It is partly historically, partly mythological, and somewhat akin to a docudrama with a purpose, trying to answer the question "Why?". In other words, a historical novel with a bit of philosophical depth.
REDCRAP SUCKS. IT HAS ALWAYS SUCKED, AND WILL CONTINUE TO SUCK NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES YOU MODERATE ME DOWN. And we will continue to moderate you down, no matter how many times you say it, or how true it is.
I happen to agree with you, but there are ways to say it that are not trollish.
PHP is perfectly secure if you aren't a bad programmer. Any language that doesn't actually include exploits in the standard library can be made perfectly secure. It can be seen as a kind of Turing-completeness.
But PHP does not have a good track record for being particularly easy to secure. It also likes to make it very easy to not be secure.
Mind you, R3 could use this as an excuse for LOTS of discovery, and post the results as video news. "Today we got the perl scripts that are the heart of MediaDefender..." I'm not sure if that's true, but if they do, I'll have to start watching R3.
I don't understand this "blame the victim" mentality that's pervasive in Slashdot discussions on this. I don't understand how ISO is a victim here.
And ISO is not alone - look at all the governments and departments MS has bought or influenced over the years. Ok, question: Was anybody holding a gun to their head, forcing them to take the money?
Does anyone seriously think that being bought is somehow unavoidable, or something Microsoft can force you into doing?
It's very, very simple:
The geeks of slashdot acknowledge that P2P use strangles traffic on their LAN, and feel that some modification needs to happen to address this. And when we do this, we're doing it to our own LAN. And it affects our own bandwidth, and the bandwidth of any roommates -- who most likely know what's going on, and agree to it. (After all, it's not as though it's going to slow the torrent by much.)
However, when service providers complain about the negative effects of millions of people using P2P on their backbones, and take action to correct this, same said slashdot geeks get their panties in a bunch and cry fowl. Cry "bird"? WTF?
More seriously: Me shaping my own traffic is very different from someone else shaping my traffic against my will.
To borrow another poster's analogy:
I have no problem with choosing what kind of food I eat. If I had kids, I'd have no problem choosing what kind of food they eat.
I would very much not like the grocery store to choose what kind of food is best for everyone.
Fortunately, it's in the grocery store's best interest to give customers what they want. For some reason, ISPs think it's not in their best interest to do the same.
If the ISP wants to make the shaping opt-in, and give me a website to visit to shape my own bandwidth, I'm all for it. It might be easier than trying to shape my own traffic.
But if the ISP is going to choose for me, no thanks. I'd rather you just actually give me my full pipe and let me use it how I want.
And believe it or not, I seem to actually get that, on a fiber connection, for $60/mo. In rural Iowa.
By the way, this is the solution to how to have net neutrality, and still have working VoIP: Actually build enough infrastructure that you can handle users actually using their bandwidth. Then, it's entirely up to them how they want to shape it.
Maybe he used more sophisticated tactics than "Well, I don't seem to be lagging", but I could cap a torrent at 100kbytes out of a 2 megabit connection -- so, roughly half -- and no lag. Since I got fiber, I simply cannot saturate my pipe thoroughly enough to cause significant lag.
So they nailed you with SQL injection. Which can be protected against by either not using a SQL database at all -- depending on the app, a Document database might be better. (I'm not sure yet what kind of app SQL would be more suited for.)
Or, more relevantly, by never inserting data into your SQL string in the first place. Use placeholder arguments instead, and prepare statements when you can.
And getting back on-topic, you could also use a framework which discourages using SQL at all, let alone SQL injection. Rails is a good start, there.
There is no substitute for knowing WTF. It's not a substitute, it's a supplement. Yes, you have to know more than just "OMG RAILZ IS TEH AWESUM" -- but it is nice when you no longer even have to think about buffer overflows or SQL injection.
I was thinking HDMI, but the encoding for that would just suck an iPhone-type device dry and wouldn't even have the decency to call the next morning. You're confusing HDMI with HDCP.
HDMI is an interface. It's basically DVI plus audio. The audio might be compressed, I don't know, but the video is pretty much exactly the same as DVI.
HDCP is the new HD copy protection scheme, and you're absolutely right, it'd be horrible. But HDCP works on both DVI and HDMI.
MediaDefender claims that they have taken steps to ensure this won't happen again. "We've added a policy that will investigate open public trackers to see if they are associated with other companies", promised Grodsky, "and first will make a communication that says, hey are you aware of this." Since when is being a "company" required to legally run a BitTorrent tracker?
Try this instead: Determine if the tracker belongs to you. No? Then you don't have the right to abuse it in this way.
This is attempting to correct the problem, yes. But saying that we should withhold judgment because ISO may redeem itself is nonsensical -- the concept of redemption implies that wrong has been done.
As it stands, ISO is worthless. If the appeal process goes anywhere, then we can talk about respecting them again.
Providing me a KDE utility to graphically change video settings would be spectacular Fedora doesn't do that? Really?
On Ubuntu, I just go to System Settings, Monitor & Display, and drag the slider. Granted, System Settings isn't in KDE3 by default -- but it's just an OSX-like frontend to all the KDE control modules. There is an older frontend that you should have somewhere.
Wake me up when I can again buy a modern subnotebook and expect it to have 10 hours of battery life, instead of 2.
The iPhone proves it can be done -- I don't need anything much more powerful than that, but I would very much like to be able to have a reasonably-sized screen and keyboard. Yes, the screen will draw more power, but that's also more space for batteries.
ISO-8859-1 is a standard for the www. An encoding is almost always specified somewhere, and UTF-8 is common.
In fact, I (and others) have been a bit dismayed at what appears to be normal UTF-8 characters entered into a comment box that don't quite translate into the posted comment.
MS is staffed with talented people and good ideas DO come out of Redmond. I'll give you that. I like the idea of Singularity, for example.
It's their published products I'm talking about.
To think that their software is de-evolving somehow is just silly anti-MS stuff. Well, there is Vista.
But no, that's not what I meant. I meant that we generally see a good idea, implemented well, in a third-party product. Microsoft either buys said product and absorbs it into themselves (hurting it in the process), or duplicates it (producing an inferior version, but people buy it because it's Microsoft, and/or because it came with Windows.)
After this initial process, they often improve it steadily over time. Occasionally it surpasses the original.
But I'm talking about things like the Microsoft acquisition of Hotmail. They had to quadruple their hardware to port it to Windows. Whether it's improved since then is a matter of opinion -- I happen to think it's bloated towards Outlook-esque unusability (when compared to Gmail or even things like Squirrelmail) -- but that initial move is never clean.
They did achieve one thing. Standards in communication. Pardon me while I go laugh until I cry...
Has Microsoft even implemented TCP yet? Or does Vista still use the BSD implementation? I forget.
One person could easily read another persons file, document or whatever with EASE. Provided they both had the same application, yes. And when we try to move beyond that, Microsoft actively sabotages the process.
And I'm not just talking about ODF. Try working with RTFs sometime. Same deal -- most other people manage to implement the standards well enough, but end up having to accommodate quirks in Word.
And then there's IE -- which Microsoft bought, by the way, so no, they didn't invent the browser. And don't get me started on Outlook.
Is there any way in which Microsoft did anything but hinder standards in communication, when that communication was with anyone but Microsoft?
Lets bare in mind that its only since the *buntu's that linux has made any REAL progress on the UI front (yes I use/abuse linux but im a realist). Much more likely is that you didn't see most of the real progress which was being made. Ubuntu contributes a lot, yes, but most of their work is still collecting the work of others. It didn't spring fully-formed from Mark Shuttleworth's brain.
Please I am not bothered about "who did what first in the in the linuxverse" so do not start with the "well actually Debian x...". Then don't start shit about "It's only since the *buntu's..." What was the point of that comment?
Live Search was Beta on March 8th, 2006, and 1.0 on September 11th, 2006.
Google Desktop was Beta on October 14th, 2004, and finally escaped beta status (actually 5.1) was released on April 27th, 2007.
Given Google's track record with Beta stuff, it tends to trump Microsoft's released stuff, at least until the first service pack. But it depends how you count -- if you only count the time they officially left Beta, Live Search wins by several months.
However, if you count from the first public beta release, Google beat Microsoft by over a year, probably a year and a half. Since we're playing the game of who innovated what, I think that counts as a significant headstart.
That's why I didn't use Time Machine as an example. It's just most of what's visibly in Leopard, from what I can tell -- well, that and Spaces. (Disclaimer: I no longer have a Mac.)
Also, does "Volume Shadow Copy" do directory hardlinks?
Some are 3.5, some are 4.0, and some are both. I used to have 4.0 on this machine, until I discovered just how badly KDE has screwed with the concept of what a dot-oh release means. So I still have some cases where I've got two identical menu items, except one of them ends in a (KDE4).
Going through the list:
Strigi is most likely 3.5, if anything. SpeedCrunch appears to be 3.5. Printing and Hardware Drivers Manager are very likely Ubuntu-specific Install is the Ubuntu installer. Probably 3.5. Adept Manager is an apt frontend for KDE. Probably 3.5. Screensaver is hopefully both by now. Bovo is a game for KDE4. Shishen-Sho, Patience, Potato Guy, and SameGame are all games, for both.
System Settings is integrated as of 4.0, but has been in Kubuntu on 3.5 for awhile. It's an alternate frontend for all of the KDE control widgets, and it looks and feels exactly like System Preferences on OS X. The widgets themselves have always been there, this just organizes them better.
It seems like all the new technology for KDE4 that's fit to name ends up with a non-K name. Plasma is the widget manager, which makes up the desktop/dashboard and the panel. Phonon is the multimedia metaframework.
Not everything that's new in KDE4 lacks the K -- there's Okular, a replacement for KPDF. But that's not exactly a deep, system-level difference -- although, this being KDE, everywhere there could possibly be a PDF, there's a fair shot I can have an embedded Okular.
Slashdot Mirror
I happen to agree with you, but there are ways to say it that are not trollish.
But PHP does not have a good track record for being particularly easy to secure. It also likes to make it very easy to not be secure.
It's my understanding that any DoS is going to be problematic. So long as they have more bandwidth than you do, you're hosed, right?
Does anyone seriously think that being bought is somehow unavoidable, or something Microsoft can force you into doing?
More seriously: Me shaping my own traffic is very different from someone else shaping my traffic against my will.
To borrow another poster's analogy:
I have no problem with choosing what kind of food I eat. If I had kids, I'd have no problem choosing what kind of food they eat.
I would very much not like the grocery store to choose what kind of food is best for everyone.
Fortunately, it's in the grocery store's best interest to give customers what they want. For some reason, ISPs think it's not in their best interest to do the same.
If the ISP wants to make the shaping opt-in, and give me a website to visit to shape my own bandwidth, I'm all for it. It might be easier than trying to shape my own traffic.
But if the ISP is going to choose for me, no thanks. I'd rather you just actually give me my full pipe and let me use it how I want.
And believe it or not, I seem to actually get that, on a fiber connection, for $60/mo. In rural Iowa.
By the way, this is the solution to how to have net neutrality, and still have working VoIP: Actually build enough infrastructure that you can handle users actually using their bandwidth. Then, it's entirely up to them how they want to shape it.
Plain and simple.
Maybe he used more sophisticated tactics than "Well, I don't seem to be lagging", but I could cap a torrent at 100kbytes out of a 2 megabit connection -- so, roughly half -- and no lag. Since I got fiber, I simply cannot saturate my pipe thoroughly enough to cause significant lag.
Or, more relevantly, by never inserting data into your SQL string in the first place. Use placeholder arguments instead, and prepare statements when you can.
And getting back on-topic, you could also use a framework which discourages using SQL at all, let alone SQL injection. Rails is a good start, there. There is no substitute for knowing WTF. It's not a substitute, it's a supplement. Yes, you have to know more than just "OMG RAILZ IS TEH AWESUM" -- but it is nice when you no longer even have to think about buffer overflows or SQL injection.
AJAX-like techniques were done with iframes long before XMLHttpRequest was.
And socket programming would be much more useful, and (obviously) predates XHR by quite a lot.
It was, however, an evolutionary step. That's why I said "most".
Except USB would be much too slow, and HDMI would probably fit on an iPod if Apple bothered.
HDMI is an interface. It's basically DVI plus audio. The audio might be compressed, I don't know, but the video is pretty much exactly the same as DVI.
HDCP is the new HD copy protection scheme, and you're absolutely right, it'd be horrible. But HDCP works on both DVI and HDMI.
MediaDefender claims that they have taken steps to ensure this won't happen again. "We've added a policy that will investigate open public trackers to see if they are associated with other companies", promised Grodsky, "and first will make a communication that says, hey are you aware of this." Since when is being a "company" required to legally run a BitTorrent tracker?
Try this instead: Determine if the tracker belongs to you. No? Then you don't have the right to abuse it in this way.
Too soon? They already bought the standard.
This is attempting to correct the problem, yes. But saying that we should withhold judgment because ISO may redeem itself is nonsensical -- the concept of redemption implies that wrong has been done.
As it stands, ISO is worthless. If the appeal process goes anywhere, then we can talk about respecting them again.
On Ubuntu, I just go to System Settings, Monitor & Display, and drag the slider. Granted, System Settings isn't in KDE3 by default -- but it's just an OSX-like frontend to all the KDE control modules. There is an older frontend that you should have somewhere.
Wake me up when I can again buy a modern subnotebook and expect it to have 10 hours of battery life, instead of 2.
The iPhone proves it can be done -- I don't need anything much more powerful than that, but I would very much like to be able to have a reasonably-sized screen and keyboard. Yes, the screen will draw more power, but that's also more space for batteries.
ISO-8859-1 is a standard for the www. An encoding is almost always specified somewhere, and UTF-8 is common.
In fact, I (and others) have been a bit dismayed at what appears to be normal UTF-8 characters entered into a comment box that don't quite translate into the posted comment.
It's their published products I'm talking about. To think that their software is de-evolving somehow is just silly anti-MS stuff. Well, there is Vista.
But no, that's not what I meant. I meant that we generally see a good idea, implemented well, in a third-party product. Microsoft either buys said product and absorbs it into themselves (hurting it in the process), or duplicates it (producing an inferior version, but people buy it because it's Microsoft, and/or because it came with Windows.)
After this initial process, they often improve it steadily over time. Occasionally it surpasses the original.
But I'm talking about things like the Microsoft acquisition of Hotmail. They had to quadruple their hardware to port it to Windows. Whether it's improved since then is a matter of opinion -- I happen to think it's bloated towards Outlook-esque unusability (when compared to Gmail or even things like Squirrelmail) -- but that initial move is never clean.
Has Microsoft even implemented TCP yet? Or does Vista still use the BSD implementation? I forget. One person could easily read another persons file, document or whatever with EASE. Provided they both had the same application, yes. And when we try to move beyond that, Microsoft actively sabotages the process.
And I'm not just talking about ODF. Try working with RTFs sometime. Same deal -- most other people manage to implement the standards well enough, but end up having to accommodate quirks in Word.
And then there's IE -- which Microsoft bought, by the way, so no, they didn't invent the browser. And don't get me started on Outlook.
Is there any way in which Microsoft did anything but hinder standards in communication, when that communication was with anyone but Microsoft? Lets bare in mind that its only since the *buntu's that linux has made any REAL progress on the UI front (yes I use/abuse linux but im a realist). Much more likely is that you didn't see most of the real progress which was being made. Ubuntu contributes a lot, yes, but most of their work is still collecting the work of others. It didn't spring fully-formed from Mark Shuttleworth's brain. Please I am not bothered about "who did what first in the in the linuxverse" so do not start with the "well actually Debian x...". Then don't start shit about "It's only since the *buntu's..." What was the point of that comment?
Unlikely. Off the top of my head: AJAX, Web 2.0, user-friendly.
"Windows Live Search"? Let's ask Wikipedia...
Live Search was Beta on March 8th, 2006, and 1.0 on September 11th, 2006.
Google Desktop was Beta on October 14th, 2004, and finally escaped beta status (actually 5.1) was released on April 27th, 2007.
Given Google's track record with Beta stuff, it tends to trump Microsoft's released stuff, at least until the first service pack. But it depends how you count -- if you only count the time they officially left Beta, Live Search wins by several months.
However, if you count from the first public beta release, Google beat Microsoft by over a year, probably a year and a half. Since we're playing the game of who innovated what, I think that counts as a significant headstart.
That's why I didn't use Time Machine as an example. It's just most of what's visibly in Leopard, from what I can tell -- well, that and Spaces. (Disclaimer: I no longer have a Mac.)
Also, does "Volume Shadow Copy" do directory hardlinks?
Some are 3.5, some are 4.0, and some are both. I used to have 4.0 on this machine, until I discovered just how badly KDE has screwed with the concept of what a dot-oh release means. So I still have some cases where I've got two identical menu items, except one of them ends in a (KDE4).
Going through the list:
Strigi is most likely 3.5, if anything.
SpeedCrunch appears to be 3.5.
Printing and Hardware Drivers Manager are very likely Ubuntu-specific
Install is the Ubuntu installer. Probably 3.5.
Adept Manager is an apt frontend for KDE. Probably 3.5.
Screensaver is hopefully both by now.
Bovo is a game for KDE4.
Shishen-Sho, Patience, Potato Guy, and SameGame are all games, for both.
System Settings is integrated as of 4.0, but has been in Kubuntu on 3.5 for awhile. It's an alternate frontend for all of the KDE control widgets, and it looks and feels exactly like System Preferences on OS X. The widgets themselves have always been there, this just organizes them better.
It seems like all the new technology for KDE4 that's fit to name ends up with a non-K name. Plasma is the widget manager, which makes up the desktop/dashboard and the panel. Phonon is the multimedia metaframework.
Not everything that's new in KDE4 lacks the K -- there's Okular, a replacement for KPDF. But that's not exactly a deep, system-level difference -- although, this being KDE, everywhere there could possibly be a PDF, there's a fair shot I can have an embedded Okular.