Hmmm... Good statements you made here about them... Don't be admired that they'll be ringing your bell soon...
Common Criteria is a set of security standards sponsored by such kind organisations as the NSA and its cousins from UK, Germany, France, Netherlands and maybe more.
Many people think that IT personell are some kind of running clerks at a cafe. These ones have absolutely no respect for your brains, your experience and your sweet. More, they tend to hide their incompetence, ignorance and stupidity behind a mask of arrogance and superiority. If your ex-boss called you demanding something, the first thing you should have done was to say "Cool but that will cost you US$XXXX...". If he comes up with threats and dubious statements about your past work, you better send him fast to Hell and tell him to forget your name and your phone.
Beware that you open-hearthed behaviour could have caused more damage rather than help to yourself. There are times when old bosses start to talk too much about their ex-employees as "smarties that left hacks and bombs to spoil our work". And when you come back and do something in half-second, they may try to use it to make a serious accusation that you tried to crook them. While I have never seen such stories getting to courts, there are pretty real examples how ex-bosses tried to extort cheap work out of their ex-employees by playing such scenarios. Personally, many years ago, I was in such situation and things nearly ended in a violent fight inside a "respectable" commercial bank.
And you think that if this move from M$ would help you? Apart of the good or bad intentions from Redmond, I'm pretty sure that your users will force you to keep not one, but several copies of Windows, some more older or crappy than others. Users are a terrible thing to deal with. For you Lotus 2.4 and WordPerfect 5.1 are dinosaurs that give you headaches and leave you with the feeling you live in a swamp. For the users they are work tools and they may go pretty happy with them. They are not IT experts and in the bottom of their souls they are working just with what they well know.
To change their minds, you have to get someone to change those macros and cell calculations. As it is you who propose the change, you should give the ground for it. No one will be kind to change if you cannot afford a slow but reliable move into a new system. This can be painful as it may take a year or two to do it. But if you build up a small revolution on changing the OS, then most users will try to smoke you out of the company. And they may have a reason as, in reality, you may kill the businees on making such rough changes.
Note that there is a difference between doing a bad business but still making some profit, and making revolutions where everything looks shiny, but no one can work with the new system. You may put XP everywhere, but if management sees money flying out the window, they will have some good questions about your technocratic progressism.
As a final note I can note you that I'm in a similar position. I'm in the 7th month on trying to change a company where people used old NT and FoxPro into a Linux/SQL world. The job is not nice at all. While it was easy to scrap all NTs outta there, it is tremendously difficult to convince people stop using their old FoxPro programs. The interfaces are clumsy, data gets trashed from time to time, the system does not allow wide-scale WAN use, but they are used to it and, no matter the problems, they do their job with it. To force them into a new world, I'll need a few months more to create new fullscale apps, capable of doing most things these people do now with Fox. And every step is a baggage of problems. It was a Hell to have these people using mail to exchange documents, instead of printing them and cloggering desks with paper. The biggest problem is to avoid them to get the feeling that we are playing revolutions on them.
And what's special about that?
on
Film Gimp
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Some good years ago I read an interview from some M$ developer in one serious journal (PC Magazine? Byte? I don't remember) where is showed pride that Windows95 had some piece of code that was taken from some free source. It seems it was something related to those irritating "lemedoitfoyou" wizards that populated Windows since then. Moreover, Windows has some features that were directly taken from X interface.
That's one example taken out of the *NIX world. On *NIX world we have tons of examples on how certain "purities" dissolve in the mass of needs and wishes of its users.
The fact that Warner Bros uses GPL is nothing extraordinary. And, frankly, it has nothing to do with their stances for protecting ownership. The problem of content, information sharing going beyond software is something to be dealt with extreme care. A film, book or other media content is not a product of software exclusively. And the means to share it should be completely different. In our software world, we still may play a barter between programs and things related to them. In the other spheres of activity, like films and books, the author is usually offering something that cannot be retributed in the same way. I am not a writer and I cannot offer a book for every book someone offers me.
Anyway, the restrictive politics that MPAA and its cousins play, surely hurt everyone. They are creating a feud out of certain media and they are seriously hindering the chances for people to have a right for information (entertainment is also a form of information) in these environments. Considering this highly restrictive stance and their use of free software tools is surely a paradox. But it does not mean they should free something. Anyway, their money helps a little our world, right? But they should be more democratic and flexible in what relates to the media they work with. Because if they will keep this stance, the consequences will backfire at them. For example, they may produce new fresh laws that will hinder developers from making cheap software they highly depend on...
From reading the article it seems that the new meanong of NASA will be:
National Aerospace Sliced Apart
Good bye Moon, farewell Mars, arriverdeci Space, do svidanya Cosmos, sayanora Universe, bonne nuit Science. It seems that the only thing that will fly in 2015 will be a crappy ISS falling apart and hundreds of threatening robots seeking its targets in Earth's surface. Oh, and a few commercial satellites to make people happy with streaming media and give them a chance to chat a bit on Internet mobiles from LA to Tokyo, through Space and Paris. A small taste of technology for the masses...
Well, tcpdump.org guys may be the best to answer this question but there are some usual ways to do it:
A: Break into the Web site, get privileges and change the source.
B: Play the dirty contributor, add the torjaned code during development.
C: Play the good coder, get popularity and in last moment change the hat.
D: Play the jerk coder, make some silly debugs and leave the backdoor open in the distro.
D is probably the most inoccent. However it is not unusual as it seems. We have some good examples of debug backdoors left by well intended developers or less scruplous vendors.
B and C are a risk. You have to leave some tracks behind before you play dirty. It demands brians and some guts to do it. And it demands that you care for not being catched. However, these situations are not impossible.
A is the most usual of all. Breaking sites or users responsible for them has been the most usual, experienced and well-proved tendency of all. Besides, the one that gives the best results. You may be a super-hacker, creating a super-tool and hoping for a super-world out of your super-work. But you are not God All-Mighty.
Everyone has its strong sides and weak ones. It is very frequent to see that if one is a developer, then things concerning system and network administration are exactly his weak sides. The same goes for admins and development, example: me. I may be a good sysadmin and most people consider me as such. However, if I write a few pieces of code I usually get the reaction: "Uh, oh, hmmm... well I understand what you trying to do but leave to me that thing, ok?"
The problem why so many programs are being broken is not a problem of developers as developers. It is a problem of system administration, for which they may as far as I am from development of such tools like tcpdump. The solution to this problem is that main developers should start to care about gathering not only coders but also admins. However this may not be a solution for every ill. It may turn into into a new sphere. Imagine some ubercracker being invited as admin for some major site...
For those who came from Pascal's golden years and later, FORTRAN may look as some crappy language that once fed iron dinosaurs. Well, some years ago I got convinced that this is not the way things are. FORTRAN is still a language that is in high demand. However, in very specific but very hightech areas - main supercomputing and clusters. As far as I see, there is a big lack of experts, here as many good FORTRAN gurus are in their late 50's and early 60's and unwilling to get back to the rooms. Anyway, if you are skilled in FORTRAN and willing to remember your old times, maybe you should try something on this field. Surely it will not be exactly like old good times. Things changed a lot since then, and there are a lot of new things to learn. But your FORTRAN skills may be an arrow that will put you ahead of many younger candidates.
BTW I saw a small job fever in one organisation when they set up a small cluster for chemistry analysis. They could not find anyone younger than 34 to catch the task of programming the monster. The guy who went there, passed 3-4 months blaming the skies for the headache they gave him but later was happily playing the role of guru...
Very Interesting to find your post just after being sent into Offtopic (?????????????). Flamebait or Troll I would understand. But Offtopic???
And why you Microsoft jerk point to the dollar sign and don't seem to mind that I use also "/.". Or has anyone considered that shortsigns are no longer used in Internet? Probably M$ was used when you still had haven't seen a display in front of your eyes. And it meant Megadollars Corporation for some in the beginning of the 90's. And besides I ain't 14 years old but I have had 15 years on using Windows. Since its beta 1 version.
And more. I don't want to anyone to take me seriously. It his part to take me seriously or not. My part is to state my opinion like it or not.
And finally. Get out of that Anonymous Cowardish suit and come into the frontline if you have something serious to say.
First we had/. bashing M$ Then we had M$ fans bashing/. Then we had/. fans bashing M$ fans. Then we had M$ fans bashing/. fans. Then we had M$ fans appraising M$ in/.. Now we have/. appraising M$. Soon we probably will have M$/. Later we will have M$ bashing/.
I really don't care for someone appraising here some real feature from M$ world. However, seeing the comments going after this post, I'm pretty admired that someone made such an golden appraisal for the whacky X-Box, while the thing didn't deserve such focus (According to one comment, Dragon's Lair is multi-platform, the site also shows it).
Frankly it seems that/. is slowly but surely diving into a M$ hype world that doesn't distinguish it from any other mass media outlet. It's sad as it was one of the best forums in the net, apart of some yellow journalism in the posts and Katz prayings.
That's interesting... But think... Where America would be if people in the XVI and XVII centuries would be so straightful?
America belonged to only and EXCLUSIVELY to Spain and Portugal. Right? And that was an international agreement recognized at the biggest European authority of the time - the Catholic Church.
How many Europeans would manage to reach the America's if everyone considered King Filipe's gold and lands as his rightful property?
What would have happen to Europe if they gave Carl V, the Filipes and his descendents the right to choose whether or not to share its "product" - the conquer of America's?
Brrr. Hope the US Congress will be a bit cold-head before giving military the power to roam the net. Military are usually too crazy and too paranoid. Besides they are not usually bound to rules and laws the same way enforcement and intelligence agencies are. They are warmakers, and in war, most rules and laws are usually pieces of paper and voices in the wind. They are the dreamers of the maxima that "the only rule in war is that there are no rules". Right, there is the Geneva Convention, all those doctrines and instructions, there is still the fact that they have to bound to the civil state. However, in real wars, and I have seen a very real one, all that gets quite foggy.
Btw, yesterday a program in Russian TV was criticizing Pentagon for its stance on Iraq. One of the criticisms was well remarked there:
"While CIA still has its header in its shoulders and tries to see the real situation, Pentagon military try to take for granted what they wish to see and how they wish too see. Worse, they try that the Congress and general public only see what they wish.
Frankly, in this statement there is something that applies to many military in the world. In most cases they see things as they wish to see. If someone walks near the border, he's probably a spy. If someone makes too harsh statements, he's an enemy to be crushed down without pitty. If someone shoots into your territory, then there's a whole division behind and it's time to move our forces into enemy territory before they do it on us. And all this should be accepted by everyone. Or else you're a traitor, a summy commy, a terrorist and you should also be crushed.
Leave security to FBI, CIA and NSA. While they are not saints, they still are the professionals who know the field and the limits. Military have no breaks in their heads and may fire a war much faster than anyone else, as that's their main profession...
You can if you are also a professional and care for your work, the network you administer and the people who work on it. "Professional" is a term that states your experience and skills and not that you are God-All-Mighty.
And what do you offer in exchange? Raw Ethernet? Sorry but that's overbastardization for some tasks. You ignore that virtual networks, private networks and several security tasks need such things as PPOE, VPN, PPTP and alikes. However there is a price to pay. In the case of PPOE it is a logical price as you need to low the MTU of the inner package so that the whole thing fits into a classical 1500 byte data envelope and the host will not break his head with oversized datapacks. If no one gets the idea why this should be done, then it is him who's the idiot and not the protocol. And if one doesn't get the idea why such kind of protocols exist than better RTFM a little before calling others idiots. A lot of my colleagues use virtual networks for tons of tasks as solving things in a single raw physical basis is becoming near to impossible today. It is becoming overexpensive and risks are getting bigger and bigger.
It's already making its first run around the world in 80 minutes. Russian media have already picked it up... So it is probable that soon we will see Y3K crisis building up... I wonder how any billions state budgets will pour in this... Anyway, jounalists, priests, doomsday analytics will not loose their jobs for the next 1000 years.
We have just seen on/. some story about academical rubbish in the field of Physics. Now we read another bigger rubbish about Earth's magnetic poles. Yes, "bigger" because a Big Bang hoax theory may be still "speculative" as Big Bang itself is still a Big Question. Now that Earth will boil or that migrating birds will get disoriented is pure bullshit as there are tons of facts to show its fallacy. Let me note a few:
The geological record shows lots of inversions occuring during Earth's History. But we are still alive don't we?
For those who studied Mars, well studied it, know that Martian Oceans didn't boil up in a very very old past. Whatever happened there, created a global and massive movement of the hydrosphere some billion years after Mars was formed. I don't see how a magnetic pole inversion would help creating 1km deep canyons in a matter of hours or days. It is very probable that this happened long after the Martian Magnetic Pole turned off.
If anyone cares to look at the Atlantic migrating birds, then he will note that some use both America and Africa to their travel North-South. Before Challenger's expedition (the ship, not the shuttle), people considered this as one of the evidences that these continents were much closer together in the past, as the zigzag pattern of migration turned into a nearly straight line.
Some birds may highly depend on the magnetic field to travel. But birds have been travelling around earth for a period much longer than most modern mammals (note: marsupials and placentarians are very recent additions to Earth's biota). Have we seen major extinctions of birds during Earth's magnetic flip-flops?
As far as I know, the Atlantic had plenty of water since Jurassic times. Challenger's expedition made several analysis of the magnetic properties of the bottom of the Atlantic. It showed a surface where the magnetic field changed direction sequently during the several millions of years, since Atlantic was formed.
There is a theory that claims that for some millions of years, Earth had no magnetic field - during the megafrost that happened between Archaic and Cambric. I don't know if this is correct but, if so, it seems that Life lived and passed well enough this terrible period.
Well, probably, any pole flip-flop may have its consequences on Earth and its inhabitants. But claiming it as the End of the World is the purest BS. This is Bad Science(TM) that many academics love to drop out over the masses. On one side they love to consider themselves as The Temple of Knowledge and save it from hoaxers, marginals, dissidents and heretics. On the other side they play no better than those clerics in Middle Ages, that at every sighting of a comet would cry over the crows "Armageddon! Armageddon is coming". Time to get more serious and sobber.
and places like India instead of combating absolute illiteracy and hunger, run out to make PDAs
India has first to combat poverty, illiteracy, give food for its people, care to fight droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes, make peace with everyone else, and then make PDA's...
However, I wonder how will India will do all this if it can't reach the technological frontier. On what basis will India fight its ills if they tell her not to make PDA's or similar technological achievements (aka not make good real money). That's the Banana Republic philosophy. You make bananas and you should fight your ills. And we keep making rockets, computers, PDA's and nukes. From time to time we send you a taste of our technocratic civilization so that you will not feel so bad with this "divide" between us. But you should stop altogether to make PDA's. Poverty and PDA's are incompatible. Do bananas as we like them while making PDA's.
Wrong. And you contradict yourself. Your cell phones example shows how a more modern technology is able to cripple down the prohibitive prices the telephone system had in Nigeria.
It is not the lack of power and fresh water that inhibits new things. I know places on Earth that are a damn hell for human beings. Places where 90% of people cannot live as it is deadly freezing (-60C), water is a mess and power goes always with hickups (if it exists at all). However, people live there and make a good effort to live. Why? Because they are technocrats. And not because they have computers, PDA's or anything like that. An hammer there, can be a Hell of technological advance if one knows how, where, and what to hit. Specially when you have the truck stuck and it is the only chance to break the frost around it. But if you don't know how to use it, then you may break the truck and freeze to Hell in the middle of the taiga.
The problem with poverty is not in the fact that people live badly. The problem is exactly in the technological divide. While you don't teach people to use its brains for every case and every tool, no matter it is Sahara, Amazonia, Rocky Mountains, Siberia or Mars they will not be able to fight for a better living. It is the technocratic thought that saves many cultures from the fate of its brothers and cousins in the world. While you will not break the conservatism and traditionalism among certain cultures, they will not be able to move further. They will keep burning tropical forests and dig holes by hand. And they will keep being poor and hungry because they don't know any other way to live and solve their problems.
Interesting... And you thing that M$ "All things bloated"(TM) will manage to do something thinner than PDF? And with the same quality? (No I'm not talking about canned features but _real_ quality, ex. security, reliability)
Such incidents are prone to happen when things are new. One colleague nearly scared to death a University teacher in the beginning of the 90's, and guess how, using the fresh new and revolutionary remote control technology. Today we have all these Remote Admins, VNC, Terminal Services and so. Back then, people were only starting to see these things. And well, one colleague took control of a machine and started playing with it. I saw what was happening with the teacher while the show went on. Imagine someone in its late 40's, using a good suit, with a small Lenin-like beard and a good hair-cut. Now, this is not a joke, imagine how he went out the room - hair all up, his Lenin-like beard pointing forward, with the upper buttons of the shirt open, trembling and with wide eyes open... That's one of the first remote control jokes...
The idea that this is a new kind of transportation is completely wrong. Such vacuum tubes were in the drawing boards since the 60's. I have seen several pictures of prototypes which were just artistic reproductions of real designs. However, the oil crisis of 73 made these and many other "alternative" transportations go into oblivion.
I wouldn't blame exclusively the Arab magnates for this. The problem looks much more complex and includes the dismissal of Lunar expeditions and the pre-"Star Wars" craze of the 70's. But I consider that for the last 30 years we are seriously stucked in development. We are a shadow of the technocratism of the 70's. We have been developing extensively, and, majorly, we keep sitting on the same ideas and technologies that were created then. Till now, we have not exploited the whole spectrum of inventions and ideas created back then. We have even run backward, as it will take some other 10 years to get back to the Moon. And we see on overold idea, with the same plus and minuses pointed back then, being presented as new.
Sincerly I'm terribly scheptical that this thing will go out of the drawing board. If anyone manages to do it, it will be great. However, I believe that people lost the hand for creativity and risk and go more for the extravaganza of the invention. Much like steam engines were for ancient greeks and egyptians... (Yes, they knew the steam engine...)
Re:Ghost is worth the money
on
Ghost for Unix
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· Score: 4, Informative
Well I once tried ghost and sincerly it was a great product. But since Symantec bought it, I forgot about that thing. Because Symantec wacked it to the impossible. After a few tries I dropped any idea to use the product altogether. And one of the problems was with multicast. It would die after some minutes and leave all stations in a dead end. Besides, on multicast, I couldn't ghost a tonne of workstations. Yes, could ghost a lot more than unicast but not a tonne.Well if Symantec solved these problems, then, I'm happy for them. But it is not good to make much hype of it. Ghost was a great product, probably still is a great product. But it is a product that it is oriented in one of the most critical segments of the market. Hypes here are too bad.
Yes, it is good that ghost understands filesystems. But it is also good that ghost would work nicely on raw data. Why? For forensics, to copy unmovable data (in relation to the disk itself), to mirror disks where data is partially damaged. At the time I tried, Ghost was "acceptable" on this level but it had some problems.
Anyway, for those who would like to work nicely without caring for many hassles about how these things work, ghost is probably the best choice.
The reluctance most companies have to present evidence they have been jacked is not because they fear the effect it will have in their customers. This fear goes much deeper and touches the very soul of many companies. It is a problem of competence, knowledge, expertise and information control. Many companies control quite badly or don't have any control over the information exchanges ocurring inside their infrastructure. It is a mess that no one can get an hint of and no one really cares. While money keeps coming, they will not worry sharing its local network with third parties (some business centers work that way), sending tons of internal data through simple e-mails out to Internet (no cyphers, no filtering), sharing local networks with customer's ones (how many ISPs work like that?) and many, many more.
It is curious to note that these cases are even more frequent among corporate strucutures, specially among holdings. And no one cares when one company gets sold and still keeps using the common corporate resources. And some do use these security breaches for their purposes.
So why companies want to hide information? Because they don't want people to mess up in their "internal" affairs. Roughly this is the same type of story like the county sheriff meeting the feds in its town. He may know he has a problem but he will be more happy to see these suits outta there ASAP and leave people solve its own problems. The same goes to most companies. They will not invite feds because they fear publicity. They will not invite them because they prefer to leave the mess for themselves, instead of having some "outsiders" sniffing all around and giving too many questions.
Not long ago I was in such situation. I came in in a "no publicity, no scandals, all confidential, internal and top secret" agreement. However, some guys didn't calm down until they smoked me outta the company. According to my recent data, they keep living exactly the same way as they did. While they fill their pockets, they don't care for shareholders, clients, partners or concurrents. And frankly it seems that their shareholders don't worry either.
Today the Kronos observatory managed to snap its first picture of Cassini. Cassini is a piece junkyard which Earthlings call "spacecraft". It will be their first attempt to orbit our planet, after their surreptical flybys almost an year ago. According to sources they will attempt to crash a small probe in Titan. Official sources at Titan colony consider a very remote possibility that this thing will fall on someone and call the mass media to stop the hype about this:
"The most probable is that this thing will burn up in the atmosphere. Besides there is some assurance that Earthlings will buzz around a little, make some fuss out of it and calm down for the next years, or centuries in Earth's terms. So we decided not to interfere on this things a get them a little happy for having a glimpse of our homeland... Anyway, I may assure you that we will not see tourists storming our beautiful landscape and poisoning our nature... However these guys have some sickening curiosity and if we stop them right now, we can see something similar to our Mars cousins were they frequently crash one or two probes every year. We surely don't want to see this happening every month here..."
"Let me present you with the most superb, high-tech, uberpowerful laser weapon ever. It's the size of a pen, it is as light as a feather, it is stealthy and it is powerful... Look at that van!.. BANG!!! Yes, you see how the van vapourized! Because this little thing produces no less than 5GW!!! Uh? Yes?..
"Well Sir I'm quite impressed with you demonstration! But why are you making this demonstration near a nuclear facility?"
OSS licenses are Potential Viral Software. Anyway a virus can potentially strike most software stuff. Besides, we have Linux virus don't we? So I think M$ does make a serious point here. As they software has nothing "potential" in virus terms. It had viruses, it has viruses and it will have a lot more for generations coming. So that's a point dividing "Potential Viral Software" from "Effective Viral Software". So let's thank M$ for its care of trying to avoid us of catching this eternal endemic plague out from its soft...
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... Good statements you made here about them... Don't be admired that they'll be ringing your bell soon...
Common Criteria is a set of security standards sponsored by such kind organisations as the NSA and its cousins from UK, Germany, France, Netherlands and maybe more.
So pack the bags, kiss the cat goodbye and run...
Many people think that IT personell are some kind of running clerks at a cafe. These ones have absolutely no respect for your brains, your experience and your sweet. More, they tend to hide their incompetence, ignorance and stupidity behind a mask of arrogance and superiority. If your ex-boss called you demanding something, the first thing you should have done was to say "Cool but that will cost you US$XXXX...". If he comes up with threats and dubious statements about your past work, you better send him fast to Hell and tell him to forget your name and your phone.
Beware that you open-hearthed behaviour could have caused more damage rather than help to yourself. There are times when old bosses start to talk too much about their ex-employees as "smarties that left hacks and bombs to spoil our work". And when you come back and do something in half-second, they may try to use it to make a serious accusation that you tried to crook them. While I have never seen such stories getting to courts, there are pretty real examples how ex-bosses tried to extort cheap work out of their ex-employees by playing such scenarios. Personally, many years ago, I was in such situation and things nearly ended in a violent fight inside a "respectable" commercial bank.
And you think that if this move from M$ would help you? Apart of the good or bad intentions from Redmond, I'm pretty sure that your users will force you to keep not one, but several copies of Windows, some more older or crappy than others. Users are a terrible thing to deal with. For you Lotus 2.4 and WordPerfect 5.1 are dinosaurs that give you headaches and leave you with the feeling you live in a swamp. For the users they are work tools and they may go pretty happy with them. They are not IT experts and in the bottom of their souls they are working just with what they well know.
To change their minds, you have to get someone to change those macros and cell calculations. As it is you who propose the change, you should give the ground for it. No one will be kind to change if you cannot afford a slow but reliable move into a new system. This can be painful as it may take a year or two to do it. But if you build up a small revolution on changing the OS, then most users will try to smoke you out of the company. And they may have a reason as, in reality, you may kill the businees on making such rough changes.
Note that there is a difference between doing a bad business but still making some profit, and making revolutions where everything looks shiny, but no one can work with the new system. You may put XP everywhere, but if management sees money flying out the window, they will have some good questions about your technocratic progressism.
As a final note I can note you that I'm in a similar position. I'm in the 7th month on trying to change a company where people used old NT and FoxPro into a Linux/SQL world. The job is not nice at all. While it was easy to scrap all NTs outta there, it is tremendously difficult to convince people stop using their old FoxPro programs. The interfaces are clumsy, data gets trashed from time to time, the system does not allow wide-scale WAN use, but they are used to it and, no matter the problems, they do their job with it. To force them into a new world, I'll need a few months more to create new fullscale apps, capable of doing most things these people do now with Fox. And every step is a baggage of problems. It was a Hell to have these people using mail to exchange documents, instead of printing them and cloggering desks with paper. The biggest problem is to avoid them to get the feeling that we are playing revolutions on them.
Some good years ago I read an interview from some M$ developer in one serious journal (PC Magazine? Byte? I don't remember) where is showed pride that Windows95 had some piece of code that was taken from some free source. It seems it was something related to those irritating "lemedoitfoyou" wizards that populated Windows since then. Moreover, Windows has some features that were directly taken from X interface.
That's one example taken out of the *NIX world. On *NIX world we have tons of examples on how certain "purities" dissolve in the mass of needs and wishes of its users.
The fact that Warner Bros uses GPL is nothing extraordinary. And, frankly, it has nothing to do with their stances for protecting ownership. The problem of content, information sharing going beyond software is something to be dealt with extreme care. A film, book or other media content is not a product of software exclusively. And the means to share it should be completely different. In our software world, we still may play a barter between programs and things related to them. In the other spheres of activity, like films and books, the author is usually offering something that cannot be retributed in the same way. I am not a writer and I cannot offer a book for every book someone offers me.
Anyway, the restrictive politics that MPAA and its cousins play, surely hurt everyone. They are creating a feud out of certain media and they are seriously hindering the chances for people to have a right for information (entertainment is also a form of information) in these environments. Considering this highly restrictive stance and their use of free software tools is surely a paradox. But it does not mean they should free something. Anyway, their money helps a little our world, right? But they should be more democratic and flexible in what relates to the media they work with. Because if they will keep this stance, the consequences will backfire at them. For example, they may produce new fresh laws that will hinder developers from making cheap software they highly depend on...
From reading the article it seems that the new meanong of NASA will be:
National Aerospace Sliced Apart
Good bye Moon, farewell Mars, arriverdeci Space, do svidanya Cosmos, sayanora Universe, bonne nuit Science. It seems that the only thing that will fly in 2015 will be a crappy ISS falling apart and hundreds of threatening robots seeking its targets in Earth's surface. Oh, and a few commercial satellites to make people happy with streaming media and give them a chance to chat a bit on Internet mobiles from LA to Tokyo, through Space and Paris. A small taste of technology for the masses...
Well, tcpdump.org guys may be the best to answer this question but there are some usual ways to do it:
A: Break into the Web site, get privileges and change the source.
B: Play the dirty contributor, add the torjaned code during development.
C: Play the good coder, get popularity and in last moment change the hat.
D: Play the jerk coder, make some silly debugs and leave the backdoor open in the distro.
D is probably the most inoccent. However it is not unusual as it seems. We have some good examples of debug backdoors left by well intended developers or less scruplous vendors.
B and C are a risk. You have to leave some tracks behind before you play dirty. It demands brians and some guts to do it. And it demands that you care for not being catched. However, these situations are not impossible.
A is the most usual of all. Breaking sites or users responsible for them has been the most usual, experienced and well-proved tendency of all. Besides, the one that gives the best results. You may be a super-hacker, creating a super-tool and hoping for a super-world out of your super-work. But you are not God All-Mighty.
Everyone has its strong sides and weak ones. It is very frequent to see that if one is a developer, then things concerning system and network administration are exactly his weak sides. The same goes for admins and development, example: me. I may be a good sysadmin and most people consider me as such. However, if I write a few pieces of code I usually get the reaction: "Uh, oh, hmmm... well I understand what you trying to do but leave to me that thing, ok?"
The problem why so many programs are being broken is not a problem of developers as developers. It is a problem of system administration, for which they may as far as I am from development of such tools like tcpdump. The solution to this problem is that main developers should start to care about gathering not only coders but also admins. However this may not be a solution for every ill. It may turn into into a new sphere. Imagine some ubercracker being invited as admin for some major site...
For those who came from Pascal's golden years and later, FORTRAN may look as some crappy language that once fed iron dinosaurs. Well, some years ago I got convinced that this is not the way things are. FORTRAN is still a language that is in high demand. However, in very specific but very hightech areas - main supercomputing and clusters. As far as I see, there is a big lack of experts, here as many good FORTRAN gurus are in their late 50's and early 60's and unwilling to get back to the rooms. Anyway, if you are skilled in FORTRAN and willing to remember your old times, maybe you should try something on this field. Surely it will not be exactly like old good times. Things changed a lot since then, and there are a lot of new things to learn. But your FORTRAN skills may be an arrow that will put you ahead of many younger candidates.
BTW I saw a small job fever in one organisation when they set up a small cluster for chemistry analysis. They could not find anyone younger than 34 to catch the task of programming the monster. The guy who went there, passed 3-4 months blaming the skies for the headache they gave him but later was happily playing the role of guru...
Very Interesting to find your post just after being sent into Offtopic (?????????????). Flamebait or Troll I would understand. But Offtopic???
And why you Microsoft jerk point to the dollar sign and don't seem to mind that I use also "/.". Or has anyone considered that shortsigns are no longer used in Internet? Probably M$ was used when you still had haven't seen a display in front of your eyes. And it meant Megadollars Corporation for some in the beginning of the 90's. And besides I ain't 14 years old but I have had 15 years on using Windows. Since its beta 1 version.
And more. I don't want to anyone to take me seriously. It his part to take me seriously or not. My part is to state my opinion like it or not.
And finally. Get out of that Anonymous Cowardish suit and come into the frontline if you have something serious to say.
First we had /. bashing M$ /. /. fans bashing M$ fans. /. fans. /.. /. appraising M$. /. /.
/. is slowly but surely diving into a M$ hype world that doesn't distinguish it from any other mass media outlet. It's sad as it was one of the best forums in the net, apart of some yellow journalism in the posts and Katz prayings.
Then we had M$ fans bashing
Then we had
Then we had M$ fans bashing
Then we had M$ fans appraising M$ in
Now we have
Soon we probably will have M$
Later we will have M$ bashing
I really don't care for someone appraising here some real feature from M$ world. However, seeing the comments going after this post, I'm pretty admired that someone made such an golden appraisal for the whacky X-Box, while the thing didn't deserve such focus (According to one comment, Dragon's Lair is multi-platform, the site also shows it).
Frankly it seems that
That's interesting... But think... Where America would be if people in the XVI and XVII centuries would be so straightful?
America belonged to only and EXCLUSIVELY to Spain and Portugal. Right? And that was an international agreement recognized at the biggest European authority of the time - the Catholic Church.
How many Europeans would manage to reach the America's if everyone considered King Filipe's gold and lands as his rightful property?
What would have happen to Europe if they gave Carl V, the Filipes and his descendents the right to choose whether or not to share its "product" - the conquer of America's?
"military cyber-guards"
Brrr. Hope the US Congress will be a bit cold-head before giving military the power to roam the net. Military are usually too crazy and too paranoid. Besides they are not usually bound to rules and laws the same way enforcement and intelligence agencies are. They are warmakers, and in war, most rules and laws are usually pieces of paper and voices in the wind. They are the dreamers of the maxima that "the only rule in war is that there are no rules". Right, there is the Geneva Convention, all those doctrines and instructions, there is still the fact that they have to bound to the civil state. However, in real wars, and I have seen a very real one, all that gets quite foggy.
Btw, yesterday a program in Russian TV was criticizing Pentagon for its stance on Iraq. One of the criticisms was well remarked there:
"While CIA still has its header in its shoulders and tries to see the real situation, Pentagon military try to take for granted what they wish to see and how they wish too see. Worse, they try that the Congress and general public only see what they wish.
Frankly, in this statement there is something that applies to many military in the world. In most cases they see things as they wish to see. If someone walks near the border, he's probably a spy. If someone makes too harsh statements, he's an enemy to be crushed down without pitty. If someone shoots into your territory, then there's a whole division behind and it's time to move our forces into enemy territory before they do it on us. And all this should be accepted by everyone. Or else you're a traitor, a summy commy, a terrorist and you should also be crushed.
Leave security to FBI, CIA and NSA. While they are not saints, they still are the professionals who know the field and the limits. Military have no breaks in their heads and may fire a war much faster than anyone else, as that's their main profession...
You can if you are also a professional and care for your work, the network you administer and the people who work on it. "Professional" is a term that states your experience and skills and not that you are God-All-Mighty.
*Interesting*???? Who modded this up?
And what do you offer in exchange? Raw Ethernet? Sorry but that's overbastardization for some tasks. You ignore that virtual networks, private networks and several security tasks need such things as PPOE, VPN, PPTP and alikes. However there is a price to pay. In the case of PPOE it is a logical price as you need to low the MTU of the inner package so that the whole thing fits into a classical 1500 byte data envelope and the host will not break his head with oversized datapacks. If no one gets the idea why this should be done, then it is him who's the idiot and not the protocol. And if one doesn't get the idea why such kind of protocols exist than better RTFM a little before calling others idiots. A lot of my colleagues use virtual networks for tons of tasks as solving things in a single raw physical basis is becoming near to impossible today. It is becoming overexpensive and risks are getting bigger and bigger.
It's already making its first run around the world in 80 minutes. Russian media have already picked it up... So it is probable that soon we will see Y3K crisis building up... I wonder how any billions state budgets will pour in this... Anyway, jounalists, priests, doomsday analytics will not loose their jobs for the next 1000 years.
We have just seen on /. some story about academical rubbish in the field of Physics. Now we read another bigger rubbish about Earth's magnetic poles. Yes, "bigger" because a Big Bang hoax theory may be still "speculative" as Big Bang itself is still a Big Question. Now that Earth will boil or that migrating birds will get disoriented is pure bullshit as there are tons of facts to show its fallacy. Let me note a few:
The geological record shows lots of inversions occuring during Earth's History. But we are still alive don't we?
For those who studied Mars, well studied it, know that Martian Oceans didn't boil up in a very very old past. Whatever happened there, created a global and massive movement of the hydrosphere some billion years after Mars was formed. I don't see how a magnetic pole inversion would help creating 1km deep canyons in a matter of hours or days. It is very probable that this happened long after the Martian Magnetic Pole turned off.
If anyone cares to look at the Atlantic migrating birds, then he will note that some use both America and Africa to their travel North-South. Before Challenger's expedition (the ship, not the shuttle), people considered this as one of the evidences that these continents were much closer together in the past, as the zigzag pattern of migration turned into a nearly straight line.
Some birds may highly depend on the magnetic field to travel. But birds have been travelling around earth for a period much longer than most modern mammals (note: marsupials and placentarians are very recent additions to Earth's biota). Have we seen major extinctions of birds during Earth's magnetic flip-flops?
As far as I know, the Atlantic had plenty of water since Jurassic times. Challenger's expedition made several analysis of the magnetic properties of the bottom of the Atlantic. It showed a surface where the magnetic field changed direction sequently during the several millions of years, since Atlantic was formed.
There is a theory that claims that for some millions of years, Earth had no magnetic field - during the megafrost that happened between Archaic and Cambric. I don't know if this is correct but, if so, it seems that Life lived and passed well enough this terrible period.
Well, probably, any pole flip-flop may have its consequences on Earth and its inhabitants. But claiming it as the End of the World is the purest BS. This is Bad Science(TM) that many academics love to drop out over the masses. On one side they love to consider themselves as The Temple of Knowledge and save it from hoaxers, marginals, dissidents and heretics. On the other side they play no better than those clerics in Middle Ages, that at every sighting of a comet would cry over the crows "Armageddon! Armageddon is coming". Time to get more serious and sobber.
and places like India instead of combating absolute illiteracy and hunger, run out to make PDAs
India has first to combat poverty, illiteracy, give food for its people, care to fight droughts, hurricanes and earthquakes, make peace with everyone else, and then make PDA's...
However, I wonder how will India will do all this if it can't reach the technological frontier. On what basis will India fight its ills if they tell her not to make PDA's or similar technological achievements (aka not make good real money). That's the Banana Republic philosophy. You make bananas and you should fight your ills. And we keep making rockets, computers, PDA's and nukes. From time to time we send you a taste of our technocratic civilization so that you will not feel so bad with this "divide" between us. But you should stop altogether to make PDA's. Poverty and PDA's are incompatible. Do bananas as we like them while making PDA's.
Wrong. And you contradict yourself. Your cell phones example shows how a more modern technology is able to cripple down the prohibitive prices the telephone system had in Nigeria.
It is not the lack of power and fresh water that inhibits new things. I know places on Earth that are a damn hell for human beings. Places where 90% of people cannot live as it is deadly freezing (-60C), water is a mess and power goes always with hickups (if it exists at all). However, people live there and make a good effort to live. Why? Because they are technocrats. And not because they have computers, PDA's or anything like that. An hammer there, can be a Hell of technological advance if one knows how, where, and what to hit. Specially when you have the truck stuck and it is the only chance to break the frost around it. But if you don't know how to use it, then you may break the truck and freeze to Hell in the middle of the taiga.
The problem with poverty is not in the fact that people live badly. The problem is exactly in the technological divide. While you don't teach people to use its brains for every case and every tool, no matter it is Sahara, Amazonia, Rocky Mountains, Siberia or Mars they will not be able to fight for a better living. It is the technocratic thought that saves many cultures from the fate of its brothers and cousins in the world. While you will not break the conservatism and traditionalism among certain cultures, they will not be able to move further. They will keep burning tropical forests and dig holes by hand. And they will keep being poor and hungry because they don't know any other way to live and solve their problems.
Interesting... And you thing that M$ "All things bloated"(TM) will manage to do something thinner than PDF? And with the same quality? (No I'm not talking about canned features but _real_ quality, ex. security, reliability)
Such incidents are prone to happen when things are new. One colleague nearly scared to death a University teacher in the beginning of the 90's, and guess how, using the fresh new and revolutionary remote control technology. Today we have all these Remote Admins, VNC, Terminal Services and so. Back then, people were only starting to see these things. And well, one colleague took control of a machine and started playing with it. I saw what was happening with the teacher while the show went on. Imagine someone in its late 40's, using a good suit, with a small Lenin-like beard and a good hair-cut. Now, this is not a joke, imagine how he went out the room - hair all up, his Lenin-like beard pointing forward, with the upper buttons of the shirt open, trembling and with wide eyes open...
That's one of the first remote control jokes...
The idea that this is a new kind of transportation is completely wrong. Such vacuum tubes were in the drawing boards since the 60's. I have seen several pictures of prototypes which were just artistic reproductions of real designs. However, the oil crisis of 73 made these and many other "alternative" transportations go into oblivion.
I wouldn't blame exclusively the Arab magnates for this. The problem looks much more complex and includes the dismissal of Lunar expeditions and the pre-"Star Wars" craze of the 70's. But I consider that for the last 30 years we are seriously stucked in development. We are a shadow of the technocratism of the 70's. We have been developing extensively, and, majorly, we keep sitting on the same ideas and technologies that were created then. Till now, we have not exploited the whole spectrum of inventions and ideas created back then. We have even run backward, as it will take some other 10 years to get back to the Moon. And we see on overold idea, with the same plus and minuses pointed back then, being presented as new.
Sincerly I'm terribly scheptical that this thing will go out of the drawing board. If anyone manages to do it, it will be great. However, I believe that people lost the hand for creativity and risk and go more for the extravaganza of the invention. Much like steam engines were for ancient greeks and egyptians... (Yes, they knew the steam engine...)
Well I once tried ghost and sincerly it was a great product. But since Symantec bought it, I forgot about that thing. Because Symantec wacked it to the impossible. After a few tries I dropped any idea to use the product altogether. And one of the problems was with multicast. It would die after some minutes and leave all stations in a dead end. Besides, on multicast, I couldn't ghost a tonne of workstations. Yes, could ghost a lot more than unicast but not a tonne.Well if Symantec solved these problems, then, I'm happy for them. But it is not good to make much hype of it. Ghost was a great product, probably still is a great product. But it is a product that it is oriented in one of the most critical segments of the market. Hypes here are too bad.
Yes, it is good that ghost understands filesystems. But it is also good that ghost would work nicely on raw data. Why? For forensics, to copy unmovable data (in relation to the disk itself), to mirror disks where data is partially damaged. At the time I tried, Ghost was "acceptable" on this level but it had some problems.
Anyway, for those who would like to work nicely without caring for many hassles about how these things work, ghost is probably the best choice.
The reluctance most companies have to present evidence they have been jacked is not because they fear the effect it will have in their customers. This fear goes much deeper and touches the very soul of many companies. It is a problem of competence, knowledge, expertise and information control. Many companies control quite badly or don't have any control over the information exchanges ocurring inside their infrastructure. It is a mess that no one can get an hint of and no one really cares. While money keeps coming, they will not worry sharing its local network with third parties (some business centers work that way), sending tons of internal data through simple e-mails out to Internet (no cyphers, no filtering), sharing local networks with customer's ones (how many ISPs work like that?) and many, many more.
It is curious to note that these cases are even more frequent among corporate strucutures, specially among holdings. And no one cares when one company gets sold and still keeps using the common corporate resources. And some do use these security breaches for their purposes.
So why companies want to hide information? Because they don't want people to mess up in their "internal" affairs. Roughly this is the same type of story like the county sheriff meeting the feds in its town. He may know he has a problem but he will be more happy to see these suits outta there ASAP and leave people solve its own problems. The same goes to most companies. They will not invite feds because they fear publicity. They will not invite them because they prefer to leave the mess for themselves, instead of having some "outsiders" sniffing all around and giving too many questions.
Not long ago I was in such situation. I came in in a "no publicity, no scandals, all confidential, internal and top secret" agreement. However, some guys didn't calm down until they smoked me outta the company. According to my recent data, they keep living exactly the same way as they did. While they fill their pockets, they don't care for shareholders, clients, partners or concurrents. And frankly it seems that their shareholders don't worry either.
Today the Kronos observatory managed to snap its first picture of Cassini. Cassini is a piece junkyard which Earthlings call "spacecraft". It will be their first attempt to orbit our planet, after their surreptical flybys almost an year ago. According to sources they will attempt to crash a small probe in Titan. Official sources at Titan colony consider a very remote possibility that this thing will fall on someone and call the mass media to stop the hype about this:
"The most probable is that this thing will burn up in the atmosphere. Besides there is some assurance that Earthlings will buzz around a little, make some fuss out of it and calm down for the next years, or centuries in Earth's terms. So we decided not to interfere on this things a get them a little happy for having a glimpse of our homeland... Anyway, I may assure you that we will not see tourists storming our beautiful landscape and poisoning our nature... However these guys have some sickening curiosity and if we stop them right now, we can see something similar to our Mars cousins were they frequently crash one or two probes every year. We surely don't want to see this happening every month here..."
"Let me present you with the most superb, high-tech, uberpowerful laser weapon ever. It's the size of a pen, it is as light as a feather, it is stealthy and it is powerful... Look at that van!.. BANG!!! Yes, you see how the van vapourized! Because this little thing produces no less than 5GW!!! Uh? Yes?..
"Well Sir I'm quite impressed with you demonstration! But why are you making this demonstration near a nuclear facility?"
"Ooooh, that's the batteries..."
OSS licenses are Potential Viral Software. Anyway a virus can potentially strike most software stuff. Besides, we have Linux virus don't we? So I think M$ does make a serious point here. As they software has nothing "potential" in virus terms. It had viruses, it has viruses and it will have a lot more for generations coming. So that's a point dividing "Potential Viral Software" from "Effective Viral Software". So let's thank M$ for its care of trying to avoid us of catching this eternal endemic plague out from its soft...