This book is what I consider to be very expensive for an IT book.
I am not particularly familiar with the topic, but I expect the subject matter continually changes
as the authors address contemporary issues. It would not surprise me if the publisher is already
preparing for a second edition with "critical" subject matter changes.
CERT has been sending out notifications for free using a mailing list for at least a decade and
in this Internet world we live in, they could have promulgated the information more widely by
simply posting it on their website.
Anyway, that is my opinion. OK?
I think my first experience with technical book over $50 was buying books from Microsoft press, trying to get and keep a handle on Windows programming. I noticed several things about this trend. First of all, we must be out of our minds to pay over $50 for a paperback book. Secondly, I don't want to buy any more books that are about a specific version of a software package. By the time the book is published and in my hands, Microsoft is already distributing the beta's for the next version of the software. Thirdly, these books give me a stomach ache. Have you tried sitting in bed a reading one of these tomes with it sitting on your stomach. Not for long is my experience, but these book usually put me to sleep before I get tired of holding them up.
My father told me when he heard I was going to visit Isreal, to have them stamp a post-it in my passport instead of one of the normal pages. He would do the same thing if he visited other countries in the region. Was that sneaky, or just polite not rub someone's noses in an issue that is bothersome to them? Years ago I worked briefly with an Isreali consultant building point of sale terminals for use in a mall. As it turns out, I let them stamp my passport as I had no foreseeable need to visit any neighboring countries, and in fact I could have applied for a replacement passport had I felt it was an issue.
These days I have a different point of view and I simply wouldn't do any business in the region because ancient passions have caused all concerned to behave in a non-linear way. To put it bluntly. I have no desire to fly into an airport where the plane is met by a tank and soldiers wielding automatic weapons. Whether it is Israel, or Germany, or Japan for that matter. These days, RMS could have attended virtually on a big screen.
My kids are all excited about the latest toy from japan. It is a gel that you can paint on things that makes them glow in the dark. They have already painted their bedroom ceilings, and each other with the stuff. And it's cheap. You can depend on the Japanese to know what kids like...
I have to disagree with you. Sure your machine may be behind a firewall, and because of that it is probably using NAT services to access the Internet at large. But doing so, your machine probably accesses high profile servers and services that are often infeted themselves.
Old unix users know that you shouldn't actually have to reboot a unix system unless it is the core of the kernel itself that is being updated. Otherwise you can reduce your run-level and bring it back up in order to restart updated services. Just calling reboot is the lazy way, and is no better at verifying startup sequences than varying the run-level as I said before.
This sounds really similar to my experiences with Windows Server 2003R2. I got out the install media, got the system formatted and installed, and chose a reasonable sounding set of default services to run. I tested what I had running and things seemed good, for about an hour. Then the SMTP mail stopped working. I go to bed, but by morning the system logs have become immense with all sorts of inscrutable error messages about sub-services that are not starting or responding as expected and reduced functionality modes that are becoming active as the system basically goes to pieces within 24 hours. The bizarre part of this story is that just after the install everything was working and tested good. But within an hour, things started unraveling. My hopes that Windows 2003R2 might be better started fading at that point.
So true, I used to use a nice OS called 86DOS and it was mean and lean. small, and just supplied the CP/M like service I needed. Then Bill got his hands on it, and it went to hell. Oh, well, another piece of software perverted.
I am the proud owner of two 60GB fat PS3's. I bought them for the express purpose of running Linux and learning more about the Cell processor. I believe I have read that newer PS3's have been cheapened to the point where they cannot run Linux, firmware notwithstanding. I am thinking that this new firmware release that allegedly causes overheating and shutdown, could be an attempt to literally burn up these early collector's items. It has been several years since my PS3's were on the Internet communicating with Sony's network. I waited impatiently for years for their SL knockoff to arrive, and I finally just lost interest. For some reason one of my two unts has decided it doesn't want to play Bluray disks any more. This is probably the result of DRM issues. Even though it was in warrantee, I cannot send in the unit as they would undoubtedly update the firmware to the current version and my Linux would be hosed. I have am not clever enough to use geohot's package of secrets to unlock the PS'3 hypervisor security. I wish someone would develop a new set of PROMS (or whatever) that would dispense with the Sony GUI and hypervisor, and just allow a distribution of Linux to own the machine. Then I could do what I wanted which was to learn about the Cell, in a less memory restricted fashion. An after-market memory(ram) enhancement would be nice too.
After some poor judgement trusting neighbors not to use my open wi-fi with napster, my DSL was useless for over a year because of the constant connection attempts from napster users all over the world. I had to get another DSL line and wait for that one to cal down. BlueCoder is right, and the attackers can easily fill up your pipe with garbage and it does act as a denial of service attack.
When you decide to share something you have created, and you have to pay an extra 10% for the blank CD media you want to share it on because the publishing industry has convinced a judge that these CD will be used to damage them financially. Is this not a little of that?
But it was a moving target beyond the Windows API. Just learn the API, oh, Just learn MFC, oh Just learn OLE, oh, just lean custom controls, oh Just learn active X, oops bad cert, so much for securicode. Just learn.NET, use visual basic, oops I mean use C#...
Just which published API's are we supposed to cling to that will make life good?
Surely Microsoft isn't going to say that their virus troubles are related to their use of Intel x86 architecture. Microsoft ignored the support that Intel put into the processors for decades. As we all know these days, buffer overruns are the source of most vulnerabilities, but had the compilers implemented BOUND instructions on buffers (for example), a lot of this could have been avoided. As far back as Windows 3.1 (Enhanced Mode), they could have utilized these protections. Microsoft had their MSC around that time and could have built in those protections which could have been used immediately in the operating system (assuming MS wasn't compiling Windows with Borland:-) ) There have been plenty of very stable operating systems on x86, and the Intel x86 Operating System Writer's Guide has been available since day one.
Pardon my ignorance, but I have been thinking since.NET 1.0 that that was it was all about. I thought the point of.NET was to use a CLR targeting compiler to generate assemblies that would run anywhere there was a complaint runtime. Now it may be that as soon as Microsoft was faced with the challenge of getting any kind of performance out of these lower power devices, they realized this whole runtime deal was wasting cycles and they needed to go native again so their new tech would only seem sluggish, and not unusable. At this point I doubt Microsoft even knows how to write code that performs, because they have spent too much time in the world where you don't have to re-write something that is wrong, and instead, just derive a subclass and override away, piling goop on top of goop, ad-nauseum.
What I am interested in is the conjecture in TFA that the new code base will be immune from viruses and malware, for any length of time. Malware writers have shown that given a beta copy and 24-hours, the goose is cooked. As a developer, I am long past trusting them in any way. They have abused several generations of developers, and we all don't have dysfunctional memories.
Lets talk about taxing licenses. When I became a Concurrent DOS licensee, I gave Digital Research $25,000 for the right to resell 100 copies of the Concurrent CP/M-86 operating system. A while later the issue arose about whether the transaction should have been subject to sales tax.The concept was discussed that the OEM kit containing the master images of the software had a price of $25,000 and happened to allow you to sell 100 copies of the software with unique accountable serial numbers. OEM's like me said, "I don't need the kit, thank you". The franchise tax board was unconvinced. When I sold copies of the software to people in my state (California), I had to charge them California state sales tax, which was collected and sent on to FTB. The question was immediately raised, "If I have a resale number , can I buy the license wholesale and then tax my customers (only some of which were inside California)? Frankly I don't remember how things worked out, but I remember it being vigorously debated. Microsoft insists that when you buy a copy of Windows, you haven't actually bought something that you then own. You just happen to have the right to run their OS on your computer, and your ability to resell that copy to another person is hotly contested by Microsoft. More and more software is "sold" over the Internet, whatever "sold" means, and the issue of sales tax becomes more vague every day.
I lived in Japan, and when you damage someone, and you eventually get to court, the judge asks what compensatory payments were made. If there haven't been enough good-faith payments, things don't go well.
If you cause a traffic accident and someone is killed, you had better give a shitload of money to the family that just lost their breadwinner, for example.
I was unemployed at the time, and it was painful to reject the work. But I have thankfully avoided litigation with any of my clients for forty years. Now the allegedly religious clients that didn't pay my final invoice and stiffed me for $17,000 deserved to explain themselves to a judge. But that taught me not to let clients get so far out that it is worth blowing me off to avoid payment. I guess the contemporary issue beyond non-competes is the one of software licensing and patent issues, and I would have a hard time signing a contract these days promising that code I write for a client does not have patent issues when the big boys have so many patents you cannot do Hello World without changing the final two exclamation points.:-) I used to think software people should get an MBA first. Now I think they should be lawyers, get an MBA, and then if they aren't grey by then, learn enough programming to make a living.
I have been a contract software engineer for a few decades now, and about a decade ago, Attachemate wanted to contract with me for some work. I was very excited about the opportunity until I read their contract. There were some portions about non-compete that were problematic for me and I attempted unsuccessfully to come to any accommodation about this. The problem about their contract is that it states that you can never again (ever) work for a competitor that has, or is planning to have, or considering having, a product that might compete with Attachemate, or any affiliate of Attachemate, now or at any time in the future. There are just so many things wrong about this I don't know where to start. A non-compete that lasts forever, a non-compete not only about an existing product, but anything that might be planned, or even considered, not only by Attachemate today, but any of their affiliates today, and any of these affiliates any time in the future, and the topper, any new affiliates that might arrive any time in the future. They were absolutely hardcore and would not even discuss changing any of these terms. I believe when they purchased Novell, they probably approached the MONO engineers and tried to get them to sign a new contract with the aforementioned non-compete terms. I doubt any of the American engineers agreed to sign such an open ended contract, and Attachemate probably gave up, and laid off the bunch, thinking Americans are unreasonable. For those in the know about ECMA, there is also the possibility that Microsoft told Attachemate to deprecate MONO, and Attachemate may be a big member in ECMA.
If Apple wants to have some common code between iOS and Mac OS X, using an Intel CPU on the iOS side would make things easier. Depending that is, on how similar the iOS cpu is to the x86 cpu's in the Mac OS X machines.
OK, I bought a Mac (and love it), I bought an iPhone 4(and love it). I am watching android and think the day will come when I want to begin programming for it. Microsoft(SCO) has tried repeatedly to kill Linux, and now they want to kill android(sort of like linux for devices). They (Microsoft) are committed to this "Windows everywhere" thing, which any reasonable person should see as a grandiose goal of a megalomaniacal company. In my opinion, no single company should have their software in everything (especially a company with bug-ridden software). It creates too big of a danger should something generic go wrong, as we have seen with Windows (all versions) and Office(all versions)...
Die now in a war, or die later of cancer, it is unclear which is worse and more or less desirable. But this article is about the government declaring that some information is illegal. I can vaguely see that false information is problematic, but you cannot suppress the truth for long in a well connected world. I would think the Japanese people would have a serious commitment to knowing everything about nuclear activity in Japan. I can't throw many stones at Japan though as I was only several miles from the largest reactor event in American history and it tool decades to find out about it (San Fernando Valley sodium reactor melt-down at Atomics International facility).
Almost three years ago I contracted with Comcast for business class high speed internet here in the home. I was forced to go business class to get fixed IP numbers, even as few as five. The service has been so miserable I can't even stomach describing it. But the only alternative in my subdivision to comcast is verizon, who did't bother to lay fiber here and still want $39 per month for 1.5Mb Downward 384Kb upward DSL. I have been paying about $105/mo for a fraction of 105Mbit service all this time, and my anus is sore from the experience. Getting into that contract with them was a mistake I will never forget. I am starting to look at taking my notebook to an internet cafe if I need to download something. You can buy a lot of coffee for $100 a month.
Ok Mr Anonymous Coward. If you are done criticizing my thoughtfully expressed opinion, and have no actual content of value to add, I guess not.
This book is what I consider to be very expensive for an IT book. I am not particularly familiar with the topic, but I expect the subject matter continually changes as the authors address contemporary issues. It would not surprise me if the publisher is already preparing for a second edition with "critical" subject matter changes. CERT has been sending out notifications for free using a mailing list for at least a decade and in this Internet world we live in, they could have promulgated the information more widely by simply posting it on their website. Anyway, that is my opinion. OK?
I think my first experience with technical book over $50 was buying books from Microsoft press, trying to get and keep a handle on Windows programming. I noticed several things about this trend. First of all, we must be out of our minds to pay over $50 for a paperback book. Secondly, I don't want to buy any more books that are about a specific version of a software package. By the time the book is published and in my hands, Microsoft is already distributing the beta's for the next version of the software. Thirdly, these books give me a stomach ache. Have you tried sitting in bed a reading one of these tomes with it sitting on your stomach. Not for long is my experience, but these book usually put me to sleep before I get tired of holding them up.
These days I have a different point of view and I simply wouldn't do any business in the region because ancient passions have caused all concerned to behave in a non-linear way. To put it bluntly. I have no desire to fly into an airport where the plane is met by a tank and soldiers wielding automatic weapons. Whether it is Israel, or Germany, or Japan for that matter. These days, RMS could have attended virtually on a big screen.
My kids are all excited about the latest toy from japan. It is a gel that you can paint on things that makes them glow in the dark. They have already painted their bedroom ceilings, and each other with the stuff. And it's cheap. You can depend on the Japanese to know what kids like...
I have to disagree with you. Sure your machine may be behind a firewall, and because of that it is probably using NAT services to access the Internet at large. But doing so, your machine probably accesses high profile servers and services that are often infeted themselves.
Old unix users know that you shouldn't actually have to reboot a unix system unless it is the core of the kernel itself that is being updated. Otherwise you can reduce your run-level and bring it back up in order to restart updated services. Just calling reboot is the lazy way, and is no better at verifying startup sequences than varying the run-level as I said before.
This sounds really similar to my experiences with Windows Server 2003R2. I got out the install media, got the system formatted and installed, and chose a reasonable sounding set of default services to run. I tested what I had running and things seemed good, for about an hour. Then the SMTP mail stopped working. I go to bed, but by morning the system logs have become immense with all sorts of inscrutable error messages about sub-services that are not starting or responding as expected and reduced functionality modes that are becoming active as the system basically goes to pieces within 24 hours. The bizarre part of this story is that just after the install everything was working and tested good. But within an hour, things started unraveling. My hopes that Windows 2003R2 might be better started fading at that point.
So true, I used to use a nice OS called 86DOS and it was mean and lean. small, and just supplied the CP/M like service I needed. Then Bill got his hands on it, and it went to hell. Oh, well, another piece of software perverted.
I am the proud owner of two 60GB fat PS3's. I bought them for the express purpose of running Linux and learning more about the Cell processor. I believe I have read that newer PS3's have been cheapened to the point where they cannot run Linux, firmware notwithstanding. I am thinking that this new firmware release that allegedly causes overheating and shutdown, could be an attempt to literally burn up these early collector's items. It has been several years since my PS3's were on the Internet communicating with Sony's network. I waited impatiently for years for their SL knockoff to arrive, and I finally just lost interest. For some reason one of my two unts has decided it doesn't want to play Bluray disks any more. This is probably the result of DRM issues. Even though it was in warrantee, I cannot send in the unit as they would undoubtedly update the firmware to the current version and my Linux would be hosed. I have am not clever enough to use geohot's package of secrets to unlock the PS'3 hypervisor security. I wish someone would develop a new set of PROMS (or whatever) that would dispense with the Sony GUI and hypervisor, and just allow a distribution of Linux to own the machine. Then I could do what I wanted which was to learn about the Cell, in a less memory restricted fashion. An after-market memory(ram) enhancement would be nice too.
After some poor judgement trusting neighbors not to use my open wi-fi with napster, my DSL was useless for over a year because of the constant connection attempts from napster users all over the world. I had to get another DSL line and wait for that one to cal down. BlueCoder is right, and the attackers can easily fill up your pipe with garbage and it does act as a denial of service attack.
Installation procedure doesn't work, too bad. The GIT fetch of the package fails over some certificate issue. Blah... http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/05/19/1648200/Imagining-the-CLI-For-the-Modern-Machine?utm_source=headlines&utm_medium=email#
tht lrdy hpnd. sdly
When you decide to share something you have created, and you have to pay an extra 10% for the blank CD media you want to share it on because the publishing industry has convinced a judge that these CD will be used to damage them financially. Is this not a little of that?
Just which published API's are we supposed to cling to that will make life good?
Surely Microsoft isn't going to say that their virus troubles are related to their use of Intel x86 architecture. Microsoft ignored the support that Intel put into the processors for decades. As we all know these days, buffer overruns are the source of most vulnerabilities, but had the compilers implemented BOUND instructions on buffers (for example), a lot of this could have been avoided. As far back as Windows 3.1 (Enhanced Mode), they could have utilized these protections. Microsoft had their MSC around that time and could have built in those protections which could have been used immediately in the operating system (assuming MS wasn't compiling Windows with Borland :-) ) There have been plenty of very stable operating systems on x86, and the Intel x86 Operating System Writer's Guide has been available since day one.
What I am interested in is the conjecture in TFA that the new code base will be immune from viruses and malware, for any length of time. Malware writers have shown that given a beta copy and 24-hours, the goose is cooked. As a developer, I am long past trusting them in any way. They have abused several generations of developers, and we all don't have dysfunctional memories.
Lets talk about taxing licenses. When I became a Concurrent DOS licensee, I gave Digital Research $25,000 for the right to resell 100 copies of the Concurrent CP/M-86 operating system. A while later the issue arose about whether the transaction should have been subject to sales tax.The concept was discussed that the OEM kit containing the master images of the software had a price of $25,000 and happened to allow you to sell 100 copies of the software with unique accountable serial numbers. OEM's like me said, "I don't need the kit, thank you". The franchise tax board was unconvinced. When I sold copies of the software to people in my state (California), I had to charge them California state sales tax, which was collected and sent on to FTB. The question was immediately raised, "If I have a resale number , can I buy the license wholesale and then tax my customers (only some of which were inside California)? Frankly I don't remember how things worked out, but I remember it being vigorously debated. Microsoft insists that when you buy a copy of Windows, you haven't actually bought something that you then own. You just happen to have the right to run their OS on your computer, and your ability to resell that copy to another person is hotly contested by Microsoft. More and more software is "sold" over the Internet, whatever "sold" means, and the issue of sales tax becomes more vague every day.
I lived in Japan, and when you damage someone, and you eventually get to court, the judge asks what compensatory payments were made. If there haven't been enough good-faith payments, things don't go well. If you cause a traffic accident and someone is killed, you had better give a shitload of money to the family that just lost their breadwinner, for example.
I was unemployed at the time, and it was painful to reject the work. But I have thankfully avoided litigation with any of my clients for forty years. Now the allegedly religious clients that didn't pay my final invoice and stiffed me for $17,000 deserved to explain themselves to a judge. But that taught me not to let clients get so far out that it is worth blowing me off to avoid payment. I guess the contemporary issue beyond non-competes is the one of software licensing and patent issues, and I would have a hard time signing a contract these days promising that code I write for a client does not have patent issues when the big boys have so many patents you cannot do Hello World without changing the final two exclamation points. :-) I used to think software people should get an MBA first. Now I think they should be lawyers, get an MBA, and then if they aren't grey by then, learn enough programming to make a living.
I have been a contract software engineer for a few decades now, and about a decade ago, Attachemate wanted to contract with me for some work. I was very excited about the opportunity until I read their contract. There were some portions about non-compete that were problematic for me and I attempted unsuccessfully to come to any accommodation about this. The problem about their contract is that it states that you can never again (ever) work for a competitor that has, or is planning to have, or considering having, a product that might compete with Attachemate, or any affiliate of Attachemate, now or at any time in the future. There are just so many things wrong about this I don't know where to start. A non-compete that lasts forever, a non-compete not only about an existing product, but anything that might be planned, or even considered, not only by Attachemate today, but any of their affiliates today, and any of these affiliates any time in the future, and the topper, any new affiliates that might arrive any time in the future. They were absolutely hardcore and would not even discuss changing any of these terms. I believe when they purchased Novell, they probably approached the MONO engineers and tried to get them to sign a new contract with the aforementioned non-compete terms. I doubt any of the American engineers agreed to sign such an open ended contract, and Attachemate probably gave up, and laid off the bunch, thinking Americans are unreasonable. For those in the know about ECMA, there is also the possibility that Microsoft told Attachemate to deprecate MONO, and Attachemate may be a big member in ECMA.
If Apple wants to have some common code between iOS and Mac OS X, using an Intel CPU on the iOS side would make things easier. Depending that is, on how similar the iOS cpu is to the x86 cpu's in the Mac OS X machines.
OK, I bought a Mac (and love it), I bought an iPhone 4(and love it). I am watching android and think the day will come when I want to begin programming for it. Microsoft(SCO) has tried repeatedly to kill Linux, and now they want to kill android(sort of like linux for devices). They (Microsoft) are committed to this "Windows everywhere" thing, which any reasonable person should see as a grandiose goal of a megalomaniacal company. In my opinion, no single company should have their software in everything (especially a company with bug-ridden software). It creates too big of a danger should something generic go wrong, as we have seen with Windows (all versions) and Office(all versions)...
Die now in a war, or die later of cancer, it is unclear which is worse and more or less desirable. But this article is about the government declaring that some information is illegal. I can vaguely see that false information is problematic, but you cannot suppress the truth for long in a well connected world. I would think the Japanese people would have a serious commitment to knowing everything about nuclear activity in Japan. I can't throw many stones at Japan though as I was only several miles from the largest reactor event in American history and it tool decades to find out about it (San Fernando Valley sodium reactor melt-down at Atomics International facility).
Almost three years ago I contracted with Comcast for business class high speed internet here in the home. I was forced to go business class to get fixed IP numbers, even as few as five. The service has been so miserable I can't even stomach describing it. But the only alternative in my subdivision to comcast is verizon, who did't bother to lay fiber here and still want $39 per month for 1.5Mb Downward 384Kb upward DSL. I have been paying about $105/mo for a fraction of 105Mbit service all this time, and my anus is sore from the experience. Getting into that contract with them was a mistake I will never forget. I am starting to look at taking my notebook to an internet cafe if I need to download something. You can buy a lot of coffee for $100 a month.