As a shareholder in Cisco, I would like to see this issue discussed and voted on.
And as executives, the members of the board would like to see this swept under the rug as quickly and quietly as possible. Remember that such a resolution would impede the company's ability to do business in the single fastest growing tech market in the world.
IIRC, I read in a recent issue of IEEE Spectrum that Cisco was also a winner of one of six huge contracts to rebuild China's Internet infrastructure. I highly doubt the Chinese government would have chosen Cisco if they did not have the ability to sensor as the Chinese government on it. If you can lay your hands on that copy of Spectrum, they specifically discuss the censorship issue and speculate as to whether or not Cisco is party to it.
Bob Cringely's latest article shows evidence that some aspects of the 90s bubble are indeed back: Why would Rupert Murdoch think of paying $3billion for a mostly free online service like Skype?
This is the classic fake left and go right. It has been around as long as competition in business. Why is it that as soon as you throw in a 'net, eThis, iThat, or whatever other technology related slang, people immediately get stupind and forgetful? It's business plain and simple. Make your competitor concentrate on one part of the market and you have free reign in the rest. It's that simple.
I'm a Ph.D. computer science professor with 20 years of experience in design and implementation of programming languages...
In light of the below statement, I find the above statement to be dubious at best.
C's problem is that it (a) does not have a "safe" static type system, (b) does not have any dynamic type checking, and (c) has no operand checking. This combination of misfeatures is incredibly and obviously error-prone; offhand, I can think of no other popular language (not derived from C) that is broken in this fashion. Fixing (a) and/or (b) is not sufficient---(c) also needs to be fixed. Java, for example, has shown that this can be done in a C-like compiled language without noticeable loss of efficiency. (This was shown for PL/I more than 30 years ago, so it's no surprise.)
The reason I do not believe that you are a CS prof with 20 years experiences writing languages is becuase a real CS prof with 20 years experience writing languages would not describe as broken the exact features put into the language by the designers to provide the flexibility they needed to write an OS!
C was designed by a group of very experienced computer scientists and programmers for use by other very experienced computer scientists and programmers to develop operating systems and other system-level utilities. Any first year CS student, let alone a professor, should know this. The fact that C was adopted by academia, industry, and everybody and his grandmother as a general purpose application language is not the fault of the designers!
In fact, when you are coding things like process and memory mangement routines and libraries, it is very handy to be able to do arithmetic with and compare to variables that are not "exactly" the same type, if the comparison or operation otherwise makes sense. Hence, things like the boolean FALSE and integer 0 being equal (which Java will complain about) are handy.
Not only that, but the lack of dynamic type checking, operand checking and bounds checking allows the programmer to write low level or system code that gets out of the way of higher level code. Imagine the performance degradation at the kernel if every comparison was dynamically checked for type, operand and bounds.
Out of curiousity, how much is the average supercomputer utilized? I mean, out of a 24 hour day, how much of that time does the supercomputer stay at >50% utilization? What is considered "full" utilization? Every CPU at >x% load? y of z CPUs at >x% load?
Thank you so ******* much for saying whay I wanted to say to people who slammed the ACLU here on/.!!!!!!!!!!!
I'll tell you what. I consider myslef a conservative Libertarian. I think the government should stay out most everything. However, I equate this with the laws that require phone companies to offer 900 block service. It is completely opt-in. There is no requirement on the consumer.
They are here to protect ALL of our civil rights.
Some of the things the ACLU defends make me shake my head. However, I realize that is critical to a free society that the rights be given equally and that the laws be applied equally and fiairly, not just because the majority says so. However, I think that they are making a way bigger case out of this than necessary.
Once the state of Utah make it mandatory for consumers to start using the service, or subjecting themselves to searches, or makes it an opt-out (i.e., your service some with it enabled and you must take action to have it removed, then they will have a strong case.
It's called the right tool for the right job. Desktops allow you to customized and upgrade, laptops sacrifice that for portability. Get over yourself and go back to looking at porn on your super l33t custom rig with clear side panel and neon lighting.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. What I meant to get across was this:
Case 1: Owner of desktop (custom or not) - wants new Athlon64 CPU. Orders CPU + mobo for $250 from NewEgg.
Case 2: Owner of laptop - wants new Athlon64 CPU. Drops ~$2500 on a new HP laptop.
I am just trying to point out that the numbers are skewed since the first guy essentially got a "new" computer. I know that it is a bit different, but the old laptop will either get tossed or donated or relegated to something else. So in reality, it's like it is no longer there (in most cases).
Some of the features common in most notebooks are longer-lasting batteries, CD burners and wireless capability.
Yeah. They left out the inability to easily upgrade components. In the last 10 years i have owned +/- 6 computers. One was a laptop that I purchased new. The others were all custom rigs that got upgraded expansion cards, peripherals, memory, etc. when needed. Thus they didn't show up as desktop sales. I am willing to bet that as building machines from components has gotten easier, lots more people have been doing it to get more bang for the buck.
Thing is, with a laptop, upgrading the monitor is impossible and upgrading pretty much anything else is a royal pain and/or too expensive. Thus, laptop users can't take advantage of individual components on the same scale as desktop owners.
Seriously, you can't pay someone to come up with schlock this bad.
No kidding. Check this out (from vmscan.c in the Linux kernel):
/* * linux/mm/vmscan.c * * Copyright (C) 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 Linus Torvalds * * Swap reorganised 29.12.95, Stephen Tweedie. * kswapd added: 7.1.96 sct * Removed kswapd_ctl limits, and swap out as many pages as needed * to bring the system back to freepages.high: 2.4.97, Rik van Riel. * Zone aware kswapd started 02/00, Kanoj Sarcar (kanoj@sgi.com). * Multiqueue VM started 5.8.00, Rik van Riel. */
David Sheets has up an interesting article on browser security, and I have to agree with his conclusion: no web browser is safe
No program that accepts input is safe. Even some programs that don't accept input aren't safe either. It is the nature of how complex software really is and how little of it we understand.
but students from Saudi Arabia -- home country for most of the participants in the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, and much of the financing and ideology behind Islamist terrorism -- will not.
Aside from making me wish I could mod the article -1, Flamebait, what does this matter? The only possible purpose to this statement is to inflame the debate.
NEWS FLASH: The USofA is home to the majority of terrorists that have attacked abortion clinics and is the source of the financing and ideology of right wing militants. We should immediately move to ensure that all Americans that attend universities apply for licenses to use the knowledge the acquire.
According to the Washington Post, Microsoft is developing a version of Windows to run on old machines that currently run 95 or 98. It would be very similar to XP, but run faster on the older hardware.
Umm.. Shouldn't improving performance always a metric for systems developers? Really. Apple manages to make new versions of OS X that run and perform better on the same hardware. Is it too much to ask that MS, who has significantly greater development resources, try to improve the performance of their OS?
Run a local Debian package repository, only put updates you want in it, point your system's sources.list at the local repository, and add the following to the crontab for every system you deploy:
That's good for professor and permanent student workstations. But for lab machines, what you want is systemimager. I used to admin a lab as an undergrad and it was great. I had two "golden clients" from which came the two images I used. Then if a machine got messed up or if I did an update of some kind, I just told all the machines to reboot and grab their new omages from the server. It also supports letting you specify certain parts of the directory to not send and/or receive. All in all, a very powerful piece of software.
There were obviously a number of choices. PC-DOS was the least robust, the most temperamental, and arguably not very compatible with the IBM hardware and BIOS it was sold to work on. Yet, somewhat like the odd but obvious dominance of the VHS over BETA, this simple, cheap OS stole the show.
A more apt comparison I have not seen. In the end, both were about marketing---the inferior product had better marketing strategies pushing them. Both were championed by groups whose main selling point was that it was "good enough" to do what you wanted, but without you having to pay out the nose for more proprietary solutions.
Firefox is entering an already saturated market
on
Firefox Growth Slowing?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
It could also show that the browser's widely publicised security flaws have begun to undermine the foundation's argument that people should switch from IE to be safer.
Um... I don't think that's it. While the security flaws might be causing some to think twice, the real issue is market saturation. There does not exist a desktop computer sold in the last 10 years that didn't come with a web browser. They are essentially entering a 100% saturated market. Nonetheless, I think their accomplishments are stunning.
This is just the market at work ...
on
Safari vs. KHTML
·
· Score: 1
Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend? Can OSS code and goals harmonize with the goals and needs of corporation designed code? Is it that Apple mismanaged the relationship, or that the KHTML guys expected too much? Interesting warning for other OSS-corporate marriages.
There is always a danger that someone will fork your code. That being said, Apple must perceive sufficient commercial advantage to maintaining their own fork.
People don't realize that many contributions to OSS projects by businesses (particular projects that allow commercial closed source derivatives, e.g., Apache, PHP, BSD) are not motivated by altruism, but by a cost benefit analysis. If it will cost them more to maintain their forked version than they will gain from it, then they are hurting themselves in the marketplace. If they can get the project to accept their changes, then the next version will already have their changes and they don't need to cross/backport the code.
Advisories will be issued within one business day of a publicly reported security hole along with guidance and mitigation.
So, Microsoft only will do something if inaction stands to bring them negative attention. What I would like to see from Microsoft (and other commercial and/or closed source vendors) is a commitment to treat the security holes their own developers discover in the same way.
I just don't think it is right to withhold the information, espcially if admins can use it so secure their sites, until the threat of public disclosure by a third party is imminent or past.
Access to source code also reduces the risk of vendor lock-in.
MS bashing aside, this is the real issue. If you like MS software and it does the job for you, then go ahead and use it if that is what you want. The problem I have is when some government agency makes their public record information available only in Word or Publisher format. (I know OOo does word, but that is not the point). Once governments push for truly open data interchange standards, industry will follow and the sky is the limit.
Simply look at the history of telecommunications and the early years of the automotive industry before things like ITU and SAE standards were around. It was a dismal place for consumers and businesses. That is the current state of the IT industry. It is a patchwork of incompatible and proprietary lock in devices.
I think this sums up the problem right here; are these people relying on email to keep them updated on potentially life-threatening situations?
The same can be said of radio, television, and even telephone. The point is that it is an additional means of notification. I.e., if you get the information out via enough different types of media, hopefully everyone will get it.
It's not like they said that the email is now the only way to get the alerts. I presume the National Weather Service still makes the appropriate announcements and the local TV and radio stations also carry the information.
... they're attacking slashdot too and posting dupes!
Yeah, but at least my website hasn't been attacked. But, then again, I only get like 300 hits a month (and 2/3 of them are from within my own network). Sigh...
It gets better. If someone says "but I use a stock kernel," remind them that they don't have to load every module under the sun.
This guy would be better off going off to tell hardware manufacturers to quit making new hardware. Yeah right! Also, why does he not complain about bloat in the Windows kernel? IIRC, there is a much larger segment of hardware supported in Windows than in Linux. Mehtinks his statement should be modded -1 Flamebait.
If this isnt an prime example right in your face, i dont know what is.
BSD type licensing is free, and isnt viral..
Please quit spreading FUD. The only thing that this shows is that application of the GPL to non-software has some issues. Ever wonder why the GNU Free Documentation License was written? Granted, BSD-type licenses lend themselves to be applicable to a wider range of content, but that is just incidental, it was not designed into the license.
Basically, your options are:
Use a different license (BSD, CC, Artistic, etc.)
Support the creation of a GNU Free Font License (possibly based on the LGPL)
Or just use the LGPL (though, I am not sure if this solves all of the issues).
Perhaps this will even open the way for Linux and other open-source options being chosen over Microsoft and the like.
The government buys what its contractors tell it to. Thus, the only open source will get into the government is when the IBM's, EDS's and Oracle's of the world start pushing open source (or at least partial open source) solutions to the government. While there are many smart people in the government who like open source, they rarely make the spending decisions (and face it, MS and other proprietary vendors court the decision makers). The key is to raise awareness among the PHBs and to get the solution providers to push open source.
Slashdot Mirror
So does Google and so does Yahoo!. But then, Google is held in such high regard here that we can only say such things about them in hushed tones.
As a shareholder in Cisco, I would like to see this issue discussed and voted on.
And as executives, the members of the board would like to see this swept under the rug as quickly and quietly as possible. Remember that such a resolution would impede the company's ability to do business in the single fastest growing tech market in the world.
IIRC, I read in a recent issue of IEEE Spectrum that Cisco was also a winner of one of six huge contracts to rebuild China's Internet infrastructure. I highly doubt the Chinese government would have chosen Cisco if they did not have the ability to sensor as the Chinese government on it. If you can lay your hands on that copy of Spectrum, they specifically discuss the censorship issue and speculate as to whether or not Cisco is party to it.
Bob Cringely's latest article shows evidence that some aspects of the 90s bubble are indeed back: Why would Rupert Murdoch think of paying $3billion for a mostly free online service like Skype?
This is the classic fake left and go right. It has been around as long as competition in business. Why is it that as soon as you throw in a 'net, eThis, iThat, or whatever other technology related slang, people immediately get stupind and forgetful? It's business plain and simple. Make your competitor concentrate on one part of the market and you have free reign in the rest. It's that simple.
I'm a Ph.D. computer science professor with 20 years of experience in design and implementation of programming languages...
In light of the below statement, I find the above statement to be dubious at best.
C's problem is that it (a) does not have a "safe" static type system, (b) does not have any dynamic type checking, and (c) has no operand checking. This combination of misfeatures is incredibly and obviously error-prone; offhand, I can think of no other popular language (not derived from C) that is broken in this fashion. Fixing (a) and/or (b) is not sufficient---(c) also needs to be fixed. Java, for example, has shown that this can be done in a C-like compiled language without noticeable loss of efficiency. (This was shown for PL/I more than 30 years ago, so it's no surprise.)
The reason I do not believe that you are a CS prof with 20 years experiences writing languages is becuase a real CS prof with 20 years experience writing languages would not describe as broken the exact features put into the language by the designers to provide the flexibility they needed to write an OS!
C was designed by a group of very experienced computer scientists and programmers for use by other very experienced computer scientists and programmers to develop operating systems and other system-level utilities. Any first year CS student, let alone a professor, should know this. The fact that C was adopted by academia, industry, and everybody and his grandmother as a general purpose application language is not the fault of the designers!
In fact, when you are coding things like process and memory mangement routines and libraries, it is very handy to be able to do arithmetic with and compare to variables that are not "exactly" the same type, if the comparison or operation otherwise makes sense. Hence, things like the boolean FALSE and integer 0 being equal (which Java will complain about) are handy.
Not only that, but the lack of dynamic type checking, operand checking and bounds checking allows the programmer to write low level or system code that gets out of the way of higher level code. Imagine the performance degradation at the kernel if every comparison was dynamically checked for type, operand and bounds.
Out of curiousity, how much is the average supercomputer utilized? I mean, out of a 24 hour day, how much of that time does the supercomputer stay at >50% utilization? What is considered "full" utilization? Every CPU at >x% load? y of z CPUs at >x% load?
Thank you so ******* much for saying whay I wanted to say to people who slammed the ACLU here on /.!!!!!!!!!!!
I'll tell you what. I consider myslef a conservative Libertarian. I think the government should stay out most everything. However, I equate this with the laws that require phone companies to offer 900 block service. It is completely opt-in. There is no requirement on the consumer.
They are here to protect ALL of our civil rights.
Some of the things the ACLU defends make me shake my head. However, I realize that is critical to a free society that the rights be given equally and that the laws be applied equally and fiairly, not just because the majority says so. However, I think that they are making a way bigger case out of this than necessary.
Once the state of Utah make it mandatory for consumers to start using the service, or subjecting themselves to searches, or makes it an opt-out (i.e., your service some with it enabled and you must take action to have it removed, then they will have a strong case.
It's called the right tool for the right job. Desktops allow you to customized and upgrade, laptops sacrifice that for portability. Get over yourself and go back to looking at porn on your super l33t custom rig with clear side panel and neon lighting.
Sorry if I wasn't clear. What I meant to get across was this:
I am just trying to point out that the numbers are skewed since the first guy essentially got a "new" computer. I know that it is a bit different, but the old laptop will either get tossed or donated or relegated to something else. So in reality, it's like it is no longer there (in most cases).
Some of the features common in most notebooks are longer-lasting batteries, CD burners and wireless capability.
Yeah. They left out the inability to easily upgrade components. In the last 10 years i have owned +/- 6 computers. One was a laptop that I purchased new. The others were all custom rigs that got upgraded expansion cards, peripherals, memory, etc. when needed. Thus they didn't show up as desktop sales. I am willing to bet that as building machines from components has gotten easier, lots more people have been doing it to get more bang for the buck.
Thing is, with a laptop, upgrading the monitor is impossible and upgrading pretty much anything else is a royal pain and/or too expensive. Thus, laptop users can't take advantage of individual components on the same scale as desktop owners.
Seriously, you can't pay someone to come up with schlock this bad.
No kidding. Check this out (from vmscan.c in the Linux kernel):
Any doubts about whose the copyright is?
David Sheets has up an interesting article on browser security, and I have to agree with his conclusion: no web browser is safe
No program that accepts input is safe. Even some programs that don't accept input aren't safe either. It is the nature of how complex software really is and how little of it we understand.
but students from Saudi Arabia -- home country for most of the participants in the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, and much of the financing and ideology behind Islamist terrorism -- will not.
Aside from making me wish I could mod the article -1, Flamebait, what does this matter? The only possible purpose to this statement is to inflame the debate.
NEWS FLASH: The USofA is home to the majority of terrorists that have attacked abortion clinics and is the source of the financing and ideology of right wing militants. We should immediately move to ensure that all Americans that attend universities apply for licenses to use the knowledge the acquire.
Ridiculous, right? Feel better now?
According to the Washington Post, Microsoft is developing a version of Windows to run on old machines that currently run 95 or 98. It would be very similar to XP, but run faster on the older hardware.
Umm.. Shouldn't improving performance always a metric for systems developers? Really. Apple manages to make new versions of OS X that run and perform better on the same hardware. Is it too much to ask that MS, who has significantly greater development resources, try to improve the performance of their OS?
Run a local Debian package repository, only put updates you want in it, point your system's sources.list at the local repository, and add the following to the crontab for every system you deploy:
That's good for professor and permanent student workstations. But for lab machines, what you want is systemimager. I used to admin a lab as an undergrad and it was great. I had two "golden clients" from which came the two images I used. Then if a machine got messed up or if I did an update of some kind, I just told all the machines to reboot and grab their new omages from the server. It also supports letting you specify certain parts of the directory to not send and/or receive. All in all, a very powerful piece of software.
There were obviously a number of choices. PC-DOS was the least robust, the most temperamental, and arguably not very compatible with the IBM hardware and BIOS it was sold to work on. Yet, somewhat like the odd but obvious dominance of the VHS over BETA, this simple, cheap OS stole the show.
A more apt comparison I have not seen. In the end, both were about marketing---the inferior product had better marketing strategies pushing them. Both were championed by groups whose main selling point was that it was "good enough" to do what you wanted, but without you having to pay out the nose for more proprietary solutions.
It could also show that the browser's widely publicised security flaws have begun to undermine the foundation's argument that people should switch from IE to be safer.
Um... I don't think that's it. While the security flaws might be causing some to think twice, the real issue is market saturation. There does not exist a desktop computer sold in the last 10 years that didn't come with a web browser. They are essentially entering a 100% saturated market. Nonetheless, I think their accomplishments are stunning.
Is an unrealized danger of OSS that others may take your project in a direction you didn't intend? Can OSS code and goals harmonize with the goals and needs of corporation designed code? Is it that Apple mismanaged the relationship, or that the KHTML guys expected too much? Interesting warning for other OSS-corporate marriages.
There is always a danger that someone will fork your code. That being said, Apple must perceive sufficient commercial advantage to maintaining their own fork.
People don't realize that many contributions to OSS projects by businesses (particular projects that allow commercial closed source derivatives, e.g., Apache, PHP, BSD) are not motivated by altruism, but by a cost benefit analysis. If it will cost them more to maintain their forked version than they will gain from it, then they are hurting themselves in the marketplace. If they can get the project to accept their changes, then the next version will already have their changes and they don't need to cross/backport the code.
Advisories will be issued within one business day of a publicly reported security hole along with guidance and mitigation.
So, Microsoft only will do something if inaction stands to bring them negative attention. What I would like to see from Microsoft (and other commercial and/or closed source vendors) is a commitment to treat the security holes their own developers discover in the same way.
I just don't think it is right to withhold the information, espcially if admins can use it so secure their sites, until the threat of public disclosure by a third party is imminent or past.
Access to source code also reduces the risk of vendor lock-in.
MS bashing aside, this is the real issue. If you like MS software and it does the job for you, then go ahead and use it if that is what you want. The problem I have is when some government agency makes their public record information available only in Word or Publisher format. (I know OOo does word, but that is not the point). Once governments push for truly open data interchange standards, industry will follow and the sky is the limit.
Simply look at the history of telecommunications and the early years of the automotive industry before things like ITU and SAE standards were around. It was a dismal place for consumers and businesses. That is the current state of the IT industry. It is a patchwork of incompatible and proprietary lock in devices.
I think this sums up the problem right here; are these people relying on email to keep them updated on potentially life-threatening situations?
The same can be said of radio, television, and even telephone. The point is that it is an additional means of notification. I.e., if you get the information out via enough different types of media, hopefully everyone will get it.
It's not like they said that the email is now the only way to get the alerts. I presume the National Weather Service still makes the appropriate announcements and the local TV and radio stations also carry the information.
And it can't be a coincidence that the page doesn't display properly in Internet Explorer!!
Look here. This Page Is Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict! No conspiracy theories around here. Valid HTML is difficult to get looking right in IE.
I have download it 3 times for the same machine.
And I have downloaded it 0 times (from mozilla.org, that is) for ~20 machines, thanks to the Debian archive and apt-proxy.
Yeah, but at least my website hasn't been attacked. But, then again, I only get like 300 hits a month (and 2/3 of them are from within my own network). Sigh...
If you don't want it, don't compile it in.
It gets better. If someone says "but I use a stock kernel," remind them that they don't have to load every module under the sun.
This guy would be better off going off to tell hardware manufacturers to quit making new hardware. Yeah right! Also, why does he not complain about bloat in the Windows kernel? IIRC, there is a much larger segment of hardware supported in Windows than in Linux. Mehtinks his statement should be modded -1 Flamebait.
If this isnt an prime example right in your face, i dont know what is.
BSD type licensing is free, and isnt viral..
Please quit spreading FUD. The only thing that this shows is that application of the GPL to non-software has some issues. Ever wonder why the GNU Free Documentation License was written? Granted, BSD-type licenses lend themselves to be applicable to a wider range of content, but that is just incidental, it was not designed into the license.
Basically, your options are:
Perhaps this will even open the way for Linux and other open-source options being chosen over Microsoft and the like.
The government buys what its contractors tell it to. Thus, the only open source will get into the government is when the IBM's, EDS's and Oracle's of the world start pushing open source (or at least partial open source) solutions to the government. While there are many smart people in the government who like open source, they rarely make the spending decisions (and face it, MS and other proprietary vendors court the decision makers). The key is to raise awareness among the PHBs and to get the solution providers to push open source.