You appear to be suggesting that we solve the spam problem by sending more spam.
The currenty existing spammers are not going to cease their activities - and if they had any respect for common sense conventions or for good manners then the spam problem would never have occured.
So the only way we're going to implemnet your educational strategy is if we do it ourselves.
Somhow I have my doubts about the effectiveness of this, except for providing a pseudo-ligitimate pretext for scumbag spammers. Honestly, your honour, I wasn't going to take anyone's money! All those Nigerian scam eamils were purely an education measure. They said it was ok on Slashdot!
Oh and just for the record: I would object to receiving the "spams" you describe, just as much as all the other crap I have to filter daily.
This begs the question: Is it better for security researchers to avoid publicly criticizing e-voting flaws? Is public faith in the system more important than overall system security?
See, this is exactly my argument about my paying my taxes. They shouldn't go checking up to see if people have paid or not. It just undermines confidence in society, and without that where are we. I mean people are basically honest and trustworthy, yeah?
Yeah, right. I can't see them buying that one.
So if the politicicians don't think think it sensible to trust us not to cheat them, why on earth should it be sensible for us to trust them not to cheat us.
And if anyone ever finds me begging such a blithering, brain-dead bonehead question, feel free to shoot me. I'd sooner be dead than be that short of ideas.
They also apparently install spam relays and launch DDOS attack on anti-spam sites.
I'm no fan of Microsoft and dubious about any attempt to coerce a large block of people into a sigle pigeonhole - that doesn't mean I'm going to buy the "robin hood" stoy over the "criminal scum". In fact, after the recent slowdowns due to worms and the relentless increase in spam, I'm tending rather strongly toward the latter
The GPL is a truly revolutionary license, it is *designed*, as SCO says, to reduce the financial value of proprietary software
And given the artificially inflated prices charged by various software vendors, MS in particular, those prices could stand a little reduction.
If the software companies want to sell product, all they haveto do is write better software than a bunch of amateurs and hobbyists. I mean how hard can that be?
And if they can't manage that then arguably their software wasn't worth much in the first place
Interesting, isn't it? I think there's an opportunity here, if the reseller's have the gumption for it.
I mean, they have a whole load of customers, and nothing to sell. They know what their buyers want and need in a system. And there are a lot if techies at a loose and at the moment.
Sounds like an ideal opportunity for a few ex SCO resellers to band together and found a linux distro.
After all, the other thing that came across strongly from those articles was this: there's sweet f.a. that SCO unix can do that liunx can't.
I have broadband and a good solid firewall. I use a deny-by-defualt iptables script on my gateway box and and a second layer filtering outbound connections on my desktop machine. I have neither need nor desire for my ISP to provide a firewall. If they start closing my ports for me, then I get myself a new ISP.
How easy do you suppose it's going to be to get ISPs to open one of those ports? If it's too hard, written confirmation and three days notice perhaps, then its no good if I want to, say, open a port of ssh for a few days.
On the other hand, if it's too easy then it's going to be easy for some hacker to social engineer himself access to port X, should he or she so desire.
Lastly, if ISPs get to thinking that ports are some sort resource that they control, then its only a matter of time before they start charging for them. If I wanted to subscribe to one of those browser only services then that's what I would have done.
I'd have no problem with a ISP based firewall that I had administrative control over. It should be easy enough to design a web-based interface, similar to the webmail pages you see everywhere. Allow me to configure firewall rules at the ISP and I'll use that as well as my own setup. But the minute they start dictating what I can do with which, or messing around with my settings, I look for a new provider.
But I'll not willingly be locked in a cage. Not for my own protection, nor for anyone else's.
It was called the Selden Patent and it gave its owners the exclusive right to sell a very basic invention: self-propelled vehicles powered by internal combustion engines. Many people in the car business thought this patent was an outrage...
So no it wasn't a patent on a specific type of engine. The patent was granted on engine driven vehicles in general. It took eight years and an appeal before the court ruling restricted the scope of the patent to one specific engine.
Is it fair to thow in a Non Journaling FS in a benchmark against a bunch of Journaling ones?
Yes. Of course. The ext2 numbers provide a baseline for the comparison comparison. Any journaled FS that could match it would have to be very good indeed. This isn't explicity stated anywhere - but this was posted to the kernel list. They can reasonably be expected to know the difference between ext2 and the rest. It's all data. Data is good.
I know we're used to seeing "benchmarks" used as corporate propaganda, but let's not forget what they're supposed to be used for
Now now. You can hardly blame open source for the tendancy of people not to read all the posts on a popular mailing list.:D
But you're right that a lot of projects get started and never get finished. That's part of the learning process. Some of them will decide they can have more fun engaged in other pastimes; some of them will move on to better researched projects; some of them will push on and complete the project even if it doesn't work; and some of them may succceed and produce something useful.
Bear in mind that the there is a large faiulure rate for corporate computer development as well. The only difference is that, since no company wants to be associated with a failed project, the corporate falures tend to get quietly swept inder the carpet. The open source ones however languish on sourceforge for all to see,
You still haven't shown me anything that looks like a failure of the open source development model.
I do think you're trolling, but I'll byte anyway...
Perfect example of how open-source has failed us; EVERYBODY's gotta invent their own wheel instead of helping to make the existing wheel(s) better.
That's not the failure of the open source model - that is its strength.
Something like windows is very limited in how it can evolve for two reasons. On the one hand there is the development history which can make it very expensive to make certain changes, if they would affect a lot of code, and then there is the corporate culture behind the project that has a certain way of doing things. Both these factors tend to enforce a somewhat linear style of evolution for a system. Windows evolves, yes, but only along certain lines in one general direction. Some of the projects I've worked on - if they'd invented the wheel it'd have been triangular.
"It works if you put enough power behind it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
The first problem is lessened with open source, A project can split in several directions at once and the most useful results will eventually be the ones to predominate. This is only possible beause there are (in general) no dealines; no financial risk involved and no one is required to use the new packages generated by this divergence.
The second probles does affect open source, but far less so. There is pressure from the community to use established methodologies and packages, but this cannot be enforced.
The upshot is that a lot of coding gets done in the open source world that would be politically impossible in a corporate environment. Which means that we see a lot of creativity. Sure a lot of that is misguided, and a lot of these divergent projects fail. Then again, a lot of corporate projects fail too - we just don't hear so much about those ones:) Meanwhile the successful ones can lead developemnt in unexpected directions, interact with other new ideas to produce even stranger offspring, or diverge into something else entirely
The thing that stops everything from diverginf completely is that there is a nequal pressure to standardise and unify packages. That's factor two again.
It's an unstable equilibrium. Divergence and convergence, Ying and Yang. Because square wheels need reinventing.
Closed and opened source software provides jobs and services for an ass load of people. The UN should treat them equally and fairly.
So are you calling for a level playing field? If so, maybe they'd be better off drawing up giudelines based upon criteria other than licencing terms.
Price, or example, would seem a valid consideration. Corporations make descisions based on price internally all the time. That's not just cost of software - there's forced hardware upgrades, subscription based licences, all valid as criteria to decide
The there's security. How easy is it to verify that the softwear doesn't have any nasty backdoors in it? Can you look at it yourself, or do you have to take the vendor's word? Do you have to sign an NDA - and if so and you find a big are you allowed to tell anyone? How easy it is to get it patched if exploits are discovered?
Which brings us to maintainability: What has to happen if it doesn't do quite what you need? Do you have pay the vendor? Wait for the next release. Put up with it as it is? Or can they get local talent to fix it?
Then there's interoperability - by which I mean with more than one vendor. Do you want to lock your taxpayers/users/whatever into using a the same vedor as you use, or are you going to choose a solution that has no vested interest in lock-in?
It's issues like these, and the frustration they engender, that are, IMHO, turning the free software/open source movement from a minority hobby into a movement that can challenge the mighty microsoft. So from that viewpoint I agree with you. We don't need mandated free software - just some specific, verifiable criteria for guidelines. I expect there'd be some vigorous debate as to what those criteria should be - but the debate itself would be welcome.
Instead we get some carefully meaningless drivel that allows corporate software to push as hard as they like and gives them a basis to cry "foul!" whenever anyone chooses linux.
The Xen layer wil have some sort of deep down DRM. It'll be set up so XP won't run on any but an MS signed Xen binary which MS then bundles with XP. The don't charge for the Xen software since that's GPL'd but they can and do charge for the enabling signature.
Suddenlly MS have a windows platform that runs linux. If the distro has a MS digital signature that is. They get to charge for that too. Probably they'll require linux apps to each bear a separate signature so they can sell or whithold individual apps according to marketing strategy.
Of course ayone else is welcome to sign their own linux distros for Xen - but not for the MS Xen release because redmond won't discose the numbers and the DMCA makes reverse egineering illegal.
Meanwhile - who needs linux? XP now does all that strtaight out of the box! Hoorah!
Yep - that's why I put a lock on my front door- to help prevent crime. A lot of people say that I'm just worried about my stuff being ripped off, but that's not true! I am passionately committed to whole crime prevetion thing.
Trouble is, Microsoft want to be the ones that put the lock on my house. For my protection, obviously. And they'll keep a copy just in case. And so they can let themselves whenever they want to. Just to check my security. And make sure I've not pinched anything. And maybe redecorate if they feel like it.
And if they sometimes take stuff away, well that's ok because it really all belongs to them anyway. All I do is pay for it, it says so on the licence.
And come the advent of Palladium, if I want to get in myself, all I'll have to do is ask them...
Just as Perl is mainly defined by what Larry Wall has wanted it to be, Linux is mostly defined by what Linus Torvalds wants Linux to be
I tend to disagree there. Perhaps if you take a strict RMS view and define Linux as the kernel and only the kernel, then yes, that'd be correct.
Most people think of Linux as the OS however, and for the OS there are just too many different forces at work for any one vision to dominate they way Larry's personality pervades Perl.
I mean we're talking about an OS that has distros designed to run in tiny embedded systems, and others optimised for a bog iron server role. We have multi-cd distros like RedHat, LiveCD systems like knoppix, and all-on-one-floppy systems like tomsrtbt.
Thinking about it, it'd be hard to write a meaningful standard that supported that level of diversity.
Linux is a product of the platforms and packages and desktops and people, and the other systems with which if must interact, and of the synergy generated by all of these existing in endless combinatons, In that sense, linux can be considered to be more of an emergent pheonomenon than an artifact. And that is very cool.
Linux is not a standard. It is often standards compliant, and more importantly it is a platform that enables standards compliance - you can write a linux app to comply with any standard so long as it doesn't actually prohibit linux itself.
When it comes to "open standards", "open" is a lot more important than "standard".
If there is a job that an Indian programmer can do significantly cheaper than an American programmer (total cost factored in, not just wages), then PLEASE let the Indian do it and sell the product to me for less.
"Sell the product for less?" Surely you mean "enhance stockholder value", Increase the next dividend perhaps? Or maybe vote the board a whopping big pay increase?
Why do you assume the consumer is going to see any of the savings?
We got SCO, MS and Sun on one side, IBM, HP, and the linux comunity on the other... A few more and we this issue could end up polarising the industry. That'd be interesting...
Are we talking about ROI for shareholders? 'cause that'd be better served by slave labour.
What would be in the corporate interest would be if a single corporation controlled all the assets and all the resources and doled out only as much to the proles as was needed to stave off bloody revolution.
The corporate interest is the corporate interest. It may occasionally co-incide with the public interest, but to assume the two to be identical is stupidity; to define public interest in terms of corportate interests is little short of villainy
you can't just assert a slippery slope without proof
I'd have said history pretty much backs m up here. Why do we have standard weights and measures? Because, among other reasons, traders will sel short measure if you don't watch them. Not all of them, perhaps. But it only needs one or two and the rest will follow to stay competetive.
If I go down to the supermarket I see row after row of stuff, all of it marked by weight aned volume. The only reasons those volumes are there is because the law mandates them. And also makes it an offence for the contents not to match the stated quantity. Why pass a law like that? Unless there was widespread cheating on the part of traders.
This is human nature. People test their limits to see what they can get away with. If on one complains they test a bit more. If we don't complain here the ISPs will shrink it a bit more in response to evil increased file sharing, MSBlast virus actiuvity, excessive use of MSN, the evil influence of the moon and invisible bandwidth eating spiders from the planet Zorgon. If they think you'll put up with it they will surely try it on.
And even if not - they'll still taking away a resource that has been paid for by their customers. And that still isn't right.
Sure. I pay monthly for a 0.5Mbps ADSL connection, (.25 upstream). That's how they're advertised and sold round here. 0.5Mbps always on, 24/7
0.5 Mbps means half a million bits per second. That's a unit of bandwidth. They dont sell me a gigabyte a month, or some other arbitary amount. They sell me half a megabit per second. If I want to donwload at that rate 24/7, well that is what is in my contract. That is what they sold me. That is what I pay for. That is what I want.
I'd take it pretty amis if my ISP decided to cap me.
Lots of people subscribe to a service that offers 0.5Mbps 24/7 because they actaully want 0.5 Mbps 24/7. The fact that a lot of customers do not use the entirely of the allocation for which they pay does not make those that do so into bad people.
Nor does the legality or illegality of P2P file sharing, which is a separate issue entirely.
Difference being that, unlike at your school, the ISP's top users are using bandwith that they already paid for
As for the flexible caps, what's to stop them from capping everyone down 56k+1 (faster than dial up) and further dividing the bandwidth? You don't think thet will? Someone will if this trend runs uncheked.
A) acknowledge that there will always be some bias due to researcher preconceptions;
B) state your bating methods explicity;
C) include a caveat in the conclusion to the effect that different bait may yeild different results.
Then at least the next fellow who works with your results can use different parameters and comapare results.
Slashdot Mirror
The currenty existing spammers are not going to cease their activities - and if they had any respect for common sense conventions or for good manners then the spam problem would never have occured.
So the only way we're going to implemnet your educational strategy is if we do it ourselves.
Somhow I have my doubts about the effectiveness of this, except for providing a pseudo-ligitimate pretext for scumbag spammers. Honestly, your honour, I wasn't going to take anyone's money! All those Nigerian scam eamils were purely an education measure. They said it was ok on Slashdot!
Oh and just for the record: I would object to receiving the "spams" you describe, just as much as all the other crap I have to filter daily.
Yeah, right. I can't see them buying that one.
So if the politicicians don't think think it sensible to trust us not to cheat them, why on earth should it be sensible for us to trust them not to cheat us.
And if anyone ever finds me begging such a blithering, brain-dead bonehead question, feel free to shoot me. I'd sooner be dead than be that short of ideas.
sheesh...
I'm no fan of Microsoft and dubious about any attempt to coerce a large block of people into a sigle pigeonhole - that doesn't mean I'm going to buy the "robin hood" stoy over the "criminal scum". In fact, after the recent slowdowns due to worms and the relentless increase in spam, I'm tending rather strongly toward the latter
If the software companies want to sell product, all they haveto do is write better software than a bunch of amateurs and hobbyists. I mean how hard can that be?
And if they can't manage that then arguably their software wasn't worth much in the first place
I mean, they have a whole load of customers, and nothing to sell. They know what their buyers want and need in a system. And there are a lot if techies at a loose and at the moment.
Sounds like an ideal opportunity for a few ex SCO resellers to band together and found a linux distro.
After all, the other thing that came across strongly from those articles was this: there's sweet f.a. that SCO unix can do that liunx can't.
How easy do you suppose it's going to be to get ISPs to open one of those ports? If it's too hard, written confirmation and three days notice perhaps, then its no good if I want to, say, open a port of ssh for a few days.
On the other hand, if it's too easy then it's going to be easy for some hacker to social engineer himself access to port X, should he or she so desire.
Lastly, if ISPs get to thinking that ports are some sort resource that they control, then its only a matter of time before they start charging for them. If I wanted to subscribe to one of those browser only services then that's what I would have done.
I'd have no problem with a ISP based firewall that I had administrative control over. It should be easy enough to design a web-based interface, similar to the webmail pages you see everywhere. Allow me to configure firewall rules at the ISP and I'll use that as well as my own setup. But the minute they start dictating what I can do with which, or messing around with my settings, I look for a new provider.
But I'll not willingly be locked in a cage. Not for my own protection, nor for anyone else's.
I know we're used to seeing "benchmarks" used as corporate propaganda, but let's not forget what they're supposed to be used for
Managers who will let the programmers get on with the job
Corporate structure that will let the management let the programmers get on with the job
But you're right that a lot of projects get started and never get finished. That's part of the learning process. Some of them will decide they can have more fun engaged in other pastimes; some of them will move on to better researched projects; some of them will push on and complete the project even if it doesn't work; and some of them may succceed and produce something useful.
Bear in mind that the there is a large faiulure rate for corporate computer development as well. The only difference is that, since no company wants to be associated with a failed project, the corporate falures tend to get quietly swept inder the carpet. The open source ones however languish on sourceforge for all to see,
You still haven't shown me anything that looks like a failure of the open source development model.
Something like windows is very limited in how it can evolve for two reasons. On the one hand there is the development history which can make it very expensive to make certain changes, if they would affect a lot of code, and then there is the corporate culture behind the project that has a certain way of doing things. Both these factors tend to enforce a somewhat linear style of evolution for a system. Windows evolves, yes, but only along certain lines in one general direction. Some of the projects I've worked on - if they'd invented the wheel it'd have been triangular. "It works if you put enough power behind it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
The first problem is lessened with open source, A project can split in several directions at once and the most useful results will eventually be the ones to predominate. This is only possible beause there are (in general) no dealines; no financial risk involved and no one is required to use the new packages generated by this divergence.
The second probles does affect open source, but far less so. There is pressure from the community to use established methodologies and packages, but this cannot be enforced.
The upshot is that a lot of coding gets done in the open source world that would be politically impossible in a corporate environment. Which means that we see a lot of creativity. Sure a lot of that is misguided, and a lot of these divergent projects fail. Then again, a lot of corporate projects fail too - we just don't hear so much about those ones:) Meanwhile the successful ones can lead developemnt in unexpected directions, interact with other new ideas to produce even stranger offspring, or diverge into something else entirely
The thing that stops everything from diverginf completely is that there is a nequal pressure to standardise and unify packages. That's factor two again.
It's an unstable equilibrium. Divergence and convergence, Ying and Yang. Because square wheels need reinventing.
Price, or example, would seem a valid consideration. Corporations make descisions based on price internally all the time. That's not just cost of software - there's forced hardware upgrades, subscription based licences, all valid as criteria to decide
The there's security. How easy is it to verify that the softwear doesn't have any nasty backdoors in it? Can you look at it yourself, or do you have to take the vendor's word? Do you have to sign an NDA - and if so and you find a big are you allowed to tell anyone? How easy it is to get it patched if exploits are discovered?
Which brings us to maintainability: What has to happen if it doesn't do quite what you need? Do you have pay the vendor? Wait for the next release. Put up with it as it is? Or can they get local talent to fix it?
Then there's interoperability - by which I mean with more than one vendor. Do you want to lock your taxpayers/users/whatever into using a the same vedor as you use, or are you going to choose a solution that has no vested interest in lock-in?
It's issues like these, and the frustration they engender, that are, IMHO, turning the free software/open source movement from a minority hobby into a movement that can challenge the mighty microsoft. So from that viewpoint I agree with you. We don't need mandated free software - just some specific, verifiable criteria for guidelines. I expect there'd be some vigorous debate as to what those criteria should be - but the debate itself would be welcome.
Instead we get some carefully meaningless drivel that allows corporate software to push as hard as they like and gives them a basis to cry "foul!" whenever anyone chooses linux.
The Xen layer wil have some sort of deep down DRM. It'll be set up so XP won't run on any but an MS signed Xen binary which MS then bundles with XP. The don't charge for the Xen software since that's GPL'd but they can and do charge for the enabling signature.
Suddenlly MS have a windows platform that runs linux. If the distro has a MS digital signature that is. They get to charge for that too. Probably they'll require linux apps to each bear a separate signature so they can sell or whithold individual apps according to marketing strategy.
Of course ayone else is welcome to sign their own linux distros for Xen - but not for the MS Xen release because redmond won't discose the numbers and the DMCA makes reverse egineering illegal.
Meanwhile - who needs linux? XP now does all that strtaight out of the box! Hoorah!
Sanity check, anyone?
The trouble is that as a died in the wool techie, it's difficult getting my head into a marketing worldview.
Does anyone know of a marketing-for-geeks HOWTO file anywhere? More of us should learn how to think like that
Trouble is, Microsoft want to be the ones that put the lock on my house. For my protection, obviously. And they'll keep a copy just in case. And so they can let themselves whenever they want to. Just to check my security. And make sure I've not pinched anything. And maybe redecorate if they feel like it.
And if they sometimes take stuff away, well that's ok because it really all belongs to them anyway. All I do is pay for it, it says so on the licence.
And come the advent of Palladium, if I want to get in myself, all I'll have to do is ask them...
Yeah, good job boys. Quality work.
I mean we're talking about an OS that has distros designed to run in tiny embedded systems, and others optimised for a bog iron server role. We have multi-cd distros like RedHat, LiveCD systems like knoppix, and all-on-one-floppy systems like tomsrtbt.
Thinking about it, it'd be hard to write a meaningful standard that supported that level of diversity.
Linux is a product of the platforms and packages and desktops and people, and the other systems with which if must interact, and of the synergy generated by all of these existing in endless combinatons, In that sense, linux can be considered to be more of an emergent pheonomenon than an artifact. And that is very cool.
Linux is not a standard. It is often standards compliant, and more importantly it is a platform that enables standards compliance - you can write a linux app to comply with any standard so long as it doesn't actually prohibit linux itself.
When it comes to "open standards", "open" is a lot more important than "standard".
Why do you assume the consumer is going to see any of the savings?
...GRIEVOUS abuse of CAPITALISATION...
Yayyyyy, HP! Yaayyyyyyyy!!!
We got SCO, MS and Sun on one side, IBM, HP, and the linux comunity on the other... A few more and we this issue could end up polarising the industry. That'd be interesting...
Are we talking about ROI for shareholders? 'cause that'd be better served by slave labour.
What would be in the corporate interest would be if a single corporation controlled all the assets and all the resources and doled out only as much to the proles as was needed to stave off bloody revolution.
The corporate interest is the corporate interest. It may occasionally co-incide with the public interest, but to assume the two to be identical is stupidity; to define public interest in terms of corportate interests is little short of villainy
If I go down to the supermarket I see row after row of stuff, all of it marked by weight aned volume. The only reasons those volumes are there is because the law mandates them. And also makes it an offence for the contents not to match the stated quantity. Why pass a law like that? Unless there was widespread cheating on the part of traders.
This is human nature. People test their limits to see what they can get away with. If on one complains they test a bit more. If we don't complain here the ISPs will shrink it a bit more in response to evil increased file sharing, MSBlast virus actiuvity, excessive use of MSN, the evil influence of the moon and invisible bandwidth eating spiders from the planet Zorgon. If they think you'll put up with it they will surely try it on.
And even if not - they'll still taking away a resource that has been paid for by their customers. And that still isn't right.
0.5 Mbps means half a million bits per second. That's a unit of bandwidth. They dont sell me a gigabyte a month, or some other arbitary amount. They sell me half a megabit per second. If I want to donwload at that rate 24/7, well that is what is in my contract. That is what they sold me. That is what I pay for. That is what I want.
I'd take it pretty amis if my ISP decided to cap me.
Lots of people subscribe to a service that offers 0.5Mbps 24/7 because they actaully want 0.5 Mbps 24/7. The fact that a lot of customers do not use the entirely of the allocation for which they pay does not make those that do so into bad people. Nor does the legality or illegality of P2P file sharing, which is a separate issue entirely.
As for the flexible caps, what's to stop them from capping everyone down 56k+1 (faster than dial up) and further dividing the bandwidth? You don't think thet will? Someone will if this trend runs uncheked.
A) acknowledge that there will always be some bias due to researcher preconceptions;
B) state your bating methods explicity;
C) include a caveat in the conclusion to the effect that different bait may yeild different results.
Then at least the next fellow who works with your results can use different parameters and comapare results.
Now my only concerns would be price, speed, java's braindead threading implementation on my box. and the fact that I like lightweight window managers.
I could see it being appealing to a CTO mind you, but I'd still worry about the price.