The main thing is how often do you have to do all that?
At least monthly. And note that the recent "zero-day" IE exploit was based on a known bug which Microsoft didn't fix because they couldn't see how it would be used. FOSS people would (do) fix it anyway.
How many linux kernel security probs so far this year?
Two observations worth noting are that the Linux problems are actually being found and fixed: many of them are falling out of deliberate efforts to purify the kernel, whereas the corresponding problems in the MS-Windows core are not being found - at least, not by white-hats; and that if a DOS is the worst that can be found in Linux in... how long...? then we don't have all that much to worry about (but I'm glad that there are people out there worrying on my behalf anyway).
"Hello, and welcome to the mental health hotline...
If you are obsessive-compulsive, press 1 repeatedly.
If you are co-dependent, please ask someone to press 2 for you.
If you suffer from indecision, press either 2, 3, or 4.
If you have multiple personalities, press 5 and any other three numbers.
If you are paranoid, we know who you are and what you want. Do not press 6. Stay on the line so we can trace your call.
If you are delusional, press 7 and your call will be transferred to the mother ship.
If you are schizophrenic, listen carefully and a small voice will tell you which number to press.
If you are a manic-depressive, it doesn't matter which number you press; no one will answer.
If you have amnesia, press 8 and state your name, address, telephone number, date of birth, social security number, and your mother's maiden name.
If you have bi-polar disorder, please leave a message after the beep or before the beep or after the beep. Please wait for the beep.
If you have short-term memory loss, press 9. If you have short-term memory loss, press 9. If you have short-term memory loss, press 9. If you have short-term memory loss, press 9.
If you have low self-esteem, please hang up. All of our operators are too busy to talk to you.
If you are menopausal, hang up, turn on the fan, lie down and cry. You won't be crazy forever.
If you are blonde, please don't press any buttons; you'll just mess it up."
you just confirmed the parent's point with your bs comment
Those who won't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, including you.
Not everyone who pounds on Microsoft's character is doing it by reflex. The company as such, following the character of its fearless leader, is actually as amoral as it is so often painted - and that's only the greed and carelessness we actually know about because it's been made public; what about the other skeletons in their closet?
Linux is not a panacea, although it does everything I personally need and more, but it is being adopted in far too many places simply because it's ABM (Anything But Microsoft).
-3. Deny that there is a problem (or assert that it is "theoretical");
-2. Sue or at least threaten to sue the people reporting it;
-1. Produce a fix that breaks several other things;
0. Produce a fix which only breaks a few other things but which silently rewinds some earlier security patches;
For Linux, choice of:
A. Download the vendor-prepared kernel within a few hours of seeing a problem report, install and reboot;
B. Download and apply a patch, then "nice rpm -bb kernel.spec" so the compile doesn't bring your machine to its knees the way it would under MS-Windows, install the results and reboot (with variants for non-RPM distros like Debian and Slack) (and what sort of nutcase would do the rebuild on a production machine when their own desktop would do the job just as well, even if it was a G5 and the target an Athlon64?);
C. Download and install a library shim which blocks the offending action, then do A or B without the reboot.
I'd like to see a TwoKernelMonte variant for SMP which allowed you to isolate one processor from the kernel, bring up a patched version of the same kernel under it in cooperation with the running kernel (which process would presumably not survive any changes in in-memory structures, so check for that first), migrating devices across in idle moments, then finally deleting the old kernel and bonding the processor thus freed to the new kernel. Viola, new kernel sans reboot. Ideal for a patching situation.
Face it, the majority of America is a fertile farming par[a]dise,
This is not true. If it were, why would they need tarrifs to protect their goods?
Because their labour is too expensive. They are protecting USD$10/hour workers against production from USD$0.10/hour workers in other countries.
our production can't compare to theirs,
This is untrue. Australia is a leader in farming efficiency.
In point of fact, I have an uncle who contributes significantly to this efficiency all by himself. However, it ain't enough.
There are more than ten times as many people in the USA, and I cordially invite you to raise anything but spinifex and kangaroos (sometimes not even that) on more than half of our land area.
Other than that, I agree that US agricultural protectionism is a bit extreme.
However, let me introduce you to an interesting comparison. When my Albany (WestOz) rellies started farming, you could swap a typical good-quality bull for a new four-wheel drive. Now you need to swap something like 700 of them to get one 4WD.
All of the money gets made by merchants and brokers on the other side of the farm gate, and bugger-all gets left for the farmers themselves. Given that they're the ones tied down to huge, inflexible and expensive assets and taking all of the (weather, pests, salinity etc) risks to make those assets produce stuff, that's not exactly equitable. If you can solve that problem, you can quietly do away with a lot of agricultural protectionism and any farmer who isn't terminally greedy and short-sighted will run to help you.
...but in the eyes of a militant Mohammedan, anyone who refuses to embrace Shari'ah needs chastisement (read "bombing or whatever else it takes to either persuade or destroy them").
This also applies in varying degree to reciting the (at least) daily Shahada, five-times-daily Salah, doing your Zakat (I do this anyway, and I'm not Muslim), and annual Saum (can't see that doing most Westerners any harm either) and - at least once - Hajj. I think you'd be forgiven the Hajj and the Zakat would be overlooked (in fact, in some places it's really not applicable: how does someone who has absolutely nothing to offer implement Zakat?), but the rest would be regarded as straightforward and enforceable.
Odd side-effects: you'd have to destroy a lot of statuary and other artwork which would be regarded as idolatrous, bulldoze any building that looked religious but not Islamic, and close down a lot of Humanist, Christian and Atheist organisations, even schools and charities. Transport would have separate men's and women's sections. Theft would dwindle (many hands cut off make law work), and sodomy increase (too many spare males hanging around).
Most of the neighbours concerned have entire societies which march to a different drummer. An agreement with someone like Indonesia wouldn't be worth a pinch of goat dung if they decided that we had land they needed.
Many Indonesians are fairly decent people, but you have to remember that they're currently beating up, raping and killing each other; in particular, the "native" more-or-less-Islamic Indos are coming down hard on the Chinese Catholics. How much easier would it be for them to do the same to even more different-looking (and snotty) neighbours like us?
There is one blind spot which appears to be shared by both Aussie and Indo governments, though. They both keep proposing (every so often) to fill the Pilbara and Kimberley with millions and millions of people. Let's just say that it's prima facie obvious that neither of them have gone out and walked that ground themselves. Speaking as an ex-resident of Paraburdoo, Dampier and Pannawonica, and an occasional visitor to Argyle, Broome and Port Hedland: they're nuts.
Another question to ask is: the United States of America defends Australia from sundry greedy South-East Asians by expressing an interest in us. But who is to defend us from the USA? So they come with writs instead of guns? Does it really matter how it's done if in the end we have no rights, no property, no privacy?
They wanted to give away all of WA and the NT too, as well as parts of SA. You can bet that was popular with the Sandgropers and Territorians! And Indonesia seems to remember that, since some of their maps mark the area as South Irian.
Full disclosure: hello from Perth, Western Australia.
Coworker of mine had to find new hardware that he could move a failing MS-Windows NT 4.0 server onto, and it was no picnic. Video driver is VGA (1024x768x8 at flat strap, zero hardware acceleration), there's no working USB drivers at all (not that it matters here) and the on-board network card had to be, er, assisted with an end-of-model PCI plugin. And he counts himself lucky to have gotten that far.
As to their claims of invulnerability, may I refer you to CERT's attitude on that matter? Search for "making the theoretical practical since 1992".
My Panasonic remote controller doesn't even have a zeta function, let alone a way of zeroing it. It's got some real numbers, though. Is there a way to hack a zeta function in? Can I interface it with a learning remote?
Two different kinds of AOpen optical mice, an IBM ball mouse, two Chinse nameless matchbox-sized opticals, a Dexxa optical, even an Acer tablet. That's just in this room. Only problem was I had to recompile the Acer tablet drivers 'coz the ones that ship with X are ancient. QED, more or less, for the g'g'g'grantparent.
KDevelop runs flawlessly.
Only issue I've had that looks like a freeze is one multi-processor machine will sometimes power down when you kill the X server. Otherwise, not a blip.
Currently recompiling KDE 3.2.2 from Cooker under Mandrake 10.0 so I can use the Kiosk Admin Tool for an internet cafe.
If Microsoft shipped 5000+ packages with every version of MS-Windows and supported them, they'd have at least an order of magnitude more advisories.
Mandrake Linux 10.0 ships with 7460 packages, from 3ddesktop-0.2.5 to zziplib0-static-devel-0.12.82 inclusive, including such non-trivia as the OpenOffice and KOffice suites, a dozen web browsers, who knows how many email clients, IRC and instant messaging clients by the bucketful (and servers for all of the above), several DNSes, FTP servers and all manner of dangerous internet-exposed and user-exposed applications. Try limiting your advisories to Mandrake alone and see what happens to your stats. Think of it as eliminating dupes.
Next, have a look at what is being reported. On one hand we have the Code Reds and MSBlasts of the world - rolling worldwide disasters - on the other hand we have lots of things like possible local privesc exploits. Nothing compares, baby...
Now before any other chucklehead brings up the "but MS-Windows is more common" furphy, consider that about 2/3 of all webservers, 4/5 of all email servers and 3/4 of all name servers are Open Source. We're talking constant Internet exposure here, not Joe Random Dialup. If the popularity argument had anything going for it, we should be seeing over twice as many CodeReddishes for Apache as for IIS, and it ain't so. It really, really ain't so.
Overly Critical Guy, my ass. Not Critical Enough Guy would be more like it.
...vs a crappy one is that you can take larger images and fix framing mistakes by cropping and scaling them into the smaller size.
Also, using my DSC-F707 in 640x480 mode (not sure if it'll go that low, it might only go down as far as 800x600), you can fit about a zillion shots on the hopelessly small Sony sticks, compared with only about 60-70 at full res.
But wait... there's more... (-:
The Sony will also do infrared shots, close-ups down to about 2cm, postage-stamp movies (the DSC-F828 does reasonably sized movies), and sounds for attachment to images. Admittedly, the sound quality is not exactly prizewinning, but it's useful for stuff like tagging a shot of a bird with its call. It also optically zooms.
OTOH, you can buy a lot of more-or-less-disposable crappy digital cameras for the cost of one high-end camera.
It's an interesting exercise for cars, too. I can buy 40 of the second-hand Peugeot 505 that I drive for the same price as my brother-in-law's single 4WD.
I have a handy-dandy unfolding hairbrush with a mirror inside the handle. Holding that across the front of the flash on my Sony DSC-F707 at about a 30deg angle bounces the light off the ceiling quite nicely, a steeper hangle diffuses it around the room behind you. A slab of tinfoil wrapped around a ruler or similar also does well, and if you use a short length of fat broom-handle or similar rod - you may be able to get an inch or two (a few centimeters, or for the farmers about 1/800 of a chain:-) of offcut from a timber supplier, woodworking or cabinetmaking shop for free (sawn in half lengthways) to form the tinfoil over, it makes a nice convex reflector and disperses the flash across most of ceiling.
You can also experiment with muting your flash (with plastic containers, cloth, paper etc). If you want to see serious redness, use a hand. (-:
The game's only just got a Linux player port (how hard is that? his graphics engine is already ported, the rest of the game or editor shouldn't take more than a couple of hours) and no Linux editor, yet Commander Keen here thinks that Linux is only 2% of his market. How often does he expect Linux visitors to return when they gan't use his game? And now that there's a game (but no editor) that they can use, does he expect his Linux visitor count to instantly redline?
On top of this, he's apparently unaware that many Linux users will be visiting his site from their (MS-Windows, for now) work computers.
To really ice his cake with a deep layer of naivete, he believes the UserAgent headers are all accurate. Hellooo...? Evidently the firelight of his experience doesn't extend its glow as far as the sites that won't even let you in unless they think you're running IE under MS-Windows. For others with the same handicap, a common reaction to that situation is to set your browser to always identify itself as (for example) "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)" (IE 5.5 on 'doze2000 or 'dozeXP).
His real-world exposure to Linux - with Linux ports of the game and editor available - would probably be closer to 10% already, and steadily growing.
As for the work involved in defending a GPLed program, let the FSF do it for you. They enjoy that sort of thing.
Slashdot Mirror
At least monthly. And note that the recent "zero-day" IE exploit was based on a known bug which Microsoft didn't fix because they couldn't see how it would be used. FOSS people would (do) fix it anyway.
Two observations worth noting are that the Linux problems are actually being found and fixed: many of them are falling out of deliberate efforts to purify the kernel, whereas the corresponding problems in the MS-Windows core are not being found - at least, not by white-hats; and that if a DOS is the worst that can be found in Linux in... how long...? then we don't have all that much to worry about (but I'm glad that there are people out there worrying on my behalf anyway).
"Hello, and welcome to the mental health hotline...
If you are obsessive-compulsive, press 1 repeatedly.
If you are co-dependent, please ask someone to press 2 for you.
If you suffer from indecision, press either 2, 3, or 4.
If you have multiple personalities, press 5 and any other three numbers.
If you are paranoid, we know who you are and what you want. Do not press 6. Stay on the line so we can trace your call.
If you are delusional, press 7 and your call will be transferred to the mother ship.
If you are schizophrenic, listen carefully and a small voice will tell you which number to press.
If you are a manic-depressive, it doesn't matter which number you press; no one will answer.
If you have amnesia, press 8 and state your name, address, telephone number, date of birth, social security number, and your mother's maiden name.
If you have bi-polar disorder, please leave a message after the beep or before the beep or after the beep. Please wait for the beep.
If you have short-term memory loss, press 9. If you have short-term memory loss, press 9. If you have short-term memory loss, press 9. If you have short-term memory loss, press 9.
If you have low self-esteem, please hang up. All of our operators are too busy to talk to you.
If you are menopausal, hang up, turn on the fan, lie down and cry. You won't be crazy forever.
If you are blonde, please don't press any buttons; you'll just mess it up."
...how Microsoft can lay claim to "effective" security.
...I do like your sig. Sums up D'ohl MacBride's strategy nicely.
...if any of the /. admins actually read /.?
Those who won't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, including you.
Not everyone who pounds on Microsoft's character is doing it by reflex. The company as such, following the character of its fearless leader, is actually as amoral as it is so often painted - and that's only the greed and carelessness we actually know about because it's been made public; what about the other skeletons in their closet?
Linux is not a panacea, although it does everything I personally need and more, but it is being adopted in far too many places simply because it's ABM (Anything But Microsoft).
For Linux, choice of:
I'd like to see a TwoKernelMonte variant for SMP which allowed you to isolate one processor from the kernel, bring up a patched version of the same kernel under it in cooperation with the running kernel (which process would presumably not survive any changes in in-memory structures, so check for that first), migrating devices across in idle moments, then finally deleting the old kernel and bonding the processor thus freed to the new kernel. Viola, new kernel sans reboot. Ideal for a patching situation.
Is it just me, or do many of those random features look more like gas vents or subsidences than they do impact craters?
Some of the smaller craters look almost as if they've got ant-lions hiding under them.
If more is better, why not proliferate cores like crazy?
Because their labour is too expensive. They are protecting USD$10/hour workers against production from USD$0.10/hour workers in other countries.
In point of fact, I have an uncle who contributes significantly to this efficiency all by himself. However, it ain't enough.
There are more than ten times as many people in the USA, and I cordially invite you to raise anything but spinifex and kangaroos (sometimes not even that) on more than half of our land area.
Other than that, I agree that US agricultural protectionism is a bit extreme.
However, let me introduce you to an interesting comparison. When my Albany (WestOz) rellies started farming, you could swap a typical good-quality bull for a new four-wheel drive. Now you need to swap something like 700 of them to get one 4WD.
All of the money gets made by merchants and brokers on the other side of the farm gate, and bugger-all gets left for the farmers themselves. Given that they're the ones tied down to huge, inflexible and expensive assets and taking all of the (weather, pests, salinity etc) risks to make those assets produce stuff, that's not exactly equitable. If you can solve that problem, you can quietly do away with a lot of agricultural protectionism and any farmer who isn't terminally greedy and short-sighted will run to help you.
...but in the eyes of a militant Mohammedan, anyone who refuses to embrace Shari'ah needs chastisement (read "bombing or whatever else it takes to either persuade or destroy them").
This also applies in varying degree to reciting the (at least) daily Shahada, five-times-daily Salah, doing your Zakat (I do this anyway, and I'm not Muslim), and annual Saum (can't see that doing most Westerners any harm either) and - at least once - Hajj. I think you'd be forgiven the Hajj and the Zakat would be overlooked (in fact, in some places it's really not applicable: how does someone who has absolutely nothing to offer implement Zakat?), but the rest would be regarded as straightforward and enforceable.
Odd side-effects: you'd have to destroy a lot of statuary and other artwork which would be regarded as idolatrous, bulldoze any building that looked religious but not Islamic, and close down a lot of Humanist, Christian and Atheist organisations, even schools and charities. Transport would have separate men's and women's sections. Theft would dwindle (many hands cut off make law work), and sodomy increase (too many spare males hanging around).
Most of the neighbours concerned have entire societies which march to a different drummer. An agreement with someone like Indonesia wouldn't be worth a pinch of goat dung if they decided that we had land they needed.
Many Indonesians are fairly decent people, but you have to remember that they're currently beating up, raping and killing each other; in particular, the "native" more-or-less-Islamic Indos are coming down hard on the Chinese Catholics. How much easier would it be for them to do the same to even more different-looking (and snotty) neighbours like us?
There is one blind spot which appears to be shared by both Aussie and Indo governments, though. They both keep proposing (every so often) to fill the Pilbara and Kimberley with millions and millions of people. Let's just say that it's prima facie obvious that neither of them have gone out and walked that ground themselves. Speaking as an ex-resident of Paraburdoo, Dampier and Pannawonica, and an occasional visitor to Argyle, Broome and Port Hedland: they're nuts.
Another question to ask is: the United States of America defends Australia from sundry greedy South-East Asians by expressing an interest in us. But who is to defend us from the USA? So they come with writs instead of guns? Does it really matter how it's done if in the end we have no rights, no property, no privacy?
They wanted to give away all of WA and the NT too, as well as parts of SA. You can bet that was popular with the Sandgropers and Territorians! And Indonesia seems to remember that, since some of their maps mark the area as South Irian.
Full disclosure: hello from Perth, Western Australia.
Coworker of mine had to find new hardware that he could move a failing MS-Windows NT 4.0 server onto, and it was no picnic. Video driver is VGA (1024x768x8 at flat strap, zero hardware acceleration), there's no working USB drivers at all (not that it matters here) and the on-board network card had to be, er, assisted with an end-of-model PCI plugin. And he counts himself lucky to have gotten that far.
As to their claims of invulnerability, may I refer you to CERT's attitude on that matter? Search for "making the theoretical practical since 1992".
Don't you mean...
My Panasonic remote controller doesn't even have a zeta function, let alone a way of zeroing it. It's got some real numbers, though. Is there a way to hack a zeta function in? Can I interface it with a learning remote?
Correct! It is indeed enforcement of IPRs. Parking meters on a grand scale.
Of what benefit to Australia is:
- opening their markets to the biggest property-rights sharks in the world?
- joining their markets to those of a country whose income is earned not so much from innovation or production as from milking them both?
- Moving their laws towards those of a country already neck-deep in litigation?
- Opening their markets to a huge producer of Australian staples like wheat?
From an Australian perspective, she's a no make sense.At all.
So why is it going ahead regardless?
Enquiring Aussies want to know.
Two different kinds of AOpen optical mice, an IBM ball mouse, two Chinse nameless matchbox-sized opticals, a Dexxa optical, even an Acer tablet. That's just in this room. Only problem was I had to recompile the Acer tablet drivers 'coz the ones that ship with X are ancient. QED, more or less, for the g'g'g'grantparent.
KDevelop runs flawlessly.
Only issue I've had that looks like a freeze is one multi-processor machine will sometimes power down when you kill the X server. Otherwise, not a blip.
Currently recompiling KDE 3.2.2 from Cooker under Mandrake 10.0 so I can use the Kiosk Admin Tool for an internet cafe.
If Microsoft shipped 5000+ packages with every version of MS-Windows and supported them, they'd have at least an order of magnitude more advisories.
Mandrake Linux 10.0 ships with 7460 packages, from 3ddesktop-0.2.5 to zziplib0-static-devel-0.12.82 inclusive, including such non-trivia as the OpenOffice and KOffice suites, a dozen web browsers, who knows how many email clients, IRC and instant messaging clients by the bucketful (and servers for all of the above), several DNSes, FTP servers and all manner of dangerous internet-exposed and user-exposed applications. Try limiting your advisories to Mandrake alone and see what happens to your stats. Think of it as eliminating dupes.
Next, have a look at what is being reported. On one hand we have the Code Reds and MSBlasts of the world - rolling worldwide disasters - on the other hand we have lots of things like possible local privesc exploits. Nothing compares, baby...
Now before any other chucklehead brings up the "but MS-Windows is more common" furphy, consider that about 2/3 of all webservers, 4/5 of all email servers and 3/4 of all name servers are Open Source. We're talking constant Internet exposure here, not Joe Random Dialup. If the popularity argument had anything going for it, we should be seeing over twice as many CodeReddishes for Apache as for IIS, and it ain't so. It really, really ain't so.
Overly Critical Guy, my ass. Not Critical Enough Guy would be more like it.
...vs a crappy one is that you can take larger images and fix framing mistakes by cropping and scaling them into the smaller size.
Also, using my DSC-F707 in 640x480 mode (not sure if it'll go that low, it might only go down as far as 800x600), you can fit about a zillion shots on the hopelessly small Sony sticks, compared with only about 60-70 at full res.
But wait... there's more... (-:
The Sony will also do infrared shots, close-ups down to about 2cm, postage-stamp movies (the DSC-F828 does reasonably sized movies), and sounds for attachment to images. Admittedly, the sound quality is not exactly prizewinning, but it's useful for stuff like tagging a shot of a bird with its call. It also optically zooms.
OTOH, you can buy a lot of more-or-less-disposable crappy digital cameras for the cost of one high-end camera.
It's an interesting exercise for cars, too. I can buy 40 of the second-hand Peugeot 505 that I drive for the same price as my brother-in-law's single 4WD.
I have a handy-dandy unfolding hairbrush with a mirror inside the handle. Holding that across the front of the flash on my Sony DSC-F707 at about a 30deg angle bounces the light off the ceiling quite nicely, a steeper hangle diffuses it around the room behind you. A slab of tinfoil wrapped around a ruler or similar also does well, and if you use a short length of fat broom-handle or similar rod - you may be able to get an inch or two (a few centimeters, or for the farmers about 1/800 of a chain :-) of offcut from a timber supplier, woodworking or cabinetmaking shop for free (sawn in half lengthways) to form the tinfoil over, it makes a nice convex reflector and disperses the flash across most of ceiling.
You can also experiment with muting your flash (with plastic containers, cloth, paper etc). If you want to see serious redness, use a hand. (-:
The game's only just got a Linux player port (how hard is that? his graphics engine is already ported, the rest of the game or editor shouldn't take more than a couple of hours) and no Linux editor, yet Commander Keen here thinks that Linux is only 2% of his market. How often does he expect Linux visitors to return when they gan't use his game? And now that there's a game (but no editor) that they can use, does he expect his Linux visitor count to instantly redline?
On top of this, he's apparently unaware that many Linux users will be visiting his site from their (MS-Windows, for now) work computers.
To really ice his cake with a deep layer of naivete, he believes the UserAgent headers are all accurate. Hellooo...? Evidently the firelight of his experience doesn't extend its glow as far as the sites that won't even let you in unless they think you're running IE under MS-Windows. For others with the same handicap, a common reaction to that situation is to set your browser to always identify itself as (for example) "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0)" (IE 5.5 on 'doze2000 or 'dozeXP).
His real-world exposure to Linux - with Linux ports of the game and editor available - would probably be closer to 10% already, and steadily growing.
As for the work involved in defending a GPLed program, let the FSF do it for you. They enjoy that sort of thing.
Oh, wait, it's only small. They can't possibly... yes, master... yes, master... ot once, master...
Yes, they would. But they aren't. Go figure. (-: