Why on Earth do I need to "migrate Windows settings"?!
WHAT settings? Other than my browser settings - why the FUCK do you think I use Firefox? (Or Opera in the past.) Email? How hard is it to set up a new account in whatever email client you use? Such as Thunderbird, for Christ's sakes!
My data happens to be sitting on a FAT32 partition that I can easily access from Linux. Try the reverse in Windows (without using a third party tool like explore2fs)! Yes, it would be nice to have a tool that converts it to EXT3 or whatever without losing the data, but that's hardly critical.
Everybody needs to get a grip. There is NOTHING about Linux that is a showstopper to migrating someone to it except the EXPECTATION that it will IDENTICAL to Windows.
And this nitwit wants to perpetuate that by babbling about migrating "settings."
They can't even detect our ICBM's and sub-launched IRBM's any more. How many subs do they have left running? Ten, maybe? Their hardware is excellent, but they don't even BEGIN to have enough of it any more to threaten the US. And with the military budget the US has (which IIRC is half the WORLD military budget) I really doubt we need to worry about being "conquered" any time soon - or for that matter over the next twenty or thirty years.
After which we Transhumans will disassemble the US government and the rest of the world governments anyway with nanotech.
You are beyond foolish. The real point of this space crap is exactly what I said - build up somebody's career in the Pentagon, hand out taxpayer money to the industrial thieves, and set themselves up for high-paying board jobs when they retire. It's bullshit and has been bullshit for the last hundred years.
Yes, I know there is a way to do that in Windows 98 (and apparently it's directly supported in 2000 and above), but most end users don't.
Until the BIOS directly supports CD/DVD drives (and I don't know why the industry doesn't make that effort), the floppy will continue to be critical for system repairs.
First of all, the Web site is making marketing speak to get people to use the Intel compiler on their Intel processors. If Intel didn't want people to use their compiler on AMD processors, they should have said plainly "Does not execute properly on AMD" or "Not for use on AMD processors." Obviously therefore they DO expect people to run their compiler on other non-Intel architectures.
And if they didn't want to optimize on other processors, they could have said equally plainly, "NO optimization done on anything but Intel processors." Which obviously would have led most people to NOT buy their compiler if using AMD.
So if they then deliberately sabotaged those other architectures (and I repeat, I'm not saying they did), they are guilty of fraud to their compiler customers.
Secondly, the comparison with NVIDIA vs ATI is not relevant. They are two competing architectures, but the drivers make no sense outside of their respective architectures, by definition. Drivers are not compilers. You're seriously reaching here. It's the same as the AIX on Sun argument but more so.
Operating systems other than Linux are used to drive sales of hardware, not the reverse (which is why Linux will bury Solaris, AIX, and HP/UX once it gets enough enterprise-class capabilities). If Intel wants to use compilers to do the same, they should do so openly, not with anonymous hacks (if in fact they did so, which, I repeat, I do not know.)
I'm not sure the number of US bases is the real issue, although the last figure I saw was in excess of 700 IIRC. I suspect the size and positioning are more significant.
The US is apparently relocating many of the South Korean bases south on the peninsula - evidently because they expect the conflict there to go hot at any time, and the existing bases will simply get 35,000 US troops killed in three hours. They also needed to move a lot of South Korean US troops to Iraq due to the manpower shortage.
There's no doubt that the US is projecting military power much further than they used to and for political and economic motives - the penetrations into Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East make that crystal clear.
In any event, it's clear that the suggestion of using the LaGrange Points is more of the same, i.e. "We are the only power than can seize those points for military purposes, so we should do so regardless of whether it makes any sense militarily, financially or politically."
I just read Justin Raimondo's latest column over at www.antiwar.com and he quotes foreign policy analyst Chalmers Johnson as follows:
Look at the Big Picture through the perceptive eyes of foreign policy analyst Chalmers Johnson, who notes in his book, Sorrows of Empire, that conquerors of all eras have built encampments and forts in subject provinces, but there is something unique about the Americans:
"What is most fascinating and curious about the developing American form of empire, however, is that, in its modern phase, it is solely an empire of bases, not of territories, and these bases now encircle the earth in a way that, despite centuries-old dreams of global domination, would previously have been inconceivable."
Aside from the interest groups that benefit economically from a policy of militarism and perpetual war, and such factors as securing oil and other resources, Johnson sees
"Something else at work, which I believe is the post-Cold War discovery of our immense power, rationalized by the self-glorifying conclusion that because we have it we deserve to have it. The only truly common elements in the totality of America's foreign bases are imperialism and militarism-an impulse on the part of our elites to dominate other peoples largely because we have the power to do so, followed by the strategic reasoning that, in order to defend these newly acquired outposts and control the regions they are in, we must expand the areas under our control with still more bases. To maintain its empire, the Pentagon must constantly invent new reasons for keeping in our hands as many bases as possible long after the wars and crises that led to their creation have evaporated."
So now these same assholes want to dominate the entire world from the LaGrange Points.
Probably before these morons can "seize control" of the LaGrange Points, we Transhumans will fry their asses with nanotech.
This is bullshit. They're looking for more taxpayer money to be pissed away on expensive and completely useless military projects in exchange for contractor industries funding politicians campaigns and paying them big bucks to be on the boards of said companies when they retire from the military - and enhanced military careers while they're in.
Morons can't knock over a bunch of insurgents in Iraq and they want to drop rocks on countries from the LaGrange Points. Get serious.
Fucking assholes, the lot. I say bin Laden needs to try again on the Pentagon - use more and bigger planes loaded with explosives this time. Hijack a couple freight planes - forget passenger planes. Load them up with a truckload of C4 - forget the fertilizer crap.
Make sure you get Donnie Asshole the SecDef. Catch him at home at night - drop a plane on his house. It's not rocket science. Why Arab terrorists have left this idiot breathing - let alone Sharon - is a mystery to me. I don't care how many bodyguards the idiot has, it's the work of five minutes to remove his ass from the scene - and it's long overdue. 1,740 dead US troops and scores of thousands of Iraqis because of this twit while he mumbles about "things we know that we don't know and things we don't know we don't know" or whatever that bullshit was. Anybody else recognize extreme senility in this old twat?
"it smacks a little bit of unfairness if my US based cousins can enjoy what is arguably the best part of the BBC (BBC Online) without having to contribute a penny."
Well, last week's Live 8 concert was limited to the UK - except that some people managed to put up proxy servers that allowed people outside the UK to see it. So I got my fix of the Corrs - especially Andrea being very sexy (again) with Bono (again) on "When The Stars Go Blue". (Actually I didn't get it online myself, but other people did and recorded it, converted it to MPG and I downloaded it within 24 hours of the show.)
Personally I think if you don't like paying your government a license fee to listen to commercial-free radio, overthrow your government. Then you can pay Bill Gates and the music labels fees to listen to commercial-FULL radio. And I suspect you'll pay more than $220 a year on it once they get cranked up with DRM and the like.
As an aside, do you oppose BBC World Service on shortwave?
But I think they'd prefer to have been told IN ADVANCE BY INTEL.
Presumably they use the Intel compiler because it's the fastest and also presumably many are writing code they would like to see run equally or at least acceptably fast on AMD. If in fact Intel concealed an attempt to run slower on AMD, they are defrauding their compiler customers who are in the situation specified. It's really that simple.
Whether it was in fact done deliberately or not is a matter for court-appointed analysts to determine.
Is this an assumption on your part? Have you seen the source code?
And apparently there is some question over whether Intel's compiler bothers to optimize when optimization features are present in BOTH Intel and AMD architectures. This might be attributable to laziness or incompetence, but it might also be more than that.
At the very least Intel compiler users who run on AMD should feel slighted if Intel did not bother to optimize code everywhere it could do so safely simply to protect its CPU business.
Who's right depends on an impartial engineering analysis of the compiler. Without the source code, this may prove difficult. Presumably AMD will demand exactly this - analysis of the source code by a court-appointed independent group - much like has been done in the IBM vs SCO suit. It will be interesting to see whether two opposing groups of analysts will come to opposite conclusions.
As I indicated in my post, I'm NOT assuming Intel is guilty. I'm just saying that if in fact they did not have good engineering reasons to do what they did, then it's sleazy behavior.
As for the poster who says the compiler docs say it doesn't optimize for other processors, that's fine if that's ALL it does. I doubt AMD is filing a legal case based on that simply because it would be easy to disprove and get the case thrown out of court. I make no assumptions, but it seems likely to me that AMD has some engineering reasons for saying the lack of optimization is in bad faith.
As other posters here have suggested, failing to use CPU facilities that are in BOTH the Intel and AMD architectures would seem to indicate at least a considerable lack of interest in providing compiler performance to their COMPILER customers running on AMD as opposed to their CPU customers for reasons of protecting their CPU business. If true, this would likely be considered anti-competitive behavior by the courts.
"will it not apply Intel optimizations to any chip without "Genuine Intel" the CPUID?"
And who else is a significant competitor to Intel except AMD? Fujitsu?
As for corporations being unethical, I go further than that. Most humans are "unethical". As Robert Ringer pointed out once, every human draws the line between "right" and "wrong" so that his actions fall on the "right" side of the line. I don't bother talking about "right" and "wrong" - I talk about "correct" and "incorrect." By that criteria, yes, most corporations suck rocks.
As for the "meaning" of the word "corporation", a corporation is NOT a "company". A "company" is a group of people heading in the same direction and providing mutual support and dealing with the outside world as a group. A "corporation" is a state-created entity which has legal protections not available to individuals. Ipso facto, from my view, the corporation is "evil" since it would not exist without the existence of the state - which almost by definition is "evil" (not that I take the term "evil" to have any more meaning than the words "right" or "wrong" - the effects of the state are universally bad, however.)
I don't assume every corporation is behaving badly by intention. In some cases, they behave badly by stupidity and incompetence. There may even be some corporations run by reasonably well-meaning and competent people - very few, in my lifetime experience. Certainly most of the big ones succumb to sleazy behavior at some point. Why trust them until you know otherwise?
Uhm, excuse me, but isn't the compiler assembly what is running?
And therefore you can inspect it using a debugger? Or by comparison with the output of an uncompromised compiler that does nearly but not exactly the same compilation methods used by the suspected one?
I think Thompson's point was that while inspecting the source code of the compiler will not reveal if the compiler is compromised, if you have the compiler output, you can still detect it.
This means you can certainly compromise any software if you don't have access to the source code, and if you have the source code, it could be harder. But if you have the output, you can certainly detect the compromise.
One way would be to run the same program through a compiler that is made by someone else which presumably does not use the same method of compromise and compare the output. It would be hard, but no harder I assume than detecting whether copyrighted code is included in some other software.
In fact, this is what Thompson actually said:
"You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of SOURCE-LEVEL [Emphasis added. RSH] verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code."
He did also say that the lower-level this sort of thing is done on, the harder it is to detect - it would be nearly impossible on the micro-code level. Which seems to support AMD's contention that the Intel modifications could be sabotage, not just conservatism in compiling for non-Intel processors.
In general, of course, while Thompson's point may be valid, it mostly applies to companies or hackers who may have a motivation - and more importantly, a reputation - to do something like this. It would be pointless for someone like GNU to do it. It would get out and it would damage their reputation.
While Thompson said no code other than that written by yourself can be trusted, I hardly think he requires everyone in the world to write their own assemblers, compilers, operating systems and applications (and design their own CPUs to avoid micro-code tampering). Given that, I'd say that open source is still far more likely to be trustworthy than closed-source.
"Why would AMD expect its competitor, Intel, to write software that supports AMD's own products?"
How about because Intel's compiler customers would expect Intel to do so?
It's hardly the same as refusing to allow your OS to run on another company's processors. If you don't want your compiler to support AMD, engineer it that way and say so to your customers. Building in stealth methods of sabotaging performance on the CPU is hardly the way to go (if in fact that is what Intel did without good engineering reasons why.)
Did you use to work for Enron or WorldCom by any chance?
Do you work for Microsoft?
I'm amazed at how you can find shills on/. to support almost any form of sleazy behavior on the part of some corporation.
By the way, if you'd ever noticed my comments on SUN or Real here, you wouldn't suggest I work for either of them. As it happens, I work for myself. In fact, about the only company I think I'd ever consider working for in the industry today might be SpikeSource - mostly because I like Kim Polese and open source (not necessarily in that order.)
Nobody said anything about somebody's access point conflicting with their service.
If you have your own access point and use an outside service (and there's nothing in the building contract restricting that - which there could be for exactly that reason), then all they can do is complain if your PC connects to their AP rather than yours.
They can, however, demand you fix that, shut down or get out since as long as you ARE accessing their AP without paying, you're in violation of the contract.
I doubt you've worked in tech more than 56 years, but if so, you're senile to boot.
So you don't work FOR Microsoft, eh? Good, because I've been told it's illegal for companies to masquerade advertising as personal commentary. I'm just waiting to catch a Microsoft employee spreading FUD on orders.
You're just a voluneer shill, I guess.
So I guess your livelihood just depends on Microsoft. Nothing else explains your comments.
"McAffee reported 337 trojans/worms/viruses on the system."
That all?
I had a client a few weeks ago that I reported about here on/. She had something like 900 pieces of spyware - AFTER a roommate had cleaned off "thousands", he told me - plus 109 trojans. Her other roommate had left the machine on a porn site for two weeks while she was on vacation - plus she had no firewall, no AV, no antispyware, nothing.
I had another client a couple weeks before for whom I had cleaned spyware a few months earlier. She hadn't run the Ad-Aware I installed on her machine, so she ended up with another 900 pieces of spyware plus 127 trojans from her kids visiting sports sites and sports shoe sites. This time I installed SpyBot and SpywareBlaster as well which ought to block at least some of the stuff.
There are starting to be a lot of useful tools coming out for killing spyware that can't be removed by the usual tools. I found a site that has some VB scripts that supposedly do a good job (I haven't tried them yet.) And I found a tool called PowerPrompt that starts up a command shell with Windows System privilege so you can delete stuff and kill running processes that even Administrator privilege won't be allowed to delete.
What I need to do now is build a bootable OS CD or an external hard drive that contains a clean Windows OS (probably 98 since some clients have older machines that won't run Bart's PE bootable XP) with everything needed to get rid of ANY virus, trojan, or spyware.
That should work - at least until Longhorn comes embedded with kernel-level spyware hooks.
Got that right - except it's no longer "marketing spin", it's outright LIES. We need to re-lable Microsoft from "Marketing Company" to "Lying Company" - and then just ignore anything they say, while telling end users to do the same.
However, I think we need to re-lable Microsoft from "Marketing Company" to "Lying Company" - since the two are usually synonymous and especially so in MS's case.
Slashdot Mirror
Why on Earth do I need to "migrate Windows settings"?!
WHAT settings? Other than my browser settings - why the FUCK do you think I use Firefox? (Or Opera in the past.) Email? How hard is it to set up a new account in whatever email client you use? Such as Thunderbird, for Christ's sakes!
My data happens to be sitting on a FAT32 partition that I can easily access from Linux. Try the reverse in Windows (without using a third party tool like explore2fs)! Yes, it would be nice to have a tool that converts it to EXT3 or whatever without losing the data, but that's hardly critical.
Everybody needs to get a grip. There is NOTHING about Linux that is a showstopper to migrating someone to it except the EXPECTATION that it will IDENTICAL to Windows.
And this nitwit wants to perpetuate that by babbling about migrating "settings."
Right - the Russians are a huge threat.
They can't even detect our ICBM's and sub-launched IRBM's any more. How many subs do they have left running? Ten, maybe? Their hardware is excellent, but they don't even BEGIN to have enough of it any more to threaten the US. And with the military budget the US has (which IIRC is half the WORLD military budget) I really doubt we need to worry about being "conquered" any time soon - or for that matter over the next twenty or thirty years.
After which we Transhumans will disassemble the US government and the rest of the world governments anyway with nanotech.
You are beyond foolish. The real point of this space crap is exactly what I said - build up somebody's career in the Pentagon, hand out taxpayer money to the industrial thieves, and set themselves up for high-paying board jobs when they retire. It's bullshit and has been bullshit for the last hundred years.
for dumbest lawsuit of all time.
Boot into Safe Mode.
Try to access your CD.
Yes, I know there is a way to do that in Windows 98 (and apparently it's directly supported in 2000 and above), but most end users don't.
Until the BIOS directly supports CD/DVD drives (and I don't know why the industry doesn't make that effort), the floppy will continue to be critical for system repairs.
First of all, the Web site is making marketing speak to get people to use the Intel compiler on their Intel processors. If Intel didn't want people to use their compiler on AMD processors, they should have said plainly "Does not execute properly on AMD" or "Not for use on AMD processors." Obviously therefore they DO expect people to run their compiler on other non-Intel architectures.
And if they didn't want to optimize on other processors, they could have said equally plainly, "NO optimization done on anything but Intel processors." Which obviously would have led most people to NOT buy their compiler if using AMD.
So if they then deliberately sabotaged those other architectures (and I repeat, I'm not saying they did), they are guilty of fraud to their compiler customers.
Secondly, the comparison with NVIDIA vs ATI is not relevant. They are two competing architectures, but the drivers make no sense outside of their respective architectures, by definition. Drivers are not compilers. You're seriously reaching here. It's the same as the AIX on Sun argument but more so.
Operating systems other than Linux are used to drive sales of hardware, not the reverse (which is why Linux will bury Solaris, AIX, and HP/UX once it gets enough enterprise-class capabilities). If Intel wants to use compilers to do the same, they should do so openly, not with anonymous hacks (if in fact they did so, which, I repeat, I do not know.)
I'm not sure the number of US bases is the real issue, although the last figure I saw was in excess of 700 IIRC. I suspect the size and positioning are more significant.
The US is apparently relocating many of the South Korean bases south on the peninsula - evidently because they expect the conflict there to go hot at any time, and the existing bases will simply get 35,000 US troops killed in three hours. They also needed to move a lot of South Korean US troops to Iraq due to the manpower shortage.
There's no doubt that the US is projecting military power much further than they used to and for political and economic motives - the penetrations into Eastern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East make that crystal clear.
In any event, it's clear that the suggestion of using the LaGrange Points is more of the same, i.e. "We are the only power than can seize those points for military purposes, so we should do so regardless of whether it makes any sense militarily, financially or politically."
I just read Justin Raimondo's latest column over at www.antiwar.com and he quotes foreign policy analyst Chalmers Johnson as follows:
Look at the Big Picture through the perceptive eyes of foreign policy analyst Chalmers Johnson, who notes in his book, Sorrows of Empire, that conquerors of all eras have built encampments and forts in subject provinces, but there is something unique about the Americans:
"What is most fascinating and curious about the developing American form of empire, however, is that, in its modern phase, it is solely an empire of bases, not of territories, and these bases now encircle the earth in a way that, despite centuries-old dreams of global domination, would previously have been inconceivable."
Aside from the interest groups that benefit economically from a policy of militarism and perpetual war, and such factors as securing oil and other resources, Johnson sees
"Something else at work, which I believe is the post-Cold War discovery of our immense power, rationalized by the self-glorifying conclusion that because we have it we deserve to have it. The only truly common elements in the totality of America's foreign bases are imperialism and militarism-an impulse on the part of our elites to dominate other peoples largely because we have the power to do so, followed by the strategic reasoning that, in order to defend these newly acquired outposts and control the regions they are in, we must expand the areas under our control with still more bases. To maintain its empire, the Pentagon must constantly invent new reasons for keeping in our hands as many bases as possible long after the wars and crises that led to their creation have evaporated."
So now these same assholes want to dominate the entire world from the LaGrange Points.
Probably before these morons can "seize control" of the LaGrange Points, we Transhumans will fry their asses with nanotech.
This is bullshit. They're looking for more taxpayer money to be pissed away on expensive and completely useless military projects in exchange for contractor industries funding politicians campaigns and paying them big bucks to be on the boards of said companies when they retire from the military - and enhanced military careers while they're in.
Morons can't knock over a bunch of insurgents in Iraq and they want to drop rocks on countries from the LaGrange Points. Get serious.
Fucking assholes, the lot. I say bin Laden needs to try again on the Pentagon - use more and bigger planes loaded with explosives this time. Hijack a couple freight planes - forget passenger planes. Load them up with a truckload of C4 - forget the fertilizer crap.
Make sure you get Donnie Asshole the SecDef. Catch him at home at night - drop a plane on his house. It's not rocket science. Why Arab terrorists have left this idiot breathing - let alone Sharon - is a mystery to me. I don't care how many bodyguards the idiot has, it's the work of five minutes to remove his ass from the scene - and it's long overdue. 1,740 dead US troops and scores of thousands of Iraqis because of this twit while he mumbles about "things we know that we don't know and things we don't know we don't know" or whatever that bullshit was. Anybody else recognize extreme senility in this old twat?
"it smacks a little bit of unfairness if my US based cousins can enjoy what is arguably the best part of the BBC (BBC Online) without having to contribute a penny."
Well, last week's Live 8 concert was limited to the UK - except that some people managed to put up proxy servers that allowed people outside the UK to see it. So I got my fix of the Corrs - especially Andrea being very sexy (again) with Bono (again) on "When The Stars Go Blue". (Actually I didn't get it online myself, but other people did and recorded it, converted it to MPG and I downloaded it within 24 hours of the show.)
Personally I think if you don't like paying your government a license fee to listen to commercial-free radio, overthrow your government. Then you can pay Bill Gates and the music labels fees to listen to commercial-FULL radio. And I suspect you'll pay more than $220 a year on it once they get cranked up with DRM and the like.
As an aside, do you oppose BBC World Service on shortwave?
Yes, one could tell those people that.
But I think they'd prefer to have been told IN ADVANCE BY INTEL.
Presumably they use the Intel compiler because it's the fastest and also presumably many are writing code they would like to see run equally or at least acceptably fast on AMD. If in fact Intel concealed an attempt to run slower on AMD, they are defrauding their compiler customers who are in the situation specified. It's really that simple.
Whether it was in fact done deliberately or not is a matter for court-appointed analysts to determine.
"Instead Intel just put out generic code."
Is this an assumption on your part? Have you seen the source code?
And apparently there is some question over whether Intel's compiler bothers to optimize when optimization features are present in BOTH Intel and AMD architectures. This might be attributable to laziness or incompetence, but it might also be more than that.
At the very least Intel compiler users who run on AMD should feel slighted if Intel did not bother to optimize code everywhere it could do so safely simply to protect its CPU business.
Who's right depends on an impartial engineering analysis of the compiler. Without the source code, this may prove difficult. Presumably AMD will demand exactly this - analysis of the source code by a court-appointed independent group - much like has been done in the IBM vs SCO suit. It will be interesting to see whether two opposing groups of analysts will come to opposite conclusions.
As I indicated in my post, I'm NOT assuming Intel is guilty. I'm just saying that if in fact they did not have good engineering reasons to do what they did, then it's sleazy behavior.
As for the poster who says the compiler docs say it doesn't optimize for other processors, that's fine if that's ALL it does. I doubt AMD is filing a legal case based on that simply because it would be easy to disprove and get the case thrown out of court. I make no assumptions, but it seems likely to me that AMD has some engineering reasons for saying the lack of optimization is in bad faith.
As other posters here have suggested, failing to use CPU facilities that are in BOTH the Intel and AMD architectures would seem to indicate at least a considerable lack of interest in providing compiler performance to their COMPILER customers running on AMD as opposed to their CPU customers for reasons of protecting their CPU business. If true, this would likely be considered anti-competitive behavior by the courts.
"will it not apply Intel optimizations to any chip without "Genuine Intel" the CPUID?"
And who else is a significant competitor to Intel except AMD? Fujitsu?
As for corporations being unethical, I go further than that. Most humans are "unethical". As Robert Ringer pointed out once, every human draws the line between "right" and "wrong" so that his actions fall on the "right" side of the line. I don't bother talking about "right" and "wrong" - I talk about "correct" and "incorrect." By that criteria, yes, most corporations suck rocks.
As for the "meaning" of the word "corporation", a corporation is NOT a "company". A "company" is a group of people heading in the same direction and providing mutual support and dealing with the outside world as a group. A "corporation" is a state-created entity which has legal protections not available to individuals. Ipso facto, from my view, the corporation is "evil" since it would not exist without the existence of the state - which almost by definition is "evil" (not that I take the term "evil" to have any more meaning than the words "right" or "wrong" - the effects of the state are universally bad, however.)
I don't assume every corporation is behaving badly by intention. In some cases, they behave badly by stupidity and incompetence. There may even be some corporations run by reasonably well-meaning and competent people - very few, in my lifetime experience. Certainly most of the big ones succumb to sleazy behavior at some point. Why trust them until you know otherwise?
Drawn and quartered?
Sent to Abu Ghraib? Gitmo?
Forced to submit to interviews by Rosie O'Donnell?
Wait! I know! Has to donate all his money to the OSDL! (Including his stock laundering "Foundation")
Oh, yeah, a fate worse than death for Bill! No money!
Microsoft is always hiring such people.
Uhm, excuse me, but isn't the compiler assembly what is running?
And therefore you can inspect it using a debugger? Or by comparison with the output of an uncompromised compiler that does nearly but not exactly the same compilation methods used by the suspected one?
I think Thompson's point was that while inspecting the source code of the compiler will not reveal if the compiler is compromised, if you have the compiler output, you can still detect it.
This means you can certainly compromise any software if you don't have access to the source code, and if you have the source code, it could be harder. But if you have the output, you can certainly detect the compromise.
One way would be to run the same program through a compiler that is made by someone else which presumably does not use the same method of compromise and compare the output. It would be hard, but no harder I assume than detecting whether copyrighted code is included in some other software.
In fact, this is what Thompson actually said:
"You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of SOURCE-LEVEL [Emphasis added. RSH] verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code."
He did also say that the lower-level this sort of thing is done on, the harder it is to detect - it would be nearly impossible on the micro-code level. Which seems to support AMD's contention that the Intel modifications could be sabotage, not just conservatism in compiling for non-Intel processors.
In general, of course, while Thompson's point may be valid, it mostly applies to companies or hackers who may have a motivation - and more importantly, a reputation - to do something like this. It would be pointless for someone like GNU to do it. It would get out and it would damage their reputation.
While Thompson said no code other than that written by yourself can be trusted, I hardly think he requires everyone in the world to write their own assemblers, compilers, operating systems and applications (and design their own CPUs to avoid micro-code tampering). Given that, I'd say that open source is still far more likely to be trustworthy than closed-source.
Which renders the entire discussion here moot.
The usual stupid question.
The answer: someone (other than the GCC writers) does.
Next question: How often do you review Microsoft source code?
Oh, wait, I forgot, you work for Microsoft, right?
"Why would AMD expect its competitor, Intel, to write software that supports AMD's own products?"
/. to support almost any form of sleazy behavior on the part of some corporation.
How about because Intel's compiler customers would expect Intel to do so?
It's hardly the same as refusing to allow your OS to run on another company's processors. If you don't want your compiler to support AMD, engineer it that way and say so to your customers. Building in stealth methods of sabotaging performance on the CPU is hardly the way to go (if in fact that is what Intel did without good engineering reasons why.)
Did you use to work for Enron or WorldCom by any chance?
Do you work for Microsoft?
I'm amazed at how you can find shills on
By the way, if you'd ever noticed my comments on SUN or Real here, you wouldn't suggest I work for either of them. As it happens, I work for myself. In fact, about the only company I think I'd ever consider working for in the industry today might be SpikeSource - mostly because I like Kim Polese and open source (not necessarily in that order.)
No, you don't want to see "real dialogue" - you simply want everybody to cut Microsoft some slack.
Which happens to be exactly what Billy Boy wants so he can continue to pick everybody's pockets.
Sorry, I'm not so obliging.
Bill and his minions are LIARS and I don't cut slack for LIARS.
Or the fools who believe the liars, like you.
Nobody said anything about somebody's access point conflicting with their service.
If you have your own access point and use an outside service (and there's nothing in the building contract restricting that - which there could be for exactly that reason), then all they can do is complain if your PC connects to their AP rather than yours.
They can, however, demand you fix that, shut down or get out since as long as you ARE accessing their AP without paying, you're in violation of the contract.
Go back on vacation and think it over.
I doubt you've worked in tech more than 56 years, but if so, you're senile to boot.
So you don't work FOR Microsoft, eh? Good, because I've been told it's illegal for companies to masquerade advertising as personal commentary. I'm just waiting to catch a Microsoft employee spreading FUD on orders.
You're just a voluneer shill, I guess.
So I guess your livelihood just depends on Microsoft. Nothing else explains your comments.
"But I am so fatigued with the anti-MS bent here"
Well, go back to Microsoft's internal Web site where your fellow Microsoft employees can feed you an unending stream of happy-talk.
Fucking Microsoft astroturfer.
"McAffee reported 337 trojans/worms/viruses on the system."
/. She had something like 900 pieces of spyware - AFTER a roommate had cleaned off "thousands", he told me - plus 109 trojans. Her other roommate had left the machine on a porn site for two weeks while she was on vacation - plus she had no firewall, no AV, no antispyware, nothing.
That all?
I had a client a few weeks ago that I reported about here on
I had another client a couple weeks before for whom I had cleaned spyware a few months earlier. She hadn't run the Ad-Aware I installed on her machine, so she ended up with another 900 pieces of spyware plus 127 trojans from her kids visiting sports sites and sports shoe sites. This time I installed SpyBot and SpywareBlaster as well which ought to block at least some of the stuff.
There are starting to be a lot of useful tools coming out for killing spyware that can't be removed by the usual tools. I found a site that has some VB scripts that supposedly do a good job (I haven't tried them yet.) And I found a tool called PowerPrompt that starts up a command shell with Windows System privilege so you can delete stuff and kill running processes that even Administrator privilege won't be allowed to delete.
What I need to do now is build a bootable OS CD or an external hard drive that contains a clean Windows OS (probably 98 since some clients have older machines that won't run Bart's PE bootable XP) with everything needed to get rid of ANY virus, trojan, or spyware.
That should work - at least until Longhorn comes embedded with kernel-level spyware hooks.
Got that right - except it's no longer "marketing spin", it's outright LIES. We need to re-lable Microsoft from "Marketing Company" to "Lying Company" - and then just ignore anything they say, while telling end users to do the same.
Probably true.
However, I think we need to re-lable Microsoft from "Marketing Company" to "Lying Company" - since the two are usually synonymous and especially so in MS's case.