The differences between operating systems are not simply cosmetic, certainly not when it comes to writing code (including writing viruses and worms). The differences between Linux distros may be cosmetic, to a degree (there are plenty of exceptions to that statement, even among popular desktop distros), but there is a world of difference between Windows and Ubuntu or Fedora. The first thing that comes to my mind is that most desktop Linux users will find all the software they need in the repositories, with the exception of the Flash plugin (but Adobe maintains Ubuntu and Fedora repositories for that plugin anyway, so the point is a bit moot) -- so setting noexec on/home is reasonable and will probably go unnoticed by the users who are most vulnerable to trojans (at least in my experience). The same cannot really be said about Windows, for which an extensive system of repositories does not really exist. Setting noexec is not beyond the skill level of "that family member who knows about computers," and it would not be too far fetched for distro maintainers to create a "basic mode" which sets noexec, and an "expert mode" which does not (perhaps these modes would be selected at the first boot).
Even if the noexec strategy was not in use, a virus writer would still have issues to deal with. Different distros are not necessarily compatible, and even within a single distro, there is no guarantee of compatibility. A trojan that tries to pass itself off as a routine program in GNOME would stick out like a sore thumb for a KDE user. A virus that tries to add itself to.bashrc would not be very effective for a csh user (nor would it be very effective for a user who does not use the shell, which is not as rare as you might think). The sort of monoculture that exists with Windows -- where a particular set of programs is very likely to be installed and used -- is not so prevalent with common Linux distros.
Sure, it is possible to write Linux viruses, but the effect is not as severe (Warhol worms do not seem very likely); even if "Linux" grew to the popularity of Windows, it would require a single distro to be king, with a single configuration -- a monoculture that is not very likely to happen.
This reminds me of one of the IT guys where I work. When I was tasked with setting up a new server for my research group, he loaned me a screwdriver...and it was pink. He said he had held on to it since the early 80s, because nobody wanted a pink screwdriver.
I think that analogy fails: the technical differences between operating systems are a bit more significant than the technical differences between car colors. I could be wrong, though, and it may also be the case that nobody is painting a car worth stealing pink...
Of course, if everyone who didn't want their car stolen drove a pink car, then thieves would start stealing pink cars, and some other color would become the least popular.
Let's face it...if you are going to deal with a walled garden, you're most likely going to go with Apple.
Where did you get that one from? Many cell phones have no options for installing third party software at all; the imprisoned garden would be perceived as an improvement for users of those phones. Microsoft may be coming a bit late to that party, but I do not think the party is over just yet.
Microsoft do not have engineering talent nor software talents to pull something like that off
Where the hell did you get that from? Microsoft has plenty of programming talent, and they pay quite a lot for it. The problems are primarily in management (see: Vista).
Take a look at contributions to open source projects that are popular in enterprise environments -- large percentages of the patches come from open source companies. If Oracle bought up all these companies, there is no guarantee that those patches would continue to be contributed, particularly if the projects directly compete with Oracle's offerings. Sure, volunteers can do a lot, but it is nice to have people who are paid to develop these projects, particularly since there is a good level of assurance that the projects will not be orphaned or abandoned. It also helps to have companies around that push for hardware compatibility, and to have companies that can help protect the rest of us from patent trolls.
Strictly speaking, you only get marginally more security when you run your own datacenter than when you use a cloud provider, assuming that you have competent security staff in your datacenter. The only real risk cloud providers carry that internal datacenters do not is the risk that your data may accidentally be copied into someone else', thus leaking your information; assuming that the cloud provider's software does not have such a serious bug, what more security do you really get? Your datacenter still has to be staffed, and there are still going to be people who are not necessarily trustworthy -- janitors, IT tech/interns, etc. Additionally, it is not that far fetched to demand that cloud providers encrypt your data when it is not in active use, and in the coming years it is likely that we will see more developments in homomorphic encryption which will allow your data to be encrypted while it is in use, further adding to the security.
My issue with cloud providers is the libre software issue: you become reliant on the cloud provider for your software, and the cloud provider basically holds your data hostage. I really do not want Google to be given so much power -- when Google controls government data, and presumably charges the government a fee for the services they provide, that gives Google some pretty serious leverage and lobbying power. It would not even be obvious -- suppose the government wants to raise taxes on energy used by large data centers, and Google says, "Well if you do that, we'll be forced to increase our service fees..." Does that situation seem far fetched to you?
Personally, I would not be very comfortable if a company I have absolutely no control over has control over the software that runs the pacemaker in my chest. What if they decide to start charging a yearly fee for their pacemaker software? What if they refuse to provide critical software updates unless I fork over more money to them?
Medical software should be libre, there is just no arguing that. When it comes to software that sustains a person's life, no single corporation or entity of any sort should have absolute control over that software.
Except that the mechanisms behind many of the drugs we use are not fully understood by the companies that make those drugs. They only disclose the chemical formula behind the drugs, not the logic of why that particular chemical works the way it does.
And as people pointed out the first time around, medical devices are tested extensively before being deployed. I am an ardent free software supporter, but the safety/reliability issue is simply the wrong argument. I would say the more important argument when it comes to medical software is control -- do you really want to have a corporation that you have absolutely no control over to be in control of a device that sustains your very life? What happens if that company goes bankrupt, and the source code dies with the company? What if they decide they want to start charging people a yearly fee for using their pacemakers (a situation that does not seem too far fetched, given what I have seen proprietary software companies do in the past)?
you'd be wise to search the place pretty thoroughly yourself first to make absolutely sure there are no weapons or contraband there.
Assuming, of course, that you are even aware of what is considered contraband. Suppose I have an ounce of Salvia Divinorum sitting on my desk, clearly dried and prepared for human consumption. Some states recently outlawed Salvia when prepared for human consumption (ostensibly because it is sometimes used as a recreational drug), but other states have not, and it is not at all far fetched to assume that a person might be unaware that Salvia is illegal in their state, given that the drug is relatively unknown. The police come in because there was a crime in your house, see a bag full of plant material, and then charge you with possession of an illegal drug -- and ignorance of the law is not a valid defense.
The problem is that we simply have too many laws. Being a law abiding citizen is becoming a pretty difficult thing to do, and I am not very comfortable relying on the "it would not be worth it for the police to come after me" strategy, given how many localities engage in "crack downs" and whatnot to score political points. Already, I was nearly arrested for carrying a pocket knife that is legal where I live, but illegal where my mom lives (not something I was even aware of -- it is just a pocket knife), and I only evaded prosecution because the cop felt like bending the rules for me. Had the cop not been in such a friendly mood, I would have been imprisoned for two weeks.
Why do people constantly bring up nuclear launch codes in discussions about national security secrets? The system of nuclear launch codes was not designed to protect America from foreign threats; it was designed to protect foreign nations from rogue soldiers engaging in an authorized nuclear strike. The nuclear command and control system is mostly related to ensuring that our nuclear weapons can only be armed following an order from the President or a combination of cabinet members.
That being said, the entire nuclear command and control system was designed when concerns about soviet spies were rampant. It was, naturally, designed to withstand a certain level of information leakage without compromising security. The idea that a leak on the scale of what Wikileaks does would somehow compromise our nuclear weapons system is a bit far-fetched; by the time Wikileaks even got around to publishing launch codes and missile locations, the information would be completely out of date and worthless (launch codes are changed daily, and missiles are periodically shuffled between silos; also, we open a certain fraction of our silos, chosen by the Russians, for Russian airplanes to photograph, as part of an agreement of assurances that we are not exceeding a certain number of nuclear weapons).
The problem, though, is that people can no longer trust the government to give accurate information about our reasons for going to war, the state of affairs in the war, or what sort of conduct our soldiers are engaging in. If it were the case that when the government says, "this document is being kept secret to protect the lives of people who are helping us," we could actually trust that is the case and that the government is not just trying to hide some sort of mistake (like an apache helicopter crew killing someone who was trying to bring a wounded reporter to the hospital), then I would say that yeah, Wikileaks is not doing us a service. Unfortunately, when the government says something is being kept secret for national security purposes, it is not possible to know whether there really is a good reason to keep it secret, or if it is just part of another attempt to keep the public in the dark about what our supposed representatives are doing. Keep in mind that the US government classified a copyright treaty as a national security secret.
As one of the people who works with Wikileaks recently said, the people in Iraq and Afghanistan know what is happening in the war. They see the civilian deaths all the time. Why, then, does the US government want to keep the American public in the dark about civilian deaths in the wars that we are fighting?
Extreme secrecy on the part of the government demands the sort of extreme response that Wikileaks represents. Until we can trust the government, Wikileaks is doing vital and necessary work to preserve the right of the people to know what their government is up to, which is absolutely necessary for a democracy to work.
For me, Wikileaks represents a sliver of hope for citizen action; for-profit news sources and government operated news sources have become the tools of the very organizations (corporate and government) that wish to take advantage of the majority of people, but Wikileaks is run by average people who do not have a vested interest in taking advantage of the rest of the population. If there were more of this sort of citizen action, we would have a much stronger democracy, one that is not run by the powerful corporations and their lobbyists. Unfortunately, we have a long way to go before more than a fraction of a percent of the population gets up and takes any sort of action on their own behalf.
The Daily Show is more of a source of commentary on the news than a source of it. What is somewhat shocking, though, is that The Daily Show is where increasing numbers of young people are turning to learn what is happening in the world -- more conventional news sources must be doing a really bad job.
The press does a bad job specifically because it is not just a group of volunteers; the press ultimately needs to make enough money to pay reporters, journalists, editors, etc. In countries where news is a business, getting on the government's bad side can mean losing access to news sources (the ability to speak with powerful people); in countries where news is sponsored by the government, getting on the government's bad side could mean getting fired or receiving less funding. There are a few exceptional cases, such as the New York Times leaking the illegal wiretapping program, but more often than not it seems that news organizations avoid creating controversies.
Can Photoshop and Illustrator and Final Cut use an arbitrarily large number of cores efficiently?
Arbitrarily large numbers of cores? No, not a chance, certainly not on a shared memory architecture like the system in question. 12 cores is probably going to be OK, but when you pass 16 cores you'll start to notice the memory bottleneck; once you are at 64 cores you are basically at the limit of usefulness for shared memory architectures, and you have to be careful about memory access patterns or your software will be slower. Even "embarrassingly parallel" can suffer if the memory access patterns are bad.
There is a reason that almost all of the supercomputers in use today use some sort of NUMA or distributed memory architecture.
If/. is about generating ad views, they are certainly attracting the wrong audience -- I would guess that most/. users have some sort of ad blocking software installed.
Slashdot Mirror
The differences between operating systems are not simply cosmetic, certainly not when it comes to writing code (including writing viruses and worms). The differences between Linux distros may be cosmetic, to a degree (there are plenty of exceptions to that statement, even among popular desktop distros), but there is a world of difference between Windows and Ubuntu or Fedora. The first thing that comes to my mind is that most desktop Linux users will find all the software they need in the repositories, with the exception of the Flash plugin (but Adobe maintains Ubuntu and Fedora repositories for that plugin anyway, so the point is a bit moot) -- so setting noexec on /home is reasonable and will probably go unnoticed by the users who are most vulnerable to trojans (at least in my experience). The same cannot really be said about Windows, for which an extensive system of repositories does not really exist. Setting noexec is not beyond the skill level of "that family member who knows about computers," and it would not be too far fetched for distro maintainers to create a "basic mode" which sets noexec, and an "expert mode" which does not (perhaps these modes would be selected at the first boot).
.bashrc would not be very effective for a csh user (nor would it be very effective for a user who does not use the shell, which is not as rare as you might think). The sort of monoculture that exists with Windows -- where a particular set of programs is very likely to be installed and used -- is not so prevalent with common Linux distros.
Even if the noexec strategy was not in use, a virus writer would still have issues to deal with. Different distros are not necessarily compatible, and even within a single distro, there is no guarantee of compatibility. A trojan that tries to pass itself off as a routine program in GNOME would stick out like a sore thumb for a KDE user. A virus that tries to add itself to
Sure, it is possible to write Linux viruses, but the effect is not as severe (Warhol worms do not seem very likely); even if "Linux" grew to the popularity of Windows, it would require a single distro to be king, with a single configuration -- a monoculture that is not very likely to happen.
Somehow, I think the differences between operating systems are a bit more significant than the differences between car colors...
This reminds me of one of the IT guys where I work. When I was tasked with setting up a new server for my research group, he loaned me a screwdriver...and it was pink. He said he had held on to it since the early 80s, because nobody wanted a pink screwdriver.
I think that analogy fails: the technical differences between operating systems are a bit more significant than the technical differences between car colors. I could be wrong, though, and it may also be the case that nobody is painting a car worth stealing pink...
Of course, if everyone who didn't want their car stolen drove a pink car, then thieves would start stealing pink cars, and some other color would become the least popular.
Let's face it...if you are going to deal with a walled garden, you're most likely going to go with Apple.
Where did you get that one from? Many cell phones have no options for installing third party software at all; the imprisoned garden would be perceived as an improvement for users of those phones. Microsoft may be coming a bit late to that party, but I do not think the party is over just yet.
Microsoft do not have engineering talent nor software talents to pull something like that off
Where the hell did you get that from? Microsoft has plenty of programming talent, and they pay quite a lot for it. The problems are primarily in management (see: Vista).
Just what we need -- a Microsoft apps store.
Take a look at contributions to open source projects that are popular in enterprise environments -- large percentages of the patches come from open source companies. If Oracle bought up all these companies, there is no guarantee that those patches would continue to be contributed, particularly if the projects directly compete with Oracle's offerings. Sure, volunteers can do a lot, but it is nice to have people who are paid to develop these projects, particularly since there is a good level of assurance that the projects will not be orphaned or abandoned. It also helps to have companies around that push for hardware compatibility, and to have companies that can help protect the rest of us from patent trolls.
Strictly speaking, you only get marginally more security when you run your own datacenter than when you use a cloud provider, assuming that you have competent security staff in your datacenter. The only real risk cloud providers carry that internal datacenters do not is the risk that your data may accidentally be copied into someone else', thus leaking your information; assuming that the cloud provider's software does not have such a serious bug, what more security do you really get? Your datacenter still has to be staffed, and there are still going to be people who are not necessarily trustworthy -- janitors, IT tech/interns, etc. Additionally, it is not that far fetched to demand that cloud providers encrypt your data when it is not in active use, and in the coming years it is likely that we will see more developments in homomorphic encryption which will allow your data to be encrypted while it is in use, further adding to the security.
My issue with cloud providers is the libre software issue: you become reliant on the cloud provider for your software, and the cloud provider basically holds your data hostage. I really do not want Google to be given so much power -- when Google controls government data, and presumably charges the government a fee for the services they provide, that gives Google some pretty serious leverage and lobbying power. It would not even be obvious -- suppose the government wants to raise taxes on energy used by large data centers, and Google says, "Well if you do that, we'll be forced to increase our service fees..." Does that situation seem far fetched to you?
Well...technically...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fully_homomorphic_encryption
I seriously doubt it would EVER be legal to remotely disable a pace-maker.
Why do you doubt that? "Our licensing is reasonable and non-discriminatory."
Do you also doubt that a pacemaker manufacturer would refuse to provide a critical software update unless each pacemaker user pays them for it?
Here I was, thinking that Facebook was the software the created depression...
Or was that MySpace?
Personally, I would not be very comfortable if a company I have absolutely no control over has control over the software that runs the pacemaker in my chest. What if they decide to start charging a yearly fee for their pacemaker software? What if they refuse to provide critical software updates unless I fork over more money to them?
Medical software should be libre, there is just no arguing that. When it comes to software that sustains a person's life, no single corporation or entity of any sort should have absolute control over that software.
Except that the mechanisms behind many of the drugs we use are not fully understood by the companies that make those drugs. They only disclose the chemical formula behind the drugs, not the logic of why that particular chemical works the way it does.
And as people pointed out the first time around, medical devices are tested extensively before being deployed. I am an ardent free software supporter, but the safety/reliability issue is simply the wrong argument. I would say the more important argument when it comes to medical software is control -- do you really want to have a corporation that you have absolutely no control over to be in control of a device that sustains your very life? What happens if that company goes bankrupt, and the source code dies with the company? What if they decide they want to start charging people a yearly fee for using their pacemakers (a situation that does not seem too far fetched, given what I have seen proprietary software companies do in the past)?
you'd be wise to search the place pretty thoroughly yourself first to make absolutely sure there are no weapons or contraband there.
Assuming, of course, that you are even aware of what is considered contraband. Suppose I have an ounce of Salvia Divinorum sitting on my desk, clearly dried and prepared for human consumption. Some states recently outlawed Salvia when prepared for human consumption (ostensibly because it is sometimes used as a recreational drug), but other states have not, and it is not at all far fetched to assume that a person might be unaware that Salvia is illegal in their state, given that the drug is relatively unknown. The police come in because there was a crime in your house, see a bag full of plant material, and then charge you with possession of an illegal drug -- and ignorance of the law is not a valid defense.
The problem is that we simply have too many laws. Being a law abiding citizen is becoming a pretty difficult thing to do, and I am not very comfortable relying on the "it would not be worth it for the police to come after me" strategy, given how many localities engage in "crack downs" and whatnot to score political points. Already, I was nearly arrested for carrying a pocket knife that is legal where I live, but illegal where my mom lives (not something I was even aware of -- it is just a pocket knife), and I only evaded prosecution because the cop felt like bending the rules for me. Had the cop not been in such a friendly mood, I would have been imprisoned for two weeks.
Why do people constantly bring up nuclear launch codes in discussions about national security secrets? The system of nuclear launch codes was not designed to protect America from foreign threats; it was designed to protect foreign nations from rogue soldiers engaging in an authorized nuclear strike. The nuclear command and control system is mostly related to ensuring that our nuclear weapons can only be armed following an order from the President or a combination of cabinet members.
That being said, the entire nuclear command and control system was designed when concerns about soviet spies were rampant. It was, naturally, designed to withstand a certain level of information leakage without compromising security. The idea that a leak on the scale of what Wikileaks does would somehow compromise our nuclear weapons system is a bit far-fetched; by the time Wikileaks even got around to publishing launch codes and missile locations, the information would be completely out of date and worthless (launch codes are changed daily, and missiles are periodically shuffled between silos; also, we open a certain fraction of our silos, chosen by the Russians, for Russian airplanes to photograph, as part of an agreement of assurances that we are not exceeding a certain number of nuclear weapons).
The problem, though, is that people can no longer trust the government to give accurate information about our reasons for going to war, the state of affairs in the war, or what sort of conduct our soldiers are engaging in. If it were the case that when the government says, "this document is being kept secret to protect the lives of people who are helping us," we could actually trust that is the case and that the government is not just trying to hide some sort of mistake (like an apache helicopter crew killing someone who was trying to bring a wounded reporter to the hospital), then I would say that yeah, Wikileaks is not doing us a service. Unfortunately, when the government says something is being kept secret for national security purposes, it is not possible to know whether there really is a good reason to keep it secret, or if it is just part of another attempt to keep the public in the dark about what our supposed representatives are doing. Keep in mind that the US government classified a copyright treaty as a national security secret.
As one of the people who works with Wikileaks recently said, the people in Iraq and Afghanistan know what is happening in the war. They see the civilian deaths all the time. Why, then, does the US government want to keep the American public in the dark about civilian deaths in the wars that we are fighting?
Extreme secrecy on the part of the government demands the sort of extreme response that Wikileaks represents. Until we can trust the government, Wikileaks is doing vital and necessary work to preserve the right of the people to know what their government is up to, which is absolutely necessary for a democracy to work.
For me, Wikileaks represents a sliver of hope for citizen action; for-profit news sources and government operated news sources have become the tools of the very organizations (corporate and government) that wish to take advantage of the majority of people, but Wikileaks is run by average people who do not have a vested interest in taking advantage of the rest of the population. If there were more of this sort of citizen action, we would have a much stronger democracy, one that is not run by the powerful corporations and their lobbyists. Unfortunately, we have a long way to go before more than a fraction of a percent of the population gets up and takes any sort of action on their own behalf.
The Daily Show is more of a source of commentary on the news than a source of it. What is somewhat shocking, though, is that The Daily Show is where increasing numbers of young people are turning to learn what is happening in the world -- more conventional news sources must be doing a really bad job.
The press does a bad job specifically because it is not just a group of volunteers; the press ultimately needs to make enough money to pay reporters, journalists, editors, etc. In countries where news is a business, getting on the government's bad side can mean losing access to news sources (the ability to speak with powerful people); in countries where news is sponsored by the government, getting on the government's bad side could mean getting fired or receiving less funding. There are a few exceptional cases, such as the New York Times leaking the illegal wiretapping program, but more often than not it seems that news organizations avoid creating controversies.
Can Photoshop and Illustrator and Final Cut use an arbitrarily large number of cores efficiently?
Arbitrarily large numbers of cores? No, not a chance, certainly not on a shared memory architecture like the system in question. 12 cores is probably going to be OK, but when you pass 16 cores you'll start to notice the memory bottleneck; once you are at 64 cores you are basically at the limit of usefulness for shared memory architectures, and you have to be careful about memory access patterns or your software will be slower. Even "embarrassingly parallel" can suffer if the memory access patterns are bad.
There is a reason that almost all of the supercomputers in use today use some sort of NUMA or distributed memory architecture.
Honestly, I find this "magic" marketing strategy to be a complete turnoff.
If /. is about generating ad views, they are certainly attracting the wrong audience -- I would guess that most /. users have some sort of ad blocking software installed.