Just today, I read that the Netherlands was the country where the people were the LEAST happy after the switch to the Euro, in comparison with other Euro countries.
When it came, I was really happy about it: easier shopping across the border (Germany is 10 km. away from where I live), less hassle during vacation abroad, easier payment to/from other Euro countries, and a big, strong currency (check Dollar-Euro rates lately). I still feel that way.
But the money & coins themselves: worthless! Okay, it's just money, and you get used to it real quick, but check out those beautiful banknotes linked above (especially the backsides on the more colourful ones): it was really sad to wave goodbye to those. And why can't banknotes be something nice/artsy to look at?
Being one of those weird Dutch folks, let me explain:
These kinds of coins are issued regularly (like every couple of years) on special occasions. Usually around 1 million coins are issued (with some 16 million people in this country), and can be obtained at post offices, banks and so on, 'until stocks last'.
They are legal currency, so if you get paid with it, shops and so on should accept these as normal money. Ofcourse most of these coins end up in storage boxes in peoples homes, never to be used again...
Usually, these special coins are made of silver, and the Royal Mint often creates a small number of 'extra beautiful' or gold coins, targeted at coin collectors.
A couple of months back, I paid a UPS delivery guy with a 5 Euro coin that was issued in honor of the 150th birthday of Vincent van Gogh, and there have been several 50 guilders coins in the past.
For many people, the birth of a princess was a very special and happy event, and the Royal Mint thought so too...:=))
The real problem here is just that bad/infected e-mails get answered at all. Even if you would know a worm doesn't forge the "From:" line, you always have the chance that it's a mutation that does.
So: why not simply throw away bad e-mails without comment?
This is very similar to spoofed IP packets: a firewall might bounce (answer) the packet back to its origin, and if the original packet was broadcasted to a lot of systems, the fake return address gets bombarded with those bounced packets.
The solution: if there's ANYTHING wrong with a packet that makes it unacceptable, simply drop it without any further action.
With e-mail: if scanning it show an infected attachment, simply strip that attachment, and nothing else.
If an e-mail is positively spam, simply throw it away, without comment.
If a destination address doesn't exist, then don't bounce it, but simply throw it away.
The result: infected attachments don't generate extra traffic, spam doesn't get bounced back to bogus addresses, and only e-mails that are correctly addressed, make it to their destination.
And if you really want know whether it got there, there's always the option to request confirmation that it was received.
a) A method -> there sure are other methods
b) Only IBM paying? Then all those OS developers must be working for IBM -> IBM shall be the new M$. Hallelujahh!
c) Not every OS developer is payed, right?
BTW: Wasn't IBM the same company that already has the largest number of patents in its portfolio, or am I mistaken there?
Let me conclude from reading the article: -Memory errors can allow a system running a virtual machine to be compromised/corrupted -Such memory errors are most likely to occur when an attacker has physical access to the machine -One way to make it less likely, is to use error correction (ECC) on the memory.
Rewritten: -If a computer's memory is not 100% reliable, you can't fully trust software running on it, to perform as expected -Physical access to a machine gives an attacker more chance of compromising it -Having error correction enabled, would make a system more reliable.
So what's new here? Nothing. I have to give the researchers credit though, for the nice way they worked out how to exploit such hardware errors.
Okay, you've got MP3 portable players, and now one or more that can play Ogg Vorbis format.
But why not make a player that you can re-program yourself, to support any format, provided the player has enough CPU power to process it? And, while you're at it, why not deliver a software development kit to help with supporting future formats, with it?
Or better (maybe a nice project for/.-ers?): develop a player in the form of a freely available hardware design, so that anyone can build it for him/herself? That is, with a hardware design developed in a similar way as the Ogg audio format was developed.
I read in the GNU General Public License, what it means:
They used the GPL-licensed software, and with that, indicated they accept it.
They made a derived work from it, and distributed this as a whole, in binairy form.
With selling a product that contains it, they distribute this derived work.
Consequences:
The GPL also applies to their modification, UNLESS the GPL-covered part and their part are seperate, or can easily be told apart. Hmmm, binairy form? Incorporated as a whole inside a product? Distributed? I'd say, that results in the GPL extending to their modification. The license they indicate to have agreed to, says so.
Thus: you can regard their addition as included in that product, as covered by the GPL as well.
My suggestion:
Find out what they added, reverse engineer that, turn it into source code, and publish/distribute that as a new piece of GPL-covered code. Thank you very much!
If they don't like it, and try to sue, their use of the GPL-covered code would not leave much (if any) legal ground for them to stand on.
Oh, and of course, you could offer any buyer of that product the source code for all that's inside it, under the GPL, regardless of whether the company likes it. (And you might try to force the company to do that for their customers)
I couldn't agree more. These days, you can do very complex things with computers, BUT: at the same time, it becomes increasingly difficult to do really simple things. Shouldn't more powerful systems besides giving you more possibilities, also make simple things even more simple or easy? They should! But they don't. I think it's really a fundamental problem with today's Operating Systems. For instance, to create a simple 'Hello World' program, you need an ever bigger set of development tools. Logical? No!
On any old homecomputer, it looks really simple:
10 PRINT "Hello World" And to execute it: RUN
Why is it more difficult to do that on today's systems? Because, the "Hello World" program has to support all the added features of today's system. And that's the fundamental flaw. It should be the other way round, where the "Hello World" progam would still look the same, and such extra features would be supported another way. That's what an improved OS should do. I found a project on the web recently that makes a serious attempt to find a solution to this:
$250,000 fine? Up to 3 year prison? For file sharing? Get real!
A fine should relate to the damage done, right? How to prove you did so much damage? The RIAA would like people to believe that every single CD shared is the full price of that CD stolen from the artist. Come on! We all know that the truth is far from that, and hard to calculate, or even prove that damage was actually done.
Prison? Aren't they already crowded in the US? So, next to thieves and murderers, fill them up with P2P file sharing folks? Yeah, sure.
Prosecution by the Justice Department? I thought they were there to serve the public, to keep serial killers of the street and so on. Spend tax payers money for prosecuting folks that share their favourite musician's work with other fans? Get real.
And get it to stand up, when going through the higher courts? I don't think so.
Who to begin with? More users of any P2P network than there are lawyers on total in the world...
It's really amazing that such nonsense laws actually get passed in 'the land of the free'.
And really useful too. Crackdown on KaZaA, and the next popular P2P network will be one that's harder to force out of existence.
I think it would be cool to use a X-Box for every-day tasks, like a beautyful designed office PC.
One problem here: M$ controls X-Box production, right?
Scenario: X-Box/Linux succes -> M$ no like (not much money coming in through X-Box hardware sales, only the games with it) -> M$ stops X-Box production -> the X-Box/Linux platform becomes 'frozen' -> the hardware in this combination growing old from then on
Unlike any other PC (or Mac, or Alpha, or..) that you can replace with faster/newer versions/components.
Over the past months I've seen an ever increasing incidents along the line:
"DMCA slapped at "
"Copyright infringement threat shuts down "
Scientist afraid to travel to the U.S. on fear of being arrested for violating patent laws
Some research project frozen for similar reasons
And 1 question pops up again and again with me:
Wasn't there some original reason for these laws in the first place? Something like "for the promotion of creative works and scientific progress, for the benefit of the public in general"?
Does there still exist such a benefit, or what?
Please explain if you know any...
I hope they read the license though, mostly there's something like "this software is provided AS IS" in there..
And who to sue in case of a screw-up? The hospital? The doctor who pressed the 'start' button? The original author of the laser power control code? 8-{
Slashdot Mirror
When it came, I was really happy about it: easier shopping across the border (Germany is 10 km. away from where I live), less hassle during vacation abroad, easier payment to/from other Euro countries, and a big, strong currency (check Dollar-Euro rates lately). I still feel that way.
But the money & coins themselves: worthless! Okay, it's just money, and you get used to it real quick, but check out those beautiful banknotes linked above (especially the backsides on the more colourful ones): it was really sad to wave goodbye to those. And why can't banknotes be something nice/artsy to look at?
They are legal currency, so if you get paid with it, shops and so on should accept these as normal money. Ofcourse most of these coins end up in storage boxes in peoples homes, never to be used again...
Usually, these special coins are made of silver, and the Royal Mint often creates a small number of 'extra beautiful' or gold coins, targeted at coin collectors.
A couple of months back, I paid a UPS delivery guy with a 5 Euro coin that was issued in honor of the 150th birthday of Vincent van Gogh, and there have been several 50 guilders coins in the past.
For many people, the birth of a princess was a very special and happy event, and the Royal Mint thought so too... :=))
This is very similar to spoofed IP packets: a firewall might bounce (answer) the packet back to its origin, and if the original packet was broadcasted to a lot of systems, the fake return address gets bombarded with those bounced packets.
The solution: if there's ANYTHING wrong with a packet that makes it unacceptable, simply drop it without any further action.
With e-mail: if scanning it show an infected attachment, simply strip that attachment, and nothing else.
If an e-mail is positively spam, simply throw it away, without comment.
If a destination address doesn't exist, then don't bounce it, but simply throw it away.
The result: infected attachments don't generate extra traffic, spam doesn't get bounced back to bogus addresses, and only e-mails that are correctly addressed, make it to their destination.
And if you really want know whether it got there, there's always the option to request confirmation that it was received.
a) A method -> there sure are other methods
b) Only IBM paying? Then all those OS developers must be working for IBM -> IBM shall be the new M$. Hallelujahh!
c) Not every OS developer is payed, right?
BTW: Wasn't IBM the same company that already has the largest number of patents in its portfolio, or am I mistaken there?
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."l
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/faq.htm
Let me conclude from reading the article:
-Memory errors can allow a system running a virtual machine to be compromised/corrupted
-Such memory errors are most likely to occur when an attacker has physical access to the machine
-One way to make it less likely, is to use error correction (ECC) on the memory.
Rewritten:
-If a computer's memory is not 100% reliable, you can't fully trust software running on it, to perform as expected
-Physical access to a machine gives an attacker more chance of compromising it
-Having error correction enabled, would make a system more reliable.
So what's new here? Nothing.
I have to give the researchers credit though, for the nice way they worked out how to exploit such hardware errors.
But why not make a player that you can re-program yourself, to support any format, provided the player has enough CPU power to process it? And, while you're at it, why not deliver a software development kit to help with supporting future formats, with it?
Or better (maybe a nice project for /.-ers?): develop a player in the form of a freely available hardware design, so that anyone can build it for him/herself? That is, with a hardware design developed in a similar way as the Ogg audio format was developed.
Wow...everybody in my home loves beer..
;-))
and we have a washing machine...where would this lead to?
Everybody drunk all the time.
No chance to wash our clothes, so they'll get dirty.
So, everybody hanging around drunk all the time, in dirty clothes.
Naahh, then it must be a bad thing to use a washing machine as beer brewing machine...
They used the GPL-licensed software, and with that, indicated they accept it. They made a derived work from it, and distributed this as a whole, in binairy form. With selling a product that contains it, they distribute this derived work.
Consequences:
The GPL also applies to their modification, UNLESS the GPL-covered part and their part are seperate, or can easily be told apart. Hmmm, binairy form? Incorporated as a whole inside a product? Distributed? I'd say, that results in the GPL extending to their modification. The license they indicate to have agreed to, says so.
Thus: you can regard their addition as included in that product, as covered by the GPL as well.
My suggestion:
Find out what they added, reverse engineer that, turn it into source code, and publish/distribute that as a new piece of GPL-covered code. Thank you very much!
If they don't like it, and try to sue, their use of the GPL-covered code would not leave much (if any) legal ground for them to stand on.
Oh, and of course, you could offer any buyer of that product the source code for all that's inside it, under the GPL, regardless of whether the company likes it. (And you might try to force the company to do that for their customers)
I couldn't agree more. These days, you can do very complex things with computers, BUT: at the same time, it becomes increasingly difficult to do really simple things.
Shouldn't more powerful systems besides giving you more possibilities, also make simple things even more simple or easy? They should! But they don't.
I think it's really a fundamental problem with today's Operating Systems. For instance, to create a simple 'Hello World' program, you need an ever bigger set of development tools. Logical? No!
On any old homecomputer, it looks really simple:
10 PRINT "Hello World"
And to execute it: RUN
Why is it more difficult to do that on today's systems? Because, the "Hello World" program has to support all the added features of today's system. And that's the fundamental flaw. It should be the other way round, where the "Hello World" progam would still look the same, and such extra features would be supported another way. That's what an improved OS should do.
I found a project on the web recently that makes a serious attempt to find a solution to this:
the TUNES project
A fine should relate to the damage done, right? How to prove you did so much damage? The RIAA would like people to believe that every single CD shared is the full price of that CD stolen from the artist. Come on! We all know that the truth is far from that, and hard to calculate, or even prove that damage was actually done.
Prison? Aren't they already crowded in the US? So, next to thieves and murderers, fill them up with P2P file sharing folks? Yeah, sure.
Prosecution by the Justice Department? I thought they were there to serve the public, to keep serial killers of the street and so on. Spend tax payers money for prosecuting folks that share their favourite musician's work with other fans? Get real.
And get it to stand up, when going through the higher courts? I don't think so.
Who to begin with? More users of any P2P network than there are lawyers on total in the world...
It's really amazing that such nonsense laws actually get passed in 'the land of the free'.
And really useful too. Crackdown on KaZaA, and the next popular P2P network will be one that's harder to force out of existence.
Scenario: X-Box/Linux succes -> M$ no like (not much money coming in through X-Box hardware sales, only the games with it) -> M$ stops X-Box production -> the X-Box/Linux platform becomes 'frozen' -> the hardware in this combination growing old from then on
Unlike any other PC (or Mac, or Alpha, or ..) that you can replace with faster/newer versions/components.
Over the past months I've seen an ever increasing incidents along the line: "DMCA slapped at " "Copyright infringement threat shuts down " Scientist afraid to travel to the U.S. on fear of being arrested for violating patent laws Some research project frozen for similar reasons And 1 question pops up again and again with me: Wasn't there some original reason for these laws in the first place? Something like "for the promotion of creative works and scientific progress, for the benefit of the public in general"? Does there still exist such a benefit, or what? Please explain if you know any...
Gee, I know Linux is good, but THAT good? Wow.
I hope they read the license though, mostly there's something like "this software is provided AS IS" in there..
And who to sue in case of a screw-up? The hospital? The doctor who pressed the 'start' button? The original author of the laser power control code? 8-{