"Giving a guy who is about to dump a few billion dollars into your nation "a taste of their own medicine" is by far the stupidest idea I can possibly think of."
Which makes it all the more odd to see the U.S. immigration people behaving so stupidly towards business visitors who'll benefit their country.
Whereas a program which allows you to (a) insert formatted example code into your documents from the files themselves, and (b) run that example code and put the output into your document is the sort of area where the documentation system could be more powerful than a simple word processor.
"Short pulses at varying frequencies and (probably) varying pulse duration, timing,power, etc., keep it from being detected by the enemy's RWR."
And it has to put one of those pulses at the correct frequency at every position in the area of sky it's interested in searching, to get even an indication of where some targets might be. Repeat many times to find out exactly where the target is and where it's going.
Oh, did that expose you to ECM? Too bad for leaving the radar on long enough to actually do a scan...
"Holy crap, someone found a bug in a Microsoft product! Stop the presses!"
No, they found a bug in some software that isn't needed to perform any legitimate function of the product, but was added-on by Microsoft to spy on their customers. That's the worst kind of bug, because if they hadn't been so paranoid it needn't have happened
I'll say it again: this entire class of bugs is nonexistant in Free Software, mainly because the person writing the software isn't trying to deliberately break your computer.
Bugs may be a fact of life. But licensing-related bugs are inexcusable.
And for Gantt charts, there's a program which lets you express each task in python code (including whatever calculations, remote data, or whatever that it needs to get data from)
"I'd have to say the biggest barrier (aside from the relatively tiny potential market) is the lack of standardization in Linux. Dozens of distros with multiple shells and several desktop environments"
Weird how all the programs I use "just happened to work" in about 10 different versions of about 5 different Linux distributions.
Actually no, it's not weird at all, since they all run the same software with interfaces defined by UNIX and RFC standards, and with separation between software and GUIs and interfaces and file formats, and each one only changing where required.
"With Windows, you can specify "requires Windows XP with SP2 and.Net Framework 3.0"."
I think you answered your own question about which OS is the least stable between versions...
You mean they need to jump a motorcycle into the guard post from an adjacent building, break into the control centre, and run nmap on a terminal on the internal network?
(b.t.w. that means: Skype over WiFi, bluetooth mesh networks, end-to-end encryption, openfirmware, and general hackability. your phone should work for you, not against you)
"While this incident may have been an overreaction, two Russian airliners were brought down on the same day in 2004 with explosives suspected to have been hidden in the bras of two female passengers. It's not that far-fetched."
Expecting the staff at an american airport to know this _would_ be far-fetched...
Well if they only count companies who upgraded all computers, then it just smells of a biased survey. One person still running a legacy application on an old OS and you don't get counted in the 2%.
Imagine a company with some Macs or Linux machines being asked this. "did you upgrade all of your computers to vista? [Y/N]"
Not being able to export PDFs from a word processor is a real deal-breaker in most companies - it's insane that MS Word could screw-up something as simple as this.
And no: external plugins and "printer drivers" aren't a suitable replacement. (imagine your tech support explaining that people need to print a document when they want to save it... "why doesn't the export menu work?")
It was interesting to hear Lord Sainsbury in the UK (while talking to a load of OSS folks about patents) tell everyone (paraphrased) that Microsoft would never dare pull anticompetitive stunts in the UK because the competition commission was so powerful and so scary.
Obviously the assembled audience gave him the "are you taking the piss?" style of rolling around laughing, which wasn't the most polite thing to do, but he seemed to take it fairly well...
"Again, it's fairly clear you've never actually used a Mac. Fink (apt for Darwin), and DarwinPorts offer the free software."
How is that considered insightful? You ever try running free software on a mac? e.g. try something GNOME related, and look at the unscalable raster fonts which are uglier than a 30-year-old Xwindow terminal. or the lack of any integration with the system.
MacOS X is not even in the same league as a polished, user-friendly, customisable desktop like KDE, especially not if you're trying to compare software (yes you can get nice software for the mac but each program costs over $300 - the best software on KDE is free)
"Windows NT (and its later incarnations like XP and Vista) aren't vulnerable because kernel components facing user mode are always expected to make copies of user arguments before they're validated and used"
So Windows has a coding standard that says this shouldn't happen. I don't see how it necessarily follows that Windows isn't vulnerable. You're assuming that all the kernel-mode code in Windows is following the standard/reccomendation that you refer to. Let's say that even one occurance of code that doesn't meet the standard is potentially enough to do major damage (like break the most hardened-possible system). Have there been any other times when Windows code didn't follow recommended security rules? Did they make it past code-audits and onto customers' computers? What's the frequency? What's the chances of it occuring with this set of vulnerabilities?
A phrase like "isn't vulnerable" seems awfully strong to use, when the only thing protecting against it is a warning in the developer documentation...
If you really think that such diversity is useful for security (you'd need to have several million type of operating system all incompatible with each others' code and scripting languages for it to be a useful block to worm transfer (and 50 different versions of redhat with the name changed doesn't count)) - then suddenly each OS has only a few users, so nobody to help you with problems on it, and nobody to write software for it.
(you thought it was hard getting games to run on linux - try getting games to run on AIX on a SPARC if you want an idea of what a true OS biodiversity would be like to use)
Better to get more people on to the same platform, something like linux which is (a) got lots of people working on security for it, (b) got lots of companies doing support for it, (c) loads of places to host/write/maintain the auto updates.
Being Free Software is a prerequisite for security (as the recent windows-update has shown) -- if people can't trust the supplier, they'll start turning off updates.
None of this has any relation to the multithreaded OS attack being discussed of course...
Slashdot Mirror
"Giving a guy who is about to dump a few billion dollars into your nation "a taste of their own medicine" is by far the stupidest idea I can possibly think of."
Which makes it all the more odd to see the U.S. immigration people behaving so stupidly towards business visitors who'll benefit their country.
Whereas a program which allows you to (a) insert formatted example code into your documents from the files themselves, and (b) run that example code and put the output into your document is the sort of area where the documentation system could be more powerful than a simple word processor.
"Short pulses at varying frequencies and (probably) varying pulse duration, timing ,power, etc., keep it from being detected by the enemy's RWR."
...
And it has to put one of those pulses at the correct frequency at every position in the area of sky it's interested in searching, to get even an indication of where some targets might be. Repeat many times to find out exactly where the target is and where it's going.
Oh, did that expose you to ECM? Too bad for leaving the radar on long enough to actually do a scan
"Holy crap, someone found a bug in a Microsoft product! Stop the presses!"
No, they found a bug in some software that isn't needed to perform any legitimate function of the product, but was added-on by Microsoft to spy on their customers. That's the worst kind of bug, because if they hadn't been so paranoid it needn't have happened
I'll say it again: this entire class of bugs is nonexistant in Free Software, mainly because the person writing the software isn't trying to deliberately break your computer.
Bugs may be a fact of life. But licensing-related bugs are inexcusable.
And for Gantt charts, there's a program which lets you express each task in python code (including whatever calculations, remote data, or whatever that it needs to get data from)
http://faces.homeip.net/
"I'd have to say the biggest barrier (aside from the relatively tiny potential market) is the lack of standardization in Linux. Dozens of distros with multiple shells and several desktop environments"
.Net Framework 3.0"."
Weird how all the programs I use "just happened to work" in about 10 different versions of about 5 different Linux distributions.
Actually no, it's not weird at all, since they all run the same software with interfaces defined by UNIX and RFC standards, and with separation between software and GUIs and interfaces and file formats, and each one only changing where required.
"With Windows, you can specify "requires Windows XP with SP2 and
I think you answered your own question about which OS is the least stable between versions...
You mean they need to jump a motorcycle into the guard post from an adjacent building, break into the control centre, and run nmap on a terminal on the internal network?
"The question we all need to ask is why do we even need to go back?"
To prove that you can?
Are you an engineering nation, or a flop?
Will you get the high-tech contracts, or the easy ones?
needs to run OpenMoko
(b.t.w. that means: Skype over WiFi, bluetooth mesh networks, end-to-end encryption, openfirmware, and general hackability. your phone should work for you, not against you)
"On the other hand, he does kind of skip over the other professions that also discriminate against women. How about the military?"
Don't ask, don't tell...
"While this incident may have been an overreaction, two Russian airliners were brought down on the same day in 2004 with explosives suspected to have been hidden in the bras of two female passengers. It's not that far-fetched."
Expecting the staff at an american airport to know this _would_ be far-fetched...
Well if they only count companies who upgraded all computers, then it just smells of a biased survey. One person still running a legacy application on an old OS and you don't get counted in the 2%.
Imagine a company with some Macs or Linux machines being asked this. "did you upgrade all of your computers to vista? [Y/N]"
"The suit is back" as PG would say...
"(international copies of the same book which have different ISBN numbers and are technically not to allowed to be sold in US)"
Gotta love free trade. Was RMS seeing the future when he wrote about region-encoded textbooks?
"In both universities I attended, textbooks were sold at market prices."
Do you mean the price printed on the back? "market price" is what you pay at ebay or amazon marketplace.
And once you've got the ISBN, type it into http://bookmooch.com/ to see whether anyone is giving-away the book
"Like inhaling toxic smoke is going to be your big worry if the PLANE is ON FIRE."
Just out of interest, are the airliners still refusing to carry smoke hoods in their planes?
(I seem to remember some old slashdot discussions on smoke inhalation being one of the biggest preventable causes of deaths after airliner crashes?)
"Since when have Microsoft been distributing Linux?"
Since they sold coupons for Novell support?
Not being able to export PDFs from a word processor is a real deal-breaker in most companies - it's insane that MS Word could screw-up something as simple as this.
And no: external plugins and "printer drivers" aren't a suitable replacement. (imagine your tech support explaining that people need to print a document when they want to save it... "why doesn't the export menu work?")
"It was a hash not encryption. Get over it. It's more than likely for data integrity than "ZOMG WE R GONIN TO BREAK LINUX"."
So why doesn't iTunes run on Linux? (they ported it to Windows, and [as Apple tells anyone who'll listen] their OS is really unix-like)
"Are people excited about a Linux Cell phone or a Unix cell phone. If the latter why not a BSD based cell phone. Like say the Iphone."
MacOS X is the best example of why BSD licensing doesn't work.
It was interesting to hear Lord Sainsbury in the UK (while talking to a load of OSS folks about patents) tell everyone (paraphrased) that Microsoft would never dare pull anticompetitive stunts in the UK because the competition commission was so powerful and so scary.
Obviously the assembled audience gave him the "are you taking the piss?" style of rolling around laughing, which wasn't the most polite thing to do, but he seemed to take it fairly well...
"Again, it's fairly clear you've never actually used a Mac. Fink (apt for Darwin), and DarwinPorts offer the free software."
How is that considered insightful? You ever try running free software on a mac? e.g. try something GNOME related, and look at the unscalable raster fonts which are uglier than a 30-year-old Xwindow terminal. or the lack of any integration with the system.
MacOS X is not even in the same league as a polished, user-friendly, customisable desktop like KDE, especially not if you're trying to compare software (yes you can get nice software for the mac but each program costs over $300 - the best software on KDE is free)
"Windows NT (and its later incarnations like XP and Vista) aren't vulnerable because kernel components facing user mode are always expected to make copies of user arguments before they're validated and used"
So Windows has a coding standard that says this shouldn't happen. I don't see how it necessarily follows that Windows isn't vulnerable. You're assuming that all the kernel-mode code in Windows is following the standard/reccomendation that you refer to. Let's say that even one occurance of code that doesn't meet the standard is potentially enough to do major damage (like break the most hardened-possible system). Have there been any other times when Windows code didn't follow recommended security rules? Did they make it past code-audits and onto customers' computers? What's the frequency? What's the chances of it occuring with this set of vulnerabilities?
A phrase like "isn't vulnerable" seems awfully strong to use, when the only thing protecting against it is a warning in the developer documentation...
If you really think that such diversity is useful for security (you'd need to have several million type of operating system all incompatible with each others' code and scripting languages for it to be a useful block to worm transfer (and 50 different versions of redhat with the name changed doesn't count)) - then suddenly each OS has only a few users, so nobody to help you with problems on it, and nobody to write software for it.
(you thought it was hard getting games to run on linux - try getting games to run on AIX on a SPARC if you want an idea of what a true OS biodiversity would be like to use)
Better to get more people on to the same platform, something like linux which is (a) got lots of people working on security for it, (b) got lots of companies doing support for it, (c) loads of places to host/write/maintain the auto updates.
Being Free Software is a prerequisite for security (as the recent windows-update has shown) -- if people can't trust the supplier, they'll start turning off updates.
None of this has any relation to the multithreaded OS attack being discussed of course...
"The most common way for young data to be corrupted is to be saved on a block that once contained pornographic data."
;)
Whatever you do, don't dilute the data 200 times by zeroing 9/10 of the data each time, otherwise your drive will be full of porn