I'm not a laywer either, but I'd like to ask a legal question.
Is it possible to file a class action suit on behalf of customers for the "opt out" changes? Would the FTC ruling sink the case, or would it still be possible?
Perhaps some enterprising lawyer could make a bundle and force Amazon to do the right thing at the same time.
It seems to me that this is a situation where open standards/open source is important.
What happens if your $3k phone turns out to have a weakness in it? A crummy pseudo-random number generator or a more mundane bug? Or what happens when your neighbor buys a doohickey that plugs into a visor or a WinCE box that gives him the same functionality for $150? How do you know you can trust the chip?
I don't know if Hailstorm will work. It seems like a longshot to me, but I'm a pauper and Bill Gates has an impressive track record with world domination.
But this does illustrate one of the big differneces between Linux and MS. MS has a master plan. They're building server software, server farms, development tools, business alliances and strategic partnerships. They have a business plan and a technological plan, and they both seem to fit together. Even though the word is going to come off as a joke after all that's happened, this stuff is innovative, in kind of an Orwellian sense. Especially as a business plan.
They looked at the future and decided it was going to be objects running out in the cloud, talking to each other in complicated ways, and they tried to figure out the best places to build the toll booths.
We don't have a plan. We've yet to come up with a really good business model. We've been making incremental improvements to a 70's operating system. Individuals or small groups have ideas and they make it better in a small way. The result is a lot better than anything they had in the 70's. But it's a gradual process of accumulation. No one comes down from the mountain with the new direction.
The first time I realized that Linux had super powers was when SLS dropped the ball. They were an old distribution. For whatever reason they just stopped doing it. And Slackware stepped up to the plate and took over. If Linux had been commercial, SLS would have killed it in its cradle. But you can't kill Linux. Debian will be moving along long after VA Linux and Red Hat have succomed to financial reality.
MS has a plan. Gates says he's "betting the company" on it. I don't think he's kidding, or that he's wrong. If.NET and Hailstorm don't fly, they're screwed. Of course they're so big it would take them decades to waste away. The plan offers vast rewards, potentially, but it has enormous risks, as well.
This is not a clash between rival technical systems. It's about world views.
I've got to be honest, I love the megalomaniacal scope of MS's plan. They're thinking the way the the guys who built the pyramids thought. Part of me wants to email Bill and say, "God speed, you magnificent bastard!"
But ultimately, I think he's going to fall on his ass.
Why?
The OS monopoly was achieved in an environment when no one understood the dynamics of the business. There's the famous story about Bill trying to sell out to IBM for a relative song, and IBM turning him down. That suggests that neither side knew what MS had.
Translation: the lucky SOB *stumbled* into it. And he was helped along by the fact that no one else understood how big the prize was either, or even that it existed at all.
There's another famous story about Lotus dissing Bill, rudely pointing up the difference in the bottom lines. People didn't understand the dynamics of lock in back then, that the person who controlled the OS had leverage over the application market. These were smart guys, the best and the brightest in the industry.
The article at the top of this thread is first class. People are thinking like chess players when they look at the business now. Which squares on the board do you need to control if you want to win? The word is out, the guard towers are fully manned, and no one is going to be stumbling into anything this time around.
No one is going to create a strategic dependence on MS if they can help it. Especially now, when the XP license server shock waves are about to hit. These guys are lining up their ducks to do the same to thing to their customers that OPEC did to the West in the 70's.
It's going to be an intersting thing to watch, though.
The issue isn't whether information is going to be shared or not. The issue is who controls the process: individuals or large companies?
Of course I want my medical records available to doctors if I collapse. But that problem is solved quite simply with a medic alert bracelet. Lots of people use them. Lots of people CHOOSE to use them.
But does a guy who had psychiatric treatment want a potential employer to know that he took prozac for 14 months two years ago?
McNealy's piece is an argument against a straw man. As someone who uses Sun products, I'd feel better if he took his head out of the clouds and tried to fix problems with Java Web Start and the Solaris download process. It seems that more and more often Sun stuff is broken out of the box.
Fix that stuff, then tell us how to run the world.
I don't know if the insurance price difference is justified or not.
But I think that part of the problem isn't with NT/W2K per se, but with the culture that surrounds MS sys admining. MS tries to make things simple -- and they often seem simple. It's easy to throw stuff up without thinking about it first. And one of the selling points that MS uses in comparisons with Unix/Linux is that W2K is easier.
On a certain level, that means that you get a sysadmin that went to Windows because Unix was too hard. That's a harsh overgeneralization, but I think there's some truth to it.
The problem is that security is hard on any platform. The issues are pretty similar. But if you keep telling people that all of you have to do is click on an icon to set things up, it's not surprising that people click on the icon, take the defaults, and don't think about locking things down.
I'm not a doctor, so take this for what it's worth.
Masking the pain is a bad long term solution. You're doing something bad to your body, and it's letting you know about it. Pay attention.
You didn't mention it, but I suspect that you're overweight. I'm not giving you a hard time -- I'm overweight too. But if you are, and you have back problems, you've got to lose weight. Everything else is a band aide.
The other thing you have to do is strengthen the muscles in your back. Yoga and stretching exercices are good for this.
In the short term a chiropractor will probably make you feel better. I'm typing this through clenched teeth, because those quacks refuse to follow the scientific method, they don't run tests, and lots of them claim they can cure things like ear infections through "spinal cord manipulations". But I have friends who have had positive results.
Fundamentally, you need to reduce the load on your back muscles (lose weight and find a better chair that helps you balance more naturally), and improve the ability of your muscles to handle the load (yoga and stretching).
Anything else is just going to make it easier for you to keep abusing your body, and will lead to grief in the long run.
In today's economy, a smart person with skills is insane to mangle their body for their job. Coal miners in Pennsylvania 75 years ago didn't have many options. You do. Geeking just isn't worth it.
The article didn't say so, but I have to believe that AOL will help the Chineese government restrict the flow of information to the people. They simply wouldn't be allowed to operate otherwise. It was interesting to note that the local company keeps 52% vs. AOL's 48%.
There's no way to sugar coat this. These guys are selling their enginnering muscle to China in the service of repression. They're doing something immoral because it's profitable.
As bad as that is -- and it's bad enough all by itself -- we have to deal with the fact that AOL is the preemininent member of the oligopoly that will control access to information in the US. In other words, a company that's establishing a track record of selling out civil liberties for money is in the driver's seat.
Murdoch's News Corp has pulled punches in its publishing houses and other media outlets in order to get Chineese deals. Will AOL/Time Warner follow suit? If they do, will it be any worse, or even as bad, as providing the technical infrastructure to censort the net?
Think about that when you watch CNN or read Time Magazine. If you still read or watch them, that is.
Re:AOL is totally cool (some corrections)
on
AOL And The GPL
·
· Score: 2
I did think that it meant they had to provide the source, and I stand corrected.
Thanks.
Re:AOL is totally cool (some corrections)
on
AOL And The GPL
·
· Score: 2
This, I think, is a flaw in the GPL.
I'm not saying that your interpretation is incorrect (I don't know), only that if it is correct, it's asking AOL to do something that's totally impractical. Are they supposed to let you scroll through the text on the device?
Their changes and improvements were given back, and the code is available.
As Hank Hill said to his son Bobby when Bobby make a lame legalistic excuse, "Son, don't play lawyer ball."
If open source != secure, then how does MS explain OpenBSD? Do they really want to compare their record to Theo's?
And it sounds like the kinds of tools that were used to find the recent IIS hole (they scan binaries, not source) are more effective than pouring over source code. At least with open source people can fix the bugs that are found.
One poster said that security is pretty poor on both sides of the fence, and I think he has a point. It's the #1 problem with OSs now, IMO. It's not a problem of open source vs. proprietary software. It's a matter of security being a priority.
That means telling the marketing or tech people with bad judgment that the whizbang feature they want (like automatically launching docs that are emailed to you) doesn't make sense from a security point of view.
Someone else posted about RH 7.1, and how RH seems to be improving things. I installed it, and was also impressed with the config screens. Of course the real test is in how well it works, and it's too soon to tell. But they seem to be taking things more seriously.
I believe that Linux is almost wholy responsible for the massive improvements in MS's reliablity we've seen in the last couple of years. Perhaps RH and other companies can clean up their own houses to the point where MS is obliged to take security more seriously as well.
The reviews at Ain't it Cool News (www.aintitcool.com) were really enthusiastic. I don't think they were coerced, at least I don't think they were coerced into saying things they wouldn't have said otherwise.
I can see the studio's side of it -- they're not showing a movie, they're showing some raw material that they're going to use to make a movie. But it was a dumb thing to make people sign those agreements, because by all accounts they weren't necessary, and now there will be a cloud of doubt hanging over the initial buzz.
This is almost there. The problem with this system is that different would be censors have very different ideas about what to suppress.
Some parents will want to suppress homophobic hate speech, and other parents will want to suppress discussions about evolution.
Instead of one big mass of rules, they need to make it possible for spliter groups of parents to "fork the rules", or to start out from scratch with a new set of rules. That way concerned parents can pick the censorscheme that fits their own biases best.
As long as none of this is compulsory, I think it's probably a reasonable approach.
.NET is still a vague concept to me, but one of the main guys behind it said that C# was analagous to Java the language, while.NET was analagous to Java the platform. I took that to mean the JVM and things like the EJB and Servelet standards.
My impression is that.NET is about tools to build and deploy sites. I don't think it's going to be a series of portals and content sites like MSN. I think that MS will use.NET to build new generations of MSN, but that other people can use.NET to build competing services if they want.
Again, I have only a fuzzy picture of.NET, so this could be off base, but I think that MS is trying to rebuild Java with a couple of key differences.
First of all, they're trying to duplicate their VB control model across languages and in a distributed fashion. I believe that.NET controls will be much easier to work with than EJB objects.
Second of all, I think they're going to really go to town with visual RAD tools. They want to make developing Web applications to be much easier.
Third of all, they want to put less of an emphasis on supporting multiple platforms (although I think they will -- at least things like XBox and WinCE, and probably OS X as well), and more of an emphasis on supporting multiple language syntaxes.
I wish an MS guy would post here or email me to clear this up, but I doubt it will happen.
I think the problem they have is that it's going to take years to tighten up.NET. There will inevitably be lots of loose ends after the early releases. And Java is here and reasonably solid now.
But MS is betting that they can manage a platform better than Sun. Java people complain bitterly about Swing vs. MFC, and about seemingly small things like printing support. So there's room for improvement. And presumably.NET will be tweaked for Wintel boxes, and will run much faster than JVM stuff.
I'm intrigued by the scope of.NET. They certainly did a lot of pimping of the word "innovation" during the anti-trust trial, but this seems to be genuinely innovative stuff to me. I'm not saying it will work well or that it will win, but it is a big vision, and it is a gutsy thing to try to roll it out. And I give them credit for it. And yes, I know that it's all about trying to keep their leverage. But it's still interesting technology.
This exploit is more serious than the others you've listed. It's a remote root exploit, and it affects people who take the out of the box installation.
A comparable Unix exploit would have been the recent BIND fiasco. And that got good coverage on/.
I get tired of MS bashing too. But I think there's a lot less of it here than there used to be. The article about Easel and Ximian took a lot of heat, but I think it was a healthy thing to post. We're still a long way away from looking at the ethics of some of the Linux IPOs, but it's a start.
This is a big security problem, and it was made worse by some questionable design decisions (automatic restarts, etc.). But the effect isn't really any worse than the recent BIND exploits.
And you could argue, as perhaps the OpenBSD guys might, that by not advising people to run BIND in a chroot jail, the ISC guys are being less responsible than MS, which has published security guidelines that protected the users who followed them from this particular exploit.
But what good does that do? The reality is that both Linux and Windows have their share of security problems. MS has a long list of bad decisions from a security point of view, but we have things like linuxconf. Sacrificing security for convenience isn't just a MS thing. And there are plenty of buffer overflows to go around.
We need to encourage everyone to think about security more seriously. We need to get companies to think about security from the beginning, instead of trying to bolt it on in the end. And we need to make sure that they respond quickly when problems do arise.
I don't think there's any doubt that MS is the victim of a lot of piracy. I can understand that they would want to try to climb on top of the problem, but it seems like a lot of the stuff they do -- recovery cds vs. full versions of the OS on cd, and things like harassing pc manufacturers who don't install Windows -- puts unfair burdens on their own customers and even on people who don't use their products.
People have been screaming about the new MS license servers. But if they work, won't it be a good thing for Linux users? If they can actually control piracy, what happens to their argument in situations like this? And how will they justify giving people crippled recovery CDs?
Commerical software piracy is bad for free software because it tends to blur the difference between the free stuff and the commercial stuff. MS Office is better than Star Office. If a guy can borrow the CDs from work, he's going to use MS Office. But if he has to pay $400 to run it, he's probably going to run Star instead.
So I think we should support reasonable and well targeted efforts on the part of MS to elminate piracy. Harassing naked PC people isn't reasonable and it isn't well targeted. But the license severs are both of those things.
Spam is illegal in many jurisdictions. People have been prosecuted. Unless you have a reliable system to avoid sending spam to people in those jurisdictions -- and I'm certain you don't -- you're going to break the law.
Life's too short to work for jerks and criminals. You've got skills, and despite what everyone says, your skills are still marketable. Take advantage of that, and trade up to a better job.
Well, the NSA is made up of a lot of people, and I'm sure that many of them feel that they shouldn't have done this, while others felt that they should have.
As for me, It's an overture to the Open Source movement, and I appreciate it.
The government always had a weak argument with the four horsemen stuff (terrorists, drug dealers, child pornographers, and some other threat I can't remember). The problem is that Bin Laudin would have strong crypto no matter what. RSA was published in Scientific American back in the late 70's, it's not a big secret. People with resources and incentives to use strong crypto can get the job done on their own.
Releasing this software isn't going to give any terrorists any fundamental capabilities they didn't have already, and not releasing it wouldn't have made the NSA's deteriorating situation with respect to surveillance any better. And who knows, maybe this will give us safer ecommerce systems.
So let's give them credit for choosing rationality over political hype, rather than rubbing their noses in that same old hype.
Also, I'm not sure how you're comparing Linux SE with OpenBSD. They're different animals. Linux SE is a kernel with added functionality that makes it possible to implement certain kinds of access controls. OpenBSD is an audited BSD in a small BSD with integrated crypto tools. I don't think it can do what Linux SE was designed to do, and I know that Linux SE doesn't claim to have the audit against buffer overflows. In the article they quoted the NSA guys talking about why they felt an encrypted FS was beyond the scope of their project.
For the last 10 years I've been reading NSA flames on the net. They did something good here. I think it's great, and I hope they continue to move in this direction.
Putting aside moral arguments on one side or another, pushing for global piracy networks doesn't make sense because it isn't winnable. I'm not saying that there won't always be file trading networks around -- just that they'll be shut down frequently, and that finding them will probably be more trouble than it's worth.
There was an interesting article on arstechnica awhile back. The writer said that Napster's offer to the recording industry would be rejected, because it created a distribution system that would be a level playing field for small companies as well as for big companies.
We need to shift our focus away from piracy, and towards the creation of an open and level electronic distribution system. If you want to screw the record industry, make it possible for bands to distribute and sell their own stuff efficiently without paying more than half to the record industry.
If your position is "I want everything to be free" your voice will be marginalized, and you won't count.
I think there are really three broad categories of issues.
First of all, how important is your data? High end RDBMS systems offer a lot of administrative features that make backing up your data easier and less intrusive. To take an extreme example, Access is notorious for losing data. Everything is stored in a giant blob file, and when that gets corrupt, you can loose everything.
Second of all, how much load do you need to support? Oracle has been running very heavily loaded DB servers for a long time; it's the safe choice. SQL Server is getting better, and MS claims that it will scale indefinitely, but it's probably trickier to run under high loads than Oracle on Solaris.
Finally, what kinds of programming are you going to need to do? Will you have feeds of data moving in and out of the system? Lots of triggers? Integrity checks? How much procedural language programming are you going to have to do, and how closely will you need to integrate the DB into existing systems?
You shouldn't use Access for anything serious. It's a bad system that can't handle loads, and that tends to corrupt and lose data. Think of Access as a 2nd rate front end, and stay away from its back end at all costs.
MySQL is fast, and it's great for simple web applications, but it doesn't support big chunks of important SQL functionality and it doesn't have professional admin tools that you need to protect your data.
MS-SQL is kind of expensive for web applications, unless you're comparing it to Oracle. And I think the development tools are weak when compared to Oracle. But it's easy to admin, it's rock solid, and it has a really respectable features set across the board. MS seems to be intent on closing the features gap with Oracle. Some big companies use SQL Server to store financial data -- it's a reliable platform.
Admining Oracle was hard for me to learn. Setting Oracle up on Linux was painful as well, for me at least. I don't know it well, and I've only played with it, never done anything serious with it, so I'm not a good Oracle reference. But it strikes me as big and complicated and able to do absolutely everything that you'll need. You probably won't outgrow it.
If you're going to run a message board on a web site, then use MySQL and PHP. But if you have data you have to protect, and you need to keep an offsite server that's constantly synced with your main server for safety, you really have to go with something like MS-SQL or Oracle.
I'm not sure this software will be very useful, but I'm not sure it's as dumb as people here seem to think.
My windows 2000 desktop is rock solid. Machines that I've built myself aren't that great with windows, but my Dell never crashes. I think windows is pickier about hardware than linux.
I run linux (and BSD now) for the applications. Things like sendmail and apache, mutt, vim, and fetchmail.
Exchange might be a wonderful package (never used it), but it's expensive, and I'm running email for my own personal domain, not an enterprise -- so the thousands of dollars 2000 Server and Exchange would cost are out of the question. Outlook does a lot of nice stuff, but it won't let me read the headers (at least I haven't figured out how), things like that. Too much hand holding.
The problem with unix apps like sendmail is the learning curve. Once you know it, it really is good stuff, especially when it's free.
The whole idea that w2k isn't solid for a desktop is just silly, and the argument will only be taken seriously when you're preaching to the choir at places like/.. Whenever a linux guy says that his w2k box crashes all the time, I always assume he built it himself, or that he's overclocking or something like that. If you buy a Dell, it will work fine. To put it another way, it's certainly possible to make w2k solid, and if yours isn't, well you're not doing it right.
But at the same time, the idea that stability is the only drawing card of linux is silly too. Unix is simple, it's clean, and it's easy to use, once you've climbed up a bit on the learning curve. It's more than clean, it's elegant. And a lot of the apps are key -- if you want to run NAT, if you want to handle your email, if you want to filter net traffic, Linux or BSD is the way to go.
I'm not sure this particular software will be that useful -- it really makes more sense to me to just have two machines.
Could this be a way for admissions people to work for diversity?
Someone just sued Michigan's law school because she was turned down, while a minority student with worse test scores was accepted. I imagine that if you didn't have test scores, the law suits would be a lot harder to win.
I'm a little older than most people here, and I like affirimative action. Things are a lot better than they used to be, and I think affirmative action helped us get there. I'm not trying to bash the people who want to throw out testing. I'm just trying to speculate about motives.
A lot of what you said sounds reasonable, but I don't think getting rid of popup and banner ads is a fringe element thing. I think that almost everyone would prefer to have the ability to turn them off, espeically the ones that flash on and off really quickly like a strobe light. No matter how you slice it, those ads suck.
I don't want to defend Netscape and its shopping buttons. The Mozilla I just dl'd doesn't have them. Most of your comments are about Netscape, so in a sense we're talking past one another. But I'll keep going anyway.j
Corporate IT guys are going to go with IE, at least in the foreseeable future. I wrote a web app for internal use at a real estate support company, and reluctantly had to agree with my boss that going IE only made sense. There are too many differences in DHTML and Javascript across platforms, almost everyone wanted to use IE anyway, and supporting other browsers would have made the project much harder to pull off. XML was a big bonus as well. And we didn't put any animated gifs in our app anyway.
But there's more to life than your cube. People wear bland clothes at work, they sit at ugly desks, and often have uncomfortable chairs. At home we have options, and hopefully we make sure things are better. I don't feel that my work environment ought to dictate how I furnish my apartment. Why should it dictate what kind of software I run?
I want to turn off ads, at least the flashing ones. Maybe that makes me sick and unamerican, but that's how I feel.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that this is an important point. The idea of studying what happens when someone "buys a server" tends to push you towards MS.
:)
I'm sure we beat MS in recycled servers by a wide margin, though.
I'm not a laywer either, but I'd like to ask a legal question.
Is it possible to file a class action suit on behalf of customers for the "opt out" changes? Would the FTC ruling sink the case, or would it still be possible?
Perhaps some enterprising lawyer could make a bundle and force Amazon to do the right thing at the same time.
It seems to me that this is a situation where open standards/open source is important.
What happens if your $3k phone turns out to have a weakness in it? A crummy pseudo-random number generator or a more mundane bug? Or what happens when your neighbor buys a doohickey that plugs into a visor or a WinCE box that gives him the same functionality for $150? How do you know you can trust the chip?
I don't know if Hailstorm will work. It seems like a longshot to me, but I'm a pauper and Bill Gates has an impressive track record with world domination.
.NET and Hailstorm don't fly, they're screwed. Of course they're so big it would take them decades to waste away. The plan offers vast rewards, potentially, but it has enormous risks, as well.
But this does illustrate one of the big differneces between Linux and MS. MS has a master plan. They're building server software, server farms, development tools, business alliances and strategic partnerships. They have a business plan and a technological plan, and they both seem to fit together. Even though the word is going to come off as a joke after all that's happened, this stuff is innovative, in kind of an Orwellian sense. Especially as a business plan.
They looked at the future and decided it was going to be objects running out in the cloud, talking to each other in complicated ways, and they tried to figure out the best places to build the toll booths.
We don't have a plan. We've yet to come up with a really good business model. We've been making incremental improvements to a 70's operating system. Individuals or small groups have ideas and they make it better in a small way. The result is a lot better than anything they had in the 70's. But it's a gradual process of accumulation. No one comes down from the mountain with the new direction.
The first time I realized that Linux had super powers was when SLS dropped the ball. They were an old distribution. For whatever reason they just stopped doing it. And Slackware stepped up to the plate and took over. If Linux had been commercial, SLS would have killed it in its cradle. But you can't kill Linux. Debian will be moving along long after VA Linux and Red Hat have succomed to financial reality.
MS has a plan. Gates says he's "betting the company" on it. I don't think he's kidding, or that he's wrong. If
This is not a clash between rival technical systems. It's about world views.
I've got to be honest, I love the megalomaniacal scope of MS's plan. They're thinking the way the the guys who built the pyramids thought. Part of me wants to email Bill and say, "God speed, you magnificent bastard!"
But ultimately, I think he's going to fall on his ass.
Why?
The OS monopoly was achieved in an environment when no one understood the dynamics of the business. There's the famous story about Bill trying to sell out to IBM for a relative song, and IBM turning him down. That suggests that neither side knew what MS had.
Translation: the lucky SOB *stumbled* into it. And he was helped along by the fact that no one else understood how big the prize was either, or even that it existed at all.
There's another famous story about Lotus dissing Bill, rudely pointing up the difference in the bottom lines. People didn't understand the dynamics of lock in back then, that the person who controlled the OS had leverage over the application market. These were smart guys, the best and the brightest in the industry.
The article at the top of this thread is first class. People are thinking like chess players when they look at the business now. Which squares on the board do you need to control if you want to win? The word is out, the guard towers are fully manned, and no one is going to be stumbling into anything this time around.
No one is going to create a strategic dependence on MS if they can help it. Especially now, when the XP license server shock waves are about to hit. These guys are lining up their ducks to do the same to thing to their customers that OPEC did to the West in the 70's.
It's going to be an intersting thing to watch, though.
The issue isn't whether information is going to be shared or not. The issue is who controls the process: individuals or large companies?
Of course I want my medical records available to doctors if I collapse. But that problem is solved quite simply with a medic alert bracelet. Lots of people use them. Lots of people CHOOSE to use them.
But does a guy who had psychiatric treatment want a potential employer to know that he took prozac for 14 months two years ago?
McNealy's piece is an argument against a straw man. As someone who uses Sun products, I'd feel better if he took his head out of the clouds and tried to fix problems with Java Web Start and the Solaris download process. It seems that more and more often Sun stuff is broken out of the box.
Fix that stuff, then tell us how to run the world.
I don't know if the insurance price difference is justified or not.
But I think that part of the problem isn't with NT/W2K per se, but with the culture that surrounds MS sys admining. MS tries to make things simple -- and they often seem simple. It's easy to throw stuff up without thinking about it first. And one of the selling points that MS uses in comparisons with Unix/Linux is that W2K is easier.
On a certain level, that means that you get a sysadmin that went to Windows because Unix was too hard. That's a harsh overgeneralization, but I think there's some truth to it.
The problem is that security is hard on any platform. The issues are pretty similar. But if you keep telling people that all of you have to do is click on an icon to set things up, it's not surprising that people click on the icon, take the defaults, and don't think about locking things down.
I'm not a doctor, so take this for what it's worth.
Masking the pain is a bad long term solution. You're doing something bad to your body, and it's letting you know about it. Pay attention.
You didn't mention it, but I suspect that you're overweight. I'm not giving you a hard time -- I'm overweight too. But if you are, and you have back problems, you've got to lose weight. Everything else is a band aide.
The other thing you have to do is strengthen the muscles in your back. Yoga and stretching exercices are good for this.
In the short term a chiropractor will probably make you feel better. I'm typing this through clenched teeth, because those quacks refuse to follow the scientific method, they don't run tests, and lots of them claim they can cure things like ear infections through "spinal cord manipulations". But I have friends who have had positive results.
Fundamentally, you need to reduce the load on your back muscles (lose weight and find a better chair that helps you balance more naturally), and improve the ability of your muscles to handle the load (yoga and stretching).
Anything else is just going to make it easier for you to keep abusing your body, and will lead to grief in the long run.
In today's economy, a smart person with skills is insane to mangle their body for their job. Coal miners in Pennsylvania 75 years ago didn't have many options. You do. Geeking just isn't worth it.
The article didn't say so, but I have to believe that AOL will help the Chineese government restrict the flow of information to the people. They simply wouldn't be allowed to operate otherwise. It was interesting to note that the local company keeps 52% vs. AOL's 48%.
There's no way to sugar coat this. These guys are selling their enginnering muscle to China in the service of repression. They're doing something immoral because it's profitable.
As bad as that is -- and it's bad enough all by itself -- we have to deal with the fact that AOL is the preemininent member of the oligopoly that will control access to information in the US. In other words, a company that's establishing a track record of selling out civil liberties for money is in the driver's seat.
Murdoch's News Corp has pulled punches in its publishing houses and other media outlets in order to get Chineese deals. Will AOL/Time Warner follow suit? If they do, will it be any worse, or even as bad, as providing the technical infrastructure to censort the net?
Think about that when you watch CNN or read Time Magazine. If you still read or watch them, that is.
I did think that it meant they had to provide the source, and I stand corrected.
Thanks.
This, I think, is a flaw in the GPL.
I'm not saying that your interpretation is incorrect (I don't know), only that if it is correct, it's asking AOL to do something that's totally impractical. Are they supposed to let you scroll through the text on the device?
Their changes and improvements were given back, and the code is available.
As Hank Hill said to his son Bobby when Bobby make a lame legalistic excuse, "Son, don't play lawyer ball."
If open source != secure, then how does MS explain OpenBSD? Do they really want to compare their record to Theo's?
And it sounds like the kinds of tools that were used to find the recent IIS hole (they scan binaries, not source) are more effective than pouring over source code. At least with open source people can fix the bugs that are found.
One poster said that security is pretty poor on both sides of the fence, and I think he has a point. It's the #1 problem with OSs now, IMO. It's not a problem of open source vs. proprietary software. It's a matter of security being a priority.
That means telling the marketing or tech people with bad judgment that the whizbang feature they want (like automatically launching docs that are emailed to you) doesn't make sense from a security point of view.
Someone else posted about RH 7.1, and how RH seems to be improving things. I installed it, and was also impressed with the config screens. Of course the real test is in how well it works, and it's too soon to tell. But they seem to be taking things more seriously.
I believe that Linux is almost wholy responsible for the massive improvements in MS's reliablity we've seen in the last couple of years. Perhaps RH and other companies can clean up their own houses to the point where MS is obliged to take security more seriously as well.
The reviews at Ain't it Cool News (www.aintitcool.com) were really enthusiastic. I don't think they were coerced, at least I don't think they were coerced into saying things they wouldn't have said otherwise.
I can see the studio's side of it -- they're not showing a movie, they're showing some raw material that they're going to use to make a movie. But it was a dumb thing to make people sign those agreements, because by all accounts they weren't necessary, and now there will be a cloud of doubt hanging over the initial buzz.
This is almost there. The problem with this system is that different would be censors have very different ideas about what to suppress.
Some parents will want to suppress homophobic hate speech, and other parents will want to suppress discussions about evolution.
Instead of one big mass of rules, they need to make it possible for spliter groups of parents to "fork the rules", or to start out from scratch with a new set of rules. That way concerned parents can pick the censorscheme that fits their own biases best.
As long as none of this is compulsory, I think it's probably a reasonable approach.
I don't understand this.
.NET was analagous to Java the platform. I took that to mean the JVM and things like the EJB and Servelet standards.
.NET is about tools to build and deploy sites. I don't think it's going to be a series of portals and content sites like MSN. I think that MS will use .NET to build new generations of MSN, but that other people can use .NET to build competing services if they want.
.NET, so this could be off base, but I think that MS is trying to rebuild Java with a couple of key differences.
.NET controls will be much easier to work with than EJB objects.
.NET. There will inevitably be lots of loose ends after the early releases. And Java is here and reasonably solid now.
.NET will be tweaked for Wintel boxes, and will run much faster than JVM stuff.
.NET. They certainly did a lot of pimping of the word "innovation" during the anti-trust trial, but this seems to be genuinely innovative stuff to me. I'm not saying it will work well or that it will win, but it is a big vision, and it is a gutsy thing to try to roll it out. And I give them credit for it. And yes, I know that it's all about trying to keep their leverage. But it's still interesting technology.
.NET is still a vague concept to me, but one of the main guys behind it said that C# was analagous to Java the language, while
My impression is that
Again, I have only a fuzzy picture of
First of all, they're trying to duplicate their VB control model across languages and in a distributed fashion. I believe that
Second of all, I think they're going to really go to town with visual RAD tools. They want to make developing Web applications to be much easier.
Third of all, they want to put less of an emphasis on supporting multiple platforms (although I think they will -- at least things like XBox and WinCE, and probably OS X as well), and more of an emphasis on supporting multiple language syntaxes.
I wish an MS guy would post here or email me to clear this up, but I doubt it will happen.
I think the problem they have is that it's going to take years to tighten up
But MS is betting that they can manage a platform better than Sun. Java people complain bitterly about Swing vs. MFC, and about seemingly small things like printing support. So there's room for improvement. And presumably
I'm intrigued by the scope of
This exploit is more serious than the others you've listed. It's a remote root exploit, and it affects people who take the out of the box installation.
/.
A comparable Unix exploit would have been the recent BIND fiasco. And that got good coverage on
I get tired of MS bashing too. But I think there's a lot less of it here than there used to be. The article about Easel and Ximian took a lot of heat, but I think it was a healthy thing to post. We're still a long way away from looking at the ethics of some of the Linux IPOs, but it's a start.
This is a big security problem, and it was made worse by some questionable design decisions (automatic restarts, etc.). But the effect isn't really any worse than the recent BIND exploits.
And you could argue, as perhaps the OpenBSD guys might, that by not advising people to run BIND in a chroot jail, the ISC guys are being less responsible than MS, which has published security guidelines that protected the users who followed them from this particular exploit.
But what good does that do? The reality is that both Linux and Windows have their share of security problems. MS has a long list of bad decisions from a security point of view, but we have things like linuxconf. Sacrificing security for convenience isn't just a MS thing. And there are plenty of buffer overflows to go around.
We need to encourage everyone to think about security more seriously. We need to get companies to think about security from the beginning, instead of trying to bolt it on in the end. And we need to make sure that they respond quickly when problems do arise.
This just isn't a Linux vs. MS situation.
I don't think there's any doubt that MS is the victim of a lot of piracy. I can understand that they would want to try to climb on top of the problem, but it seems like a lot of the stuff they do -- recovery cds vs. full versions of the OS on cd, and things like harassing pc manufacturers who don't install Windows -- puts unfair burdens on their own customers and even on people who don't use their products.
People have been screaming about the new MS license servers. But if they work, won't it be a good thing for Linux users? If they can actually control piracy, what happens to their argument in situations like this? And how will they justify giving people crippled recovery CDs?
Commerical software piracy is bad for free software because it tends to blur the difference between the free stuff and the commercial stuff. MS Office is better than Star Office. If a guy can borrow the CDs from work, he's going to use MS Office. But if he has to pay $400 to run it, he's probably going to run Star instead.
So I think we should support reasonable and well targeted efforts on the part of MS to elminate piracy. Harassing naked PC people isn't reasonable and it isn't well targeted. But the license severs are both of those things.
My Chicago neighborhood is covered with this graffiti as well.
Spam is illegal in many jurisdictions. People have been prosecuted. Unless you have a reliable system to avoid sending spam to people in those jurisdictions -- and I'm certain you don't -- you're going to break the law.
Life's too short to work for jerks and criminals. You've got skills, and despite what everyone says, your skills are still marketable. Take advantage of that, and trade up to a better job.
Well, the NSA is made up of a lot of people, and I'm sure that many of them feel that they shouldn't have done this, while others felt that they should have.
As for me, It's an overture to the Open Source movement, and I appreciate it.
The government always had a weak argument with the four horsemen stuff (terrorists, drug dealers, child pornographers, and some other threat I can't remember). The problem is that Bin Laudin would have strong crypto no matter what. RSA was published in Scientific American back in the late 70's, it's not a big secret. People with resources and incentives to use strong crypto can get the job done on their own.
Releasing this software isn't going to give any terrorists any fundamental capabilities they didn't have already, and not releasing it wouldn't have made the NSA's deteriorating situation with respect to surveillance any better. And who knows, maybe this will give us safer ecommerce systems.
So let's give them credit for choosing rationality over political hype, rather than rubbing their noses in that same old hype.
Also, I'm not sure how you're comparing Linux SE with OpenBSD. They're different animals. Linux SE is a kernel with added functionality that makes it possible to implement certain kinds of access controls. OpenBSD is an audited BSD in a small BSD with integrated crypto tools. I don't think it can do what Linux SE was designed to do, and I know that Linux SE doesn't claim to have the audit against buffer overflows. In the article they quoted the NSA guys talking about why they felt an encrypted FS was beyond the scope of their project.
For the last 10 years I've been reading NSA flames on the net. They did something good here. I think it's great, and I hope they continue to move in this direction.
I think you're 100% right.
Putting aside moral arguments on one side or another, pushing for global piracy networks doesn't make sense because it isn't winnable. I'm not saying that there won't always be file trading networks around -- just that they'll be shut down frequently, and that finding them will probably be more trouble than it's worth.
There was an interesting article on arstechnica awhile back. The writer said that Napster's offer to the recording industry would be rejected, because it created a distribution system that would be a level playing field for small companies as well as for big companies.
We need to shift our focus away from piracy, and towards the creation of an open and level electronic distribution system. If you want to screw the record industry, make it possible for bands to distribute and sell their own stuff efficiently without paying more than half to the record industry.
If your position is "I want everything to be free" your voice will be marginalized, and you won't count.
I think there are really three broad categories of issues.
First of all, how important is your data? High end RDBMS systems offer a lot of administrative features that make backing up your data easier and less intrusive. To take an extreme example, Access is notorious for losing data. Everything is stored in a giant blob file, and when that gets corrupt, you can loose everything.
Second of all, how much load do you need to support? Oracle has been running very heavily loaded DB servers for a long time; it's the safe choice. SQL Server is getting better, and MS claims that it will scale indefinitely, but it's probably trickier to run under high loads than Oracle on Solaris.
Finally, what kinds of programming are you going to need to do? Will you have feeds of data moving in and out of the system? Lots of triggers? Integrity checks? How much procedural language programming are you going to have to do, and how closely will you need to integrate the DB into existing systems?
You shouldn't use Access for anything serious. It's a bad system that can't handle loads, and that tends to corrupt and lose data. Think of Access as a 2nd rate front end, and stay away from its back end at all costs.
MySQL is fast, and it's great for simple web applications, but it doesn't support big chunks of important SQL functionality and it doesn't have professional admin tools that you need to protect your data.
MS-SQL is kind of expensive for web applications, unless you're comparing it to Oracle. And I think the development tools are weak when compared to Oracle. But it's easy to admin, it's rock solid, and it has a really respectable features set across the board. MS seems to be intent on closing the features gap with Oracle. Some big companies use SQL Server to store financial data -- it's a reliable platform.
Admining Oracle was hard for me to learn. Setting Oracle up on Linux was painful as well, for me at least. I don't know it well, and I've only played with it, never done anything serious with it, so I'm not a good Oracle reference. But it strikes me as big and complicated and able to do absolutely everything that you'll need. You probably won't outgrow it.
If you're going to run a message board on a web site, then use MySQL and PHP. But if you have data you have to protect, and you need to keep an offsite server that's constantly synced with your main server for safety, you really have to go with something like MS-SQL or Oracle.
I'm not sure this software will be very useful, but I'm not sure it's as dumb as people here seem to think.
/.. Whenever a linux guy says that his w2k box crashes all the time, I always assume he built it himself, or that he's overclocking or something like that. If you buy a Dell, it will work fine. To put it another way, it's certainly possible to make w2k solid, and if yours isn't, well you're not doing it right.
My windows 2000 desktop is rock solid. Machines that I've built myself aren't that great with windows, but my Dell never crashes. I think windows is pickier about hardware than linux.
I run linux (and BSD now) for the applications. Things like sendmail and apache, mutt, vim, and fetchmail.
Exchange might be a wonderful package (never used it), but it's expensive, and I'm running email for my own personal domain, not an enterprise -- so the thousands of dollars 2000 Server and Exchange would cost are out of the question. Outlook does a lot of nice stuff, but it won't let me read the headers (at least I haven't figured out how), things like that. Too much hand holding.
The problem with unix apps like sendmail is the learning curve. Once you know it, it really is good stuff, especially when it's free.
The whole idea that w2k isn't solid for a desktop is just silly, and the argument will only be taken seriously when you're preaching to the choir at places like
But at the same time, the idea that stability is the only drawing card of linux is silly too. Unix is simple, it's clean, and it's easy to use, once you've climbed up a bit on the learning curve. It's more than clean, it's elegant. And a lot of the apps are key -- if you want to run NAT, if you want to handle your email, if you want to filter net traffic, Linux or BSD is the way to go.
I'm not sure this particular software will be that useful -- it really makes more sense to me to just have two machines.
Could this be a way for admissions people to work for diversity?
Someone just sued Michigan's law school because she was turned down, while a minority student with worse test scores was accepted. I imagine that if you didn't have test scores, the law suits would be a lot harder to win.
I'm a little older than most people here, and I like affirimative action. Things are a lot better than they used to be, and I think affirmative action helped us get there. I'm not trying to bash the people who want to throw out testing. I'm just trying to speculate about motives.
That was supposed to go under the post from the MIT guy who likes IE.
Time to go to sleep.
A lot of what you said sounds reasonable, but I don't think getting rid of popup and banner ads is a fringe element thing. I think that almost everyone would prefer to have the ability to turn them off, espeically the ones that flash on and off really quickly like a strobe light. No matter how you slice it, those ads suck.
I don't want to defend Netscape and its shopping buttons. The Mozilla I just dl'd doesn't have them. Most of your comments are about Netscape, so in a sense we're talking past one another. But I'll keep going anyway.j
Corporate IT guys are going to go with IE, at least in the foreseeable future. I wrote a web app for internal use at a real estate support company, and reluctantly had to agree with my boss that going IE only made sense. There are too many differences in DHTML and Javascript across platforms, almost everyone wanted to use IE anyway, and supporting other browsers would have made the project much harder to pull off. XML was a big bonus as well. And we didn't put any animated gifs in our app anyway.
But there's more to life than your cube. People wear bland clothes at work, they sit at ugly desks, and often have uncomfortable chairs. At home we have options, and hopefully we make sure things are better. I don't feel that my work environment ought to dictate how I furnish my apartment. Why should it dictate what kind of software I run?
I want to turn off ads, at least the flashing ones. Maybe that makes me sick and unamerican, but that's how I feel.