The province of Zeeland is in the Netherlands. So are the provinces of North and South Holland. Holland is just a part of the Netherlands. Zeeland is located south of Holland:-)
We can sit around laughing or bitching or whining or moaning, but what will happen if there turns out to be code in Linux that we dont have the rights to, either by way of trade secrets or patents?
They distribute their own distro of Linux, Caldera Linux. So all the code there is in Linux, they have distributed themselves under the GPL. So we have the rights to it. This is really quite funny:-).
It's all very well and good to want to provide communications access to those that don't have it, but do they *need* it?
I would have thought that tackling the causes of Africa's poverty, rather than attempt to "boost it into the 21st century" (whatever that means) would be a more effective and longer-lasting solution.
There's no way they're going to get out of the poverty without education. They need to be able to compete with Western countries. For many people, books are too expensive, and also just unavailable. On the Internet however, there's a wealth of information about basically everything. For ambitious Africans who want to get away from poverty, the Internet is invaluable.
Bacteria have been found living in nuclear reactors, sealed in caves for millions of years, and living in ecosystems fueled by volcanic vents. There is no reason why there might not be life on Europa. Any doubt about its being there is an illusion, thrown up by theories that have been demonstrated to be utterly false, or at best, very incomplete.
Any doubt about its being there is an illusion? Man, we don't have any evidence at all of life there! Get some perspective, please.
My guess as to why he plead guilty:
The Department of Gestapo... err Justice goons threatened to hold him without a bail hearing or a trial for a long time (much like the government did to Kevin Mitnick), and told him it'd be a lot easier in the long run to plead guilty rather than fight.
This is one of the reasons why it'll soon be illegal for Dutch courts to extradite people to the US. There is so much pressure on accepting a plea bargain that basically nobody gets a fair trial anymore.
The other reason is that agreements for extraditions of Dutch citizens to the US always state that they will be allowed to sit out their jail time in a Dutch prison - but this never actually happened in the last ten years.
Did America have a serious terrorist problem back in 1964?
Do you have one now? You had three hijackings on a day one and a half years ago, and the bastards were lucky and managed to take far more people with them than they expected. But that's all.
It seems like a good start would be to stop calling it a "law," a term that has some kind of meaning, in a scientific sense.
"Law" isn't a scientific term. Science deals with theories that try to describe the world. You seem to imply there are some "special" theories that get promoted to "Law", but that's hardly scientific. Some of these things get names, and the names sometimes include "Law". But that's just a name, it doesn't mean they're different from theories that get names with "Theory" in it.
For instance, the "Laws of Thermodynamics" are a theory. A great theory.
Anyway, of course Moore's thing is just never going to be true for a long period, it's not even a try to describe the physical world. It's not as if it's still going to be true a billion years after the last human died. I call it "Moore's short term observation".
Why on earth make whitespace vital to the compiler? For business reasons I have to edit my programs in Windows but run them on Linux. Editing out all those ^M's is a big pain.
That has nothing to do with significant whitespace - it only occurs at the end of lines, not at the beginning.
Most Linux distros have tools named 'dos2unix' and 'unix2dos' that can do the conversion for you.
Re:Think of the back-end info this gives them
on
Google buys Pyra Labs
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This isn't about Google pumping up Blogger, or BlogSpot. This is about them acquiring direct access to blog data.
Also, Google News works great, except it is sometimes slow to react to current events (Shuttle breakdown took a few hours to appear or so?). Blogs are known to be very fast information suppliers if a crisis is going on. Perhaps News can use the Blogs to spot something important quickly.
I believe that Computer Science != Software Engineering. The job I actually ended up in is a programming job, which means that not all the CS I had is relevant. But that is good - they aren't meant to be the same thing.
For instance, in CS, to calculate the time efficiency of some algorithm, some really hairy analysis may be needed to decide it's actually O(n log log n). This is important as a part of CS. What is important for CS is not defined by what is important for getting a programming job. The science is important for its own sake, as a branch of math.
That said, logic, sets, graphs, relations, discrete algebra - the "discrete stuff" so to say, is both what I like best and what I think is central to CS.
I seem to fit your description pretty neatly. But I disagree on the 'no excuse' part. If I help somebody with a simple page that reaches 80% of all Internet users, why does that oblige me to figure out how to make it work for the other 20%?
You seem to believe it's actually hard work to make a standards compliant web page. It's not. Any simple page will work fine on any browser.
It's only when you go out of your way to use unnecessary non-portable stuff that suddenly it only works on a few browsers. And the worst thing is, in most cases, it's easier to do the same thing the right way.
Of course, it may be that if you use stuff like Frontpage, that it will include MS-only stuff. I don't know, I never used it. It seems that you don't either.
It is essential that every programmer in a big system only thinks about his own problem, and uses the other parts as a black box.
Say I want to use some library. Then it has a documented API, which explains how I can use it. I don't need to know more. For me as a programmer, that means:
Simplicity - it is a limit on what I need to understand.
Compatibility - if a new version comes out, which changes implementation details but leaves the API intact, programs that don't make assumptions about these details won't break.
Portability - if there is a new implementation of the same API by another vendor, I can (theoretically) just change to that implementation and nothing changes.
I'm certain that without these black boxes, no big software engineering project would be possible. The human mind can't keep track of everything in a whole system at once (except for some simple cases - like embedded systems, perhaps).
It is done sometimes - I believe perl looks inside a file struct when reading/writing files on some platforms to get faster I/O than standard C, for example. But that's only as an optimization after coding the general case, and even then I don't believe it's a good idea.
For hardware, the story is much the same. Any speedups specific for the hardware are optimizations, and they should only be looked at when the program works, after profiling, when there's a speed problem, and the algorithm can't be improved.
Remember the rules of optimization: 1) Don't do it. 2) (for experts only) Don't do it yet.
Black boxes in software engineering are your friend.
If you look up Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, you'll see that in any axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved within the axioms of the system. So if I propose that there does exist some (unspecified) mathimatical way to break that cipher, you won't be able to 100% conclusively _disprove_ it.
Huh? That doesn't follow. For instance, if you propose that there exists some unspecified way to break a one time pad, then I can 100% conclusively disprove that.
Godel demonstrated just one, very convoluted example of a formula that could not be proven, and neither can its negation. That doesn't generalize at all to the sort of thing you're making it into ("I can say anything about math and you can't disprove it", basically).
Furthermore, calling a proof "100% conclusive" is a bit weird in math. Either it's a proof or it's not.
Even though this is probably bogus, the prize for breaking it looks interesting
In an attempt to prove VME's trength, Meganet began offering prizes such as a Ferrari or $1m. to anyone who could break into a VME-protected file. So far, two million people have attempted to crack the code, but none have managed.
Yeah, but of course that contest means nothing if the algorithm isn't public. It relies on security by obscurity if it's not, which means that if it's not broken it doesn't say much about the breakability of the algorithm. And considering their file is probably one line of text and the key is a million random bits, gee, maybe that's unbreakable! Again, means nothing.
Now, they do have an extraordinary claim, and one that I too don't believe. I don't believe that any encryption is unbreakable, but that doesn't mean it is "snake oil". It could still be really really tough to crack.
Yeah, but read the quote, typical snake oil... "The security community just kept throwing stones at us" (ie, pointing out fatal flaws), "but they didn't take the time to *understand* it!" (read "I don't understand it myself").
It sounds like they did put it up for review somewhere, and it was shot down, and they now think that's unfair.
They point at websites where credit card numbers where stolen, and say their unbreakable encryption will help there.
Well, surely those weren't encrypted, but were simply stored in some directory in unencrypted text? Almost always it's just stupid security that's the problem. Any sort of modern encryption would have been good enough, too.
And if you can't keep crackers away from your credit card numbers, why would you be able to keep them away from your 1Mb key?
From the article: "Most of the encryption community called our product snake oil," says Backal. "Everyone competed to throw stones at us and didn't bother trying to understand the product."
So, 1) They have an unbelievable claim (unbreakable encryption) and 2) the extremely knowledgeable encrypton community, who have much experience with breaking encryption, has seen their product and calls it snake oil.
All those irritating managers with their incomprehensible buzzwords. I'll just go back to work.
I'm currently writing a Web App for our intranet where we try to use mostly Open Source (or rather, anything that's free as in beer - since when is beer free anyway?), using J2EE on Tomcat, with Java Server Pages because dumb CGIs are just too damn fast, or something. We have no design phase to speak of but that's ok since we plan to throw this version away. I connect to MySQL with JDBC but I'm going to need some sort of ODBC bridge to also connect it with Access, if we go that route. I must seperate the presentation tier and the business tier, and somehow magic a third tier into existence because that's J2EE - or so it seems. Some HTML hacks in the same office use a language called PHP, but that's not a real language. My main concern is to sneak Python in somewhere.
(That could have been much worse, but I thought I'd stay close to the truth - it's easily enough to scare managers away:))
Almost everybody seems to be suggesting programming language books. Useful for programmers, but not quite enough for a complete "tech" library, nor very useful for people who don't program yet and don't think they should.
Also, anyone who says the Knuth Bible isn't academic but high school level is totally out of his mind.
I think they should have books that inspire people, and be very readable and not purely technical. Unfortunately I don't own that many of them myself, but how about
Ed Regis - Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition
Godel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid (perhaps not a "tech" book though - but any library should have it)
Oliver Sacks - Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Childhood
And hrm... I too know more about programming:-). I can't imagine a student learning programming these days without heavy use of the Internet. References are online and quickly outdated. I'd say get a few books that teach the first steps - "Learn to program using Python" by Alan Gauld is one. It shows most examples in three different languages (Python, TCL, QBasic iirc), and starts with the very basics.
Code Complete is also very good, but not for beginners - it describes what makes good code good code. If you get any Java books, also get "Effective Java - Programming Language Guide" by Joshua Bloch.
I guess there's little chance of getting a Linux box there on which people can get accounts to try programming a bit?:-)
Most people won't want to dive into programming right away, I think. Get a book about making web pages. HTML, JavaScript, PHP perhaps. Or Flash. Actually, from what I hear Flash may be perfect to start in as it's easy to make cool looking things - but I don't have experience with it.
Moreover, I know that even without Cygwin there are ways to do this with native DOS tools -- I know this because the first time I installed Linux, the RedHat documentation described how to write a disc image to the floppy drive from a DOS prompt.
Rawrite.exe is a utility that you find on the RH CD. It's not a standard DOS utility.
So, How did the universe get created. Does this mean that there was actually a "beginning of time" as far as we can tell? What was that point? What existed before then? Since matter can't be created nor destroyed, where did it come from? (though that is a question beyond most planes of though, IMO)
The Big Bang was the beginning of time. Therefore, there is no "before then".
But then, I would guess that most people have been warned not to use their "real" mail address for the hazards I mentioned, making them as careful with their addresses as I am with mine. This would contradict my mesures beeing that effective when others still seem to get massive amounts of spam?
I refuse to stop using my real address wherever I want to because of spam. So the email address above this comment is my real home mail address. I also use it on Usenet (but I stopped posting). People who want to reach me must be able to do so, a bit of spam won't kill me.
That said, the guy who runs the incoming mail server here is rather aggressively anti-spam, dropping subnets when the only mail they ever send is spam, using RBL lists, etc. I get at most 10 spams per day. And I expect a lot of Mozilla's soon to be released spam filter.
Slashdot Mirror
Others are getting pedantic, so so can I...
The province of Zeeland is in the Netherlands. So are the provinces of North and South Holland. Holland is just a part of the Netherlands. Zeeland is located south of Holland :-)
We can sit around laughing or bitching or whining or moaning, but what will happen if there turns out to be code in Linux that we dont have the rights to, either by way of trade secrets or patents?
They distribute their own distro of Linux, Caldera Linux. So all the code there is in Linux, they have distributed themselves under the GPL. So we have the rights to it. This is really quite funny :-).
It might be nice if moderators also got the advanc reading.
But then you wouldn't want to lose your last mod point.
It's all very well and good to want to provide communications access to those that don't have it, but do they *need* it? I would have thought that tackling the causes of Africa's poverty, rather than attempt to "boost it into the 21st century" (whatever that means) would be a more effective and longer-lasting solution.
There's no way they're going to get out of the poverty without education. They need to be able to compete with Western countries. For many people, books are too expensive, and also just unavailable. On the Internet however, there's a wealth of information about basically everything. For ambitious Africans who want to get away from poverty, the Internet is invaluable.
Bacteria have been found living in nuclear reactors, sealed in caves for millions of years, and living in ecosystems fueled by volcanic vents. There is no reason why there might not be life on Europa. Any doubt about its being there is an illusion, thrown up by theories that have been demonstrated to be utterly false, or at best, very incomplete.
Any doubt about its being there is an illusion? Man, we don't have any evidence at all of life there! Get some perspective, please.
My guess as to why he plead guilty: The Department of Gestapo... err Justice goons threatened to hold him without a bail hearing or a trial for a long time (much like the government did to Kevin Mitnick), and told him it'd be a lot easier in the long run to plead guilty rather than fight.
This is one of the reasons why it'll soon be illegal for Dutch courts to extradite people to the US. There is so much pressure on accepting a plea bargain that basically nobody gets a fair trial anymore.
The other reason is that agreements for extraditions of Dutch citizens to the US always state that they will be allowed to sit out their jail time in a Dutch prison - but this never actually happened in the last ten years.
Did America have a serious terrorist problem back in 1964?
Do you have one now? You had three hijackings on a day one and a half years ago, and the bastards were lucky and managed to take far more people with them than they expected. But that's all.
You have a propaganda problem in 2003.
It seems like a good start would be to stop calling it a "law," a term that has some kind of meaning, in a scientific sense.
"Law" isn't a scientific term. Science deals with theories that try to describe the world. You seem to imply there are some "special" theories that get promoted to "Law", but that's hardly scientific. Some of these things get names, and the names sometimes include "Law". But that's just a name, it doesn't mean they're different from theories that get names with "Theory" in it.
For instance, the "Laws of Thermodynamics" are a theory. A great theory.
Anyway, of course Moore's thing is just never going to be true for a long period, it's not even a try to describe the physical world. It's not as if it's still going to be true a billion years after the last human died. I call it "Moore's short term observation".
Why on earth make whitespace vital to the compiler? For business reasons I have to edit my programs in Windows but run them on Linux. Editing out all those ^M's is a big pain.
That has nothing to do with significant whitespace - it only occurs at the end of lines, not at the beginning.
Most Linux distros have tools named 'dos2unix' and 'unix2dos' that can do the conversion for you.
This isn't about Google pumping up Blogger, or BlogSpot. This is about them acquiring direct access to blog data.
Also, Google News works great, except it is sometimes slow to react to current events (Shuttle breakdown took a few hours to appear or so?). Blogs are known to be very fast information suppliers if a crisis is going on. Perhaps News can use the Blogs to spot something important quickly.
I believe that Computer Science != Software Engineering. The job I actually ended up in is a programming job, which means that not all the CS I had is relevant. But that is good - they aren't meant to be the same thing.
For instance, in CS, to calculate the time efficiency of some algorithm, some really hairy analysis may be needed to decide it's actually O(n log log n). This is important as a part of CS. What is important for CS is not defined by what is important for getting a programming job. The science is important for its own sake, as a branch of math.
That said, logic, sets, graphs, relations, discrete algebra - the "discrete stuff" so to say, is both what I like best and what I think is central to CS.
I seem to fit your description pretty neatly. But I disagree on the 'no excuse' part. If I help somebody with a simple page that reaches 80% of all Internet users, why does that oblige me to figure out how to make it work for the other 20%?
You seem to believe it's actually hard work to make a standards compliant web page. It's not. Any simple page will work fine on any browser.
It's only when you go out of your way to use unnecessary non-portable stuff that suddenly it only works on a few browsers. And the worst thing is, in most cases, it's easier to do the same thing the right way.
Of course, it may be that if you use stuff like Frontpage, that it will include MS-only stuff. I don't know, I never used it. It seems that you don't either.
In Cyberspace Russia, all those hackers will try to port Linux to YOU!
It is essential that every programmer in a big system only thinks about his own problem, and uses the other parts as a black box.
Say I want to use some library. Then it has a documented API, which explains how I can use it. I don't need to know more. For me as a programmer, that means:
I'm certain that without these black boxes, no big software engineering project would be possible. The human mind can't keep track of everything in a whole system at once (except for some simple cases - like embedded systems, perhaps).
It is done sometimes - I believe perl looks inside a file struct when reading/writing files on some platforms to get faster I/O than standard C, for example. But that's only as an optimization after coding the general case, and even then I don't believe it's a good idea.
For hardware, the story is much the same. Any speedups specific for the hardware are optimizations, and they should only be looked at when the program works, after profiling, when there's a speed problem, and the algorithm can't be improved.
Remember the rules of optimization: 1) Don't do it. 2) (for experts only) Don't do it yet.
Black boxes in software engineering are your friend.
If you look up Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, you'll see that in any axiomatic mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved within the axioms of the system. So if I propose that there does exist some (unspecified) mathimatical way to break that cipher, you won't be able to 100% conclusively _disprove_ it.
Huh? That doesn't follow. For instance, if you propose that there exists some unspecified way to break a one time pad, then I can 100% conclusively disprove that.
Godel demonstrated just one, very convoluted example of a formula that could not be proven, and neither can its negation. That doesn't generalize at all to the sort of thing you're making it into ("I can say anything about math and you can't disprove it", basically).
Furthermore, calling a proof "100% conclusive" is a bit weird in math. Either it's a proof or it's not.
Even though this is probably bogus, the prize for breaking it looks interesting
Yeah, but of course that contest means nothing if the algorithm isn't public. It relies on security by obscurity if it's not, which means that if it's not broken it doesn't say much about the breakability of the algorithm. And considering their file is probably one line of text and the key is a million random bits, gee, maybe that's unbreakable! Again, means nothing.
But you knew that.
Now, they do have an extraordinary claim, and one that I too don't believe. I don't believe that any encryption is unbreakable, but that doesn't mean it is "snake oil". It could still be really really tough to crack.
Yeah, but read the quote, typical snake oil... "The security community just kept throwing stones at us" (ie, pointing out fatal flaws), "but they didn't take the time to *understand* it!" (read "I don't understand it myself").
It sounds like they did put it up for review somewhere, and it was shot down, and they now think that's unfair.
They point at websites where credit card numbers where stolen, and say their unbreakable encryption will help there.
Well, surely those weren't encrypted, but were simply stored in some directory in unencrypted text? Almost always it's just stupid security that's the problem. Any sort of modern encryption would have been good enough, too.
And if you can't keep crackers away from your credit card numbers, why would you be able to keep them away from your 1Mb key?
From the article:
"Most of the encryption community called our product snake oil," says Backal. "Everyone competed to throw stones at us and didn't bother trying to understand the product."
So, 1) They have an unbelievable claim (unbreakable encryption) and 2) the extremely knowledgeable encrypton community, who have much experience with breaking encryption, has seen their product and calls it snake oil.
It is snake oil. Move along.
All those irritating managers with their incomprehensible buzzwords. I'll just go back to work.
I'm currently writing a Web App for our intranet where we try to use mostly Open Source (or rather, anything that's free as in beer - since when is beer free anyway?), using J2EE on Tomcat, with Java Server Pages because dumb CGIs are just too damn fast, or something. We have no design phase to speak of but that's ok since we plan to throw this version away. I connect to MySQL with JDBC but I'm going to need some sort of ODBC bridge to also connect it with Access, if we go that route. I must seperate the presentation tier and the business tier, and somehow magic a third tier into existence because that's J2EE - or so it seems. Some HTML hacks in the same office use a language called PHP, but that's not a real language. My main concern is to sneak Python in somewhere.
(That could have been much worse, but I thought I'd stay close to the truth - it's easily enough to scare managers away :))
Almost everybody seems to be suggesting programming language books. Useful for programmers, but not quite enough for a complete "tech" library, nor very useful for people who don't program yet and don't think they should.
Also, anyone who says the Knuth Bible isn't academic but high school level is totally out of his mind.
I think they should have books that inspire people, and be very readable and not purely technical. Unfortunately I don't own that many of them myself, but how about
And hrm... I too know more about programming :-). I can't imagine a student learning programming these days without heavy use of the Internet. References are online and quickly outdated. I'd say get a few books that teach the first steps - "Learn to program using Python" by Alan Gauld is one. It shows most examples in three different languages (Python, TCL, QBasic iirc), and starts with the very basics.
Code Complete is also very good, but not for beginners - it describes what makes good code good code. If you get any Java books, also get "Effective Java - Programming Language Guide" by Joshua Bloch.
I guess there's little chance of getting a Linux box there on which people can get accounts to try programming a bit? :-)
Most people won't want to dive into programming right away, I think. Get a book about making web pages. HTML, JavaScript, PHP perhaps. Or Flash. Actually, from what I hear Flash may be perfect to start in as it's easy to make cool looking things - but I don't have experience with it.
I'll stop rambling.
Moreover, I know that even without Cygwin there are ways to do this with native DOS tools -- I know this because the first time I installed Linux, the RedHat documentation described how to write a disc image to the floppy drive from a DOS prompt.
Rawrite.exe is a utility that you find on the RH CD. It's not a standard DOS utility.
So, How did the universe get created. Does this mean that there was actually a "beginning of time" as far as we can tell? What was that point? What existed before then? Since matter can't be created nor destroyed, where did it come from? (though that is a question beyond most planes of though, IMO)
The Big Bang was the beginning of time. Therefore, there is no "before then".
But then, I would guess that most people have been warned not to use their "real" mail address for the hazards I mentioned, making them as careful with their addresses as I am with mine. This would contradict my mesures beeing that effective when others still seem to get massive amounts of spam?
I refuse to stop using my real address wherever I want to because of spam. So the email address above this comment is my real home mail address. I also use it on Usenet (but I stopped posting). People who want to reach me must be able to do so, a bit of spam won't kill me.
That said, the guy who runs the incoming mail server here is rather aggressively anti-spam, dropping subnets when the only mail they ever send is spam, using RBL lists, etc. I get at most 10 spams per day. And I expect a lot of Mozilla's soon to be released spam filter.
Nonsense. I can easily hack into a UNIX system without nothing more than a floppy disk and the power switch.
A floppy? How quaint. Our Linux boxen at the uni don't have drives.