Geeks don't do impossible things. By the very nature of impossible things they must be, well, impossible. This does raise the question of what happens when someone does something that was generally considered impossible. Does it break the universe?
While security through obscurity shouldn't be your only defence it is still a valid defence. Moving a service to an odd port will stop the majority of "passer by" attacks (the equivalent fo someone trying your car door as they walk past). It won't stop any one that is determined but if you have removed the noise it is easier to see the determined little *%*£)".
I think it will probably slow down the current worm attacks but I wouldn't be supprised if we also saw a new breed of worm that used a different method to find hosts.
If you are in the UK you will be able to see this abomination in every super market. Look at packets of Disco crisps. Every one mis-spells flavour as flava. Grrrrr that winds me up so much. I really wish I wasn't chemically addicted to the salt and vinegar "falva" ones.
Rather than criticize the less than perfect grammer and spelling of the parent I would like to offer him/her some encouragement.
I too was taught in a regime that felt that books should be chosen for their political correctness rather than their interest and by the time I left school I probably hadn't read more than half a dozen books.
I was quite interested in sci-fi and fantasy novels and decided to give Lord of the Rings a try. I don't mind admitting that it was a struggle. A huge struggle. My reading skills, or lack of them, meant that the book was a chore to read but I pressed on and eventually finished it. Despite the amount of time it had taken me to read it I had become absorbed in the story and really enjoyed it. The best part though was the sense of personal achievement I got from finishing it. At the time I never in my wildest dreams thought that I could finish a book of that length and complexity. Since then I have never not had a book on the go - I've got 6 on the go at the moment and have developed a taste for Thomad Hardy.
What I am trying to say is that although the modern school system is letting kids down left right and centre you can teach yourself English. Read a few books that you enjoy and you will quickly find that you won't be able to put books down. That will make reading the tripe that the school gives you so much easier.
I don't really have a problem with poor grammer as long as the person is able to get their meaning across. I have come across situations, however, where the meaning has been lost in a wave of gibberish. I think we should aim more for clarity in writting rather than making sure every i is dotted and t crossed. Certainly in an technical document I read I woudl rather it was clear and had bad spelling than the other way round
My spelling and grammer were terrible when I left school (the school I was at all but gave up on the ones that weren't naturally high performers) but I have, over the last few years, tried to improve my English skills.
One fairly cheap we of educating the masses regarding English would be for the Government to sponsor the creation of a web site that took people in my situation (able to read and write well enough to get a degree) and taught them more about the language. This wouldn't work for everyone but it could potentially catch a large number of people that have to write substantial amounts on a daily basis. Note that I am not saying we should ignore those who have very little or nothing in the way of English skills. They could also do with help but it would be of a different type.
To go slightly off topic... I realize it is a somewhat radical idea but I would like to see the English language standardized and a formal grammer developed for it. I IIRC there have been attempts to develop formal grammers for English but they mostly focussed on fitting the grammer to the current language. I would like to see it happen the other way round. Develope a grammer that fits 95%+ of the current language and then over the course of say 20 years phase out the bits that don't fit. Initially there would be little benifit and probably the only people that would use it would be those that were writting specifications or similar documents. As the formal grammer improved and we developed better ways of processing we could begin to enter the realms of fully computer processable text. Imagine being able to just run something you have written against the mother of all schemas to prove that it is correct. What a benefit. Combine that with the fact that there is now meaning in the document and you could probably do near perfect machine translations. I'm sure there are plenty of other plus points as well. All it would take is a central governing body.
I have been a Java developer since year dot (well it feels like it) and I can't understand the fuss about having an open source Java. Most of the libraries that I use (in fact all I think) are fully open source along with the application server the only bit that isn't is open is the core libraries but these are given away for free and I have never run into a license issue.
The only thing that I would like in terms of openness is a packaging license that allows the registered linux distributions to repackage the JVM because current installation methods are a pain (I'm on Debian which probably makes it worse that on a lot of other distros).
Other than that I like the stability that is granted by having one company at the wheel. If Sun decided to loose the plot and start imposing strange conditions on VM useage I am sure an open source VM would appear the day after tomorrow. Until then though I will keep buy as many free VMs as I can.
Were they actually hosting music or were they providing pointers to music. I think the distinction is very important because it feel like the music industry is playing on the lack of technical knowledge in the general (downloading) population.
I, personally, think that hosting music for download is wrong (I think that we should have far more rights regarding what we do with music we have bought though) but wrong with a little w. I can't see any way that providing a pointer to music is wrong though. I admit that the music industry is going to be annoyed that people are providing pointers but information shouldn't be illegal.
I, too, can't understand why people would pay for copied software. I suppose people just don't have the time to technical knowledge to get it for free. Perhaps they also kid themselves that they are helping a poor self employed buisness man. Who knows?
While I don't condone wide spread piracy there are some types of pircay that I don't have that much of a problem with. For example, go back a few years, you were interested in ray tracing and 3d modelling. You had a choice of pov-ray and coding all the scene files by hand or paying megabucks for 3d studio (I know this is a little simplified). If it is something that you are only semi-interested (you would never consider doing it commercially) that I don't see a big problem with you grabbing a cracked copy of 3ds. After all you would never buy it, and in reality what has discreet lost? They didn't even have to pay for the bandwidth used in the download. I pick 3ds because it was widely cracked (and still is I believe). It used to be protected with a dongle (not sure if it still is) and there was no "entry level" version. They seem to have finally figured it out though as you can now get a feature restricted free version which is supprisingly good.
As for music piracy well I say eat as much as you can. Reproduction costs of music now must be tiny yet the price of music in real terms is still sky high. I can't help feeling that we, as a consumers, are being ripped off left right and center. If we aren't beign riped off then the music industry needs to be prompted to look at ways of cutting back on costs. Perhaps the problem is that there are to few music producers.
Unfortunatly I think that we will probably see software patents in the EU in the next few years irrespective of how hard we fight them. The companies pushing for them just have to much money and can easily buy off the people that make the choice so... we should start looking for ways in which we can undermine the system and bring it down.
The people voting on software patents are going to vote for them whatever we do but what we might be able to do is add clauses that provide useful loop holes. One such clause I would push for is this: if the software is being given away for free it can't infringe a software patent. After all patents are there to protect the finantial interests of the inventer. I admit that the inventer could loose out here so perhaps give them 5 years of total protection and then allow this clause.
I would like to reply to it too but the question is who do I write to? We have so many people "in control" now it is hard to know which one to contact about what. I presume that the correct person would be our local MEP (whoever that is).
Has anyone actually bottered to check the PTO in the UK before going off on one about how Firefox is already registered?
If you go over there and have a little look you will notice that the mozilla foundation has filed their trademark application and none of the other firefox applications directly conflict with it. There are others in class 9 but none of them specifically list web browser (which the firefox applicaiton does) as part of the application. The biggest threat, IMHO, is 2007607 which bangs on about software but from an analysis point of view. IANAL but I would say that firefox will probably be granted the trademark in the UK at least.
<disclaimer>I used to work for one of the online digital printing service providers.</disclaimer>
The quality of the prints was, I have to admit, pretty damn good. When I first started there the service was quite expensive and it was touch and go whether it was worth sending off to have them printed. By the time I left though the price had dropped greatly and the quality remained (at least in the basic prints anyway).
It's worth shopping round, you can get some really good deals such as a second set for free. The cheapest always used to be (in the UK at least) Bonus Print but they were cheap because they only did a very limited number of print sizes. There are loads of other services out there that will print you photos onto just about anything you can think (we even did a toy bear for a while!). The quality of the other stuff though is questionable at best. A 2MPixel camera will produce a pretty good A4 sized print.
I'm sure I will get shouted at for promoting it but there is actually a fairly good digital printing client built into XP. You select a folder with images in it and then select print from the left hand menu (you need folder view tured off). It will give you a list with a number of printing service providers. I don't know if it still works though - since leaving the company I have stopped using Windows.
I wish I could get the submitters exchange rate. I'd be rich rich rich. It's currently around 1.9 dollars to the pound meaning anual running costs are more line $260k which could rise to around $1m.
Having said that everything is cheaper on the US side of the pond so the submitter is probably about right. Sigh.
...if you have all the time in the world. The single biggest advantage to Linux, for me at least, is that it allows me to get my job done faster and more cheaply (although I sometimes wonder if thats the case when something goes wrong).
I think the single biggest disadvantage to Linux is the amount of knowledge needed to do most things. I have been using one version of Linux or another for about 4 years and only now do I really feel like I know how to use it. If you start telling people they have to build the whole thing themselves there isn't a hope in hell they will switch.
As long as this is aimed at the interested minority who perhaps are activly involved in putting together a distribution fair enough but it would be suicide to promote this approach to the general populous.
While I mostly agree with you I don't think you are totally correct. As another reply stated there may be better alternatives that we could be using.
The way that we (US and UK in particular) elect representatives is not very "fair" in that it wastes a lot of votes and tends to seriously under-represent minority opinions. Even opinions that are held by large numbers of people (say 15% of the population which is millions) can easily be ignored.
The problem is that democracy is easy to understand so it will be difficult to replace.
While it is true that Debian doesn't directly ship the Sun VM it does provide a package called java-package which will create and install debs from the Sun VM that you download. It needs a little more work to make it completely idiot proof, it would be nice if it started automatically after install for instance or instance, but it's so close as to make no difference. Try it out - it's a workable solution to the problem.
I like what this guy said about binary drivers. I admit that it would be nice if we had open source drivers for everything but in the real world that just isn't going to happen - at least not in the near future. Companies like nVidia just can't see any benifit to open sourcing their drivers and I can quite understand that.
What we (the Linux comunity) should do is accept that there are going to be binary drivers (this will involve some people pulling their head out of the sand) and make it as easy as possible for hardware manufacturers to write drivers while still encouraging openness and adherance to standards. Very few hardware manufacturers will write drivers that need to be updated and tweeked every couple of months becuse the cost is just to high so we need a rock solid API that is well documented and has a documented change policy. Perhaps that exists already, I'm not that familiar with the exact kernel development process, but it doesn't seem like it is based on others comments.
Sorry I already hold the patent on the idea of patenting other peopls ideas and I am filing a patent on the idea of patenting ideas that realate to patenting ideas that were patented by someone else.
I agree with you upto a point. I run Debian testing with a 2.6.8 kernel and KDE 3.3.2 ok it is slightly behind the times but it's pretty damn close. If I wanted my system to be closer to the leading edge I could up it to unstable. I choose to stay with testing though because I like the feeling that the software I run has mangled other peoples systems first (cheers guys).
What I think should be the case though is that I can track stable on a server and actually have a rock solid OS that gets updated every 10 to 12 months. Having the stable release be 2 years old is just a joke. Worse, it doesn't look like there is going to be another stable release for a while yet. Everytime they get close more stuff comes into testing.
I would really like to see Debian loose the zealotry as I think it damages a great the distribution. For example, they have written a great installer but won't release it because it's got a little bug on platform X. I and 99.9% of people out there don't care that the installer doesn't work on a C64 just give it to us on x86.
Grrrr. I makes me so mad to watch a great distribution die.
Yes I realize it doesn't stop at 9. I was trying to make a point and 9 to most people seems more final than [insert arbitary number here].
As for Firefox IMHO that should be on about 4 or 5 by now. It was a decent useable browser with relativly few bugs at around 0.4. To my mind therefore it should have been released as 1.0
I think one of the problems is that without the commercial push to release a lot of projects get bogged down. The developers wan't it to be perfect and have all the bells and whistles that they imagined the finished product to have before it is released on the masses. I completely understand that view but I don't think Jo public does. What they see is something that isn't finished and therefore not worth using. Joe public has a hard time understanding the major number let alone the minor number and doesn't have a clue what a revision number is which is exactly why the beast dropped version numbers and why Sun is trying again to switch Java from 1.5 to 5.0.
What is with people. Most open source projects seem to be scared of the number 1 so every piece of software is 0.x.y.z now the kernel people have become afraid of 3 (or maybe 7) either way this is just silly. I can see it now, in twenty years time we will be up to 2.9.9.9.9.3.8.1 because nobody will take the plunge and call it 3. At least the emacs people got a grip and just dropped the 0.
Slashdot Mirror
picky mode on...
Geeks don't do impossible things. By the very nature of impossible things they must be, well, impossible. This does raise the question of what happens when someone does something that was generally considered impossible. Does it break the universe?
...picky mode off
While security through obscurity shouldn't be your only defence it is still a valid defence. Moving a service to an odd port will stop the majority of "passer by" attacks (the equivalent fo someone trying your car door as they walk past). It won't stop any one that is determined but if you have removed the noise it is easier to see the determined little *%*£)".
I think it will probably slow down the current worm attacks but I wouldn't be supprised if we also saw a new breed of worm that used a different method to find hosts.
If you are in the UK you will be able to see this abomination in every super market. Look at packets of Disco crisps. Every one mis-spells flavour as flava. Grrrrr that winds me up so much. I really wish I wasn't chemically addicted to the salt and vinegar "falva" ones.
Rather than criticize the less than perfect grammer and spelling of the parent I would like to offer him/her some encouragement.
I too was taught in a regime that felt that books should be chosen for their political correctness rather than their interest and by the time I left school I probably hadn't read more than half a dozen books.
I was quite interested in sci-fi and fantasy novels and decided to give Lord of the Rings a try. I don't mind admitting that it was a struggle. A huge struggle. My reading skills, or lack of them, meant that the book was a chore to read but I pressed on and eventually finished it. Despite the amount of time it had taken me to read it I had become absorbed in the story and really enjoyed it. The best part though was the sense of personal achievement I got from finishing it. At the time I never in my wildest dreams thought that I could finish a book of that length and complexity. Since then I have never not had a book on the go - I've got 6 on the go at the moment and have developed a taste for Thomad Hardy.
What I am trying to say is that although the modern school system is letting kids down left right and centre you can teach yourself English. Read a few books that you enjoy and you will quickly find that you won't be able to put books down. That will make reading the tripe that the school gives you so much easier.
I don't really have a problem with poor grammer as long as the person is able to get their meaning across. I have come across situations, however, where the meaning has been lost in a wave of gibberish. I think we should aim more for clarity in writting rather than making sure every i is dotted and t crossed. Certainly in an technical document I read I woudl rather it was clear and had bad spelling than the other way round
My spelling and grammer were terrible when I left school (the school I was at all but gave up on the ones that weren't naturally high performers) but I have, over the last few years, tried to improve my English skills.
One fairly cheap we of educating the masses regarding English would be for the Government to sponsor the creation of a web site that took people in my situation (able to read and write well enough to get a degree) and taught them more about the language. This wouldn't work for everyone but it could potentially catch a large number of people that have to write substantial amounts on a daily basis. Note that I am not saying we should ignore those who have very little or nothing in the way of English skills. They could also do with help but it would be of a different type.
To go slightly off topic... I realize it is a somewhat radical idea but I would like to see the English language standardized and a formal grammer developed for it. I IIRC there have been attempts to develop formal grammers for English but they mostly focussed on fitting the grammer to the current language. I would like to see it happen the other way round. Develope a grammer that fits 95%+ of the current language and then over the course of say 20 years phase out the bits that don't fit. Initially there would be little benifit and probably the only people that would use it would be those that were writting specifications or similar documents. As the formal grammer improved and we developed better ways of processing we could begin to enter the realms of fully computer processable text. Imagine being able to just run something you have written against the mother of all schemas to prove that it is correct. What a benefit. Combine that with the fact that there is now meaning in the document and you could probably do near perfect machine translations. I'm sure there are plenty of other plus points as well. All it would take is a central governing body.
Especially about testing on humans.
Although I suppose there are a fair number of "disapeared" people to test on so you never know.
I have been a Java developer since year dot (well it feels like it) and I can't understand the fuss about having an open source Java. Most of the libraries that I use (in fact all I think) are fully open source along with the application server the only bit that isn't is open is the core libraries but these are given away for free and I have never run into a license issue.
The only thing that I would like in terms of openness is a packaging license that allows the registered linux distributions to repackage the JVM because current installation methods are a pain (I'm on Debian which probably makes it worse that on a lot of other distros).
Other than that I like the stability that is granted by having one company at the wheel. If Sun decided to loose the plot and start imposing strange conditions on VM useage I am sure an open source VM would appear the day after tomorrow. Until then though I will keep buy as many free VMs as I can.
Were they actually hosting music or were they providing pointers to music. I think the distinction is very important because it feel like the music industry is playing on the lack of technical knowledge in the general (downloading) population.
I, personally, think that hosting music for download is wrong (I think that we should have far more rights regarding what we do with music we have bought though) but wrong with a little w. I can't see any way that providing a pointer to music is wrong though. I admit that the music industry is going to be annoyed that people are providing pointers but information shouldn't be illegal.
I, too, can't understand why people would pay for copied software. I suppose people just don't have the time to technical knowledge to get it for free. Perhaps they also kid themselves that they are helping a poor self employed buisness man. Who knows?
While I don't condone wide spread piracy there are some types of pircay that I don't have that much of a problem with. For example, go back a few years, you were interested in ray tracing and 3d modelling. You had a choice of pov-ray and coding all the scene files by hand or paying megabucks for 3d studio (I know this is a little simplified). If it is something that you are only semi-interested (you would never consider doing it commercially) that I don't see a big problem with you grabbing a cracked copy of 3ds. After all you would never buy it, and in reality what has discreet lost? They didn't even have to pay for the bandwidth used in the download. I pick 3ds because it was widely cracked (and still is I believe). It used to be protected with a dongle (not sure if it still is) and there was no "entry level" version. They seem to have finally figured it out though as you can now get a feature restricted free version which is supprisingly good.
As for music piracy well I say eat as much as you can. Reproduction costs of music now must be tiny yet the price of music in real terms is still sky high. I can't help feeling that we, as a consumers, are being ripped off left right and center. If we aren't beign riped off then the music industry needs to be prompted to look at ways of cutting back on costs. Perhaps the problem is that there are to few music producers.
Unfortunatly I think that we will probably see software patents in the EU in the next few years irrespective of how hard we fight them. The companies pushing for them just have to much money and can easily buy off the people that make the choice so... we should start looking for ways in which we can undermine the system and bring it down.
The people voting on software patents are going to vote for them whatever we do but what we might be able to do is add clauses that provide useful loop holes. One such clause I would push for is this: if the software is being given away for free it can't infringe a software patent. After all patents are there to protect the finantial interests of the inventer. I admit that the inventer could loose out here so perhaps give them 5 years of total protection and then allow this clause.
What do your think?
I would like to reply to it too but the question is who do I write to? We have so many people "in control" now it is hard to know which one to contact about what. I presume that the correct person would be our local MEP (whoever that is).
Has anyone actually bottered to check the PTO in the UK before going off on one about how Firefox is already registered?
If you go over there and have a little look you will notice that the mozilla foundation has filed their trademark application and none of the other firefox applications directly conflict with it. There are others in class 9 but none of them specifically list web browser (which the firefox applicaiton does) as part of the application. The biggest threat, IMHO, is 2007607 which bangs on about software but from an analysis point of view. IANAL but I would say that firefox will probably be granted the trademark in the UK at least.
<disclaimer>I used to work for one of the online digital printing service providers.</disclaimer>
The quality of the prints was, I have to admit, pretty damn good. When I first started there the service was quite expensive and it was touch and go whether it was worth sending off to have them printed. By the time I left though the price had dropped greatly and the quality remained (at least in the basic prints anyway).
It's worth shopping round, you can get some really good deals such as a second set for free. The cheapest always used to be (in the UK at least) Bonus Print but they were cheap because they only did a very limited number of print sizes. There are loads of other services out there that will print you photos onto just about anything you can think (we even did a toy bear for a while!). The quality of the other stuff though is questionable at best. A 2MPixel camera will produce a pretty good A4 sized print.
I'm sure I will get shouted at for promoting it but there is actually a fairly good digital printing client built into XP. You select a folder with images in it and then select print from the left hand menu (you need folder view tured off). It will give you a list with a number of printing service providers. I don't know if it still works though - since leaving the company I have stopped using Windows.
I wish I could get the submitters exchange rate. I'd be rich rich rich. It's currently around 1.9 dollars to the pound meaning anual running costs are more line $260k which could rise to around $1m.
Having said that everything is cheaper on the US side of the pond so the submitter is probably about right. Sigh.
...if you have all the time in the world. The single biggest advantage to Linux, for me at least, is that it allows me to get my job done faster and more cheaply (although I sometimes wonder if thats the case when something goes wrong).
I think the single biggest disadvantage to Linux is the amount of knowledge needed to do most things. I have been using one version of Linux or another for about 4 years and only now do I really feel like I know how to use it. If you start telling people they have to build the whole thing themselves there isn't a hope in hell they will switch.
As long as this is aimed at the interested minority who perhaps are activly involved in putting together a distribution fair enough but it would be suicide to promote this approach to the general populous.
Oh that should just be arse they will now then. Hmmm
Won't this fall foul of laws regarding content distribution? It's bad enough lending your mate a CD without broadcasting it for everyone to hear.
While I mostly agree with you I don't think you are totally correct. As another reply stated there may be better alternatives that we could be using.
The way that we (US and UK in particular) elect representatives is not very "fair" in that it wastes a lot of votes and tends to seriously under-represent minority opinions. Even opinions that are held by large numbers of people (say 15% of the population which is millions) can easily be ignored.
The problem is that democracy is easy to understand so it will be difficult to replace.
I swear the submitter should start writting scripts for Star Trek or something.
While it is true that Debian doesn't directly ship the Sun VM it does provide a package called java-package which will create and install debs from the Sun VM that you download. It needs a little more work to make it completely idiot proof, it would be nice if it started automatically after install for instance or instance, but it's so close as to make no difference. Try it out - it's a workable solution to the problem.
I like what this guy said about binary drivers. I admit that it would be nice if we had open source drivers for everything but in the real world that just isn't going to happen - at least not in the near future. Companies like nVidia just can't see any benifit to open sourcing their drivers and I can quite understand that.
What we (the Linux comunity) should do is accept that there are going to be binary drivers (this will involve some people pulling their head out of the sand) and make it as easy as possible for hardware manufacturers to write drivers while still encouraging openness and adherance to standards. Very few hardware manufacturers will write drivers that need to be updated and tweeked every couple of months becuse the cost is just to high so we need a rock solid API that is well documented and has a documented change policy. Perhaps that exists already, I'm not that familiar with the exact kernel development process, but it doesn't seem like it is based on others comments.
Sorry I already hold the patent on the idea of patenting other peopls ideas and I am filing a patent on the idea of patenting ideas that realate to patenting ideas that were patented by someone else.
I think that just about covers all bases.
I agree with you upto a point. I run Debian testing with a 2.6.8 kernel and KDE 3.3.2 ok it is slightly behind the times but it's pretty damn close. If I wanted my system to be closer to the leading edge I could up it to unstable. I choose to stay with testing though because I like the feeling that the software I run has mangled other peoples systems first (cheers guys).
What I think should be the case though is that I can track stable on a server and actually have a rock solid OS that gets updated every 10 to 12 months. Having the stable release be 2 years old is just a joke. Worse, it doesn't look like there is going to be another stable release for a while yet. Everytime they get close more stuff comes into testing.
I would really like to see Debian loose the zealotry as I think it damages a great the distribution. For example, they have written a great installer but won't release it because it's got a little bug on platform X. I and 99.9% of people out there don't care that the installer doesn't work on a C64 just give it to us on x86.
Grrrr. I makes me so mad to watch a great distribution die.
Yes I realize it doesn't stop at 9. I was trying to make a point and 9 to most people seems more final than [insert arbitary number here].
As for Firefox IMHO that should be on about 4 or 5 by now. It was a decent useable browser with relativly few bugs at around 0.4. To my mind therefore it should have been released as 1.0
I think one of the problems is that without the commercial push to release a lot of projects get bogged down. The developers wan't it to be perfect and have all the bells and whistles that they imagined the finished product to have before it is released on the masses. I completely understand that view but I don't think Jo public does. What they see is something that isn't finished and therefore not worth using. Joe public has a hard time understanding the major number let alone the minor number and doesn't have a clue what a revision number is which is exactly why the beast dropped version numbers and why Sun is trying again to switch Java from 1.5 to 5.0.
What is with people. Most open source projects seem to be scared of the number 1 so every piece of software is 0.x.y.z now the kernel people have become afraid of 3 (or maybe 7) either way this is just silly. I can see it now, in twenty years time we will be up to 2.9.9.9.9.3.8.1 because nobody will take the plunge and call it 3. At least the emacs people got a grip and just dropped the 0.