstream, and people dont start thinking "hardline lefty" until you get way extreme.
Welfare state, heavy taxation, a nanny state that tells me what to eat, drink, and smoke.. These aren't lefty ideas, these are mainstream realities. Something like "ban smoking in all public places" is no longer seen as a bit of an extremist infringement on someones freedom - it's something thats necessary to protect all of our health - govt knows best.
Somebody who attends church, whether a zealot or just a casual participant, is ridiculed constantly in our media, and merely believing in the concept of a god - without ascribing to any particular religion - is enough today to have you branded a "right wing fundamentalist".
We pulled a sharp larry off the middle road a long, long time ago. We don't even know where to find it on the map anymore.
Who'd have thought all the hippy liberal movement in the 60s would have ushered in so much intolerance.
Problem: If a cop in Anytown, USA, pulls over a suspect, he checks the person's ID remotely from the squad car. He's linked to databases filled with Who's Who in the world of crime, killing and mayhem. In Iraq, there is nothing like that. When our troops and the Iraqi army enter a town, village or street, what they know about the local bad guys is pretty much in their heads, at best.
Solution: Give our troops what our cops have. The Pentagon knows this. For reasons you can imagine, it hasn't happened.
I do police RMS systems for a living. They don't have all this most magic of technology. Usually, roadside, the cop will radio in to the dispatcher to have them run an NCIC check, although increasingly they have the infrastructure to put this on a laptop in the car.
Anyways, more on topic, it isnt about the government not being able to develop this device. The government doesnt develop such devices, we do, in fact we sell something quite similar. Governments have to bid contracts and select one. The problem, as presented in TFA, is that they are trying to fight a war with peacetime procurement rules.
It's not "hurr US too stupid to make a database", it's "dems dont want to let them have the funding they need".
Besides, aren't you guys going to freak out about the privacy implications of a database that people can put names in? ONE THATS USE BY DUN DUN DUNNNN THE US GOVERNMENT?!
I grew up with video games, and so have my kids. I collect arcade machines and console, and we wholeheartedly love them. But a video game is never a match for a good toy, and the best multiplayer games we've played have never been as enjoyable as a good round of monopoly. There's no real person-to-person interaction playing Mario Party or Halo 2.
It *is* vastly more fun to play with RC cars than video game cars. I was looking at the RC aisle at Target not too long ago, milling around waiting for my wife, and got really jealous of my kids. When I was a young, cars like these were the realm of Tamiya, and required a fair amount of investment and work and model making. We'd spend hundreds crafting and honing our cars, and treat them like they were made out of gold and eggshells. Now you can get a 14V crazy honker car that does backflips for 29.99. Zip zaps are a blast, etc. A sub 50 dollar "RC car" in my youth was one of those dumb things that always went forward, and had one button that made it back up and turn right. Serious RC enthusiasts may scoff at such silly toys, but for just pure fun factor, these kids have it made.
They're two different markets.. Video games can never replace real world toys, and I feel sad for anybody who lets them.
Re:Zork and other Infocom games past
on
Hotel Dusk Review
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· Score: 1
PS: grab the free infocom interpreter, and google around for the game data files. Zork and those old games are great to play while you're sitting at work, pretending to be writing code. Nothing but keyclicks, and from a casual glance they see nothing but text on the screen.
Just tell the bossman a Grue is something in the.net global assembly. He'll just nod and go "oh yeah, take care of those grues" He doesnt know what the fuck he's talking about anyways.
Yeah we played these all the time back in the C64 days. Interactive fiction is not new.
The game sounds interesting and all, but when I want to read a good book, I'll read a good book. To me, handheld games are almost always of the casual variety, something I play for a half hour while I'm on a plane. I'm way too old to sit on the couch playing gameboy for hours at a time.
I'm not sure what exactly NX does, or how it differs from X11. Like I said, I can connect from any computer with a vncviewer client (or I can use the java applet that comes with vncserver with just a browser on the client). I can connect to 3 different desktop sessions that are all constantly running (and running different desktop environments), I can even share display 0 if I enable the VNC module for X. Windows does not do all that.
VNC is bloaty and based on rasters and bitmaps. It works, but its clunky, and both a resource and bandwidth hog. NX is a compression scheme for X11 traffic. Over dialup it feels like X11 on a LAN. I've set up everything you have, and it works, but it's nowhere near the performance of RDP into my XP box. You are flat out lying to yourself (or just clueless with windows) if you say that VNC is more responsive than Windows natively.
Mplayer plays all my video content just fine, but the interface is ugly as crap (repeat for VLC). OO.o does everything I need it to do, but it just feels slow and bloated. If I can type faster than it can display characters, it feels wrong. It feels like GeoWrite on my C64. It should not feel that way on a 2.6ghz machine with a gigabyte of RAM, and no other user apps running.
Everything on the linux desktop works, but it all feels unpolished, like it's almost there. It's felt like that forever.
All this string theory parallel universe type of crap?
If it's not, it's really just philosophy. The universe could be made up of interdimensional farts. Whatever.
Is there an actual field of science that tries to quantify and observe this stuff, or is it just people sitting around going "DUUUUUDE... like, what if the universe explodes into A MILLION UNIVERSES!"
I guess the title pHd make your daydreams more important than those of any other stoner.
Here's a better prediction: Steve Jobs will sink the entire R&D budget into another dopey stinker of a product (Lisa, Newton, Pippin), and Apple will slink back into the semi-obscurity they've almost always labored in.
The XBox 360 already beat Apple TV into my entertainment center, and with Video Marketplace here (and pretty cool) and IPTV service starting soon for it, I fail to see what's going to be so groundbreaking about apple when they release a product to do the same things, but I'm sure slashdotters will tell me all about it ad-nauseum.
I decided to give linux on the desktop another go, I've been trying it about every other year for about 12 years now. During that time I've seen windows progress from 3.1, to Vista. Sure, there's a lot to hate about microsoft, but if you cant look at that evolution and tell me they've significantly improved the product, you're just being a zealot.
During the same time, I've seen the linux desktop evolve - well none. OpenOffice works, but it just feels clunky - it feels like the versino of word I used on win 3.1 so long ago. MPlayer will start and randomly not play sound. Sound is still a big kludgy wtf-is-goin-on type thing. Should I be using ALSA, or ESD or/dev/dsp or what? What the fuck? I think ESD is what I want to use, but now all sound is delayed by a half second. What about all the piles of graphics libraries, what's a game developer supposed to work with? DirectX may be kludgy in a lot of ways, but it's a HUGE asset for Windows.
Bon Echo feels bloaty and slow - but firefox under windows XP on the same hardware is snappy and responsive. I'm using nvidias latest drivers, and glx.
I dunno, it's usable, but it was usable in the early 90s. I know that things have improved, but it still feels like the same experience I had back then - right down to fucking around with monitor frequencies by hand?. The big difference is that file is called xorg.conf now. What the fuck is up with that? Are people still using monitors without EDID? Even if a handful are, why are we still designing for that outside case? Why cant I just have " Section Montior / EDID True / End Section" or something like that?
The one thing that's gotten me excited is NX, and when I can migrate a session from windows to unix and back, and hijack the local desktop, then maybe I'll be a bit happier and find a little more use for my linux machine. Of course, Windows already does all of this.
Linux, in my home, is still just a big thing that runs samba so I can store all my porn on a computer built out of spare parts.
In 10 years, your OS choice will be pretty much irrelevant. With virtualization built into desktop processors, you could just go ahead and run a hybrid linux/bsd/windows/osx box and run whatever application you want or need natively. Your host OS would be irrelevant.
Ok, Apple will keep it's fiefdom - but there's really nothing in that world I'd miss.
I would love to see some sort of unified driver type - your driver and hardware not tied to an OS, but that's unlikely.
Not every goverment application requires the same level of validation or security. Not everything they do is secret - in fact, most of what they do is not secret.
How much security do you think your local municipalities roads department needs? I'm sure they keep track of what roads got plowed, and salted, and when. I wouldnt think that would be something they need under fort knox level security.
You can reply with "what if a hacker said dont plow this road then it got real icy and a car crashed and the TERRORISTS WIN", but the fact is, they would hardly give any thought to that scenario, they would have no problem sending updates to the database in cleartext over a wifi link secured with nothing more than WEP. In fact, the key is probably something like 1A2B3C4D5E. The database would exist as a work log - people still do their jobs in the real world.
Hell, maybe some guy wrote that little database 10 years ago, and its still running on a windows 3.1 box in a back room. I saw a dos terminal in the post office, I see ancient hardware still performing its duties every day.
No, but like they say in the article, it delayed their validation, because it's easier to criticize something open source, you can pull open the code and point at something and say "see see". The OpenSSL team cant make the same accusations against a closed source product, because the code isnt available - trade secret.
Validation is somewhat less meaningful for OSS because of this - anyone (assuming the proper skill level) could look at the code, and see for themselves if the criticisms have any merit. With a closed solution, all you have to go on is the validation - that stamp of approval.
You are correct though, this isnt that big a deal, it's just about OSS so it's/. news.
It's all going to depend on the project, and the level of security required, who it's for.
We sell to municipal, state, and federal levels of government, and have worked with a lot of different agencies, and the requirements are different every time. A city servant who needs a database to keep track of the flow rates of fire hydrants has different security concerns from a federal agent investigating a military colonel for embezzlement, or whatever.
Technically, the policy says OS's have to be POSIX compliant. The reality is, you still stumble across a windows 3.1 box chugging on some home-spun app sitting in the basement.
I can't get idea support, and the other proprietary algo's to compile right in 0.9.8, and they stop me from running the commercial NX server - need to use 0.9.7.
I use gentoo, but was playing with the ebuild by hand and it didn't seem to just be a gentoo problem. It was./configure --with-idea , and all that, like it should. Anybody know anything weird about 0.9.7 vs 0.9.8, or if it's fixed/changed in 0.9.9?
How do you know that? Do you nmap ever single machine to try to determine the host OS? That's not reliable, so you must make contact with the admin of each machine that spams you, and verify that they are all, indeed, windows.
Are you saying that it's un-possible for some guy to install sendmail on his mac and fuck up and turn it into an open relay?
Truth is I played a little bit of the hax0r game a while back, mostly looking for public ftp in my warez days, but I'd stumble across open relays. A lot (you'd be surprised) of the ftp site's I'd find, that allowed anonymous write access, were proftpd's running on linux, and merely misconfigured. I'd find the odd mac, solaris, BSD, all kinds of crazy stuff. Of course, the majority were NT4.0 boxes, which allowed anony write access by default, but a lazy admin or user can make ANY computer insecure.
If Mac was 25% marketshare, people would write trojans for it. There's no architecture immune to "moron user clicking OK when he shouldnt"
I'm so tired of paying for Windows every 5 years, and running linux on cheap commodity hardware. I cant wait until we ditch this oppressive monopoly, and everybody pays 3 grand for a 750 dollar PC, and 150 bucks a year for a service pack to the OS.
WHY ARE PEOPLE SO PRO APPLE? ARE YOU THAT FUCKING STUPID? Pro-linux I get, it's all about philosophy, but pro-apple, pro-microsoft, pro-nintendo, pro-proctor-and-gamble, I don't get - unless you're an employee or stockholder.
Do you realize how much it would suck if Apple completely took over the desktop market? I love cheap commodity hardware. They would put an end to all of that. *shudder*. Sure you could run linux, but you still have to buy a 3000 mid-range PC and ditch the OS on it.
I won't buy a Mac, ever. Quit trying to sell me one. I have no problems using a PC, and would rather keep my cash. I have no problems if you like your Mac, but seriously, GET OVER IT. It's really not that amazing or impressive to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, duh, we made that choice in the 80s. That's why MS is who they are, and Apple is who they are.
MS wrote an OS for an open hardware platform, Apple decided to create the entire package, hardware and software, themselves.
Heh, I remember as a kid, it was Apple vs Commodore. C64 vs the IIe. The Apple zealots are kind of like I was at 12 - the C64 was the ultimate computing machine, and Commodore was the greatest company, and Jack Tramail was my god. But I was 12 and in retrospect understand I was a moron - these modern day mac people are grown adults, and it boggles the mind.
Of course the choice in hardware for the PC platform made all the difference in the world. Especially in the days when hardware costs still dwarfed software cost. The MS "tax" (run our software) was negligible compared to the Mac "tax" (run our hardware).
I'll tell you which one of those commercials bugged me. Actually, they all bug me, they insult my intelligence, and I want to punch the metrosexual anthropomorphic Mac right in his smug faggy little trendy mczippershirt ironically-listens-to-duran-duran face, but I digress..
The one where "PC" has this bodyguard standing there, and Mac is dissing him (in his smug hip "I'm really being nice" way) for needing a firewall. The whole time the bodyguard is asking "do you want to allow this, yes or no?"
Does OS/X not ship with a firewall? Yes, it does, and it's functionally quite similar to the one in XP. Isn't that just basic common sense for any computer on the internet?
I dunno, it just struck me as especially stupid. But then the "cult of Apple" always has. Faster than light, just works, all that bumper sticker bullshit.
My understanding is that they are still using it because their deal with the record companies, who actually own the rights to the music, won't let them sell it without DRM. If some of the labels don't require DRM, then Apple should definitely not require it either, though.
/. article yesterday, there are an assload of indie artists who would love to sell their music DRM-less on iTunes right now. Apple could allow this right now, and have it be completely transparent. Right now it's Apple that requires DRM on everything in iTunes, they just turn around and blame it on the media companies.
As DVD Jon pointed out in a
As long as they follow their business model they've always had - tying software to hardware - they'll never achieve enough market penetration to be Microsoft. For consumer level stuff, if iTunes becomes too cumbersome, people will move on. It's yet to face any serious competition, when it does, it won't seem like such an unstoppable force.
They could have very microsoft-ish market share if they'd sell OS/X for commodity hardware. I'd install it tomorrow if I could (i mean could in a supported way, not a hacky-half-assed way). But they won't, so they're pretty much irrelevant to me as a company. They've never factored into any buying decisions I've been a part of in the business world - I'm sure some businesses love Macs and are all Apple this and Apple that, but that's the exception that proves the rule.
They'll always remain as a sort of a curiosity. A proprietary platform in a world where hardware and the OS is a commodity. As people move towards internet based productivity apps, and towards cheaper purposed appliances for other things (gaming, media), the whole Mac vs PC thing will become less and less relevant. We already talked about this in the "future of OS's" story today - with virtualization, and other technologies, we'll be able to focus on the applications, and less attention to the chunk of code between the hardware and the application.
Bottom line; they just don't have the clout, and never will - short of a total remake of their company from the ground up.
What happened to common sense and the political middle road?
Anything right of center these days is seen as conservative (it is). Thing is, anything left of center is seen as mainstream, and people dont start thinking "hardline lefty" until you get way extreme.
Welfare state, heavy taxation, a nanny state that tells me what to eat, drink, and smoke.. These aren't lefty ideas, these are mainstream realities. Something like "ban smoking in all public places" is no longer seen as a bit of an extremist infringement on someones freedom - it's something thats necessary to protect all of our health - govt knows best.
Somebody who attends church, whether a zealot or just a casual participant, is ridiculed constantly in our media, and merely believing in the concept of a god - without ascribing to any particular religion - is enough today to have you branded a "right wing fundamentalist".
We pulled a sharp larry off the middle road a long, long time ago. We don't even know where to find it on the map anymore.
Who'd have thought all the hippy liberal movement in the 60s would have ushered in so much intolerance.
You dont need a warrant to conduct a search, but without one any evidence you collect will be useless in court.
Why does there have to be an end? Why cant it be turtles all the way down?
We as humans have to shoehorn the universe into our concept of birth, life, and death.
I do police RMS systems for a living. They don't have all this most magic of technology. Usually, roadside, the cop will radio in to the dispatcher to have them run an NCIC check, although increasingly they have the infrastructure to put this on a laptop in the car.
Anyways, more on topic, it isnt about the government not being able to develop this device. The government doesnt develop such devices, we do, in fact we sell something quite similar. Governments have to bid contracts and select one. The problem, as presented in TFA, is that they are trying to fight a war with peacetime procurement rules.
It's not "hurr US too stupid to make a database", it's "dems dont want to let them have the funding they need".
Besides, aren't you guys going to freak out about the privacy implications of a database that people can put names in? ONE THATS USE BY DUN DUN DUNNNN THE US GOVERNMENT?!
I grew up with video games, and so have my kids. I collect arcade machines and console, and we wholeheartedly love them. But a video game is never a match for a good toy, and the best multiplayer games we've played have never been as enjoyable as a good round of monopoly. There's no real person-to-person interaction playing Mario Party or Halo 2.
It *is* vastly more fun to play with RC cars than video game cars. I was looking at the RC aisle at Target not too long ago, milling around waiting for my wife, and got really jealous of my kids. When I was a young, cars like these were the realm of Tamiya, and required a fair amount of investment and work and model making. We'd spend hundreds crafting and honing our cars, and treat them like they were made out of gold and eggshells. Now you can get a 14V crazy honker car that does backflips for 29.99. Zip zaps are a blast, etc. A sub 50 dollar "RC car" in my youth was one of those dumb things that always went forward, and had one button that made it back up and turn right. Serious RC enthusiasts may scoff at such silly toys, but for just pure fun factor, these kids have it made.
They're two different markets.. Video games can never replace real world toys, and I feel sad for anybody who lets them.
PS: grab the free infocom interpreter, and google around for the game data files. Zork and those old games are great to play while you're sitting at work, pretending to be writing code. Nothing but keyclicks, and from a casual glance they see nothing but text on the screen.
.net global assembly. He'll just nod and go "oh yeah, take care of those grues" He doesnt know what the fuck he's talking about anyways.
Just tell the bossman a Grue is something in the
Yeah we played these all the time back in the C64 days. Interactive fiction is not new.
The game sounds interesting and all, but when I want to read a good book, I'll read a good book. To me, handheld games are almost always of the casual variety, something I play for a half hour while I'm on a plane. I'm way too old to sit on the couch playing gameboy for hours at a time.
VNC is bloaty and based on rasters and bitmaps. It works, but its clunky, and both a resource and bandwidth hog. NX is a compression scheme for X11 traffic. Over dialup it feels like X11 on a LAN. I've set up everything you have, and it works, but it's nowhere near the performance of RDP into my XP box. You are flat out lying to yourself (or just clueless with windows) if you say that VNC is more responsive than Windows natively.
Mplayer plays all my video content just fine, but the interface is ugly as crap (repeat for VLC). OO.o does everything I need it to do, but it just feels slow and bloated. If I can type faster than it can display characters, it feels wrong. It feels like GeoWrite on my C64. It should not feel that way on a 2.6ghz machine with a gigabyte of RAM, and no other user apps running.
Everything on the linux desktop works, but it all feels unpolished, like it's almost there. It's felt like that forever.
I'll try that.
Why do all the docs still tell me to run xorgconfig, which asks me the same questions, in the same console interface, as back in 1993?
Because physicists dont look shit up on WordNet.
The word delegate means different things to a security guard at the UN, and a C# programmer.
All this string theory parallel universe type of crap?
If it's not, it's really just philosophy. The universe could be made up of interdimensional farts. Whatever.
Is there an actual field of science that tries to quantify and observe this stuff, or is it just people sitting around going "DUUUUUDE... like, what if the universe explodes into A MILLION UNIVERSES!"
I guess the title pHd make your daydreams more important than those of any other stoner.
Here's a better prediction: Steve Jobs will sink the entire R&D budget into another dopey stinker of a product (Lisa, Newton, Pippin), and Apple will slink back into the semi-obscurity they've almost always labored in.
The XBox 360 already beat Apple TV into my entertainment center, and with Video Marketplace here (and pretty cool) and IPTV service starting soon for it, I fail to see what's going to be so groundbreaking about apple when they release a product to do the same things, but I'm sure slashdotters will tell me all about it ad-nauseum.
I decided to give linux on the desktop another go, I've been trying it about every other year for about 12 years now. During that time I've seen windows progress from 3.1, to Vista. Sure, there's a lot to hate about microsoft, but if you cant look at that evolution and tell me they've significantly improved the product, you're just being a zealot.
/dev/dsp or what? What the fuck? I think ESD is what I want to use, but now all sound is delayed by a half second. What about all the piles of graphics libraries, what's a game developer supposed to work with? DirectX may be kludgy in a lot of ways, but it's a HUGE asset for Windows.
During the same time, I've seen the linux desktop evolve - well none. OpenOffice works, but it just feels clunky - it feels like the versino of word I used on win 3.1 so long ago. MPlayer will start and randomly not play sound. Sound is still a big kludgy wtf-is-goin-on type thing. Should I be using ALSA, or ESD or
Bon Echo feels bloaty and slow - but firefox under windows XP on the same hardware is snappy and responsive. I'm using nvidias latest drivers, and glx.
I dunno, it's usable, but it was usable in the early 90s. I know that things have improved, but it still feels like the same experience I had back then - right down to fucking around with monitor frequencies by hand?. The big difference is that file is called xorg.conf now. What the fuck is up with that? Are people still using monitors without EDID? Even if a handful are, why are we still designing for that outside case? Why cant I just have " Section Montior / EDID True / End Section" or something like that?
The one thing that's gotten me excited is NX, and when I can migrate a session from windows to unix and back, and hijack the local desktop, then maybe I'll be a bit happier and find a little more use for my linux machine. Of course, Windows already does all of this.
Linux, in my home, is still just a big thing that runs samba so I can store all my porn on a computer built out of spare parts.
In 10 years, your OS choice will be pretty much irrelevant. With virtualization built into desktop processors, you could just go ahead and run a hybrid linux/bsd/windows/osx box and run whatever application you want or need natively. Your host OS would be irrelevant.
Ok, Apple will keep it's fiefdom - but there's really nothing in that world I'd miss.
I would love to see some sort of unified driver type - your driver and hardware not tied to an OS, but that's unlikely.
Not every goverment application requires the same level of validation or security. Not everything they do is secret - in fact, most of what they do is not secret.
How much security do you think your local municipalities roads department needs? I'm sure they keep track of what roads got plowed, and salted, and when. I wouldnt think that would be something they need under fort knox level security.
You can reply with "what if a hacker said dont plow this road then it got real icy and a car crashed and the TERRORISTS WIN", but the fact is, they would hardly give any thought to that scenario, they would have no problem sending updates to the database in cleartext over a wifi link secured with nothing more than WEP. In fact, the key is probably something like 1A2B3C4D5E. The database would exist as a work log - people still do their jobs in the real world.
Hell, maybe some guy wrote that little database 10 years ago, and its still running on a windows 3.1 box in a back room. I saw a dos terminal in the post office, I see ancient hardware still performing its duties every day.
No, but like they say in the article, it delayed their validation, because it's easier to criticize something open source, you can pull open the code and point at something and say "see see". The OpenSSL team cant make the same accusations against a closed source product, because the code isnt available - trade secret.
/. news.
Validation is somewhat less meaningful for OSS because of this - anyone (assuming the proper skill level) could look at the code, and see for themselves if the criticisms have any merit. With a closed solution, all you have to go on is the validation - that stamp of approval.
You are correct though, this isnt that big a deal, it's just about OSS so it's
It's all going to depend on the project, and the level of security required, who it's for.
We sell to municipal, state, and federal levels of government, and have worked with a lot of different agencies, and the requirements are different every time. A city servant who needs a database to keep track of the flow rates of fire hydrants has different security concerns from a federal agent investigating a military colonel for embezzlement, or whatever.
Technically, the policy says OS's have to be POSIX compliant. The reality is, you still stumble across a windows 3.1 box chugging on some home-spun app sitting in the basement.
I can't get idea support, and the other proprietary algo's to compile right in 0.9.8, and they stop me from running the commercial NX server - need to use 0.9.7.
./configure --with-idea , and all that, like it should. Anybody know anything weird about 0.9.7 vs 0.9.8, or if it's fixed/changed in 0.9.9?
I use gentoo, but was playing with the ebuild by hand and it didn't seem to just be a gentoo problem. It was
Sure you could, *if* you knew exactly what the insecurities were and worked around them.
How do you know that? Do you nmap ever single machine to try to determine the host OS? That's not reliable, so you must make contact with the admin of each machine that spams you, and verify that they are all, indeed, windows.
Are you saying that it's un-possible for some guy to install sendmail on his mac and fuck up and turn it into an open relay?
Truth is I played a little bit of the hax0r game a while back, mostly looking for public ftp in my warez days, but I'd stumble across open relays. A lot (you'd be surprised) of the ftp site's I'd find, that allowed anonymous write access, were proftpd's running on linux, and merely misconfigured. I'd find the odd mac, solaris, BSD, all kinds of crazy stuff. Of course, the majority were NT4.0 boxes, which allowed anony write access by default, but a lazy admin or user can make ANY computer insecure.
If Mac was 25% marketshare, people would write trojans for it. There's no architecture immune to "moron user clicking OK when he shouldnt"
I'm so tired of paying for Windows every 5 years, and running linux on cheap commodity hardware. I cant wait until we ditch this oppressive monopoly, and everybody pays 3 grand for a 750 dollar PC, and 150 bucks a year for a service pack to the OS.
WHY ARE PEOPLE SO PRO APPLE? ARE YOU THAT FUCKING STUPID? Pro-linux I get, it's all about philosophy, but pro-apple, pro-microsoft, pro-nintendo, pro-proctor-and-gamble, I don't get - unless you're an employee or stockholder.
Do you realize how much it would suck if Apple completely took over the desktop market? I love cheap commodity hardware. They would put an end to all of that. *shudder*. Sure you could run linux, but you still have to buy a 3000 mid-range PC and ditch the OS on it.
I won't buy a Mac, ever. Quit trying to sell me one. I have no problems using a PC, and would rather keep my cash. I have no problems if you like your Mac, but seriously, GET OVER IT. It's really not that amazing or impressive to me.