Software products already have supported hardware stuff on the boxes. Your saying that a piece of software cannot be certified to do said function on X pieces of hardware?
No, I am saying that testing 1 is trivial... testing the plethora of, for example PC hardware, well......try in the words of one of my former bosses, "being a real man and writing your own device drivers." If you deal with 1 set of standard hardware, the job is easier, in one respect, but consider: the demands for perfection are so much higher. Consider: recompiling a program is trivial compared to the cost of burning a single test chip, and the cost only increases with the complexity of the instruction set.
So? This product is certified to run on any standard ethernet network or whatever, does not seem too difficult.
I think you miss the point again. Software is, by fundamental nature, more mutable than hardware. This mutability is exactly what allows you to state "standard ethernet network or whatever,..." You can change a staggeringly large amount of code through most applications, it's called portability, and it works for a staggeringly large pool of software. This is a trivial action in software, period(.)
In hardware, changes, even in good designs, are generally non-trivial, and limited. I'll wager the Gandalf routers I had a love/hate relationship through quite a few years of my career aren't doing much real service anymore. Mostly because their core logic was burned to chip. It was a trade-off, performance athe enpense of the ability to upgrade them, without a plethora of linked hardware upgrades, IE: replacement. So they were replaced, not upgraded in the software sense, but replaced.
You cannot test all input parameters, there are infinite inputs. You can say what is "acceptable input". You can test for that every time, and reject anything that is not acceptable. I see no reason that an OS should crash without help from faulty hardware.
Please, I'm not saying that you try to test all input parameters, which is patently impossible, nor am I going to lecture on the common programming practices to obviate just such silliness...
But I digress, because here you make my point... think about the pipe. What a glorious, elegant, absolutely indispensible concept, let alone piece of code. Yet, the writer ensures us that the implications were only self evident after the fact... The point is, you cannot code for _EVERY_POSSIBLE_ situation.
With software, as you learn, the source evolves and you compile it. That process is not the same in hardware. In hardware making those changes may not always be a trivial, or even, a possible, task, consider my old friend the Gandalf router...
Agreed, but that, is really no different than a hardware firewall. Neither is going to do the others job, and neither is going to be a corporate (or home, except again, in edge cases...) desktop, nor even the "average competent" linux user's workstation...
The point was, when you build hardware solutions, you're operating under a fundamentally different operating paradigm. I point you to the software enginners snipe at the hardware engineer (which, BTW leads directly to...) but, it's inherently logical... You test the code which is going to become a chip _AN_EPLETIVE_DELETED_LOT_MORE_ than a comparable software application. Re-writing software is relatively cheap, espeacially compared to the cost of discovering a flaw in your 1.5M unit ASIC run......ask Apple.
With hardware you are testing a standard package, every line of code written for the app, the tolerances of all the hardware, etc. etc. are indentical, unit to unit. What the tests are establishing is that the combined parts still perform within acceptable parameters.
Not so with software. You can't know what hardware the end user will use. You can;t know every little idiosyncracy of every private network on the planet. You can't cover every edge case. Standardized testing like hardware can be put through is far less meaningful in such an environment.
This is not to say that testing, particularly thotough and thoughful testing is not desirable, I just suspect that it takes something other than a cookie cutter approach to test software thoroughly.
Actually, I would expect M$'s decision to end of life 98 to have a small but positive impact on the number of 98 boxes compromised.
Most of the malware that 98 boxes would vulnerable to will be in the wild allready, going forward, I would expect the Windows code base to diverge further and further from what exists in 98, sorta natural.
That factor is part of it, but the bigger factor is if you write malware, why are you writing it for a niche OS, no longer in widespread use, no longer supported by the creator? As an intellectual exercise, sure, but intellectual exercising is different from malware authoriong.
I would expect the malware authors to write to current versions of Windows, which are far more prevalent, and thereby produce a far more noticeable effect.
1) Presumably the OS has been hardened, even without the firewall. You can have the greatest firewall on the face of the earth, but if the underlying OS is compromised....
2) Presumably the kernel is optimized for the task. Lean, as modular as possible to maintain the low overhead which would be mandated to perform decently on older hardware.
But, given that Linux is the OS (and Smoothwall is GPL'ed) it opens up the possibility of tightly integrating the application to the running kernel, up to and including modules which fundamentally alter how the kernel handles network traffic. This would seem to be likely, as it owuld bring immediate payoffs in performance.
I'm not saying any of these are the case with Smoothwall, but they are all reasonable reasons to use Linux to create a dedicated firewall operating system.
Sun has not addressed any of the major issues facing Linux and the home user. Say what you like about M$, they do make a hell of a desktop for Joe Six-pack. Consider the first time Joe Six-pack installs some software and it doesn't show up in his menu... That will be the end of JDS for the average home user, the only good point being that as long as Sun sells it as JDS, the Linux community might at some later date reclaim that user, when the needed work has been done.
And that is only one trivial example of a real world ordniary user issue. Literally thousands exist, each of which has the potential to be a show-stopper for some portion of the home user base.
Linux has a long way to go before it is ready for prime time on the home front. Microsoft has queered that pitch permanently. As long as Linux does not provide, internal to the desktop environment itself, the kind of handholding help system that M$ users have at their disposal, why would Joe Six-pack switch?
All of "our" arguments about the superiority of security, etc. fall on deaf ears if folk can't use it. The home user is the guy who uses his CD drive as a cupholder people. Does anyone think Linux is ready to deal with that level of incompetence? But that is the market Sun is going after? Does anyone else see the problem there?
Now everyone restrain yourself before posting your favorite Linux rhetoric in reply. Your elegantly crafted arguments, and the sublime supremacy of your arguments (and mine) are all predicated on the necessity that the audience has access to the relveant information, but more importantly, can understand that information, and comprehend the implications of it. Now apply that to Joe Six-pack.
I understand the missionary urge that makes most of us want to push oour OS to the limit, but to be successful at converting the "heathens" requires more than a strong wish. Consider the Roman Catholic Church and Christmas. Christmas is a compromise, a case where accepted religious doctrine was modified in order to be able to attract, and retain converts among the pagans. That it was extremely successful is obvious, that it fundamentally changed core aspects of Catholocism should also be obvious. I have serious concerns about the "Church of Linus" being able to accomplish the same thing.
How many of you would accept fundamental changes to Linux in order to get it widespread use in private homes?
More importantly, how many of you would accept fundamental changes you were diametrically opposed to in oder to get Linux on more home desktops?
I strongly suspect that such a fork is coming. While I won't be so naive as to suggest that the Linuxwe all know and love is going to go away, but I will suggest it will not be the Linux that could succeed in the home market.
As Catholocsim has to make some room for patently pagan beliefs in order to grow and spread, Linux may well have to make some room for heretical beliefs for the same reasons.
Sounds more like a stinging indictment of weak passwords than crypt().
Reading the article there is no way that teracrack is going to deal with a strong password, the hash won't be present in it's table.
Regardless of algorithm, the weak passwords will allways be the first to fall. We can all stop using crypt() and start using md5 hashes, but the same techniques can be applied again, and again the first passwords to fall will be the weak ones.
I hate to sound like a Luddite, but technical problems aren't allways best fixed with more technology. The best use of teracrack that I can see, is the same use that it's predecessor had, to identify weak passwords and identify them to the user and admin to ensure that this core problem is addressed.
Is it just me, or is this a pretty short time frame, court-procedure-wise?
Someone over at groklaw also seized on this, sounds like a pretty ticked off judge to me too. I'm not going to lever open the Friexnet just yet, but I have to be encouraged by this.
Of course, we have yet to see what SCO hauls out of the arsenal of pre-emptive counter-FUD... But on the whole, I think we have some reason to relax.
In spite of all the bluster, I think we all have had misgivings that the courts would seriously botch this case. While today's decision doesn't absolve me of that worry, I do feel a lot more confident than I did logging in this morning.
Makes me want to go over to the SCO site, and taunt them through their feedback form.
How many/.ers does it take to change a light bulb?
1 - To change the bulb and post on/. where the notification of the light bulb change could be found.
6 - To repost the light bulb change notification in the thread, in case of/.ing.
5 - To post how they last changed a light bulb, how it differed from how the original poster changed the light bulb, and why their way was better.
121 - Who have never changed a light bulb, have no clear concept of what a light bulb does, but feel constrained to critique all of the methods.
15 - To question if there was ever any need to change the light bulb in the first place.
17 - To blame the need to change light bulbs on government interference.
7 - To accuse the above of being short-sighted sycophants with little or no appreciation for how things work in the real world (the author sits firmly in this category, possibly as it's King.)
400 - To moderate posts about which they have only strong opinions, no facts, but some very strong opinions.
10 - Staff, to ignore 95% of the light bulb change notification postings. Only notifications about the light bulbs they find interesting will be posted.
5 - Malcontents who take umbrage with the above, and use the thread to express their extreme antipathy toward this practice.
3 - to point out to the above that they are wasting everyone's time since the Staff plainly do not react to such commentary.
4 - To question wether changing any light bulb is worth reporting on/.
133 - To make posts demonstrating their poor grasp of the concept of comedy.
97 - To make posts demonstrating that they have only a slightly improved sense of ha-ha over the above.
64 - To make posts which indicate that they should definitely keep their day jobs.
16 - Who actually post funny things most of the time, but seem to have a real problem with finding anything funny about light bulbs.
4 - Who genuinely are funny in their post. (No, the author does not claim to be one of these.)
25 - To post extrememly insightful diatribes which have NOTHING to do with light bulbs, or the changing thereof.
1,234 - Anonymous Cowards who dilute threads, engage in trolling, generally conduct themselves poorly and make all of us wonder why/. isn't members-only to post.
3 - Memebers who forgot to log in and posted as Anonymous Coward, falsely giving hope to the staff for improved AC posts in the future.
But, I've also come down with a condition, which I affectionately call/.syndrome.
The main symptom is the pathological inability to give the benefit of the doubt to my fellow man. Other symptoms include, pedantic ranting, repitition, teaching everyone's grandmother to suck eggs, over-explanation, over-simplification, intolerance, and repitition.
Oh no, I was thinking far closer to the ground than that...
Allthough, that would be a logical step to take along with what I was thinking.
But, to my way of thinking, why didn't they just put their own File Sharing software out there? Given, too late now, they have completely queered the pitch. But if you think about it, there was a point in time after Napster and before Kazaa where the time was ripe. If they could have got a product out there...
There are a lot of variables in the equation, but like I said before, you co-opt the biggest filesharers and go from there. Really, give the biggest filesharers a reason to play ball, appeal to their greed. If the worst filesharers could profit by hauling the line and toting the barge, you knock out the bottom of the market. Or at least reduce the occurence rate to acceptable amounts.
Pretty much idle speculation now though...
Nice to have the pundits back you...
on
SCOrched Earth
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"We believe that the "progress of science" is best advanced by vigorously protecting the right of authors and inventors to earn a profit from their work."
We should all believe that the "progress of science" is best advanced when "Authors" have the right to do with their property whatever it is they want to do -- consistent with the law, and so long as the property right is properly balanced. And we should all believe that the "progress of science" is best advanced when that right is "vigorously protect[ed]".
But the owners of GPL'd software are doing no more than exercising this right, just as Microsoft would exercise its right. They are profiting from the right to choose the terms under which they release their software, and the terms they have chosen also have a great benefit to other software innovation. They exercise their property right; they and we benefit.
But if we are to protect that property right "vigorously," then we should take steps to protect property owners from baseless lawsuits against their right to use their property as they wish. So when it comes to the matter of sanctions against the lawyers in this case, the judge might well want to consider how important it is that the property right of copyright owners be "vigorously" defended.
Thank you, that's what grabbed my eye out of the whole thing too, hard to project yourself as the champion of authors and inventors rights when your vision of success would force those people to give up their rights in order to realize the work.
SCO idea of authors and inventors rights is that they have the right to sell them to SCO, or Microsoft, or some other company which is going to require the author to assign in perpetuity any rights they had to their work.
Darl and SCO repeatedly try to paint themselves as progressive, which certainly is not the case. In point of fact, what SCO seeks is a return to serfdom. During Feudal times serf's were treated as chattel, property tied to more property. They would routinely be transferred along with the property they lived on. Darl would like nothing better than a return to those days, and in fact has staked his company livelihood (and possibly his freedom) on attaining that goal. Except the new serf's are programmers, and the land they are tied to is the code, particularly the plot of code which is the Viscounty of Unix.
Except for one little thing. The pan you are making this omelette in contains every last egg in existence. And, the eggs are so situated that there are ways of breaking one, which will ensure breaking them all.
Just one thing to consider, retro-viruses. These babies are capable of entering a cell and re-writing the DNA therein. To date medical science has never found a reliable cure for a viral disease. Not one, and especially not retro-viruses. Given our inability to deal with a naturally occuring organism, what makes us so sure we could undo what we've done?
Another quick mitigator, We hammered the hell out of those diseases with a bacterial vector by the use of antibiotics. Only a very few saw the potential for anti-biotic resistant bacteria, despite the fact that out own medical science had been using the technique since we started playing with vaccines.
In view of the hundreds of anecdotes about unintended consequences, and the folly of humanity in specfifc and general, I think we can afford to be a little cautious with things like genetics which have the ability to radically alter the form, function, and ability to survive of life on earth.
Evolution in Action is all well and good, so long as the individual evolving isn't playing with a flu virus and cancer genes, knowwhatImean...
No, that would be an oxymoron, nice try though. But their are genetic conditions which include sterility as part of the symptoms. There are other 'genetic' tricks too, artificially creating freemartins for example. I presume geneticists would first think DNA, then hormonal regulation, never mind the inherent impossibility of performing large scale neutering...
We believe that the "progress of science" is best advanced by vigorously protecting the right of authors and inventors to earn a profit from their work.
No Darl, what you believe is in propping up a corupt system which destroys the rights of authors and inventors by forcing them to sign over their rights to their work to companies which in and of themselves, have no vested interest in said work, except to earn monetary profit.
If SCO and yousrselves truly believed in authors and inventors rights, you would honor their rights to dispose of their work as they see fit. Profit of the soul is still profit Darl, but I don't expect you to understand this sophisticated point.
If SCO want to purport that they are the defenders of authros and inventor's rights, how do they rationalize their attempts to narrow the options available to those self-same authors and inventors? Protecting inventro rights means event he ones you don't agree with Darl...
I mean unless you want to neuter a billion fish...
Sure, the geneticists can claim that they could "turn on" sterility in the target animal/plant genome. But that begs the conundrum:
If one modification can have unintended consequences than all of them can. If neither can have unintended consequences, why bother with the safeguard?
Okay, it's an oversimplification of a vastly complex subject, but I think the proposition is oversimplified as well. It is all well and good to cite genetic sterility as a safeguard when making other genetic modifications, but what are the unintended consequneces of genetically inducing sterility? More importantly, the unintended consequnces of the two in combination. After all, at one point, adding an extra Y chromosome might have looked like a viable way to block breeding, but now we know that would have resulted in billions of sociopathic fish (but sterile).
Power corupts, but absolute power is kinda neat... at least until your three hundred pound, opposable thumbed, parthenogenic guppies decide that they are entitled to the six pack of Weinhards in the fridge...
We simply don't know enough to know what we have to do to minimize the impact of mistakes, malice and general human stupidity.
I'm not so sure about that. As someone points out, the distribution is superficially similar to radio. Radio stations have to pay royalties for the music they play.
Actually, RIAA might even like this methodology. After all, they could lump the projected royalties due into the original cost of all music.
Now for the bit that get's me modded down for going offtopic...
Why the hell didn't RIAA just get in the game themselves? Too late now (one would assume) but after Napster, wouldn't it have been easier to beat iTunes Et. Al. to the punch? Hell I mean they could have knocked the bottom out of the entire issue with a few developers and a coherent plan...
Hell, they could have turned their worst enemies into their greatest asset. That being the large scale file sharers. Hell, these guys do a better job of distribution than the record stores. Gods! developers are cheaper than lawyers, and do better work! The biggest trick would be co-opting the filesharers, and IMHO, these folks aren't truly interested in the real issue, their interested in getting something for nothing. Greedy people, which encompasses both RIAA and the filesharers are the easiest to manipulate. I would suggest this is tied into a lack of imagination, since neither side in this little fracas has really displayed any capability of devising the ground shaking innovation.
Admitedly, this would do nothing for the artists, who, by the way, are the biggest victims of RIAA, not the consumers, but nothing that is being done now helps us either. Six of one, a half dozen of the other.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you miss the point again. Software is, by fundamental nature, more mutable than hardware. This mutability is exactly what allows you to state "standard ethernet network or whatever,..." You can change a staggeringly large amount of code through most applications, it's called portability, and it works for a staggeringly large pool of software. This is a trivial action in software, period(.)
In hardware, changes, even in good designs, are generally non-trivial, and limited. I'll wager the Gandalf routers I had a love/hate relationship through quite a few years of my career aren't doing much real service anymore. Mostly because their core logic was burned to chip. It was a trade-off, performance athe enpense of the ability to upgrade them, without a plethora of linked hardware upgrades, IE: replacement. So they were replaced, not upgraded in the software sense, but replaced.
Please, I'm not saying that you try to test all input parameters, which is patently impossible, nor am I going to lecture on the common programming practices to obviate just such silliness...
But I digress, because here you make my point... think about the pipe. What a glorious, elegant, absolutely indispensible concept, let alone piece of code. Yet, the writer ensures us that the implications were only self evident after the fact... The point is, you cannot code for _EVERY_POSSIBLE_ situation.
With software, as you learn, the source evolves and you compile it. That process is not the same in hardware. In hardware making those changes may not always be a trivial, or even, a possible, task, consider my old friend the Gandalf router...
The point was, when you build hardware solutions, you're operating under a fundamentally different operating paradigm. I point you to the software enginners snipe at the hardware engineer (which, BTW leads directly to...) but, it's inherently logical... You test the code which is going to become a chip _AN_EPLETIVE_DELETED_LOT_MORE_ than a comparable software application. Re-writing software is relatively cheap, espeacially compared to the cost of discovering a flaw in your 1.5M unit ASIC run... ...ask Apple.
Not so with software. You can't know what hardware the end user will use. You can;t know every little idiosyncracy of every private network on the planet. You can't cover every edge case. Standardized testing like hardware can be put through is far less meaningful in such an environment.
This is not to say that testing, particularly thotough and thoughful testing is not desirable, I just suspect that it takes something other than a cookie cutter approach to test software thoroughly.
Most of the malware that 98 boxes would vulnerable to will be in the wild allready, going forward, I would expect the Windows code base to diverge further and further from what exists in 98, sorta natural.
That factor is part of it, but the bigger factor is if you write malware, why are you writing it for a niche OS, no longer in widespread use, no longer supported by the creator? As an intellectual exercise, sure, but intellectual exercising is different from malware authoriong.
I would expect the malware authors to write to current versions of Windows, which are far more prevalent, and thereby produce a far more noticeable effect.
But that's exactly what I mean, to make _real_ inroads Linux has to get some of those features.
RTFA, they did not compute all possible hashes, they computed all common hashes from common dictionary attacks.
1) Presumably the OS has been hardened, even without the firewall. You can have the greatest firewall on the face of the earth, but if the underlying OS is compromised....
2) Presumably the kernel is optimized for the task. Lean, as modular as possible to maintain the low overhead which would be mandated to perform decently on older hardware.
But, given that Linux is the OS (and Smoothwall is GPL'ed) it opens up the possibility of tightly integrating the application to the running kernel, up to and including modules which fundamentally alter how the kernel handles network traffic. This would seem to be likely, as it owuld bring immediate payoffs in performance.
I'm not saying any of these are the case with Smoothwall, but they are all reasonable reasons to use Linux to create a dedicated firewall operating system.
Sun has not addressed any of the major issues facing Linux and the home user. Say what you like about M$, they do make a hell of a desktop for Joe Six-pack. Consider the first time Joe Six-pack installs some software and it doesn't show up in his menu... That will be the end of JDS for the average home user, the only good point being that as long as Sun sells it as JDS, the Linux community might at some later date reclaim that user, when the needed work has been done.
And that is only one trivial example of a real world ordniary user issue. Literally thousands exist, each of which has the potential to be a show-stopper for some portion of the home user base.
Linux has a long way to go before it is ready for prime time on the home front. Microsoft has queered that pitch permanently. As long as Linux does not provide, internal to the desktop environment itself, the kind of handholding help system that M$ users have at their disposal, why would Joe Six-pack switch?
All of "our" arguments about the superiority of security, etc. fall on deaf ears if folk can't use it. The home user is the guy who uses his CD drive as a cupholder people. Does anyone think Linux is ready to deal with that level of incompetence? But that is the market Sun is going after? Does anyone else see the problem there?
Now everyone restrain yourself before posting your favorite Linux rhetoric in reply. Your elegantly crafted arguments, and the sublime supremacy of your arguments (and mine) are all predicated on the necessity that the audience has access to the relveant information, but more importantly, can understand that information, and comprehend the implications of it. Now apply that to Joe Six-pack.
I understand the missionary urge that makes most of us want to push oour OS to the limit, but to be successful at converting the "heathens" requires more than a strong wish. Consider the Roman Catholic Church and Christmas. Christmas is a compromise, a case where accepted religious doctrine was modified in order to be able to attract, and retain converts among the pagans. That it was extremely successful is obvious, that it fundamentally changed core aspects of Catholocism should also be obvious. I have serious concerns about the "Church of Linus" being able to accomplish the same thing.
How many of you would accept fundamental changes to Linux in order to get it widespread use in private homes?
More importantly, how many of you would accept fundamental changes you were diametrically opposed to in oder to get Linux on more home desktops?
I strongly suspect that such a fork is coming. While I won't be so naive as to suggest that the Linuxwe all know and love is going to go away, but I will suggest it will not be the Linux that could succeed in the home market.
As Catholocsim has to make some room for patently pagan beliefs in order to grow and spread, Linux may well have to make some room for heretical beliefs for the same reasons.
Reading the article there is no way that teracrack is going to deal with a strong password, the hash won't be present in it's table.
Regardless of algorithm, the weak passwords will allways be the first to fall. We can all stop using crypt() and start using md5 hashes, but the same techniques can be applied again, and again the first passwords to fall will be the weak ones.
I hate to sound like a Luddite, but technical problems aren't allways best fixed with more technology. The best use of teracrack that I can see, is the same use that it's predecessor had, to identify weak passwords and identify them to the user and admin to ensure that this core problem is addressed.
Someone over at groklaw also seized on this, sounds like a pretty ticked off judge to me too. I'm not going to lever open the Friexnet just yet, but I have to be encouraged by this.
Of course, we have yet to see what SCO hauls out of the arsenal of pre-emptive counter-FUD... But on the whole, I think we have some reason to relax.
In spite of all the bluster, I think we all have had misgivings that the courts would seriously botch this case. While today's decision doesn't absolve me of that worry, I do feel a lot more confident than I did logging in this morning.
Makes me want to go over to the SCO site, and taunt them through their feedback form.
Must resist urge to gloat...
That judge sees fit to throw this mess out of court and I'm going to need the space for all the flowers I'm sending to those chambers...
1 - To change the bulb and post on /. where the notification of the light bulb change could be found.
6 - To repost the light bulb change notification in the thread, in case of /.ing.
5 - To post how they last changed a light bulb, how it differed from how the original poster changed the light bulb, and why their way was better.
121 - Who have never changed a light bulb, have no clear concept of what a light bulb does, but feel constrained to critique all of the methods.
15 - To question if there was ever any need to change the light bulb in the first place.
17 - To blame the need to change light bulbs on government interference.
7 - To accuse the above of being short-sighted sycophants with little or no appreciation for how things work in the real world (the author sits firmly in this category, possibly as it's King.)
400 - To moderate posts about which they have only strong opinions, no facts, but some very strong opinions.
10 - Staff, to ignore 95% of the light bulb change notification postings. Only notifications about the light bulbs they find interesting will be posted.
5 - Malcontents who take umbrage with the above, and use the thread to express their extreme antipathy toward this practice.
3 - to point out to the above that they are wasting everyone's time since the Staff plainly do not react to such commentary.
4 - To question wether changing any light bulb is worth reporting on /.
133 - To make posts demonstrating their poor grasp of the concept of comedy.
97 - To make posts demonstrating that they have only a slightly improved sense of ha-ha over the above.
64 - To make posts which indicate that they should definitely keep their day jobs.
16 - Who actually post funny things most of the time, but seem to have a real problem with finding anything funny about light bulbs.
4 - Who genuinely are funny in their post. (No, the author does not claim to be one of these.)
25 - To post extrememly insightful diatribes which have NOTHING to do with light bulbs, or the changing thereof.
1,234 - Anonymous Cowards who dilute threads, engage in trolling, generally conduct themselves poorly and make all of us wonder why /. isn't members-only to post.
3 - Memebers who forgot to log in and posted as Anonymous Coward, falsely giving hope to the staff for improved AC posts in the future.
But, I've also come down with a condition, which I affectionately call /.syndrome.
The main symptom is the pathological inability to give the benefit of the doubt to my fellow man. Other symptoms include, pedantic ranting, repitition, teaching everyone's grandmother to suck eggs, over-explanation, over-simplification, intolerance, and repitition.
Allthough, that would be a logical step to take along with what I was thinking.
But, to my way of thinking, why didn't they just put their own File Sharing software out there? Given, too late now, they have completely queered the pitch. But if you think about it, there was a point in time after Napster and before Kazaa where the time was ripe. If they could have got a product out there...
There are a lot of variables in the equation, but like I said before, you co-opt the biggest filesharers and go from there. Really, give the biggest filesharers a reason to play ball, appeal to their greed. If the worst filesharers could profit by hauling the line and toting the barge, you knock out the bottom of the market. Or at least reduce the occurence rate to acceptable amounts.
Pretty much idle speculation now though...
SCO idea of authors and inventors rights is that they have the right to sell them to SCO, or Microsoft, or some other company which is going to require the author to assign in perpetuity any rights they had to their work.
Darl and SCO repeatedly try to paint themselves as progressive, which certainly is not the case. In point of fact, what SCO seeks is a return to serfdom. During Feudal times serf's were treated as chattel, property tied to more property. They would routinely be transferred along with the property they lived on. Darl would like nothing better than a return to those days, and in fact has staked his company livelihood (and possibly his freedom) on attaining that goal. Except the new serf's are programmers, and the land they are tied to is the code, particularly the plot of code which is the Viscounty of Unix.
Just one thing to consider, retro-viruses. These babies are capable of entering a cell and re-writing the DNA therein. To date medical science has never found a reliable cure for a viral disease. Not one, and especially not retro-viruses. Given our inability to deal with a naturally occuring organism, what makes us so sure we could undo what we've done?
Another quick mitigator, We hammered the hell out of those diseases with a bacterial vector by the use of antibiotics. Only a very few saw the potential for anti-biotic resistant bacteria, despite the fact that out own medical science had been using the technique since we started playing with vaccines.
In view of the hundreds of anecdotes about unintended consequences, and the folly of humanity in specfifc and general, I think we can afford to be a little cautious with things like genetics which have the ability to radically alter the form, function, and ability to survive of life on earth.
Evolution in Action is all well and good, so long as the individual evolving isn't playing with a flu virus and cancer genes, knowwhatImean...
No, that would be an oxymoron, nice try though. But their are genetic conditions which include sterility as part of the symptoms. There are other 'genetic' tricks too, artificially creating freemartins for example. I presume geneticists would first think DNA, then hormonal regulation, never mind the inherent impossibility of performing large scale neutering...
If SCO and yousrselves truly believed in authors and inventors rights, you would honor their rights to dispose of their work as they see fit. Profit of the soul is still profit Darl, but I don't expect you to understand this sophisticated point.
If SCO want to purport that they are the defenders of authros and inventor's rights, how do they rationalize their attempts to narrow the options available to those self-same authors and inventors? Protecting inventro rights means event he ones you don't agree with Darl...
Sure, the geneticists can claim that they could "turn on" sterility in the target animal/plant genome. But that begs the conundrum:
If one modification can have unintended consequences than all of them can. If neither can have unintended consequences, why bother with the safeguard?
Okay, it's an oversimplification of a vastly complex subject, but I think the proposition is oversimplified as well. It is all well and good to cite genetic sterility as a safeguard when making other genetic modifications, but what are the unintended consequneces of genetically inducing sterility? More importantly, the unintended consequnces of the two in combination. After all, at one point, adding an extra Y chromosome might have looked like a viable way to block breeding, but now we know that would have resulted in billions of sociopathic fish (but sterile).
Power corupts, but absolute power is kinda neat... at least until your three hundred pound, opposable thumbed, parthenogenic guppies decide that they are entitled to the six pack of Weinhards in the fridge...
We simply don't know enough to know what we have to do to minimize the impact of mistakes, malice and general human stupidity.
shock, horror, disbelief, amazement, nausea, on their fac... ...oh you meant your music...
Addendum: If you must experiment with this yourself, DO NOT select the payroll/AP cleark!
Actually, RIAA might even like this methodology. After all, they could lump the projected royalties due into the original cost of all music.
Now for the bit that get's me modded down for going offtopic...
Why the hell didn't RIAA just get in the game themselves? Too late now (one would assume) but after Napster, wouldn't it have been easier to beat iTunes Et. Al. to the punch? Hell I mean they could have knocked the bottom out of the entire issue with a few developers and a coherent plan...
Hell, they could have turned their worst enemies into their greatest asset. That being the large scale file sharers. Hell, these guys do a better job of distribution than the record stores. Gods! developers are cheaper than lawyers, and do better work! The biggest trick would be co-opting the filesharers, and IMHO, these folks aren't truly interested in the real issue, their interested in getting something for nothing. Greedy people, which encompasses both RIAA and the filesharers are the easiest to manipulate. I would suggest this is tied into a lack of imagination, since neither side in this little fracas has really displayed any capability of devising the ground shaking innovation.
Admitedly, this would do nothing for the artists, who, by the way, are the biggest victims of RIAA, not the consumers, but nothing that is being done now helps us either. Six of one, a half dozen of the other.
Damn, that's right, at least this time I delimited with the "not 100% sure..." bit...
It may be Jobs, but it wasn't Apple...
Should have been troll, the original was off-topic, but that's moderators for ya.