Python is perfect because it is basically "executable psuedocode". It is hard to explain the concept of a while loop any more simply than in the python code for it.
It is harder than it has to be. It's just as easy to get a working solution in python - and, in the absence of evidence one way or the other, there's far more chance of that working solution being legible in python than in perl.
Doing things in legible code in perl does not count as "very easy". It requires significant effort, wheras in python it happens without thinking. Sure, you can write legible perl - but python's advantage is that unless you're actively trying not to, you *will* write legible python.
I've used python as a language to teach people programming (in the context of a physics course, to do numerical simulations). It was OK, but the significance of whitespace was a major barrier for them to overcome.
Then it's a good thing they learnt it. There's nothing worse than programmers who can't indent. Seriously, you'd have to teach them to indent like that for C anyway, so what's the problem?
Another consideration is that it might be good to use a language that's small enough to run in a web browser.
Python does that too.
Python's strengths, AFAICT, are its pure object-oriented design and the large set of libraries available for it.
The clean syntax and readability are also major strengths, and the last in particular is important for beginners.
I think Apple must tell their employees to come here and say how good they are. That's the only reasonable explanation for the ridiculous amount of Apple-love on this site.
It's no worse than Amazon tracking your purchase habbits and using it to suggest what other shoppers must buy,
No, it's like Amazon coming into your house on the pretext of being something useful and looking through your book collection, then using that to sell you books.
or the fact that you have to register with CDDB now, so they could potentially track what music you listen to.
If it were just recommending on what you buy there would be no problem. It's recommending based on the collection on your hard drive. That's wrong.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
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iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 1
The term "hide" suggests to me that that just means you don't see the recommendations. Do you know it stops the data being sent?
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
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iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 1
It's worse. They have your personal info, not just a unique identifier, and it's not just DVDs you put in, it's every file you have.
Re:Big Brother and the iTunes Company
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iTunes is Malware?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The user doesn't have to read the readme, they're entitled to assume it will not contain anything they need to know about unless their attention is drawn to it.
I'm not that knowledgeable about VoIP's inner workings, but it seems to me that anything that allows data to be moved back and forth from your computer unfettered is a doorway for malware to be lodged on your machine.
On the whole, no. If you have a buffer overflow or something then yes, you will get malware coming in. But most problems are caused by computers stupidly executing data they get, due to stupid design, the most common form of which is deciding to allow remote plugins (activex, I'm looking at you, but the mozilla XUL stuff is just as boneheaded). This is especially common in web browsers, and anything that uses MS's HTML rendering, but skype doesn't look like it will go down that road.
If it's doesn't do that, it's unlikely to be exploited. How many times do you hear about a streaming media exploit? There were buffer overflows found in xine and mplayer a year or so ago, but they were fixed before any exploit was known. The only ItW attack I know of using a media player was against windows media, using the ASX metadata to get it to - guess what? - run an activex control.
1: i don't think i've ever seen a flash drive as big as 32GB. were you thinking of an external hdd maybe.
I've seen 6G SD cards for sale, so I wouldn't be at all surprised that 32G in USB drive size existed, but it might have been hard drives. Doesn't really matter.
2: iirc the limit for FAT32 is somewhere arround 4 terabytes. This is still the territory of large raid arrays! maybe you were thinking of the broken formatting tool in win2K/XP. For the record i have two hard drives in usb enclosures one used to be in internal hard drive in a 98 box the other was formatted on win98 whilst in the usb enclosure. All partitions on the drives are over 32 gigabyte and windows XP has no trouble handling them.
Just what I read was the reason for it. Maybe manufacturers think it's not a good idea to have a drive the user can't easily reformat.
3: last i checked windows couldn't handle the writable versions of udf without third party drivers this may have changed with XP though.
I'd be surprised but it's possible. Doesn't really matter though - as long as it can read it, you could have the driver on the drive.
tracking down 10 year old code written by someone who either doesn't remember writing it or no longer works there,
Tracking the code down should be no problem. They know what function in what dll it was - how hard is it to find the code for it?
correcting the code in a way that prevents the exploit, but doesn't impact functionality,
Shouldn't take more than a day. Two, tops.
testing the correction on all supported versions of windows, numerous hardware configurations, and against dozens of 3rd party software packages that use the library,
Testing is parallelizeable (sp?). If they really have hundreds of people working on it, it should be done in a matter of hours. Certainly I'd expect them to finish it in 3 days.
then documenting the problem, the change, and the disimination of the change,
This can be done at the same time as testing.
then getting the whole thing wrapped up into a nice neat deployment package,
I may get owned by other/.ers here but, If your windows box gets beaten to crap by spyware, malware, etc, you have to be doing something wrong.
I've heard a lot of people say that. Usually it emerges that their ISP filters things.
I use firefox with noscript and adblock on my home windows machine.
So you're the person responsible for having those unintrusive banner ads replaced by cpu-sucking flash ads. Anyway, why should you need to block scripts?
I surf the web, but generally not to www.trytohackmywindowsboxhahaha.com - I browse to reputable websites only.
But you shouldn't have to. Looking at a website - any website - should be a zero-risk activity.
I use linux. I have javascript enabled, though I don't let it resize windows or anything else I don't like. I browse wherever I like, without fear, without any real need to be careful.
What about one of the ISO filesystems? There's an ISO for CDROM filesystems, and I imagine that thing isn't always read-only. If anyone has a flash disk and wants to format it as an ISO9660 filesystem and see if Windows can read/write it, that would be nice of them. I don't have either.
ISO9660 is completely non-writeable - the filesystem is designed in such a way that you simply can't write to it. However, its successor, UDF, is writeable, and is already being used by flash drives which are too big for FAT (>32GB).
Second, what product is hit by this? People are going on about shipping unformatted media, but think about it: most devices that use the media have to speak FAT as well. Your camera can't write a file to the flash card if it doesn't understand how to read and write to it, even if rudimentary. The unformatted argument only works for media that will only be used on a PC, which seems like it will be a small minority.
Absolutely. Anything that has to access its own disk is at risk - the main things I see are cameras, MP3 players and possibly PDAs. A camera could just use another filesystem and be accessible via PTP, and since that just specifies how to transfer files, I suppose in theory it could be used for MP3 players as well, it has support from all major OSes.
Every OS supports it for the purposes of reading DVDs. It may not have been designed for flash drives, but it works on them fine. And it's an ISO standard.
The art of choosing strategically well thought out product names is a declining art these days, I need only point to "Windows Defender". While most of us nerds know that Windows is on the defensive in the malware department there is no reason to let the uninitiated masses of Windows users know about it, they think the current situation is normal.
They need to know it's bad so vista can be sold to them as an improvement on that front.
You mean to say that you believe distributions like Fedora write all the applications they include? In most cases, they don't (except for things like the redhat-config-* family of apps). Linux distributors don't have a choice about including libc unless they want to rewrite ls and every other application written in C.
And they don't have a choice about including python unless they want to rewrite every application written in python. It's exactly the same situation.
I mean it, everything. Every single link on the site. We don't owe google anything, we don't need to help them to get their results, and they lead to spammers messing up our site. So, not to put too fine a point on it, fuck them.
True, but we see more than enough dupes where it's exactly the same URL. A few lines to check the story URL would probably cut the number of dupes in half.
A better way: cap how many *submissions* a given submitter can make per week. That way someone who finds interesting stories can still get a lot accepted, but someone who just takes a shotgun approach can't get submissions through by sheer weight of numbers.
Distributions depend on libc because they have to.
No they don't. They could write everything in assembler and just use the kernel calls. They depend on libc because it's easier to write programs in C and use the library - the exact same reason they depend on python.
How is it a boil? It's a great language, very useful, makes the base system smaller overall (because so many things can be made much smaller in python) and is nice to be able to depend on it being available. Slating distributions for depending on python is like criticising them for depending on libc.
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Python is perfect because it is basically "executable psuedocode". It is hard to explain the concept of a while loop any more simply than in the python code for it.
It is harder than it has to be. It's just as easy to get a working solution in python - and, in the absence of evidence one way or the other, there's far more chance of that working solution being legible in python than in perl.
Doing things in legible code in perl does not count as "very easy". It requires significant effort, wheras in python it happens without thinking. Sure, you can write legible perl - but python's advantage is that unless you're actively trying not to, you *will* write legible python.
Then it's a good thing they learnt it. There's nothing worse than programmers who can't indent. Seriously, you'd have to teach them to indent like that for C anyway, so what's the problem?
Another consideration is that it might be good to use a language that's small enough to run in a web browser.
Python does that too.
Python's strengths, AFAICT, are its pure object-oriented design and the large set of libraries available for it.
The clean syntax and readability are also major strengths, and the last in particular is important for beginners.
I think Apple must tell their employees to come here and say how good they are. That's the only reasonable explanation for the ridiculous amount of Apple-love on this site.
No, it's like Amazon coming into your house on the pretext of being something useful and looking through your book collection, then using that to sell you books.
or the fact that you have to register with CDDB now, so they could potentially track what music you listen to.
That's opt-in. Big difference.
If it were just recommending on what you buy there would be no problem. It's recommending based on the collection on your hard drive. That's wrong.
The term "hide" suggests to me that that just means you don't see the recommendations. Do you know it stops the data being sent?
It's worse. They have your personal info, not just a unique identifier, and it's not just DVDs you put in, it's every file you have.
The user doesn't have to read the readme, they're entitled to assume it will not contain anything they need to know about unless their attention is drawn to it.
On the whole, no. If you have a buffer overflow or something then yes, you will get malware coming in. But most problems are caused by computers stupidly executing data they get, due to stupid design, the most common form of which is deciding to allow remote plugins (activex, I'm looking at you, but the mozilla XUL stuff is just as boneheaded). This is especially common in web browsers, and anything that uses MS's HTML rendering, but skype doesn't look like it will go down that road.
If it's doesn't do that, it's unlikely to be exploited. How many times do you hear about a streaming media exploit? There were buffer overflows found in xine and mplayer a year or so ago, but they were fixed before any exploit was known. The only ItW attack I know of using a media player was against windows media, using the ASX metadata to get it to - guess what? - run an activex control.
I've seen 6G SD cards for sale, so I wouldn't be at all surprised that 32G in USB drive size existed, but it might have been hard drives. Doesn't really matter.
2: iirc the limit for FAT32 is somewhere arround 4 terabytes. This is still the territory of large raid arrays! maybe you were thinking of the broken formatting tool in win2K/XP. For the record i have two hard drives in usb enclosures one used to be in internal hard drive in a 98 box the other was formatted on win98 whilst in the usb enclosure. All partitions on the drives are over 32 gigabyte and windows XP has no trouble handling them.
Just what I read was the reason for it. Maybe manufacturers think it's not a good idea to have a drive the user can't easily reformat.
3: last i checked windows couldn't handle the writable versions of udf without third party drivers this may have changed with XP though.
I'd be surprised but it's possible. Doesn't really matter though - as long as it can read it, you could have the driver on the drive.
Tracking the code down should be no problem. They know what function in what dll it was - how hard is it to find the code for it?
correcting the code in a way that prevents the exploit, but doesn't impact functionality,
Shouldn't take more than a day. Two, tops.
testing the correction on all supported versions of windows, numerous hardware configurations, and against dozens of 3rd party software packages that use the library,
Testing is parallelizeable (sp?). If they really have hundreds of people working on it, it should be done in a matter of hours. Certainly I'd expect them to finish it in 3 days.
then documenting the problem, the change, and the disimination of the change,
This can be done at the same time as testing.
then getting the whole thing wrapped up into a nice neat deployment package,
One click these days.
I've heard a lot of people say that. Usually it emerges that their ISP filters things.
I use firefox with noscript and adblock on my home windows machine.
So you're the person responsible for having those unintrusive banner ads replaced by cpu-sucking flash ads. Anyway, why should you need to block scripts?
I surf the web, but generally not to www.trytohackmywindowsboxhahaha.com - I browse to reputable websites only.
But you shouldn't have to. Looking at a website - any website - should be a zero-risk activity.
I use linux. I have javascript enabled, though I don't let it resize windows or anything else I don't like. I browse wherever I like, without fear, without any real need to be careful.
ISO9660 is completely non-writeable - the filesystem is designed in such a way that you simply can't write to it. However, its successor, UDF, is writeable, and is already being used by flash drives which are too big for FAT (>32GB).
Second, what product is hit by this? People are going on about shipping unformatted media, but think about it: most devices that use the media have to speak FAT as well. Your camera can't write a file to the flash card if it doesn't understand how to read and write to it, even if rudimentary. The unformatted argument only works for media that will only be used on a PC, which seems like it will be a small minority.
Absolutely. Anything that has to access its own disk is at risk - the main things I see are cameras, MP3 players and possibly PDAs. A camera could just use another filesystem and be accessible via PTP, and since that just specifies how to transfer files, I suppose in theory it could be used for MP3 players as well, it has support from all major OSes.
Every OS supports it for the purposes of reading DVDs. It may not have been designed for flash drives, but it works on them fine. And it's an ISO standard.
A year or two ago I'm sure mac zealots were saying the purpose was the superiority of the PPC hardware platform.
They need to know it's bad so vista can be sold to them as an improvement on that front.
And they don't have a choice about including python unless they want to rewrite every application written in python. It's exactly the same situation.
I mean it, everything. Every single link on the site. We don't owe google anything, we don't need to help them to get their results, and they lead to spammers messing up our site. So, not to put too fine a point on it, fuck them.
That won't work with beatles-beatles. He doesn't care about the link in the story, he just wants to have the word "beatles" linking to his site a lot.
True, but we see more than enough dupes where it's exactly the same URL. A few lines to check the story URL would probably cut the number of dupes in half.
A better way: cap how many *submissions* a given submitter can make per week. That way someone who finds interesting stories can still get a lot accepted, but someone who just takes a shotgun approach can't get submissions through by sheer weight of numbers.
No they don't. They could write everything in assembler and just use the kernel calls. They depend on libc because it's easier to write programs in C and use the library - the exact same reason they depend on python.
How is it a boil? It's a great language, very useful, makes the base system smaller overall (because so many things can be made much smaller in python) and is nice to be able to depend on it being available. Slating distributions for depending on python is like criticising them for depending on libc.