I don't think that SCO wants those lines removed, because their whole business plan now seems based on those lines being in there.
Exactly.
Even if 2.6.0-test9 were to be free of supposedly offending code, I'm positive the rabid dog they call SCO would go after everyone (well, everyone with deep pockets) that's run old versions of Linux for some period of time and theoretically gained substantial financial benefit as a direct consequence of using those versions of Linux.
The only good thing that would come out of those preposterous claims is when SCO says some company gained US$ X million advantage by using this "pirate code".
For cost-conscious IT shops, I'd take that as a signal to look more into this "Linux thing".
It's like hearing about folks gathering down at the river for free drinks where Jack Daniels has been pouring into the water.
I think forced immunization of vulnerable open machines on the network is a good idea, under the right conditions.
After public notification of the nature of the vulnerability.
After a patch has been made available and notices posted, sent out.
After a user or sysadmin keeps their machine unpatched and exposed.
After a second warning has been posted, sent that forced patching will occur.
Then, and only then, a worm-delivered patch should be administered.
But it should not be administered by MS, though they were responsible for the vulnerability.
MS is a profit oriented business, whose goals include many actions directed towards increasing their own profit in the long and short term, as well as fixing software that users have bought from them.
No. It should be role of people responsible for network health, because that is the public good that is impacted. As a public, non-profit entity, they would be free of conflict of interest, financial considerations. If MS were to administer remote administration in this way, they would be opening themselves up to conflicts of interest, particularly because of the monopoly market position they hold.
"Well, M.S. is More of the Same, and PhD is Piled Higher and Deeper."
ACLU Acts on Principles, Not Popular Perception
on
Joining the ACLU?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
They're really an admirable organization in being dedicated to principles of civil liberties.
This often takes them into positions that are strictly correct in terms of principle, but extremely unpopular in terms of practice.
They will defend the rights of Nazis and pornographers to free speech, for example.
And they will sue to exclude any possible mention of God, Ten Commandments in official government documents.
And the right to refrain from saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
All of this makes great fodder on talk shows, where people can emotionally vent about how ridiculous this is.
Some people like that emotional venting more than they like the fundamental principles of liberty. That's fine for them.
Personally, I take those liberties very seriously. They are special conditions of being an American that make our country unlike most others.
As soon as you concede that any of those rights can be abridged for any reason under any circumstance, then you open up a potential Pandora's box.
If someone can decide Nazis and pornographers belong to a special class of people for whom civil liberties do not apply, then you have to admit that someone will have the power to put you into a similar classification some day and to silence your opinion. Your opinion could be "hate-speak" or "obscene" by John Ashcroft and you could be jailed.
If you say that mixing religion with government is OK, then you admit that it would be just fine if ever a hypothetical Muslim majority in the United States should decree that the Koran and sharia law would be posted in all schools and to which everyone must memorize and adhere, rigth after one of the 5 prayer sessions during the day.
[One very good reason our founding fathers tried to separate church and state was based on centuries of bloody evidence in Europe. Recall that Catholics and Protestants killed each other viciously for a long time. Many nations today Muslim fundamentalist are going down the same road today with wars between Shia, Sunni, Muslim and Hindu or Christian. How many centuries it will take for those conflicts to prove the point our foudning fathers recognized in the late 18th century I don't know.]
It's not popular or always expedient to be principled, but it's more enduring.
identifying susceptable machines without burning the network,
fixing exactly what needs to be fixed, no more, no less,
and, most importantly, how does the quality of this unsolicited support per dollar compare with Windows Update or what private companies charge for this service?
I've often thought that this is the proper way to clean up machines where sysadmins fail to do their own patching after a decent interval.
In fact, if I were MS, I'd have someone do this, but disclaim any and all connection, for the obvious reason of legal liability.
[But considering the extra powers authorities have in the case of human infection - witness the recent SARS outbreak - having a net Doctor authorized to release a vaccine for such a serious vulnerability as this RPC/DCOM, at some point after the general notification, seems reasonable to me.]
Phew... That took the whole night. Maybe I should have used GARNOME after all.
Yeah, when it gets going, garnome is pretty impressive to watch wget-ing packages,./configure-ing, make-ing, and make install-ing.
Lately, though, I've become intrigued by Gentoo's portage system for building packages. SO I have a question for the knowledgeable:
Is it possible to set up a local portage and ebuild system, on non-Gentoo systems, for packages like Gnome-2.4 without having to build an entire Linux system from scratch?
>Any image can be used as a tracking device, it doesn't have to be a 1x1 pixel size image to track you.
That is why Outlook 2003 blocks ALL images by default.
It's good that the latest full versions of Outlook fix this insidious problem.
At the same time, though, I have to wonder what fraction of Outlook users are using versions prior to Outlook 2003; it may be high enough that this kind of spam spyware tactic will be used for a while because it is pratically successful.
If Outlook users could upgrade to 2003 for free, maybe that would help.
compete and excell and outdo our neighbors has benefited EVERYONE a great deal.
Well, not everyone.
There is a disproportionate number of underprivileged teenagers who believe they have a chance to play professional basketball and to earn big money. The large numbers of also-rans will have to make last-minute career plans to take into account lack of formal education: the only logical lucrative careers involve selling illegal substances.
There's a fine line between healthy competition and unhealthy competition that is too easily crossed.
Regarding different countries competing:
"patriotism" is always regarded as a good thing
"nationalism" is a bad thing (eg, caused WWI)
but the line between the two is blurry and faded.
the contact patch the tire is actually stationary relative to the road.
I wonder if it really is.
Just as you mention, the tire does flex and deform as it comes into contact with the road and as it leaves contact with the road (warm tires after a high speed drive confirm the viscous dissipation during such flexing).
I'd be inclined to believe that smooth roads with very low dynamic friction coefficients would enable better gas mileage because then all expansion and contraction of the contact patch could be accomodated with very little energy loss.
Of course, such roads would be unsafe...
[I remember driving across some steel plates years ago and noticed how road noise decreased a lot. I was quite wary about driving across those plates in the rain, however.]
I'd also be in favor of specially designed acoustic reflectors near roadways to reflect the waves upward and away from residential areas.
Wouldn't it be Microsoft's responsibility to look at third party contributions that they've elected to include in their codebase?
I think I'd do that even if the 3rd party agreed to do their own code audits.
It's just common sense, like looking at your lug nuts after a tire rotation and before you speed up to 80 mph.
If MS doesn't do that kind of internal quality checking, then maybe customers ought to look at competitive product offerings for their PC besides what Microsoft offers.
While I'd love to see diamond start to make inroads into the semiconductor business, it won't happen overnight.
There are a couple of big obstacles.
The main one that I recall was the CVD grown diamond was still polycrystalline.
The other problem, IIRC, was that it was difficult to find a reasonable lattice-matched p-type dopant for diamond.
[Actually, if bulk diamond were cheaply available, it would be good for all kinds of things because of its great strength and high thermal conductivity (about 5-6 times better than OFHC copper).]
The speed of sound in diamond is pretty fantastic, too, something like 17 km/sec!
SCO announced late yesterday evening that all companies running Linux were dangerous felons and that SCO was in the process of filing criminal complaints against members of the board of directors for those corporations.
Darl McBride, reached by satellite phone offshore on his recently-purchased yacht, told reporters that the whole affair,
"It was not about Linux. It never was."
"The reason we're taking this action is to enforce the sacred rights of intellectual property that Abraham Lincoln enjoyed and which made this country great and the envy of the free world. Those responsible are just as bad as Enron executives and should be take away publicly in shackles so justice can be served."
"To make my point unambiguous, I'm seeking to have the State of Delaware revoke the corporate charters of these companies that continue to flout the law in the faces of hard-working American families."
Asked to comment about SCO executives recent selling of SCO shares, McBride made staticky noises with his mouth and said:
"You're breaking up!"
"I have to run now to take my sick children to the hospital!"
So do you think that the technologies will have nothing to offer an old fogey?
Absolutely - great drugs!
I still have to wonder, though, because if all of us senior citizens are happy in our drug-induced purple hazes, we won't be able to interact in a genuine way with other human beings and we'll have lost something significant.
What sort of social impact can we expect when/if life expectancies are measured in centuries?
Easy.
Given that genetic engineering will start to impact the human race in unprecedented ways, future intelligent beings will look upon us old fogeys as obsolete models.
Incidentally, anyone interested in this subject ought to read Francis Fukayama's Our Post-Human Future, which discusses these matters, as well as touching on other significant modifications to the human race like neuro-pharmacology.
Maybe the next worm should drain their paypal, epay, egold, and bank accounts into an account in the Caymans... format their hard drive just for good mesure and force people to open their eyes.
Not that the slackers don't deserve it.
But remember the society we're living in.
Congress only reacts to a crisis, and it will react in an knee-jerk fashion, imposing a half-assed solution to the problem where the side-effects of the cure will be almost as bad or worse than the original problem.
I fully expect all of these widespread Windows vulnerabilities and exploits to lend weight to the argument for implementing TCPA.
Cameras will do anything BUT interfere with teaching.
Excellent!
You'll be ready to have that webcam installed in your workplace next week, then?
You'll be quite pleased when needless inefficiencies and complacent behavior (eg, posting to Slashdot) is readily abandoned as you become aware of being watched.
It will start hitting the fan when the most shrill of parents evaluate teachers based on political criteria rather than on whether little Johnny or little Joanie is being taught to think critically and rationally and to evaluate evidence unemotionally.
Personally, I think every parent that supports video camera monitoring in schools should receive the consequences.
Forty years from now, thinking it not at all unusual, their children will install similar cameras in the nursing homes, on the sidewalks, in the stores, at the shooting range, in the bars, aimed at cars, aimed at private homes, etc.
When we live in that surveiled society, we will know that we trained the young people to think that ripping all semblance of privacy from our lives is an entirely reasonable protection from terrorism.
I'm sure Indians will enjoy getting a high quality freely-modifiable operating system for almost no money.
It will enable more of their domestic industry to gain the advantages of information technology that enable the kinds of productivity growth rates the US has seen in the last decade or so.
Here in the US, as a Linux user, I'm looking forward to gaining from this development as well.
From a population of 1e9, the country produces a fair share of the world's brilliant programmers.
Plus, they can read and write English, which gives them a head start relative to China, which possesses a like number of intelligent programmers.
The label of being "hackable" makes the device more desirable for a lot of us.
"Hackable"
A definite good thing in this forum, where the difference between a hacker and a cracker is appreciated. And someone who deliberately makes hardware that is flexible is appreciated, not scorned.
But in the world at large, hackable is regarded as a negative attribute, something that allows vague unknown bad people to do bad things to MyComputer.
It's sad that there is such a large gap in understanding what "hackable" means between the inside expert press and the world at large.
Someone with a loud voice ought to educate the masses with some kind of analogy to cars with locked hoods being unhackable.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that SCO wants those lines removed, because their whole business plan now seems based on those lines being in there.
Exactly.
Even if 2.6.0-test9 were to be free of supposedly offending code, I'm positive the rabid dog they call SCO would go after everyone (well, everyone with deep pockets) that's run old versions of Linux for some period of time and theoretically gained substantial financial benefit as a direct consequence of using those versions of Linux.
The only good thing that would come out of those preposterous claims is when SCO says some company gained US$ X million advantage by using this "pirate code".
For cost-conscious IT shops, I'd take that as a signal to look more into this "Linux thing".
It's like hearing about folks gathering down at the river for free drinks where Jack Daniels has been pouring into the water.
I think forced immunization of vulnerable open machines on the network is a good idea, under the right conditions.
After public notification of the nature of the vulnerability.
After a patch has been made available and notices posted, sent out.
After a user or sysadmin keeps their machine unpatched and exposed.
After a second warning has been posted, sent that forced patching will occur.
Then, and only then, a worm-delivered patch should be administered.
But it should not be administered by MS, though they were responsible for the vulnerability.
MS is a profit oriented business, whose goals include many actions directed towards increasing their own profit in the long and short term, as well as fixing software that users have bought from them.
No. It should be role of people responsible for network health, because that is the public good that is impacted. As a public, non-profit entity, they would be free of conflict of interest, financial considerations. If MS were to administer remote administration in this way, they would be opening themselves up to conflicts of interest, particularly because of the monopoly market position they hold.
"So you know what B.S. is?"
"Yeah."
"Well, M.S. is More of the Same, and PhD is Piled Higher and Deeper."
They're really an admirable organization in being dedicated to principles of civil liberties.
This often takes them into positions that are strictly correct in terms of principle, but extremely unpopular in terms of practice.
They will defend the rights of Nazis and pornographers to free speech, for example.
And they will sue to exclude any possible mention of God, Ten Commandments in official government documents.
And the right to refrain from saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
All of this makes great fodder on talk shows, where people can emotionally vent about how ridiculous this is.
Some people like that emotional venting more than they like the fundamental principles of liberty. That's fine for them.
Personally, I take those liberties very seriously. They are special conditions of being an American that make our country unlike most others.
As soon as you concede that any of those rights can be abridged for any reason under any circumstance, then you open up a potential Pandora's box.
If someone can decide Nazis and pornographers belong to a special class of people for whom civil liberties do not apply, then you have to admit that someone will have the power to put you into a similar classification some day and to silence your opinion. Your opinion could be "hate-speak" or "obscene" by John Ashcroft and you could be jailed.
If you say that mixing religion with government is OK, then you admit that it would be just fine if ever a hypothetical Muslim majority in the United States should decree that the Koran and sharia law would be posted in all schools and to which everyone must memorize and adhere, rigth after one of the 5 prayer sessions during the day.
[One very good reason our founding fathers tried to separate church and state was based on centuries of bloody evidence in Europe. Recall that Catholics and Protestants killed each other viciously for a long time. Many nations today Muslim fundamentalist are going down the same road today with wars between Shia, Sunni, Muslim and Hindu or Christian. How many centuries it will take for those conflicts to prove the point our foudning fathers recognized in the late 18th century I don't know.]
It's not popular or always expedient to be principled, but it's more enduring.
...is how good a job this worm does of
- identifying susceptable machines without burning the network,
- fixing exactly what needs to be fixed, no more, no less,
and, most importantly, how does the quality of this unsolicited support per dollar compare with Windows Update or what private companies charge for this service?I've often thought that this is the proper way to clean up machines where sysadmins fail to do their own patching after a decent interval.
In fact, if I were MS, I'd have someone do this, but disclaim any and all connection, for the obvious reason of legal liability.
[But considering the extra powers authorities have in the case of human infection - witness the recent SARS outbreak - having a net Doctor authorized to release a vaccine for such a serious vulnerability as this RPC/DCOM, at some point after the general notification, seems reasonable to me.]
Phew... That took the whole night. Maybe I should have used GARNOME after all.
Yeah, when it gets going, garnome is pretty impressive to watch wget-ing packages, ./configure-ing, make-ing, and make install-ing.
Lately, though, I've become intrigued by Gentoo's portage system for building packages. SO I have a question for the knowledgeable:
fallacy is that there is any such thing as a "truly random number."
You haven't been following the stock market much lately, have you?
Yes, it's a good movie and all that.
But anyone that sees a movie that many times makes me kind of nervous.
I definitely wouldn't invite such a person out to go shoot handguns or anything.
>Any image can be used as a tracking device, it doesn't have to be a 1x1 pixel size image to track you.
That is why Outlook 2003 blocks ALL images by default.
It's good that the latest full versions of Outlook fix this insidious problem.
At the same time, though, I have to wonder what fraction of Outlook users are using versions prior to Outlook 2003; it may be high enough that this kind of spam spyware tactic will be used for a while because it is pratically successful.
If Outlook users could upgrade to 2003 for free, maybe that would help.
compete and excell and outdo our neighbors has benefited EVERYONE a great deal.
Well, not everyone.
There is a disproportionate number of underprivileged teenagers who believe they have a chance to play professional basketball and to earn big money. The large numbers of also-rans will have to make last-minute career plans to take into account lack of formal education: the only logical lucrative careers involve selling illegal substances.
There's a fine line between healthy competition and unhealthy competition that is too easily crossed.
Regarding different countries competing:
"patriotism" is always regarded as a good thing
"nationalism" is a bad thing (eg, caused WWI)
but the line between the two is blurry and faded.
the contact patch the tire is actually stationary relative to the road.
I wonder if it really is.
Just as you mention, the tire does flex and deform as it comes into contact with the road and as it leaves contact with the road (warm tires after a high speed drive confirm the viscous dissipation during such flexing).
I'd be inclined to believe that smooth roads with very low dynamic friction coefficients would enable better gas mileage because then all expansion and contraction of the contact patch could be accomodated with very little energy loss.
Of course, such roads would be unsafe...
[I remember driving across some steel plates years ago and noticed how road noise decreased a lot. I was quite wary about driving across those plates in the rain, however.]
I'd also be in favor of specially designed acoustic reflectors near roadways to reflect the waves upward and away from residential areas.
Perhaps my favorite link to checkout new releases from the FSF hasn't been working the past week or so.
Wouldn't it be Microsoft's responsibility to look at third party contributions that they've elected to include in their codebase?
I think I'd do that even if the 3rd party agreed to do their own code audits.
It's just common sense, like looking at your lug nuts after a tire rotation and before you speed up to 80 mph.
If MS doesn't do that kind of internal quality checking, then maybe customers ought to look at competitive product offerings for their PC besides what Microsoft offers.
While I'd love to see diamond start to make inroads into the semiconductor business, it won't happen overnight.
There are a couple of big obstacles.
The main one that I recall was the CVD grown diamond was still polycrystalline.
The other problem, IIRC, was that it was difficult to find a reasonable lattice-matched p-type dopant for diamond.
[Actually, if bulk diamond were cheaply available, it would be good for all kinds of things because of its great strength and high thermal conductivity (about 5-6 times better than OFHC copper).]
The speed of sound in diamond is pretty fantastic, too, something like 17 km/sec!
SCO announced late yesterday evening that all companies running Linux were dangerous felons and that SCO was in the process of filing criminal complaints against members of the board of directors for those corporations.
Darl McBride, reached by satellite phone offshore on his recently-purchased yacht, told reporters that the whole affair,
Asked to comment about SCO executives recent selling of SCO shares, McBride made staticky noises with his mouth and said:So do you think that the technologies will have nothing to offer an old fogey?
Absolutely - great drugs!
I still have to wonder, though, because if all of us senior citizens are happy in our drug-induced purple hazes, we won't be able to interact in a genuine way with other human beings and we'll have lost something significant.
What sort of social impact can we expect when/if life expectancies are measured in centuries?
Easy.
Given that genetic engineering will start to impact the human race in unprecedented ways, future intelligent beings will look upon us old fogeys as obsolete models.
Incidentally, anyone interested in this subject ought to read Francis Fukayama's Our Post-Human Future , which discusses these matters, as well as touching on other significant modifications to the human race like neuro-pharmacology.
Definite signs they used ProductNamesForCheep, as I think of...
- "effete"
- "effigy" (as in "burn in")
- "feces"
- "iffy"
Transmeta ought to hire the same big-gun name-generating people that came up with "Viagra".I suddenly find myself with incriminating information about you, what legal obligation do I have to keep that information confidential?
None, I guess, but you could be in a position to make a great deal of money if you're willing to take some risk:)
Maybe the next worm should drain their paypal, epay, egold, and bank accounts into an account in the Caymans... format their hard drive just for good mesure and force people to open their eyes.
Not that the slackers don't deserve it.
But remember the society we're living in.
Congress only reacts to a crisis, and it will react in an knee-jerk fashion, imposing a half-assed solution to the problem where the side-effects of the cure will be almost as bad or worse than the original problem.
I fully expect all of these widespread Windows vulnerabilities and exploits to lend weight to the argument for implementing TCPA.
Cameras will do anything BUT interfere with teaching.
Excellent!
You'll be ready to have that webcam installed in your workplace next week, then?
You'll be quite pleased when needless inefficiencies and complacent behavior (eg, posting to Slashdot) is readily abandoned as you become aware of being watched.
It will start hitting the fan when the most shrill of parents evaluate teachers based on political criteria rather than on whether little Johnny or little Joanie is being taught to think critically and rationally and to evaluate evidence unemotionally.
Personally, I think every parent that supports video camera monitoring in schools should receive the consequences.
Forty years from now, thinking it not at all unusual, their children will install similar cameras in the nursing homes, on the sidewalks, in the stores, at the shooting range, in the bars, aimed at cars, aimed at private homes, etc.
When we live in that surveiled society, we will know that we trained the young people to think that ripping all semblance of privacy from our lives is an entirely reasonable protection from terrorism.
is not that an unnamed Fortune 500 company bought "protection" from SCO.
Rather, it is that an unnamed Fortune 500 company has a significant Linux deployment.
That makes at least 2, assuming that IBM is not buying an SCO lie-sense.
If Fortune 500 companies have this kind of Linux effort, then maybe it's time for your company to look into Linux, too.
I'm sure Indians will enjoy getting a high quality freely-modifiable operating system for almost no money.
It will enable more of their domestic industry to gain the advantages of information technology that enable the kinds of productivity growth rates the US has seen in the last decade or so.
Here in the US, as a Linux user, I'm looking forward to gaining from this development as well.
From a population of 1e9, the country produces a fair share of the world's brilliant programmers.
Plus, they can read and write English, which gives them a head start relative to China, which possesses a like number of intelligent programmers.
The label of being "hackable" makes the device more desirable for a lot of us.
"Hackable"
A definite good thing in this forum, where the difference between a hacker and a cracker is appreciated. And someone who deliberately makes hardware that is flexible is appreciated, not scorned.
But in the world at large, hackable is regarded as a negative attribute, something that allows vague unknown bad people to do bad things to MyComputer.
It's sad that there is such a large gap in understanding what "hackable" means between the inside expert press and the world at large.
Someone with a loud voice ought to educate the masses with some kind of analogy to cars with locked hoods being unhackable.