I don't know what all you guys are complaining about. I always set my sa password to 'sa' right after I install my database. How hard is it to follow good security practices?
Yeah, and if I knew your root password, another user account+password, and you enabled telnet and su, I could log onto your [server type]server and do [bad stuff] to it.
You're right, this could be potentially dangerous. But you don't give a handgun to someone who's never used one before and act all surprised when they shoot themselves in the head(apparently experienced owners have done the same to themselves).
Maintaining and setting up a database is not a task for the unwashed masses, nor should it be designed with your typical "where's the 'any' key" user in mind. Any competent admin, and I mean ANY slightly competent DB admin knows to set the stupid default password. Anyone claiming to be competent who doesn't know about this "vulnerability" should be fired immediately.
You can implement just about any programming paradigm you like in just about any decent language you like. I could implement features that make BASIC look like Eiffel, but the problem is that it's just coding convention. To cliche, "actual mileage may vary".
Along the same lines, the question isn't "can UNIX be a modular component-based system", or even "is UNIX a modular component-based system", but rather "is UNIX being used as a modular component-based system". Looking at the current state of affairs, I'd have to say no.
The exciting thing, though, is that I'd have to say yes! to the previous two(okay, the second has a little free-play in it), and that's what I think Miguel's trying to say. The tools are there, but not enough people are using them.
Disclaimer: The following is not a whole-hearted endorsement of Linux et al. If you are easily offended by constructive criticism, please disregard this posting. Moderators: Karma exists beyond Slasdot, and it'll come to getcha.
First of all, to those of you who are criticizing Miguel by saying "Miguel is wrong because being Object Oriented isn't necessary", or "Miguel is wrong because XML isn't necessary", I hope you're keeping this in mind: Miguel's comments can be broken down into two parts("You know, there are two kinds of people in the world...":) )
1)We should be thinking about ways in which the UNIX philosophy is deficient, rather than continually reassuring ourselves that it's all okay. Look at it pragmatically: Who's got the biggest market penetration? Who's system is easier to learn to program in for the beginner, ignoring cost?
Okay, these are total flamebait questions, so please, please don't respond to these in particular. Use your imagination, and think of some ways in which Windows is better than UNIX, rather than touting all the advantages of your pet operating system. Otherwise, you're just brainwashing yourselves with your own marketing.
The question here isn't which way we should take things, it's how we should think about them. If you want to respond to this half of the question, address what the community should expect of UNIX, not how it should be done.
2)UNIX needs standards, reusability, etc. This is a set of recommendations to the community about where things should go specifically. If you agree to Miguel's motivations in the first part, then read on. His argument is based on looking at "the competition", and I can give you a concrete example.
He mentions IE, and how it's actually made up of a large collection of components rather than being a monolithic application. True. If I want IE's rendering capabilities in my application and I'm using something like Delphi(example because I actually had to do this once), Hell, I'll just draw myself a window and drop the browser component into it. You can argue about whether it's bloated code or not, but the end result is that I didn't have to reinvent the wheel to get something pretty momentous done. Further, I can now focus on doing something with this browser component that hasn't been done before.
For those of you who aren't interested in looking into it, Microsoft is working on something called dotNet. There's a lot of argument about what it all is, and whether it's useful, a product of the devil, etc. The thing that excited me about it is that components from one language can be used in another. And here's where I must admit that I didn't read the details about Bonobo. But my point is that Microsoft is going to have a fully operational Death Star of interoperability between languages pretty danged soon. Miguel rattles off a list of languages:
C++ objects live within the C++ universe.
Perl objects live within the Perl universe.
Java objects live within the Java universe.
Python objects live in the Python universe.
Object Pascal objects live in the Object Pascal universe.
Gtk objects live in the C/Gtk universe.
And this is exactly what isn't going to be the case with dotNet.
I know most of you have lost interest by now, and are happily moderating me down, flaming me, etc., but I have an appeal to those serious programmers and geeks amongst you who bore with me this far. It doesn't matter who came up with it, but isn't that just a bitchin' cool idea???
As you know, everyone who writes about their new features admits that you can already do the same thing in plain old C, but you also know how the rest of it goes.
By now, I've totally lost track of any other points I was going to make, if any. Please fill in the blanks with anything relavent you see:
The issue that stands out the most to me here is the part about notifying a suspect before you tap them. I mean, really, as much as all you privacy fanatics out there want to download your pr0n in safety, do you honestly even want to know that letters like this are going out to your neighbors?
F.B.I., New York Branch
August 5, 2000
Mr. Galeewakitz(remember the beer commercial?),
It has come to our attention that you may be planning on committing a crime in the near future. Furthermore, our sources inform us that you may reveal some information leading to your conviction between the days of November 21, 2000 and November 25, 2000. Please be advised that under the Cable Communications Act of 1984, we are required to give notice of our intention to monitor your electronic communications via Cable Modem on these dates. Should you object to these plans, please contest the issue at your nearest Court of Law on or before October 1, 2000.
Can you think of at least one programming language (C), markup language (HTML), or Communications Protocol(HTTP) that was in widespread use before a standard for it was completed?
How exactly do you think standards organizations get their ideas on improving a standard?
Or wait, you don't mean that they're making C# an "Extensible" language, do you? Yeah, I've heard about those "Extensible" languages. People keep coming up with ways to dirty the language with their own changes to it, rather than just making up their own separate language.
Look at it this way - at least he's a high-caliber software demi-god getting paid 2M a year to produce work of value to society rather than a double-digit millions/year dude in lycra running around on a field with a bunch of his friends all day.
Again, I've got to say that I don't know anyone involved with this, and I've got to say in the nicest possible way, Emmett(whom I don't know personally), that it sounds like you might want to take a look at that link.
I'm not saying that I think the article is somehow invalidated by the fact that you may know some of the other people involved, but FascDot's suggestion seems like a pretty valid one to me.
Gonna have to add another amen to that. You definitely haven't accused anyone of anything, and I might sound like I am, but I also just really want to know the answer to this question.
Oh yeah, another disclaimer: I have no idea who any of the people in this thread are. So no offense to anyone, I just want to know what the issues are.
Take the disclaimers from the previous post, and add this to have mine: I also, not having done any journalism, don't know anything about journalistic integrity, except that it exists.
Could someone add a little commentary about FascDot's suggestion that someone else do the interview? It does sound good to me intuitively, but I don't have the background to say anything more about it.
Okay, Jamie, so now we've established that Richard M. Smith himeself says the code on this web-page is not a "web bug". Now that I know it's there, what does Slashdot/Andover with this "non-web bug" to differentiate it from a genuine web bug? Just curious, really. Does the information reach some corporate entity outside Slashdot.org? Andover.net? Is the information for the sole non-resellable use of Slashdot.org? Andover.net?
You might note that while the deeply-informed author of the article says a "hacker" "tapped" into NASA's monitoring equipment, he graciously quotes a real person with a clue as saying
"We had an activity at NASA center where a hacker was overloading our system...to such an extent that it interfered with communications between the NASA center, some medical communications and the astronaut aboard the shuttle."
This quote doesn't say that a "hacker" penetrated the monitoring equipment, it says that a "hacker" overloaded "our system"(possibly being any computer on or near a NASA campus), and that the actions of this "hacker" interfered with the monitoring system. That still leaves open the possibility that the interference was an indirect effect of an attack somewhere else in "their system".
<rant to the ignorant> Not that anyone's going to notice this. Looks like the highest rated posts are a close second to "hot British breakfast cereal" posts. Oh, don't open.vbs emails. Oh, don't you know the only way to be safe from the internet is not to be connected to it. Yeah, well the only way not to get murdered on the streets is to lock yourself into your house. Pray to God you're not also afraid of arsonists.
Warning:As opposed to flamebait, the following is really my humble opinion.
Is it just me, or does this interview paint a little bit too rosy a picture of the project? Everything's fine, we didn't make any mistakes, managing hundreds of machines is even easier than managing a single machine, etc., etc. I have a lot of respect for the project, but I don't think Greg's being totally honest about any problems they (haven't) had. This may be a phenomenal opportunity to learn from experience here, and it'd be a shame to miss out on any detail at all.
But hey, if it really is that easy, drop me a line if you need a supercomputing cluster. Reasonable pricing, subject to availability, yada, yada, yada...
Just how much backup juice would you need to keep a bunch of sticks running in the event of a crash?
I would think a reliable UPS and an "old-fashioned" drive on standby would be a pretty sure bet. You'll need a physical drive to load up your Qikdrive at boot time, and save out at shutdown, so that thing will already be spinning when the power cuts out. Then your only worry is that you can copy 8G before your UPS fails;)
Sounds like you should try and figure out if your name is on there, and then pay a lawyer $50 to write them a nice (legally)threatening letter. Maybe find out if you can get together with anyone else in a similar situation.
That's a pretty interesting idea, too. I was just posting in another thread above(forgive me, I don't know how to link to it) where the author said
if they do nothing else, many "consciousness-expanding" drugs do temporarily alter your frame of reference
So many drugs, like staying up late or just plain getting into that zone, could cause you to look at a problem in a different way, maybe remove some mental blocks that a "normal" mind has. I know it's not an original thought... nothing new under the sun, eh?
This may be a good thing, since it shocks people out of complacency, which will in turn lead to more active thinking.
I think I can agree with that. Possibly part of the problem with altered states comes when people tend to stay there and adopt that state as their objective reality. And that doesn't just go for drugs. I'm talking about video games, sci-fi novels, and even pouring over court cases for too long. People need to turn off the computer, close the book, leave the office, or whatever they're doing too much of and take a walk. Looking closely at the leaves on the trees can be a mind-altering experience if you've never really looked at them before. </ramble>
I'm not really offended, but I'm a little surprised at the number of testimonials where people say they took [drug] and wrote [program], which is the greatest piece of software they've ever created.
Personally, I drink tea, water, sometimes a Dr Pepper when I program, and that works just fine for me. All of my best programming happens when I concentrate deeply enough on my work.
So let's hear it: How many of you wrote [program] without [drug]?
In other news, superstar car maker Gee Em was caught in its biggest engineering gaffe yet, turning out some of their latest line of automobiles without gas tanks or working steering wheels.
"I don't know how this happened," remarks one shocked engineer, who wishes to keep his name anonymous, "We tested and retested, ran computer simulations, all to no avail. I'm quite frankly shocked that this didn't come out in our tests with live drivers."
In Gee Em's official press release, the company's president says laughingly, "Oops. Don't we look stupid?"
Disclaimer to the stupid: The preceding is a fictional story. Any resemblance to the blunders of any corporate entity living or dead is PURELY coincidental.
Slashdot Mirror
GraniteMonkey, posting anonymous so you don't get noticed.
Hey, at least I attach a handle to my posts. Until you've got a name, I'm ignoring you after this point.
I don't know what all you guys are complaining about. I always set my sa password to 'sa' right after I install my database. How hard is it to follow good security practices?
Yeah, and if I knew your root password, another user account+password, and you enabled telnet and su, I could log onto your [server type]server and do [bad stuff] to it.
You're right, this could be potentially dangerous. But you don't give a handgun to someone who's never used one before and act all surprised when they shoot themselves in the head(apparently experienced owners have done the same to themselves).
Maintaining and setting up a database is not a task for the unwashed masses, nor should it be designed with your typical "where's the 'any' key" user in mind. Any competent admin, and I mean ANY slightly competent DB admin knows to set the stupid default password. Anyone claiming to be competent who doesn't know about this "vulnerability" should be fired immediately.
You can implement just about any programming paradigm you like in just about any decent language you like. I could implement features that make BASIC look like Eiffel, but the problem is that it's just coding convention. To cliche, "actual mileage may vary".
Along the same lines, the question isn't "can UNIX be a modular component-based system", or even "is UNIX a modular component-based system", but rather "is UNIX being used as a modular component-based system". Looking at the current state of affairs, I'd have to say no.
The exciting thing, though, is that I'd have to say yes! to the previous two(okay, the second has a little free-play in it), and that's what I think Miguel's trying to say. The tools are there, but not enough people are using them.
Damn it. You just posted the article I wished I could have written.
First of all, to those of you who are criticizing Miguel by saying "Miguel is wrong because being Object Oriented isn't necessary", or "Miguel is wrong because XML isn't necessary", I hope you're keeping this in mind: Miguel's comments can be broken down into two parts("You know, there are two kinds of people in the world..."
1)We should be thinking about ways in which the UNIX philosophy is deficient, rather than continually reassuring ourselves that it's all okay. Look at it pragmatically: Who's got the biggest market penetration? Who's system is easier to learn to program in for the beginner, ignoring cost?
Okay, these are total flamebait questions, so please, please don't respond to these in particular. Use your imagination, and think of some ways in which Windows is better than UNIX, rather than touting all the advantages of your pet operating system. Otherwise, you're just brainwashing yourselves with your own marketing.
The question here isn't which way we should take things, it's how we should think about them. If you want to respond to this half of the question, address what the community should expect of UNIX, not how it should be done.
2)UNIX needs standards, reusability, etc. This is a set of recommendations to the community about where things should go specifically. If you agree to Miguel's motivations in the first part, then read on. His argument is based on looking at "the competition", and I can give you a concrete example.
He mentions IE, and how it's actually made up of a large collection of components rather than being a monolithic application. True. If I want IE's rendering capabilities in my application and I'm using something like Delphi(example because I actually had to do this once), Hell, I'll just draw myself a window and drop the browser component into it. You can argue about whether it's bloated code or not, but the end result is that I didn't have to reinvent the wheel to get something pretty momentous done. Further, I can now focus on doing something with this browser component that hasn't been done before.
For those of you who aren't interested in looking into it, Microsoft is working on something called dotNet. There's a lot of argument about what it all is, and whether it's useful, a product of the devil, etc. The thing that excited me about it is that components from one language can be used in another. And here's where I must admit that I didn't read the details about Bonobo. But my point is that Microsoft is going to have a fully operational Death Star of interoperability between languages pretty danged soon. Miguel rattles off a list of languages:
And this is exactly what isn't going to be the case with dotNet.
I know most of you have lost interest by now, and are happily moderating me down, flaming me, etc., but I have an appeal to those serious programmers and geeks amongst you who bore with me this far. It doesn't matter who came up with it, but isn't that just a bitchin' cool idea???
As you know, everyone who writes about their new features admits that you can already do the same thing in plain old C, but you also know how the rest of it goes.
By now, I've totally lost track of any other points I was going to make, if any. Please fill in the blanks with anything relavent you see:
The issue that stands out the most to me here is the part about notifying a suspect before you tap them. I mean, really, as much as all you privacy fanatics out there want to download your pr0n in safety, do you honestly even want to know that letters like this are going out to your neighbors?
F.B.I., New York Branch
August 5, 2000
Mr. Galeewakitz(remember the beer commercial?),
It has come to our attention that you may be planning on committing a crime in the near future. Furthermore, our sources inform us that you may reveal some information leading to your conviction between the days of November 21, 2000 and November 25, 2000. Please be advised that under the Cable Communications Act of 1984, we are required to give notice of our intention to monitor your electronic communications via Cable Modem on these dates. Should you object to these plans, please contest the issue at your nearest Court of Law on or before October 1, 2000.
Courteously Yours,
Agent Smith,
F.B.I.
Can you think of at least one programming language (C), markup language (HTML), or Communications Protocol(HTTP) that was in widespread use before a standard for it was completed?
How exactly do you think standards organizations get their ideas on improving a standard?
Or wait, you don't mean that they're making C# an "Extensible" language, do you? Yeah, I've heard about those "Extensible" languages. People keep coming up with ways to dirty the language with their own changes to it, rather than just making up their own separate language.
Look at it this way - at least he's a high-caliber software demi-god getting paid 2M a year to produce work of value to society rather than a double-digit millions/year dude in lycra running around on a field with a bunch of his friends all day.
Wow, dude. Thanks for the info.
Again, I've got to say that I don't know anyone involved with this, and I've got to say in the nicest possible way, Emmett(whom I don't know personally), that it sounds like you might want to take a look at that link.
I'm not saying that I think the article is somehow invalidated by the fact that you may know some of the other people involved, but FascDot's suggestion seems like a pretty valid one to me.
Gonna have to add another amen to that. You definitely haven't accused anyone of anything, and I might sound like I am, but I also just really want to know the answer to this question.
Oh yeah, another disclaimer: I have no idea who any of the people in this thread are. So no offense to anyone, I just want to know what the issues are.
Take the disclaimers from the previous post, and add this to have mine: I also, not having done any journalism, don't know anything about journalistic integrity, except that it exists.
Could someone add a little commentary about FascDot's suggestion that someone else do the interview? It does sound good to me intuitively, but I don't have the background to say anything more about it.
Okay, Jamie, so now we've established that Richard M. Smith himeself says the code on this web-page is not a "web bug". Now that I know it's there, what does Slashdot/Andover with this "non-web bug" to differentiate it from a genuine web bug? Just curious, really. Does the information reach some corporate entity outside Slashdot.org? Andover.net? Is the information for the sole non-resellable use of Slashdot.org? Andover.net?
This quote doesn't say that a "hacker" penetrated the monitoring equipment, it says that a "hacker" overloaded "our system"(possibly being any computer on or near a NASA campus), and that the actions of this "hacker" interfered with the monitoring system. That still leaves open the possibility that the interference was an indirect effect of an attack somewhere else in "their system".
<rant to the ignorant>
Not that anyone's going to notice this. Looks like the highest rated posts are a close second to "hot British breakfast cereal" posts. Oh, don't open
Whoo hoooHaHaHaHa!!! Those British have a real sense of "humour", I've got to tell you.
...Unless USPTO has say in this... ::silence::
Don't overreact, guys. Just give it the hardy chuckle it deserves and move on with your day.
I mean, honestly, who is going to take this seriously???
Warning:As opposed to flamebait, the following is really my humble opinion.
Is it just me, or does this interview paint a little bit too rosy a picture of the project? Everything's fine, we didn't make any mistakes, managing hundreds of machines is even easier than managing a single machine, etc., etc. I have a lot of respect for the project, but I don't think Greg's being totally honest about any problems they (haven't) had. This may be a phenomenal opportunity to learn from experience here, and it'd be a shame to miss out on any detail at all.
But hey, if it really is that easy, drop me a line if you need a supercomputing cluster. Reasonable pricing, subject to availability, yada, yada, yada...
Just how much backup juice would you need to keep a bunch of sticks running in the event of a crash?
;)
I would think a reliable UPS and an "old-fashioned" drive on standby would be a pretty sure bet. You'll need a physical drive to load up your Qikdrive at boot time, and save out at shutdown, so that thing will already be spinning when the power cuts out. Then your only worry is that you can copy 8G before your UPS fails
Does anyone else(author included) find it just a little chilling that this post was rated as "funny"? I think we need a Ha Ha, Only Serious rating.
Sounds like you should try and figure out if your name is on there, and then pay a lawyer $50 to write them a nice (legally)threatening letter. Maybe find out if you can get together with anyone else in a similar situation.
I think I can agree with that. Possibly part of the problem with altered states comes when people tend to stay there and adopt that state as their objective reality. And that doesn't just go for drugs. I'm talking about video games, sci-fi novels, and even pouring over court cases for too long. People need to turn off the computer, close the book, leave the office, or whatever they're doing too much of and take a walk. Looking closely at the leaves on the trees can be a mind-altering experience if you've never really looked at them before.
</ramble>
I'm not really offended, but I'm a little surprised at the number of testimonials where people say they took [drug] and wrote [program], which is the greatest piece of software they've ever created.
Personally, I drink tea, water, sometimes a Dr Pepper when I program, and that works just fine for me. All of my best programming happens when I concentrate deeply enough on my work.
So let's hear it: How many of you wrote [program] without [drug]?
In other news, superstar car maker Gee Em was caught in its biggest engineering gaffe yet, turning out some of their latest line of automobiles without gas tanks or working steering wheels.
"I don't know how this happened," remarks one shocked engineer, who wishes to keep his name anonymous, "We tested and retested, ran computer simulations, all to no avail. I'm quite frankly shocked that this didn't come out in our tests with live drivers."
In Gee Em's official press release, the company's president says laughingly, "Oops. Don't we look stupid?"
Disclaimer to the stupid: The preceding is a fictional story. Any resemblance to the blunders of any corporate entity living or dead is PURELY coincidental.