Philosopher Bill to the rescue...it is my experience that people don't face reality anyway. Them younguns are tuned in to some reality, probably more deeply than Bill is tuned in to whatever he's calling reality. Sheesh, he's one to talk about being out of touch with what's really going on.
The core of a capitalist economy is that you can make money off capital without producing anything new. It's just as shady as communism if taken in its purest since. Copyright laws exist to keep a certain system of production in place, and it is in a sense unfair, but it does create wealth through somewhat artificial means.
What you are discussing sounds like more of a true meritocracy - you get paid for your initial production, and must continue to product something of value to continue to be in exchange with others. It sounds nice in theory, but I'm having trouble seeing how it would be viable in a macroeconomic sense. Information would have no objective value. It is a move from a scarcity-based economic model to one based on agalmics, and I think it would require a highly educated and fair society to turn into anything more than the exploitation of those who can produce. A highly educated and fair society is something that seems to be in short supply, speaking of scarcity...
You don't need the source code, don't even need a disassembler. I know that it would take me the better part of the next two months to get a grip on the assembly behind a windows app. Having the source code would be a different story.
The first thing you want to do is figure out, broadly, what it's supposed to do. Install the software. Get it running. Look over the buttons and menu options. Look over the manual. Next I'd start examining the likely inputs and outputs. What data gets fed into the software? What does it output? What does it store? How does it store it? It may be worthwhile to find an external way to read the datastore (e.g. opening an access database in access) or that may come later.
Now that you have an idea of how the software works, start examining how it handles inputs of different types. What are the expected inputs? Does it handle those properly? What are some unexpected inputs that are still input-able by the UI? What are some unexpected inputs that would not be possible or likely through the UI, i.e. a deliberately or intentionally corrupted input file or stream. Can you inject arbitrary values into the software where there should be none? Can you get the software to perform unexpected operations by manipulating the input? Attack the UI deliberately, perform operations in unexpected sequences, etc.
During this process I guarantee that you will make the application break somewhere, if you're creative enough. Now you want to take the unexpected behavior that you caused and find some way to exploit it. In this case, one must ask, is there some way to manipulate the vote count through exploitation of the defect in the code? Better yet, is there some way to accomplish this manipulation strictly through the UI that generated the input? Or at least, with minimal rights to the aggregated input data, in this case? Can you make the software change the count through manipulating the UI of the counting application?
Coders fall into routines and often repeat the same mistakes over and over. If you find one type of defect (e.g. SQL injection vulnerability), chances are you will find others like it. If they miss proper RI checking in one place, chances are they do so in others. You start to get a feel for how the program works and how it breaks. If you have written enough code of a similar nature, after a few hours or days of fooling around, you will probably have a very good idea of how the application is organized and even have an inkling of the code that went behind it without ever seeing a line of source or assembly.
It was software made for profit in a closed-source environment, so they did not disclose or fix all the bugs they found during test. That's the way of closed source, proprietary software. They presumably fixed larger crashes and glaring problems but left the smaller stuff alone in the interest of adding features and meeting deadlines. These smaller issues and poor design decisions will make up the weaknesses in the code that can ultimately be exploited for fun and profit.
I really don't like Pelosi, but I don't think that she's going to go nuts with investigations into the Bush administration. There may be some things that need flushing out; it's hard to know what, exactly, has been going on for the last six years that remains undisclosed, like the wiretappings and secret prisons were. The election of a democratic senate, however, doesn't necessarily result in the types of time and money spent on investigating Clinton's misdeeds back in the 90's - that was a Republican game. The dems know why they were elected, and it wasn't to spend the next two years performing a witch hunt that ends with them being voted back out of office and possibly sacrificing the presidency in '08. If she is smart, Pelosi will focus her efforts on either fixing or scaling down our efforts in Iraq, which is the overriding reason that the dems won this time around.
The democrats may not have much organizational smarts, but they are patient.
Hey, that's not a half bad idea. You could actually prevent crime this way, you know? If you had a group randomly monitoring the feeds in realtime, say. How much domestic abuse do you think goes unreported in this country? In fact, as computers get better and better at pattern recognition, we could really start monitoring everyone all the time. I know that if I were momentarily irrational at some point, I would want my friends in the DOJ to come and stop me before I could do something harmful to myself or someone else. We should praise Gonzales and welcome the beginning of the revolution in fighting crime today! What rational person could say no to fighting crime?
Interesting, but you can already do this with or without the xmlhttprequest object. The technique is old, it's called slow load or comet. Basically you open a connection to the server, and have the server sit on it until it has something to send you. As soon as it sends its reply, that connection terminates and fires off a new one, continuing the cycle. Real-time feedback between client and server, without the need to poll or eat up bandwidth. I created a proof of concept of this using ajax here. You can build a full-fledged application like this with very low latency that looks just like a regular socket-using network app, in a web browser. The code in this posting has been revised, you need to spawn the thread off of the web server's hands to the CLR in this instance so as not to tie up web requests, and you can probably just do a thread.suspend and reawaken it instead of looping on the server, but it gets the idea across...
Space junk? Nah, it should be much less expensive to get it to escape orbit than to get it into orbit in the first place. The goal would be to fling it into the sun. Just make sure you launch during the day or you may miss...
It seems like it's more designed to stop little, fast-moving stuff from penetrating the armor rather than deflecting blunt force trauma over a large area, like you would experience in a bike crash. I also bet that a slide on asphault would tear it to shreds, but I don't know much about kevlar. I think your best bet is a padded leather racing suit like people I've known wear for the track.
Why is it any of their business what you choose to put in your body
By they, I'm assuming you mean the FDA or the DEA or PETA, although it is not exactly clear. I think that drug enforcement does way more harm than good. We still have some social responsibility, however, to our fellow men, women, and children, and taking the polarized stance of "it's no one's business" is equally as bad as what our government does in the name of protection now. Some people are not really capable of looking after themselves, and while it is one's privilege to self-destruct, no one truly wants this and the effects of self-destructive actions generally have a broader scope than those committing them like to admit.
I'll go you one further: we'll never see mass migration until there's something new that users just can't live without on a different system than the one they have now. Otherwise you will get a trickle of users from system x to system y because system y is more secure, has a shinier box, or whatever. If you could really take the exact same CDs from your windows box and just run them on your mac/bsd/whatever install, that would probably do it too, but I think that innovation will end up paving the way away from - or back to - Microsoft.
I have always found the same thing about politeness, and I think it holds true in most cases. I am however a white male, and I speculate that in many cases where politeness has bought me out of a potentially bad situation with police, it would not have gone that extra mile were I, say, a minority and/or female. I don't even mean imply overt racism except in rare cases, but rather an ingrained, pervasive prejudice that may seem subtle to those who are not so frequently on the receiving end of it...
I also take issue with the idea that a corporation, as an entity in itself, has a moral valence
The Nazis as a group certainly had a moral valence. There were at least a few good people in the party, who ended up hanging on and doing horrible things from fear and intimidation. The suppressive actions of others can make otherwise good and helpful people do bad things and then an entire group starts manifesting an evil valence. Likewise a good group can pull people up and act in a beneficial way, and can be evaluated much as an individual would be. This is what I have heard termed, "group egregore". I think that throughout history, entire civilizations have manifested a particular valence of this sort.
Of course, MS has used some certainly questionable tactics, but I would hardly deem them evil. They have done a lot more good than harm in my opinion and continue to do so.
Maybe he was lucky, but it sounds to me like he made his own luck. Some people really get shat on but I just don't see that the majority of the middle class in the US are in this camp. We are just brought up to believe in the dual-income-two-point-three-kid two-car-big-house dream and most people follow it. This guy clearly sacrificed some material wealth for his lifestyle, I would not be so cavalier with the criticism...
The hippocratic oath should dissuade doctors from wanton prescription of potentially dangerous narcotics, but this has become accepted practice throughout the medical profession. The link between brain chemistry and disorders like ADD and ADHD is not well understood, and the link between drug therapy and the disorders even less so. I don't believe that a brain chemical imbalance is the root cause of all but a very, very few disorders of this sort. A brain chemical imbalance could certainly, on the other hand, be a side effect of a bad personal/family/diet/school/whatever situation, and a combination of effects could lead to what we term ADD/ADHD. In some patients, the drugs certainly treat the symptoms, so I cannot blame some people for saying they are effective. The prescription of these drugs, however, has turned into an epidemic among American youth. With millions of children taking them, the 1% or so who suffer really bad side effects adds up to an enormous public health problem, while hundreds of thousands or even millions of others are being drugged for no good reason.
I think the parent is correct. You can customize document libraries pretty easily in sharepoint. You can't do some source control things like branching, but it offers an explorer-like interface that everyone is familiar with, and it does offer version control and document checkout, as well as integration with AD for security/user setup. Heck, you can browse to a url through windows explorer to navigate the document tree. The automation support is also very good - you can write.NET code to do anything to the documents stored in the database. Having everything in SQL server is nice too. I have used Sharepoint to manage/server webpage content, automatically zip up and send files based on document properties, build custom forms for end users to control these features, etc. Download the WSS SDK and have a look around in VS.NET.
The main thing I don't like about it is administering the system if it goes down. The admin tools and documentation are for sh*t.
I don't see the conflict here. Microsoft wrote a large amount of code for their new OS without, apparently, any high regard for security. The code-test-debug model does not work very well for building security into software products. It needs to be designed to be secure from the ground up. MS has had plenty of time to see this coming, but their reduction in functionality for security purposes screams that this was not how many of the shiny new Vista features were designed. I'm sure it was code-test-debug all the way and you just can't catch everything like that. You can't catch *everything* anyway, but debugging "insecure" code to make it "secure" will just be a rerun of the last four years.
Is it crazy to expect secure, functional, feature-rich applications from vendors?
I'd be curious as well. The cipher was only meant for very short cryptic messages to begin with - just enough security to give a field agent a means of quick and dirty communication that could not be broken within a reasonable timeframe. The idea was to give someone without a computer strong encryption. With the 52-bit key of the deck of cards, this qualifies, unless there is a real break...
I think the main reason that vb.net is so popular is due to the hordes of vb6 programmers who are moving to.NET. There is a technet article (can't find the url now) about how MS documentation is moving more towards vb.net-only code examples. The company found that a) there are way more vb.net programmers than c# programmers and b) c# programmers are more likely to be willing to look at and understand vb.net code than the other way around.
I cannot see that vb syntax, for someone coming in with no prior experience, would be better than c# syntax. VB.NET has more than twice the number of reserved words than C#, with no added functionality that I have been able to tell. The "Basic" in Visual Basic has long since been obliterated.
AFAIK the subscriptions came out after Napster re-launched a couple years ago. I find the grandparent's statement an interesting one - their recent advertising may have inadvertently done them more harm than good.
On the other hand, my girlfriend had an RCA mp3 player and wanted me to show her how to download songs. We tried two online services and with each one the DRM stuff was a complete PITA. The worst part was, though, getting the songs onto her computer, getting the license for the song, and getting the music onto the player. It took a while for me to figure it out, and it drove me nuts. She bought an iPod and problem solved.
That's where I could see Napster having a viable gripe against MS. You do business with a company and they fall short of expectations and that impacts you directly - it would make me upset, too. That being said, if you weren't in a contractual agreement, there's not much legal standing at this point (IANAL), but still...I think they have some viable gripes about MS not being competitive in the marketplace.
I think you could make it interesting for FPS games, but it would take some work. First, it would have to be a teamplay event or some really clever scenario to cover an entire round or series of rounds. Otherwise, the only objective is to rack up the kills which does get boring to watch pretty quickly, no matter how good the players are. Cuts between floating commentators' viewpoints and individual players' viewpoints would help keep it interesting. Commentators that know the levels and the players and the game in general would be necessary IMO - they may be annoying, but the coverage needs to tell a story and I don't think you can get there without narration. I'm not a big fan of professional sporting event coverage but I think there's a lot that the gaming industry could learn from it.
I have never run OSX but generally, software is licensed, not sold. You did not "buy" the software, you bought a license to use it under the seller's terms. You probably bought a cd as a transmission medium but that has little to do with the software itself. Shitty as it may seem, them's the breaks, and that's the present and future reality of software sales.
I don't think that Apple probably cares much about the lone hacker who bought their product and got it to run on non-apple hardware, but putting the instructions up so others can do the same enables a lot more, less technically savvy people to circumvent the license, and they understandably see this as a risk to their business model.
Komodo dragons are not, AFAIK, venomous. When they eat, some of the meat sticks in their teeth and rots, creating a very deadly batch of bacteria. The dragons are very fast at short distances but not good distance runners...they will often strike a prey once and let the bacteria finish it off, since they cannot keep up with larger animals like deer. I know that some of the Komodo dragons in captivity in the US are being studied to figure out why the sceptic bacteria does not kill them, as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Philosopher Bill to the rescue...it is my experience that people don't face reality anyway. Them younguns are tuned in to some reality, probably more deeply than Bill is tuned in to whatever he's calling reality. Sheesh, he's one to talk about being out of touch with what's really going on.
You're not the only one, I was quite confused. Thanks for the clarification, grandparent...
The core of a capitalist economy is that you can make money off capital without producing anything new. It's just as shady as communism if taken in its purest since. Copyright laws exist to keep a certain system of production in place, and it is in a sense unfair, but it does create wealth through somewhat artificial means.
What you are discussing sounds like more of a true meritocracy - you get paid for your initial production, and must continue to product something of value to continue to be in exchange with others. It sounds nice in theory, but I'm having trouble seeing how it would be viable in a macroeconomic sense. Information would have no objective value. It is a move from a scarcity-based economic model to one based on agalmics, and I think it would require a highly educated and fair society to turn into anything more than the exploitation of those who can produce. A highly educated and fair society is something that seems to be in short supply, speaking of scarcity...
You don't need the source code, don't even need a disassembler. I know that it would take me the better part of the next two months to get a grip on the assembly behind a windows app. Having the source code would be a different story.
The first thing you want to do is figure out, broadly, what it's supposed to do. Install the software. Get it running. Look over the buttons and menu options. Look over the manual. Next I'd start examining the likely inputs and outputs. What data gets fed into the software? What does it output? What does it store? How does it store it? It may be worthwhile to find an external way to read the datastore (e.g. opening an access database in access) or that may come later.
Now that you have an idea of how the software works, start examining how it handles inputs of different types. What are the expected inputs? Does it handle those properly? What are some unexpected inputs that are still input-able by the UI? What are some unexpected inputs that would not be possible or likely through the UI, i.e. a deliberately or intentionally corrupted input file or stream. Can you inject arbitrary values into the software where there should be none? Can you get the software to perform unexpected operations by manipulating the input? Attack the UI deliberately, perform operations in unexpected sequences, etc.
During this process I guarantee that you will make the application break somewhere, if you're creative enough. Now you want to take the unexpected behavior that you caused and find some way to exploit it. In this case, one must ask, is there some way to manipulate the vote count through exploitation of the defect in the code? Better yet, is there some way to accomplish this manipulation strictly through the UI that generated the input? Or at least, with minimal rights to the aggregated input data, in this case? Can you make the software change the count through manipulating the UI of the counting application?
Coders fall into routines and often repeat the same mistakes over and over. If you find one type of defect (e.g. SQL injection vulnerability), chances are you will find others like it. If they miss proper RI checking in one place, chances are they do so in others. You start to get a feel for how the program works and how it breaks. If you have written enough code of a similar nature, after a few hours or days of fooling around, you will probably have a very good idea of how the application is organized and even have an inkling of the code that went behind it without ever seeing a line of source or assembly.
It was software made for profit in a closed-source environment, so they did not disclose or fix all the bugs they found during test. That's the way of closed source, proprietary software. They presumably fixed larger crashes and glaring problems but left the smaller stuff alone in the interest of adding features and meeting deadlines. These smaller issues and poor design decisions will make up the weaknesses in the code that can ultimately be exploited for fun and profit.
I really don't like Pelosi, but I don't think that she's going to go nuts with investigations into the Bush administration. There may be some things that need flushing out; it's hard to know what, exactly, has been going on for the last six years that remains undisclosed, like the wiretappings and secret prisons were. The election of a democratic senate, however, doesn't necessarily result in the types of time and money spent on investigating Clinton's misdeeds back in the 90's - that was a Republican game. The dems know why they were elected, and it wasn't to spend the next two years performing a witch hunt that ends with them being voted back out of office and possibly sacrificing the presidency in '08. If she is smart, Pelosi will focus her efforts on either fixing or scaling down our efforts in Iraq, which is the overriding reason that the dems won this time around.
The democrats may not have much organizational smarts, but they are patient.
Hey, that's not a half bad idea. You could actually prevent crime this way, you know? If you had a group randomly monitoring the feeds in realtime, say. How much domestic abuse do you think goes unreported in this country? In fact, as computers get better and better at pattern recognition, we could really start monitoring everyone all the time. I know that if I were momentarily irrational at some point, I would want my friends in the DOJ to come and stop me before I could do something harmful to myself or someone else. We should praise Gonzales and welcome the beginning of the revolution in fighting crime today! What rational person could say no to fighting crime?
Interesting, but you can already do this with or without the xmlhttprequest object. The technique is old, it's called slow load or comet. Basically you open a connection to the server, and have the server sit on it until it has something to send you. As soon as it sends its reply, that connection terminates and fires off a new one, continuing the cycle. Real-time feedback between client and server, without the need to poll or eat up bandwidth. I created a proof of concept of this using ajax here. You can build a full-fledged application like this with very low latency that looks just like a regular socket-using network app, in a web browser. The code in this posting has been revised, you need to spawn the thread off of the web server's hands to the CLR in this instance so as not to tie up web requests, and you can probably just do a thread.suspend and reawaken it instead of looping on the server, but it gets the idea across...
Space junk? Nah, it should be much less expensive to get it to escape orbit than to get it into orbit in the first place. The goal would be to fling it into the sun. Just make sure you launch during the day or you may miss...
It seems like it's more designed to stop little, fast-moving stuff from penetrating the armor rather than deflecting blunt force trauma over a large area, like you would experience in a bike crash. I also bet that a slide on asphault would tear it to shreds, but I don't know much about kevlar. I think your best bet is a padded leather racing suit like people I've known wear for the track.
By they, I'm assuming you mean the FDA or the DEA or PETA, although it is not exactly clear. I think that drug enforcement does way more harm than good. We still have some social responsibility, however, to our fellow men, women, and children, and taking the polarized stance of "it's no one's business" is equally as bad as what our government does in the name of protection now. Some people are not really capable of looking after themselves, and while it is one's privilege to self-destruct, no one truly wants this and the effects of self-destructive actions generally have a broader scope than those committing them like to admit.
I'll go you one further: we'll never see mass migration until there's something new that users just can't live without on a different system than the one they have now. Otherwise you will get a trickle of users from system x to system y because system y is more secure, has a shinier box, or whatever. If you could really take the exact same CDs from your windows box and just run them on your mac/bsd/whatever install, that would probably do it too, but I think that innovation will end up paving the way away from - or back to - Microsoft.
I have always found the same thing about politeness, and I think it holds true in most cases. I am however a white male, and I speculate that in many cases where politeness has bought me out of a potentially bad situation with police, it would not have gone that extra mile were I, say, a minority and/or female. I don't even mean imply overt racism except in rare cases, but rather an ingrained, pervasive prejudice that may seem subtle to those who are not so frequently on the receiving end of it...
Of course, MS has used some certainly questionable tactics, but I would hardly deem them evil. They have done a lot more good than harm in my opinion and continue to do so.
Maybe he was lucky, but it sounds to me like he made his own luck. Some people really get shat on but I just don't see that the majority of the middle class in the US are in this camp. We are just brought up to believe in the dual-income-two-point-three-kid two-car-big-house dream and most people follow it. This guy clearly sacrificed some material wealth for his lifestyle, I would not be so cavalier with the criticism...
The hippocratic oath should dissuade doctors from wanton prescription of potentially dangerous narcotics, but this has become accepted practice throughout the medical profession. The link between brain chemistry and disorders like ADD and ADHD is not well understood, and the link between drug therapy and the disorders even less so. I don't believe that a brain chemical imbalance is the root cause of all but a very, very few disorders of this sort. A brain chemical imbalance could certainly, on the other hand, be a side effect of a bad personal/family/diet/school/whatever situation, and a combination of effects could lead to what we term ADD/ADHD. In some patients, the drugs certainly treat the symptoms, so I cannot blame some people for saying they are effective. The prescription of these drugs, however, has turned into an epidemic among American youth. With millions of children taking them, the 1% or so who suffer really bad side effects adds up to an enormous public health problem, while hundreds of thousands or even millions of others are being drugged for no good reason.
The main thing I don't like about it is administering the system if it goes down. The admin tools and documentation are for sh*t.
...a paedophile. Filthy dipthongs!
Is it crazy to expect secure, functional, feature-rich applications from vendors?
I'd be curious as well. The cipher was only meant for very short cryptic messages to begin with - just enough security to give a field agent a means of quick and dirty communication that could not be broken within a reasonable timeframe. The idea was to give someone without a computer strong encryption. With the 52-bit key of the deck of cards, this qualifies, unless there is a real break...
I cannot see that vb syntax, for someone coming in with no prior experience, would be better than c# syntax. VB.NET has more than twice the number of reserved words than C#, with no added functionality that I have been able to tell. The "Basic" in Visual Basic has long since been obliterated.
On the other hand, my girlfriend had an RCA mp3 player and wanted me to show her how to download songs. We tried two online services and with each one the DRM stuff was a complete PITA. The worst part was, though, getting the songs onto her computer, getting the license for the song, and getting the music onto the player. It took a while for me to figure it out, and it drove me nuts. She bought an iPod and problem solved.
That's where I could see Napster having a viable gripe against MS. You do business with a company and they fall short of expectations and that impacts you directly - it would make me upset, too. That being said, if you weren't in a contractual agreement, there's not much legal standing at this point (IANAL), but still...I think they have some viable gripes about MS not being competitive in the marketplace.
I think you could make it interesting for FPS games, but it would take some work. First, it would have to be a teamplay event or some really clever scenario to cover an entire round or series of rounds. Otherwise, the only objective is to rack up the kills which does get boring to watch pretty quickly, no matter how good the players are. Cuts between floating commentators' viewpoints and individual players' viewpoints would help keep it interesting. Commentators that know the levels and the players and the game in general would be necessary IMO - they may be annoying, but the coverage needs to tell a story and I don't think you can get there without narration. I'm not a big fan of professional sporting event coverage but I think there's a lot that the gaming industry could learn from it.
I don't think that Apple probably cares much about the lone hacker who bought their product and got it to run on non-apple hardware, but putting the instructions up so others can do the same enables a lot more, less technically savvy people to circumvent the license, and they understandably see this as a risk to their business model.
Go install linux if you want a free O/S.
Actually on taking a further look it appears that Komodo's aren't a special case after all...just a couple months ago it was found that they have venom. Nevermind:( http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ss/stories/s15209 86.htm
Komodo dragons are not, AFAIK, venomous. When they eat, some of the meat sticks in their teeth and rots, creating a very deadly batch of bacteria. The dragons are very fast at short distances but not good distance runners...they will often strike a prey once and let the bacteria finish it off, since they cannot keep up with larger animals like deer. I know that some of the Komodo dragons in captivity in the US are being studied to figure out why the sceptic bacteria does not kill them, as well.