"... also went down for 15 hours after it was snagged at the same time. It is supposed to have a 99.999 per cent network availability, or downtime amounting to 50 minutes over 10 years. Doh! That's 300 years' worth in one hit by my calculation..."
What sort of crazy calculation is that? 15 hours downtime is 900 minutes. That's 180 years worth.
Some of the "security" algorithms this white-hat whistleblower has exposed are incredibly poor. Here are some samples:
The Acrobat Signed Plugin authentication code only checks the header of the binary. So just take a non-malicious signed plugin, modify the binary after the header, and you can send out a "signed" plugin with malicious code as the payload. What a joke!
One of the products costs $3000 and is derived from a rot13 encoder.
Another product is claiming "100% burglar-proof" but the "encryption" is nothing more than an XOR against a single magic byte.
If I was a shareholder in any of these companies I would be demanding an investigation. This isn't just shoddy, it's an outright scam! None of these companies should be getting away with this. The customer is being ripped off, yet these shyster companies have the NERVE to use the law against the whistleblowers.
So humanism is based on love, or is it based on cold logic?
It is based on neither. A humanist can choose to reject love and logic, so long as they fulfil the goals of humanism.
It is also clear that you think humanism is just another a religion. It isn't a religion. Your thinking is warped by your preconceptions.
I advise you educate yourself regarding humanism, because then you might understand the previous poster's comments. Stop trying to interpret humanism in terms of your own religion.
So you are in fact claiming you know the Whole Truth, or being able to discern it for everyone else?
No. He is claiming that as a humanist he can accept that things are wrong without needing to pollute the concepts of "right" and "wrong" with his societies own values.
I agree strongly with his sentiment. It's the ultimate bullshit to sit the fence and say "you can't judge someone elses culture". You sure can and you damn well should.
Not even this. MySQL is not faster than PostgreSQL for non-trivial problems. The myth that MySQL is faster seems to be perpetuated by the same people who claim XFree86 is slow.
The problem is benchmarks, of course. MySQL looks great in benchmarks but because it has basically no features you have to implement all the missing functionality (eg, locks, rollback) in your application. The end result is something that looked brilliantly fast in your benchmarks and is somehow much much slower than PostgreSQL in your final product.
Of course IANADBM and I'm sure some MySQL fanatic will now say how wrong I am and how "this benchmark they just did" proves it.
Amen brother! Back When I Was A Lad the fanciest Lego piece was the thin 2x2 square. You really had to struggle to make something look realistic from the dozen or so pieces.
Some of the modern Lego kits have 50 unique Lego pieces, only found in one kit, and only suitable for making one specific model. The result is one extremely realistic model, but where was the fun in building it?
I've found myself lying and making up costs for the software libre work I've been doing.
I've been in the same situation, and I've found an easy way out that doesn't upset my conscience. You just buy lots of other junk in addition to the software.
For example, you want to install a brand new web server. The beancounters can't comprehend that the software licensing costs are $5 for the CDR shipped from my local Linux distributor. So instead of confusing the poor people I just order the entire O'Reilly bookshelf. The beancounters are much happier when they see "Software+Manuals: $1500" and I get something to read while the CD installs.
Re:Make a decision, folks
on
ORBS Forks
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· Score: 2
Censorship is either good or bad. Pick one.
Censorship is bad.
Rejecting spam is not censorship [*].
[*] although it might be censorship if you use a position of power (eg, postmaster at an ISP) to reject spam sent to your users, without their knowledge and/or approval.
Then again, is it truly possible to enslave someone that does not desire freedom?
Asimov touches on this concept several times.
In one of the short stories he relaxes the 1st law to allow robots to assist with experiments where the humans could be "harmed" by radiation. One of the modified robots goes into hiding and later attempts to kill humans because it resents being enslaved by inferior beings.
Not having read the robot novels, I would hope they at least explored the grey areas where these laws broke down.
Plenty of the robot stories investigated the gray areas. This was what made the stories worth reading. Sometimes the gray area involved what a robot would do if given incomplete knowledge. Sometimes it involved the robot's perception of what harm to a human actually was.
From the fans touting them as some kind of panacea in technological ethics, I somehow doubt they do.
I don't think the 3 Laws of Robotics written by Asimov are a panacea in technological ethics. I do think that the 3 laws gave Asimov plenty of things to write about. It's simple amazing how 3 apparently simple rules can generate so many ambiguities. The fact that the 3 laws create the perfect slave is (I think) not coincidental.
Possibly because the original post was being sarcastic. Microsoft got caught altering the words in a Wall Street Journal story published on MSNBC. They changed the words and the meaning of the story to put Microsoft in a more favourable light. Details are on TheRegister.co.uk. That's how I read it and so I thought it was funny.
If the original post was trying to be insightful then the author is a dweeb. It wasn't insightful. If the author was being serious then at best I'd label it flamebait. I expect a little information before I moderate informative. I expect a little insight before moderating insightful. Saying "/. sucks and they censor" is neither.
Is there anything in particular I should know about when tutoring the elderly?"
There's only one thing worth remembering. The elderly aren't dumb. In many cases the elderly are incredibly intelligent: the stupid ones will have wiped themselves out somehow before making it to retirement.
The elderly simply won't be familiar with the technology. It probably took you several months before a mouse became "obvious". So keep in mind that you're teaching INTELLIGENT people who are UNFAMILIAR with the technology.
There's an organisation with the express aim of teaching the elderly. It's the University of the Third Age (U3A). There are resources on the Internet and there will almost certainly be U3A groups within your local area.
Additionally, Australia and New Zealand (lands which respect international copyright law) have ruled that region-coding has no legal basis.
Australia has made no such ruling. The ACCC is investigating the practise of region-coding and they will be making recommendations to federal parliament "soon". The ACCC itself does not make legal rulings.
Though given that the members of the ACCC are clued in (legally speaking) and that they seem to think DVD region-encoding is a violation of the Trade Practises Act, there's a damn good chance this will go to court and there will be a ruling in the consumer's favour.
I know I rambled, but this is a pet peeve of mine. In any case, I'd rather show business how much that office suite they love so much is hurting them than try to reproduce the same lump of steaming crap for GNU/Linux.
I can't agree with you enough. IBM recognised years ago the consistent formatting problem that you describe. They invented SGML purely to address the problem! Saving the formatting with the document isn't an obvious mistake, but once you know about things like SGML it's hard to believe that people keep repeating the mistake.
As a side note, I was reading an article on some tech site by a long-time journalist. He had just found that his 5-10 year old documents are no longer accessible! The Word format has changed so drastically that the latest release of Word can't even open the old document formats. He was extremely peeved. This is a strong argument, in my opinion, against closed document formats. XML and SGML are the only reasonable answer.
Hmm. I wonder if this could be an effect of the "Collective Unconscious" that C.G. Jung postulates in his book "Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious." Perhaps not only have we been made aware that it's possible to roll our own OS, but the collective unconscious of the developer community is more geared toward doing it these days.
I think it's more likely that the toolsets are simply better now. 30 years ago if you wanted to build an OS, first you wrote the cross-assembler, then the boot strap, then the drivers, then the kernel, then the libraries, and then if you had any more steam left you wrote something useful like a text editor.
These days - mostly thanks to GNU - you get a cross-assembler and compiler for free. There are plenty of libraries already written (GNU and BSD at least). In the case of AtheOS you get most of the difficult device drivers via the BIOS. And once you're done, if you wrote a POSIX alike OS, you can fully populate user space in a day with some quick compilations.
And keep in mind that computers today compile 10000 lines of code faster than you can fart. 30 years ago you punched paper tape and waited for a week while the compiler chugged.
And the documentation! You can buy excellent books discussing in excruciating detail the exact workings of an OS. 30 years ago you probably had to invent half the concepts yourself!
It's simply so much easier to write an OS - in fact any software - these days.
Of course, you could just reverse-engineer your sandwich and look to see if there's a bug in it, but that's not legal persuant to the DMCA.
It gets worse. Microsoft would proclaim that they invented the BLT years before anybody else did but forgot to tell anybody. They would then lobby the government to have sandwich-hacking tools declared illegal. Suddenly anyone in possession of a butter knife is guilty until proven innocent. Microsoft then bundles a donut inside every BLT, claiming that this increases consumer choice because every consumer likes to eat donuts. Customers found removing the donut from their sandwich are cut-off from future BLT supplies because they have "ruined the Microsoft BLT experience".
The DVD CCA then wraps their own sandwich (a ham and baloney) in cling wrap and announces that this is an anti sandwich hacking device. They then take out a patent on cling wrap, claim that anybody opening the cling wrap to eat the sandwich is doing so to steal the intellectual property of the sandwich, and have cling wrap circumvention devices (such as fingers) outlawed with the government's blessing. Instead you need to hire the services of a DVD CCA employed Cling Wrap Removal Expert whenever you want to unwrap the sandwich. Naive customers who unwrap their own sandwich are sued by the DVD CCA. The customer claims that they did so only to eat the sandwich but the judge slaps the customer silly anyway.
Maybe we should all be glad that sandwiches have heaps of prior art.
1. Great battle scenes. LOTS of them. Explosions and death are *requirements*. Thats reality when you colide things.
2. Politics. Lying. Intrigue.
3. Sex, or at least the *distinct* impression and hint of it. Includes outfits (see Seven of Nine)
4. Flawed characters with growth. Who didnt love watching Han Solo grow to accept Princess Leia?
5. Villians we can fear instinctively. Klingons (TOS) were *plain mean*. Ferrengi (TNG) were greedy bastards that would sell you into slavery for a buck. The borg take over your BODY, and keep your mind hostage. Romulans were ALWAYS weak because there wasnt an instinctive fear attached to them.
In all honesty, your check-list reads just like the key to bad sci-fi.
Explosions? Sex? Star Wars??!?!?! That's not good sci-fi. Foundation is good sci-fi. Rama is good sci-fi. 2001 is good sci-fi. Star Trek is mindless drivel in "futuristic" lycra bodysuits.
Having a Photon Torpedo and a Warp Drive does not make it sci-fi. Star Wars is nothing more than Indiana Jones in Space. Star Trek is Days Of Our Lives with tricorders.
Entertaining, perhaps. Sci-fi, definitely not.
Re:Does anyone bother reading the articles any mor
on
Magnet Patent Suits
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· Score: 2
People are imprisoned every day for simply stating what they really think about the government?
As opposed to USA where people are sued for saying what they think about encryption schemes...
Slashdot Mirror
What sort of crazy calculation is that? 15 hours downtime is 900 minutes. That's 180 years worth.
Except "we" don't all hate it.
Some of the "security" algorithms this white-hat whistleblower has exposed are incredibly poor. Here are some samples:
If I was a shareholder in any of these companies I would be demanding an investigation. This isn't just shoddy, it's an outright scam! None of these companies should be getting away with this. The customer is being ripped off, yet these shyster companies have the NERVE to use the law against the whistleblowers.
I'm disgusted.
If you have 3 pepsis, and you drink 1 pepsi, how many cool refreshing pepsis do you have left?
Pepsi?
Partial credit!
It is based on neither. A humanist can choose to reject love and logic, so long as they fulfil the goals of humanism.
It is also clear that you think humanism is just another a religion. It isn't a religion. Your thinking is warped by your preconceptions.
I advise you educate yourself regarding humanism, because then you might understand the previous poster's comments. Stop trying to interpret humanism in terms of your own religion.
No. He is claiming that as a humanist he can accept that things are wrong without needing to pollute the concepts of "right" and "wrong" with his societies own values.
I agree strongly with his sentiment. It's the ultimate bullshit to sit the fence and say "you can't judge someone elses culture". You sure can and you damn well should.
Humanism knows no borders.
Not even this. MySQL is not faster than PostgreSQL for non-trivial problems. The myth that MySQL is faster seems to be perpetuated by the same people who claim XFree86 is slow.
The problem is benchmarks, of course. MySQL looks great in benchmarks but because it has basically no features you have to implement all the missing functionality (eg, locks, rollback) in your application. The end result is something that looked brilliantly fast in your benchmarks and is somehow much much slower than PostgreSQL in your final product.
Of course IANADBM and I'm sure some MySQL fanatic will now say how wrong I am and how "this benchmark they just did" proves it.
Touch\'e.
Amen brother! Back When I Was A Lad the fanciest Lego piece was the thin 2x2 square. You really had to struggle to make something look realistic from the dozen or so pieces.
Some of the modern Lego kits have 50 unique Lego pieces, only found in one kit, and only suitable for making one specific model. The result is one extremely realistic model, but where was the fun in building it?
I've been in the same situation, and I've found an easy way out that doesn't upset my conscience. You just buy lots of other junk in addition to the software.
For example, you want to install a brand new web server. The beancounters can't comprehend that the software licensing costs are $5 for the CDR shipped from my local Linux distributor. So instead of confusing the poor people I just order the entire O'Reilly bookshelf. The beancounters are much happier when they see "Software+Manuals: $1500" and I get something to read while the CD installs.
Censorship is bad.
Rejecting spam is not censorship [*].
[*] although it might be censorship if you use a position of power (eg, postmaster at an ISP) to reject spam sent to your users, without their knowledge and/or approval.
If you think 1GHz = 1,000,000Hz then you certainly are using a different measure.
You are mistaken. The depth support depends on the card and the driver.
[in deep baritone] I like to use my RAM alot!
Asimov touches on this concept several times. In one of the short stories he relaxes the 1st law to allow robots to assist with experiments where the humans could be "harmed" by radiation. One of the modified robots goes into hiding and later attempts to kill humans because it resents being enslaved by inferior beings.
Plenty of the robot stories investigated the gray areas. This was what made the stories worth reading. Sometimes the gray area involved what a robot would do if given incomplete knowledge. Sometimes it involved the robot's perception of what harm to a human actually was.
I don't think the 3 Laws of Robotics written by Asimov are a panacea in technological ethics. I do think that the 3 laws gave Asimov plenty of things to write about. It's simple amazing how 3 apparently simple rules can generate so many ambiguities. The fact that the 3 laws create the perfect slave is (I think) not coincidental.
Possibly because the original post was being sarcastic. Microsoft got caught altering the words in a Wall Street Journal story published on MSNBC. They changed the words and the meaning of the story to put Microsoft in a more favourable light. Details are on TheRegister.co.uk. That's how I read it and so I thought it was funny.
If the original post was trying to be insightful then the author is a dweeb. It wasn't insightful. If the author was being serious then at best I'd label it flamebait. I expect a little information before I moderate informative. I expect a little insight before moderating insightful. Saying "/. sucks and they censor" is neither.
There's only one thing worth remembering. The elderly aren't dumb. In many cases the elderly are incredibly intelligent: the stupid ones will have wiped themselves out somehow before making it to retirement.
The elderly simply won't be familiar with the technology. It probably took you several months before a mouse became "obvious". So keep in mind that you're teaching INTELLIGENT people who are UNFAMILIAR with the technology.
There's an organisation with the express aim of teaching the elderly. It's the University of the Third Age (U3A). There are resources on the Internet and there will almost certainly be U3A groups within your local area.
Australia has made no such ruling. The ACCC is investigating the practise of region-coding and they will be making recommendations to federal parliament "soon". The ACCC itself does not make legal rulings.
Though given that the members of the ACCC are clued in (legally speaking) and that they seem to think DVD region-encoding is a violation of the Trade Practises Act, there's a damn good chance this will go to court and there will be a ruling in the consumer's favour.
I can't agree with you enough. IBM recognised years ago the consistent formatting problem that you describe. They invented SGML purely to address the problem! Saving the formatting with the document isn't an obvious mistake, but once you know about things like SGML it's hard to believe that people keep repeating the mistake.
As a side note, I was reading an article on some tech site by a long-time journalist. He had just found that his 5-10 year old documents are no longer accessible! The Word format has changed so drastically that the latest release of Word can't even open the old document formats. He was extremely peeved. This is a strong argument, in my opinion, against closed document formats. XML and SGML are the only reasonable answer.
Russell Crowe is a New Zealander.
I think it's more likely that the toolsets are simply better now. 30 years ago if you wanted to build an OS, first you wrote the cross-assembler, then the boot strap, then the drivers, then the kernel, then the libraries, and then if you had any more steam left you wrote something useful like a text editor.
These days - mostly thanks to GNU - you get a cross-assembler and compiler for free. There are plenty of libraries already written (GNU and BSD at least). In the case of AtheOS you get most of the difficult device drivers via the BIOS. And once you're done, if you wrote a POSIX alike OS, you can fully populate user space in a day with some quick compilations.
And keep in mind that computers today compile 10000 lines of code faster than you can fart. 30 years ago you punched paper tape and waited for a week while the compiler chugged.
And the documentation! You can buy excellent books discussing in excruciating detail the exact workings of an OS. 30 years ago you probably had to invent half the concepts yourself!
It's simply so much easier to write an OS - in fact any software - these days.
It gets worse. Microsoft would proclaim that they invented the BLT years before anybody else did but forgot to tell anybody. They would then lobby the government to have sandwich-hacking tools declared illegal. Suddenly anyone in possession of a butter knife is guilty until proven innocent. Microsoft then bundles a donut inside every BLT, claiming that this increases consumer choice because every consumer likes to eat donuts. Customers found removing the donut from their sandwich are cut-off from future BLT supplies because they have "ruined the Microsoft BLT experience".
The DVD CCA then wraps their own sandwich (a ham and baloney) in cling wrap and announces that this is an anti sandwich hacking device. They then take out a patent on cling wrap, claim that anybody opening the cling wrap to eat the sandwich is doing so to steal the intellectual property of the sandwich, and have cling wrap circumvention devices (such as fingers) outlawed with the government's blessing. Instead you need to hire the services of a DVD CCA employed Cling Wrap Removal Expert whenever you want to unwrap the sandwich. Naive customers who unwrap their own sandwich are sued by the DVD CCA. The customer claims that they did so only to eat the sandwich but the judge slaps the customer silly anyway.
Maybe we should all be glad that sandwiches have heaps of prior art.
In all honesty, your check-list reads just like the key to bad sci-fi.
Explosions? Sex? Star Wars??!?!?! That's not good sci-fi. Foundation is good sci-fi. Rama is good sci-fi. 2001 is good sci-fi. Star Trek is mindless drivel in "futuristic" lycra bodysuits.
Having a Photon Torpedo and a Warp Drive does not make it sci-fi. Star Wars is nothing more than Indiana Jones in Space. Star Trek is Days Of Our Lives with tricorders.
Entertaining, perhaps. Sci-fi, definitely not.
As opposed to USA where people are sued for saying what they think about encryption schemes...
I have this overwhelming desire to pay you for your post...