A big company is going the cheap and dirty way to make some cash, and I'm not surprised. If there isn't a culture of "We make money by respecting the customer" at a company, you can expect the customer to get screwed over as soon as some marketing dude deems it convenient.
This is a great idea on their part. They will become a player in the Web browser market by doing this, since Opera is actually quite a bit better then anything else out there. This might cost the a bit in whatever they stood to make from selling licenses, but they will now have a strategic advantage (i.e. more to say about how the Web works) with their increasing marketshare.
The new companies will be the ones who are able to make the new paradigm work. It will take a while to sort itself out, but soon a few companies will come around that do not base their entire business model on hyping physical copies out the door. I would be extrememly surprised if one of the established recording industry behemoths were able to make this transition; the bigger the organization, the greater the inertia.
"We are still in a world where an attack like the slammer worm combined with a PC BIOS eraser or disk locking tool could wipe out half the PCs exposed to the internet in a few hours. In a sense we are fortunate that most attackers want to control and use systems they attack rather than destroy them."
Bet that would get people switching in droves to "alternative" operating systems which were immune to the attack.
Here is my answer: If you want more interesting, independent (games/music/books/software) go seek it out. It will take you more work. If you are satisfied with the same mainstream bullshit that gets shoveled out to the lowest common denominator, go to (insert large store) and buy it. Independent stuff is out there, and there will be more if people start buying it.
What, Microsoft crippling an open standard in favour of their own, thereby forcing developers into using an MS technology so that their products are less able to run on other platforms, leading to users being locked in to Windows?!?! I never thought they'd try something dirty like this.
Successful Open Source projects need a large enough base of people who care. In other words, the more common the need, the more likely it is that a Free solution will come up. Proprietary software only deserves to exist if a company can make software that is better than what can be made by people who are pooling their efforts out of the interest of making something they can all use.
Let's see, the death penalty for writing a virus that disrupts someone's ability to get their work done for a little while, but we still hand out comparative slaps on the wrist for rape.
We need to move to a new system. I think all high level decisions should be made by one person. They should pick a retired American sports icon who, while not understanding the finer points of politcs, has a good heart and knows when to reap and when to sow. Him, or maybe an actor!
We are talking about working with tech in a business. It's easy for us tech folks to assume that what we are interested in doing with tech matches a company's goals, but this is rarely so. A company is not interested in technical brilliance if that is not their core business, they are interested in using the tech to help them make money. You can't do that sitting in a cube, and only people who can talk to non-tech people in business and figure out how to use tech to help them will be useful to these (non-high tech) companies.
Wouldn't it be something if MS had trouble functioning in markets because of their past and current monopoly abuses? Sounds like, I dunno, justice or something.
Why other companies haven't thought about this, I have no idea
What other companies make "server" software that allows someone to configure something without understanding what they are doing? I'm assuming the other companies you are talking about are all *nix vendors of some sort, and they don't have the same incidence of their customers plugging unpatched boxes into live, unfiltered networks.
And internally, certain ports have to be open to work. These will have to open on the new firewall, which means the firewall does dick.
Actually, good firewalls allow you to restrict which hosts can access these certain ports. This is the difference between these certain ports being accessible to the world and only trusted hosts getting access to your certain ports. That is quite a difference, and something you couldn't make the crippled Windows Firewall that came with server 2003 do. Because that would have made it actually useful. So, a good firewall does more than dick, even if certain ports have to be open.
And then suddenly, MySQL isn't quite so fast. It used to be, if you need a speedy db and don't need all the fancy features (like integrity) you choose MySQL. If you want to sacrifice a little speed but need features, you got PostgreSQL. Products should stick to what they're good at.
Mentally and emotionally, I don't think that I would have been able to try anything like that right out of high school.
I travelled through Europe when I was 18 for 2 months on my own. I don't think I would have had the perspective on what's important in life and what's not that I relied on through university if I hadn't. That's just me, however.
But I think most people would be surprised what they were capable of if they just pushed themselves. My advice is, if you're thinking about it, go.
How clueless do legislators have to be to make an act which actually legitimizes spam? I have low hopes for US lawmakers to respond to increased corporate control of people's lives with legislation that protects the rights of citizens. I hope I'm proven wrong.
No. That is not cache poisoning, since it doesn't poison a cache. All DNS servers will cache records that they had to look up. It works like this: Someone queries a DNS server, asking what IP an address maps to. This DNS server doesn't know, and must query another server to find out. Our DNS server sends the query out to another DNS server that would know the answer (the authoritative server for that domain) and waits for a response. When it receives this response, it answers the original query and caches the response so the next time the same query is made it has the answer.
What the attacker does is sends out several (as in, a LOT of) queries to a DNS server for a name, say bank.com. Then, the same attacker sends out several (!) spoofed answers to this query, saying that bank.com maps to a certain address, which is actually some server the attacker controls. The goal is that your bogus response will beat the real response and be accepted by the target DNS server. If the attack is successful, this bogus answer is cached, so when someone else goes to look up bank.com from that particular DNS server, they get the IP of the attacker's server.
The trick is that a DNS server will pick a random number that it assigns to the query sent out to the next DNS server. The response must contain this number for it to be accepted as authentic. The attacker very rarely can know what that number is, hence the large amount of query and answer packets that must be sent out (you are essentially trying to get lucky and hope that one of your fake response packet's number matches one of the server's query packets). In a perfect world, these numbers would be truly random and an immense amount of bandwidth would be required to get enough packets to the server to have a shot at guessing correctly. However, many of the DNS servers pick random numbers out of a much smaller field than they should.
If you were, you would realize the potential of anyone to "control" an OSS project. All it takes is work. Evidently these big corporations have a stake and are willing to put in the work to improve this software. That doesn't mean you or I cannot take their improvements and use them however we want, including throwing them out. No one can truly control an OSS project. Their control is tenuous and based on the acceptance of the users of their software. If they screw it up, somebody takes the good bits, starts their own project, and does it right. The users flock to the one they prefer.
What's with the Flash? (Completly off topic, btw)
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Why is every single band website you visit these days completely dependent on Flash? Can bands not hire competent web designers as a rule or something?
I have started to develop a reflex action when I see a page load up where the entire centre is obviously a Flash object of just closing the tab. It's almost automatic now. I have to really want to see a site to put up with Flash these days.
Don't get me wrong, there are places where Flash is handy (webtoons), but not for cranking out these baroque, unnavigatable monstrosities that have my system load sitting at 50% just so the guy can have animated buttons and cool looking scrollies. I have (rarely) seen some wonderful examples of artistic and creative Flash work, but it's somehow never contributed to the useability of the site. You want cool effects, learn CSS and DHTML, don't just braindump your creation into whatever Macromedia product facilitates these things. (If you want to see what is possible using only CSS, look here [using a browser that's not IE, of course]) And if you find that you can't do something using functionality built into web standards, that means (95% of the time) that what you are trying to do is going to be very annoying for people visiting you site, so don't do it.
There is an Apache module that allows you to run ASP.NET stuff under linux here. You need the mod_mono, the XSP server, and all of Mono. If you're using a distro with packages you're in luck. I compiled and installed on Slackware, which, although time consuming, was not difficult. Works pretty well once you get it configured.
There seems to be no real "meat" to this article, they talk about how we will get "raw data files" which we can encode to anything we want. That's really nothing new to me, and I get the feeling that the article is written for people who are not techinically inclined and don't care about the details (which basically renders it useless to me). I mean "the new format is no format, what we will get is a data file"...but what format would the datafile be in?
One interesting thing that the article almost hints at is a change in ideas about how music is distributed and musicians make money. The say that artists will make lots of different stuff (different tracks, videos, album art) available and you choose what to "consume". They don't however, say how this will be distributed, and this is an interesting thing to speculate on. I, for one, would be excited to see the music industry move towards a subsription based model, where you pay a fee to subscribe to your favourite artists and in exchange you get to download tracks, see what the artist has been up to, etc. (I'm not in the business of marketing, somebody else can figure out the details here). This would reward bands that have a loyal following and can keep people's interest for years, and eliminate the hype-marketing that is responsible for convincing so many people to buy crap music.
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A big company is going the cheap and dirty way to make some cash, and I'm not surprised. If there isn't a culture of "We make money by respecting the customer" at a company, you can expect the customer to get screwed over as soon as some marketing dude deems it convenient.
This is a great idea on their part. They will become a player in the Web browser market by doing this, since Opera is actually quite a bit better then anything else out there. This might cost the a bit in whatever they stood to make from selling licenses, but they will now have a strategic advantage (i.e. more to say about how the Web works) with their increasing marketshare.
The new companies will be the ones who are able to make the new paradigm work. It will take a while to sort itself out, but soon a few companies will come around that do not base their entire business model on hyping physical copies out the door. I would be extrememly surprised if one of the established recording industry behemoths were able to make this transition; the bigger the organization, the greater the inertia.
Bet that would get people switching in droves to "alternative" operating systems which were immune to the attack.
Here is my answer: If you want more interesting, independent (games/music/books/software) go seek it out. It will take you more work. If you are satisfied with the same mainstream bullshit that gets shoveled out to the lowest common denominator, go to (insert large store) and buy it. Independent stuff is out there, and there will be more if people start buying it.
What, Microsoft crippling an open standard in favour of their own, thereby forcing developers into using an MS technology so that their products are less able to run on other platforms, leading to users being locked in to Windows?!?! I never thought they'd try something dirty like this.
Oh wait...
How so very NOT SURPRISING.
Successful Open Source projects need a large enough base of people who care. In other words, the more common the need, the more likely it is that a Free solution will come up. Proprietary software only deserves to exist if a company can make software that is better than what can be made by people who are pooling their efforts out of the interest of making something they can all use.
Let's see, the death penalty for writing a virus that disrupts someone's ability to get their work done for a little while, but we still hand out comparative slaps on the wrist for rape.
You've obviously never worked at a University. Obtuse people are everywhere.
We need to move to a new system. I think all high level decisions should be made by one person. They should pick a retired American sports icon who, while not understanding the finer points of politcs, has a good heart and knows when to reap and when to sow. Him, or maybe an actor!
Gtk-gnutella runs on my system of choice, iTunes does not. Sorry.
We are talking about working with tech in a business. It's easy for us tech folks to assume that what we are interested in doing with tech matches a company's goals, but this is rarely so. A company is not interested in technical brilliance if that is not their core business, they are interested in using the tech to help them make money. You can't do that sitting in a cube, and only people who can talk to non-tech people in business and figure out how to use tech to help them will be useful to these (non-high tech) companies.
Wouldn't it be something if MS had trouble functioning in markets because of their past and current monopoly abuses? Sounds like, I dunno, justice or something.
Why other companies haven't thought about this, I have no idea
What other companies make "server" software that allows someone to configure something without understanding what they are doing? I'm assuming the other companies you are talking about are all *nix vendors of some sort, and they don't have the same incidence of their customers plugging unpatched boxes into live, unfiltered networks.
And internally, certain ports have to be open to work. These will have to open on the new firewall, which means the firewall does dick.
Actually, good firewalls allow you to restrict which hosts can access these certain ports. This is the difference between these certain ports being accessible to the world and only trusted hosts getting access to your certain ports. That is quite a difference, and something you couldn't make the crippled Windows Firewall that came with server 2003 do. Because that would have made it actually useful. So, a good firewall does more than dick, even if certain ports have to be open.
And then suddenly, MySQL isn't quite so fast. It used to be, if you need a speedy db and don't need all the fancy features (like integrity) you choose MySQL. If you want to sacrifice a little speed but need features, you got PostgreSQL. Products should stick to what they're good at.
Mentally and emotionally, I don't think that I would have been able to try anything like that right out of high school.
I travelled through Europe when I was 18 for 2 months on my own. I don't think I would have had the perspective on what's important in life and what's not that I relied on through university if I hadn't. That's just me, however.
But I think most people would be surprised what they were capable of if they just pushed themselves. My advice is, if you're thinking about it, go.
How clueless do legislators have to be to make an act which actually legitimizes spam? I have low hopes for US lawmakers to respond to increased corporate control of people's lives with legislation that protects the rights of citizens. I hope I'm proven wrong.
Here's a couple of people who are happy about the possiblity of Mozilla being discontinued.
No. That is not cache poisoning, since it doesn't poison a cache. All DNS servers will cache records that they had to look up. It works like this: Someone queries a DNS server, asking what IP an address maps to. This DNS server doesn't know, and must query another server to find out. Our DNS server sends the query out to another DNS server that would know the answer (the authoritative server for that domain) and waits for a response. When it receives this response, it answers the original query and caches the response so the next time the same query is made it has the answer.
What the attacker does is sends out several (as in, a LOT of) queries to a DNS server for a name, say bank.com. Then, the same attacker sends out several (!) spoofed answers to this query, saying that bank.com maps to a certain address, which is actually some server the attacker controls. The goal is that your bogus response will beat the real response and be accepted by the target DNS server. If the attack is successful, this bogus answer is cached, so when someone else goes to look up bank.com from that particular DNS server, they get the IP of the attacker's server.
The trick is that a DNS server will pick a random number that it assigns to the query sent out to the next DNS server. The response must contain this number for it to be accepted as authentic. The attacker very rarely can know what that number is, hence the large amount of query and answer packets that must be sent out (you are essentially trying to get lucky and hope that one of your fake response packet's number matches one of the server's query packets). In a perfect world, these numbers would be truly random and an immense amount of bandwidth would be required to get enough packets to the server to have a shot at guessing correctly. However, many of the DNS servers pick random numbers out of a much smaller field than they should.
If you were, you would realize the potential of anyone to "control" an OSS project. All it takes is work. Evidently these big corporations have a stake and are willing to put in the work to improve this software. That doesn't mean you or I cannot take their improvements and use them however we want, including throwing them out. No one can truly control an OSS project. Their control is tenuous and based on the acceptance of the users of their software. If they screw it up, somebody takes the good bits, starts their own project, and does it right. The users flock to the one they prefer.
...thank god I don't live in the states.
Why is every single band website you visit these days completely dependent on Flash? Can bands not hire competent web designers as a rule or something?
I have started to develop a reflex action when I see a page load up where the entire centre is obviously a Flash object of just closing the tab. It's almost automatic now. I have to really want to see a site to put up with Flash these days.
Don't get me wrong, there are places where Flash is handy (webtoons), but not for cranking out these baroque, unnavigatable monstrosities that have my system load sitting at 50% just so the guy can have animated buttons and cool looking scrollies. I have (rarely) seen some wonderful examples of artistic and creative Flash work, but it's somehow never contributed to the useability of the site. You want cool effects, learn CSS and DHTML, don't just braindump your creation into whatever Macromedia product facilitates these things. (If you want to see what is possible using only CSS, look here [using a browser that's not IE, of course]) And if you find that you can't do something using functionality built into web standards, that means (95% of the time) that what you are trying to do is going to be very annoying for people visiting you site, so don't do it.
There is an Apache module that allows you to run ASP.NET stuff under linux here. You need the mod_mono, the XSP server, and all of Mono. If you're using a distro with packages you're in luck. I compiled and installed on Slackware, which, although time consuming, was not difficult. Works pretty well once you get it configured.
There seems to be no real "meat" to this article, they talk about how we will get "raw data files" which we can encode to anything we want. That's really nothing new to me, and I get the feeling that the article is written for people who are not techinically inclined and don't care about the details (which basically renders it useless to me). I mean "the new format is no format, what we will get is a data file"...but what format would the datafile be in?
One interesting thing that the article almost hints at is a change in ideas about how music is distributed and musicians make money. The say that artists will make lots of different stuff (different tracks, videos, album art) available and you choose what to "consume". They don't however, say how this will be distributed, and this is an interesting thing to speculate on. I, for one, would be excited to see the music industry move towards a subsription based model, where you pay a fee to subscribe to your favourite artists and in exchange you get to download tracks, see what the artist has been up to, etc. (I'm not in the business of marketing, somebody else can figure out the details here). This would reward bands that have a loyal following and can keep people's interest for years, and eliminate the hype-marketing that is responsible for convincing so many people to buy crap music.