I don't think other software firms will follow suit. I work for a software company, and while we don't have time-limited licenses, we stick it to you with maintenance fees.
When you buy the software, you get whatever licenses you bought for forever(actually until 2035, but it's a numbers thing), you also have a maintenance contract that entitles you to support, upgrades, and patches.
If you don't want upgrades, or want to try and work without support, you can let your maintenance expire, and you're done.
It's a good sceme for us to ensure revenue, and mitigate the cost of our support staff, plus the customer can stop paying and still use the product.
I will have to shtrongly disagree with the idea that Computer Scientists learn "cookbook" ways of dealing with problems.
Computer Science is an outgrowth of discreet mathematics, using many of the same methodologies and practices mathemeticians use. Mathemeticians bank on reducing complex problems to QED problems, which are then easy to solve. This is not "cook book", this is analysis, finding out not how to get from point A to point B, but how A tells you how to move towards B.
The beauty of God's creation, as Chaos theory has taught us, is that even vastly complex systems have an underlying order that can be understood. In my computer science education, I became more prepared for programming and a host of other possibilities because I don't know how to create a hash table, but what a hash table is.
I have seen smart people who know perl/C/python, etc. struggle with problems that I think are simple because a lack of understanding in basic principles of computer science.
"Cook book" problem solvers are those who don't understand how things happen, but merely what the result is. "Cookbook coders" don't understand the problem solving methodolgy, just that if they jiggle the pieces enough, the problem works itself out.
A computer scientist, on the other hand, finds the core of the problem and solves that problem. For instance, a coder might see "tar this directory, but make sure the tar file is under 2GB, if it goes over, split it into 2 files." and he codes a simple method to add files until the total size will exceed 2GB.
The Computer Scientist sees the same problem and separates it into pieces of a set of variously sized items, and n containers of size 2GB. She then solves the problem using principles learned from the classic "Knapsack problem", resulting in a vastly superior program thatn above.
And show me an on the job learner who has a practical understanding of O-notation.
I don't think that they generally hold up in the US either.
When you work for a company, you are, in most cases, considered an "At Will" employee. This means that you are not contractually obligated to stay for any period of time. I can start work on Monday and quit on Tuesday. This also generally means that the employer takes on the risk of allowing the employee access to its secrets and business strategies, as well as allocating resources to somebody who won't necessarily be their tomorrow.
"Contracts" that state you will reimberse the employer for initial training costs and won't work for a competing company are generally unenforceable unless classified government information relating to national security is involved. As my lawyer friends have explained to me, tying to non compete and training reimbursements is tantamount to indentured servitude. It can be argued in court that the employee did not know about these conditions until he had agreed, in principal, to tkae the job.
In this case, the employee is no longer in a position to refuse the terms because he can be assumed to be in a state of hardship, if he doesn't agree he doesn't have a job, but if he does, the employer holds all of the chips in respect to the employee's ability to make a living.
In a nutshell, it's a scare tactic that they won't go to court to enforce.
I must say that none of this is information comes froma legal expert, it is merely a set of observations based on conversations with lawyers and reading law articles.
Personally, I would go with the Technics SA-DX940.
It has optical and coax inputs, Dolby Po-Logic and Digital decoding, as well DTS decoding. Let's not forget Dolby 5.1. There are also several video inputs, allowin you to multiplex several vido inputs to your television.
This receiever can't be beat for price/performance, and is a high quality product all around.
If I lend you a book, then I can't use it. However, if I make a copy of that book and give it to you, that is not legal.
Similar with Napster. Napster is now a distribution point for copying music and then distributing it.
Mr. Katz is making an arguement that is not reasonable. Monitoring Napster traffic is not wrong, Napster promises you no right to privacy. If Mr. Katz were at all knowledgeable on this subject, he would know that Napster actually requests that its users notify it of users that are violating the copyrights of artists. In this, Metallica is just helping out Napster by ratting on those people who are doing illegal things. Furthermore, one major arguement in favor of Napster seems to have the general feeling of "MP3 still isn't ubiquitous, so this is OK." If the day comes that I can head over to Crutchfield and buy an Sony MP3 player for my home stereo set up at a reasonable price, then I have no motivation to purchase music if it is freely available.
This is why the music industry is resitant to this technology, and Napster, Slashdot, Jon Katz, et al. have been guilty of encouraging these illegal activity.
Furthermore, Jon Katz attempts to villify Metallica for going after "young people who don't know any better[sic]." Illogical. Napster has several warnings about the legality of music sources. There is a reasonable expectation at this point that these users have not only read the warning, but are aware of this current debate.
Jon Katz has merely proved to us that he is a paranoid horse's ass.
the courts *can't* find napster at fault. Precedent is set by the fact you can't sue the phone company for fraud committed by phone. It's the driver, not the road that's to blame
Once again, people have missed the point. With the phone company, there are no reasonable steps that can be taken to revent fraud. Napster is a different story.
Napster exists for the sole purpose of exchanging music, and Napster itself recognizes that some of this music may infringe on another's copyright. It is then incumbent upon Napster to ensure that the content available through its service is legal.
Certainly the phone company is not responsible for fraud, but it must take reasonable steps to prevent fraud. Napster makes it clear on the Napster website that some music may be infringing on copyrights and that those users should be reported. Given this, Napster should take action and actively police its users. If I own a building where drug dealing is on and I know about it, if I do nothing, I am certainly liable, as is Napster for illegal MP3's.
By looking in named logs you will see the address of the machine that made the request, which could be anything.
Most boxes are don't handle their own DNS, rather, they get it from some other host. The machine that you pull DNS from will either query a root server at then the primary nameserver for the domain, or hand the query off to another DNS server.
B) What's to stop the haxx0rs from writing a small script that polls the dns servers every 5..10..30 seconds and changes all of the DDos boxen to the new IP instantly
Actually, they wouldn't have to do this. If you set the TTL for a DNS etry very low, then I am assuming that the expire time on the record as a whole is very low, probably not more than a minute. With this being true, if the attacker uses the hostname rather than IP, he won't have any problems. His internal cahce will expire quickly, as well as whatever servers he is using for resolution.
This will result in a flooding of the target's DNS servers as well as a DDOS attack.
In looking this over, this "solution" will never work.
The only question that I have is whether it is GPL'd "enough"
That's a very good point. In my past examinations of the GPL, I had gotten the feeling that in order to GPL it, you had to include the GPL with the distribution and state the requirements of the GPL so that it was stated obviously.
I don't believe that GPL can be considered Prime Facia in that just saying it's under GPL is enough.
Perhaps somebody out there with some legal expertise can fill us in? Anyone from EFF or FSF?
This article shows a huge lack of Mr Katz's understanding of art. Works of art, for the most part, are not interactive. Interactive art means that the audience effects the shape of the art.
Most art is not this way. It is contemplative. Much of the art that one experiences is aimed at conveying an idea and causing a reaction. When you see "Guernica", "The Nighthawks", or "The Mona Lisa", you don't move or shape it, you experience it, and when it has its essence to you, you contemplate it and discuss it with others.
This is what most art forms have in common, from literature and poetry, visual art, and theater and film. Good art, whether on screen, television, canvas, or paper, does not need to be interactive to be effective, and is infact most often better when the creator is allowed to direct what you see and where you go. If you direct it, then the creator has little ability to achievbe his message.
Good point. The Oscars were never there to be interactive. The show is put on TV because people are interested in who wins and what people are waering. Any notion about interactive voting on winners, presenters, and speeches is nonsense.
Don't forget what the Oscars are, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards. Think what you will about insiderism, these people are still much more knowledgeable about filmmaking than you or me. The Oscars are Hollywoods day to parade and promote itself, not pander to the public. That's what the People's Choice Awards and the TV GUide awards are for.
I am interested in who the industry thinks are the best actors, directors, producers etc., not participating in the show.
Interactive broadcasts are great for presidential debates, interviews, and other programs aimed at public opinion, but not awards shows.
There has already been a fairly "unstoppable" virus run through *nix systems. Go talk to RT about worms and such. Seems to me that was a virus with all of the capabilities.
If you type su and then start executing commands, your original envinronment persists, so a malicious script that update your path can still have some effect. It is for exactly this reason that I NEVER us just plain su, always su -, that way you avoid corruption of root's environment.
Assurance against viruses then becomes an issue of safeguarding root's resource files and making sure that installs haven't changed things they aren't supposed to.
Even still, are these viruses may not be able to reproduce readily, but if they cause harm to one user, the objective was met. Let's say your company runs Linux as a whole, and you want to try some binary only software, that may have been downloaded from a not so secure site.
If you install it and run it and it hoses up everything in your $HOME, you are screwed.
These aren't so much viruses as they are trojan horses, and nobody is ever same from a Trojan Horse.
Dual Band phones are a stop-gap while whatever company builds out its network. It was never meant to be a coverall. If you live in a major city and don't travel out to BFE, or to "remote" areas like St. Joe, MI, dual band is great.
Don't be fooled by these arguements about coverage. My phone works fine where I need it to, plus no roaming ir long distance. Analog gives no service outside of dial tone. With digital I get Voicemail, caller id, free long distance, and 1 number ring anywhere. In chicago, it's cheaper to use a cell phone for cross town calls than a regular phone.
WHat made the original so great was its relative simplicity. No infinite numbers of sub-class specializations and source books for each. Back in the day, you wanted an MU who did nothing but fireballs and destructive spells, you just did it. The Old schoolwasn't about rules, but about new twists to throw at people, magic items, neutral dragons, new monsters.
Actually, it makes a lot of sense, assuming my facts are correct.
I had an interview with some Motorola folks out of college and they explained to me how these LEO satelites would ony be orbit for a short time before they fell out.
With this in mind, Iridium's lease on life, if not maintained, was short anyway.
What one should ask is did it make sense to put a network in orbit that would need to be replaced every 8 years or so?
I think that you miss the relevancy of the postal service. I bank with a credit union in another state because I refuse to deal with corporate mega-banks. When forms need to be filled out and exchanged, I can put them in the mail and get them there in 2-3 days for.33. To send it by FedEx or UPS would cost about 50 times more for no added convienience. Certified mail still only costs a few dollars. Do you really think that FedEx could deliver a letter for $.33? No, our taxes subsidize the mail and it still remains one of the most effective means of communicating via paper. Don't kid yourself, this world is a very long way off from shedding its need of paper documents. Loans, insurance companies, brokerages, all of these require some degree of paper work that needs to be exchanged. If you want cheap and effiecient, you need the USPS. BTW, what if FedEx decided it was too dangerous to deliver to area's of New York, or LA; perhaps they would decide that delivering to Big Sky Montana is not cost effective, they would stop. The USPS is REQUIRED by Congress to deliver to every address in the US.
Let us also remember our Patterson and Hennesey, wherethe first couple chapters explains to us that more than MHz need be factored into measure performance. Let's think about CPI. If your G4 has a CPI of say 4 and the pentium is at 6 or 8, then that 500MHz G4 is processing date between 30 and 50% than the Pentium.
Good point. We all knew about symlinks years/decades ago. I did see that the article talk about administrators having to copy large amounts of data to a new machine. Aside from the OS, what does a machine need to ahve installed on it? Every system I have used usued mounts everything important.
I think this comment is quite valid. Why hasn't the object oriented paradigm become truly mainstream. Most omputer science departments teach C, with classes based in OO programming as under attended electives. In examining many of the projects that I have worked with, I have neverf found a problem well suited an OO framework outside of a database. Many other models just don't break down into simple objects, there are too many other complexities. How has C++ become so popular then?
As far as security goes I think that it is worth to mention one of the most glaring omissions by MS.
they state:
"Linux only provides access controls for files and directories. In contrast, every object in Windows NT, from files to operating system data structures, has an access control list and its use can be regulated as appropriate."
What they fail to point out is that the Unix system model is to abstract everything to a file. given this idea, file security is all that you need. Want to block access to a device, change the permissions. This goes beyond creative omission, this is a grievous misrepresentation of the facts. If Microsoft can't understand the basic concepts of its competitors, how can they be taken as legitimate software providers?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think other software firms will follow suit. I work for a software company, and while we don't have time-limited licenses, we stick it to you with maintenance fees.
When you buy the software, you get whatever licenses you bought for forever(actually until 2035, but it's a numbers thing), you also have a maintenance contract that entitles you to support, upgrades, and patches.
If you don't want upgrades, or want to try and work without support, you can let your maintenance expire, and you're done.
It's a good sceme for us to ensure revenue, and mitigate the cost of our support staff, plus the customer can stop paying and still use the product.
I will have to shtrongly disagree with the idea that Computer Scientists learn "cookbook" ways of dealing with problems.
Computer Science is an outgrowth of discreet mathematics, using many of the same methodologies and practices mathemeticians use. Mathemeticians bank on reducing complex problems to QED problems, which are then easy to solve. This is not "cook book", this is analysis, finding out not how to get from point A to point B, but how A tells you how to move towards B.
The beauty of God's creation, as Chaos theory has taught us, is that even vastly complex systems have an underlying order that can be understood. In my computer science education, I became more prepared for programming and a host of other possibilities because I don't know how to create a hash table, but what a hash table is.
I have seen smart people who know perl/C/python, etc. struggle with problems that I think are simple because a lack of understanding in basic principles of computer science.
"Cook book" problem solvers are those who don't understand how things happen, but merely what the result is. "Cookbook coders" don't understand the problem solving methodolgy, just that if they jiggle the pieces enough, the problem works itself out.
A computer scientist, on the other hand, finds the core of the problem and solves that problem. For instance, a coder might see "tar this directory, but make sure the tar file is under 2GB, if it goes over, split it into 2 files." and he codes a simple method to add files until the total size will exceed 2GB.
The Computer Scientist sees the same problem and separates it into pieces of a set of variously sized items, and n containers of size 2GB. She then solves the problem using principles learned from the classic "Knapsack problem", resulting in a vastly superior program thatn above.
And show me an on the job learner who has a practical understanding of O-notation.
I don't think that they generally hold up in the US either.
When you work for a company, you are, in most cases, considered an "At Will" employee. This means that you are not contractually obligated to stay for any period of time. I can start work on Monday and quit on Tuesday. This also generally means that the employer takes on the risk of allowing the employee access to its secrets and business strategies, as well as allocating resources to somebody who won't necessarily be their tomorrow.
"Contracts" that state you will reimberse the employer for initial training costs and won't work for a competing company are generally unenforceable unless classified government information relating to national security is involved. As my lawyer friends have explained to me, tying to non compete and training reimbursements is tantamount to indentured servitude. It can be argued in court that the employee did not know about these conditions until he had agreed, in principal, to tkae the job.
In this case, the employee is no longer in a position to refuse the terms because he can be assumed to be in a state of hardship, if he doesn't agree he doesn't have a job, but if he does, the employer holds all of the chips in respect to the employee's ability to make a living.
In a nutshell, it's a scare tactic that they won't go to court to enforce.
I must say that none of this is information comes froma legal expert, it is merely a set of observations based on conversations with lawyers and reading law articles.
Personally, I would go with the Technics SA-DX940.
It has optical and coax inputs, Dolby Po-Logic and Digital decoding, as well DTS decoding. Let's not forget Dolby 5.1. There are also several video inputs, allowin you to multiplex several vido inputs to your television.
This receiever can't be beat for price/performance, and is a high quality product all around.
The issue of lending books is different.
If I lend you a book, then I can't use it. However, if I make a copy of that book and give it to you, that is not legal.
Similar with Napster. Napster is now a distribution point for copying music and then distributing it.
Mr. Katz is making an arguement that is not reasonable. Monitoring Napster traffic is not wrong, Napster promises you no right to privacy. If Mr. Katz were at all knowledgeable on this subject, he would know that Napster actually requests that its users notify it of users that are violating the copyrights of artists. In this, Metallica is just helping out Napster by ratting on those people who are doing illegal things. Furthermore, one major arguement in favor of Napster seems to have the general feeling of "MP3 still isn't ubiquitous, so this is OK." If the day comes that I can head over to Crutchfield and buy an Sony MP3 player for my home stereo set up at a reasonable price, then I have no motivation to purchase music if it is freely available.
This is why the music industry is resitant to this technology, and Napster, Slashdot, Jon Katz, et al. have been guilty of encouraging these illegal activity.
Furthermore, Jon Katz attempts to villify Metallica for going after "young people who don't know any better[sic]." Illogical. Napster has several warnings about the legality of music sources. There is a reasonable expectation at this point that these users have not only read the warning, but are aware of this current debate.
Jon Katz has merely proved to us that he is a paranoid horse's ass.
the courts *can't* find napster at fault. Precedent is set by the fact you can't sue the phone company for fraud committed by phone. It's the driver, not the road that's to blame
Once again, people have missed the point. With the phone company, there are no reasonable steps that can be taken to revent fraud. Napster is a different story.
Napster exists for the sole purpose of exchanging music, and Napster itself recognizes that some of this music may infringe on another's copyright. It is then incumbent upon Napster to ensure that the content available through its service is legal.
Certainly the phone company is not responsible for fraud, but it must take reasonable steps to prevent fraud. Napster makes it clear on the Napster website that some music may be infringing on copyrights and that those users should be reported. Given this, Napster should take action and actively police its users. If I own a building where drug dealing is on and I know about it, if I do nothing, I am certainly liable, as is Napster for illegal MP3's.
The attacking host wouldn't be discovered.
By looking in named logs you will see the address of the machine that made the request, which could be anything.
Most boxes are don't handle their own DNS, rather, they get it from some other host. The machine that you pull DNS from will either query a root server at then the primary nameserver for the domain, or hand the query off to another DNS server.
Either way, you won't find the exact machine.
B) What's to stop the haxx0rs from writing a small script that polls the dns servers every
5..10..30 seconds and changes all of the DDos boxen to the new IP instantly
Actually, they wouldn't have to do this. If you set the TTL for a DNS etry very low, then I am assuming
that the expire time on the record as a whole is very low, probably not more than a minute.
With this being true, if the attacker uses the hostname rather than IP, he won't have any problems.
His internal cahce will expire quickly, as well as whatever servers he is using for resolution.
This will result in a flooding of the target's DNS servers as well as a DDOS attack.
In looking this over, this "solution" will never work.
The only question that I have is whether it is GPL'd "enough"
That's a very good point. In my past examinations of the GPL, I had gotten the feeling that in order
to GPL it, you had to include the GPL with the distribution and state the requirements of the GPL
so that it was stated obviously.
I don't believe that GPL can be considered Prime Facia in that just saying it's under GPL is enough.
Perhaps somebody out there with some legal expertise can fill us in?
Anyone from EFF or FSF?
This article shows a huge lack of Mr Katz's understanding of art. Works of art, for the most
part, are not interactive. Interactive art means that the audience effects the shape of the art.
Most art is not this way. It is contemplative. Much of the art that one experiences is aimed at
conveying an idea and causing a reaction. When you see "Guernica", "The Nighthawks", or "The
Mona Lisa", you don't move or shape it, you experience it, and when it has its essence to you,
you contemplate it and discuss it with others.
This is what most art forms have in common, from literature and poetry, visual art, and theater and
film. Good art, whether on screen, television, canvas, or paper, does not need to be
interactive to be effective, and is infact most often better when the creator is allowed to
direct what you see and where you go. If you direct it, then the creator has little ability to achievbe his message.
Good point. The Oscars were never there to be interactive. The show is put on TV because people
are interested in who wins and what people are waering. Any notion about interactive voting on
winners, presenters, and speeches is nonsense.
Don't forget what the Oscars are, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awards. Think
what you will about insiderism, these people are still much more knowledgeable about filmmaking
than you or me. The Oscars are Hollywoods day to parade and promote itself, not pander to
the public. That's what the People's Choice Awards and the TV GUide awards are for.
I am interested in who the industry thinks are the
best actors, directors, producers etc., not participating in the show.
Interactive broadcasts are great for presidential debates, interviews, and other programs aimed at
public opinion, but not awards shows.
There has already been a fairly "unstoppable" virus run through *nix systems.
Go talk to RT about worms and such.
Seems to me that was a virus with all of the capabilities.
I think there is some lack of detail here.
If you type su and then start executing commands, your original envinronment persists, so a malicious script that update your path can still have some effect.
It is for exactly this reason that I NEVER us just plain su, always su -, that way you avoid corruption of root's environment.
Assurance against viruses then becomes an issue of safeguarding root's resource files and making sure
that installs haven't changed things they aren't supposed to.
Even still, are these viruses may not be able to reproduce readily, but if they cause harm to one
user, the objective was met. Let's say your company runs Linux as a whole, and you want to try
some binary only software, that may have been downloaded from a not so secure site.
If you install it and run it and it hoses up everything in your $HOME, you are screwed.
These aren't so much viruses as they are trojan horses, and nobody is ever same from a Trojan Horse.
Dual Band phones are a stop-gap while whatever
company builds out its network. It was never
meant to be a coverall. If you live in a
major city and don't travel out to BFE, or to
"remote" areas like St. Joe, MI, dual band is great.
Don't be fooled by these arguements about
coverage. My phone works fine where I need it
to, plus no roaming ir long distance. Analog
gives no service outside of dial tone. With
digital I get Voicemail, caller id, free long
distance, and 1 number ring anywhere. In
chicago, it's cheaper to use a cell phone for
cross town calls than a regular phone.
W3RD.
WHat made the original so great was its relative
simplicity. No infinite numbers of sub-class
specializations and source books for each.
Back in the day, you wanted an MU who did nothing but fireballs and destructive spells, you just did it.
The Old schoolwasn't about rules, but about new
twists to throw at people, magic items, neutral dragons, new monsters.
Actually, it makes a lot of sense, assuming my facts are correct.
I had an interview with some Motorola folks out of college and they explained to me
how these LEO satelites would ony be orbit for a short time before they fell out.
With this in mind, Iridium's lease on life, if not maintained, was short anyway.
What one should ask is did it make sense to put a network in orbit that would need to be replaced every 8 years or so?
I think that you miss the relevancy of the postal service. I bank with a credit union in another state because I refuse to deal with corporate mega-banks. When forms need to be filled out and exchanged, I can put them in the mail and get them there in 2-3 days for .33. To send it by FedEx or UPS would cost about 50 times more for no added convienience. Certified mail still only costs a few dollars. Do you really think that FedEx could deliver a letter for $.33? No, our taxes subsidize the mail and it still remains one of the most effective means of communicating via paper. Don't kid yourself, this world is a very long way off from shedding its need of paper documents. Loans, insurance companies, brokerages, all of these require some degree of paper work that needs to be exchanged. If you want cheap and effiecient, you need the USPS. BTW, what if FedEx decided it was too dangerous to deliver to area's of New York, or LA; perhaps they would decide that delivering to Big Sky Montana is not cost effective, they would stop. The USPS is REQUIRED by Congress to deliver to every address in the US.
Let us also remember our Patterson and Hennesey, wherethe first couple chapters explains to us that more than MHz need be factored into measure performance. Let's think about CPI. If your G4 has a CPI of say 4 and the pentium is at 6 or 8, then that 500MHz G4 is processing date between 30 and 50% than the Pentium.
Good point. We all knew about symlinks years/decades ago. I did see that the article talk about administrators having to copy large amounts of data to a new machine. Aside from the OS, what does a machine need to ahve installed on it? Every system I have used usued mounts everything important.
I think this comment is quite valid. Why hasn't the object oriented paradigm become truly mainstream. Most omputer science departments teach C, with classes based in OO programming as under attended electives. In examining many of the projects that I have worked with, I have neverf found a problem well suited an OO framework outside of a database. Many other models just don't break down into simple objects, there are too many other complexities. How has C++ become so popular then?
As far as security goes I think that it is worth to mention one of the most glaring omissions by MS.
they state:
"Linux only provides access controls for files and directories. In contrast, every object in Windows NT, from files to operating system data structures, has an access control list and its use can be regulated as appropriate."
What they fail to point out is that the Unix system model is to abstract everything to a file. given this idea, file security is all that you need. Want to block access to a device, change the permissions. This goes beyond creative omission, this is a grievous misrepresentation of the facts. If Microsoft can't understand the basic concepts of its competitors, how can they be taken as legitimate software providers?