But questions remain. There is a possibility that Australia may follow in Canada's footsteps, and levy a tax on other things to make up for "lost" revenues. For instance, a tax could be levied...CD...
In Canada this sort of backfired on retailers. Hey, when you go over the border next week can you bring back lots of cheap media?
Excellent news! I think it's clear now that Windows OS is about three (3) times more secure than Unix/Linux/Mac!
One could also view this differently. MS is closed source, so if that many were found by people who don't have the source how bad would it be if they had the source?
The second issue is with Linux sources, the bugs are being vetted out of the code at a much faster pace making it ulimately more secure.
Statitics lie when taken out of context. We could also look at the tally of "infections" as it may also be an indication of the ease and severity of vulnerabilities - and certainly the impact to society.
For gods sake, if you're not writing an operating system you have no business using C. Read me lips: YOU CAN'T WRITE SECURE C.
I beg to differ, C can be real secure if written that way. The problem comes in that most people do not know how C works inside yet they code something. Then of course to your next point:
Code reviews may help but they wont remove everything.
This would solve alot of issues. How many environments routinely run bounds checking and code reviews for functionality AND security? How many people who really understand C reviewed the code?
And security problems are not just C problems, any language like Java,.NET, PHP, C# can also have their issues. CERT and others concentraight on the operating systems that we all use but generally skirt applications security which can be very bad. Job schedulers written in Java that allow root access, data warehouses that give up encoded (but not encrypted) UIDs/passwords ovr the net, the list is long. And how many people use unencrypted telnet/ftp/imap/pop3 even though secure options exist? I know senior NT and UNIX admins that don't know what a key pair is let alone what a certificate chain is. But they have a half dozen certifications.
But secure code begins with it's priority, in design and takes more time to code no mater what language you use. Having knowledgable coders helps alot. But we are in a day and age where we only want cheap coders. And here is a hint, cheap coders are never good coders or they would not be cheap. There in is the issue, more time is something people do not want to do either in training, coding or review.
Which RIAA moron thought this would result in good PR down the road? Stuff like this will always come out.
Your kidding right? It is all about numbers, extortion, PR and hope people cave in. Lets face it that this is extortion tax. RIAA tax. Get 200,000 people just to pay a $200 (pseudo) fine and that equates to $40,000,000. How many people can afford a lawyer and time off from work to defend themselves for $200? It is corporate extortion against the public. These legal parasites don't care about families.
The courts should hammer the RIAA where they have no case, or cannot prove their accusations or are otherwise negligent in their behavior. RIAA are baby eaters and worse, professional extortionists backed by a legal system with no guts.
They be glad I am not sitting on a jury. If they could not prove their case I would award expenses plus punitive damages that would make them take a second look while they spin uncontrollably. Treating the general public like criminals is not going to solve anything.
The fact of the mater is that the technology today allows for rapid distribution of media and entertainment that the established mega monopolies can no longer control. So like prohibition, the monopolistic control of the entertainment industry must change. Allow movies to be legally downloaded for $1 and the block buster might net $200M in a weekend without the middleman and retail costs. And it does not require Sony/BMG, Arista or any other RIAA memebr company.
Resistance is futile, the Internet will roll over the RIAA in time.
The article is just more crap slinging between two apes vying for dominance.
I could not agree more. Names we are familiar with come with time and patience. Is Outlook any more of an intuitive name for mail than Evolution to new users? And if anything Linux's menu is better as beside KMail is Mail Client. Must me mail? In Windows you have to wait, but tool tips do this.
And if Sal Cangeloso really cares that much, there is nothing stopping him from getting involved and changing it. It isn't like the source is closed,
The reasoning is simple, I can use the results cross platform without special costly software. A few extra bytes of space is secondary.
For many files, I also find buying a larger disk a cheaper option than spending hours compressing/uncompressing files. So I generally only compress files I don't think I will need that are very compressable.
It still exists as if I go to Best Buy, Dell, Circuit City and others I MUST buy Microsoft on the products presented and their is not an option to exclude it. Dell is showing a crack in the M$ armor though, I believe you can get a very high ended desktop with Linux. But I think most Linux users want something less than $1000.
This means it is a monopolistic practice called "bundling". Even though it is against the law in the US, it is not enforced.
"Gee, judge, I have no idea how the cocaine got in my suitcase or who put it there. Can I leave now?"
Hm, now if I got an email from you, and I didn't like you I could hack your computer, drop in Kazaa and a few movies and call the RIAA. That would make your life misserable. And the email contains your IP address.
I don't like my neighbor, should I hack his wireless and set their computers to download... possible, certainly.
And even if it was one of the children, hers or someone elses. Do we now prosecute parents for their children's actions?
Right now the RIAA is practicing cowboy justice and although most of their assumptions may even be right, they in fact are making mistakes and innocent people are getting hurt.
I would love to be on a civil jury for this case, as I would award her costs plus $1M in punitive damages.
Well if you choose Java, then you can use free Eclipse IDE which is excellent.
That might be one reason but it isn't the strongest.
Just list which OSes and platforms are supported by each. Portability of your code is only unimportant if you code for one.
But one comment about C#, it is bastardized C++.
Note that C/C++ is the OS/system language of choice because it produces relatively tight fast code when compared to Java/C#. If you learn C#, learn the C/C++ FIRST as so to know the differences.
This reminds me of a story of one hot shot talker that got canned recently. They wrote this very functional application in Java, a client piece and a server piece. The business people were in heat and wanted to roll it out to 3000 users immediately! After about 10-20 users hit the system they called us in as performance and reliability tanked.
What I found is that the server piece was one VM instance per user at about a 250MB footprint, 80 for the VM and the balance for data. On a 2GB RAM server it started to thrash at 10, unstable at 20. So I suggested a rewrite of the server component, as 300 servers would be needed otherwise. Management balked and got someone else, cost them $50K and got the same answer. Months later they are still trying to rewrite it, although they will eventually succeed the costs and delays are hurting them.
The moral here is use the right tool for the right place keeping the end use in mind. Avoid vendor hype and be rational in the choices. Architect your software, don't just hack it and make it look pretty for one if it has to scale.
Which also means if you are a professional software developer you will need to know more than one language. In order, I prefer C/C++, Java, UNIX shells and utilities myself. Languages like C# and J# are too narrow in portability and scalability for what I do.
Since all levels of government is greedy for taxes, would it not be more cost effective to say tax all purchases a flat rate of 3% and not force a million web sites to code in the complexity? And let the state, county, city fight over the 3%.
And if expensive tax states don't like it... touch $h1t.
The only way ISPs could block P2P is if they blocked every single goddam port excluding 21, 80 and a few others for AIM.
Want a bet on this? Any service can run on any port. You can also run any protocol through a tunnel through another. Further more, you can even do a file download over DNS that looks like DNS traffic to evade detection.
Trust me when I say an ISP would have to disconnect paying customers to stop it. Which is lucrative enough they will not. Only a fool with too much stupidity would even try to stop it.
So long live freedmon of the Internet. No one is going to stop it.
It will be impossible as why have a DVD or tape player when you are safer with illegal content off the net? The Sony rootkit techniques would work on DVDs too.
Someday we will be able to download movies for $3 - and as soon as some company figures out 60 million downlaods @ $3 is 180 million of mostly profit as packaging, distribution costs are driven down then we will have Internet TV on demand.
Why don't they just invalidate them all? It would send a message to patent holders that patents are to protect legitimate business activity and filling frivolous patents for stuff you never plan to build is not tolerated. Then the world might actually respect the patent system.
"Betanews is reporting about a Harvard medical school report that suggests Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is unrelated to typing at all.
I didn't get mine by typing, I got it from the mouse. Having clicked for so long I finally got sharp pains and the symptoms. And does it hurt.
So I switched to my left hand for the mouse, continue to type and it is slowly getting better.
Might I suggest to researchers to really do some pure no BS research. What they might find is the ergonomics of many of todays offices and computers are the problem. Some I/T people work in closets. And that "touch pad" on my portable, more than once I have thought about taking an electric drill to it to destroy it.
Computers need to fit people, not the other way around.
Seems Mediamax made the fatal mistake of setting out their entire scheme in an SEC filing.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, any company making a CD or DVD may try this.
As a consumer I just ceased purchasing all media with software on it, this includes USB anything and CD, DVD. I will resume purchases when I see "DRM Free" labels on them. I would suggest everyone do the same. If enough people do, the industry will recoil.
You give your post the name Censorship. This is nothing of the sort. Censorship would be if MS sued or threatened the guy if he posted the vulnerability on a web site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
It does look to me to be suppression of ideas. There isn't a law forbidding the sale of the knowledge about vulnerability and all sorts of different stuff is sold on eBay.
He didnt, he's profiteering from a weakness in someones defences not fighting for freedom of speech. Sticking with the analogy this is no different to somebody trying to sell someone elses lost house keys to criminals before they can get the locks changed.
People sell and profit from cars, bullets, drugs, F18's, cruise missiles and knives. Even though if you are facing the criminal use of one of these tools we do not prosecute the seller when the sale is open and not illegal to do so. Nor should we prosecute those who would sell the vulnerabilities to legitimate parties. If sold to known criminals it could be called conspiracy. But if McAfee, Trend or Sophros buys it to get the leg up then it is free eneterprise.
There is also the factor of due diligence and effort on the seller of software today, Microsoft is not as much the victim as one might suspect. More is spent on marketing security than actually practicing it and it shows. This isn't just Microsoft, hundreds of products (UNIX too) have security problems in them 2500 miles wide and 1 light year deep. Few are really doing much about it. I know of vendors that have known of problems for 3 years and done squat to fix it.
Maybe this, like nature is a check. Maybe companies need to be objectively white-hacked to effectively get their security up to par. And the white-hacker needs to eat and so far the software vendors are generally poor at doing this. So why can they not sell this?
It wouldn't bother me so much but people use anti-censorship as some all powerful law that can be used to dismiss even the most immoral of acts. (Just look at the media.)
While it is true freedom of expression and anti-censorship has its perceived drawbacks when you don't agree with others behaviors, by not letting the freedom occur is opening the door for abuse of freedom itself. There will be those that choose illicit use of freedom, but by them being free we are also free from their ability to impose their views on us. God even gives us this as a choice.
What isn't a choice is going to Best Buy or Circuit City and buyig a computer with a more secure OS (at prices mortals can afford) without paying a M$ tax. That is enough freedom erosion for me thanks.
...meantime the original listing on eBay has been pulled.
Why should not one be able to sell a vulnerability since they are in fact commodities?
If you can profit from making them, profit from dealing with them then why not profit by discovering them? There are precidents like this, the patent system has companies that hold patents for no other reason than to sue other companies when they trip on a patent.
All this will do is force the practice underground. Mind you, it does let the world know it is going on.
,,,file for obvious patents for the sole purpose of hoping that our competitors will accidentally use this idea in their products.
So well put. It kills competition. And there are hundreds of companies who's sole existance is to hide behind a limited Incorporation or LLC just to sue people and companies for success.
Now if some DC lard asses could get some insight they would force software into copywrite law and say it is what it is, authorship. The only difference between a book and a program is who/what reads it. In the case of a book, people, in the case of a program a computer reads it. I have never understood why software algorithms and program methods ever made it to the patent office in the first place.
I would even go as far as to say 99% of all patents (not just software) are in fact stolen ideas from other sources and should be tossed out with prejudice. That is, if challenged they have ot pay the legal costs times 10 if they loose.
The patent system as it is has become a gag order on software innovation and a legal tool for extortion.
I think that the Fedora directory Server is late, and it is based on old versions of Netscape Directory Server.
Yes, it is late. Plus I find it disturbing some parts of it have special licensing concerns. And being version 1.0.... hopefully they will write this code out in time.
But it's strengths are that being based on the Netscape server gives it a boost in functionality over Open LDAP. I often wondered why Open LDAP seemed to almost stall in it's development.
So I will still be using Sun One Directory Server but do plan to watch this development carefully.
Does anyone else find it weird that just a few years ago, big mergers were all the rage and "synergy" was the magic buzzword in corporate America and on Wall Street.
Not really so weird. Boards and execs have little to do but cook up a buy, merger or divestiture. It is self justification for their existance. But what a waste of money.
The truth is the rich at the top want to keep one part of the company and cash out another and now realize the merger was stupid. My guess is AOL has been loosing too many customers under the new management and instead of dealing with the synergy and management issues they are going to cut AOL back out on their own.
It is too bad short term greed and short sightedness were not the only traights you need on a good board of directors, if so America would be rich.
When you are pissed that your favorite show was cancelled BLAME NIELSEN!
Count not agree more. Something is very wrong with the ratings they produce.
Now my wife does not like SciFi, but she actually, much to my delight and surprize will turn "Enterprise" on and watch it with me with interest. And we have a GREAT hour!
So WTF did they get in their brain by canceling it? As I suspect it had an audience beyond the spiked hair klignon freaks.
Not everyone likes watching cheap sitcoms with zero imagination and how screwed up or mundane others are... besides once you have seen one, they will rotate the scripts, change the names and show it in 3 months on a a different budget show.
Lets face it, TV sucks. If we were hald serious about real ratings we would have the cable ccompanies provide us on a per channel subscription so the 100 channels they say I get, I could reduce it to th 4-5 I actually occasional watch.
But Internet TV would be best. THis way we can bypass what they want us to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
But questions remain. There is a possibility that Australia may follow in Canada's footsteps, and levy a tax on other things to make up for "lost" revenues. For instance, a tax could be levied...CD...
In Canada this sort of backfired on retailers. Hey, when you go over the border next week can you bring back lots of cheap media?
Should that no be something more like:
Home computer:
price: $1100
retail profit: $150
wholesale profit: $100
manufacturers profit: $50
cost: $800 (includes warehousign and shipping)
Office desktop:
price: $2500, discount $500, $100 lunch
retail profit: $0 (sold directly)
Wholesale profit: $0 (sold directly)
manufacturers profit: $1100 plus extra sales of Office
cost: $800 (includes warehousign and shipping)
Excellent news! I think it's clear now that Windows OS is about three (3) times more secure than Unix/Linux/Mac!
One could also view this differently. MS is closed source, so if that many were found by people who don't have the source how bad would it be if they had the source?
The second issue is with Linux sources, the bugs are being vetted out of the code at a much faster pace making it ulimately more secure.
Statitics lie when taken out of context. We could also look at the tally of "infections" as it may also be an indication of the ease and severity of vulnerabilities - and certainly the impact to society.
For gods sake, if you're not writing an operating system you have no business using C. Read me lips: YOU CAN'T WRITE SECURE C.
I beg to differ, C can be real secure if written that way. The problem comes in that most people do not know how C works inside yet they code something. Then of course to your next point:
Code reviews may help but they wont remove everything.
This would solve alot of issues. How many environments routinely run bounds checking and code reviews for functionality AND security? How many people who really understand C reviewed the code?
And security problems are not just C problems, any language like Java, .NET, PHP, C# can also have their issues. CERT and others concentraight on the operating systems that we all use but generally skirt applications security which can be very bad. Job schedulers written in Java that allow root access, data warehouses that give up encoded (but not encrypted) UIDs/passwords ovr the net, the list is long. And how many people use unencrypted telnet/ftp/imap/pop3 even though secure options exist? I know senior NT and UNIX admins that don't know what a key pair is let alone what a certificate chain is. But they have a half dozen certifications.
But secure code begins with it's priority, in design and takes more time to code no mater what language you use. Having knowledgable coders helps alot. But we are in a day and age where we only want cheap coders. And here is a hint, cheap coders are never good coders or they would not be cheap. There in is the issue, more time is something people do not want to do either in training, coding or review.
Which RIAA moron thought this would result in good PR down the road? Stuff like this will always come out.
Your kidding right? It is all about numbers, extortion, PR and hope people cave in. Lets face it that this is extortion tax. RIAA tax. Get 200,000 people just to pay a $200 (pseudo) fine and that equates to $40,000,000. How many people can afford a lawyer and time off from work to defend themselves for $200? It is corporate extortion against the public. These legal parasites don't care about families.
The courts should hammer the RIAA where they have no case, or cannot prove their accusations or are otherwise negligent in their behavior. RIAA are baby eaters and worse, professional extortionists backed by a legal system with no guts.
They be glad I am not sitting on a jury. If they could not prove their case I would award expenses plus punitive damages that would make them take a second look while they spin uncontrollably. Treating the general public like criminals is not going to solve anything.
The fact of the mater is that the technology today allows for rapid distribution of media and entertainment that the established mega monopolies can no longer control. So like prohibition, the monopolistic control of the entertainment industry must change. Allow movies to be legally downloaded for $1 and the block buster might net $200M in a weekend without the middleman and retail costs. And it does not require Sony/BMG, Arista or any other RIAA memebr company.
Resistance is futile, the Internet will roll over the RIAA in time.
The article is just more crap slinging between two apes vying for dominance.
I could not agree more. Names we are familiar with come with time and patience. Is Outlook any more of an intuitive name for mail than Evolution to new users? And if anything Linux's menu is better as beside KMail is Mail Client. Must me mail? In Windows you have to wait, but tool tips do this.
And if Sal Cangeloso really cares that much, there is nothing stopping him from getting involved and changing it. It isn't like the source is closed,
I generally prefer gzip/7-Zip.
The reasoning is simple, I can use the results cross platform without special costly software. A few extra bytes of space is secondary.
For many files, I also find buying a larger disk a cheaper option than spending hours compressing/uncompressing files. So I generally only compress files I don't think I will need that are very compressable.
It still exists as if I go to Best Buy, Dell, Circuit City and others I MUST buy Microsoft on the products presented and their is not an option to exclude it. Dell is showing a crack in the M$ armor though, I believe you can get a very high ended desktop with Linux. But I think most Linux users want something less than $1000.
This means it is a monopolistic practice called "bundling". Even though it is against the law in the US, it is not enforced.
"Gee, judge, I have no idea how the cocaine got in my suitcase or who put it there. Can I leave now?"
Hm, now if I got an email from you, and I didn't like you I could hack your computer, drop in Kazaa and a few movies and call the RIAA. That would make your life misserable. And the email contains your IP address.
I don't like my neighbor, should I hack his wireless and set their computers to download... possible, certainly.
And even if it was one of the children, hers or someone elses. Do we now prosecute parents for their children's actions?
Right now the RIAA is practicing cowboy justice and although most of their assumptions may even be right, they in fact are making mistakes and innocent people are getting hurt.
I would love to be on a civil jury for this case, as I would award her costs plus $1M in punitive damages.
Well if you choose Java, then you can use free Eclipse IDE which is excellent.
That might be one reason but it isn't the strongest.
Just list which OSes and platforms are supported by each. Portability of your code is only unimportant if you code for one.
But one comment about C#, it is bastardized C++.
Note that C/C++ is the OS/system language of choice because it produces relatively tight fast code when compared to Java/C#. If you learn C#, learn the C/C++ FIRST as so to know the differences.
This reminds me of a story of one hot shot talker that got canned recently. They wrote this very functional application in Java, a client piece and a server piece. The business people were in heat and wanted to roll it out to 3000 users immediately! After about 10-20 users hit the system they called us in as performance and reliability tanked.
What I found is that the server piece was one VM instance per user at about a 250MB footprint, 80 for the VM and the balance for data. On a 2GB RAM server it started to thrash at 10, unstable at 20. So I suggested a rewrite of the server component, as 300 servers would be needed otherwise. Management balked and got someone else, cost them $50K and got the same answer. Months later they are still trying to rewrite it, although they will eventually succeed the costs and delays are hurting them.
The moral here is use the right tool for the right place keeping the end use in mind. Avoid vendor hype and be rational in the choices. Architect your software, don't just hack it and make it look pretty for one if it has to scale.
Which also means if you are a professional software developer you will need to know more than one language. In order, I prefer C/C++, Java, UNIX shells and utilities myself. Languages like C# and J# are too narrow in portability and scalability for what I do.
Since all levels of government is greedy for taxes, would it not be more cost effective to say tax all purchases a flat rate of 3% and not force a million web sites to code in the complexity? And let the state, county, city fight over the 3%.
And if expensive tax states don't like it... touch $h1t.
The only way ISPs could block P2P is if they blocked every single goddam port excluding 21, 80 and a few others for AIM.
Want a bet on this? Any service can run on any port. You can also run any protocol through a tunnel through another. Further more, you can even do a file download over DNS that looks like DNS traffic to evade detection.
Trust me when I say an ISP would have to disconnect paying customers to stop it. Which is lucrative enough they will not. Only a fool with too much stupidity would even try to stop it.
So long live freedmon of the Internet. No one is going to stop it.
This looks to be tough to enforce.
It will be impossible as why have a DVD or tape player when you are safer with illegal content off the net? The Sony rootkit techniques would work on DVDs too.
Someday we will be able to download movies for $3 - and as soon as some company figures out 60 million downlaods @ $3 is 180 million of mostly profit as packaging, distribution costs are driven down then we will have Internet TV on demand.
Why don't they just invalidate them all? It would send a message to patent holders that patents are to protect legitimate business activity and filling frivolous patents for stuff you never plan to build is not tolerated. Then the world might actually respect the patent system.
So, how is this going to be compability with older programs that require admin priveleges?
Good question but the answer is to create a privelege set with all priveleges and assign it to such applications.
Now once a admin and then users figure out how to do this, they will simply use the admin-all privelege set for everything.
Back to square one as the problem is not being addressed.
"Betanews is reporting about a Harvard medical school report that suggests Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is unrelated to typing at all.
I didn't get mine by typing, I got it from the mouse. Having clicked for so long I finally got sharp pains and the symptoms. And does it hurt.
So I switched to my left hand for the mouse, continue to type and it is slowly getting better.
Might I suggest to researchers to really do some pure no BS research. What they might find is the ergonomics of many of todays offices and computers are the problem. Some I/T people work in closets. And that "touch pad" on my portable, more than once I have thought about taking an electric drill to it to destroy it.
Computers need to fit people, not the other way around.
Seems Mediamax made the fatal mistake of setting out their entire scheme in an SEC filing.
Now that the cat is out of the bag, any company making a CD or DVD may try this.
As a consumer I just ceased purchasing all media with software on it, this includes USB anything and CD, DVD. I will resume purchases when I see "DRM Free" labels on them. I would suggest everyone do the same. If enough people do, the industry will recoil.
You give your post the name Censorship. This is nothing of the sort. Censorship would be if MS sued or threatened the guy if he posted the vulnerability on a web site.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship
It does look to me to be suppression of ideas. There isn't a law forbidding the sale of the knowledge about vulnerability and all sorts of different stuff is sold on eBay.
He didnt, he's profiteering from a weakness in someones defences not fighting for freedom of speech. Sticking with the analogy this is no different to somebody trying to sell someone elses lost house keys to criminals before they can get the locks changed.
People sell and profit from cars, bullets, drugs, F18's, cruise missiles and knives. Even though if you are facing the criminal use of one of these tools we do not prosecute the seller when the sale is open and not illegal to do so. Nor should we prosecute those who would sell the vulnerabilities to legitimate parties. If sold to known criminals it could be called conspiracy. But if McAfee, Trend or Sophros buys it to get the leg up then it is free eneterprise.
There is also the factor of due diligence and effort on the seller of software today, Microsoft is not as much the victim as one might suspect. More is spent on marketing security than actually practicing it and it shows. This isn't just Microsoft, hundreds of products (UNIX too) have security problems in them 2500 miles wide and 1 light year deep. Few are really doing much about it. I know of vendors that have known of problems for 3 years and done squat to fix it.
Maybe this, like nature is a check. Maybe companies need to be objectively white-hacked to effectively get their security up to par. And the white-hacker needs to eat and so far the software vendors are generally poor at doing this. So why can they not sell this?
It wouldn't bother me so much but people use anti-censorship as some all powerful law that can be used to dismiss even the most immoral of acts. (Just look at the media.)
While it is true freedom of expression and anti-censorship has its perceived drawbacks when you don't agree with others behaviors, by not letting the freedom occur is opening the door for abuse of freedom itself. There will be those that choose illicit use of freedom, but by them being free we are also free from their ability to impose their views on us. God even gives us this as a choice.
What isn't a choice is going to Best Buy or Circuit City and buyig a computer with a more secure OS (at prices mortals can afford) without paying a M$ tax. That is enough freedom erosion for me thanks.
Why should not one be able to sell a vulnerability since they are in fact commodities?
If you can profit from making them, profit from dealing with them then why not profit by discovering them? There are precidents like this, the patent system has companies that hold patents for no other reason than to sue other companies when they trip on a patent.
All this will do is force the practice underground. Mind you, it does let the world know it is going on.
So well put. It kills competition. And there are hundreds of companies who's sole existance is to hide behind a limited Incorporation or LLC just to sue people and companies for success.
Now if some DC lard asses could get some insight they would force software into copywrite law and say it is what it is, authorship. The only difference between a book and a program is who/what reads it. In the case of a book, people, in the case of a program a computer reads it. I have never understood why software algorithms and program methods ever made it to the patent office in the first place.
I would even go as far as to say 99% of all patents (not just software) are in fact stolen ideas from other sources and should be tossed out with prejudice. That is, if challenged they have ot pay the legal costs times 10 if they loose.
The patent system as it is has become a gag order on software innovation and a legal tool for extortion.
I think that the Fedora directory Server is late, and it is based on old versions of Netscape Directory Server.
Yes, it is late. Plus I find it disturbing some parts of it have special licensing concerns. And being version 1.0.... hopefully they will write this code out in time.
But it's strengths are that being based on the Netscape server gives it a boost in functionality over Open LDAP. I often wondered why Open LDAP seemed to almost stall in it's development.
So I will still be using Sun One Directory Server but do plan to watch this development carefully.
Does anyone else find it weird that just a few years ago, big mergers were all the rage and "synergy" was the magic buzzword in corporate America and on Wall Street.
Not really so weird. Boards and execs have little to do but cook up a buy, merger or divestiture. It is self justification for their existance. But what a waste of money.
The truth is the rich at the top want to keep one part of the company and cash out another and now realize the merger was stupid. My guess is AOL has been loosing too many customers under the new management and instead of dealing with the synergy and management issues they are going to cut AOL back out on their own.
It is too bad short term greed and short sightedness were not the only traights you need on a good board of directors, if so America would be rich.
When you are pissed that your favorite show was cancelled BLAME NIELSEN!
Count not agree more. Something is very wrong with the ratings they produce.
Now my wife does not like SciFi, but she actually, much to my delight and surprize will turn "Enterprise" on and watch it with me with interest. And we have a GREAT hour!
So WTF did they get in their brain by canceling it? As I suspect it had an audience beyond the spiked hair klignon freaks.
Not everyone likes watching cheap sitcoms with zero imagination and how screwed up or mundane others are... besides once you have seen one, they will rotate the scripts, change the names and show it in 3 months on a a different budget show.
Lets face it, TV sucks. If we were hald serious about real ratings we would have the cable ccompanies provide us on a per channel subscription so the 100 channels they say I get, I could reduce it to th 4-5 I actually occasional watch.
But Internet TV would be best. THis way we can bypass what they want us to watch.
is denying that it gives the US government too much control over its operations.
ICANN seems to forget some things, it is wholy supported by the US government on US soil. The UN does not contribute a red cent to it's operations.
I would not underestimate the US influence, but nor do I fear it.
Windows PC users will feal right at home.