It is a social norm in the US that you do ask to take permission. There is expectation that you will be photographed/video'ed in certain places (stores, banks, etc...), but if I walked out of my house and someone was videotaping me as I got in my car and drove to work, w/o saying a word to me, I'd be less than happy.
The point of an encyclopedia is to get experts to write accessible entries for the lay person. It's no so that someone who just learned quantum physics could change the entry on it to something they understand (which would probably be wrong).
Where do people get this illusion that Unix systems were secure in the past? As an undergrad we would drive our friends crazy hacking into computers. Just about every Unix program they ran, from mail to finger to rn had security holes you could drive a car through.
The difference back then was no one cared if we broke into a computer. It just didn't make news. Heck, I remember that remote exploits stayed open for years, and no one said a peep. The world was very different back then. Plus there just wasn't much interesting to hack into. People would generally hack into other students accounts -- erase homework, put a bug in a friends assignment, send a goofy email from their professor's account, etc... You didn't have organized crime stealing credit cards, because no one besides geeks used computers.
I know this doesn't fit into your mental model of how Unix was this secure fort in the old days, but you'd better think again. Those of us who were there, know better.
I hate to sound cliche, but as long as we have people programming systems, there will be security holes. And I've worked at enough places to know that no one has a silver bullet.
"There is nothing particularly hard about programming the Cell. Any software engineer worth their salt (i.e. the kind responsible for writing game engines, optimized code etc.), should be able to master it easily enough and the people doing periphery stuff like menu systems shouldn't have to care. SPU programming is little removed from multi-threading and most of the principles can be carried over to it."
OK, you're clearly not a developer. The Cell is a bear to get good and correct code on. Plus Sony/IBM doesn't do much to help. I had suggested to them early in the development that they should only consider a Cell like architecture if they could help the developers write to it, and they didn't. They're paying now because so many major game shops aren't getting great perf on the PS3.
Precendent from the Napster case shows that this is not the case. The music labels can effectively drop their catalog in your lap and then say, "Now make sure these don't show up on your site", and in Napster's case, they weren't even hosting the music!
All Viacom has to do is say, "Here's our catalog of shows, they'd better not show up." The burden has now shifted to YouTube to do the policing of the catalog. And given that YouTube actually hosts the content, I think the case against them ia actually more compelling than the case against Napster (which was pretty weak).
At the end of the day, everyone in the industry knew this was going to happen. The only thing that was surprising was that Google didn't force a lawsuit before they bought to see how things would play out. I think the thing that surprised people was Google buying YouTube, which made a big money play all but inevitable. Either Google has already calculated a multi-billion dollar payout with the YouTube purchase, or they feel like they can show that this is a DMCA case, which Napster could not.
Actually my first response was "Finally!". I think the surprise exhibited by most people on Slashdot has more to do with the level of actual CS sophistication on Slashdot than it does anything else (which is consistently displayed on almost anything related to CS). Her work on program analysis and program transformation has completely changed the field in the same way that Codd changed databases or Thompson changed systems.
Also, RIP Ken Kennedy. Another true star in the field.
on at least one count. It says that the typed URLs in the registry don't get purged when you clear the history. I just tested it, and it does get purged. It's the one thing I tested, and it was wrong. Doesn't give me a whole lot of faith for everything else in the article (including the fact that there was another correction listed at the end of the article).
No you can still do what you want with the disc. Just because the content on the disk does not play in your Linux computer, only limits your use of the content. You can break the disc, through the disc like a frisbee, put it in a Linux computer, put it on a record player and listen to it. You probably won't enjoy the content doing most of these things, but that has nothing to do with the disc proper.
Re:What were they thinking?
on
Inside MySpace.com
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The fact of the matter is, almost no website has as much traffic as MySpace (and certainly not of the sort they have). In hindsight I think it's easier to say, "X would have been better to do.", but when you're seeing traffic increase 10% per day, you need fast solutions now. I've worked on large sites, but never as large as MySpace, and I've certainly seen the best architects make decisions that you'd question, but it was the best at the time. And these are real architects that have built real large scale websites, databases, and scale out configurations -- not like most of the commenters on slashdot, whom always seem to have a critique, but yet neither have a product that generates over $10Mil in revenue per year, has over 50Mil downloads, nor is in the top 100 of websites visited.
Did this study not read like something that was trying to prove a point rather than a real study? There seemed to be a fundamental lack of questions, that had two answers: one that would show non-FOSS was better and another that would show that FOSS was better. This seemed to start on the premise that FOSS is better, and then I'll give you the data to support that claim. There is nothing wrong with that in propaganda or politics, but from an academic research study, it was sorely lacking.
Note that this does not mean that the conclusions are not correct, but you can't tell any better from this than you can from any "sponsored" piece of research. It's just that this one is quite a bit longer, with a lot more authors.
I think this is fundamental misconception that most people on slashdot and the FSF have. They believe that most people have some strong desire to do whatever they want with software. While it may (or may not) be a noble cause, most people have so many restrictions in other aspects of their life, they don't think much of the restrictions on software.
I have to pay ridiculous fees on my car, I can't do most modifications that I think would be fun, and still legally drive on the freeway, and I can't even put it up on blocks in most neighborhoods that I'd want to live in. This is just but one example, and I could give a million others.
The FSF should be focusing on value add of free software, and not something that most people frankly could care less about.
You clearly have never done real programming. Arguing to "simply not write the bugs in the first place" is a high schooler statement. Any programmer who has written "Hello World" knows that if you're doing any non-trivial work in C there is going to be a chance of buffer overflow.
The other thing that gets me is about the computer manufacturers that whine is this line:
"We have to pay more but users are not going to pay more," Wong said. This would mean an increase in the cost to PC manufacturers of 1 percent to 2 percent, according to Wong, in a business where the profit margin is around 5 percent or less.
If MS has increased their prices to all computer manufacturers then wouldn't they all need to adjust their prices upwards by 1-2%? The thing is that this is a cost of doing business -- like minimum wage going up. It impacts everyone equally. And given all this, there's little competitive disadvantage.
You have a similar situation with oil and gas. Oil prices go up, and guess what, so does gas. Gas prices still aren't $1/gallon. They've moved with oil prices. Given that oil prices are a cost of doing business, no gas station worries about oil prices going up. They know that the guy across the street will have to increase prices too.
If you need to raise the price 1%, then do it. The market will decide if Windows is worth it at the higher price.
Furthermore, it's an increase of $10 on a $1000 machine. I don't think many people would blink twice. Should we sue Sony for the price of the PS3? They have a monopoly on my PS2 games and they raised the price of the PS3 to ridiculous amounts. Plus the cost of games is going up. Microsoft did it at a rate that is about the same as inflation. Sony went way past inflation.
The big news with XP was removing the Win9x line of the OS. I suspect most of the work done in XP was app compat for Win9x. The move from Win2k to WinXP was not huge (but not minor). The big move was the move from the Win9x, which was a tremendous jump along virtually every axis.
KnoppMyth sounds good, but things like "Note: You'll still need to edit/etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to change the refresh rate or you CAN destroy your TV." just aren't things I really feel like experimenting with. Can't someone get this type of stuff to just work?! This stupid config has been a pain for the past decade for me (outside of MythTV). Why is it in Windows I've never had to deal with anything like this?
I have to agree that it is too hard to install. I've run multiple Linux desktops and setup a couple of servers, but setting up MythTV was too much for me. Admittedly, this was about 4 years ago, but I check the webpage to see if the description is easier, and it doesn't appear to be much easier. The feature set for MythTV is incredible. If they could make it a simply "click and install" process, it would own the media center market in a way that other open source products would envy.
If I was running the project I'd make this next year all about ease of install.
But this is common in every area of the US. Don't blame Microsoft for this, but blame our methods for local funding of US schools.
And if this works, it should be replicated in other schools and we should demand that there is funding for other similar programs. Rather than the standard chant we get from Republicans that money at schools does not matter, while they send their school to well funded private schools.
Applying for college is not the same as attending college. BUT there is an important reason why they're doing that. There is some data that suggests that one reason that many students don't go to college is that they think they can not get in. By requiring them to apply it at least addresses that issue. The students can decide whether or not they want to go to college after the college decision.
And applying to college does cost money, but virtually every college will waive the fee if you can't afford.
Unfortunately, most people don't understand the "charter" of most charter schools. Having worked on a couple of charter schools in the past it is an attempt to learn what educational mechansims work. Those charter that do not work should be shut down. But those that do, should be kept open, and MORE importantly, the lessons learned should be filtered into other public and private schools.
You never do anything at a charter school to hurt students, but you do take on some experimental teaching ideas. This report completely ignored that fact.
A Microsoft RC has not meant a real "release candidate" since I was in the NT4 Beta program (and maybe it never did). I remember when RC1 and then RC2 came out, I wrote a post saying that RC2 is better, that was the one they should release. Others pointed out that they don't choose between the RCs. They're just on the way to the final release. So in reality Alphas, Beta, and RCs are just pre-releases at different states.
Weird. Computer games can be downloaded for free, or acquired for a very small fee from your neighbourhood copy-peddler. And still the game-development industry is steadily increasing its revenues.
There's a difference between something being free and your ability to steal it. If I could go to a legit website or to my local Best Buy and get all games for free or pay for them -- guess what? I'd take them for free.
Now I don't copy music, because it is illegal, and frankly I don't music so badly that I'd copy it. With games it's even trickier since if I'm not getting games from a trusted source, who knows what I just installed on my computer (see Rootkit).
And even cooler -- if you are in college or school, get the Acedemic version of MS VS 2005 for $50 (like I did) from ccvsoftware.com.
Or better yet, if you're in college, get you school to pay $800/year and the whole school gets an academic alliance license. Every student, faculty members, and staff get access to MSDN, Visual Studio, Office, Windows, etc... At a school like Ohio State this comes down to a few cents per person per year.
Slashdot Mirror
It is a social norm in the US that you do ask to take permission. There is expectation that you will be photographed/video'ed in certain places (stores, banks, etc...), but if I walked out of my house and someone was videotaping me as I got in my car and drove to work, w/o saying a word to me, I'd be less than happy.
The point of an encyclopedia is to get experts to write accessible entries for the lay person. It's no so that someone who just learned quantum physics could change the entry on it to something they understand (which would probably be wrong).
Where do people get this illusion that Unix systems were secure in the past? As an undergrad we would drive our friends crazy hacking into computers. Just about every Unix program they ran, from mail to finger to rn had security holes you could drive a car through.
The difference back then was no one cared if we broke into a computer. It just didn't make news. Heck, I remember that remote exploits stayed open for years, and no one said a peep. The world was very different back then. Plus there just wasn't much interesting to hack into. People would generally hack into other students accounts -- erase homework, put a bug in a friends assignment, send a goofy email from their professor's account, etc... You didn't have organized crime stealing credit cards, because no one besides geeks used computers.
I know this doesn't fit into your mental model of how Unix was this secure fort in the old days, but you'd better think again. Those of us who were there, know better.
I hate to sound cliche, but as long as we have people programming systems, there will be security holes. And I've worked at enough places to know that no one has a silver bullet.
"There is nothing particularly hard about programming the Cell. Any software engineer worth their salt (i.e. the kind responsible for writing game engines, optimized code etc.), should be able to master it easily enough and the people doing periphery stuff like menu systems shouldn't have to care. SPU programming is little removed from multi-threading and most of the principles can be carried over to it."
OK, you're clearly not a developer. The Cell is a bear to get good and correct code on. Plus Sony/IBM doesn't do much to help. I had suggested to them early in the development that they should only consider a Cell like architecture if they could help the developers write to it, and they didn't. They're paying now because so many major game shops aren't getting great perf on the PS3.
Precendent from the Napster case shows that this is not the case. The music labels can effectively drop their catalog in your lap and then say, "Now make sure these don't show up on your site", and in Napster's case, they weren't even hosting the music!
All Viacom has to do is say, "Here's our catalog of shows, they'd better not show up." The burden has now shifted to YouTube to do the policing of the catalog. And given that YouTube actually hosts the content, I think the case against them ia actually more compelling than the case against Napster (which was pretty weak).
At the end of the day, everyone in the industry knew this was going to happen. The only thing that was surprising was that Google didn't force a lawsuit before they bought to see how things would play out. I think the thing that surprised people was Google buying YouTube, which made a big money play all but inevitable. Either Google has already calculated a multi-billion dollar payout with the YouTube purchase, or they feel like they can show that this is a DMCA case, which Napster could not.
Actually my first response was "Finally!". I think the surprise exhibited by most people on Slashdot has more to do with the level of actual CS sophistication on Slashdot than it does anything else (which is consistently displayed on almost anything related to CS). Her work on program analysis and program transformation has completely changed the field in the same way that Codd changed databases or Thompson changed systems.
Also, RIP Ken Kennedy. Another true star in the field.
on at least one count. It says that the typed URLs in the registry don't get purged when you clear the history. I just tested it, and it does get purged. It's the one thing I tested, and it was wrong. Doesn't give me a whole lot of faith for everything else in the article (including the fact that there was another correction listed at the end of the article).
No you can still do what you want with the disc. Just because the content on the disk does not play in your Linux computer, only limits your use of the content. You can break the disc, through the disc like a frisbee, put it in a Linux computer, put it on a record player and listen to it. You probably won't enjoy the content doing most of these things, but that has nothing to do with the disc proper.
The fact of the matter is, almost no website has as much traffic as MySpace (and certainly not of the sort they have). In hindsight I think it's easier to say, "X would have been better to do.", but when you're seeing traffic increase 10% per day, you need fast solutions now. I've worked on large sites, but never as large as MySpace, and I've certainly seen the best architects make decisions that you'd question, but it was the best at the time. And these are real architects that have built real large scale websites, databases, and scale out configurations -- not like most of the commenters on slashdot, whom always seem to have a critique, but yet neither have a product that generates over $10Mil in revenue per year, has over 50Mil downloads, nor is in the top 100 of websites visited.
Did this study not read like something that was trying to prove a point rather than a real study? There seemed to be a fundamental lack of questions, that had two answers: one that would show non-FOSS was better and another that would show that FOSS was better. This seemed to start on the premise that FOSS is better, and then I'll give you the data to support that claim. There is nothing wrong with that in propaganda or politics, but from an academic research study, it was sorely lacking.
Note that this does not mean that the conclusions are not correct, but you can't tell any better from this than you can from any "sponsored" piece of research. It's just that this one is quite a bit longer, with a lot more authors.
I have to pay ridiculous fees on my car, I can't do most modifications that I think would be fun, and still legally drive on the freeway, and I can't even put it up on blocks in most neighborhoods that I'd want to live in. This is just but one example, and I could give a million others.
The FSF should be focusing on value add of free software, and not something that most people frankly could care less about.
Legit question. Check out this link: http://blogs.msdn.com/bharry/archive/2006/11/21/no vember-devdiv-dogfood-statistics.aspx
It actually gives in-depth states on the use of Team System in Visual Studio and .NET.
You clearly have never done real programming. Arguing to "simply not write the bugs in the first place" is a high schooler statement. Any programmer who has written "Hello World" knows that if you're doing any non-trivial work in C there is going to be a chance of buffer overflow.
Actually much of Microsoft is moving to VS Team System. I believe all of Visual Studio and .NET is using it now.
The other thing that gets me is about the computer manufacturers that whine is this line: "We have to pay more but users are not going to pay more," Wong said. This would mean an increase in the cost to PC manufacturers of 1 percent to 2 percent, according to Wong, in a business where the profit margin is around 5 percent or less. If MS has increased their prices to all computer manufacturers then wouldn't they all need to adjust their prices upwards by 1-2%? The thing is that this is a cost of doing business -- like minimum wage going up. It impacts everyone equally. And given all this, there's little competitive disadvantage.
You have a similar situation with oil and gas. Oil prices go up, and guess what, so does gas. Gas prices still aren't $1/gallon. They've moved with oil prices. Given that oil prices are a cost of doing business, no gas station worries about oil prices going up. They know that the guy across the street will have to increase prices too.
If you need to raise the price 1%, then do it. The market will decide if Windows is worth it at the higher price.
Furthermore, it's an increase of $10 on a $1000 machine. I don't think many people would blink twice. Should we sue Sony for the price of the PS3? They have a monopoly on my PS2 games and they raised the price of the PS3 to ridiculous amounts. Plus the cost of games is going up. Microsoft did it at a rate that is about the same as inflation. Sony went way past inflation.
The big news with XP was removing the Win9x line of the OS. I suspect most of the work done in XP was app compat for Win9x. The move from Win2k to WinXP was not huge (but not minor). The big move was the move from the Win9x, which was a tremendous jump along virtually every axis.
KnoppMyth sounds good, but things like "Note: You'll still need to edit /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 to change the refresh rate or you CAN destroy your TV." just aren't things I really feel like experimenting with. Can't someone get this type of stuff to just work?! This stupid config has been a pain for the past decade for me (outside of MythTV). Why is it in Windows I've never had to deal with anything like this?
If I was running the project I'd make this next year all about ease of install.
And if this works, it should be replicated in other schools and we should demand that there is funding for other similar programs. Rather than the standard chant we get from Republicans that money at schools does not matter, while they send their school to well funded private schools.
And applying to college does cost money, but virtually every college will waive the fee if you can't afford.
You never do anything at a charter school to hurt students, but you do take on some experimental teaching ideas. This report completely ignored that fact.
A Microsoft RC has not meant a real "release candidate" since I was in the NT4 Beta program (and maybe it never did). I remember when RC1 and then RC2 came out, I wrote a post saying that RC2 is better, that was the one they should release. Others pointed out that they don't choose between the RCs. They're just on the way to the final release. So in reality Alphas, Beta, and RCs are just pre-releases at different states.
There's a difference between something being free and your ability to steal it. If I could go to a legit website or to my local Best Buy and get all games for free or pay for them -- guess what? I'd take them for free.
Now I don't copy music, because it is illegal, and frankly I don't music so badly that I'd copy it. With games it's even trickier since if I'm not getting games from a trusted source, who knows what I just installed on my computer (see Rootkit).
Maybe you have a different search.msn.com than I do, but I don't get any pop-ups. The webpage is equally as terse as google.com.
search.yahoo.com is a bit more cluttered.
search.live.com is about as clean as it gets though.
Or better yet, if you're in college, get you school to pay $800/year and the whole school gets an academic alliance license. Every student, faculty members, and staff get access to MSDN, Visual Studio, Office, Windows, etc... At a school like Ohio State this comes down to a few cents per person per year.