Fine, let's ban cameras and the Internet too. You're more than welcome to not use Freenet. You can also not have an ISP, thus giving it that much less money to maintain the Internet, which can be used to spread all kinds of information including child porn. If you don't, then you're giving tacit approval of child porn. That kind of argument is just silly. Freenet wasn't made to distribute child porn. It was made to carry information anonymously. Furthermore, child porn is illegal not because of the content but because of the harm caused to children in the production of. So, if the information itself is not illegal, why should be medium to carry it be?
Schools that I know, which are Florida schools so bottom of barrel, aren't run by the most tech literate or most intelligent people. They're run by principals who could easily be a life-long middle manager somewhere, never rising above his position. What will he do when he needs tech resources? He'll look to well-known names and people with certifications from well-known names. Yes, they'll hire MCSAs. I'm not saying OSS is difficult. In fact, I find Linux to be simpler. However, mention the words "compile", "code", and "command-line" these MCSAs will freak out. Plus they want the job security of all Microsoft shop. Essentially, you have a tech clueless principal hiring someone who's barely competent with a recognizable certification to do IT. Can he get it to work? Yeah. That's what Microsoft aims for. Even the dumbest of us can build a network with Microsoft products. Is it going to be good? Not really. I remember how easy it was for us to bypass all their "security" features. In fact, my friend email-bombed the principal using the school's own mail server. You think any of these people involved in the decision making is going to risk trying something different? If they go Microsoft and it blows up, they can always blame Microsoft. Anyone will accept blaming Microsoft. If they go with OSS and it blows up, what the hell were they doing with "cheap" software with no corporate backing? In PHPs' minds, a corporate logo is a stamp of approval.
Saying the recent security flaws in Firefox is causing people to stay with IE is like saying people would rather drive a Ford Pinto because they realized that BMWs aren't completely safe. No one with an ounce of intelligence said Firefox is completely safe. The advantage to Firefox and OSS in general is the process. There's a great deal more transparency. If Firefox has a bug, at least I would know about it and can take actions on my own initiative to mitigate it. With non-OSS software, however, I'm at the mercy of the people who wrote the software.
If You Can't Fight Them, Join Them
on
Star Wars Sickout
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
My employers decided that it would be smarter to rent out a theater on premiere day for a showing at 4 PM rather than have people skip out. No lines or sleeping in tents for me. It also helps that my company is a hedge fund founded by a bunch of engineering nerds. They want to go as much as we do. It's a win-win situation. Boost morale, prevent "sick" leaves, and satisfy your inner nerd. The company is run by smart people I tell you:-).
IANAL but doesn't that violate warranty laws? Isn't there an implied warranty on the expected use of a product? That's not the official name of the law, but it simply means that when you buy a car, you should be able to expect that you can drive it safely (ie. steer, stop, and accelerate).
You think that's bad...
2 of my college friends dropped out of college because of Everquest. They spent ALL day playing it and not going to class because they felt that they needed to keep up with their guild members, etc. They were on scholarship, which they lost. Eventually they dropped out of college. It's sad but games can be very addicting, just like a lot of things. Games are designed to be addicting, that's how they make their money. I'm guilty of being an addict as well, but to cycling. The good thing is that when I'm cycling, I'm in so much pain that there's a limit to how much I do it. Computer games, on the other hand, has no such mechanism. I think the pain comes later when the rest of your life suffers as in the case of my friends. So maybe instead of immediate reward and delayed punishment, they should make it delayed reward and immediate punishment, like cycling:-) Then again, a game like that will never sell.
I've been signed up to that site for a while. Unless your group is well established, it's very difficult to get it going. The Dallas Chess meetup group collapsed. The cycling group meets never worked. Most of the members were inactive. The administrators are really killing any chance of these fledgling groups growing with this idea. They've done very little to promote as is. The idea of critical mass somehow managed to escape them. Charge well-established groups with N members but leave the little ones so they have time to grow. As it is, members can't directly message each other with their Meetup+ membership. It is very difficult to organize anything if you can't contact other members via email and only via the forums or the organizer. I've tried explaining critical mass to them but they don't seen to value it. Once a group get big enough, the numbers will attract other people and activities can happen and repeat. Below that level, things just fall apart. No one goes to meets so the newcomers become inactive, etc. When the next newcomers arrive, the old members are already inactive so there's not enough people to do anything.
This Dell using AMD thing is so predictable and the market always acts as though they've never heard it. So... My new plan to become flithy rich goes: 1. Buy AMD stock when it's low. 2. Wait for Dell to mention AMD. 3. Speculators get excited and drives price up. 4. Dump AMD stock. 5. Wait for Dell to reconfirm their Intel only strategy. 6. Price falls. 7. Profit! 8. Repeat as needed.
That's just too broad of a generalization. Yes, I've seen politics at my workplace sometimes. But I am very happy with the company I work for. It has a nearly flat hierarchy. We call our managing directors by their first names. No "Mister" or "Miss". They're not micromanaging me. 99% of the time I report only directly to my manager, who's more of a team member than a manager. He does the same thing I do. People thank me when I fix their problems. They apologize when something goes wrong and I tell them it's okay. They all have admin rights on their boxes. Adwares are a minor nuisances. I've yet to find a virus on a box. A lot of the protections are provided behind the scenes by our server and network guys.
The key I think is to look for a good company to work for. Cultural fit is a very important factor for both the employer and employee. The reason I took the job is how the company was describe, "a small company with a lot of resources." They have a really tough hiring process and new hires happen after a long stretch of time but in the end, it's worth it. The interview process wasn't just a way for me to impress them but also for me to find out if I really want to work for the company.
Maybe I'm one of those people on the long tail end. Maybe it's because I work in a financial company. I think it has a lot with the philosophy/culture of the company.
Question of legality: If the author succeeds in writing a virus and it spreads all over the Internet, who's legally responsible for it? The guy who solicited it? Also, if he does succeed, who would be dumb enough to step forward to claim the prize and then get arrested by the Feds?
Caveat on that: Women in China traditionally DID NOT take her husband's name. Their children did but the wife did not. At least, that's what happened in my family and every Chinese family I know. We were from Southern China so maybe traditions differ in the north.
On the other hand, people cry foul anytime someone is rewarded a huge punitive damage against a company. Now some people and politicians are looking to cap it. Are we going to repeat the mistakes we made with Ford? Remember the Ford Pinto case was Ford decided it costs less for them to get sued over deaths from the Pinto than to do a recall? That's precisely when punitive damages were started.
So on one hand you have people getting ridiculously wealthy off punitive damages, sometimes more than the damage. Then you have companies who can afford to pay the settlement and would rather do that than obey the law. I don't know what the solution is. Perhaps we should raise the punitive damage and just flush it down the toilet once it's paid. Make it grow exponential based on the number of infractions?
Good enough doesn't hold up against time. People will innovate and standards will go up. Good enough of yesterday is the junk of today. Who the hell still have those blocky cellphones? In the 80s and early 90's they were good enough.
My friends and I once made a connect 4 game but the AI wasn't very good against other AIs. It occured to me that perhaps Connect 4 is solvable. Each hole has 3 possible states and there are 42 holes. So it's 3^42 possible board states. However, there is a very large number of board states that cannot happen, such as having a piece in row 2 but not row 1, etc. Someone with better math skills can calculate what the actual number of possible board states. My intuition is that it should greatly reduces the number of states enough that we can solve the entire game. The rules are simple and the AI for it is simple as well. We used a tree to represent moves and applied alpha-beta pruning to it.
I would say it depends on the college you graduated from. It doesn't PROVE you're smart but if you graduated from MIT, it suggests that you're more likely to be smart than the average joe. Does that mean anyone who didn't go to a good, challenging college isn't smart? No. But we know converses of statements aren't necessarily true.
So if you do extremely well on standardized tests, chances are you're fairly bright to some extend. It doesn't mean you'll be a Nobel Laureate just because you got a 1600 on the SAT. It doesn't mean you're a dumbass if you got a 1200. It just means if you score high, there's a potential for success. Let's NOT ignore these tests. Universities don't use them for no reason. They're imperfect, yes, but they do work for most parts. But there's more to success than just potentials.
"Stiennon said while a computer running Firefox will still not be as good of a machine to infect with spyware and it takes the malicious software some time to have an impact, the Mozilla browser will come under fire as it nears and surpasses 10 percent market share."
Predictions like that makes me very wary of the article. Where did he pull out numbers like that? Is there a correlation between the increase in market share and the number of spywares written for Firefox? Or does he think that spyware writers are watching the market share meter and the minute it strikes 10%, they'll start writing spywares for it? 10% is a nice round number but it also make me think he just pull that number out of his head without any thorough research or analysis. Market share increase will draw the attention of spyware writers of course. That's obvious. Yes, at 10%, there will be more spyware than now but so will 13% and 79%.
It just seems to me that he pulled a nice round number out of his head and predicts this year since most of it is still ahead of us and gives his predictions a nice fat margin of error. In other words, the predictions provide no new or key insights.
"I'd like to ask for Slashdot's experiences and opinions on why you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on an expensive tool to perform a professional security assessment."
It sounds like you're already set in your opinion and just asking for justifications. That doesn't usually develop any new insights or make good comparisons. If you really want to sell people on Open Source, do a fair and un-biased comparison. An obviously biased comparison is easily detectable and loses credibility. I really don't think Open Source needs biased comparisons to look good.
Slashdot Mirror
Do a search for "software" on this page
Fine, let's ban cameras and the Internet too. You're more than welcome to not use Freenet. You can also not have an ISP, thus giving it that much less money to maintain the Internet, which can be used to spread all kinds of information including child porn. If you don't, then you're giving tacit approval of child porn. That kind of argument is just silly. Freenet wasn't made to distribute child porn. It was made to carry information anonymously. Furthermore, child porn is illegal not because of the content but because of the harm caused to children in the production of. So, if the information itself is not illegal, why should be medium to carry it be?
Schools that I know, which are Florida schools so bottom of barrel, aren't run by the most tech literate or most intelligent people. They're run by principals who could easily be a life-long middle manager somewhere, never rising above his position. What will he do when he needs tech resources? He'll look to well-known names and people with certifications from well-known names. Yes, they'll hire MCSAs. I'm not saying OSS is difficult. In fact, I find Linux to be simpler. However, mention the words "compile", "code", and "command-line" these MCSAs will freak out. Plus they want the job security of all Microsoft shop. Essentially, you have a tech clueless principal hiring someone who's barely competent with a recognizable certification to do IT. Can he get it to work? Yeah. That's what Microsoft aims for. Even the dumbest of us can build a network with Microsoft products. Is it going to be good? Not really. I remember how easy it was for us to bypass all their "security" features. In fact, my friend email-bombed the principal using the school's own mail server. You think any of these people involved in the decision making is going to risk trying something different? If they go Microsoft and it blows up, they can always blame Microsoft. Anyone will accept blaming Microsoft. If they go with OSS and it blows up, what the hell were they doing with "cheap" software with no corporate backing? In PHPs' minds, a corporate logo is a stamp of approval.
Saying the recent security flaws in Firefox is causing people to stay with IE is like saying people would rather drive a Ford Pinto because they realized that BMWs aren't completely safe. No one with an ounce of intelligence said Firefox is completely safe. The advantage to Firefox and OSS in general is the process. There's a great deal more transparency. If Firefox has a bug, at least I would know about it and can take actions on my own initiative to mitigate it. With non-OSS software, however, I'm at the mercy of the people who wrote the software.
My employers decided that it would be smarter to rent out a theater on premiere day for a showing at 4 PM rather than have people skip out. No lines or sleeping in tents for me. It also helps that my company is a hedge fund founded by a bunch of engineering nerds. They want to go as much as we do. It's a win-win situation. Boost morale, prevent "sick" leaves, and satisfy your inner nerd. The company is run by smart people I tell you :-).
5 hurricanes, God's pissed off at you South Florida! I heard hurricane season is about to start again soon... Repent now!
(I can say this because I'm from S. Florida.)
IANAL, but I don't think cases like this have juries... I don't seen to recall a jury in the Microsoft anti-trust case nor one in the SCO case.
IANAL but doesn't that violate warranty laws? Isn't there an implied warranty on the expected use of a product? That's not the official name of the law, but it simply means that when you buy a car, you should be able to expect that you can drive it safely (ie. steer, stop, and accelerate).
You think that's bad... 2 of my college friends dropped out of college because of Everquest. They spent ALL day playing it and not going to class because they felt that they needed to keep up with their guild members, etc. They were on scholarship, which they lost. Eventually they dropped out of college. It's sad but games can be very addicting, just like a lot of things. Games are designed to be addicting, that's how they make their money. I'm guilty of being an addict as well, but to cycling. The good thing is that when I'm cycling, I'm in so much pain that there's a limit to how much I do it. Computer games, on the other hand, has no such mechanism. I think the pain comes later when the rest of your life suffers as in the case of my friends. So maybe instead of immediate reward and delayed punishment, they should make it delayed reward and immediate punishment, like cycling :-) Then again, a game like that will never sell.
I've been signed up to that site for a while. Unless your group is well established, it's very difficult to get it going. The Dallas Chess meetup group collapsed. The cycling group meets never worked. Most of the members were inactive. The administrators are really killing any chance of these fledgling groups growing with this idea. They've done very little to promote as is. The idea of critical mass somehow managed to escape them. Charge well-established groups with N members but leave the little ones so they have time to grow. As it is, members can't directly message each other with their Meetup+ membership. It is very difficult to organize anything if you can't contact other members via email and only via the forums or the organizer. I've tried explaining critical mass to them but they don't seen to value it. Once a group get big enough, the numbers will attract other people and activities can happen and repeat. Below that level, things just fall apart. No one goes to meets so the newcomers become inactive, etc. When the next newcomers arrive, the old members are already inactive so there's not enough people to do anything.
This Dell using AMD thing is so predictable and the market always acts as though they've never heard it. So... My new plan to become flithy rich goes:
1. Buy AMD stock when it's low.
2. Wait for Dell to mention AMD.
3. Speculators get excited and drives price up.
4. Dump AMD stock.
5. Wait for Dell to reconfirm their Intel only strategy.
6. Price falls.
7. Profit!
8. Repeat as needed.
With Open Source, everyone can be an editor, a contributor, a tester, and an end-user at the same time if they want.
"The kettle calling the pot black?"
Good thing it's Open Source and open to a fork.
That's just too broad of a generalization. Yes, I've seen politics at my workplace sometimes. But I am very happy with the company I work for. It has a nearly flat hierarchy. We call our managing directors by their first names. No "Mister" or "Miss". They're not micromanaging me. 99% of the time I report only directly to my manager, who's more of a team member than a manager. He does the same thing I do. People thank me when I fix their problems. They apologize when something goes wrong and I tell them it's okay. They all have admin rights on their boxes. Adwares are a minor nuisances. I've yet to find a virus on a box. A lot of the protections are provided behind the scenes by our server and network guys.
The key I think is to look for a good company to work for. Cultural fit is a very important factor for both the employer and employee. The reason I took the job is how the company was describe, "a small company with a lot of resources." They have a really tough hiring process and new hires happen after a long stretch of time but in the end, it's worth it. The interview process wasn't just a way for me to impress them but also for me to find out if I really want to work for the company.
Maybe I'm one of those people on the long tail end. Maybe it's because I work in a financial company. I think it has a lot with the philosophy/culture of the company.
Question of legality: If the author succeeds in writing a virus and it spreads all over the Internet, who's legally responsible for it? The guy who solicited it? Also, if he does succeed, who would be dumb enough to step forward to claim the prize and then get arrested by the Feds?
SWEET!
Caveat on that: Women in China traditionally DID NOT take her husband's name. Their children did but the wife did not. At least, that's what happened in my family and every Chinese family I know. We were from Southern China so maybe traditions differ in the north.
On the other hand, people cry foul anytime someone is rewarded a huge punitive damage against a company. Now some people and politicians are looking to cap it. Are we going to repeat the mistakes we made with Ford? Remember the Ford Pinto case was Ford decided it costs less for them to get sued over deaths from the Pinto than to do a recall? That's precisely when punitive damages were started.
So on one hand you have people getting ridiculously wealthy off punitive damages, sometimes more than the damage. Then you have companies who can afford to pay the settlement and would rather do that than obey the law. I don't know what the solution is. Perhaps we should raise the punitive damage and just flush it down the toilet once it's paid. Make it grow exponential based on the number of infractions?
Good enough doesn't hold up against time. People will innovate and standards will go up. Good enough of yesterday is the junk of today. Who the hell still have those blocky cellphones? In the 80s and early 90's they were good enough.
My friends and I once made a connect 4 game but the AI wasn't very good against other AIs. It occured to me that perhaps Connect 4 is solvable. Each hole has 3 possible states and there are 42 holes. So it's 3^42 possible board states. However, there is a very large number of board states that cannot happen, such as having a piece in row 2 but not row 1, etc. Someone with better math skills can calculate what the actual number of possible board states. My intuition is that it should greatly reduces the number of states enough that we can solve the entire game. The rules are simple and the AI for it is simple as well. We used a tree to represent moves and applied alpha-beta pruning to it.
It all depends if you're running Linux or not...
I would say it depends on the college you graduated from. It doesn't PROVE you're smart but if you graduated from MIT, it suggests that you're more likely to be smart than the average joe. Does that mean anyone who didn't go to a good, challenging college isn't smart? No. But we know converses of statements aren't necessarily true.
So if you do extremely well on standardized tests, chances are you're fairly bright to some extend. It doesn't mean you'll be a Nobel Laureate just because you got a 1600 on the SAT. It doesn't mean you're a dumbass if you got a 1200. It just means if you score high, there's a potential for success. Let's NOT ignore these tests. Universities don't use them for no reason. They're imperfect, yes, but they do work for most parts. But there's more to success than just potentials.
Predictions like that makes me very wary of the article. Where did he pull out numbers like that? Is there a correlation between the increase in market share and the number of spywares written for Firefox? Or does he think that spyware writers are watching the market share meter and the minute it strikes 10%, they'll start writing spywares for it? 10% is a nice round number but it also make me think he just pull that number out of his head without any thorough research or analysis. Market share increase will draw the attention of spyware writers of course. That's obvious. Yes, at 10%, there will be more spyware than now but so will 13% and 79%.
It just seems to me that he pulled a nice round number out of his head and predicts this year since most of it is still ahead of us and gives his predictions a nice fat margin of error. In other words, the predictions provide no new or key insights.
Is that the right question to ask?
"I'd like to ask for Slashdot's experiences and opinions on why you don't need to spend thousands of dollars on an expensive tool to perform a professional security assessment."
It sounds like you're already set in your opinion and just asking for justifications. That doesn't usually develop any new insights or make good comparisons. If you really want to sell people on Open Source, do a fair and un-biased comparison. An obviously biased comparison is easily detectable and loses credibility. I really don't think Open Source needs biased comparisons to look good.