How about SETI@Home stacks? Several people are building clusters of various sorts for SETI, and probably other distributed projects as well. There are some great images at http://bhs.broo.k12.wv.us/homepage/staff/seti/farm s.htm.
I'd probably want something as efficient as possible, perhaps provide some redundancy, etc., but there are probably situations where space is a problem, etc.
Different strokes, people. Choice is a Good Thing.
Phase velocities > c have been known for years. In fact, it used to be standard content in electronics courses related to waveguide technologies. Probably for its woooo-factor.
Group and phase velocity. The energy and the modulations on the microwave signal going down the waveguide both travel at the "group velocity" c*cos(alpha) which is necessarily less than the velocity of light c. The pattern however travels at the "phase velocity" c/cos(alpha) which is necessarily greater than the velocity of light. The product of (group velocity)*(phase velocity) = c^2.
Meant in a non-intellectual sense. As in, "There's no need to hurt them more. They jacked us up, but the debt is paid."
I should have realized that someone here would look at that from a programmer's perspective and been, "astonished."
My background is as much military as geek. Coming from that perspective, "They hurt us bad, we hurt them worse, we're all even," makes sense. Maybe you have to have heard some rounds go past your head, or it's nonsensical? No. If you've even been in an adolescent fight behind the gym that should easy to understand. Maybe you've never had even an adolescent fight? No way to tell.
That, "we're all even," viewpoint is important, though, from a 'down in the trenches' perspective. It's prevented a lot of atrocities. Without it, you have a lot of young people, angry about just having been shot at, maybe having just seen some buddies killed--and it's usually fairly gory. So maybe now they have the upper hand (very common in the US mil, BTW--we usually win), and *don't* know to think that, "We're all even." I think you can see what that would lead to. It's what prevents killers (military Good Thing) from becoming murderers (anybody's Bad Thing). There's a huge difference.
Did you truly not know this, were you trying to stake out some moral high ground, striking some ultimate/. logician pose, or what? There have been a lot more warriors than logicians in human history. Yes, I agree that that's a Bad Thing. It's also the real world. Deal with it.
If this viewpoint is news to you, you *really should* be aware that it exists, and it's quite common. I'm sure it's inconceivable to someone who has their sensitivity screwed up to such a fever-pitch. But there it is. Again--deal with it.
The 21 kiloton test (equal to Fat Man, the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and the more powerfull of the two) that many have seen photos of (it was the one with US troops in slit trenches), was detonated at a range of 6 miles. All too many of these soldiers later died from this, which was a great tragedy. But it was from long-term effects. None were killed outright.
A detonation at 60 miles miles, or ten times that range, would have accomplished nothing. It would also have depleted a very small supply of fissionables, produced at enormous cost at Oak Ridge (uranium 235) and Hanford (plutonium).
Save the talk, ye who would say, "What, you're worrying about the cost, when so many lives were lost?" Yes, I am. The US didn't fire the first shot, no matter what YAN conspiracy nutjob (we didn't land on the moon, alien bodies at Area 51, the CIA blew up the Twin Towers, etc.). But we sure as *hell* fired the last shot. We paid a lot to do it, and it was worth it. It saved US lives. Quite a few/. readers probably wouldn't be here (hard for an ancestor to spawn, if he's dead, after all) if it hadn't been done.
As soon as it happened, a very warlike people suddenly decided they were pacifists. MacArthur spent more US $ rebuilding Japan, because contrary to the worst fears of the Japanese, he thought it was the right thing to do. He was dead-on right. That was money well-spent as well. Humanitarian reasons aside, Japan is now a firm ally. They are certainly lined up behind any non-proliferation actions, unless that brutal bastard in N. Korea *forces* them to develop nuclear arms, because the US waffles on something.
They hurt us bad, we hurt them worse, we're all even, and they're our friends. Good friends. I wish it hadn't happened, but not so much as the guys who served at the time. Bet on that, ladies and gentlemen. Don't get all PC, and sobbing over the cruelty of something that happened 60 years ago, and wasn't our fault to begin with. Enjoy what we have--the current friendship of a great people.
At this point, the US and Japan should just go off and build a lunar colony or something together. That's what friends are for, at the nation-state level: to do remarkable things that could not be done alone.
I think hydrazine is out. Apparently there are three different MIL Spec'ed hydrazine propellants, but all are very toxic. We don't have a launch location isolated enough to store and use them in the required quantities.
I wonder what the current Russian costs are? Also, anyone know what their current propellant is? Is it really hydrazine?
Yet they require registration? Sounds as if they like anonymity when it serves their purposes (covering their six, so they can preserve their sources, produce content, and deliver eyeballs to advertisers) but when it *doesn't* serve their purposes, all bets are off.
What did that boardroom conversation sound like? My guess would be something like, "Make 'em register. Learn all we can. We can probably data mine, or sell the data to others who *can* data mine, and still smell like a rose."
The NYT wants to be known as the leading US 'newspaper of record'. OK, I'm fine with that. But there's a social resposibility that comes with the title. Let people see things without leaving a trail. The would-be Emperor Shrub the First's regime is in the process of of making permanent the most onerous provistions of the Patriot Act. Library records, etc. They plainly want the ability to see what you're reading.
Anonymity is important. The NYT is abrogating their right to any claim of a 'newspaper of record'. They're not just annoying you--they're selling you down the river.
NYT--take the moral high ground, if you want to stake a claim. Or just admit you're well on the way to becomming Fox News, and make the stockholders happy. You can't have it both ways.
BTW, NYT, your material on the Discovery Channel, etc., sucks hugely, and it's getting rapidly worse. The episode on the Deep Impact comet mission broke new ground in this area. I can probably come up with 20 entirely valid points of complaint. So you're already on the way to becoming the Fox News of popular science education.
You suck. Just admit it. Repeat after me: "We'll do whatever it takes to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. If that involves means ignoring our responsibility as a free press in a republic, and selling out the American people, so be it. If we have to misinform and/or slant science news, we'll do that too. Science news is verifiable, but we don't think that anyone is gonna check up and call BS. So we'll just do it. Have a nice day."
For some users, they could actualy surge ahead if they put some work into MathML. Firefox definitely doesn't do this well. Presenting equations as image files in HTML sucks. Yet I have to either do that, or go non-native, using LATEX and publishing as PS or PDF, for instance.
I suppose I could check out equation authoring in OO Writer, and publish those, but that's even less standard.
If I'm serving something from a Web server, I want to use HTML and close cousins, such as MathML.
--VENONA
Re:I liked Internet Explorer 7 the first time...
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IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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I'd agree with most of that. The sticking point would be,"cators to the low self-esteem of many Microsoft fanboys."
In my experience as a security guy (who also did a few Web sites, back in 1995-2000), they tend to be arrogant. Usually in inverse proportion to what they actually know. You want to remember that the whole certification thing was largely started by Microsoft. That was just a whole new lock-in. It pretended to give HR guys a means of screening applicants, and sucked up fees for M$. To this day, most HR guys probably don't know how worthless many M$ certs are. It's not all their fault, BTW. The people putting in the personnel reqs often leave that as a sort of minimum standard, just to weed out people who really should be wearing paper hats. It's just easier.
And now it's embedded in HR business rules, which are really slow to change, so it's worked. Guaranteed income for M$. These guys make money from more directions than most people realize.
Back to that sucky job. In the time that I worked for that company, they managed to make a Spam black hole list, got infected by serveral viruses and worms, placed default-value Web applications on MS servers in cloud-facing positions, saw their M$ IT guys *recommend* known spyware, etc.
In short, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Penalties for the guilty? Nah. I think management looked on it as business as usuall. Meanwhile, things on the UNIX side of the fence proceeded pretty much normally. Keep things patched, read the security bulletins, etc.
The only breach related to UNIX was making that Spam RBL list. That was because the Web site was running a vulnerable Formmail, and I couldn't get the non-security minded managers (including the site Security Officer, who had a backgound in MPE/iX only, from the OS side and COBOL, from a language side,and minimal clues as to TCP/IP) to grant me the time to plow through that nasty Matt Wright Perl code. Hey, you warn them several times, then you surrender. At least until you get so tired of it that you leave. I eventually did.
There will be an entirely new crop of exploits based around IE7. Companies won't care, Aunt Nellie's machine will join the botnet du jour, many users will see privacy violations, etc.
In short, nothing will change. That's not scary. What's scary is the who that company was, and what their product was. And no, you won't hear it on/.! Now, I only work for clients that take security seriously.
Re:I liked Internet Explorer 7 the first time...
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No, I don't think you're the only one. I certainly hope not, at any rate. I would too, if I ever used IE. But I don't and frankly, I'm not particularly sympathetic to IE users. I think they deserve what they get, except in those cases where they have to, due to corporate fiat, required Web apps that support nothing else, etc.
OK, my Aunt Tillie can't be expected to know about this sort of thing. I can be a bit sympathetic there. But Aunt Tillie (or anyone else, for that matter) should be able to recognize that there are dangers to using things tools they don't understand. There's only so much you can do to defend these people from themselves. It's largely a difficult and thankless job. In fact, it's worse than thankless--it often gets you the tin-foil hat label. I've had that happen to me, professionally. It's unpleasant, adds to difficulites in getting other security measures implemented, etc. Now, I only do it when it's very specifically part of my charter.
In other words, I'm a security guy, and not being paid to worry about that at the moment.:)
On the other hand, this is beta software. Given the hue and cry about the rumors related to Microsoft buying Claria, covered in/. http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/30/132 9229&from=rss and http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/11/06 44245&from=rss and many more 'mainstream' media sites (Ziff-Davis properties, etc.) I think M$ could be expected to make some major guarantees that the information wouldn't be retained, much less used in any form, before this became a production release. Anything else would be an epic PR disaster. And if they lied about it, one whistle-blower would be an even *worse* PR disaster. Hard to see what's worse than 'epic' but I'm confident that it would be.
Categorization helped quite a bit in biology, didn't it. Google for Carl Linnaeus. Categorization is also pretty useful in the CS (NP complete problems, etc.), and many other fields.
In this case, astronomers of several sorts (minor planet and KBO specialists, etc.) are debating it. Possibly it's because categorization *is* meaningful?
WTF is your problem?
Categorization==profiling==horriblyNonPC or something?
IIRC, tabbed browsing first appeared in Opera, not OSS. Were you referring to other IE7 features, such as the search bar? Not sure where that first appeared.
The more concrete examples that can be used to defeat the 'OSS only copies from Microsoft' argument, the better, as it's such obvious BS. But those arguments should be accurate.
Re:I liked Internet Explorer 7 the first time...
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Well, not Konqueror-3.4.1 on KDE-3.4.1. But, of Firefox 1.0.6, Konqueror, and IE7, IE7 is unquestionably the *worst*. I'm worried that as the others become more standards-compliant, rendering differences will increase, not decrease. I'll stay with the standards. Major sites will become less IE-centric as Firefox gains market share. Which it obviously is.
M$--still ignoring standards whenever possible, despite all their talk about standards being important. They're obviously not doing this out of stupidity. It's more a rapacious greed sort of thing. Lock 'em in, and keep 'em in!
This reminds me of Ballmer wanting to quadruple Office revenue by the end of the decade. He will probably fail to get his wishes there, too, given that Office 2003 has only 15% uptake, and Office 12 is supposed to be released in 2006.
Possibly, the best thing that I see in the reviews above is the anti-phishing measures. That could save casual users some grief. It could also fall prey to all the sorts of problems that spam black lists can be subject to regarding DHCP, etc.
"That was true a few years ago, but its rarely the case these days. Once you contact the correct people at the vendor they generally move fairly quickly to resolve the issue."
In userland, Microsoft Internet Explorer is famous for long-standing open vulnerabilities. No point in going into that one at Slashdot.
It once took me more than a year to get HP to admit to a problem in HP-UX 11i. As of January, they still hadn't completely accepted the fact, and had only a partial fix in place.
I'd be surprised if this trend didn't continue. Software complexity is the culprit. Not only does it make flaws far more likely, but patches which really do fix the problem, without introducing others, become progressively more difficult to create and test.
Has anyone here seen software as a whole growing *simpler* with time? I didn't think so.
It's just the general nature of things. Marketing departments in commercial software shops have to keep adding bullet points to get people to buy the latest revision. Things are a bit better in the OSS world, where this sort of thing typically happens as a result of feature requests from users, not marketers. But there too, complexity only grows, albeit not as quickly.
The fix(es)? Well, like any security guy, I have my opinions. But that's way too much to cover in a Slashdot post.
Well, that assumes your CPU *has* a 'protected mode'. I'd like to see an open solution that could do Power, Intel, PA-RISC, SPARC, etc. Unless it's very broad, I'm afraid it won't get traction. And without traction, the mobo people might ignore it.
I'd hate to see that happen. Some are doing noticeably better than others. I almost wonder if they're looking at Dell PowerEdge machines (decent enough, inexpensive server, but from what I've seen they fail more often HP's Proliant line) and thinking that it would be a Good Thing to add reporting an managability features. Doing this at a pre-boot level is definitely a Good Thing, saving only that every server vendor does it differently, and IMHO that keeps cost of ownership higher than it could be.
It also misses opportunities to do some really nice-to-have stuff, such as having servers boot directly into their intended roles, but only if they have their intended security policies in place, etc.
Scripting at the boot level could be astoundingly cool, if done corectly.
I agree 100% with your, "fully customizable bootloader directly into the firmware," statement.
a) The AC message I'm replying to is spot-on. b) Thanks, tcd004 for pointing me toward http://www.foreignpolicy.com/index.php. It's made it into the News bookmarks.
Will2k_is_here makes an excelent point. I don't have to deal with Joe Six Pack too much, (mostly someone requesting that I help a friend of their's out) but I still see "Blue e == Internet" behavior. Another post in this thread requests that we all remember MS history. I'd imagine that's a reference to the MS getting anything, staking their claim, and getting something almost workable out by the 3.1 release.
So far MS is clearly losing in the UI, and in content freshness. Does it matter? The NO side of me remembers that of the Joe Six Pack contacts I've had in the past couple of months, at least half had never heard of at least one of two major non-MS properties. Specifically, the Google search service, and the Firefox Web browser.
No way am I counting MS out. I might even bet on them, except for one thing: APIs. I'm betting that Google APIs will attract a lot of geek talent. And that Google can capitalize on this in a way that doesn't involve a 'pay to use' model.
Google has hired a lot of talent. It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out.
And, as a first closing thought, how do we define 'long term'? I'd love to see Google do well, but I haven't drunk all of the Google 'Do No Evil' KoolAid. Google has become a verb. To those who use it a lot, it's become a single point of failure. Redundancy is good. The more good search services that are out there, the better. One dominant engine has also given birth to Googlewashing http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/04/03/antiwar_sl ogan_coined_repurposed/. Not a Good Thing.
The second and last closing thought is a question. Referring to Joe Six Pack just sounds demeaning as hell. Slashdotters know who I mean, and probably realize that I don't mean to sound like some elitist prick.
"By removing all the other legacy crap no-one really uses anymore (e.g. serial and paralel ports)..."
I really get tired of all the people who think their computing environment is the only computing environment. That's exactly the attitude which has lead to half the world believing that the Windows PC is sysnonymous with computing.
For instance, I use the serial port on my workstation. Like many others, I have an external modem hanging from it. 4-5 years, that was the most reliable means of home Internet access for Linux users. Avoid Winmodems, and all that.
Secondly, it's still useful to be able to dial into client servers--some have a service modem. Thirdly, it's pretty much a requirement in setting up Linux or a BSD on the small appliance machines from Soekris engineering, etc.
Repeat after me, "There are other computing environments than my own."
While writing fingerprinting software for Linux, 've found that:
Some (most?) BIOSes lie in order to circumvent problems in "popular software." Probing for hardware in a running system can be dangerous to system stability, and some info cannot be probed for at all, such a a BIOS ID string.
The software is meant to record basic (and not-so-basic) information on systems at small and medium sized installations.
Trying to question the BIOS in an environment like that, given the current state of affairs, will make you nuts. Overall, PC BIOSs are crap, compared to the mechanisms that you find
in the server hardware I'm used to. I guess you just get more for half a million dollars.
Despite all the above, building Trusted Computing code into the BIOS of personal computers is, IMHO,
a Seriously Bad Thing. I'd like to see the open solution go in.
Slashdot Mirror
How about SETI@Home stacks? Several people are building clusters of various sorts for SETI, and probably other distributed projects as well. There are some great images at http://bhs.broo.k12.wv.us/homepage/staff/seti/farm s.htm.
I'd probably want something as efficient as possible, perhaps provide some redundancy, etc., but there are probably situations where space is a problem, etc.
Different strokes, people. Choice is a Good Thing.
Phase velocities > c have been known for years. In fact, it used to be standard content in electronics courses related to waveguide technologies. Probably for its woooo-factor.
g uide.html
A quick google reveals a nice discussion at http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/D.Jefferies/w
The relevant bits:
Group and phase velocity.
The energy and the modulations on the microwave signal going down the waveguide both travel at the "group velocity" c*cos(alpha) which is necessarily less than the velocity of light c. The pattern however travels at the "phase velocity" c/cos(alpha) which is necessarily greater than the velocity of light. The product of (group velocity)*(phase velocity) = c^2.
Meant in a non-intellectual sense. As in, "There's no need to hurt them more. They jacked us up, but the debt is paid."
/. logician pose, or what? There have been a lot more warriors than logicians in human history. Yes, I agree that that's a Bad Thing. It's also the real world. Deal with it.
I should have realized that someone here would look at that from a programmer's perspective and been, "astonished."
My background is as much military as geek. Coming from that perspective, "They hurt us bad, we hurt them worse, we're all even," makes sense. Maybe you have to have heard some rounds go past your head, or it's nonsensical? No. If you've even been in an adolescent fight behind the gym that should easy to understand. Maybe you've never had even an adolescent fight? No way to tell.
That, "we're all even," viewpoint is important, though, from a 'down in the trenches' perspective. It's prevented a lot of atrocities. Without it, you have a lot of young people, angry about just having been shot at, maybe having just seen some buddies killed--and it's usually fairly gory. So maybe now they have the upper hand (very common in the US mil, BTW--we usually win), and *don't* know to think that, "We're all even." I think you can see what that would lead to. It's what prevents killers (military Good Thing) from becoming murderers (anybody's Bad Thing). There's a huge difference.
Did you truly not know this, were you trying to stake out some moral high ground, striking some ultimate
If this viewpoint is news to you, you *really should* be aware that it exists, and it's quite common. I'm sure it's inconceivable to someone who has their sensitivity screwed up to such a fever-pitch. But there it is. Again--deal with it.
The 21 kiloton test (equal to Fat Man, the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and the more powerfull of the two) that many have seen photos of (it was the one with US troops in slit trenches), was detonated at a range of 6 miles. All too many of these soldiers later died from this, which was a great tragedy. But it was from long-term effects. None were killed outright.
/. readers probably wouldn't be here (hard for an ancestor to spawn, if he's dead, after all) if it hadn't been done.
A detonation at 60 miles miles, or ten times that range, would have accomplished nothing. It would also have depleted a very small supply of fissionables, produced at enormous cost at Oak Ridge (uranium 235) and Hanford (plutonium).
Save the talk, ye who would say, "What, you're worrying about the cost, when so many lives were lost?" Yes, I am. The US didn't fire the first shot, no matter what YAN conspiracy nutjob (we didn't land on the moon, alien bodies at Area 51, the CIA blew up the Twin Towers, etc.). But we sure as *hell* fired the last shot. We paid a lot to do it, and it was worth it. It saved US lives. Quite a few
As soon as it happened, a very warlike people suddenly decided they were pacifists. MacArthur spent more US $ rebuilding Japan, because contrary to the worst fears of the Japanese, he thought it was the right thing to do. He was dead-on right. That was money well-spent as well. Humanitarian reasons aside, Japan is now a firm ally. They are certainly lined up behind any non-proliferation actions, unless that brutal bastard in N. Korea *forces* them to develop nuclear arms, because the US waffles on something.
They hurt us bad, we hurt them worse, we're all even, and they're our friends. Good friends. I wish it hadn't happened, but not so much as the guys who served at the time. Bet on that, ladies and gentlemen. Don't get all PC, and sobbing over the cruelty of something that happened 60 years ago, and wasn't our fault to begin with. Enjoy what we have--the current friendship of a great people.
At this point, the US and Japan should just go off and build a lunar colony or something together. That's what friends are for, at the nation-state level: to do remarkable things that could not be done alone.
There's a better article article at: http://www7.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0508/featur e6/multimedia.html
Gotta love that Nat Geo. Life member since forever.
I think hydrazine is out. Apparently there are three different MIL Spec'ed hydrazine propellants, but all are very toxic. We don't have a launch location isolated enough to store and use them in the required quantities.
I wonder what the current Russian costs are? Also, anyone know what their current propellant is? Is it really hydrazine?
Yet they require registration? Sounds as if they like anonymity when it serves their purposes (covering their six, so they can preserve their sources, produce content, and deliver eyeballs to advertisers) but when it *doesn't* serve their purposes, all bets are off.
What did that boardroom conversation sound like? My guess would be something like, "Make 'em register. Learn all we can. We can probably data mine, or sell the data to others who *can* data mine, and still smell like a rose."
The NYT wants to be known as the leading US 'newspaper of record'. OK, I'm fine with that. But there's a social resposibility that comes with the title. Let people see things without leaving a trail. The would-be Emperor Shrub the First's regime is in the process of of making permanent the most onerous provistions of the Patriot Act. Library records, etc. They plainly want the ability to see what you're reading.
Anonymity is important. The NYT is abrogating their right to any claim of a 'newspaper of record'. They're not just annoying you--they're selling you down the river.
NYT--take the moral high ground, if you want to stake a claim. Or just admit you're well on the way to becomming Fox News, and make the stockholders happy. You can't have it both ways.
BTW, NYT, your material on the Discovery Channel, etc., sucks hugely, and it's getting rapidly worse. The episode on the Deep Impact comet mission broke new ground in this area. I can probably come up with 20 entirely valid points of complaint. So you're already on the way to becoming the Fox News of popular science education.
You suck. Just admit it. Repeat after me: "We'll do whatever it takes to deliver eyeballs to advertisers. If that involves means ignoring our responsibility as a free press in a republic, and selling out the American people, so be it. If we have to misinform and/or slant science news, we'll do that too. Science news is verifiable, but we don't think that anyone is gonna check up and call BS. So we'll just do it. Have a nice day."
For some users, they could actualy surge ahead if they put some work into MathML. Firefox definitely doesn't do this well. Presenting equations as image files in HTML sucks. Yet I have to either do that, or go non-native, using LATEX and publishing as PS or PDF, for instance.
I suppose I could check out equation authoring in OO Writer, and publish those, but that's even less standard.
If I'm serving something from a Web server, I want to use HTML and close cousins, such as MathML.
--VENONA
I'd agree with most of that. The sticking point would be,"cators to the low self-esteem of many Microsoft fanboys."
/.! Now, I only work for clients that take security seriously.
In my experience as a security guy (who also did a few Web sites, back in 1995-2000), they tend to be arrogant. Usually in inverse proportion to what they actually know. You want to remember that the whole certification thing was largely started by Microsoft. That was just a whole new lock-in. It pretended to give HR guys a means of screening applicants, and sucked up fees for M$. To this day, most HR guys probably don't know how worthless many M$ certs are. It's not all their fault, BTW. The people putting in the personnel reqs often leave that as a sort of minimum standard, just to weed out people who really should be wearing paper hats. It's just easier.
And now it's embedded in HR business rules, which are really slow to change, so it's worked. Guaranteed income for M$. These guys make money from more directions than most people realize.
Back to that sucky job. In the time that I worked for that company, they managed to make a Spam black hole list, got infected by serveral viruses and worms, placed default-value Web applications on MS servers in cloud-facing positions, saw their M$ IT guys *recommend* known spyware, etc.
In short, everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Penalties for the guilty? Nah. I think management looked on it as business as usuall. Meanwhile, things on the UNIX side of the fence proceeded pretty much normally. Keep things patched, read the security bulletins, etc.
The only breach related to UNIX was making that Spam RBL list. That was because the Web site was running a vulnerable Formmail, and I couldn't get the non-security minded managers (including the site Security Officer, who had a backgound in MPE/iX only, from the OS side and COBOL, from a language side,and minimal clues as to TCP/IP) to grant me the time to plow through that nasty Matt Wright Perl code. Hey, you warn them several times, then you surrender. At least until you get so tired of it that you leave. I eventually did.
There will be an entirely new crop of exploits based around IE7. Companies won't care, Aunt Nellie's machine will join the botnet du jour, many users will see privacy violations, etc.
In short, nothing will change. That's not scary. What's scary is the who that company was, and what their product was. And no, you won't hear it on
No, I don't think you're the only one. I certainly hope not, at any rate. I would too, if I ever used IE. But I don't and frankly, I'm not particularly sympathetic to IE users. I think they deserve what they get, except in those cases where they have to, due to corporate fiat, required Web apps that support nothing else, etc.
:)
/.2 9229&from=rss6 44245&from=rss
OK, my Aunt Tillie can't be expected to know about this sort of thing. I can be a bit sympathetic there. But Aunt Tillie (or anyone else, for that matter) should be able to recognize that there are dangers to using things tools they don't understand. There's only so much you can do to defend these people from themselves. It's largely a difficult and thankless job. In fact, it's worse than thankless--it often gets you the tin-foil hat label. I've had that happen to me, professionally. It's unpleasant, adds to difficulites in getting other security measures implemented, etc. Now, I only do it when it's very specifically part of my charter.
In other words, I'm a security guy, and not being paid to worry about that at the moment.
On the other hand, this is beta software. Given the hue and cry about the rumors related to Microsoft buying Claria, covered in
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/30/13
and
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/11/0
and many more 'mainstream' media sites (Ziff-Davis properties, etc.) I think M$ could be expected to make some major guarantees that the information wouldn't be retained, much less used in any form, before this became a production release. Anything else would be an epic PR disaster. And if they lied about it, one whistle-blower would be an even *worse* PR disaster. Hard to see what's worse than 'epic' but I'm confident that it would be.
Cheers,
VENONA
Categorization helped quite a bit in biology, didn't it. Google for Carl Linnaeus. Categorization is also pretty useful in the CS (NP complete problems, etc.), and many other fields.
In this case, astronomers of several sorts (minor planet and KBO specialists, etc.) are debating it. Possibly it's because categorization *is* meaningful?
WTF is your problem?
Categorization==profiling==horriblyNonPC or something?
IIRC, tabbed browsing first appeared in Opera, not OSS. Were you referring to other IE7 features, such as the search bar? Not sure where that first appeared.
The more concrete examples that can be used to defeat the 'OSS only copies from Microsoft' argument, the better, as it's such obvious BS. But those arguments should be accurate.
Well, not Konqueror-3.4.1 on KDE-3.4.1. But, of Firefox 1.0.6, Konqueror, and IE7, IE7 is unquestionably the *worst*. I'm worried that as the others become more standards-compliant, rendering differences will increase, not decrease. I'll stay with the standards. Major sites will become less IE-centric as Firefox gains market share. Which it obviously is.
_ skus/.
M$--still ignoring standards whenever possible, despite all their talk about standards being important. They're obviously not doing this out of stupidity. It's more a rapacious greed sort of thing. Lock 'em in, and keep 'em in!
This reminds me of Ballmer wanting to quadruple Office revenue by the end of the decade. He will probably fail to get his wishes there, too, given that Office 2003 has only 15% uptake, and Office 12 is supposed to be released in 2006.
Reference for the above para is a good read: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/28/microsoft
Possibly, the best thing that I see in the reviews above is the anti-phishing measures. That could save casual users some grief. It could also fall prey to all the sorts of problems that spam black lists can be subject to regarding DHCP, etc.
"That was true a few years ago, but its rarely the case these days. Once you contact the correct people at the vendor they generally move fairly quickly to resolve the issue."
l ished_alerts.html
That turns out to not be the case. On the server side, Red Database reports several vulnerabilites upatched by Oracle for over 600 days, at least one unpatched for over 700 days, etc. http://www.red-database-security.com/advisory/pub
In userland, Microsoft Internet Explorer is famous for long-standing open vulnerabilities. No point in going into that one at Slashdot.
It once took me more than a year to get HP to admit to a problem in HP-UX 11i. As of January, they still hadn't completely accepted the fact, and had only a partial fix in place.
I'd be surprised if this trend didn't continue. Software complexity is the culprit. Not only does it make flaws far more likely, but patches which really do fix the problem, without introducing others, become progressively more difficult to create and test.
Has anyone here seen software as a whole growing *simpler* with time? I didn't think so.
It's just the general nature of things. Marketing departments in commercial software shops have to keep adding bullet points to get people to buy the latest revision. Things are a bit better in the OSS world, where this sort of thing typically happens as a result of feature requests from users, not marketers. But there too, complexity only grows, albeit not as quickly.
The fix(es)? Well, like any security guy, I have my opinions. But that's way too much to cover in a Slashdot post.
Well, that assumes your CPU *has* a 'protected mode'. I'd like to see an open solution that could do Power, Intel, PA-RISC, SPARC, etc. Unless it's very broad, I'm afraid it won't get traction. And without traction, the mobo people might ignore it.
I'd hate to see that happen. Some are doing noticeably better than others. I almost wonder if they're looking at Dell PowerEdge machines (decent enough, inexpensive server, but from what I've seen they fail more often HP's Proliant line) and thinking that it would be a Good Thing to add reporting an managability features. Doing this at a pre-boot level is definitely a Good Thing, saving only that every server vendor does it differently, and IMHO that keeps cost of ownership higher than it could be.
It also misses opportunities to do some really nice-to-have stuff, such as having servers boot directly into their intended roles, but only if they have their intended security policies in place, etc.
Scripting at the boot level could be astoundingly cool, if done corectly.
I agree 100% with your, "fully customizable bootloader directly into the firmware," statement.
Two comments here.
a) The AC message I'm replying to is spot-on.
b) Thanks, tcd004 for pointing me toward http://www.foreignpolicy.com/index.php. It's made it into the News bookmarks.
Will2k_is_here makes an excelent point. I don't have to deal with Joe Six Pack too much, (mostly someone requesting that I help a friend of their's out) but I still see "Blue e == Internet" behavior. Another post in this thread requests that we all remember MS history. I'd imagine that's a reference to the MS getting anything, staking their claim, and getting something almost workable out by the 3.1 release.
l ogan_coined_repurposed/. Not a Good Thing.
So far MS is clearly losing in the UI, and in content freshness. Does it matter? The NO side of me remembers that of the Joe Six Pack contacts I've had in the past couple of months, at least half had never heard of at least one of two major non-MS properties. Specifically, the Google search service, and the Firefox Web browser.
No way am I counting MS out. I might even bet on them, except for one thing: APIs. I'm betting that Google APIs will attract a lot of geek talent. And that Google can capitalize on this in a way that doesn't involve a 'pay to use' model.
Google has hired a lot of talent. It's going to be very interesting to see how this plays out.
And, as a first closing thought, how do we define 'long term'? I'd love to see Google do well, but I haven't drunk all of the Google 'Do No Evil' KoolAid. Google has become a verb. To those who use it a lot, it's become a single point of failure. Redundancy is good. The more good search services that are out there, the better. One dominant engine has also given birth to Googlewashing http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/04/03/antiwar_s
I still use other general services, such as Alta Vista http://www.altavista.com/. Specialized engines also abound, such as The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies http://liinwww.ira.uka.de/bibliography/.
The second and last closing thought is a question. Referring to Joe Six Pack just sounds demeaning as hell. Slashdotters know who I mean, and probably realize that I don't mean to sound like some elitist prick.
What term do you use?
"By removing all the other legacy crap no-one really uses anymore (e.g. serial and paralel ports)..."
I really get tired of all the people who think their computing environment is the only computing environment. That's exactly the attitude which has lead to half the world believing that the Windows PC is sysnonymous with computing.
For instance, I use the serial port on my workstation. Like many others, I have an external modem hanging from it. 4-5 years, that was the most reliable means of home Internet access for Linux users. Avoid Winmodems, and all that.
Secondly, it's still useful to be able to dial into client servers--some have a service modem. Thirdly, it's pretty much a requirement in setting up Linux or a BSD on the small appliance machines from Soekris engineering, etc.
Repeat after me, "There are other computing environments than my own."
While writing fingerprinting software for Linux, 've found that: Some (most?) BIOSes lie in order to circumvent problems in "popular software." Probing for hardware in a running system can be dangerous to system stability, and some info cannot be probed for at all, such a a BIOS ID string. The software is meant to record basic (and not-so-basic) information on systems at small and medium sized installations. Trying to question the BIOS in an environment like that, given the current state of affairs, will make you nuts. Overall, PC BIOSs are crap, compared to the mechanisms that you find in the server hardware I'm used to. I guess you just get more for half a million dollars. Despite all the above, building Trusted Computing code into the BIOS of personal computers is, IMHO, a Seriously Bad Thing. I'd like to see the open solution go in.