I think every single one of you is missing the point. First off, Neuros Audio, being in the business of making music players, has to either:
(A) Attempt to sell their business; (B) Do something else with their time and money (why have multiple vendors in a market anyway); (C) Simply die;
or
(D) compete with Apple.
The fact that they are alive means there is currently room for them on the market. The Slashdot submission, as is the norm, has a slant worse than the article it links. There's a big difference between being an iPod contender and an iPod killer (that's not to say Neuros wouldn't want to be an iPod killer, and not to say that they might not be some day).
Neuros Audio's move doesn't have to be of the magnitude to dethrone the iPod in order to be wise.
Hell, I think it's a spectacular idea anyway... we need more hardware manfacturers willing to open up to the community. Think about what state instant messaging would be in if the operators still held a lock on who could program for their networks. Think about what kind of lock is being held on consumer technology because open source can't go there (at least, it's been traditionally limited, but we've seen good movement with wireless routers, tivo, etc).
In fact, if you want to kill the DRM bullshit, one idea is to triple your current rate of innovation. DRM is an attempt for the legacy greedy content industry to catch the back of technology's shirt as it goes running by, and with a little more lunge, we might just see the old model blow away like it damn well should. What better way to triple your rate of innovation than to invite legions of excited open source developers to something 'cool' they've never had before?
How about we just start an international mob whose purpose is to brutally murder anyone greedy enough to file patents and attempt to enforce them in obnoxious ways? We could grow our business by moving onto broader issues like human rights.
On the contrary, the absolutely huge market share Perl has, combined with the 8,000+ modules available freely on CPAN, combined with the fact that well made Perl applications can readily outperform those in any other comparable language, means it's going to be around for a long time.
And on the Perl6 subject, when Perl6 is available, it's going to blow the doors off of everyone else for a long time.
If what you say is true, then you could probably make millions training the rest of the world how to write fast Java portals, because so far I've only heard of them - I've never actually seen one.
By contrast, I have seen (on the far opposite end - Java disasters) an enterprise application that would have made the most rabid Java programmers cream their pants in terms of the sheer "architecture" to it all... yet, its only problem was that it took around *90 seconds* to answer a fucking query.
When the fuck did you assholes show up in my industry? You're the reason I have to wait *seconds* when I click links on many major websites (read: J2EE websites). We live in the age of cable modems and fiber to the fucking curb... I shouldn't be surfing at dialup speeds whenever I happen across one of these 'miracles of modern engineering'. "Slight" performance increase for doing it the manly way? Bullshit! Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!
Who the fuck is raising this generation to think that mediocrity is totally a-Okay, and that you shouldn't have to know anything about a computer to use (let alone program) it?
Information needs to be free to have a free society. I love getting carried away on Wiki by looking up one obscure topic, finding heaps of valuable information which piques my curiosity further, leading me to more wikipedia articles until I've exhausted a slow afternoon at work.
Seriously, though, I tend to trust the information on Wikipedia more than I would a traditional source. It's the same reason I trust open source software more than closed source - sure, anyone could write intentionally harmful code to nuke my hard drive, but peer review all over the process prevents it from ever getting anywhere.
By contrast, the "closed-source", traditional encyclopedia has plenty of opportunity for bias and inaccuracies.
Information, in general, is never 100% accurate, just as no software is 100% perfect. The secret to being an intelligent human being on earth is exposing yourself to as much information and opinion as possible, then filtering through it to find out what works best.
Cogent Network Status/DNS Server Status Description: Date: 10/05/2005
Level 3 has partitioned its part of the Internet from Cogent's part of the Internet by denying Level 3's
customers access to Cogent's customers and denying Cogent's customers access to Level 3 customers. Level 3
terminated its peering with Cogent without cause (as permitted under its peering agreement with Cogent)
even though both Cogent and Level 3 remained in full compliance with the previously existing interconnection
agreement.
Many Level 3 customers can still exchange traffic with Cogent customers because the Level 3 customer is multi-
homed, i.e. it also has a connection to Cogent or to one of the many other networks with which Cogent has a
peering relationship. As described below Cogent is offering a solution to Level 3 customers that are not multi-homed.
Cogent will offer any Level 3 customer, who is single homed to the Level 3 network as of October 5, 2005,
one year of full Internet transit free of charge at the same bandwidth currently being supplied by Level 3.
Cogent will provide this connectivity in over 1,000 locations throughout North America and Europe.
Cogent is committed to an open Internet. The existing interconnection facilities between Level 3 and Cogent
remain intact. Cogent hopes that Level 3 will reactivate these connections, restoring a full level of service
to their customers.
For more information on Cogent's offer of free Internet transit, please call:
NORTH AMERICA: 1-877-875-4432
EUROPE: +33 (0)1 49 03 19 30
Lessig reminds of an interesting supreme court case that centered around the invention of the airplane. In early days, your 'property' was the area of the land you owned, all the way up to the heavens. The case was a farmer suing a pilot for flying over his land, on the basis that doing so was trespassing. Thankfully, the courts were (at that time) smart enough to figure out that technological innovation was much more important than maintaining the status quo.
We're running up against the same class of problem with the Internet - old ideas need to go to make way for progress. Microsoft (and the industry of proprietary software developers), the RIAA, the MPAA, etc all stand to fold if they don't find new business models, because technological innovation and peer-to-peer Internet society threatens to make them totally irrelevant.
The proper decision for these business to make would be to adapt, but blinded by their own greed (indeed, they built these huge empires on bloody money), they've sat on standby while technology blew them by. Now, facing annihilation, they're resorting to the courts and their elite lobbyist teams to try and place the onus to adapt on new technology -- to unfarily restrain and disable new technology in such ways it not only caters to their outdated ways, but makes them even more bloody money in the process.
Ladies and gentlemen, our rights are at stake; but moreover than that, they're cheating consumers out of vast technological innovation. The onus should be placed FIRMLY on these businesses to adapt in the face of new technology. If our courts, our government representatives cannot defend our right to innovate, then I think it is time we consider their next replacements. In the mean time, we need to let these organizations know that we're tired of contributing to their pile of bloody money, and remind them that even the biggest couch potatos of our ranks all have their breaking point.
Microsoft (despite late leakage) has traditionally employed some of the brightest minds in the industry. Granted, their quality contributions and suggestions are often quelched by the different priorities of upper management.
Microsoft, as a company, is anything but dumb. The reason that we're starting to see small rocks fall off their mountain, in preparation of the eventual avalanche, is because they've built a $60 billion business on corrupt business practices, and the market has finally woken up to answer them.
Now, it's much more debatable that their business practices qualify as dumb. I submit that it's made them, their employees, and their investors a goddamned fortune; in that sense, it's anything but a failure. The problem is that it's not going to last. It's time for this empire to fall.
Eh, I don't think Microsoft hates America, they just hate an America that they do not control. As for the rest of your post -- what's the word "apparently?" I thought the company's mindset was common knowledge!
I bet that Microsoft already has most if not all of the code laying around to implement OpenDocument. They'll claim not to support it, of course, in an attempt to kill it so that they can use their Microsoft XML format to put open source office tools in check. (Indeed, Microsoft's vast Windows monopoly in the enterprise is increasingly reliant on their Office monopoly). Assuming Massachusetts isn't the last state to standardize on OpenDocument, though, Office will support it. And I'm sure they'll be ready to play the standard 3 E's - embrace, extend (meaning the open source tools will mysteriously crash / improperly render Office-produced OpenDocument files), and extinguish.
You could call the Massachusetts decision a victory, and I think it is certainly deserving. Just know that Microsoft isn't as dumb as many people seem to think -- you better bet they're prepared to launch their next volley.
Apple would have to provide the products, and would probably irritate Microsoft enough to drop their Office for Mac suite. But it might not be a bad idea at this point in time.
Actually, yeah. Microsoft could, in theory, insert all of the OpenOffice code to read and write OpenDocument into Office, since it is LGPL. They'd just have to contribute back changes / enhancements to the OpenDocument code itself.
Even if it was illegal, I seriously doubt anyone in their government would ever follow up on it. Massachusetts may be tired of Microsoft and ready for freedom, but I doubt that they're zealously trying to destroy the company.
Funny... as crappy as Microsoft's shit is, they could be called not only a leader but a monopoly. Yet, they seem to have a lot of hot air to let out about Linux...
It looks like that buffer overflow might be there, but it depends on stuffing lots of data into the RELAYCLIENT environment variable. Because qmail-qmtpd does not have the setuid bit, RELAYCLIENT must be set by root or the daemon user prior to dropping root. Hence this bug is totally unexploitable.
I'm a bit suspicious of how exploitable that is myself, but in any case, as shocking as it would be, it certainly wouldn't be root. qmail-qmtpd is run as an unprivileged user. Qmail's separation model rocks... if this is true, it's a chink in the armor but it's not a root exploit.
1. You can sleep at night knowing that you're running the only MTA in widespread deployment that has never once had its security compromised; in fact, qmail's author Dan Bernstein still offers cash to the first one to be successful...
2. You can sleep at night knowing that the core MTA, qmail, has reliably handled some of the largest e-mail operations in the history of the internet. Its design is such that on a properly configured system, you'll never lose a single e-mail. Hotmail actually used qmail for a long time, even after Microsoft bought them - Microsoft repeatedly tried to replace it with Exchange, which kept buckling under the load.
3. Qmail is very modular, allowing you to pick and choose your components wisely.
4. Qmail uses the Maildir format its author pioneered. Maildir is NFS safe, not proprietary/complicated (often binary formats like PST are subject to corruption), etc.
5. LDAP makes it easy to manage massive amounts of accounts.
In any case... qmail-ldap is already running large sites with millions of users. Info:
Slashdot Mirror
I think every single one of you is missing the point. First off, Neuros Audio, being in the business of making music players, has to either:
(A) Attempt to sell their business;
(B) Do something else with their time and money (why have multiple vendors in a market anyway);
(C) Simply die;
or
(D) compete with Apple.
The fact that they are alive means there is currently room for them on the market. The Slashdot submission, as is the norm, has a slant worse than the article it links. There's a big difference between being an iPod contender and an iPod killer (that's not to say Neuros wouldn't want to be an iPod killer, and not to say that they might not be some day).
Neuros Audio's move doesn't have to be of the magnitude to dethrone the iPod in order to be wise.
Hell, I think it's a spectacular idea anyway... we need more hardware manfacturers willing to open up to the community. Think about what state instant messaging would be in if the operators still held a lock on who could program for their networks. Think about what kind of lock is being held on consumer technology because open source can't go there (at least, it's been traditionally limited, but we've seen good movement with wireless routers, tivo, etc).
In fact, if you want to kill the DRM bullshit, one idea is to triple your current rate of innovation. DRM is an attempt for the legacy greedy content industry to catch the back of technology's shirt as it goes running by, and with a little more lunge, we might just see the old model blow away like it damn well should. What better way to triple your rate of innovation than to invite legions of excited open source developers to something 'cool' they've never had before?
How about we just start an international mob whose purpose is to brutally murder anyone greedy enough to file patents and attempt to enforce them in obnoxious ways? We could grow our business by moving onto broader issues like human rights.
D'oh. Attached my reply to the wrong place.
You know, flexibility in the freedoms of society leads to abuse/misuse too. Are you ready for your iron chains?
On the contrary, the absolutely huge market share Perl has, combined with the 8,000+ modules available freely on CPAN, combined with the fact that well made Perl applications can readily outperform those in any other comparable language, means it's going to be around for a long time. And on the Perl6 subject, when Perl6 is available, it's going to blow the doors off of everyone else for a long time.
If what you say is true, then you could probably make millions training the rest of the world how to write fast Java portals, because so far I've only heard of them - I've never actually seen one.
By contrast, I have seen (on the far opposite end - Java disasters) an enterprise application that would have made the most rabid Java programmers cream their pants in terms of the sheer "architecture" to it all... yet, its only problem was that it took around *90 seconds* to answer a fucking query.
When the fuck did you assholes show up in my industry? You're the reason I have to wait *seconds* when I click links on many major websites (read: J2EE websites). We live in the age of cable modems and fiber to the fucking curb... I shouldn't be surfing at dialup speeds whenever I happen across one of these 'miracles of modern engineering'. "Slight" performance increase for doing it the manly way? Bullshit! Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!
Who the fuck is raising this generation to think that mediocrity is totally a-Okay, and that you shouldn't have to know anything about a computer to use (let alone program) it?
Information needs to be free to have a free society. I love getting carried away on Wiki by looking up one obscure topic, finding heaps of valuable information which piques my curiosity further, leading me to more wikipedia articles until I've exhausted a slow afternoon at work.
Seriously, though, I tend to trust the information on Wikipedia more than I would a traditional source. It's the same reason I trust open source software more than closed source - sure, anyone could write intentionally harmful code to nuke my hard drive, but peer review all over the process prevents it from ever getting anywhere.
By contrast, the "closed-source", traditional encyclopedia has plenty of opportunity for bias and inaccuracies.
Information, in general, is never 100% accurate, just as no software is 100% perfect. The secret to being an intelligent human being on earth is exposing yourself to as much information and opinion as possible, then filtering through it to find out what works best.
Cogent's statement:
Cogent Network Status/DNS Server Status Description:
Date: 10/05/2005
Level 3 has partitioned its part of the Internet from Cogent's part of the Internet by denying Level 3's
customers access to Cogent's customers and denying Cogent's customers access to Level 3 customers. Level 3
terminated its peering with Cogent without cause (as permitted under its peering agreement with Cogent)
even though both Cogent and Level 3 remained in full compliance with the previously existing interconnection
agreement.
Many Level 3 customers can still exchange traffic with Cogent customers because the Level 3 customer is multi-
homed, i.e. it also has a connection to Cogent or to one of the many other networks with which Cogent has a
peering relationship. As described below Cogent is offering a solution to Level 3 customers that are not multi-homed.
Cogent will offer any Level 3 customer, who is single homed to the Level 3 network as of October 5, 2005,
one year of full Internet transit free of charge at the same bandwidth currently being supplied by Level 3.
Cogent will provide this connectivity in over 1,000 locations throughout North America and Europe.
Cogent is committed to an open Internet. The existing interconnection facilities between Level 3 and Cogent
remain intact. Cogent hopes that Level 3 will reactivate these connections, restoring a full level of service
to their customers.
For more information on Cogent's offer of free Internet transit, please call:
NORTH AMERICA: 1-877-875-4432
EUROPE: +33 (0)1 49 03 19 30
Dude, share the crack! I've been fiending!
Lessig reminds of an interesting supreme court case that centered around the invention of the airplane. In early days, your 'property' was the area of the land you owned, all the way up to the heavens. The case was a farmer suing a pilot for flying over his land, on the basis that doing so was trespassing. Thankfully, the courts were (at that time) smart enough to figure out that technological innovation was much more important than maintaining the status quo.
We're running up against the same class of problem with the Internet - old ideas need to go to make way for progress. Microsoft (and the industry of proprietary software developers), the RIAA, the MPAA, etc all stand to fold if they don't find new business models, because technological innovation and peer-to-peer Internet society threatens to make them totally irrelevant.
The proper decision for these business to make would be to adapt, but blinded by their own greed (indeed, they built these huge empires on bloody money), they've sat on standby while technology blew them by. Now, facing annihilation, they're resorting to the courts and their elite lobbyist teams to try and place the onus to adapt on new technology -- to unfarily restrain and disable new technology in such ways it not only caters to their outdated ways, but makes them even more bloody money in the process.
Ladies and gentlemen, our rights are at stake; but moreover than that, they're cheating consumers out of vast technological innovation. The onus should be placed FIRMLY on these businesses to adapt in the face of new technology. If our courts, our government representatives cannot defend our right to innovate, then I think it is time we consider their next replacements. In the mean time, we need to let these organizations know that we're tired of contributing to their pile of bloody money, and remind them that even the biggest couch potatos of our ranks all have their breaking point.
Big shocker tonight at 9 - another case of PHP failing to scale.
Microsoft (despite late leakage) has traditionally employed some of the brightest minds in the industry. Granted, their quality contributions and suggestions are often quelched by the different priorities of upper management.
Microsoft, as a company, is anything but dumb. The reason that we're starting to see small rocks fall off their mountain, in preparation of the eventual avalanche, is because they've built a $60 billion business on corrupt business practices, and the market has finally woken up to answer them.
Now, it's much more debatable that their business practices qualify as dumb. I submit that it's made them, their employees, and their investors a goddamned fortune; in that sense, it's anything but a failure. The problem is that it's not going to last. It's time for this empire to fall.
Eh, I don't think Microsoft hates America, they just hate an America that they do not control. As for the rest of your post -- what's the word "apparently?" I thought the company's mindset was common knowledge!
I bet that Microsoft already has most if not all of the code laying around to implement OpenDocument. They'll claim not to support it, of course, in an attempt to kill it so that they can use their Microsoft XML format to put open source office tools in check. (Indeed, Microsoft's vast Windows monopoly in the enterprise is increasingly reliant on their Office monopoly). Assuming Massachusetts isn't the last state to standardize on OpenDocument, though, Office will support it. And I'm sure they'll be ready to play the standard 3 E's - embrace, extend (meaning the open source tools will mysteriously crash / improperly render Office-produced OpenDocument files), and extinguish.
You could call the Massachusetts decision a victory, and I think it is certainly deserving. Just know that Microsoft isn't as dumb as many people seem to think -- you better bet they're prepared to launch their next volley.
Apple would have to provide the products, and would probably irritate Microsoft enough to drop their Office for Mac suite. But it might not be a bad idea at this point in time.
Actually, yeah. Microsoft could, in theory, insert all of the OpenOffice code to read and write OpenDocument into Office, since it is LGPL. They'd just have to contribute back changes / enhancements to the OpenDocument code itself.
Even if it was illegal, I seriously doubt anyone in their government would ever follow up on it. Massachusetts may be tired of Microsoft and ready for freedom, but I doubt that they're zealously trying to destroy the company.
Now with CSS3 support and a nice ACID2-passing KHTML in 3.5! :)
You mean large-scale development of sites like Amazon.com or Slashdot.org?
Oh, and Pugs is written in another language because Perl6 is meant to be self-hosting, and hence needs to be bootstrapped.
Funny... as crappy as Microsoft's shit is, they could be called not only a leader but a monopoly. Yet, they seem to have a lot of hot air to let out about Linux...
It looks like that buffer overflow might be there, but it depends on stuffing lots of data into the RELAYCLIENT environment variable. Because qmail-qmtpd does not have the setuid bit, RELAYCLIENT must be set by root or the daemon user prior to dropping root. Hence this bug is totally unexploitable.
e /2004-March/018191.html
http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/full-disclosur
But I agree with the sentiment - oh so close!
I'm a bit suspicious of how exploitable that is myself, but in any case, as shocking as it would be, it certainly wouldn't be root. qmail-qmtpd is run as an unprivileged user. Qmail's separation model rocks... if this is true, it's a chink in the armor but it's not a root exploit.
qmail-ldap is best suited to this task. Reasons:
1. You can sleep at night knowing that you're running the only MTA in widespread deployment that has never once had its security compromised; in fact, qmail's author Dan Bernstein still offers cash to the first one to be successful...
2. You can sleep at night knowing that the core MTA, qmail, has reliably handled some of the largest e-mail operations in the history of the internet. Its design is such that on a properly configured system, you'll never lose a single e-mail. Hotmail actually used qmail for a long time, even after Microsoft bought them - Microsoft repeatedly tried to replace it with Exchange, which kept buckling under the load.
3. Qmail is very modular, allowing you to pick and choose your components wisely.
4. Qmail uses the Maildir format its author pioneered. Maildir is NFS safe, not proprietary/complicated (often binary formats like PST are subject to corruption), etc.
5. LDAP makes it easy to manage massive amounts of accounts.
In any case... qmail-ldap is already running large sites with millions of users. Info:
http://www.qmail-ldap.org/wiki/Documentation
I've set one of these systems up on an IT cluster at my current office, and I must say that it is not only very robust but also really easy to manage.
Once again, OS X x86 (unless hacked) will not run on a generic IBM PC. You're likely to run into driver issues even if it is hacked.
Also, changing the architecture isn't going to do anything for their performance problems.