And im pretty sure AMD64 isnt RISC, but the current-gen Intel 64-bit chips absolutely slaughter RISC chips in terms of computational efficiency, if Im not mistaken.
It was hard to find details, but it looks like as an example, a Cortex A8 gets ~15MBps for AES when benchmarking in OpenSSL; it uses anywhere from 1 to 10w. An unaccelerated low-voltage Sandy Bridge (like the 2GBps with AES-NI. Best case scenario (the A8 using its "idle" of 1w), the Xeon merely beats it by ~20%, and with a more realistic load of 3-4w the disparity grows-- this before factoring in the AES acceleration, at which point the Xeon blows the Cortex out of the water.
As I understand it, theyre the only game in town if you want to do massive virtualization, because they provide substantially higher cores-per-socket than Intel (unless you count hyperthreading, and really who does that).
Windows 2000 was a flop? Are you for serious? It had 4 service packs, and was widely deployed, and was TBQH an awesome OS. NT was a bag of crap in comparison.
Most cellular companies have a 2-4 week no-questions return period. If you found it slow, bad, or otherwise "hating touched based OS"... why didn't you return it? I keep hearing about these complaints on the random forums and comments sections, and I'm always like "it didn't become slow / bad overnight..." Why didn't you take advantage of it?
Because I knew there would be pains moving from RIM to Android, but I figured I should give it a fair shot, and assumed that the issues must simply be "I dont know the shortcuts" or "Im doing it wrong". It wasnt for a month until I realized just how bad it was, and even then I hoped that I would get used to it (I havent, and I still hate my phone).
Why did you blame the OS and not Motorola for bad QA?
Because Google shares some of the blame for not having a standard contacts system and dialer across models. They also share some blame for having physical keyboards be an afterthought, with awful responsiveness and no real shortcuts to speak of. The entire model of the phone seems built for swooshy gestures and glam factor, when all I ever wanted was a phone that reliably handles my business email / phone needs.
As for stability, on my 2.3.7 release, I go into Settings (which I understand to be a google app), and try to type a letter. It immediately crashes. Or I type on the physical keyboard at too fast of a rate, and keys dont register. Either googles fault from a coding perspective, or they dont care enough about their brand to step in do some level of QA.
I have no desire to try to figure out whose fault it is; this is a Motorola and Google branded device, they both get the blame. This is reasonable, and TBQH its the kind of attitude that is required for capitalism to work. Otherwise Google has no incentive to care about what the Android vendors do.
I dont know that thats the customer being dumb. If they had an iPhone or Blackberry or something and were happy, and their first experience with "Android" was this Aliyun device, and it sucks..... seems to me "dumb" would be saying "oh well, ill just drop another $200 on another Android" rather than going back to what works.
I got burned on the Motorola Admiral, which has a zillion issues (bad contacts app, bad dialer, poor responsiveness, generally hating touch-based OS); maybe its just the vendor specific version of Android, but Id have to be stupid the next time my upgrade period comes around to get another android.
You know the old saying: Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
It would be nice if you linked or gave more info on what youre referring to-- are you talking about the old antitrust IE stuff, or something with Windows Phone?
I think intent increases culpability, but even if he was ignorant of the likely consequences, negligence is not an excuse. When someone makes a choice that indirectly results in others deaths, you cant get away from culpability-- you can just try to justify why it was worth it.
You mean the last console manufacturer to move to optical media in its consoles? Or are we intentionally forgetting that one?
Isnt that the system that had what is generally regarded as one of the first good 3d platformers? And one of the most revolutionary FPSes, ever? And actually, a whole slew of games that would appear in a "best games of all time" list (Smash brothers, Star Fox, Zelda OOT, Mario 64, Perfect Dark...)? And also one of the first systems with rumble?
Anyways, Im mostly talking about Nintendo in the last 10 years.
So, its news that Republicans voted to repeal the ACA for the 33rd time (and it makes them retarded), but none of that applies to the Democrats voting to overturn that repeal bill for the 33rd time?
I like the double standard, its the sort of thing that keeps one on their toes.
I dont disagree that Youtube has every right to show it. I do just want to point out that sometimes there is a price to pay for defending free speech, and sometimes it involves peoples lives-- other peoples lives.
For the record, I think that while the pastor who produced the video may have been justified by the american legal system and the first amendment, and it may be a good principle, he nevertheless shares some small degree of culpability for what has happened. I wouldnt call him a murderer or anything crazy, but its absurd to say "well, I didnt actually pull the trigger, I just provoked people" and pretend you bear no responsibility.
Im well aware that this will likely get misunderstood and buried, but it has to be said; while theres too much of the "we need to apologize for everything mentality", theres equally too much of the "my free speech exonerates me from any of the consequences it provokes" attitude.
Unless you mean to suggest that the entire financial meltdown was due to a security breach caused by poor security practices, I fail to see the relevance of your comment.
Which would be an interesting theory, incidentally.
Are we even sure this is legit? Im not clear on why Alibaba, and not Acer, would have been the recipient of such a letter: Why would they be a relevant party? And why is it Alibaba, not Acer, who is raising the issue?
Ive been at slashdot and on the internet long enough to be suspicious when a competitor makes claims like this that are validated by noone else. Maybe its legit, but id want to see something more than accusations by a party with a vested interest in making google look bad.
Call me crazy, but I reserve judgement and have no opinion (except "looks cool") until the numbers are in. The Wii was widely derided too, and whatever its USAGE is/was, its sales certainly were impressive and Nintendo made an absolute killing on it.
Nintendo has always been pretty good at pushing the envelope and being successful. Its a mistake to look at something new theyre doing and predict "Too wierd / expensive / different, wont succeed".
And remind me again just how long until the Windows NT was adopted? And then further remind me how long it took before the Windows NT, the "robust" line, became actually remotely robust?
I mean, I guess thats kind of what I was talking about. Apparently the market cared less about that than some of the other features. Plus, lets remember that Linux wasnt some bastion of usability at that point from what I've read-- not that I can claim to be some guru computer historian. Market pressures caused MS to conform to market expectations, and they were successful (at least enough to gain monopoly status).
. If, on the other hand, Mozilla were to say something similar about Firefox, I'm almost certain that (a) a fork would start and (b) a good many distros would start using the fork
This does happen, and its not without a lot of grief. LibreOffice went relatively smoothly, but was in a bad place for a few months. AmaroK never really got fixed, and the replacements really didnt compare. Im not sure why it was never forked, but thats my point: You cant just expect Joe Random Dev to sit down and pick up a project like that and have everything continue as normal.
that distros switched to another media player
The distros are always switching media players; Im not sure anyone really understands the rationale, or whether there is one.
there's over ten people qualified to fork the Linux kernel--although due to trademarks, they'd have to call it something different.
And now you have massive chaos. Which of the 3 resulting forks to use? What about the kernel updates being pushed out from Linus? Whats the future of support for Linux look like?
This is where you realize, golly, its can be nice to have a single codebase, even when it does things as boneheaded as Metro. At least you only have ONE Metro to deal with, not 3.
since he already licensed his parts under the GPLv2 and can't rescind his code offer.
I believe he can relicense the parts of the code that are exclusively his, but I dont know whether that would be inherited by the forks, or whether their license "as forked" would continue. Doesnt really solve the whole "3 versions" issue that would occur, either way.
I certainly put more trust in an OS kernel and system libraries/utilities that is open source, in the same way I put more trust in an encryption system that has the minimal amount of obfuscation to function.
I dont know that I look at it that way, after the issues I've had with OSS projects and the sometimes spotty support. I love the idea, I love the price, I love the whole "I can download this and stuff it in a VM right now without any signup". But when it comes to a client wanting something, I am VERY hesitant, unless its a major distro (CentOS, Ubuntu Server) and / or has serious support options (pfSense, which for the record has impeccable support even if it is sometimes unstable).
But Ive definately had issues even with Fedora and Ubuntu, where its something like "whoops, our new release cripples E1000 NICs with a bad firmware", and there simply isnt the same kind of market pressure for someone to "do something" asap.
Ive also dealt with it from proprietary vendors ("sorry, we dont know what the problem is and we dont really care"), but at least there I can tell the client that the vendor isnt supporting it, rather than that "the vendor is some community and I have to wait 3 days for a response, and no there isnt a support queue".
So, I guess my point would be is, if I do have a proprietary software allergy, it's to proprietary security software
Not sure if youve ever done whole disk or volume encryption, but TrueCrypt is widely recognized as one of the best volume encryption solutions, especially for window with their WDE. Its also proprietary. Likewise, PGP is
Yes, and in fact, it makes for lots of lulz when you play a clone for 4 mana, and end up with the only copy of a specific legend. Alternatively, have a vesuvan doppleganger out, and if they ever play a legend you can just copy it at the start of your upkeep.
Clone / Doppleganger / Licid decks are so much fun....
It would be nice if their explanation actually made sense, if you wanted to do this.
Specifically, this
We use Skirk Drill Sergeant to cause the Chancellor of the Spires to repeatedly enter the battlefield, and Wheel of Sun and Moon to put it back into Denzil's library. No special tricks need to be done to get the Time and Tide card back where we want it, as the Chancellor lets the instant go back into Bob's graveyard when it resolves.
...makes no sense. Skirk drill sergeant doesnt apply to chancellor (a sphinx), and even if it did, it doesnt help you cast it over and over and over. It just helps you get it out of your library once the drill sergeant dies, assuming you modify the text to apply to sphinxes.
That whole setup seems to make no sense whatsoever.
The intended implication was that proprietary companies can hire competent security folk, but they have to go out of their way to budget for it, a point most proprietary companies don't focus on
Thats true, but the beauty of a (properly functioning) competitive market is, you can just avoid the sucky vendors, and they will generally disappear. OSS tends to not have that pressure-- although of course if the project is sucky and unpopular, its unlikely to be wellknown or have any kind of community.
Really, heres the difference youre looking at, and why I dont have this allergy to paid software. If Microsoft releases a crappy OS (bad security, or slow, or something else), there will be intense pressure on them to fix their ways; as a for-profit, publicly traded company, they very quickly run into issues if their product is unpopular.
On the other hand, when a project like AmaroK makes a crappy release (bad security, or they do a 2.0), the devs can tell everyone to go get stuffed (which, in fact, they did), because there is 0 market pressure on them.
Obviously the very large projects like Linux do have some degree of pressure; but at the end of the day, if Linus Torvalds wants to say "Ive decided to remove memory protection", he can do so, and its really no skin off of his back. The saving grace of course is that if you have a talented community (which may not be the case), they can fork it and though painful, you can transition to the fork.
I have a feeling that at least SOME of the people who seem to have this allergy havent had to deal with these kind of issues, but they do happen.
Actually, the reason they use fossil fuels for nitrogen-based fertilizer has less to do with available energy and more to do with chemistry (I had to research this while responding to GP).
When making ammonium nitrate (using the Haber process), you need hydrogen and nitrogen. Nitrogen, apparently, is easy to get, since it is a major component of the very air we breathe (if memory serves, it is actually a large majority-- something like 70% of the air we breathe?). Hydrogen is the hard part, and is what is discussed in GPs article.
The reason methane etc are used for producing hydrogen, is because their chemical structure is a core of carbon atoms linked together, surrounded by hydrogen: ....H....H H--C---C--H ....H...H Thats ethane, C2H6; Methane (CH4) lacks the second Carbon and is a more compact version. Using a catalyst and water vapor, apparently they break that methane down into a large amount of hydrogen plus carbon monoxide (CH4 + H2O --> CO + 3x H2 ).
If you dont do it that way, you can always liberate the Hydrogen from water-- but that requires energy input, since water is a fairly stable molecule. This can be done with electrolysis.
This isnt really the same as what you describe, and its not "insanely inefficient"; breaking hydrogen off of H2O requires equivalent energy input that was liberated when you combined H2 and O2 through combustion, a basic fact of chemistry. The fact that hydrogen is there for the taking in Methane is simply a reality methane is fairly high on the slope of "available energy", while water is fairly low. Im going to bet that ANYTHING that we find with easily accessible hydrogen in it would make a great fuel, as well as a great source of molecular hydrogen, and it can be used up; the beauty of electrolysis with water is, youre not likely to run out of your source, and its pretty agnostic about where the energy comes from.
As your article states, producing hydrogen requires energy-- but that does not mean it has to be fossil fuel based. We do, in fact, already produce hydrogen through electrolysis, and there is no reason that if fossil fuels became overly expensive, we could not simply use nuclear power and electrolysis.
Hence, this:
As fossil fuels become more expensive, so does nitrogen based fertilizer.
Youre free to think that, but you would be wrong. I do so enjoy ad hominems, though, I find they are a wonderful way to start a post.
so it'll be hard to argue with you as you assume everyone works only for money despite all evidence to the contrary
Everyone assumes things, but this is not something that I assume. You however seem to be making assumptions full steam. Your post isnt off to a good start.
and they will be "qualified" to catch backdoors of varying subtlety.
Read up on some of the articles like "Trusting trust", where one dev did a PoC corrupted compiler that would insert backdoor code into binaries when it saw certain strings. Students generally are not going to be qualified to catch something of that nature, or of the nature mentioned in the BSD IPSEC backdoor thing.
Indeed - this is one reason why closed source is never going to be as secure.
Generalizations generally make me uncomfortable, because they have a nasty tendency of failing. Both proprietary and non-proprietary softawre have their share of holes; with each you can find examples that are quite good, or quite bad security-wise. In a lot of ways for the last year or so Firefox remained at the BACK of the pack for security, with IE and Chrome being at the lead. Chromium is technically OSS (though chrome isnt quite the same), but IE is definitely not, and is considered a much harder target than firefox. You cant just compare two projects on the simple basis of "OSS or not?"
Seems like open source is doing really well, then.
You arent paying attention if you think thats the extent of "security blowups" in the OSS world. SSH keys being lost, root access to update domains, and of course the wonderful Debian SSH flaw requiring everyone to regenerate their keys all come to mind.
Youll note that with the SSH thing that lasted for quite some time, and was a rather simple bug IIRC (something got commented out), and yet it wasnt caught for years (early 2006 to late 2008).
But the less competent certainly benefit from having the opportunity to code during the day, no doubt. In this there is no difference between Linux as GPL software and Windows as closed source software, though.
So people who code as a job and work a full day are incompetent. Nice.
They are of course of benefit.
If memory serves, theyre one of the main contributors of "hard" stuff like drivers and SELinux.
Face it: Linux has all the paid-eyes advantages of closed source development and more from being open source.
Except for organizational issues, and the fact that your volunteers are generally paid by a third party who can cut the money stream at any time, yea.
I dont disagree with most of what you said, except the general implication that because some proprietary companies suck at security they all must. Also,
You see, as horrible as the whole situation might be with the potential OpenBSD's IPSEC backdoor, the fact that we know about it gives us the option to audit the code or to outright avoid the code because we know of the potential threat.
Thats true, but youll note that if the accusations are correct (and I see no indication that anyone has actually done the audit, 2 years later), it took 10 years and then the backdoor was not even caught by OSS devs, it was revealed by an insider whose NDA expired.
Slashdot Mirror
Somehow between preview and submit my post got mangled. The sandy bridge in question was a Xeon E3 1220-L2-- dual core, 17w TDP.
And im pretty sure AMD64 isnt RISC, but the current-gen Intel 64-bit chips absolutely slaughter RISC chips in terms of computational efficiency, if Im not mistaken.
It was hard to find details, but it looks like as an example, a Cortex A8 gets ~15MBps for AES when benchmarking in OpenSSL; it uses anywhere from 1 to 10w. An unaccelerated low-voltage Sandy Bridge (like the 2GBps with AES-NI. Best case scenario (the A8 using its "idle" of 1w), the Xeon merely beats it by ~20%, and with a more realistic load of 3-4w the disparity grows-- this before factoring in the AES acceleration, at which point the Xeon blows the Cortex out of the water.
As I understand it, theyre the only game in town if you want to do massive virtualization, because they provide substantially higher cores-per-socket than Intel (unless you count hyperthreading, and really who does that).
Windows 2000 was a flop? Are you for serious? It had 4 service packs, and was widely deployed, and was TBQH an awesome OS. NT was a bag of crap in comparison.
Most cellular companies have a 2-4 week no-questions return period. If you found it slow, bad, or otherwise "hating touched based OS"... why didn't you return it? I keep hearing about these complaints on the random forums and comments sections, and I'm always like "it didn't become slow / bad overnight..." Why didn't you take advantage of it?
Because I knew there would be pains moving from RIM to Android, but I figured I should give it a fair shot, and assumed that the issues must simply be "I dont know the shortcuts" or "Im doing it wrong". It wasnt for a month until I realized just how bad it was, and even then I hoped that I would get used to it (I havent, and I still hate my phone).
Why did you blame the OS and not Motorola for bad QA?
Because Google shares some of the blame for not having a standard contacts system and dialer across models. They also share some blame for having physical keyboards be an afterthought, with awful responsiveness and no real shortcuts to speak of. The entire model of the phone seems built for swooshy gestures and glam factor, when all I ever wanted was a phone that reliably handles my business email / phone needs.
As for stability, on my 2.3.7 release, I go into Settings (which I understand to be a google app), and try to type a letter. It immediately crashes. Or I type on the physical keyboard at too fast of a rate, and keys dont register. Either googles fault from a coding perspective, or they dont care enough about their brand to step in do some level of QA.
I have no desire to try to figure out whose fault it is; this is a Motorola and Google branded device, they both get the blame. This is reasonable, and TBQH its the kind of attitude that is required for capitalism to work. Otherwise Google has no incentive to care about what the Android vendors do.
I dont know that thats the customer being dumb. If they had an iPhone or Blackberry or something and were happy, and their first experience with "Android" was this Aliyun device, and it sucks..... seems to me "dumb" would be saying "oh well, ill just drop another $200 on another Android" rather than going back to what works.
I got burned on the Motorola Admiral, which has a zillion issues (bad contacts app, bad dialer, poor responsiveness, generally hating touch-based OS); maybe its just the vendor specific version of Android, but Id have to be stupid the next time my upgrade period comes around to get another android.
You know the old saying: Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
It would be nice if you linked or gave more info on what youre referring to-- are you talking about the old antitrust IE stuff, or something with Windows Phone?
I think intent increases culpability, but even if he was ignorant of the likely consequences, negligence is not an excuse. When someone makes a choice that indirectly results in others deaths, you cant get away from culpability-- you can just try to justify why it was worth it.
You mean the last console manufacturer to move to optical media in its consoles? Or are we intentionally forgetting that one?
Isnt that the system that had what is generally regarded as one of the first good 3d platformers? And one of the most revolutionary FPSes, ever? And actually, a whole slew of games that would appear in a "best games of all time" list (Smash brothers, Star Fox, Zelda OOT, Mario 64, Perfect Dark...)? And also one of the first systems with rumble?
Anyways, Im mostly talking about Nintendo in the last 10 years.
So, its news that Republicans voted to repeal the ACA for the 33rd time (and it makes them retarded), but none of that applies to the Democrats voting to overturn that repeal bill for the 33rd time?
I like the double standard, its the sort of thing that keeps one on their toes.
I dont disagree that Youtube has every right to show it. I do just want to point out that sometimes there is a price to pay for defending free speech, and sometimes it involves peoples lives-- other peoples lives.
For the record, I think that while the pastor who produced the video may have been justified by the american legal system and the first amendment, and it may be a good principle, he nevertheless shares some small degree of culpability for what has happened. I wouldnt call him a murderer or anything crazy, but its absurd to say "well, I didnt actually pull the trigger, I just provoked people" and pretend you bear no responsibility.
Im well aware that this will likely get misunderstood and buried, but it has to be said; while theres too much of the "we need to apologize for everything mentality", theres equally too much of the "my free speech exonerates me from any of the consequences it provokes" attitude.
Unless you mean to suggest that the entire financial meltdown was due to a security breach caused by poor security practices, I fail to see the relevance of your comment.
Which would be an interesting theory, incidentally.
Are we even sure this is legit? Im not clear on why Alibaba, and not Acer, would have been the recipient of such a letter: Why would they be a relevant party? And why is it Alibaba, not Acer, who is raising the issue?
Ive been at slashdot and on the internet long enough to be suspicious when a competitor makes claims like this that are validated by noone else. Maybe its legit, but id want to see something more than accusations by a party with a vested interest in making google look bad.
Call me crazy, but I reserve judgement and have no opinion (except "looks cool") until the numbers are in. The Wii was widely derided too, and whatever its USAGE is/was, its sales certainly were impressive and Nintendo made an absolute killing on it.
Nintendo has always been pretty good at pushing the envelope and being successful. Its a mistake to look at something new theyre doing and predict "Too wierd / expensive / different, wont succeed".
And remind me again just how long until the Windows NT was adopted? And then further remind me how long it took before the Windows NT, the "robust" line, became actually remotely robust?
I mean, I guess thats kind of what I was talking about. Apparently the market cared less about that than some of the other features. Plus, lets remember that Linux wasnt some bastion of usability at that point from what I've read-- not that I can claim to be some guru computer historian. Market pressures caused MS to conform to market expectations, and they were successful (at least enough to gain monopoly status).
. If, on the other hand, Mozilla were to say something similar about Firefox, I'm almost certain that (a) a fork would start and (b) a good many distros would start using the fork
This does happen, and its not without a lot of grief. LibreOffice went relatively smoothly, but was in a bad place for a few months. AmaroK never really got fixed, and the replacements really didnt compare. Im not sure why it was never forked, but thats my point: You cant just expect Joe Random Dev to sit down and pick up a project like that and have everything continue as normal.
that distros switched to another media player
The distros are always switching media players; Im not sure anyone really understands the rationale, or whether there is one.
there's over ten people qualified to fork the Linux kernel--although due to trademarks, they'd have to call it something different.
And now you have massive chaos. Which of the 3 resulting forks to use? What about the kernel updates being pushed out from Linus? Whats the future of support for Linux look like?
This is where you realize, golly, its can be nice to have a single codebase, even when it does things as boneheaded as Metro. At least you only have ONE Metro to deal with, not 3.
since he already licensed his parts under the GPLv2 and can't rescind his code offer.
I believe he can relicense the parts of the code that are exclusively his, but I dont know whether that would be inherited by the forks, or whether their license "as forked" would continue. Doesnt really solve the whole "3 versions" issue that would occur, either way.
I certainly put more trust in an OS kernel and system libraries/utilities that is open source, in the same way I put more trust in an encryption system that has the minimal amount of obfuscation to function.
I dont know that I look at it that way, after the issues I've had with OSS projects and the sometimes spotty support. I love the idea, I love the price, I love the whole "I can download this and stuff it in a VM right now without any signup". But when it comes to a client wanting something, I am VERY hesitant, unless its a major distro (CentOS, Ubuntu Server) and / or has serious support options (pfSense, which for the record has impeccable support even if it is sometimes unstable).
But Ive definately had issues even with Fedora and Ubuntu, where its something like "whoops, our new release cripples E1000 NICs with a bad firmware", and there simply isnt the same kind of market pressure for someone to "do something" asap.
Ive also dealt with it from proprietary vendors ("sorry, we dont know what the problem is and we dont really care"), but at least there I can tell the client that the vendor isnt supporting it, rather than that "the vendor is some community and I have to wait 3 days for a response, and no there isnt a support queue".
So, I guess my point would be is, if I do have a proprietary software allergy, it's to proprietary security software
Not sure if youve ever done whole disk or volume encryption, but TrueCrypt is widely recognized as one of the best volume encryption solutions, especially for window with their WDE. Its also proprietary.
Likewise, PGP is
Somehow I feel like that would run into a brick wall because of some of the built in golden rules of magic which cannot be altered or violated.
Yes, and in fact, it makes for lots of lulz when you play a clone for 4 mana, and end up with the only copy of a specific legend. Alternatively, have a vesuvan doppleganger out, and if they ever play a legend you can just copy it at the start of your upkeep.
Clone / Doppleganger / Licid decks are so much fun....
It would be nice if their explanation actually made sense, if you wanted to do this.
Specifically, this
We use Skirk Drill Sergeant to cause the Chancellor of the Spires to repeatedly enter the battlefield, and Wheel of Sun and Moon to put it back into Denzil's library. No special tricks need to be done to get the Time and Tide card back where we want it, as the Chancellor lets the instant go back into Bob's graveyard when it resolves.
...makes no sense. Skirk drill sergeant doesnt apply to chancellor (a sphinx), and even if it did, it doesnt help you cast it over and over and over. It just helps you get it out of your library once the drill sergeant dies, assuming you modify the text to apply to sphinxes.
That whole setup seems to make no sense whatsoever.
The intended implication was that proprietary companies can hire competent security folk, but they have to go out of their way to budget for it, a point most proprietary companies don't focus on
Thats true, but the beauty of a (properly functioning) competitive market is, you can just avoid the sucky vendors, and they will generally disappear. OSS tends to not have that pressure-- although of course if the project is sucky and unpopular, its unlikely to be wellknown or have any kind of community.
Really, heres the difference youre looking at, and why I dont have this allergy to paid software. If Microsoft releases a crappy OS (bad security, or slow, or something else), there will be intense pressure on them to fix their ways; as a for-profit, publicly traded company, they very quickly run into issues if their product is unpopular.
On the other hand, when a project like AmaroK makes a crappy release (bad security, or they do a 2.0), the devs can tell everyone to go get stuffed (which, in fact, they did), because there is 0 market pressure on them.
Obviously the very large projects like Linux do have some degree of pressure; but at the end of the day, if Linus Torvalds wants to say "Ive decided to remove memory protection", he can do so, and its really no skin off of his back. The saving grace of course is that if you have a talented community (which may not be the case), they can fork it and though painful, you can transition to the fork.
I have a feeling that at least SOME of the people who seem to have this allergy havent had to deal with these kind of issues, but they do happen.
Actually, the reason they use fossil fuels for nitrogen-based fertilizer has less to do with available energy and more to do with chemistry (I had to research this while responding to GP).
When making ammonium nitrate (using the Haber process), you need hydrogen and nitrogen. Nitrogen, apparently, is easy to get, since it is a major component of the very air we breathe (if memory serves, it is actually a large majority-- something like 70% of the air we breathe?). Hydrogen is the hard part, and is what is discussed in GPs article.
The reason methane etc are used for producing hydrogen, is because their chemical structure is a core of carbon atoms linked together, surrounded by hydrogen:
....H...H
....H....H
H--C---C--H
Thats ethane, C2H6; Methane (CH4) lacks the second Carbon and is a more compact version. Using a catalyst and water vapor, apparently they break that methane down into a large amount of hydrogen plus carbon monoxide (CH4 + H2O --> CO + 3x H2 ).
If you dont do it that way, you can always liberate the Hydrogen from water-- but that requires energy input, since water is a fairly stable molecule. This can be done with electrolysis.
This isnt really the same as what you describe, and its not "insanely inefficient"; breaking hydrogen off of H2O requires equivalent energy input that was liberated when you combined H2 and O2 through combustion, a basic fact of chemistry. The fact that hydrogen is there for the taking in Methane is simply a reality methane is fairly high on the slope of "available energy", while water is fairly low. Im going to bet that ANYTHING that we find with easily accessible hydrogen in it would make a great fuel, as well as a great source of molecular hydrogen, and it can be used up; the beauty of electrolysis with water is, youre not likely to run out of your source, and its pretty agnostic about where the energy comes from.
Im not sure if your post is serious or not, which is actually kind of depressing.
As your article states, producing hydrogen requires energy-- but that does not mean it has to be fossil fuel based. We do, in fact, already produce hydrogen through electrolysis, and there is no reason that if fossil fuels became overly expensive, we could not simply use nuclear power and electrolysis.
Hence, this:
As fossil fuels become more expensive, so does nitrogen based fertilizer.
...does not follow.
I think you're one of those stupid libertarians,
Youre free to think that, but you would be wrong. I do so enjoy ad hominems, though, I find they are a wonderful way to start a post.
so it'll be hard to argue with you as you assume everyone works only for money despite all evidence to the contrary
Everyone assumes things, but this is not something that I assume. You however seem to be making assumptions full steam. Your post isnt off to a good start.
and they will be "qualified" to catch backdoors of varying subtlety.
Read up on some of the articles like "Trusting trust", where one dev did a PoC corrupted compiler that would insert backdoor code into binaries when it saw certain strings. Students generally are not going to be qualified to catch something of that nature, or of the nature mentioned in the BSD IPSEC backdoor thing.
Indeed - this is one reason why closed source is never going to be as secure.
Generalizations generally make me uncomfortable, because they have a nasty tendency of failing. Both proprietary and non-proprietary softawre have their share of holes; with each you can find examples that are quite good, or quite bad security-wise. In a lot of ways for the last year or so Firefox remained at the BACK of the pack for security, with IE and Chrome being at the lead. Chromium is technically OSS (though chrome isnt quite the same), but IE is definitely not, and is considered a much harder target than firefox. You cant just compare two projects on the simple basis of "OSS or not?"
Seems like open source is doing really well, then.
You arent paying attention if you think thats the extent of "security blowups" in the OSS world. SSH keys being lost, root access to update domains, and of course the wonderful Debian SSH flaw requiring everyone to regenerate their keys all come to mind.
Youll note that with the SSH thing that lasted for quite some time, and was a rather simple bug IIRC (something got commented out), and yet it wasnt caught for years (early 2006 to late 2008).
But the less competent certainly benefit from having the opportunity to code during the day, no doubt. In this there is no difference between Linux as GPL software and Windows as closed source software, though.
So people who code as a job and work a full day are incompetent. Nice.
They are of course of benefit.
If memory serves, theyre one of the main contributors of "hard" stuff like drivers and SELinux.
Face it: Linux has all the paid-eyes advantages of closed source development and more from being open source.
Except for organizational issues, and the fact that your volunteers are generally paid by a third party who can cut the money stream at any time, yea.
I dont disagree with most of what you said, except the general implication that because some proprietary companies suck at security they all must.
Also,
You see, as horrible as the whole situation might be with the potential OpenBSD's IPSEC backdoor, the fact that we know about it gives us the option to audit the code or to outright avoid the code because we know of the potential threat.
Thats true, but youll note that if the accusations are correct (and I see no indication that anyone has actually done the audit, 2 years later), it took 10 years and then the backdoor was not even caught by OSS devs, it was revealed by an insider whose NDA expired.
I think youre taking that grossly out of context. I dont think he was saying "forget the poor, theres no reason to care about them."