From the comments so far, it seems that people feel that Microsoft is somehow failing in a sacred duty by not making DirectX 10 available for Windows XP.
Why should Microsoft make DirectX 10 available for old versions of Windows? How many new video drivers released for Linux in 2006 support early 2.4.x kernels?
Sometimes making progress means saying "sorry, we don't support that; you'll have to upgrade to something newer".
Yes, there are exceptional cases, like the President's access to the Nuclear Briefcase. It hasn't been used for real in a long time if ever but when he needs it it had better be close at hand.
Oddly enough, I think most people in the world would prefer that it wasn't close at hand when Bush decides he wants it.
A better example is fire extinguishers -- most of them will literally never be used, but there's a very good reason to ensure that they are readily available.
Ok, this might be a different bug; but FreeBSD fixed a remote kernel code execution bug which affected systems scanning for existing 802.11 wireless networks. The bug was discovered and reported to the FreeBSD Security Team by Karl Janmar.
Security researchers have found a way to seize control of a laptop computer by manipulating buggy code in the system's wireless device driver
Whether this is a new bug or not, it's certainly not a new type of bug.
That's my point: They've figured out what their customers want, but it doesn't look like they've stopped to ask themselves if they can actually make a profit once the shipping costs of these goods are taken into consideration.
If there's one type of goods which I would like to order online and have delivered to my door, it is bulk goods. A box of 12 1L cartons of orange juice; a dozen 2L bottles of diet coke; a 4 kg box of laundry detergent. These can sit on my shelves for months, but they're bulky, heavy, and generally annoying to handle. I'm doubt I'll ever buy tonight's dinner from an online grocery store, but I would be very happy to buy next month's laundry detergent.
Unfortunately, the very nature of these goods which makes me want to order them online and have them delivered makes them impractical for a company like Amazon to handle. Products like this tend to be are at the very low end of the $/kg scale; they are exactly the sort of products which need to be shipped in large quantities to local warehouses and then delivered locally -- not packaged into individual deliveries at a central warehouse and then shipped separately halfway across the country.
The reason an online bookstore works so well is that the book market is characterized by low turnover, high profit margins, and high $/kg ratios. Grocery stores have high turnover, low profit margins, and low $/kg ratios. Trying to apply a solution designed for bookstores to the grocery store area simply won't work.
No, 15Mbps. 15,000,000 bits per second is a good. 0.015 bits per second is not good, unless you're measuring the speed of an IP over Avian Carrier network.
Are we getting slashdot articles for each verion bump of the mozilla products?
Well, we seem to get slashdot articles about every MSIE security flaw; by that standard a new release of FireFox which fixes 12 security flaws (5 of them rated "critical") is certainly slashdotworthy.
When the files are being encrypted by software running on your computer, such a virus is inevitably vulnerable. To overcome this flaw, the virus writer would have to send the files to a pre-known IP address for off-site encryption...
A more intelligent (or crypto-knowledgeable) virus author would have generated a symmetric key at encryption-time, and then encrypted that key using a public (e.g., RSA) key stored in the binary. The extortion would then work by selling access to the RSA-decryption oracle.
I've never been to an OpenBSD Hackathon, but I really don't understand how this is the best way to use their time together. Surely the advantage of getting everybody into a room together is to allow them to talk to each other more easily, not to allow them to all stare at their terminals and ignore each other.
When FreeBSD developer summits occur (e.g., at the recent BSDCan), there is always some important hacking done, but the most useful result of the devsummit is that people can talk to each other and make decisions about where the project should going next (e.g., dropping support for Alpha, working more on embedded/arm support, et cetera). Clearly we're missing something important -- can someone more familiar with OpenBSD tell me what the ingredient is in Theo's Magic Kool-Aid which makes developers better at hacking code when they all get together in a single room?
Greenspun vastly underestimates the number of tenured university professorships available. North American universities expanded dramatically after the second world war, which resulted in some highly skewed demographics; while Greenspun's comments may accurately reflect how things were 15 years ago, there are many university departments which are seeing two thirds of their faculty retire between 2000 and 2010 -- replacements are in high demand right now.
Greenspun's schedule is also a bit slow. I'd say the following is more typical (at least for the "smartest kid you sat next to at college"): 1. Age 17-21: Receiving a scholarship at an undergraduate college. 2. Age 22-27: Graduate school, funded by a scholarship, research assistantship, and/or teaching. 3. Age 28-30: Working as a post-doc. 4. Age 31-37: Tenure-track position. 5. Age 38+: Tenured professor.
everything we do, even in mathematics, is based on faith.
While true, that remark is highly misleading. Yes, mathematics is based on the faith that our axiomatic system is consistent; but that faith is really just the faith that "there is a correct answer". In contrast, fields such as religion are based on the faith that "there is a correct answer, and it is X" (for some appropriate X).
The faith required to believe in mathematics is far more limited than the faith required, for example, to believe in God.
the equipment found in the "secret" NSA room at AT&T wasn't some elaborate device designed by Big Brother. Rather, it is a commercially available network-analysis product that any company could acquire.
Sure, anybody could acquire the hardware used. The trick is to get the equipment onto AT&T's network without ending up in jail.
To head off some confusion: This isn't about the FreeBSD base system; it's about third party code (like GNOME and KDE) in the FreeBSD ports tree. The FreeBSD base system already has feature parity with Linux (ok, there are a few things Linux has which we don't, but there are also things we have and Linux doesn't) -- the problem now is to get groups like GNOME and KDE to use the features we're making available to them.
In my experience, the best way for someone to learn to write English is to take a field in which they are an expert (or at least becoming an expert), and demand that they write about that field in a manner understandable to a member of the general public (or the English instructor). This solves two important problems simultaneously: First, because the general public does not understand technical language, it forces the student to stop hiding behind terminology; and second, because the student is writing about a field which they know a great deal about, this avoids the frequent "... but I have nothing to say about that!" response which results from asking someone with very specialized and scientific interests to write about a "general interest" topic which is probably not of interest to them. As a side benefit, students who are thinking about how to present their field of study to a member of the general public will tend to gain a better understanding of their field.
So there was a bug to be fixed anyway, and the virus just happened to uncover it?
Yes -- and it's quite possible that this bug was affecting other code, but with programs any more complicated than a virus, nobody debugged far enough to figure out that it was a kernel bug.
Linus did not create a patch for the virus. Linus created a patch for the Linux kernel, to fix a bug which happened to have been discovered by looking at the virus.
Of course, if the story had been submitted with the correct title of "Linus fixes bug in Linux", it probably would never have been posted.
... at least, not when they have terabytes of data to search through. While Boyer-Moore is an asymptotically optimal algorithm for non-indexed string matching, Google (and everybody else who wants to perform multiple searches against the same data set) uses indexed matching algorithms.
With indexed matching algorithms, you can search for a string of length M within a string of length N in M + log(N) steps -- far faster than B-M's M + N/M steps -- and you can even search for matches with mismatches (e.g., locations where the strings match at 50% of their positions) almost as fast as B-M (asymptotically B-M finds exact matches log(N)*log(M) times as fast as matches-with-mismatches can be found).
Looking at the company's website, I can't see any mention of patents -- either issued or pending. If they really don't have any patents, I don't think they're going to get very far: Compression is one of the most over-patented fields around.
There aren't many details about how their product operates, but unless they've been extremely careful they probably infringe either the rsync patents (Pyne) or the blocklet patent (Williams).
Slashdot Mirror
I can't imagine why anyone would choose a stateless firewall
Stateful firewalls scale poorly.
And don't forget teh definite article teh. That's teh definite article teh , sir.
From the comments so far, it seems that people feel that Microsoft is somehow failing in a sacred duty by not making DirectX 10 available for Windows XP.
Why should Microsoft make DirectX 10 available for old versions of Windows? How many new video drivers released for Linux in 2006 support early 2.4.x kernels?
Sometimes making progress means saying "sorry, we don't support that; you'll have to upgrade to something newer".
Yes, there are exceptional cases, like the President's access to the Nuclear Briefcase. It hasn't been used for real in a long time if ever but when he needs it it had better be close at hand.
Oddly enough, I think most people in the world would prefer that it wasn't close at hand when Bush decides he wants it.
A better example is fire extinguishers -- most of them will literally never be used, but there's a very good reason to ensure that they are readily available.
Ok, this might be a different bug; but FreeBSD fixed a remote kernel code execution bug which affected systems scanning for existing 802.11 wireless networks. The bug was discovered and reported to the FreeBSD Security Team by Karl Janmar.
Security researchers have found a way to seize control of a laptop computer by manipulating buggy code in the system's wireless device driver
Whether this is a new bug or not, it's certainly not a new type of bug.
That's my point: They've figured out what their customers want, but it doesn't look like they've stopped to ask themselves if they can actually make a profit once the shipping costs of these goods are taken into consideration.
I really don't think this makes sense.
If there's one type of goods which I would like to order online and have delivered to my door, it is bulk goods. A box of 12 1L cartons of orange juice; a dozen 2L bottles of diet coke; a 4 kg box of laundry detergent. These can sit on my shelves for months, but they're bulky, heavy, and generally annoying to handle. I'm doubt I'll ever buy tonight's dinner from an online grocery store, but I would be very happy to buy next month's laundry detergent.
Unfortunately, the very nature of these goods which makes me want to order them online and have them delivered makes them impractical for a company like Amazon to handle. Products like this tend to be are at the very low end of the $/kg scale; they are exactly the sort of products which need to be shipped in large quantities to local warehouses and then delivered locally -- not packaged into individual deliveries at a central warehouse and then shipped separately halfway across the country.
The reason an online bookstore works so well is that the book market is characterized by low turnover, high profit margins, and high $/kg ratios. Grocery stores have high turnover, low profit margins, and low $/kg ratios. Trying to apply a solution designed for bookstores to the grocery store area simply won't work.
TFA states that he got 15mbps service.
No, 15Mbps. 15,000,000 bits per second is a good. 0.015 bits per second is not good, unless you're measuring the speed of an IP over Avian Carrier network.
Are we getting slashdot articles for each verion bump of the mozilla products?
Well, we seem to get slashdot articles about every MSIE security flaw; by that standard a new release of FireFox which fixes 12 security flaws (5 of them rated "critical") is certainly slashdotworthy.
When the files are being encrypted by software running on your computer, such a virus is inevitably vulnerable. To overcome this flaw, the virus writer would have to send the files to a pre-known IP address for off-site encryption...
No.
A more intelligent (or crypto-knowledgeable) virus author would have generated a symmetric key at encryption-time, and then encrypted that key using a public (e.g., RSA) key stored in the binary. The extortion would then work by selling access to the RSA-decryption oracle.
Fortunately, most black hats are stupid.
I've never been to an OpenBSD Hackathon, but I really don't understand how this is the best way to use their time together. Surely the advantage of getting everybody into a room together is to allow them to talk to each other more easily, not to allow them to all stare at their terminals and ignore each other.
When FreeBSD developer summits occur (e.g., at the recent BSDCan), there is always some important hacking done, but the most useful result of the devsummit is that people can talk to each other and make decisions about where the project should going next (e.g., dropping support for Alpha, working more on embedded/arm support, et cetera). Clearly we're missing something important -- can someone more familiar with OpenBSD tell me what the ingredient is in Theo's Magic Kool-Aid which makes developers better at hacking code when they all get together in a single room?
Greenspun vastly underestimates the number of tenured university professorships available. North American universities expanded dramatically after the second world war, which resulted in some highly skewed demographics; while Greenspun's comments may accurately reflect how things were 15 years ago, there are many university departments which are seeing two thirds of their faculty retire between 2000 and 2010 -- replacements are in high demand right now.
Greenspun's schedule is also a bit slow. I'd say the following is more typical (at least for the "smartest kid you sat next to at college"):
1. Age 17-21: Receiving a scholarship at an undergraduate college.
2. Age 22-27: Graduate school, funded by a scholarship, research assistantship, and/or teaching.
3. Age 28-30: Working as a post-doc.
4. Age 31-37: Tenure-track position.
5. Age 38+: Tenured professor.
Personally, I'm aiming for tenure by age 0x21.
everything we do, even in mathematics, is based on faith.
While true, that remark is highly misleading. Yes, mathematics is based on the faith that our axiomatic system is consistent; but that faith is really just the faith that "there is a correct answer". In contrast, fields such as religion are based on the faith that "there is a correct answer, and it is X" (for some appropriate X).
The faith required to believe in mathematics is far more limited than the faith required, for example, to believe in God.
the equipment found in the "secret" NSA room at AT&T wasn't some elaborate device designed by Big Brother. Rather, it is a commercially available network-analysis product that any company could acquire.
Sure, anybody could acquire the hardware used. The trick is to get the equipment onto AT&T's network without ending up in jail.
To head off some confusion: This isn't about the FreeBSD base system; it's about third party code (like GNOME and KDE) in the FreeBSD ports tree. The FreeBSD base system already has feature parity with Linux (ok, there are a few things Linux has which we don't, but there are also things we have and Linux doesn't) -- the problem now is to get groups like GNOME and KDE to use the features we're making available to them.
I would literally spend an entire hour rewriting a single page...
An hour per page? That's fast -- I spent nearly a week per page writing my thesis.
Make sure you don't have words ending in -ize ... a terrible thing.
I was with you up to this point. Why would you want to exorcize the 'z' from perfectly good words like "civilize", "demobilize", and "fertilize"?
In my experience, the best way for someone to learn to write English is to take a field in which they are an expert (or at least becoming an expert), and demand that they write about that field in a manner understandable to a member of the general public (or the English instructor). This solves two important problems simultaneously: First, because the general public does not understand technical language, it forces the student to stop hiding behind terminology; and second, because the student is writing about a field which they know a great deal about, this avoids the frequent "... but I have nothing to say about that!" response which results from asking someone with very specialized and scientific interests to write about a "general interest" topic which is probably not of interest to them. As a side benefit, students who are thinking about how to present their field of study to a member of the general public will tend to gain a better understanding of their field.
So there was a bug to be fixed anyway, and the virus just happened to uncover it?
Yes -- and it's quite possible that this bug was affecting other code, but with programs any more complicated than a virus, nobody debugged far enough to figure out that it was a kernel bug.
Linus did not create a patch for the virus. Linus created a patch for the Linux kernel, to fix a bug which happened to have been discovered by looking at the virus.
Of course, if the story had been submitted with the correct title of "Linus fixes bug in Linux", it probably would never have been posted.
... at least, not when they have terabytes of data to search through. While Boyer-Moore is an asymptotically optimal algorithm for non-indexed string matching, Google (and everybody else who wants to perform multiple searches against the same data set) uses indexed matching algorithms.
With indexed matching algorithms, you can search for a string of length M within a string of length N in M + log(N) steps -- far faster than B-M's M + N/M steps -- and you can even search for matches with mismatches (e.g., locations where the strings match at 50% of their positions) almost as fast as B-M (asymptotically B-M finds exact matches log(N)*log(M) times as fast as matches-with-mismatches can be found).
Looking at the company's website, I can't see any mention of patents -- either issued or pending. If they really don't have any patents, I don't think they're going to get very far: Compression is one of the most over-patented fields around.
There aren't many details about how their product operates, but unless they've been extremely careful they probably infringe either the rsync patents (Pyne) or the blocklet patent (Williams).
Understanding data structures, in particular when a tree is called for and when a graph is called for.
A tree is a type of graph. More specifically, a tree is a connected forest, and a forest is an acyclic graph.
Perhaps you meant "understanding data structures, in particular whether the graph you're using is a tree or not"?