it sounds like they ARE smartening up. it's the adult who find the results of the survey surprising that need smartening. this country is fubar'd, and if you think it's bad now, just wait until these junior brownshirts start taking office and managing companies. it's not their fault though, they're just doing what we've taught them by example. another fine accomplishment of the pro-censorship factions of BOTH SIDES, left and right. as one would remark on fark: asshats.
five years and a whitewash of an antitrust settlement makes. after a bit of googling, i present the following (and link to source article) for the dark humor value:
let me be the first to predict that (1) there will be bugs in the ofx implementation and/or protocol, (2) these bugs will be found by crackers, (3) they will be exploited, and (4) these facts will remain largely unknown to the public for some time afterward. this is not so much the fault of ofx as it is the basic idea of allowing automated initiation of bank transactions from the typical user's computer -- for all i know, the same thing has already happened to the closed precursors to ofx. if you're going to have a protocol to do something stupid, you might as well use one that has as many eyes as possible looking for problems, but the stupidity remains. sure it's convenient, but it's also an obvious recipe for disaster waiting to happen. and you thought viruses that hijacked your computer to send spam were bad. sorry for the mostly off-topic comment, but i had somehow avoided realizing just how far this kind of stupidity has progressed until the "connects directly" phrase hit.
to each their own opinion. i think it is already very likely to be a complete bastardization due to the two following known changes: zaphord only has one skull and the two heads have been reduced to a stupid sex joke, and the heart of gold is now a sphere in direct contradiction to the book. given this i have no faith what-so-ever that it gets any better. at least adams didn't live to see this abomination. i wish there was a law against inaccurate translations of books to film, but hollywood would go broke.
being a monopoly that controls over 90% of the worlds computers, the chance of it being "on the decline" in any meaningful (i.e.: financial) sense is zero. the "amusing" thing about the profit report (i.e.: microsoft raking in the dough from it's monopoly despite the rest of the economy still going down the toilet) is to contrast it with the hyping of their new anti-piracy program:
of course, the two are not contradictory -- i'm sure piracy has impact microsoft to some degree -- but the contrast suggests that the harm caused by having thousands of unpatchable (since the owners are not going to be stupid enough to sign up for a visit from the spa) and exploited systems on the internet outweighs the impact on their profit margin.
microsoft is a monopoly and is not concerned about flaws in its products. the majority of "lay users" will be using them regardless. the "respect of the cryptographic community" is irrelevant to its profit margin, since said community is numerically insignificant in terms of sales, and it is the phbs that make corporate purchasing decisions, not technical experts. what microsoft "should" do, beyond what is in the interests of its profit margin, is a moot point.
you are incorrect and your reasoning is confused. i stand by my statements. your insult is also inaccurate, but i will not lower myself to respond in kind.
Can someone still release an open source GPL product that does the same thing as McAfee's deal and be untouchable?
no, and existing programs aren't really safe either -- the "prior art" defense is mostly a fantasy. in a legal battle between the typical large corporation and the typical freeware developer, the latter will be living in the street LONG before they can use the "prior art" defense -- assuming they have a good enough lawyer to successfully use it, and a judge that will accept it. some of us have been screaming about the danger of software patents to the right to program since the mid-90s. pity nobody paid attention then. too late now. hang on to your tar bundles, because sooner than you think you won't be able to get them anymore. at least in countries with software patents -- the us, the eu, etc.
having been confined to 98se until recently, i had assumed microsoft had by now managed to create a workable implementation of local user security in xp (aka nt5). however, since i began using it i learned this is not the case. despite the fact that properly working local security models have existed in other operating systems (even vms) for several decades, xp's local security model has a fatal flaw -- almost every application requires that you have local administrator privilege or it will not work properly. and no, you can't just give yourself local administrator privilege to install and then take it away -- that does not always work. so if you have an xp machine with more than one user, you choice is to not let those users use basic applications like Palm Desktop (it's a documented requirement, so it's 'not a bug' [yeah, right]) and cd/dvd burning software, or give everyone local administrator privilege -- which rather defeats the purpose of having a local administrator privilege. the security implication of this is that if you value your personal files and would like to prevent other users from deleting or modifying them, you need to host them on another computer (like a samba equiped linux box). anything you store locally on the xp box is obviously not secure (local administrators can delete or modify any locally stored file) -- and if you host the files on another xp box, you need to not have any real users on it for the same reason. gotta love microsoft's innovative operating system. oy.
Note that (whatever other considerations you might have about such deployment), the Rules of Robotics that some readers have linked to don't really apply to remote-controlled drones, which is what these are.
um, yes. and they will never really apply to robots, period. they are a fictional construct of an ethical science-fiction author, and do not reflect any real world requirement in the programming or design of robots. you can be certain that military robots will not respect them at all, remote controlled or not and will be designed to be as lethal as possible. i hope i'm misreading the above and people really haven't become so misinformed as to not know this.
stop dreaming about ideal alternatives and hang on to the job you have. you think things are bad now? just wait a few months. i'd be trying to enhance my interpersonal skills and pleasing my superiors to ensure you retain your job if staffing cuts come down.
the key question is, why was someone with obviously no grasp of proper application security design allowed to use identification numbers as passwords? any competent person in the field will tell you that they ARE NOT PASSWORDS and SHOULD NEVER BE USED AS PASSWORDS. but in a world where dependable unix solutions are replaced with windows solutions that have to be rebooted every two weeks to avoid "data overload" (the reporter's term, not mine) and crash if someone puts a zero in the wrong application entry field, putting 800 planes worth of lives at risk and rendering a navy vessel dead in the water respectively, but NOTHING IS DONE about it except making sure they "DON'T DO THAT, THEN", this article should come as a surprise to NO ONE.
when making a spelling/grammer gibe, it's usually best to avoid making such errors yourself.:-) but yeah, i should have used 'enacted' in that context to be canonical.
of course they're not dead. software patents benefit the corporations that control the governments, so they will eventually be installed in all countries. you'd think people would get the message from the backdoor process that was used to almost install them on eu countries this time. don't count on stopping it again.
As this article describes, resumes are largely useless. You're better off networking and trying to trick your way into speaking to an actual technical manager than worrying much about your resume -- beyond the obvious points of keeping it as targeted and brief as possible.
Well put. There's an amusing little article on CNN that discussed the true complexity of anti-U.S. sentiment in Iraq vs. Bushco's promoted fantasy that it's all bin Laden's doing. And to any and all Bush voters: thanks a lot for flushing the country down the toilet, morons. Your children will enjoy paying off the $500 billion dollar bill for your stupidity while you die in the street after Social Security is bankrupted. Family values my ass.
the obvious way to nip this fascist bullshit in the bud is to BOYCOTT THE GOD DAMNED CHIP. DON'T BUY IT OR ANYTHING MADE WITH IT. not that anyone will bother, but if you care about stopping this crap . ..
There is no shortage of Open Source expertise. Plenty of skilled Open Source people need work. The problem is PHBs in HR and IT now require various gatekeeper items for Open Source jobs, like Red Hat certification, specific Linux flavors, and other irrelevent things. Having years of experience isn't enough. So they deserve whatever "shortage" they get.
The point of the article is to draw attention away from the fact that once again the love of PHBs for Microsoft has eclipsed other concerns. The two key paragraphs are near the end:
The genesis of the problem was the transition in 2001 by Harris Corp. of the Federal Aviation Administration's Voice Switching Control System from Unix-based servers to Microsoft Corp.'s off-the-shelf Windows Advanced Server 2000.
By most accounts, the move went well except the new system required regular maintenance to prevent data overload. When that wasn't done, it turned itself off as it was designed to do. But the backup also failed.
In other words, a working Unix-based solution was replaced by a dubiously reliable Windows-based version. The phrases "regular maintenance" and "data overload" are not very descriptive, but a more technical summary,
The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times. To avoid this automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually every 30 days. An improperly trained employee failed to reset the system, leading it to shut down without warning, the official said[,]
makes the issue clear. Unix-based solutions do not require being restarted every 30 days to avoid "data overload". Unix-based solutions could restart automatically if they did. The question people should be asking is: why was an obviously defectively designed system allowed to replace a working system. Doing so put 800 planes worth of lives at risk.
A critical aspect not mentioned in the summary that users should be aware of is mentioned in this article:
Not only is Microsoft allowed to sue any company.including Sun.for alleged patent violations connected with OpenOffice, but Sun is required to provide Microsoft with legal help in bringing such lawsuits against OpenOffice users.
I.E.: When MS asks (and it will), Sun will be giving it their OpenOffice registration database. So unless you want to get sued later, beware of the answers you give when downloading (which you should do now while it's still available).
You said it. I'm forced to use Windows, and I find the requirement to both highlight AND either press ctrl-c or right-select 'copy' (you might prefer this to ctrl-c) to be an endless pita. The pasting behavior is a pain too, but right-selecting for that is not so annoying. Thanks for speaking up.
Next time, don't program it to landinacrater.
NASA was lucky that their similarly boneheaded failure to include filesystem cleanup code in their Mars landers was repairable.
If the policy is truely that users cannot obtain the patch without a valid CD key, then what are the majority of LEGAL home users -- who have preloaded systems, and either never got or threw away their copy of the CD key -- going to do?
Given that ChoicePoint is the same sleazy outfit that conspired with the Bush family and the GOP to corrupt Florida's election results in 2000 (see this article and others), it's too late to keep it out of the wrong hands, and also explains why they have no qualms about irresponsibly allowing any (other) crook to get their hands on it. Pathetic.
Slashdot Mirror
it sounds like they ARE smartening up. it's the adult who find the results of the survey surprising that need smartening. this country is fubar'd, and if you think it's bad now, just wait until these junior brownshirts start taking office and managing companies. it's not their fault though, they're just doing what we've taught them by example. another fine accomplishment of the pro-censorship factions of BOTH SIDES, left and right. as one would remark on fark: asshats.
five years and a whitewash of an antitrust settlement makes. after a bit of googling, i present the following (and link to source article) for the dark humor value:
Microsoft, meanwhile, called as its first witness an economist who described as irrelevant whether the vendor holds a monopoly in the desktop personal computer operating system market because, he said, potential competition will come from alternative computer platforms.
[rant omited]
let me be the first to predict that (1) there will be bugs in the ofx implementation and/or protocol, (2) these bugs will be found by crackers, (3) they will be exploited, and (4) these facts will remain largely unknown to the public for some time afterward. this is not so much the fault of ofx as it is the basic idea of allowing automated initiation of bank transactions from the typical user's computer -- for all i know, the same thing has already happened to the closed precursors to ofx. if you're going to have a protocol to do something stupid, you might as well use one that has as many eyes as possible looking for problems, but the stupidity remains. sure it's convenient, but it's also an obvious recipe for disaster waiting to happen. and you thought viruses that hijacked your computer to send spam were bad. sorry for the mostly off-topic comment, but i had somehow avoided realizing just how far this kind of stupidity has progressed until the "connects directly" phrase hit.
to each their own opinion. i think it is already very likely to be a complete bastardization due to the two following known changes: zaphord only has one skull and the two heads have been reduced to a stupid sex joke, and the heart of gold is now a sphere in direct contradiction to the book. given this i have no faith what-so-ever that it gets any better. at least adams didn't live to see this abomination. i wish there was a law against inaccurate translations of books to film, but hollywood would go broke.
being a monopoly that controls over 90% of the worlds computers, the chance of it being "on the decline" in any meaningful (i.e.: financial) sense is zero. the "amusing" thing about the profit report (i.e.: microsoft raking in the dough from it's monopoly despite the rest of the economy still going down the toilet) is to contrast it with the hyping of their new anti-piracy program:
David Lazar, a director of the Windows Genuine Advantage program, says piracy has cost Microsoft "billions of dollars over the past ten years."
of course, the two are not contradictory -- i'm sure piracy has impact microsoft to some degree -- but the contrast suggests that the harm caused by having thousands of unpatchable (since the owners are not going to be stupid enough to sign up for a visit from the spa) and exploited systems on the internet outweighs the impact on their profit margin.
microsoft is a monopoly and is not concerned about flaws in its products. the majority of "lay users" will be using them regardless. the "respect of the cryptographic community" is irrelevant to its profit margin, since said community is numerically insignificant in terms of sales, and it is the phbs that make corporate purchasing decisions, not technical experts. what microsoft "should" do, beyond what is in the interests of its profit margin, is a moot point.
you are incorrect and your reasoning is confused. i stand by my statements. your insult is also inaccurate, but i will not lower myself to respond in kind.
Can someone still release an open source GPL product that does the same thing as McAfee's deal and be untouchable?
no, and existing programs aren't really safe either -- the "prior art" defense is mostly a fantasy. in a legal battle between the typical large corporation and the typical freeware developer, the latter will be living in the street LONG before they can use the "prior art" defense -- assuming they have a good enough lawyer to successfully use it, and a judge that will accept it. some of us have been screaming about the danger of software patents to the right to program since the mid-90s. pity nobody paid attention then. too late now. hang on to your tar bundles, because sooner than you think you won't be able to get them anymore. at least in countries with software patents -- the us, the eu, etc.
having been confined to 98se until recently, i had assumed microsoft had by now managed to create a workable implementation of local user security in xp (aka nt5). however, since i began using it i learned this is not the case. despite the fact that properly working local security models have existed in other operating systems (even vms) for several decades, xp's local security model has a fatal flaw -- almost every application requires that you have local administrator privilege or it will not work properly. and no, you can't just give yourself local administrator privilege to install and then take it away -- that does not always work. so if you have an xp machine with more than one user, you choice is to not let those users use basic applications like Palm Desktop (it's a documented requirement, so it's 'not a bug' [yeah, right]) and cd/dvd burning software, or give everyone local administrator privilege -- which rather defeats the purpose of having a local administrator privilege. the security implication of this is that if you value your personal files and would like to prevent other users from deleting or modifying them, you need to host them on another computer (like a samba equiped linux box). anything you store locally on the xp box is obviously not secure (local administrators can delete or modify any locally stored file) -- and if you host the files on another xp box, you need to not have any real users on it for the same reason. gotta love microsoft's innovative operating system. oy.
Note that (whatever other considerations you might have about such deployment), the Rules of Robotics that some readers have linked to don't really apply to remote-controlled drones, which is what these are.
um, yes. and they will never really apply to robots, period. they are a fictional construct of an ethical science-fiction author, and do not reflect any real world requirement in the programming or design of robots. you can be certain that military robots will not respect them at all, remote controlled or not and will be designed to be as lethal as possible. i hope i'm misreading the above and people really haven't become so misinformed as to not know this.
stop dreaming about ideal alternatives and hang on to the job you have. you think things are bad now? just wait a few months. i'd be trying to enhance my interpersonal skills and pleasing my superiors to ensure you retain your job if staffing cuts come down.
the key question is, why was someone with obviously no grasp of proper application security design allowed to use identification numbers as passwords? any competent person in the field will tell you that they ARE NOT PASSWORDS and SHOULD NEVER BE USED AS PASSWORDS. but in a world where dependable unix solutions are replaced with windows solutions that have to be rebooted every two weeks to avoid "data overload" (the reporter's term, not mine) and crash if someone puts a zero in the wrong application entry field, putting 800 planes worth of lives at risk and rendering a navy vessel dead in the water respectively, but NOTHING IS DONE about it except making sure they "DON'T DO THAT, THEN", this article should come as a surprise to NO ONE.
when making a spelling/grammer gibe, it's usually best to avoid making such errors yourself. :-) but yeah, i should have used 'enacted' in that context to be canonical.
that obeying managers is more important than doing your job properly or following pledged oaths.
that lawyers care about profit, not justice.
that gates would win.
of course they're not dead. software patents benefit the corporations that control the governments, so they will eventually be installed in all countries. you'd think people would get the message from the backdoor process that was used to almost install them on eu countries this time. don't count on stopping it again.
As this article describes, resumes are largely useless. You're better off networking and trying to trick your way into speaking to an actual technical manager than worrying much about your resume -- beyond the obvious points of keeping it as targeted and brief as possible.
Well put. There's an amusing little article on CNN that discussed the true complexity of anti-U.S. sentiment in Iraq vs. Bushco's promoted fantasy that it's all bin Laden's doing. And to any and all Bush voters: thanks a lot for flushing the country down the toilet, morons. Your children will enjoy paying off the $500 billion dollar bill for your stupidity while you die in the street after Social Security is bankrupted. Family values my ass.
the obvious way to nip this fascist bullshit in the bud is to BOYCOTT THE GOD DAMNED CHIP. DON'T BUY IT OR ANYTHING MADE WITH IT. not that anyone will bother, but if you care about stopping this crap . . .
There is no shortage of Open Source expertise. Plenty of skilled Open Source people need work. The problem is PHBs in HR and IT now require various gatekeeper items for Open Source jobs, like Red Hat certification, specific Linux flavors, and other irrelevent things. Having years of experience isn't enough. So they deserve whatever "shortage" they get.
The point of the article is to draw attention away from the fact that once again the love of PHBs for Microsoft has eclipsed other concerns. The two key paragraphs are near the end:
The genesis of the problem was the transition in 2001 by Harris Corp. of the Federal Aviation Administration's Voice Switching Control System from Unix-based servers to Microsoft Corp.'s off-the-shelf Windows Advanced Server 2000.
By most accounts, the move went well except the new system required regular maintenance to prevent data overload. When that wasn't done, it turned itself off as it was designed to do. But the backup also failed.
In other words, a working Unix-based solution was replaced by a dubiously reliable Windows-based version. The phrases "regular maintenance" and "data overload" are not very descriptive, but a more technical summary,
The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order
to prevent a data overload, a union official told the LA Times. To avoid this
automatic shutdown, technicians are required to restart the system manually
every 30 days. An improperly trained employee failed to reset the system,
leading it to shut down without warning, the official said[,]
makes the issue clear. Unix-based solutions do not require being restarted every 30 days to avoid "data overload". Unix-based solutions could restart automatically if they did. The question people should be asking is: why was an obviously defectively designed system allowed to replace a working system. Doing so put 800 planes worth of lives at risk.
A critical aspect not mentioned in the summary that users should be aware of is mentioned in this article:
Not only is Microsoft allowed to sue any company.including Sun.for
alleged patent violations connected with OpenOffice, but Sun is required to
provide Microsoft with legal help in bringing such lawsuits against OpenOffice
users.
I.E.: When MS asks (and it will), Sun will be giving it their OpenOffice registration database. So unless you want to get sued later, beware of the answers you give when downloading (which you should do now while it's still available).
You said it. I'm forced to use Windows, and I find the requirement to both highlight AND either press ctrl-c or right-select 'copy' (you might prefer this to ctrl-c) to be an endless pita. The pasting behavior is a pain too, but right-selecting for that is not so annoying. Thanks for speaking up.
Next time, don't program it to land in a crater. NASA was lucky that their similarly boneheaded failure to include filesystem cleanup code in their Mars landers was repairable.
If the policy is truely that users cannot obtain the patch without a valid CD key, then what are the majority of LEGAL home users -- who have preloaded systems, and either never got or threw away their copy of the CD key -- going to do?
Given that ChoicePoint is the same sleazy outfit that conspired with the Bush family and the GOP to corrupt Florida's election results in 2000 (see this article and others), it's too late to keep it out of the wrong hands, and also explains why they have no qualms about irresponsibly allowing any (other) crook to get their hands on it. Pathetic.