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Why I gave up on Apple: A tale of unrequited love

http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/mac.html

It's hard to park a spaceship in orbit without the military doing it first. Fund it, read the evidence, understand it. Sometimes the garage scientists, the ones with no reputation to lose, are the only ones willing to try something new. A lot of scientists get away with regurgitation of old news with newer, bigger, less meaningful words.

Also, let's not forget that cold fusion is probably real.

http://world.std.com/~reinhold/dicewarefaq.html#su bpoena

and
from http://www.faqs.org/faqs/pgp-faq/part2/

3.21. Can I be forced to reveal my pass phrase in any legal
proceedings?

Gary Edstrom reported the following in earlier versions of this FAQ:

- -----
The following information applies only to citizens of the United
States in U.S. Courts. The laws in other countries may vary. Please
see the disclaimer at the top of part 1.

There have been several threads on Internet concerning the question of
whether or not the fifth amendment right about not being forced to
give testimony against yourself can be applied to the subject of being
forced to reveal your pass phrase. Not wanting to settle for the many
conflicting opinions of armchair lawyers on usenet, I asked for input
from individuals who were more qualified in the area. The results
were somewhat mixed. There apparently has NOT been much case history
to set precedence in this area. So if you find yourself in this
situation, you should be prepared for a long and costly legal fight on
the matter. Do you have the time and money for such a fight? Also
remember that judges have great freedom in the use of "Contempt of
Court". They might choose to lock you up until you decide to reveal
the pass phrase and it could take your lawyer some time to get you
out. (If only you just had a poor memory!)

Yes, you refer to the exploits of Gerald Bull, who actually was working on what you mentioned. A fascinating bit of history, really.

Most scientists and techies and as we have seen, a lot of Slash-dotters, are very dismissive of Cold Fusion. Why? Because renowned universities like MIT have discredited the results.

When MIT reproduced Pons and Fleishmann's original Utah experiment, they claimed that it hadn't work. However, evidence has surfaced that they _doctored the data_. Eugene Mallov, who was the chief science writer at MIT at the time resigned over this issue, (link) he was so upset at MIT for publishing doctored data to discredit another institution's work. This would have been in MIT's financial interest since Pons and Fleishmann had applied for Department of Energy funding for their projects. MIT does a lot of research in Hot Fusion, and recieved millions of dollars in DOE grants every year, Cold Fusion would have competed with that. Also, and probably more importantly, it was a huge blow to their pride - if Cold Fusion is real it means the changing of geopolitics and the end of our dependency on oil. How is it possible that some dinky Utah University would discover this, and not the prestigious MITs or Stanfords? Cold Fusion could be a reality if people would stop laughing at it. more info here .

Cato is infamous for questionable research that politicians have used to support some ridiculous claims. Nothing different from them here.

Ah, the fun with "melt"--I think every first-time Apollo user got hit with that one.

Just to make my points more briefly, by MS-Dos 3.0 it was well known that one needed a virus scanner/disk cleaner. And the internet worm of 1988 was devastating. I still assert that by the end of the 80s O/S vendors had no excuse for ignoring security concerns. Unixes slowly got better (took Sun until about 1995 to clean up the easy SunOS hacks), but the Microsoft platforms didn't. VMS could be locked down, though often wasn't.

See here: http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/linguistic s.html

Each of those entries is not unique to Perl (applying as well to other common languages like C++ or sh), straight-out false, or just as prevalent in "math geek" writings as standard speech.

Math notation involves all that situational ambiguity that Perl boasts of, as in "0 <One of the great things that I love about Perl is that you can rearrange statements.

Not original to Perl.
And arguably not great, either, because it creates difficulties in teaching, and causes differences in source code layout which make no difference in program execution. (That's what we call "counter intuitive")

While most programming languages would opt for several features of Perl to be libraries (like RegEx), Perl has it as a part of the syntax of the language itself.

It'd be more useful and impressive to say instead that Perl "allows separate libraries to act as if they were part of the language syntax".
If being "modelled after human languages" doesn't make the language easier for ordinary humans to grasp, what does it actually mean?

It's "modelled on sh and awk" which causes that effect, not anything about natural languages. Several of the "natural-language features" specifically make Perl more difficult to learn, such as the ordering-insensitivity of conditionals.

"That's a myth- a retroactive redefinition of the origin. Perl's design was taken as a union of the styles of sh, C, and awk."

That's just surface structure. Perl doesn't seek to be a natural language processing platform. But it does intend to bring human language characteristics to programming. See here:

http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/linguistic s.html

"Do you think that the "modelling after human languages" thing was a success?"

Yes, but not in the way that you are thinking. It was a success, not because it is easier or harder to learn, but because I can be more expressive in Perl than in other languages.

One of the great things that I love about Perl is that you can rearrange statements. I can say:

if($x) {
    blahblahblah()
}

or I can say

blahblahblah() if $x;

In the former, I am emphasizing (to myself and other programmers after me) that the condition is more important, while in the latter I am emphasizing the action as having the importance.

Likewise, moving often-used idioms into the core language is a feature of human languages that he imported into Perl. While most programming languages would opt for several features of Perl to be libraries (like RegEx), Perl has it as a part of the syntax of the language itself. Importing the core idioms of a population into a language is something that real languages do.

Having both "if" and "unless" is a very human-language thing to do, and it makes it more obvious what you are trying to do in your program than a bunch of "if(! )"s.

The beauty of Perl is that programming in Perl is much more expressive than programming in other languages. The point is not to be "easier for noobs", but for the meaning in the program to be better conveyed to other programmers who are fluent in the language.

Having a pronoun is also very linguistic.

A more specific list of human-language features of Perl is here:

http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/linguistic s.html

i used to use komodo or ptkdb or print "something" for perl debugging but recently i have been using epic, the perl IDE for eclipse.
 
it has a graphical debugger and a heap of other useful features for developing in perl (see the sf.net page for more details...). another advantage: if you need to develop in other languages, there is likely a plugin for them as well, so that you can do everything without leaving your ide (yes: i know about emacs. no: i never did take the time to learn it...)

:wq

--

"i would rather maintain someone else's language than someone else's perl..."

Many people will suggest otherwise, but they are often those who lack a formal education and background in designing secure, scalable, high-reliability software systems.

I have an M.S. in Computer Science, spent my first three years as a professional developer working on the development of a secure (TCSEC B3 targeted) operating system, then another year and a half on a firewall project based on a secure OS. I've also worked in the telecom and space sciences fields for well-known companies such as Hughes, IBM, and TRW, designing and developing secure and reliable software. These days I work for a small company, still doing my best to design and develop secure and reliable software - now in PHP.

I don't claim to be a security expert - I've met some of the experts and they're far beyond where I'll ever be on the topic. But I certainly don't fit your description of uneducated or inexperienced. And I find your claims wrt PHP bogus.

Taking a quick look at the http://www.hardened-php.net/advisories.15.html"> advisories for the "Hardened PHP" project you mention, I see 1) issues with applications written in PHP - not the language's fault; 2) people doing stupid things with the language (for example, leaving phpinfo() called in deployed scripts), which is not a language issue; or 3) addressing implementation bugs, which is no different than those found in other languages - except that with PHP we call something a "PHP bug" that in, for instance, C, would be a "libc bug".

If you've got specific claims, please, put them out. But all I see in this thread so far is vague allegations. Or maybe trolling.

SUN : The signal is the alien.

Well, I don't want anyone logged on to eDonkey or somesuch at work. And believe me, no company policy is enough to stop people from running those things on warehouse terminals having a direct connection to our ERP.

God forbid that the evil hackers work their way back up the finger connection and destroy the entire LAN!

Well, I guess you aren't familiar with this, then.

I don't get it. I'm pretty sure that IT people weren't always this clueless.

Well, you'd never get employed by me, that's for certain.

I do it in a similar way, just non-reversable. For each site/service/forum/etc I make up a user name and a domain name. In the normal case, the user name actually is the login and the domain is the site where to enter it.

Now I have one password that's both strong, easy to remember and not stored anywhere except my head. (For the curious: http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html)

I enter this master password on a non-connected machine and a little script basically hashes the string "${USER}:${DOMAIN}:${ITERATION}:${MASTERPASS}" into a binary hash. This binary hash gets run through a base64 encode, all non-alphanumeric characters are stripped (this is the lowest common denominator since some sites only allow letters and numbers), and the first 16 characters from the left are output as the resulting password. $ITERATION normally is 1. If I want to change a single password I don't have to change the master password, just increase the iteration.

In case I forget _where_ I actually signed up, all user names, domains and iterations are stored in a text file. This actually happens with dozens of forums, vendor sites that require logins for support files, etc. etc.

Ummmm...OK. :)

but maybe because this stuff is fairly new and far from mainstream?

About 15 years. Are you saying we should wait for another 20 years and watch other countries make progress? (Japan?)

The government has given money to the Fermi Accelerators for years

And that is enough justification for turning blind eye towards something better? Difficult to agree with you.

A lot of the posts seem to imply that conservative justices are to blame here. If anything, the *liberal* and moderate justices are the majority opinion in this case, not the other way around.

If you find yourself generally liberal, especially on social issues, but also strongly respect private property rights and such, you should really look at the libertarians (it was a group of libertarian lawyers ( http://www.ij.org/ ), representing the people whose homes are being seized).

lp.org is a decent place to start for that, and there are several "libertarian faqs" out there. ( http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/libertarianism.html ) is one.

A liberal refutation (that I *personally* think is largely strawman attacks, as the arguments he debunks are neither convincing nor the ones that I had heard of) is the "Non libertarian FAQ", one mirror at http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html .

APG

Hey how come there is no antivirus software needed on unix platforms?

Actually, the first internet worm invented was on UNIX.

Here is an interesting chronology

Seriously though, is it just me or has this thread been dominated my incredibly clueless posts moderated highly (even moreso than usual).

Screw that shit, you pedestrian fools with your lack of vision. This is a big step in the science of eruntics! Now I just need to train those yeasty little bitches to tell me next Wedensday's lotto numbers!

any posters believing what this guy says might want to read the non-libertarian faq first.

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html

any posters believing what this guy says might want to read the non-libertarian faq first.

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html

any posters believing what this guy says might want to read the non-libertarian faq first.

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html

any posters believing what this guy says might want to read the non-libertarian faq first.

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html/

any posters believing what this guy says might want to read the non-libertarian faq first.

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html/

any posters believing what this guy says might want to read the non-libertarian faq first.

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html/

> I'll wager my left testicle that the backlash from them breaking *every* vb app with a
> service pack or security update would be so violent and sudden that it simply won't happen.

I believe it is a pretty safe wager for the near future.
However, Just in case...

http://world.std.com/~mikep/machpaper.html: a page that has a good overview of the design differences between the Mach and NT kernels. They have a lot in common but aren't the same, especially in implementation.

Erh, yes they can : The Diceware Passphrase Home Page

You can use dictinary words to generate strong passphrases that are fairly easy to remember. Check out How long should my passphrase be for a comparions of length of passphrase with physcial security.

You can use dictinary words to generate strong passphrases that are fairly easy to remember. Check out How long should my passphrase be for a comparions of length of passphrase with physcial security.

Is The Browser Part of the Operating System?

An exercise in misdirection

Extra buttons and wheels are undoubtably useful things for shortcuts, but the design principle that everything should be available in a consistent manner without HAVING to use them is great for those of us that don't use them very often.

Perhaps all those 1-button Mac mice could be gutted out and converted to computer microphones or something useful?

Madness! I demand MORE keys! I won't be satisfied until my keyboard has 7 different shifting keys and an Alt Lock, damn it! Though I suppose the caps might get a bit small cramming all that into my iBook's keyboard space... The Space Cadet Keyboard

Try again. There are two reasons space exploration stagnated: war and money. We had great plans once, but between tax cuts and lack of commercial reason to explore there just isn't money to move quickly.

i got into yale university based on my success in the connecticut science fair for my assembly language project (on the trs-80 color computer! lol) exploring variations on fractals and john conway's game of life

you can imagine my awe when wandering the math building as a 17 year old freshman, i met benoit mandelbrot himself (he was faculty there, and i believe he still is)

Simply put, fail-safe encryption does not and will not exist. Due to increases in computer processing power, encryption is by definition a temporary safeguard.

Safe encryption exists, it's called One-Time Pad. And you can actually buy devices that use it to securely transmit data. ID Quantique has implemented a quantum key distribution system that uses one-time pads. No amount of computer processing power can break it, not even a quantum computer. You can't use this implementation of a one-time pad for WiFi devices though.

See Flying to Orbit, with an update for SpaceShipOne

That's not much of a punchline when you realize that XORing something to something unknon (and presumibly unknowable) is unbreakable excryption.

Not quite... what you're referring to is a One-Time Pad. Basically, a one-time pad works by taking the plaintext, and an equal-length string of random noise, and combining them with a simple mathematical operation (usually XOR, because XOR is very simple). (Read the link if you do not believe this is perfectly secure.) However the details are important:

• You need a completely random string to use. Technically, it should be truly random, not pseudorandom. Certainly not repeating.
• It has to be the same length as the input text. For small messages this may be fine. If you have a gig of data, you need a gig for your key, too.
• It has to be one-time! If you reuse the key, ever, then it's not a one-time pad, and it's not secure.
• The security is only as secure as the key. If you send the encrypted message, you have to find a secure way to transport the key, too.

OTPs do have some advantages, of course, such as being unbreakable, and any part of the pad being indistinguishable from mathematical noise. But not easy to use.

Actually, This is the original Space Cadet keyboard, and it makes the Symbolics one look like a Speak and Spell (even the whole damn APL character set is there!). They're both descended from Tom Knight's original "Knight" keyboard for MIT-AI's ITS system. I periodically wonder how much it would cost to do a small production run of a Space Cadet replica (the demand is there if the price is reasonable).

Actually, This is the original Space Cadet keyboard, and it makes the Symbolics one look like a Speak and Spell (even the whole damn APL character set is there!). They're both descended from Tom Knight's original "Knight" keyboard for MIT-AI's ITS system. I periodically wonder how much it would cost to do a small production run of a Space Cadet replica (the demand is there if the price is reasonable).

Shiny! (-:

This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of OTPs. Any message of n bits could be encoded as any other message of n bits. Even your "natural language parser" doesn't help. Take an arbitrary "short" message: "A". It is equally likely that it could decode to "I" or "A" or "Z" or any other 1 character string. It doesn't matter if you know what I'm talking about.

OTPs are provably secure, as long as the key isn't compromised, e.g. by reusing it....

Here is a good link that answers the question: Why Are One-Time Pads Perfectly Secure?

-a

When I read XForms the first things I thought of was this: Forms Library

XForms is a gret toolkit for X Window applications, it's been around nearly a decade, and there's absolutely no excuse for the W3C to try and steal their name. Frankly I find that behaviour disgusting.

About time they drop their crappy XUL in favour of the toolkit of the future! Sorry, gotta go to read the article.

Actually, this AC is right.

http://world.std.com/~mhuben/faq.html
http://www.sethf.com/essays/major/libstupid.php

Libertarianism is naive and silly. Thankfully, it has no chance of ever going anywhere close to an elected office.

The guy was Gerald Bull.

As you say, he was obsessed with the develpment of extreme long range cannon to launch packages into space/orbit, notably in the HARP Project.

When his research grants were cut he continued working, basically, for anyone who would fund him. South Africa, China and ultimately Iraq, where he developed the Iraqui Supergun, and more worryingly for Israel, a scud derivative with increased range and accuracy.

He was shot not once, but five times in the back of the head. No-one saw the killing, and no-one has been caught, but it's dollars to donuts that Israel/Mossad decided that if no-one else was going to do anything about this brainy menace, then they would.

Awesome, so I'll see this guy on this list real soon now, right?

Uh, the political compass has its own biases too.