I really don't understand the objections to '.kids' and '.sex'. Why does somebody need to set standards? Few who are in the sex business have any incentive to register under '.kids', and vice-versa.
Sure there will be a few exceptions. There are always a few idiots. But so what? The system doesn't need to be infallible, just reasonable.
Have tried the same sites with Mozilla instead of just Opera? I only use Opera occasionally, so I don't really know how it does, but Mozilla has been pretty good for quite some time.
I think web developers are slowly moving to W3C standard HTML because new IE and Netscape both support them. It's easy code to a common subset of HTML that works on both IE and Gecko - no more browser sniffing. That makes life a lot easier.
In my case, I remember running into IE specific web sites quite often a year ago. I don't think I've had that problem at all in the last couple of months. My on-line bank even showed a warning that they didn't support NS6 (even though it worked fine) up until a couple of months ago. But with their latest site re-design the warning is gone.
It's not bad that they publicize the vulnerability, but it's bad to make it into a bigger issue than it really is. It means that when a more serious security risk comes along nobody will pay attention.
What are you going to do in response to the next Code-Red? Declare a state of emergancy and call out the army?
There have been no
reports of any exploitations of this problem, but the vulnerability
exists nevertheless.
I know most people here know this, but for some reason this bug has gotten an almost hysterical spin in the media. This is an example of the community responding to a potential risk, before any damage is done.
All these articles that rave about millions of systems being vulnerable seem to forget the fact that nobody has been affected.
I find it fascinating that people openly discuss ways of destroying evidence in case of possible legal action. Is this going to be a standard MBA course from now on: "How to cover your tracks" or "Case Studies: Failures in Shredding Policy from Watergate to Enron"?
It makes you wonder why nobody looks at it from the opposite side. If you don't do anything illegal then your e-mail archive could prove valuable for your own defense. Trading companies, for example, keep all records of customer interaction, including phone calls, for use in the event of a dispute. You can never claim that your broker did something without authorisation because they archive everything.
I don't know about the original poster, but I have put together TCO calculations in the past. The first thing to remember is that it's largly guesswork and rules-of-thumb.
Our rules-of-thumb tended to favour large centralized installations. If you could consolidate a ton of services on a single box, then everything got cheaper: fewer administrators, less floor-space, less power, less support, etc.
I had my doubts about the numbers we used, but the company I worked for was very large and presumably had studies to back up the figures. Obviously in our calculations Unix came out ahead of NT, and mainframes came out ahead of Unix.
Also, we were in the outsourcing business, so these figures weren't invented for marketing purposes. We used these numbers to create bids. If they were too far off we'd end up losing money, so there was no incentive to lie.
That's on a "16 way NUMA-Q, 700MHz P3's, 4Gb RAM".
I've been following that thread wondering if anybody would post better results with a dual Athlon or similar. Any lucky soals with really cool hardware who want to post benchmarks? In fact, it would be interesting to know how quickly the kernel compiles on single P3/700, just to get an idea of how it scales.
I look forward to seeing your license. I really can't imagine how the license will allow looking at the code for the purposes of implementation, but not copying the code. I mean, once you've seen an implementation of a given feature, it's pretty hard to create a second implementation that isn't somehow based on the first. And even if you do develop an implementation that you feel is entirely your own, the prospect of having to prove it in court in the event of a dispute is daunting.
So, in order to be useful, your license has to permit me to look at the code and then write my own GPL'd implementation, but without my risking legal action from MS. On the other hand you still want to require a license for anybody using your code in a commercial product. Good luck.
The existance of a widely distributed "visible-source" version from MS means that developers of Open Source versions have to take special care to document their development. If there's any similarity between Mono or DotGNU and the MS offering, MS can try to say that their code has been stolen.
Note that if MS really wanted independant implmentations then they would just use a BSD license. They're not doing that, and that means there's something sneaky going on. Don't trust them.
Re:GPG, OpenPGP, and what needs saving
on
How to Save PGP
·
· Score: 2
Once you have the code linked in (statically or dynamically) you can do Bad Things to the GPG code. Manipulate static variables, change environment settings, corrupt memory, all in an attempt to compromise security.
What? That doesn't seem plausible to me at all. That would mean that any malicious software using (for example) libc could take over any other application using libc? No way.
Besides, there are lots of other security libs that work without problems. If libSSL is possible then why not libGPG?
I don't think I buy into his proposed remedy, but he's right about Gates worrying less about the PC market and more about shifting his monopoly into new areas. He's changing Windows licensing to squeeze out more short-term revenue, while creating an opening for Linux in the long-term.
But I think Cringley underestimates the power of Microsoft's new enemies. AOL/TimeWarner, Sony, and Nokia are big, smart, and on to him. And the old enemies who are still standing (IBM, Oracle, and Sun) are just waiting for a sign of weakness.
That really doesn't matter. This isn't about profit. It's about ethics.
The original point was about profits, and how the entertainment industry misrepresents their losses.
As for the ethics argument, you haven't proved your point. The whole basis for the monopoly granted to artists is that it benefits society. If you want to make an ethical argument, then you need to show that violating that monopoly hurts society. You've made that assertion, but you haven't provided any evidence.
As an individual, I can honestly say that I've never copied a CD that I would have otherwise purchased. The loss to society: zero. The gain to society: I got a few minutes of entertainment. Since there seems to have been a net benefit, my conscience is clear.
The same way I wouldn't use GPLed code without releasing my software under the GPL.
You're not required to release your software under GPL. You're prohibited from releasing your software without the GPL. In other words, you can't remove users' freedoms. That's not even vaguely similar to the situation with music and movies.
In addition to stealing your stuff the guy is depriving you of potential profit.
There's the fundamental weakness of the arguement. When dealing with intellectual property the stealing doesn't cost you (the owner) anything directly. You're only losing the potential profit.
Now the problem is figuring out what that potential profit might have been. Only a small fraction of the people who downloaded your CD for free would have otherwise purchased the music. Against that you have to (or should) weigh the benefit of additional exposure - more people will hear your music and will tend to make it more popular, thus selling more CDs.
I don't think anybody really knows what the impact of all these free downloads is. It is clear that the figures the RIAA throws around are nonsense, since they count each download as a lost sale.
What do you perceive the effect of porn to be on children? I have a vague recollection of stumbling on some porn when I was a child, and it didn't traumatize me. I was curious for about 30 seconds, and then decided it was boring and a little gross. Kids are like that.
Right now I'm living in Finland where there's tons of porn on regular late-night television. Kids aren't going to be exposed to the stuff constantly (it's past their bedtimes), but I'm sure they all see it occasionally. It doesn't seem to have much effect on them.
My conclusion is that it's the parents who are traumatized by porn - kids just couldn't care less.
From my non-American perspective, this sounds totally bizarre. Do people in the U.S. really get sued for recommending employees who don't work out?
I mean I can imagine getting sued for putting my signature on something that's clearly wrong. If the person wasn't really my employee at all, for example. But for a recommendation?
Does the GNOME community really want to be associated with this kind of establishment?
Definately. At worst, pumping some money into India will do nothing to help India's poor. At best, growth in the Indian economy will help everybody at least a little (even if it's just through an increased tax base).
I fail to see how this can be considered a bad thing.
I agree that, considered in isoloation, democracy is always better than autocracy. But you can't just take the political system in isolation. Certainly a utopian society would be democratic, have no crime, no corruption, no poverty, a strong economy, good education, good health care, etc.
But nobody has figured out how to acheive this utopia (and I doubt anybody ever will). So if you can't have utopia, you have to choose those attributes that are most important to you and build a society that nutures these. The choices you make reflect the values of your society.
Note also that the trade-off depends upon what you've got to work with. If you live in a wealthy country then you have options that poorer countries don't.
In any case, it's not for us in the West to tell the Chinese how they should build their society. It makes much more sense for us to concentrate on our own problems.
There is equal variety of social and political thought within the US as there is within the world as a whole; this can be said for any country. You cannot draw circles and declare "European Values", "Chinese Values", "American Values", etc....
Sure there are communists in the U.S. and capitalists in North Korea (and every other sort of 'ist' anywhere you have sufficient population). But societies as a whole do have value systems, and these are very different from each other. As far as I'm concerned this is a truism. I just don't see how you can argue against it. The next time you travel abroad ask some locals how they think their country is different from yours. Chances are they have a lot of misconceptions about your country, but that's not the point. Their answer - what they're proud of and what they think can be improved - reflects their value system.
Autocratic states, around the world, have been responsible for far more death and destruction than any democratically-based states.
I'm not sure that's true. It would be hard to prove in any case. Certainly a well-managed autocratic state is better than a poorly managed democracy. Given a choice between living in democratic Argentina and communist China, I'd go with China at the moment.
I think you're imagining some huge mass of repressed people suffering under the yoke of cruel dictatorship. That's just not realistic. Like most countries, most of the population gets on with their day-to-day lives without thinking about freedom or other such lofty ideals. (In fairness, your case would have been much stronger during the cultural revolution, but that was a long time ago. That sort of truly oppressive system can't last for long.)
Of the people who have strong opinions either way, it's not at all clear that the majority would support you. (Yes, you can rightly say that we'll never know without elections).
As for being well-intentioned, benevolent, or effective, they haven't been doing too badly. Economic growth in China is impressive. And I don't see any reason to beleive that they want to harm the population.
You should also consider whether or not adopting democratic elections overnight would work. Even in the U.S., a country with a long history of peaceful power transition, things didn't go so smoothly in the last election. History is full of new democracies that have gone horribly wrong. Certainly China is better off than than Zimbabwe.
In any case, it wasn't my intent to defend dictatorship. Certainly I'm happier living in the West's sort-of-democracy. It just bothers me when people project their own world-view onto others.
You're looking at the issue from a very Western perspective. Your value system places great worth on individuality and freedom. That's great, but it's not universal.
If you lived in a country like Afghanistan you might appreciate food and peace more than freedom. That's what allowed the Taliban to gain power. They promised (and delivered for a while at least) stability after decades of war.
Chinese society in general has yet another set of values. Even European values tend to be somewhat different than Americans. The world is like that. In the end the Chinese government will either evolve as the values of it's citizens change, or it will be overthrown. At the moment they do seem to be evolving.
Without getting into the whole human rights thing, it certainly is the case that if you want to do business in a country - any country - you have to live by the laws of that country.
That's why Russians doing business in the U.S. are subject to the DMCA, or, to give a positive example, why Chinese doing business in the U.S. have to accept that their employees have greater freedom of speech.
Even when administering a commercial Unix server I normally wipe off the pre-installed OS and install from tape/cd. It just feels better knowing you've done it yourself and know exactly which optional packages are installed.
If I didn't reinstall from scratch I'd probably have to go through and audit the packages that the manufacturer installed. That's more hassle than just installing from scratch.
So educate me. What is this PICS thing? I did a Google search, but all I found was some software that extracts still photos from video. Likely not the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
I really don't understand the objections to '.kids' and '.sex'. Why does somebody need to set standards? Few who are in the sex business have any incentive to register under '.kids', and vice-versa.
Sure there will be a few exceptions. There are always a few idiots. But so what? The system doesn't need to be infallible, just reasonable.
Have tried the same sites with Mozilla instead of just Opera? I only use Opera occasionally, so I don't really know how it does, but Mozilla has been pretty good for quite some time.
I think web developers are slowly moving to W3C standard HTML because new IE and Netscape both support them. It's easy code to a common subset of HTML that works on both IE and Gecko - no more browser sniffing. That makes life a lot easier.
In my case, I remember running into IE specific web sites quite often a year ago. I don't think I've had that problem at all in the last couple of months. My on-line bank even showed a warning that they didn't support NS6 (even though it worked fine) up until a couple of months ago. But with their latest site re-design the warning is gone.
It's not bad that they publicize the vulnerability, but it's bad to make it into a bigger issue than it really is. It means that when a more serious security risk comes along nobody will pay attention.
What are you going to do in response to the next Code-Red? Declare a state of emergancy and call out the army?
From the advisory
I know most people here know this, but for some reason this bug has gotten an almost hysterical spin in the media. This is an example of the community responding to a potential risk, before any damage is done.
All these articles that rave about millions of systems being vulnerable seem to forget the fact that nobody has been affected.
I find it fascinating that people openly discuss ways of destroying evidence in case of possible legal action. Is this going to be a standard MBA course from now on: "How to cover your tracks" or "Case Studies: Failures in Shredding Policy from Watergate to Enron"?
It makes you wonder why nobody looks at it from the opposite side. If you don't do anything illegal then your e-mail archive could prove valuable for your own defense. Trading companies, for example, keep all records of customer interaction, including phone calls, for use in the event of a dispute. You can never claim that your broker did something without authorisation because they archive everything.
I don't know about the original poster, but I have put together TCO calculations in the past. The first thing to remember is that it's largly guesswork and rules-of-thumb.
Our rules-of-thumb tended to favour large centralized installations. If you could consolidate a ton of services on a single box, then everything got cheaper: fewer administrators, less floor-space, less power, less support, etc.
I had my doubts about the numbers we used, but the company I worked for was very large and presumably had studies to back up the figures. Obviously in our calculations Unix came out ahead of NT, and mainframes came out ahead of Unix.
Also, we were in the outsourcing business, so these figures weren't invented for marketing purposes. We used these numbers to create bids. If they were too far off we'd end up losing money, so there was no incentive to lie.
That's on a "16 way NUMA-Q, 700MHz P3's, 4Gb RAM".
I've been following that thread wondering if anybody would post better results with a dual Athlon or similar. Any lucky soals with really cool hardware who want to post benchmarks? In fact, it would be interesting to know how quickly the kernel compiles on single P3/700, just to get an idea of how it scales.
I look forward to seeing your license. I really can't imagine how the license will allow looking at the code for the purposes of implementation, but not copying the code. I mean, once you've seen an implementation of a given feature, it's pretty hard to create a second implementation that isn't somehow based on the first. And even if you do develop an implementation that you feel is entirely your own, the prospect of having to prove it in court in the event of a dispute is daunting.
So, in order to be useful, your license has to permit me to look at the code and then write my own GPL'd implementation, but without my risking legal action from MS. On the other hand you still want to require a license for anybody using your code in a commercial product. Good luck.
The existance of a widely distributed "visible-source" version from MS means that developers of Open Source versions have to take special care to document their development. If there's any similarity between Mono or DotGNU and the MS offering, MS can try to say that their code has been stolen.
Note that if MS really wanted independant implmentations then they would just use a BSD license. They're not doing that, and that means there's something sneaky going on. Don't trust them.
What? That doesn't seem plausible to me at all. That would mean that any malicious software using (for example) libc could take over any other application using libc? No way.
Besides, there are lots of other security libs that work without problems. If libSSL is possible then why not libGPG?
I don't think I buy into his proposed remedy, but he's right about Gates worrying less about the PC market and more about shifting his monopoly into new areas. He's changing Windows licensing to squeeze out more short-term revenue, while creating an opening for Linux in the long-term.
But I think Cringley underestimates the power of Microsoft's new enemies. AOL/TimeWarner, Sony, and Nokia are big, smart, and on to him. And the old enemies who are still standing (IBM, Oracle, and Sun) are just waiting for a sign of weakness.
The original point was about profits, and how the entertainment industry misrepresents their losses.
As for the ethics argument, you haven't proved your point. The whole basis for the monopoly granted to artists is that it benefits society. If you want to make an ethical argument, then you need to show that violating that monopoly hurts society. You've made that assertion, but you haven't provided any evidence.
As an individual, I can honestly say that I've never copied a CD that I would have otherwise purchased. The loss to society: zero. The gain to society: I got a few minutes of entertainment. Since there seems to have been a net benefit, my conscience is clear.
You're not required to release your software under GPL. You're prohibited from releasing your software without the GPL. In other words, you can't remove users' freedoms. That's not even vaguely similar to the situation with music and movies.
There's the fundamental weakness of the arguement. When dealing with intellectual property the stealing doesn't cost you (the owner) anything directly. You're only losing the potential profit.
Now the problem is figuring out what that potential profit might have been. Only a small fraction of the people who downloaded your CD for free would have otherwise purchased the music. Against that you have to (or should) weigh the benefit of additional exposure - more people will hear your music and will tend to make it more popular, thus selling more CDs.
I don't think anybody really knows what the impact of all these free downloads is. It is clear that the figures the RIAA throws around are nonsense, since they count each download as a lost sale.
Ok, I know this is off-topic, but...
What do you perceive the effect of porn to be on children? I have a vague recollection of stumbling on some porn when I was a child, and it didn't traumatize me. I was curious for about 30 seconds, and then decided it was boring and a little gross. Kids are like that.
Right now I'm living in Finland where there's tons of porn on regular late-night television. Kids aren't going to be exposed to the stuff constantly (it's past their bedtimes), but I'm sure they all see it occasionally. It doesn't seem to have much effect on them.
My conclusion is that it's the parents who are traumatized by porn - kids just couldn't care less.
From my non-American perspective, this sounds totally bizarre. Do people in the U.S. really get sued for recommending employees who don't work out?
I mean I can imagine getting sued for putting my signature on something that's clearly wrong. If the person wasn't really my employee at all, for example. But for a recommendation?
Definately. At worst, pumping some money into India will do nothing to help India's poor. At best, growth in the Indian economy will help everybody at least a little (even if it's just through an increased tax base).
I fail to see how this can be considered a bad thing.
I agree that, considered in isoloation, democracy is always better than autocracy. But you can't just take the political system in isolation. Certainly a utopian society would be democratic, have no crime, no corruption, no poverty, a strong economy, good education, good health care, etc.
But nobody has figured out how to acheive this utopia (and I doubt anybody ever will). So if you can't have utopia, you have to choose those attributes that are most important to you and build a society that nutures these. The choices you make reflect the values of your society.
Note also that the trade-off depends upon what you've got to work with. If you live in a wealthy country then you have options that poorer countries don't.
In any case, it's not for us in the West to tell the Chinese how they should build their society. It makes much more sense for us to concentrate on our own problems.
Ok, you clearly know way too much about Pokemon.
Sure there are communists in the U.S. and capitalists in North Korea (and every other sort of 'ist' anywhere you have sufficient population). But societies as a whole do have value systems, and these are very different from each other. As far as I'm concerned this is a truism. I just don't see how you can argue against it. The next time you travel abroad ask some locals how they think their country is different from yours. Chances are they have a lot of misconceptions about your country, but that's not the point. Their answer - what they're proud of and what they think can be improved - reflects their value system.
I'm not sure that's true. It would be hard to prove in any case. Certainly a well-managed autocratic state is better than a poorly managed democracy. Given a choice between living in democratic Argentina and communist China, I'd go with China at the moment.
I think you're imagining some huge mass of repressed people suffering under the yoke of cruel dictatorship. That's just not realistic. Like most countries, most of the population gets on with their day-to-day lives without thinking about freedom or other such lofty ideals. (In fairness, your case would have been much stronger during the cultural revolution, but that was a long time ago. That sort of truly oppressive system can't last for long.)
Of the people who have strong opinions either way, it's not at all clear that the majority would support you. (Yes, you can rightly say that we'll never know without elections).
As for being well-intentioned, benevolent, or effective, they haven't been doing too badly. Economic growth in China is impressive. And I don't see any reason to beleive that they want to harm the population.
You should also consider whether or not adopting democratic elections overnight would work. Even in the U.S., a country with a long history of peaceful power transition, things didn't go so smoothly in the last election. History is full of new democracies that have gone horribly wrong. Certainly China is better off than than Zimbabwe.
In any case, it wasn't my intent to defend dictatorship. Certainly I'm happier living in the West's sort-of-democracy. It just bothers me when people project their own world-view onto others.
You're looking at the issue from a very Western perspective. Your value system places great worth on individuality and freedom. That's great, but it's not universal.
If you lived in a country like Afghanistan you might appreciate food and peace more than freedom. That's what allowed the Taliban to gain power. They promised (and delivered for a while at least) stability after decades of war.
Chinese society in general has yet another set of values. Even European values tend to be somewhat different than Americans. The world is like that. In the end the Chinese government will either evolve as the values of it's citizens change, or it will be overthrown. At the moment they do seem to be evolving.
Without getting into the whole human rights thing, it certainly is the case that if you want to do business in a country - any country - you have to live by the laws of that country.
That's why Russians doing business in the U.S. are subject to the DMCA, or, to give a positive example, why Chinese doing business in the U.S. have to accept that their employees have greater freedom of speech.
Even when administering a commercial Unix server I normally wipe off the pre-installed OS and install from tape/cd. It just feels better knowing you've done it yourself and know exactly which optional packages are installed.
If I didn't reinstall from scratch I'd probably have to go through and audit the packages that the manufacturer installed. That's more hassle than just installing from scratch.
From the article news.com article:
I doubt this will get much attention if it's only available for non-commercial use. Especially when two Free implementations are under development.
So educate me. What is this PICS thing? I did a Google search, but all I found was some software that extracts still photos from video. Likely not the same thing.