It would seem, then, that someone who was accessing debian's servers legitimately might have been doing so from a SucKIT-infested host. Do all the relevant people know what the state is of all relevant machines they might have used to get into Debian?
Huautla Mazatec from Mexico, can also be whistled. The phenomenon is discussed in the paper referenced here Judging from this summary, they're not almost extinct either: 72,000 speakers, 27,000 monolingual.
I was beginning to think you were incapable of further follies. I've had my gut-laugh for the day and I feel much better now.
But seriously, wouldn't it be wise for Stallman, Torvalds and all to take the stand and essentially tear the case to ribbons from discovery? They wouldn't have to restrict themselves to quoting the e-mail chain that wandered around IBM's submissions to the kernel. They could actually give the oral version, complete with iterating under oath how retaining "freedom" is so important that they do everything they can to keep disallowed trade secrets from leaking into the kernel. Not a bad set of things to have show up in sworn testimony.
Except that people ARE ponying up to buy shares (and float loans) at these ridiculous prices. Who says the market is intelligent?
Or to put it another way: if you understand the technical issues, you probably haven't spent enough time on the economic ones to see the value of the bet the way the economists do. Conversely, if you understand the economics, you probably haven't spent the necessary time to grok the technical issues enough.
Sounds like a great opportunity for a scam artist (SCO) to play off both sides (geeks and investors) against the middle and walk away (Hey! How could we know the court would find against us?).
"How so?" you ask? I can't say I know exactly. As I wrote: "It's left me with the impression..." so I don't know how much psychology is involved in that statement and how much empirical data.
As for Mozilla splitting up into pieces, I believe it isn't just "going to", it's actually in the process as we speak.
And Firebird is Mozilla not just without the e-mail client, but without anything but the web browser. Given the way over-burdened virtual memory can cause performance lags, the potential benefit from a smaller feature set (and hence a smaller memory footprint) can be quite significant, I should think. Anyone else see it my way?
Is it bad karma to mention SCO? Can't resist: the whole time I was reading that article I thought "...and SCO vs. IBM...and SCO vs. IBM...and SCO vs. IBM." The parallels are obvious.
I've come to appreciate Firebird even more. It even tends to launch faster than IE on my computers (and MUCH faster than Mozilla itself). And my experience with Firebird leads me to the impression that the pop-up blocker is even more effective than Mozilla's.
Yeah. I thought it was restricted to calculation, but perhaps there's something in the way of thinking that got us to distributed.net and SETI@Home that could help us get a distributed RBL (dare I say, "DRBL"?).
How about a DNS name that resolves to one of 20 (50? 100? 1000?) different machines all of which are kept synchronized between themselves with RBL lists. Anyone who asks for RBL information, gets any one of the machines in the cluster. Including the DDOSers. How many machines can they DDOS simultaneously? (that's why I kept cranking up that number in the first parentheses) Not all of them, I hope, but the way to find out is to build up a DRBLnet. There has to be a positive use for all those Linux/BSD boxes attached to DSL and cable lines:).
Then if the RBL-client side is modified so that if it doesn't get a response very quickly it asks again (probably getting a machine that isn't currently being attacked...).
You wrote: "The fact that GCC has rewritten the meaning of several libc functions so that they to [sic] not act in the standard behavior and can possibly break code."
Could you elaborate on this, please? I was unaware of it.
The best way to combat MS' penetration of the Universities is with quality and features + appropriate publicity. On one of the issues near and dear to academics, MS may actually be ahead of the OSS tools.
Currently, the word-among-the-gurus here where I work is that the level of compliance on Win32 to the C++ standard is in the latest.NET C++ compiler, not in GCC. Rather than complaining that MS-FUD is working, we should be making sure that things like GCC stays ahead. That's a harder task, but a more satisfying one in the long haul.
And if the local gurus are wrong about standards compliance and DevStudio 7 vs. GCC, then let me hear it -- and I'll be more than willing to trumpet it within my sphere of influence at least. I think we'd be happy to use the same compiler on all platforms: our software is on several for all of which GCC is available yet we don't use it on any. Spec compliance is only one issue, but it is an issue.
For more book reviews, especially on computer security, watch for Robert Slade's regular contributions to comp.risks. It doesn't look as though Robert has reviewed this one yet so I'll look forward to reading and comparing. His praise for a former edition seems uncharacteristically positive -- compare reviews of Secrets of a Super Hacker or Computer Security Basics -- so I'll be surprised if he doesn't praise this one, too...
Among all the other reasons that people (zealots) like Babylon 5, one of the more compelling ones is that the science is incrementally extended off science in the 90s. One of the downsides of this is that, when science has made wild advances, it makes B5 look dated -- in the same way that the "Pocket Pager" comment in Star Trek IV sounds silly in a post-NOKIA world.
When they came for the homeless, I did not speak up because I was not homeless.
Not to dismiss the needs of the homeless that might make this kind of a measure look desirable, but aren't there other ways? We've been down this kind of road before. Have the legislators forgotten them already?
gnucash.org seems to be "benefiting" from the publicity. Here's the first part of Benoit's post for those who care:
State of the GnuCash project, a call for help
The GnuCash project is having a hard time. I think most everyone agrees that GnuCash is a critical piece of software for the Linux desktop. It's also one the largest free software projects. How big is it? GnuCash currently has 287,853 physical source lines of code (SLOC). For example, had the current GnuCash CVS been included in RedHat 7.1, it would come in 21st position in code size (see http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/). At that time, the current GnuCash CVS source would have been pretty similar in size to qt, postgresql or perl, about 60% of Gimp and between 12% and 16% of Xfree, Mozilla or the Linux kernel. Although GnuCash comes up in every discussion of needed software to get Linux on the desktop, the GnuCash project currently has only about seven active developers (active being used very loosely here, considering I included myself) and enjoys far less exposure than many projects of a similar size.
We may be headed for a dead end if we don't reorganize and refocus our efforts. GnuCash badly needs more manpower (not just developers), and needs to get it quickly. How did we get here
Of course, every project could always use more developers, but the consecutive demise of both Gnumatic and Linux Developers Group caused the loss of most of GnuCash's core developers two years ago. The few volunteers that were left focused on new features, in the hopes of attracting users and hopefully also developers. We've managed to take it to 1.8.5 (to be released in a few days), and in the process GnuCash gained Small Business features, Scheduled Transactions, a completely new import UI with Bayesian filtering, OFX and HBCI support, Mortage and Loan Repayment druid, and many, many others. We are very proud of it and we clearly have more users judging from traffic on gnucash-users, and all should now be well in GnuCash-land.
Not quite. We didn't attract many new developers and all those new features have to be maintained and debugged. They also represent a huge tech support burden, since most of the features were not documented properly due to time constraints. GnuCash has grown too large for the current developers to properly debug and maintain the current code base, add new features and write documentation, all at the same time.
I hate to admit it, but in our quest for new features, choices had to be made and a lot of important things are currently being neglected. If the GnuCash project can't manage to attract more contributors and refocus the efforts of those it already has, it's going to become unmanageable. We often say that Linux would survive even if Linus got hit by a bus. Well, right now I am not too certain that GnuCash would currently survive if Derek Atkins got hit by a bus.
So perhaps the thing to do is to have CAUCE and other such groups fight fire with fire. How many interns or welfare re-trainees do you think they could afford to pay to sit there generating bogus responses to spam?
ooohhhh. I feel a shell script coming on...
All this, and my pre-ordered Babylon-5 Season 3 just shipped! (small pleasures)...ank
The really telling remarks came in the final paragraph:
"The only thing that's going to make spam go away is if people do not respond," he said. "When e-mail first started, you could send out 50,000 e-mails a day and make money. Now you have to invest a lot of money and time, you get a return rate of less than one-tenth of one percent. One day it will become so you can't send enough to make any money. And that's the only thing that will stop spam."
0.1% and it's still profitable... sheesh! Won't it be nice when it becomes 1 part in a trillion and the race comes of age in e-mail usage.
In the release, SCO insists that it is not trying to spread "fear, uncertainty and doubt" (commonly known in the industry as FUD) to users. Instead, the company asserts, "we have been educating end users on the risks of running an operating system that is an unauthorized derivative of UNIX."
Why is it I hear echoes of:
"You will die like dogs!" "No! But we will fight like lions!"
Mr. McBride even bears a striking resemblance to Chevy Chase. Oh, indeed, truth is much stranger than fiction.
What the Christian world calls "the Bible" is a collection of documents written in three languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek.
Most modern translations follow
the best available textual criticism (trying to reconstruct document 0 from the many fragments one finds -- and compare the statistics to the ones on numbers of copies of other documents available from the same time periods)
cross-checked with
quotations from commentators (Old Church Fathers)
translations into other old known languages (including in the case of Hebrew: Aramaic, Greek, Syriac and Samaritan; in the case of Greek: Aramaic, Arabic, Armenian, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Old Latin etc. etc.)
with the vocabulary used cross-checked with all available other usages of the same words in the same time-frame (Thankfully, the Greek-speaking world wrote a LOT of stuff!)
The point being that of all possible documents you could hold a copy of in your own language, a modern translation of the Bible is about as close to the closest possible meaning in your language of the meaning in language 0 of document 0 as you could possibly have of any text of similar origin and antiquity.
And all that without invoking a single phrase of mumbo jumbo...in saecula saeculorum Amen, Amen
Slashdot Mirror
It would seem, then, that someone who was accessing debian's servers legitimately might have been doing so from a SucKIT-infested host. Do all the relevant people know what the state is of all relevant machines they might have used to get into Debian?
Huautla Mazatec from Mexico, can also be whistled. The phenomenon is discussed in the paper referenced here
Judging from this summary, they're not almost extinct either: 72,000 speakers, 27,000 monolingual.
I was beginning to think you were incapable of further follies. I've had my gut-laugh for the day and I feel much better now.
But seriously, wouldn't it be wise for Stallman, Torvalds and all to take the stand and essentially tear the case to ribbons from discovery? They wouldn't have to restrict themselves to quoting the e-mail chain that wandered around IBM's submissions to the kernel. They could actually give the oral version, complete with iterating under oath how retaining "freedom" is so important that they do everything they can to keep disallowed trade secrets from leaking into the kernel. Not a bad set of things to have show up in sworn testimony.
Except that people ARE ponying up to buy shares (and float loans) at these ridiculous prices. Who says the market is intelligent?
Or to put it another way: if you understand the technical issues, you probably haven't spent enough time on the economic ones to see the value of the bet the way the economists do. Conversely, if you understand the economics, you probably haven't spent the necessary time to grok the technical issues enough.
Sounds like a great opportunity for a scam artist (SCO) to play off both sides (geeks and investors) against the middle and walk away (Hey! How could we know the court would find against us?).
cheers...ank
"How so?" you ask? I can't say I know exactly. As I wrote: "It's left me with the impression..." so I don't know how much psychology is involved in that statement and how much empirical data.
As for Mozilla splitting up into pieces, I believe it isn't just "going to", it's actually in the process as we speak.
And Firebird is Mozilla not just without the e-mail client, but without anything but the web browser. Given the way over-burdened virtual memory can cause performance lags, the potential benefit from a smaller feature set (and hence a smaller memory footprint) can be quite significant, I should think. Anyone else see it my way?
Is it bad karma to mention SCO? Can't resist: the whole time I was reading that article I thought "...and SCO vs. IBM ...and SCO vs. IBM ...and SCO vs. IBM." The parallels are obvious.
I've come to appreciate Firebird even more. It even tends to launch faster than IE on my computers (and MUCH faster than Mozilla itself). And my experience with Firebird leads me to the impression that the pop-up blocker is even more effective than Mozilla's.
'nuff said.
Yeah. The trust mechanism would probably kill it. Oh well... back to work.
cheers...ank
Yeah. I thought it was restricted to calculation, but perhaps there's something in the way of thinking that got us to distributed.net and SETI@Home that could help us get a distributed RBL (dare I say, "DRBL"?).
:).
How about a DNS name that resolves to one of 20 (50? 100? 1000?) different machines all of which are kept synchronized between themselves with RBL lists. Anyone who asks for RBL information, gets any one of the machines in the cluster. Including the DDOSers. How many machines can they DDOS simultaneously? (that's why I kept cranking up that number in the first parentheses) Not all of them, I hope, but the way to find out is to build up a DRBLnet. There has to be a positive use for all those Linux/BSD boxes attached to DSL and cable lines
Then if the RBL-client side is modified so that if it doesn't get a response very quickly it asks again (probably getting a machine that isn't currently being attacked...).
just spouting ideas...ank
Is there a way to use the technology behind distributed.net or SETI@Home for this kind of application?
just wondering...ank
The SEC won't intervene unless it can be proven that Martha Stewart is Darl McBride's silent partner.
The judges? The juries? SCO's legal counsel?
You wrote: "The fact that GCC has rewritten the meaning of several libc functions so that they to [sic] not act in the standard behavior and can possibly break code."
Could you elaborate on this, please? I was unaware of it.
The best way to combat MS' penetration of the Universities is with quality and features + appropriate publicity. On one of the issues near and dear to academics, MS may actually be ahead of the OSS tools.
.NET C++ compiler, not in GCC. Rather than complaining that MS-FUD is working, we should be making sure that things like GCC stays ahead. That's a harder task, but a more satisfying one in the long haul.
Currently, the word-among-the-gurus here where I work is that the level of compliance on Win32 to the C++ standard is in the latest
And if the local gurus are wrong about standards compliance and DevStudio 7 vs. GCC, then let me hear it -- and I'll be more than willing to trumpet it within my sphere of influence at least. I think we'd be happy to use the same compiler on all platforms: our software is on several for all of which GCC is available yet we don't use it on any. Spec compliance is only one issue, but it is an issue.
cheers...ank
For more book reviews, especially on computer security, watch for Robert Slade's regular contributions to comp.risks. It doesn't look as though Robert has reviewed this one yet so I'll look forward to reading and comparing. His praise for a former edition seems uncharacteristically positive -- compare reviews of Secrets of a Super Hacker or Computer Security Basics -- so I'll be surprised if he doesn't praise this one, too...
cheers...ank
Among all the other reasons that people (zealots) like Babylon 5, one of the more compelling ones is that the science is incrementally extended off science in the 90s. One of the downsides of this is that, when science has made wild advances, it makes B5 look dated -- in the same way that the "Pocket Pager" comment in Star Trek IV sounds silly in a post-NOKIA world.
can't have it all...ank
When they came for the homeless, I did not speak up because I was not homeless.
Not to dismiss the needs of the homeless that might make this kind of a measure look desirable, but aren't there other ways? We've been down this kind of road before. Have the legislators forgotten them already?
Without this correction, the parent of the parent looks pretty dumb.
The idea, though, is pretty cool! -- double entendre unintended, but delightedly espoused.
gnucash.org seems to be "benefiting" from the publicity. Here's the first part of Benoit's post for those who care:
State of the GnuCash project, a call for help
The GnuCash project is having a hard time. I think most everyone agrees that GnuCash is a critical piece of software for the Linux desktop. It's also one the largest free software projects. How big is it? GnuCash currently has 287,853 physical source lines of code (SLOC). For example, had the current GnuCash CVS been included in RedHat 7.1, it would come in 21st position in code size (see http://www.dwheeler.com/sloc/). At that time, the current GnuCash CVS source would have been pretty similar in size to qt, postgresql or perl, about 60% of Gimp and between 12% and 16% of Xfree, Mozilla or the Linux kernel. Although GnuCash comes up in every discussion of needed software to get Linux on the desktop, the GnuCash project currently has only about seven active developers (active being used very loosely here, considering I included myself) and enjoys far less exposure than many projects of a similar size.
We may be headed for a dead end if we don't reorganize and refocus our efforts. GnuCash badly needs more manpower (not just developers), and needs to get it quickly.
How did we get here
Of course, every project could always use more developers, but the consecutive demise of both Gnumatic and Linux Developers Group caused the loss of most of GnuCash's core developers two years ago. The few volunteers that were left focused on new features, in the hopes of attracting users and hopefully also developers. We've managed to take it to 1.8.5 (to be released in a few days), and in the process GnuCash gained Small Business features, Scheduled Transactions, a completely new import UI with Bayesian filtering, OFX and HBCI support, Mortage and Loan Repayment druid, and many, many others. We are very proud of it and we clearly have more users judging from traffic on gnucash-users, and all should now be well in GnuCash-land.
Not quite. We didn't attract many new developers and all those new features have to be maintained and debugged. They also represent a huge tech support burden, since most of the features were not documented properly due to time constraints. GnuCash has grown too large for the current developers to properly debug and maintain the current code base, add new features and write documentation, all at the same time.
I hate to admit it, but in our quest for new features, choices had to be made and a lot of important things are currently being neglected. If the GnuCash project can't manage to attract more contributors and refocus the efforts of those it already has, it's going to become unmanageable. We often say that Linux would survive even if Linus got hit by a bus. Well, right now I am not too certain that GnuCash would currently survive if Derek Atkins got hit by a bus.
So now I'll try to suggest some solutions...
(that's as far as I could get)
ooohhhh. I feel a shell script coming on...
All this, and my pre-ordered Babylon-5 Season 3 just shipped! (small pleasures)...ank
and it's always about the money...ank
Disconnect their narco-drip before they decide that the dyes in the colours of most national flags contain their IP!
"You will die like dogs!"
"No! But we will fight like lions!"
Mr. McBride even bears a striking resemblance to Chevy Chase. Oh, indeed, truth is much stranger than fiction.
The point being that of all possible documents you could hold a copy of in your own language, a modern translation of the Bible is about as close to the closest possible meaning in your language of the meaning in language 0 of document 0 as you could possibly have of any text of similar origin and antiquity.
And all that without invoking a single phrase of mumbo jumbo...in saecula saeculorum Amen, Amen