We installed blaster, I mean, XP in the office here and before the install was complete it got the blaster virus. Didn't have a chance to firewall it. It was already behind a firewall. But that doesn't help you when you have a bunch of Windows systems on your network. You have to physically disconnect the ethernet from your PC before installing XP to be absolutely sure it won't get infected before you have a chance to "secure" it.
How many worms did you have to clean off your Linux systems last year?
Linux may not be much more secure than Windows but at least my Linux boxes don't go spreading malicious code around my office faster than I can patch 'em. In fact, I don't remember ever patching in Linux box in 2003. Hrmmm, I wonder why that is..
At least with Linux I don't have to worry about security unless I put it in a production environment. Then I only need to worry about keeping up-to-date with patches.
My Linux desktop doesn't get viruses, send viruses, or take out office routers. I wish I could say the same for my Microsoft products.
Yeah, but we need a New(tm) standard. Because ebook(tm)s are a New(tm) product that will soon be making a profit for Some(r) company.
Unfortunately Someother(r) company will probably sue them for violating their patents, making Some(r) company's New(tm) ebook(tm) standard less than profitable.
Oh well, maybe civilization just isn't ready for Some(r) company's ebook(tm)s.
Yeah, fining them would either cost them or their customers money. This would be a good thing IMO since I am no longer an AT&T customer and never will be again. Maybe it would convince more of their customers to cop an attitude like me.:)
I agree. The seas still have at least 20% of the large fish in them. This will last us at least another 10 years. So we have plenty of time to look at the pros and cons of our actions and decisions reguarding change and progress. No need to hurry.
Same goes for petrol, global warming and any other large scale problems. I just hope when we do finally decide to take action that we didn't just sit around smoking dope the whole time, but actually did the research and QA necessary to release a healthy product.
I'm just glad I have no authority over these matters. I care too much to care.
Re:Insurance isn't for what you think it's for.
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 1
I'll be busy giving my kids a not quite so pessimistic view of the world.
I hope they believe whatever you tell them.
How many years of labor do you think they will pay for their lives?
Life is time. We've got a long time to think about these things, or not. But when your time is all used up, there really was no point in ever having this discussion. Was there?
Re:Insurance isn't for what you think it's for.
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 1
Thanks:)
Your sentiment is appreciated.. I love you too.
Re:Insurance isn't for what you think it's for.
on
Stealth Inflation
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This stealth inflation really must be true..
Half a million for the birth of two healthy boys? Just think humans used to do that for free.:)
Times really have changed and money has no value. What does a million mean to you?
Absolute destruction of all past and future income? You act as if that's a bad thing.
Look, I'd rather die than live a long life in this system of metrics, insurance and taxes. I know how much people like you love paying bills and managing your coins, but its not worth having 2.5 kids and a dog for me. I would rather not bring an innocent child into a fucked up world like this. You can have your capitalism and eat it too.
The way I look at it is it is up to the users to decide how much control they want to have over their systems. I don't have to network with them and they don't have to network with me if they think it might not be safe, or if they don't want to take any responsibility for it.
The more computers under Microsoft's control the better, IMO. Maybe I'll be getting less traffic from viruses and worms. Maybe I'll be getting fewer questions about how things work since I won't ever be working with that technology (they are on their own). Maybe I'll get a good laugh when I find out how much they paid for it.:)
Okay, whatever you say. I don't have either a phone or cable service any longer. Besides, I can take care of myself. I know exactly what to do in case of an emergency.
use open standards and agile/eXtreme (non waterfall) development models.
Not to mention all those cool sounding words. Was that from the tenth edition of the newspeak dictionary?
I just love the competition OSS gives to all those closed-source developement models, specially the big companies. It makes them rewrite their dictionary almost every year now.:)
Re:Moore's Law vs. Evolution
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 1
So basicly you recommend that we cut off access to people who can't remember their passwords or use the proper encryption protocols?
Isn't that like forcing people to use Linux?
I have no problems with that, but the majority of the population will not agree with us. They need this computer thing to conform to them, which is why we have to make them insecure and easy to use.
Since most security problems are the users themselves then what we need is better education for the users. We need to teach them how to remember a 20 digit password, how to create a secure password, and how to manage hundreds of these passwords in a secure manner that will not put the organization at risk.
We also need to reteach them about communication. Most of the security problems I can imagine are from communications across insecure channels. Passwords should never be sent over IM, email, http or any other protocol unless it has been properly encrypted.
What proper encryption means needs to be determined by your organzation. But most corporations I've worked for seem to think that you only need to secure the password, then the data is transmitted without encryption. This type of "security" just makes me throw up my hands and say forget-it, so I use horribly easy to remember and insecure passwords and stop caring about confidential information because obviously They don't.
The security variable is a boolean value. Either you are secure or you are not.
And even if you're secure it doesn't mean you're uncrackable. You've just given them a challenge, like the ATM card.
The way I like to see it happen is for techs to just take a step around the regulatory bodies, the industry, anyone who thinks they are in a position of authority and just implement the technology, create their own standard and make it work well, for free, using highly competitive technology.
The phone and the TV will both become software on the computer, just like the radio and stereo.
Sure we could keep it all separate and have a separate phone, cable and internet bill. But if you're going to buy a computer for something anyway why not just integrate everything into it and have one bill to deal with.
Who thinks its a good idea to give Comcast $50/mo for internet and basic cable service, and then turn around and pay SBC another $25/mo for phone service? And then be charged for hidden numbers, do-not-call lists, FCC and other regulatory taxes and fees, converter boxes, wasted time install/repairing failed service, etc.
These companies need to learn how to do it right. We've paid them billions, but they have no motivation, no competition. The internet and the computer change all of that. If we're smart enough to exploit their potential.
Lets say you invested BILLIONS of dollars in a supercomputer, then along came apple with the G5 and gives you the option to build another supercomputer that's 10 times as fast as your current system, out of cheap off-the-shelf PCs, no less. Do you upgrade to the cheap systems or do you continue dumping money into maintenance and repair of your old supercomputer?
If economics has taught me one thing its that you can't go back and get those BILLIONS of dollars you "invested". Investing in computer hardware is the same thing as throwing that money into the waste bin. You better get your moneys worth out of it while it lasts, because in 5 years it won't be worth the electricity to run it.
Do you think that the EU should bow to the US and degrade a service provided to everyone on the off possibility that the US might need to disrupt it going after a particular individual/group?
I might if I thought the US was actually capable of capturing a particular individual/group.;)
Perhaps it would be more intelligent of the community to make a note of all the specific problems they find in reviews like this article, enter bug reports for the appropriate projects and continue with their work..
Some good things we in the OSS community have is a bunch of intelligent people who can communicate well with eachother. We can use this resource of ours to educate the community how it should act appropriately, for any culture/society, as well as build the most innovative and competitive products any capitalist society has ever seen. It already is happening, but through cooperation, tolerance, solidarity, etc. We can bring it to the next level.
Not necessarily. Linux could run just as well on their hardware as it does on x86, if Sun wanted to do some of the work to get it there.
They would have access to all the software that runs on x86 Linux, like the stuff to use audio cards, firewire, usb cams, etc. And make their Sparc stations more useful.
Anyone know if you can use a firewire harddrive with a Sun Blade system? Does Solaris support this hardware? What filesystems are limited to?
With Linux they could have no limits and plenty of extra time to work on hardware and sales.
But it seems like they're doing fine with their China deal and all. How that happened is beyond me, tho. Some crazy voodoo happenin here.
Pretend you're an electron in a Hydrogen atom. Now imagine how large the proton is, that you orbit all day. Its so huge you could probably live on its surface, along with 1000 other electrons, in your own electron village. But Protons don't like that so they push all you lazy dirty electrons away and make you get a job.
Anyway, to make a long story short, electrons push eachother around in a wire, so things like AC work. And they're really tiny, so the wires can be made really really small. In fact, most atoms are smaller than 1 nm. And an electron is the smallest part of an atom.
So it should be theoretically possible to build a CPU down to 1nm and still be able to function as long as we have the right insulation/technology to control things at that size. I would hope we would be using self-replicating nanorobots built out of atoms by then.
If any corporation in a capitalist system discovers a way to make a CPU run at Y Ghz, it would do its best to slowly increase clock rate from the current speed CPUs at X Ghz up to Y so it can maximize profits.
There is no incentive to rush unless you have competition. And we're talking top of the line CPUs here. Competition would need several billion dollars and some really smart people to even dream of competing.
Just look at the Alpha. Where would be today if we could have prevented DEC from being bought out? More advanced than we are. But where could we be today if all these CPU manufacturers shared ideas and worked together to build the best CPUs they are capable of? 60nm!
Where will we be tomorrow when we decide we don't need more computing power and its no longer profitable to make CPUs?
Then use our technology to automate all the jobs people don't like doing so we have plenty of time to do all the jobs we like doing.
Then create new jobs by having the people go to a website and tell everyone else exactly what they would like. Kinda like bugzilla, but for everything.
And part of this system would involve changing our media system to promote education, by having many educational channels, no manipulative or dishonest commercials, commercials would consist of advertising the products real specs, etc. Media should promote the general mental health and welfare of the people. Get the word out when a town is losing jobs, getting poor, etc.
Poverty causes people to be unintelligent and miserable. Happy people usually like to do things. So we need to have a bunch of wealthy happy people so we have all the things we want.
Wealth is just owning property. If we shared more property maybe it would be easier to have access to more property and own more property. Make things efficient and do it the right way the first time so we don't have to do it over and over and over again, wasting resources. And go out and collect more resources, if that's what we need.
I think there are answers to all these problems, if we could cooperate and work together to solve them and take care of eachother.
Slashdot Mirror
We installed blaster, I mean, XP in the office here and before the install was complete it got the blaster virus. Didn't have a chance to firewall it. It was already behind a firewall. But that doesn't help you when you have a bunch of Windows systems on your network. You have to physically disconnect the ethernet from your PC before installing XP to be absolutely sure it won't get infected before you have a chance to "secure" it.
How many worms did you have to clean off your Linux systems last year?
Linux may not be much more secure than Windows but at least my Linux boxes don't go spreading malicious code around my office faster than I can patch 'em. In fact, I don't remember ever patching in Linux box in 2003. Hrmmm, I wonder why that is..
At least with Linux I don't have to worry about security unless I put it in a production environment. Then I only need to worry about keeping up-to-date with patches.
My Linux desktop doesn't get viruses, send viruses, or take out office routers. I wish I could say the same for my Microsoft products.
Or if Microsoft's lawsuit is already popularly considered valid then lawsuits like this one bring a big bright smile to my face.
Its nice to see what comes around goes around.
Yeah, but we need a New(tm) standard. Because ebook(tm)s are a New(tm) product that will soon be making a profit for Some(r) company.
Unfortunately Someother(r) company will probably sue them for violating their patents, making Some(r) company's New(tm) ebook(tm) standard less than profitable.
Oh well, maybe civilization just isn't ready for Some(r) company's ebook(tm)s.
Yeah, the llama's ass got whipped by AOL. Haha! :)
Yeah, I often wonder if anything you develope with Microsoft's Visual C++ is owned by Microsoft, too. I wish they explained these things better..
Yeah, fining them would either cost them or their customers money. This would be a good thing IMO since I am no longer an AT&T customer and never will be again. Maybe it would convince more of their customers to cop an attitude like me. :)
I agree. The seas still have at least 20% of the large fish in them. This will last us at least another 10 years. So we have plenty of time to look at the pros and cons of our actions and decisions reguarding change and progress. No need to hurry.
Same goes for petrol, global warming and any other large scale problems. I just hope when we do finally decide to take action that we didn't just sit around smoking dope the whole time, but actually did the research and QA necessary to release a healthy product.
I'm just glad I have no authority over these matters. I care too much to care.
I'll be busy giving my kids a not quite so pessimistic view of the world.
I hope they believe whatever you tell them.
How many years of labor do you think they will pay for their lives?
Life is time. We've got a long time to think about these things, or not. But when your time is all used up, there really was no point in ever having this discussion. Was there?
Thanks :)
Your sentiment is appreciated.. I love you too.
This stealth inflation really must be true..
:)
Half a million for the birth of two healthy boys? Just think humans used to do that for free.
Times really have changed and money has no value. What does a million mean to you?
Absolute destruction of all past and future income? You act as if that's a bad thing.
Look, I'd rather die than live a long life in this system of metrics, insurance and taxes. I know how much people like you love paying bills and managing your coins, but its not worth having 2.5 kids and a dog for me. I would rather not bring an innocent child into a fucked up world like this. You can have your capitalism and eat it too.
The way I look at it is it is up to the users to decide how much control they want to have over their systems. I don't have to network with them and they don't have to network with me if they think it might not be safe, or if they don't want to take any responsibility for it.
:)
The more computers under Microsoft's control the better, IMO. Maybe I'll be getting less traffic from viruses and worms. Maybe I'll be getting fewer questions about how things work since I won't ever be working with that technology (they are on their own). Maybe I'll get a good laugh when I find out how much they paid for it.
Okay, whatever you say. I don't have either a phone or cable service any longer. Besides, I can take care of myself. I know exactly what to do in case of an emergency.
use open standards and agile/eXtreme (non waterfall) development models.
:)
Not to mention all those cool sounding words. Was that from the tenth edition of the newspeak dictionary?
I just love the competition OSS gives to all those closed-source developement models, specially the big companies. It makes them rewrite their dictionary almost every year now.
So basicly you recommend that we cut off access to people who can't remember their passwords or use the proper encryption protocols?
Isn't that like forcing people to use Linux?
I have no problems with that, but the majority of the population will not agree with us. They need this computer thing to conform to them, which is why we have to make them insecure and easy to use.
Since most security problems are the users themselves then what we need is better education for the users. We need to teach them how to remember a 20 digit password, how to create a secure password, and how to manage hundreds of these passwords in a secure manner that will not put the organization at risk.
We also need to reteach them about communication. Most of the security problems I can imagine are from communications across insecure channels. Passwords should never be sent over IM, email, http or any other protocol unless it has been properly encrypted.
What proper encryption means needs to be determined by your organzation. But most corporations I've worked for seem to think that you only need to secure the password, then the data is transmitted without encryption. This type of "security" just makes me throw up my hands and say forget-it, so I use horribly easy to remember and insecure passwords and stop caring about confidential information because obviously They don't.
The security variable is a boolean value. Either you are secure or you are not.
And even if you're secure it doesn't mean you're uncrackable. You've just given them a challenge, like the ATM card.
The way I like to see it happen is for techs to just take a step around the regulatory bodies, the industry, anyone who thinks they are in a position of authority and just implement the technology, create their own standard and make it work well, for free, using highly competitive technology.
The phone and the TV will both become software on the computer, just like the radio and stereo.
Sure we could keep it all separate and have a separate phone, cable and internet bill. But if you're going to buy a computer for something anyway why not just integrate everything into it and have one bill to deal with.
Who thinks its a good idea to give Comcast $50/mo for internet and basic cable service, and then turn around and pay SBC another $25/mo for phone service? And then be charged for hidden numbers, do-not-call lists, FCC and other regulatory taxes and fees, converter boxes, wasted time install/repairing failed service, etc.
These companies need to learn how to do it right. We've paid them billions, but they have no motivation, no competition. The internet and the computer change all of that. If we're smart enough to exploit their potential.
So..
Cry a river to Microsoft. They wrote NTFS, tell them to port it.
How much do you want to pay for it?
Don't like it? Don't use NTFS! And laugh at all your friends whenever you catch them doing it.
Lets say you invested BILLIONS of dollars in a supercomputer, then along came apple with the G5 and gives you the option to build another supercomputer that's 10 times as fast as your current system, out of cheap off-the-shelf PCs, no less. Do you upgrade to the cheap systems or do you continue dumping money into maintenance and repair of your old supercomputer?
If economics has taught me one thing its that you can't go back and get those BILLIONS of dollars you "invested". Investing in computer hardware is the same thing as throwing that money into the waste bin. You better get your moneys worth out of it while it lasts, because in 5 years it won't be worth the electricity to run it.
Do you think that the EU should bow to the US and degrade a service provided to everyone on the off possibility that the US might need to disrupt it going after a particular individual/group?
;)
I might if I thought the US was actually capable of capturing a particular individual/group.
Perhaps it would be more intelligent of the community to make a note of all the specific problems they find in reviews like this article, enter bug reports for the appropriate projects and continue with their work..
:)
Some good things we in the OSS community have is a bunch of intelligent people who can communicate well with eachother. We can use this resource of ours to educate the community how it should act appropriately, for any culture/society, as well as build the most innovative and competitive products any capitalist society has ever seen. It already is happening, but through cooperation, tolerance, solidarity, etc. We can bring it to the next level.
Hows about a global education network? Eh?
Its all for the love of it.
Not necessarily. Linux could run just as well on their hardware as it does on x86, if Sun wanted to do some of the work to get it there.
They would have access to all the software that runs on x86 Linux, like the stuff to use audio cards, firewire, usb cams, etc. And make their Sparc stations more useful.
Anyone know if you can use a firewire harddrive with a Sun Blade system? Does Solaris support this hardware? What filesystems are limited to?
With Linux they could have no limits and plenty of extra time to work on hardware and sales.
But it seems like they're doing fine with their China deal and all. How that happened is beyond me, tho. Some crazy voodoo happenin here.
Yeah, but I've used their desktop systems. These wouldn't be any faster than my 400 Mhz PII.
Maybe if they put Linux on it and sold it for $500..
Pretend you're an electron in a Hydrogen atom. Now imagine how large the proton is, that you orbit all day. Its so huge you could probably live on its surface, along with 1000 other electrons, in your own electron village. But Protons don't like that so they push all you lazy dirty electrons away and make you get a job.
Anyway, to make a long story short, electrons push eachother around in a wire, so things like AC work. And they're really tiny, so the wires can be made really really small. In fact, most atoms are smaller than 1 nm. And an electron is the smallest part of an atom.
So it should be theoretically possible to build a CPU down to 1nm and still be able to function as long as we have the right insulation/technology to control things at that size. I would hope we would be using self-replicating nanorobots built out of atoms by then.
If any corporation in a capitalist system discovers a way to make a CPU run at Y Ghz, it would do its best to slowly increase clock rate from the current speed CPUs at X Ghz up to Y so it can maximize profits.
There is no incentive to rush unless you have competition. And we're talking top of the line CPUs here. Competition would need several billion dollars and some really smart people to even dream of competing.
Just look at the Alpha. Where would be today if we could have prevented DEC from being bought out? More advanced than we are. But where could we be today if all these CPU manufacturers shared ideas and worked together to build the best CPUs they are capable of? 60nm!
Where will we be tomorrow when we decide we don't need more computing power and its no longer profitable to make CPUs?
My theory to fix this is to get rid of money.
Then use our technology to automate all the jobs people don't like doing so we have plenty of time to do all the jobs we like doing.
Then create new jobs by having the people go to a website and tell everyone else exactly what they would like. Kinda like bugzilla, but for everything.
And part of this system would involve changing our media system to promote education, by having many educational channels, no manipulative or dishonest commercials, commercials would consist of advertising the products real specs, etc. Media should promote the general mental health and welfare of the people. Get the word out when a town is losing jobs, getting poor, etc.
Poverty causes people to be unintelligent and miserable. Happy people usually like to do things. So we need to have a bunch of wealthy happy people so we have all the things we want.
Wealth is just owning property. If we shared more property maybe it would be easier to have access to more property and own more property. Make things efficient and do it the right way the first time so we don't have to do it over and over and over again, wasting resources. And go out and collect more resources, if that's what we need.
I think there are answers to all these problems, if we could cooperate and work together to solve them and take care of eachother.