Symantec says worm attacks 25% of the time
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More MyDoom Gloom
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· Score: 1
IMHO, this is an unfounded rumor; it _will_ attack sco.com. Check out this excerpt from Symantec's report (scroll down about 1/4, to the "notes" section):
Due to the logic used to verify the date, the DoS only occurs 25% of the time.
So this guy claims that Phil Katz got rich by stealing his work. Well, I don't know anything about the story of PKZIP, but I'm not sure I'd take his word for it. The guy's biased, doesn't give many details in his story, and just from that text doesn't strike me as a particularly nice guy (Katz's early death was "a fitting demise"? He may be bitter but IMHO this is going too far.) Is there any independent proof to back up these claims?
Even taking the guy's story at face value, it doesn't sound like Katz necessarily did anything really objectionable. Here's a plausible Katz-favorable reading of the text. So this guy writes a compressor/decompressor for an open format called ARC, but it's as slow as a brain-damaged slug so it's not a big success. Katz comes along and writes a fast assembly program for the same format (the guy claims it "was basically my ARC program" --- but was code actually ripped here or is it just that Katz's program has the same functionality? He's suspiciously vague on this point.). Katz's program becomes wildly popular. This guy sees his business collapsing under the competition, so he panics and sues Katz. But the only effect is to push him to the similar but incompatible ZIP format --- which screws the guy even more since no one uses ARC anymore! The guy's business goes under because he was outmaneuvered by the competition. Fifteen years later, he is still complaining bitterly and claiming Katz stole his stuff.
I don't know the true story here, but until I see more evidence I wouldn't believe claims that Katz is a thief.
Not to diminish the importance of malaria contributions, but I would say the world's most pressing health problem is AIDS, not malaria. Remember that a major cause of the current malaria epidemic is AIDS-weakened hosts. Malaria causes deaths in the short term, but AIDS decimates entire populations over the long term, and is extremely difficult to ever recover from once the epidemic is widespread.
2 screens!? I mean, huh? Maybe I've been living in a cave, but I must've missed the hordes of gamers clamoring for this amazing new feature. Even on large-screen consoles/PC screens, I've never once seen a game who felt it was necessary to split the screen in half to have 2 separate displays (2-player games aside --- but being portable, that's is exactly the thing that this system can't do). So what in god's name makes them think this would be at all useful?
It seems Nintendo management hasn't learned anything at all from the Virtual Boy fiasco. It looks clever and innovative at first blush, but if it's huge, overexpensive and adds nothing to gameplay, then guess what Nintendo --- it ain't gonna sell. A ten-year-old could've told them this. Nobody wants fancy new controllers and displays --- the basic gaming hardware has essentially all been invented. Just focus on cranking out good games: IMHO, there's still plenty of innovation to be made in that department.
I find the article is actually hilarious if you take the time to struggle through the Big Words. My favorite passage is this one:
Derrida's perceptive reply went to the heart of classical general relativity:
The Einsteinian constant is not a constant, is not a center.
It is the very concept of variability -- it is, finally, the concept of the game. In other words, it is not the concept of something -- of a center starting from which an observer could master the field -- but the very concept of the game...
Does that passage make any kind of sense at all? It's even more hilarious that the Social Text editors read this and didn't realize this was meaningless babble, just because Derrida wrote it.
To be fair, you are naming fairly minor players in the whole computing revolution. You can bet that a whole lot more people were involved in the invention of the lightbulb (and related technologies) than only Edison, but --- as someone with no particular knowledge of the history of electricity --- I don't know the names of any of them.
I do recognize the names you gave, but that's only because I'm a relative expert in computing. It's too much to ask of even an educated layman to know who Mauchly is. I'd be happy with everyone knowing just the name Turing.
XP has hibernation support (AFAIK most/all? versions of W2K don't) --- i.e. it can just dump the contents of the RAM to the disk and load it up again. The feature is reliable enough that usually instead of shutting down I just hibernate. Counting from the point that I press the power button, it takes only about 10-15 seconds to boot up.
Probably this will be ignored by the moderators, since most of the slashdot population reads nothing but pulp fantasy and SF. But anyway, if anyone here is interested in reading a novel with any substance, I recommend Ian McEwan's Atonement as this year's best.
Ian McEwan is one of those very rare authors who seems never to have written a bad word. He is a master of deep characterization and psychology, and Atonement is certainly his most ambitious and arguably his best book so far: a fine WW2-era historical novel, with engaging battle scenes and portrayals of life in wartime hospitals.
In fact, though, it would be extremely easy to do this. Simply remove all trade barriers and other protectionist policies. Tada! With the very low cost of sea transport, 100% of rice in Japan is imported, and prices are about the same as in America.
This is so easy that whoever figures it out doesn't get any respect from me. However, someone who actually manages to get this policy past Japan's sluggish, special-interest clogged parliament does deserve respect.
Japan is not really wired when it comes to PCs. Cellphones, game consoles, yes, but not PCs and not the Internet. Japan is actually years behind America as far as the Internet goes. The Internet is still not widely used in companies, home Internet is generally overpriced, and universities in Japan have only just started to offer public Internet access (and they still don't let students plug in with their own laptops or PCs in their dorms).
The Japanese PC software industry is very weak. Hardware drivers aside, I'll bet you've never once in your life used a program written in Japan on your PC. They just don't export any PC software. Probably the only Japanese software you have ever used are games on your console. Japanese people don't generally use Japanese software either --- they use Japanese translations of MS Windows, Word, IE.
My theory is that adoption has been slowed down by the ubiquitousness of English and roman characters in the PC world (e.g. in URLs, programming languages and HTML). Anyway, it's not inaccurate to say that Japan is "wired", but PCs are an important exception.
What are you talking about? Have you compared rice prices lately? Rice is literally 10 times more expensive in Japan than in America.
Japanese agricultural policy is a disaster. It screws over Japanese consumers and developing-world farmers for the sake of handing over pork barrels to a handful of special interests. It's even worse than American and EU policy (as hard as that may be to believe). What do you find to praise?
Ha, cute lessons. Seriously though, I think the real problem with homeschooling is that a lot/most homeschooled kids don't get the chance to interact with enough of their peers. It's hard to find other places where a kid can hang out with 100s of others with varying backgrounds and interests. I've known people who've been homeschooled, and though they're smart enough, some of them are, um, weird. They just don't know how to act normally in a social context. I wouldn't wish a grave handicap like that on my kids even if I have to forego them turning into science geniuses.
You are right, I conflated those two. I think that if a law has no ethical basis, then it cannot be unethical to break it.
So you're saying that even if IP has no ethical basis in itself, just the fact that a government decided to make it into a law gives it moral strength? What if the US government decided to, say, outlaw eating hamburgers (for health reasons, presumably)? Or how about if it was taken over by an islamic contigent and decreed that women must always cover their faces? Would that make eating hamburgers, or uncovered women's faces, wrong in your eyes?
To me, this seems to suggest a dangerous devotion and trust in your government. If your government enacts laws that are wrong, there is no reason why you should follow them. Indeed I think that slashdot is in the right by constantly pointing out the laws' silliness and trying to keep them in check.
This attitude is hardly "extremism". Unlike you, most people understand that IP is a practical rather than ethical law. Just as they smoke pot and break the speed limit, millions of people violate IP every day in America, with no guilt or qualms of any kind. Your attitude is the one that's unusual. Maybe you ought to learn to tell the difference between "illegal" and "immoral".
Frankly, this is the most important pedagogical development in that last 100 years, if not longer. It will have import far into the future.
Ha, a bit of deja vu here. Wasn't that what they said when TV came out?
Problem: I've played a lot of educational video games, and all of them were boring. It certainly would be cool if a game could unconsciously teach useful things, but in 20 years of gaming it has never been done, and I see no evidence that it's possible.
E.g. I've played a platformer designed to teach math. In between the platform action, you would pick up items that froze the game and forced you to answer an arithmetic problem before you proceeded. Or a ecology adventure game that would bother you with popups about wildlife. Such things can only detract from the game. But can you propose any way to teach arithmetic without posing arithmetic problems?
Educational games are just another futile attempt to "make learning fun". The problem is that you can't make learning fun by mixing it with unrelated things that are fun, like shooting things and jumping around. You have to make children feel that learning is fun for its own sake. And the only thing that can do that is a good teacher.
No it wouldn't. The more obscene and violent the mnemonic, the easier it is to remember. Trust me on this: I spent much of last year making up sickening mnemonics for each of the 2000 standard Japanese ideograms. Rape, disembowelment, electrocution, wild dogs burned alive, the Japanese writing system has it all. Nothing helps jog the brain like beastly sadism.
Maybe you'd be a nazi too, if you had your land stolen in WW1 and your country humiliatingly crushed. What kind of argument is that? Historical background may explain racism, but it doesn't excuse it.
Probably, his beef is that he lives in Korea and he hates it there. Can't blame him.
No it hasn't. In this case there was a perfectly good word the parent poster could have used instead of "irony": namely, "fitting". Nobody who understands what irony officially means uses the word incorrectly, and the mistakes in usage show no real consistency that would indicate the appearance of a new meaning.
The reason "irony" is often misused is not because of a linguistic shift: it's because it's a subtle, relatively hard to understand concept, because people listen to brain-dead pop singers like Alanis Morrisette, and because generally people are stupid.
I agree completely. Basically, this sounds like a case of affirmative action applied to gender. From what you say, it sounds like it has the same problems as race-based affirmative action: by lowering the standards for a minority, you just get a lot of incompetent people from that minority, and push out genuinely skilled people. If most competent programmers happen to be male, nothing can be directly done about it: lowering standards isn't the solution.
Slashdot Mirror
Due to the logic used to verify the date, the DoS only occurs 25% of the time.
That would explain this guy's report.
Even taking the guy's story at face value, it doesn't sound like Katz necessarily did anything really objectionable. Here's a plausible Katz-favorable reading of the text. So this guy writes a compressor/decompressor for an open format called ARC, but it's as slow as a brain-damaged slug so it's not a big success. Katz comes along and writes a fast assembly program for the same format (the guy claims it "was basically my ARC program" --- but was code actually ripped here or is it just that Katz's program has the same functionality? He's suspiciously vague on this point.). Katz's program becomes wildly popular. This guy sees his business collapsing under the competition, so he panics and sues Katz. But the only effect is to push him to the similar but incompatible ZIP format --- which screws the guy even more since no one uses ARC anymore! The guy's business goes under because he was outmaneuvered by the competition. Fifteen years later, he is still complaining bitterly and claiming Katz stole his stuff.
I don't know the true story here, but until I see more evidence I wouldn't believe claims that Katz is a thief.
Not to diminish the importance of malaria contributions, but I would say the world's most pressing health problem is AIDS, not malaria. Remember that a major cause of the current malaria epidemic is AIDS-weakened hosts. Malaria causes deaths in the short term, but AIDS decimates entire populations over the long term, and is extremely difficult to ever recover from once the epidemic is widespread.
It seems Nintendo management hasn't learned anything at all from the Virtual Boy fiasco. It looks clever and innovative at first blush, but if it's huge, overexpensive and adds nothing to gameplay, then guess what Nintendo --- it ain't gonna sell. A ten-year-old could've told them this. Nobody wants fancy new controllers and displays --- the basic gaming hardware has essentially all been invented. Just focus on cranking out good games: IMHO, there's still plenty of innovation to be made in that department.
Derrida's perceptive reply went to the heart of classical general relativity:
Does that passage make any kind of sense at all? It's even more hilarious that the Social Text editors read this and didn't realize this was meaningless babble, just because Derrida wrote it.
I do recognize the names you gave, but that's only because I'm a relative expert in computing. It's too much to ask of even an educated layman to know who Mauchly is. I'd be happy with everyone knowing just the name Turing.
XP has hibernation support (AFAIK most/all? versions of W2K don't) --- i.e. it can just dump the contents of the RAM to the disk and load it up again. The feature is reliable enough that usually instead of shutting down I just hibernate. Counting from the point that I press the power button, it takes only about 10-15 seconds to boot up.
Ian McEwan is one of those very rare authors who seems never to have written a bad word. He is a master of deep characterization and psychology, and Atonement is certainly his most ambitious and arguably his best book so far: a fine WW2-era historical novel, with engaging battle scenes and portrayals of life in wartime hospitals.
In fact, though, it would be extremely easy to do this. Simply remove all trade barriers and other protectionist policies. Tada! With the very low cost of sea transport, 100% of rice in Japan is imported, and prices are about the same as in America.
This is so easy that whoever figures it out doesn't get any respect from me. However, someone who actually manages to get this policy past Japan's sluggish, special-interest clogged parliament does deserve respect.
The Japanese PC software industry is very weak. Hardware drivers aside, I'll bet you've never once in your life used a program written in Japan on your PC. They just don't export any PC software. Probably the only Japanese software you have ever used are games on your console. Japanese people don't generally use Japanese software either --- they use Japanese translations of MS Windows, Word, IE.
My theory is that adoption has been slowed down by the ubiquitousness of English and roman characters in the PC world (e.g. in URLs, programming languages and HTML). Anyway, it's not inaccurate to say that Japan is "wired", but PCs are an important exception.
What are you talking about? Have you compared rice prices lately? Rice is literally 10 times more expensive in Japan than in America.
Japanese agricultural policy is a disaster. It screws over Japanese consumers and developing-world farmers for the sake of handing over pork barrels to a handful of special interests. It's even worse than American and EU policy (as hard as that may be to believe). What do you find to praise?
Ha, cute lessons. Seriously though, I think the real problem with homeschooling is that a lot/most homeschooled kids don't get the chance to interact with enough of their peers. It's hard to find other places where a kid can hang out with 100s of others with varying backgrounds and interests. I've known people who've been homeschooled, and though they're smart enough, some of them are, um, weird. They just don't know how to act normally in a social context. I wouldn't wish a grave handicap like that on my kids even if I have to forego them turning into science geniuses.
So you're saying that even if IP has no ethical basis in itself, just the fact that a government decided to make it into a law gives it moral strength? What if the US government decided to, say, outlaw eating hamburgers (for health reasons, presumably)? Or how about if it was taken over by an islamic contigent and decreed that women must always cover their faces? Would that make eating hamburgers, or uncovered women's faces, wrong in your eyes?
To me, this seems to suggest a dangerous devotion and trust in your government. If your government enacts laws that are wrong, there is no reason why you should follow them. Indeed I think that slashdot is in the right by constantly pointing out the laws' silliness and trying to keep them in check.
This attitude is hardly "extremism". Unlike you, most people understand that IP is a practical rather than ethical law. Just as they smoke pot and break the speed limit, millions of people violate IP every day in America, with no guilt or qualms of any kind. Your attitude is the one that's unusual. Maybe you ought to learn to tell the difference between "illegal" and "immoral".
Ha, a bit of deja vu here. Wasn't that what they said when TV came out?
Problem: I've played a lot of educational video games, and all of them were boring. It certainly would be cool if a game could unconsciously teach useful things, but in 20 years of gaming it has never been done, and I see no evidence that it's possible.
E.g. I've played a platformer designed to teach math. In between the platform action, you would pick up items that froze the game and forced you to answer an arithmetic problem before you proceeded. Or a ecology adventure game that would bother you with popups about wildlife. Such things can only detract from the game. But can you propose any way to teach arithmetic without posing arithmetic problems?
Educational games are just another futile attempt to "make learning fun". The problem is that you can't make learning fun by mixing it with unrelated things that are fun, like shooting things and jumping around. You have to make children feel that learning is fun for its own sake. And the only thing that can do that is a good teacher.
No it wouldn't. The more obscene and violent the mnemonic, the easier it is to remember. Trust me on this: I spent much of last year making up sickening mnemonics for each of the 2000 standard Japanese ideograms. Rape, disembowelment, electrocution, wild dogs burned alive, the Japanese writing system has it all. Nothing helps jog the brain like beastly sadism.
Probably, his beef is that he lives in Korea and he hates it there. Can't blame him.
The reason "irony" is often misused is not because of a linguistic shift: it's because it's a subtle, relatively hard to understand concept, because people listen to brain-dead pop singers like Alanis Morrisette, and because generally people are stupid.
I agree completely. Basically, this sounds like a case of affirmative action applied to gender. From what you say, it sounds like it has the same problems as race-based affirmative action: by lowering the standards for a minority, you just get a lot of incompetent people from that minority, and push out genuinely skilled people. If most competent programmers happen to be male, nothing can be directly done about it: lowering standards isn't the solution.