Don't think that you're safe in your chroot'ed jail. If your website for example uses mod_php and you run an old package of Mambo, then you will be exploited despite your jail.
How so? You'll also need to install the PHP libs and old Mambo package inside the jail and run as non-root. Are you saying that PHP+Mambo can break outside a chrooted jail in OpenBSD? Worst case, they hack the jail but your base system hasn't been compromised.
Off the top of my head, I couldn't think of another way to say remote file inclusion any better- so I at least grant that they seem to have a valid overlapping use for the acronym.
It's a pretty good acronym if you actually are discussing including files. However, this attack is like me linking to http://site.com/database.php?hack-in-querystring which has nothing to do with including remote files. Both bots and humans could follow that link and "attack" the site.
Because Microsoft are leveraging the effective monopoly they have in the OS and office markets to make their protocols and file formats de-facto standards, then withholding documentation in order to stop competitors from being able to use these, now standard, protocols.
The way I see it is that various companies in the past made a deal with the devil in order to get better pricing. And whenever you make a deal with the devil, there's always a higher payment in the end.
Because it's a creationist site whose tagline is "Upholding the authority of the bible from the very first verse." While the source generally shouldn't be taken into consideration when considering the argument, in this case it's similar to asking the KKK for informed research on black people.
True, but your criteria was that given the task someone could come up with the same method as you. Of course, I haven't actually read the patent itself to know whether or not my description is essentially the same as Amazon's but on the surface developing the method to implement it does seem obvious, once the task has been stated.
Sigh. If I were to ask you how to do some technical task, without telling you how I am doing it, and you were to tell me my method, then it would be fair to say that it is obvious.. simple != obvious.
Something like the One-Click patent would fail using this criteria. Any decent web developer back when it was introduced could have duplicated the implementation given only the business problem to solve. The credit card info is in a database; if we want to tie that to the user, we'll need to find a way to have the browser persist some kind of reference to the database record; the best way for a browser to store information between sessions is via cookies; when the user returns to the site, grab the cookie, retrieve the database record, and pre-populate all the shopping information. Voila... one-click shopping.
If IM text can be considered in the same vein as email, then this could open up any legislation which specified email to other interpretations. Let's say you have a blog concerning the campus party scene and some minor subscribes to your RSS feed in their RSS-enabled email client. If you blog about something that can be construed by someone as "harmful to minors" does this mean that your RSS feed should be classified as email and you should be subjected to this legislation?
Allow me to summarize in terms you're familiar with and so that you don't have to buy the DVD. Slashdot is busy jumping the sharks with the frickin laser beams on their heads and it's those lasers which are causing global warming. Or: SLASHDOT IS JUMPIN UR SHARKZ, CAUZIN UR GLOBE TO WARMZ. When this site stops jumping the shark, the Earth will cool. Simple.
Check out which side of the road Sweden drives on. Perhaps the average Swede is a little smarter than the average Brit?
And an excellent example of weighing the benefits against the costs. Short term it must've been an expensive switch. However, Sweden likely identified the long term savings benefits and decided to go for it.
One may wonder if they paid for initial training of their workforce making the first 200 more expensive than the rest but the article does not say whether or not this occurred.
It's like considering switching all traffic so that vehicles drive on the *other* side of the road. Even if it made more sense, it would be expensive as hell to do. And it's silly to take into account the learning curve of all those who had to initially learn to drive on the current side of the road. What matters is solely the cost of any changes going forward given that they have a staff already trained and familiar with Windows. If it's cheaper in the long run to stay Microsoft and everybody's already reasonably happy with it then, technical and ideological reasons aside, why switch?
Why not ask questions of the people at Microsoft? They have been designing, building, and testing operating systems for decades. Most arm-chair Linux zealots have no practical experience in doing things on the scale Microsoft does. Asking questions instead of making claims that Microsoft has screwed up would help us learn more about what Microsoft is doing and, perhaps, help them look at what they are doing from a different view-point.
Sounds like we need to be open-source in our approach to communicating with Microsoft - ask questions, offer ideas, create a solution that all may benefit from rather than firing the cannons of FUD.
He profits only from those who wish to have their gaming experience improved by Glider --- they pay him for that improvement, and an exceedingly good improvement it is.
So people pay Blizzard a monthly fee to pay a dull game. But in order to avoid a portion of the dullness they also pay this Glider dude, thus allowing them to make the game somewhat less dull. Where do I sign up?
I don't know if you've ever been that proud of source code, but I can certainly imagine that if I'd built a ridiculously elegant, efficient engine, I wouldn't want the hood of the car to be sealed. People might know it was efficient and fast, but they wouldn't be able to really appreciate it.
Some cooks want you to enjoy the meal they've prepared and leave it a mystery as to how they made it. Other cooks want you to enjoy it but would much rather demonstrate and have you appreciate their fine cooking technique and equipment.
Yes, I've had some code I'm quite proud of, but I also like developing and implementing solutions regardless of the code. If I could snap together different libraries/services like Lego (kind of the holy grail of mashups in a way) to create a wicked new app using a concept that nobody has thought of before then I'd be in heaven. If it solves a real need, I find that quite satisfying even if nobody sees the code.
There's many kinds of art and I think we can agree that people appreciate things in different ways.
Okay, suppose you work for some random contract company and write the code to let OS X do fast user switching.
I guess that's the crux of the matter. Working for Apple directly, I'd go closed source because I'd only want OS X to have that feature and deny the competitors. If it were a company I had a controlling interest in, I'd want to write it closed source, patent it, and have it licensed to other companies. If I couldn't do that, then I guess it wouldn't matter to me much and I might want it open source for the reasons you mentioned.
No, it isn't a false dichotomy. How many people have seen the code for the respective features?
Ah, okay. So when you say your code is out there or not, you're just talking source. I took it as being the generic form of "code" which some people use as meaning the results of their code is out there. I'd still rather have implemented the cool OS X feature even if nobody can see the source code.
Tough call. A meteorite is a meteor that has hit the Earth's surface. So what remains in question is if it hits you, are you considered effectively the Earth's surface? And even if you are, did it become a meteorite right at the point of impact or only afterwards? I think this involves calculus.
This reminds me of the Machine Gun vs. Katana video. Be sure to watch past the 1 minute mark where it goes slow-motion, round by round of each impact including some rounds that were split in half by the katana edge.
So sure, you can start your own business if its small and try to sell software, but realistically you're looking at working for a salary whether you're coding open source or not, so it doesn't make too much difference. The choice is, would you rather have less widely distributed code, giving you and everyone else more potential work redoing the same thing... or would you rather have more widely distributed work that gains you a reputation and instead work on new things all the time?
False dichotomy. Would you rather be the one to develop the fast user switching graphics code for OS X which gets seen and admired by millions or the guy who writes some obscure Drupal plugin to let you rate image uploads that will only be seen by a handful of nerds?
No, it is not. Closed source is like painting the Sistine Chapel but locking the building and selling tiny postcards with photographs of it. No one ever gets to see it as you really intended it to be appreciated.
Okay, we're really stretching this analogy quite thin. However, you're wrong on this point. How many places now sell you software but don't let you try it out? Microsoft will give you a 180 day trial on Windows Server 2003 as well as trials of just about any of their products -- Office or Visual Studio and SQL Server or many others. Microsoft effectively gives you the full, real postcard for six months. If you like it, buy the postcard. If you don't, return (uninstall) it. Any decent company lets you have a thorough evaluation before you purchase. If they don't, take your business elsewhere.
Some companies offer fully functional demos, some offer demos with functionality disabled (try out the postcard, write on it, only you just can't send it through the mail) -- there's really no end to options as far as trial and demo versions. Like I said, if you're looking at some software which doesn't have a demo/trial available, you can probably ask for one from the company and, if they refuse, you won't have to look too far for another company which does. Every major PC videogame out there has a demo for download. If there isn't one, odds are the game sucks I wouldn't buy it without a demo either. Hell, you can even get a demo of AutoCAD... something that would have been unheard of years ago.
Your assertion that closed source is like looking at a tiny postcard of what you'd eventually get is like arguing that you only get to look at brochures before buying a new car. Haven't you heard? The auto manufacturers now allow you to take them out for a test drive even though they don't hand out the car's "source code". Granted, it's a fairly limited test drive (imperfect car analogy again) but if vehicles weren't subject to wear and tear, I'm sure they'd love to have you drive it for a month or more and get you hooked on the features of their vehicle so that you're more likely to end up buying it.
By the way, I personally see it as just a bit unethical that you can make a fortune off of copies.
Tell that to any commercial Linux vendor. Also, Slashdot makes money by serving up copies of other peoples content and throwing ads on top of it all. Yet here you are, participating in dubious ethics.:)
As a developer that makes money off of open source software, why do I care what the ratio of our contributions to use is? Why should someone looking at both making and using such software care? So long as it is making money for people why do you care if some other people aren't?
I too make money from open source. Five or more years ago I was paying developers to code for me, but now with the plethora of code out there contributed by people working for free I no longer have to pay developers and can sell more product at way higher profit margins. Development work has effectively turned into integration work so doesn't require as much skilled work to produce as before. I'm certainly not complaining about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't think that you're safe in your chroot'ed jail. If your website for example uses mod_php and you run an old package of Mambo, then you will be exploited despite your jail.
How so? You'll also need to install the PHP libs and old Mambo package inside the jail and run as non-root. Are you saying that PHP+Mambo can break outside a chrooted jail in OpenBSD? Worst case, they hack the jail but your base system hasn't been compromised.
Off the top of my head, I couldn't think of another way to say remote file inclusion any better- so I at least grant that they seem to have a valid overlapping use for the acronym.
It's a pretty good acronym if you actually are discussing including files. However, this attack is like me linking to http://site.com/database.php?hack-in-querystring which has nothing to do with including remote files. Both bots and humans could follow that link and "attack" the site.
Because Microsoft are leveraging the effective monopoly they have in the OS and office markets to make their protocols and file formats de-facto standards, then withholding documentation in order to stop competitors from being able to use these, now standard, protocols.
The way I see it is that various companies in the past made a deal with the devil in order to get better pricing. And whenever you make a deal with the devil, there's always a higher payment in the end.
Easy solution... wc utility to the rescue, and have it report on the number of characters.
wc -m mydna
Does it return a huge number, or 4?
So how is parent Offtopic?
Because it's a creationist site whose tagline is "Upholding the authority of the bible from the very first verse." While the source generally shouldn't be taken into consideration when considering the argument, in this case it's similar to asking the KKK for informed research on black people.
True, but your criteria was that given the task someone could come up with the same method as you. Of course, I haven't actually read the patent itself to know whether or not my description is essentially the same as Amazon's but on the surface developing the method to implement it does seem obvious, once the task has been stated.
Sigh. If I were to ask you how to do some technical task, without telling you how I am doing it, and you were to tell me my method, then it would be fair to say that it is obvious.. simple != obvious.
Something like the One-Click patent would fail using this criteria. Any decent web developer back when it was introduced could have duplicated the implementation given only the business problem to solve. The credit card info is in a database; if we want to tie that to the user, we'll need to find a way to have the browser persist some kind of reference to the database record; the best way for a browser to store information between sessions is via cookies; when the user returns to the site, grab the cookie, retrieve the database record, and pre-populate all the shopping information. Voila... one-click shopping.
See also: dork
/dawrk/
dork
-noun Slang.
1. a stupid or ridiculous person; jerk; nerd.
2. Vulgar. penis.
If IM text can be considered in the same vein as email, then this could open up any legislation which specified email to other interpretations. Let's say you have a blog concerning the campus party scene and some minor subscribes to your RSS feed in their RSS-enabled email client. If you blog about something that can be construed by someone as "harmful to minors" does this mean that your RSS feed should be classified as email and you should be subjected to this legislation?
Allow me to summarize in terms you're familiar with and so that you don't have to buy the DVD. Slashdot is busy jumping the sharks with the frickin laser beams on their heads and it's those lasers which are causing global warming. Or: SLASHDOT IS JUMPIN UR SHARKZ, CAUZIN UR GLOBE TO WARMZ. When this site stops jumping the shark, the Earth will cool. Simple.
Check out which side of the road Sweden drives on. Perhaps the average Swede is a little smarter than the average Brit?
And an excellent example of weighing the benefits against the costs. Short term it must've been an expensive switch. However, Sweden likely identified the long term savings benefits and decided to go for it.
One may wonder if they paid for initial training of their workforce making the first 200 more expensive than the rest but the article does not say whether or not this occurred.
It's like considering switching all traffic so that vehicles drive on the *other* side of the road. Even if it made more sense, it would be expensive as hell to do. And it's silly to take into account the learning curve of all those who had to initially learn to drive on the current side of the road. What matters is solely the cost of any changes going forward given that they have a staff already trained and familiar with Windows. If it's cheaper in the long run to stay Microsoft and everybody's already reasonably happy with it then, technical and ideological reasons aside, why switch?
Why not ask questions of the people at Microsoft? They have been designing, building, and testing operating systems for decades. Most arm-chair Linux zealots have no practical experience in doing things on the scale Microsoft does. Asking questions instead of making claims that Microsoft has screwed up would help us learn more about what Microsoft is doing and, perhaps, help them look at what they are doing from a different view-point.
Sounds like we need to be open-source in our approach to communicating with Microsoft - ask questions, offer ideas, create a solution that all may benefit from rather than firing the cannons of FUD.
"Your country has performed an illegal operation."
Oh, wait............ it already has. Nevermind.
That must be the red, white, and blue screen of death?
I'm really just kidding... if you look up 1984, it's a leap year and thus every 4 years is also a leap year and so it is never printed.
I seem to have missed the year 2000 edition though.
He profits only from those who wish to have their gaming experience improved by Glider --- they pay him for that improvement, and an exceedingly good improvement it is.
So people pay Blizzard a monthly fee to pay a dull game. But in order to avoid a portion of the dullness they also pay this Glider dude, thus allowing them to make the game somewhat less dull. Where do I sign up?
I don't know if you've ever been that proud of source code, but I can certainly imagine that if I'd built a ridiculously elegant, efficient engine, I wouldn't want the hood of the car to be sealed. People might know it was efficient and fast, but they wouldn't be able to really appreciate it.
Some cooks want you to enjoy the meal they've prepared and leave it a mystery as to how they made it. Other cooks want you to enjoy it but would much rather demonstrate and have you appreciate their fine cooking technique and equipment.
Yes, I've had some code I'm quite proud of, but I also like developing and implementing solutions regardless of the code. If I could snap together different libraries/services like Lego (kind of the holy grail of mashups in a way) to create a wicked new app using a concept that nobody has thought of before then I'd be in heaven. If it solves a real need, I find that quite satisfying even if nobody sees the code.
There's many kinds of art and I think we can agree that people appreciate things in different ways.
Okay, suppose you work for some random contract company and write the code to let OS X do fast user switching.
I guess that's the crux of the matter. Working for Apple directly, I'd go closed source because I'd only want OS X to have that feature and deny the competitors. If it were a company I had a controlling interest in, I'd want to write it closed source, patent it, and have it licensed to other companies. If I couldn't do that, then I guess it wouldn't matter to me much and I might want it open source for the reasons you mentioned.
No, it isn't a false dichotomy. How many people have seen the code for the respective features?
Ah, okay. So when you say your code is out there or not, you're just talking source. I took it as being the generic form of "code" which some people use as meaning the results of their code is out there. I'd still rather have implemented the cool OS X feature even if nobody can see the source code.
Tough call. A meteorite is a meteor that has hit the Earth's surface. So what remains in question is if it hits you, are you considered effectively the Earth's surface? And even if you are, did it become a meteorite right at the point of impact or only afterwards? I think this involves calculus.
This reminds me of the Machine Gun vs. Katana video. Be sure to watch past the 1 minute mark where it goes slow-motion, round by round of each impact including some rounds that were split in half by the katana edge.
And the truly pedantic are wondering "Which is the correct usage: struck by a meteorite or struck by a meteor?"
So sure, you can start your own business if its small and try to sell software, but realistically you're looking at working for a salary whether you're coding open source or not, so it doesn't make too much difference. The choice is, would you rather have less widely distributed code, giving you and everyone else more potential work redoing the same thing... or would you rather have more widely distributed work that gains you a reputation and instead work on new things all the time?
False dichotomy. Would you rather be the one to develop the fast user switching graphics code for OS X which gets seen and admired by millions or the guy who writes some obscure Drupal plugin to let you rate image uploads that will only be seen by a handful of nerds?
No, it is not. Closed source is like painting the Sistine Chapel but locking the building and selling tiny postcards with photographs of it. No one ever gets to see it as you really intended it to be appreciated.
:)
Okay, we're really stretching this analogy quite thin. However, you're wrong on this point. How many places now sell you software but don't let you try it out? Microsoft will give you a 180 day trial on Windows Server 2003 as well as trials of just about any of their products -- Office or Visual Studio and SQL Server or many others. Microsoft effectively gives you the full, real postcard for six months. If you like it, buy the postcard. If you don't, return (uninstall) it. Any decent company lets you have a thorough evaluation before you purchase. If they don't, take your business elsewhere.
Some companies offer fully functional demos, some offer demos with functionality disabled (try out the postcard, write on it, only you just can't send it through the mail) -- there's really no end to options as far as trial and demo versions. Like I said, if you're looking at some software which doesn't have a demo/trial available, you can probably ask for one from the company and, if they refuse, you won't have to look too far for another company which does. Every major PC videogame out there has a demo for download. If there isn't one, odds are the game sucks I wouldn't buy it without a demo either. Hell, you can even get a demo of AutoCAD... something that would have been unheard of years ago.
Your assertion that closed source is like looking at a tiny postcard of what you'd eventually get is like arguing that you only get to look at brochures before buying a new car. Haven't you heard? The auto manufacturers now allow you to take them out for a test drive even though they don't hand out the car's "source code". Granted, it's a fairly limited test drive (imperfect car analogy again) but if vehicles weren't subject to wear and tear, I'm sure they'd love to have you drive it for a month or more and get you hooked on the features of their vehicle so that you're more likely to end up buying it.
By the way, I personally see it as just a bit unethical that you can make a fortune off of copies.
Tell that to any commercial Linux vendor. Also, Slashdot makes money by serving up copies of other peoples content and throwing ads on top of it all. Yet here you are, participating in dubious ethics.
As a developer that makes money off of open source software, why do I care what the ratio of our contributions to use is? Why should someone looking at both making and using such software care? So long as it is making money for people why do you care if some other people aren't?
I too make money from open source. Five or more years ago I was paying developers to code for me, but now with the plethora of code out there contributed by people working for free I no longer have to pay developers and can sell more product at way higher profit margins. Development work has effectively turned into integration work so doesn't require as much skilled work to produce as before. I'm certainly not complaining about that.