IANAE As far as I understood it the recession currently seen only affects the US economy but I believe that it has to affect other economies more so than in the past. In the past our countries were not so interlinked trade wise, now everyone has almost everyone else's hands in their pockets, if someone pulls their hands out there will be an effect on every one else. However I don't think that effect will be as bad as it is on the US economy. So yes the US recession will hit us other countries but not as badly as in the US itself.
Good point. The only thing I'm wondering is; what are we discussing here? I have no idea. I thought that would appear from reading the comments.
Maybe mushrooms?
The comments on the left or the right of this page?
That would make sense if it was just a few comments posted on a website like Slashdot. If on the other hand you run your own news site about the subject, I would expect that all your alleigances be transparent.
Say I work at IBM and I slag EMACS in several posts here and there. I don't tell anyone about my employer but one day someone finds out I work for IBM. Most people will see that as my viewpoint not IBM's
Say I work at IBM and run a website that slags EMACS. I don't tell anyone about my employer but one day someone finds out I work for IBM. Most people will see this as an evil IBM conspiracy against EMACS.
Disclaimer: I don't work for IBM nor dislike EMACS
There is a big difference between saying a few things here and there on different websites and actually running a website.
Now, Slackware tends to be problematic, no package dependancy can result in chaos.
Yes and us Slackware users divert that chaos through/dev/random increasing our cryptographic key generation abilities.
Seriously I have used Slackware since before ver 3 and have never seen chaos from dependancy issues. You make it sound like it crashes computers at random. But as someone who actually knows how it works I can tell you this, all a unresolved dependancy issue does is stop a specific program from running until that dependancy is met. If foo needs bar then the system does not crash foo just complains and exits. This is Linux not Window95.
I think he is trying to say that if everyone for instance worked on Gentoo then work on Gentoo would proceed much faster. This thinking is flawed for another reason than what you pointed out. Distro's have a purpose, it may not seem like it to someone who sees 300 distros and thinks OMG that is way too many. But each Distro was designed to solve a problem, different from another Distro. If everyone worked on say Gentoo then only the Gentoo problems would be solved not the others. For example there are some Distros that are for Desktop use, some for Servers, some for partitioning, some for system rescue, some for High Performance Computing. Having one Operating System to solve all problems is a flawed idea, much better to break up Operating Systems into the groups of problems they solve, which is exactly what has been done.
Yes, I understand. Clearly the problem is how to have your cake and eat it too. Of course if you *could* do it, it would be very cool. Maybe we should theorize an ideal computer that can access these amazing numbers, and then security is an exercise in approaching it.
Perhaps some forms of quantum computing can approach that. Linear systems too can be used to store say fractional numbers, the problem their lies in getting the numbers back out of the system. Which is why we use non-linear computers for most jobs.
Is the plain old factoring a large number problem the only answer? Could the power of a group of distributed systems together access higher security numbers for their collective security? Yes I understand unless you have the bits in your hand, you don't have the bits in your hand. But we can certainly download a megabyte of digits easily.
I don't have the math nack to answer the first question but I certainly agree that by increasing say the number of ports by a factor of 4 to 64bits would mean that you would need to control ~18,446,744,073,709,551,616 hosts in order to bypass the system as mentioned in the article.
Well perhaps real infinities are so wild it is impossible to even theorize about being able to grab them, so I'd accept massive irrational or even finite floating point numbers. (Sorry I know I am not really fit to talk about these concepts.) I think a different method of managing port access cryptographically, or even just drastically increasing them, might be useful and am not a fan of knocking. Perhaps existing tech is enough if it is just applied to the problem.
I still wonder if there is something for us in higher maths that might open a window into much vaster spaces where it is difficult for others to go without our intentionally holding their hand. Certainly there is a problem with email addresses too, but they have to by memorizable by humans, or do they.
The main problem is that redesigning the Internet standards just to deal with this issues is the wrong approach. IMHO we should seek to patch the holes in current systems instead of handwaving new superior systems to do the job for us. Of course that doesn't mean we should stop looking at new systems, because they might solve other problems we have.
I doubt if even 1% of CS grads could write code to turn this BMP into a JPG, or even explain the ideas behind this. In my experience, 50% could not work out how to develop a data structure for a bitmap that used palettes.
Amazing how many people sidestepped this question, I'm not actually replying to you I'm replying to all those who want to see someone answer this. And for the record I'm doing this off the top of my head no Internet search no books.
First I make the assumption that the BMP is in a file on the disk. Before I load that file in I need to know a) it's size and b) it's path. It's size is not the length of the file but rather the data stored in the header that tells me the width and height and depth of the image. I also want to know if there is any palette and if the file is RLE encoded (I would have to look up how to unencode it if it was in RLE). I would probably use a structure to load that data off the header of the file. Then I can calculate how much memory to allocate to load the file into. I load it into another structure most likely a straight array. Then I can think about saving the file or converting it to JPEG. See the difference between a BMP and a JPEG picture when actually loaded into a program and being used is zilch, because normally only the saving and loading routines worry about compression, most of the time the picture is handled as a block of memory (especially with 8BPP). So to convert to a JPEG I create another structure to store the data in. I run an algorithm across the image (I don't know what exactly never studied it) that takes from the BMP structure and converts it into a compressed JPEG format. Then I can just write that back to the disk or send it to never never. Oh it needs a header too.
As for palettes they are not used much anymore because we mostly have >16bit colour, on average most systems have 8bits for each colour channel. Of course if you load in a file that has colours mapped from a palette it would not look pretty. So you need to look at the palette for such an image to display it even on high colour systems. With palette colour as opposed to say 16 Named colours of the C64 each pixel in the image is given a value that value is mapped in a 1-M relationship to the palette. If you have a pixel that has a value of say $16 you look in the palette and that would tell you how much Red, Green and Blue to use to display for that pixel. Encoding a picture from a hires colour to say 256colour is much more complicated.
I never put "language programming" into a search engine I find "language library tutorial" is better. Of course that means I am learning "language" and "library". If I'm already programming in a specific language and know where the libraries documentation is then I have it bookmarked.
Obviously it is time to break out the heavy math. First imagine if instead of having only measly thousands of ports you could use a floating point number to designate a port. It's not like we have thousands of ports in hardware right? Meaning virtual port addressing. Needs a big botnet to get through that. You could make the system answer on any port, or only answer on those which are being used. Well floating point still may not have a lot of significant bits to hack, so time to break out the math.
The problem with using either floating point or transinfinites is in how are they encoded. If I say that the port is number 1.326 that still needs to be encoded back into binary. If you say Aleph-Null + 256. Aleph-Null requires more bits to transmit than say a tillion trillion bit per second connection for a trillion trillion years could carry. Now that is a lot of bits but Aleph-Null is always more bits than are possible to transmit because it is so big. Aleph-Null is larger than every point in the Universe being a bit for the entire lifetime of the Universe. You might think why not encode Aleph-null as say a smaller sequence of bits but then that is no better than just adding more bits to the port addresses.
If you take Aleph-Null as a concept like the words I just used it lowers it's size to a finite number. If you try and get Aleph-Null as an actual number then it is just 111111111...infinity. BTW all the transinfinites have this problem not just Aleph-Null.
Yes you are very correct. The very small company I work for makes all of it's income from IT we fix and maintain other peoples systems. If anyone thinks they are going to lose their jobs they might be right but they also might find their jobs have moved to an outside company. As I often say "You can't get phone support to physically open up a computer in another country and replace the harddrive, you have to have people on the ground to do this." IT is not dying unless we breed specially trained squirrels to roam the world in miniature helicopters and do all this stuff for us.
How does that actually work and still elect the people that are intended to be elected by the public?
I thought it went like this. We have two major parties then minorities on the side. The minorities rarely get in, which means that all the flow on preferences eventually end up for either of the two major parties. If the votes came out equally we would need to call another election.
Sounds like a pretty terrible place to live, IMO. Laws which protect only one person from themselves (singular them, clearly) are a gross misuse of government powers. The government should only be enacting laws which protect others from the stupidity of that one person. As a grown adult, I don't want to go back to the nursery and have some higher power watch over my every move to make sure I don't trip and fall or choke on my own thumb. In other words, what you have there in Australia is derisively referred to as a "nanny government".
But since you never hear Australians complaining about living in a nanny state you might just think those terms were made up by Americans afraid of too much governmental control. America is more of a nanny state than Australia is because America's legal system lets people be lazy. For example people who sue over frivolous things still can do so in America. In Australia we have countered that with many laws basically saying that if you do certain things (drink alcohol, invade someones property) then you lose the right to sue for others negligence because you yourself are negligent. It is your negligence if you drink and go swimming and then are rescued by lifesavers who accidentally cause your leg to have to be amputated, not the lifesavers negligence. Americans always seem to rave on about their rights but never their responsibilities.
Since the OLPC is a scam, and none will really ever end up released... isn't an injunction preventing them from shipping the OLPC to Nigeria kind of useless?
BTW, I'm sure the irony of the OLPC scammers being sued, by a scammer, in Nigeria (!!!) is lost on nobody. If it were any more divorced from reality, it would tear a hole in the space-time continuum.
I got so confused when I voted, what was the difference between "The Fishing Party" and the "Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party"? Or for other kicks on the QLD senate ballot who should go lower "One Nation" or "Pauline Hanson"?
The issue with 'child pornography' is whether you define the veiwing/possesion/dissemination of it to be a lesser/equal offense to creating it. Clearly, the act of creating it is counter to our current collective sociatial morality, but the problem with our current laws is that they equate possesion/dissemination with creation. The problem here, is that the laws are written so broadly, that they can be used against minors as in this case http://www.usatoday.com/tech/webguide/internetlife/2004-03-29-child-self-porn_x.htm where the minor charged with possesion and dissemination of 'child pornography' (along with child abuse) was the minor depicted in the aforementioned pornography.
The problem with most Americans posting to slashdot is they don't realise that what is legal in their country may not be in another. Please if you are going to discuss this don't link to USA today. This is about Australia we are a different country, I know that is a hard concept to grasp but please try.
Err no
I wish that wasn't true but it is. I'm a FOSS game developer, this month a saw a musician advertise himself on one FOSS gaming site and he was asked by at least three different projects to work for them. Programmers outnumber artist something like 10-1 or 100-1. Most of them are not Geeks or Nerds like us programmers who spend our life on the Internet. They seem to be in different communities and speak in different groups to us. Not to say we don't get along with them they are just not like us. Also they view some licensing issues different to us because they are artists of a different sort.
BTW in your list the people tasked with the jobs of graphics programmers, AI programmers, networking programmers are all available but because most FOSS projects are small in size it is hard to find specialist like these when you want them. Most programmers in FOSS game development have to wear multiple hats.
You really have to make some awesome software without any competition if you can force your costumers to use a 5 year old Linux desktop. Most likely they would just dump your software and move to another company that bothers to service their costumers. Server software, that's another case entirely.
Secondly, I find your 100.000 pc's with 50.000 pc's as _spares_ scenario rather detached from reality. Just trying to get the spare pc's to work after being unused for 3-4 years would put me of this scheme. I don't think it would make financial sense either to buy 50.000 pc's to save some software testing: 50.000 x 1000 US$ buys you a lot of testing, besides you bind capital into perhaps unneeded hardware for many years.
Anyway, with 100.000 pc's to manage I would like a nice support contract from the OS vendor, so I would choose a commercial distro like Red Hat og Novell/Suse, not use neither Debian nor Fedora.
I'm sorry I confused you but I was talking about what businesses in the real world are doing right now. The other week I rebuilt a workstation that was part of a corporate environment that has over 100,000 users. There are only three machine types and the OS is NT 4, it is updated by a perl script. That is the real world. When you have 100,000+ users you can pick whatever OS you want as long as your developers can use it to create the apps. The customer says I want the system to fulfill this, this and that buisness functionality, the technology used in such scenarios is not taken into consideration. People who do that buy support from one of the large computer support companies such as Unisys, IBM, Fujitsu. In order for a company that has 100,000+ users to just change support companies and platforms takes years of preparation, that is why they are still using NT 4.
As for the financial cost of keeping spares versus paying programmers to support any sort of hardware change consider this. If one person doesn't get to use their computer for one week because of a software or hardware glitch the repair bill exceeds that of the price of a brand new pc. The price of lost work can be over ten times that. So it makes more sense to make sure that never happens and you always have spares, of course some people like to cut costs and don't have enough spares but there are financial penalties tied into the support contract. They do do upgrades, it is just that they do it very very slowly, make a mistake lose a million dollars, good incentive to keep things simple.
End users use the apps given they have no choice, it is not play it is work for them. IT is there to support buisness not the other way around.
BTW this PC I rebuilt still had it's Windows XP sticker with the key on the case but that is not what is inside the machine:)
Slashdot Mirror
IANAE As far as I understood it the recession currently seen only affects the US economy but I believe that it has to affect other economies more so than in the past. In the past our countries were not so interlinked trade wise, now everyone has almost everyone else's hands in their pockets, if someone pulls their hands out there will be an effect on every one else. However I don't think that effect will be as bad as it is on the US economy. So yes the US recession will hit us other countries but not as badly as in the US itself.
Maybe mushrooms?
The comments on the left or the right of this page?
That would make sense if it was just a few comments posted on a website like Slashdot. If on the other hand you run your own news site about the subject, I would expect that all your alleigances be transparent.
Say I work at IBM and I slag EMACS in several posts here and there. I don't tell anyone about my employer but one day someone finds out I work for IBM. Most people will see that as my viewpoint not IBM's
Say I work at IBM and run a website that slags EMACS. I don't tell anyone about my employer but one day someone finds out I work for IBM. Most people will see this as an evil IBM conspiracy against EMACS.
Disclaimer: I don't work for IBM nor dislike EMACS
There is a big difference between saying a few things here and there on different websites and actually running a website.
Ok it is not naive to us. But to other people not so cluey about teh Intrawebs it might be a bit misleading.
Yes and us Slackware users divert that chaos through /dev/random increasing our cryptographic key generation abilities.
Seriously I have used Slackware since before ver 3 and have never seen chaos from dependancy issues. You make it sound like it crashes computers at random. But as someone who actually knows how it works I can tell you this, all a unresolved dependancy issue does is stop a specific program from running until that dependancy is met. If foo needs bar then the system does not crash foo just complains and exits. This is Linux not Window95.
What's wrong with make uninstall? It works...sometimes :)
I think he is trying to say that if everyone for instance worked on Gentoo then work on Gentoo would proceed much faster. This thinking is flawed for another reason than what you pointed out. Distro's have a purpose, it may not seem like it to someone who sees 300 distros and thinks OMG that is way too many. But each Distro was designed to solve a problem, different from another Distro. If everyone worked on say Gentoo then only the Gentoo problems would be solved not the others. For example there are some Distros that are for Desktop use, some for Servers, some for partitioning, some for system rescue, some for High Performance Computing. Having one Operating System to solve all problems is a flawed idea, much better to break up Operating Systems into the groups of problems they solve, which is exactly what has been done.
Why does the Gentoo community need these people? Can't they just sail along fine without them? Make their own websites and stuff if they need it?
What is so important about this Gentoo Foundation? What happens if it goes under?
Perhaps some forms of quantum computing can approach that. Linear systems too can be used to store say fractional numbers, the problem their lies in getting the numbers back out of the system. Which is why we use non-linear computers for most jobs.
Is the plain old factoring a large number problem the only answer? Could the power of a group of distributed systems together access higher security numbers for their collective security? Yes I understand unless you have the bits in your hand, you don't have the bits in your hand. But we can certainly download a megabyte of digits easily.I don't have the math nack to answer the first question but I certainly agree that by increasing say the number of ports by a factor of 4 to 64bits would mean that you would need to control ~18,446,744,073,709,551,616 hosts in order to bypass the system as mentioned in the article.
Well perhaps real infinities are so wild it is impossible to even theorize about being able to grab them, so I'd accept massive irrational or even finite floating point numbers. (Sorry I know I am not really fit to talk about these concepts.) I think a different method of managing port access cryptographically, or even just drastically increasing them, might be useful and am not a fan of knocking. Perhaps existing tech is enough if it is just applied to the problem.I still wonder if there is something for us in higher maths that might open a window into much vaster spaces where it is difficult for others to go without our intentionally holding their hand. Certainly there is a problem with email addresses too, but they have to by memorizable by humans, or do they.
The main problem is that redesigning the Internet standards just to deal with this issues is the wrong approach. IMHO we should seek to patch the holes in current systems instead of handwaving new superior systems to do the job for us. Of course that doesn't mean we should stop looking at new systems, because they might solve other problems we have.
8BPP should be 24bpp
8bits for each of the following colour channels red, green and blue
Amazing how many people sidestepped this question, I'm not actually replying to you I'm replying to all those who want to see someone answer this. And for the record I'm doing this off the top of my head no Internet search no books.
First I make the assumption that the BMP is in a file on the disk. Before I load that file in I need to know a) it's size and b) it's path. It's size is not the length of the file but rather the data stored in the header that tells me the width and height and depth of the image. I also want to know if there is any palette and if the file is RLE encoded (I would have to look up how to unencode it if it was in RLE). I would probably use a structure to load that data off the header of the file. Then I can calculate how much memory to allocate to load the file into. I load it into another structure most likely a straight array. Then I can think about saving the file or converting it to JPEG. See the difference between a BMP and a JPEG picture when actually loaded into a program and being used is zilch, because normally only the saving and loading routines worry about compression, most of the time the picture is handled as a block of memory (especially with 8BPP). So to convert to a JPEG I create another structure to store the data in. I run an algorithm across the image (I don't know what exactly never studied it) that takes from the BMP structure and converts it into a compressed JPEG format. Then I can just write that back to the disk or send it to never never. Oh it needs a header too.
As for palettes they are not used much anymore because we mostly have >16bit colour, on average most systems have 8bits for each colour channel. Of course if you load in a file that has colours mapped from a palette it would not look pretty. So you need to look at the palette for such an image to display it even on high colour systems. With palette colour as opposed to say 16 Named colours of the C64 each pixel in the image is given a value that value is mapped in a 1-M relationship to the palette. If you have a pixel that has a value of say $16 you look in the palette and that would tell you how much Red, Green and Blue to use to display for that pixel. Encoding a picture from a hires colour to say 256colour is much more complicated.
I never put "language programming" into a search engine I find "language library tutorial" is better. Of course that means I am learning "language" and "library". If I'm already programming in a specific language and know where the libraries documentation is then I have it bookmarked.
The problem with using either floating point or transinfinites is in how are they encoded. If I say that the port is number 1.326 that still needs to be encoded back into binary. If you say Aleph-Null + 256. Aleph-Null requires more bits to transmit than say a tillion trillion bit per second connection for a trillion trillion years could carry. Now that is a lot of bits but Aleph-Null is always more bits than are possible to transmit because it is so big. Aleph-Null is larger than every point in the Universe being a bit for the entire lifetime of the Universe. You might think why not encode Aleph-null as say a smaller sequence of bits but then that is no better than just adding more bits to the port addresses.
If you take Aleph-Null as a concept like the words I just used it lowers it's size to a finite number. If you try and get Aleph-Null as an actual number then it is just 111111111...infinity. BTW all the transinfinites have this problem not just Aleph-Null.
Yes you are very correct. The very small company I work for makes all of it's income from IT we fix and maintain other peoples systems. If anyone thinks they are going to lose their jobs they might be right but they also might find their jobs have moved to an outside company. As I often say "You can't get phone support to physically open up a computer in another country and replace the harddrive, you have to have people on the ground to do this." IT is not dying unless we breed specially trained squirrels to roam the world in miniature helicopters and do all this stuff for us.
So tell me do those 300 people think it is statistically significant?
So we are not free in theory but in practice and you are free in theory but not practice?
I thought it went like this. We have two major parties then minorities on the side. The minorities rarely get in, which means that all the flow on preferences eventually end up for either of the two major parties. If the votes came out equally we would need to call another election.
But since you never hear Australians complaining about living in a nanny state you might just think those terms were made up by Americans afraid of too much governmental control. America is more of a nanny state than Australia is because America's legal system lets people be lazy. For example people who sue over frivolous things still can do so in America. In Australia we have countered that with many laws basically saying that if you do certain things (drink alcohol, invade someones property) then you lose the right to sue for others negligence because you yourself are negligent. It is your negligence if you drink and go swimming and then are rescued by lifesavers who accidentally cause your leg to have to be amputated, not the lifesavers negligence. Americans always seem to rave on about their rights but never their responsibilities.
Let me reword that for you.
America run by a gang isn't well organized.
BTW, I'm sure the irony of the OLPC scammers being sued, by a scammer, in Nigeria (!!!) is lost on nobody. If it were any more divorced from reality, it would tear a hole in the space-time continuum.
The word scam is not on the page you linked to.
I got so confused when I voted, what was the difference between "The Fishing Party" and the "Australian Fishing and Lifestyle Party"? Or for other kicks on the QLD senate ballot who should go lower "One Nation" or "Pauline Hanson"?
The problem with most Americans posting to slashdot is they don't realise that what is legal in their country may not be in another. Please if you are going to discuss this don't link to USA today. This is about Australia we are a different country, I know that is a hard concept to grasp but please try.
Err no
I wish that wasn't true but it is. I'm a FOSS game developer, this month a saw a musician advertise himself on one FOSS gaming site and he was asked by at least three different projects to work for them. Programmers outnumber artist something like 10-1 or 100-1. Most of them are not Geeks or Nerds like us programmers who spend our life on the Internet. They seem to be in different communities and speak in different groups to us. Not to say we don't get along with them they are just not like us. Also they view some licensing issues different to us because they are artists of a different sort.
BTW in your list the people tasked with the jobs of graphics programmers, AI programmers, networking programmers are all available but because most FOSS projects are small in size it is hard to find specialist like these when you want them. Most programmers in FOSS game development have to wear multiple hats.
Secondly, I find your 100.000 pc's with 50.000 pc's as _spares_ scenario rather detached from reality. Just trying to get the spare pc's to work after being unused for 3-4 years would put me of this scheme. I don't think it would make financial sense either to buy 50.000 pc's to save some software testing: 50.000 x 1000 US$ buys you a lot of testing, besides you bind capital into perhaps unneeded hardware for many years.
Anyway, with 100.000 pc's to manage I would like a nice support contract from the OS vendor, so I would choose a commercial distro like Red Hat og Novell/Suse, not use neither Debian nor Fedora.
I'm sorry I confused you but I was talking about what businesses in the real world are doing right now. The other week I rebuilt a workstation that was part of a corporate environment that has over 100,000 users. There are only three machine types and the OS is NT 4, it is updated by a perl script. That is the real world. When you have 100,000+ users you can pick whatever OS you want as long as your developers can use it to create the apps. The customer says I want the system to fulfill this, this and that buisness functionality, the technology used in such scenarios is not taken into consideration. People who do that buy support from one of the large computer support companies such as Unisys, IBM, Fujitsu. In order for a company that has 100,000+ users to just change support companies and platforms takes years of preparation, that is why they are still using NT 4.
As for the financial cost of keeping spares versus paying programmers to support any sort of hardware change consider this. If one person doesn't get to use their computer for one week because of a software or hardware glitch the repair bill exceeds that of the price of a brand new pc. The price of lost work can be over ten times that. So it makes more sense to make sure that never happens and you always have spares, of course some people like to cut costs and don't have enough spares but there are financial penalties tied into the support contract. They do do upgrades, it is just that they do it very very slowly, make a mistake lose a million dollars, good incentive to keep things simple.
End users use the apps given they have no choice, it is not play it is work for them. IT is there to support buisness not the other way around.
BTW this PC I rebuilt still had it's Windows XP sticker with the key on the case but that is not what is inside the machine :)
I don't know which is sadder