So your answer is what? Continue with the losing proposition that is the status quo? lol. That isn't any answer at all.
My point is there is good money being made by people making the tools that the crooks use. Take that money out of the hands of those people. Its not going to solve the problem but sooner or later everyone has to realize that there IS no "better" solution. At least it mitigates a part of the problem.
Of course if you have a better idea, then by all means go out there and make your multi-billion $ fortune hocking it! I got a hint for you though, it isn't going to be found "inside the box".
We should just give away copies of all the best hack tools. As soon as they appear they should be all over the net for free. What will this do? Simple. It removes the monetary incentive to write good hacking tools. If what any idiot can download for free is as good as it gets then the money is sucked right out of the market for supplying tools.
On top of that when you have every idiot out there using the best tools vendors WILL be forced to deal with the flaws a lot more quickly and release higher quality code to start with. It won't stop the people using the tools from using them and stealing money, but nothing is going to stop that.
The first property crime happened the day property was invented. Nothing we do is going to stop it, but we can suck some of the wind out of the blackhats sails.
I can go you one better even, lol. My boss dropped Mint on his laptop on his own initiative. I won't say he's totally tech illiterate but he's not any kind of genius at that kind of stuff either. Give him Power Basic and he can write some simple ETL scripts and he knows enough to set up stuff thats not too complex. Still, Mint gave him no problems, came up onto his wireless network fine and does everything he normally needs to do. When I fired the machine up the other day to take a look it was pretty nice. There are a few Ubuntuisms that don't excite me that much, but for the average user its a VERY clean looking setup Gnome isn't my favorite but I had no problems and he's happy with it.
I'm confident that any legacy software issues aside I could set up an office using any of several decent desktop distros like Ubuntu, openSuSe, Fedora, or Mandriva and things would work fine. Drop in a CentOS based LDAP server for centralized auth and file serving. Probably not quite as slick as a Windows small office setup, but a LOT cheaper and less costly to support.
Really I don't quite get why OpenMoko exists as an independent project either except that nobody seemed able to agree to all get together. Fragmentation in server and desktop space isn't a big deal and the choices made available to users are valuable, but in the mobile marketplace those considerations really don't apply so much. All that is really left as a justification for various mobile Linux projects has always been no more than technical disagreements about how to implement certain things and a desire for various vendors like Intel to focus on elements specific to their hardware architecture.
I think its been inevitable that at some point all these various mobile Linux projects would collapse together into one uber project. Some may instead simply fade away of course, but I suspect eventually even Android will be sucked in. OpenMoko too is unlikely to continue to exist as a completely distinct project for too much longer.
Yeah, as a few others have said, I agree with you and I was going to post something similar. At least up to a point. Most software development projects are highly cooperative affairs and its rarely a matter of success hinging on one's brilliance as a coder. Still, you have to be able to contribute and at least some members of the team need good design skills of various types.
The reality is that successful projects mostly succeed because someone in charge is good at utilizing the strengths of the other team members. Even a technically weak team can do quite well on many classes of projects if well led. CS courses have gotten better at teaching team building but still overemphasize coding. One wonders if some of the 'cheaters' might not actually be on the right track...
If I had to guess I'd say Skylon will probably fail. Your right, its the only viable approach in the long run, and they may well be able to produce an operational vehicle. The trick will be to make an operational vehicle that is cheap, safe, and reliable. I think basically its one of those "pick 2 of the these three" situations.
The fundamental problem with ALL rockets is you're operating at the very most hairy edge of what is possible. Everything has to be feather light, withstand huge aerodynamic stresses, monster vibration, large temperature variations and heat flux. Its a real nightmare. Even simple stuff is hard. All we worked on were avionics packages. Way simpler than structure or power. Still, try to make a piece of electronics that has to be able to work with 100% certainty after sitting on a pad for weeks, survive 180db plus vibration at all modes, temperatures from -20C to 200C. Oh, and weigh next to nothing of course. One tiny box with the simplest function, millions of dollars to develop and maybe $250k a copy. You could build the same thing for $100 if all it had to do was work in a shirtsleeve environment.
Power systems? OMG. An SSME is the size of a VW bus and has the power output of California. Its insane.
SSTO is basically a dead issue. Nobody has figured out how to build one. It may not even be feasible to build such a thing. Having worked in the field I can tell you one thing, its JUST barely possible to hurl stuff into orbit at all. The engineering is a nightmare. We aren't even close to anything like SSTO and its not even clear that if you could build such a thing it would be cheaper than disposable rockets.
The best idea anyone has come up with yet that is provably viable is essentially what the Russians do, a big dumb rocket. The concept could be pushed further but essentially the idea is you build a rocket using simple low performance systems. It will be BIG, but it can be built cheap and mass produced. Reliability comes from simplicity and when its cheap you really can launch on a fairly aggressive schedule and make it even more reliable.
The whole concept was mapped out pretty thoroughly in early 70's and many components were even built and tested. Engines fabricated out of ordinary grade materials with what were called "shipyard tolerances" etc. Totally gravity flow design with no turbo pumps or other moving parts. They're just big, but so what?
Sorry guys, but I do a LOT of really large perl based projects. CPAN is fine. Hell, it works better than the supposedly wonderful rpm and apt based package managers. At least when you install from CPAN you know the stuff WORKS because it actually gets tested. The CPAN dependency system works fine too. All I can conclude is that people who have had problems with it have a whole lot of RPM installed packages that were guess what? BADLY PACKAGED by the distro.
I agree, it would be great if CPAN and package managers coordinated. There are things CPAN certainly lacks, like transactions and any real ability to uninstall. What it does do, it does well.
Yeah, I'm just saying, when you look at it from the perspective of people on the other end of it, they see something that doesn't always look good. Eh, ultimately someone always has to get the blame for whatever isn't right with the world.
I think you miss a lot of the details of what goes on. You only get a very 10,000 foot view of things at best from the news media, if they even report something at all.
Look at the details of the kinds of low level agreements the US makes with other countries. Look at the way we refuse to participate on an equal basis in major areas of international law. The US is not often willing to live by the same rules it wants the rest of the world to follow. Go to some of these developing countries and look at what's actually going on on the ground. Its a LOT uglier than you think.
I'm not really a believer in some kind of "the US is evil" meme. In a lot of cases its the opposite, but at the same time the way we operate when it comes down to the details is like its a zero sum game.
Look at most of the money we supposedly contribute to development overseas. 86% or so of it is tied up with stipulations that it has to be spent HERE. Oh, you can have this 50 million $ to build X piece of infrastructure, but you have to hire Bechtel to do all the work, at some ridiculously inflated prices and all the jobs go to overseas contractors.
Of course there are a whole slew of things we never get credit for either, but there's a heck of a lot of arm twisting that goes on. And a heck of a lot of supporting of some very shady people that do a lot of very shady things behind the scenes.
It would take a really serious amount of in-depth analysis of the server application to even approach knowing what the efficiency impact of using a compiled language vs an interpreter would be on any specific stack. Or even stacks in general. Plus we don't even know what it really means to be "using PHP". What is PHP doing? Is it processing templates, doing just some post or pre processing with some kind of XML pipeline in the middle, how is the PHP deployed, etc?
It is simply ridiculous to make any assertions and claim accuracy for them. I'm no PHP fan boy by a LONG shot, but I know from hard experience that often a higher level tool which is optimized for a particular job can get the job done quite a lot MORE efficiently than a lower level one that isn't.
It is pretty hard to say which is governing better. The US system just seems rather slow to adapt.
Personally I think we could use a major reformulation of institutions over here right now, but then again I'm not sure I think there's a process for doing that which wouldn't create something worse.
I don't the US has been a particularly harsh "master" either. Nor is it really all that correct to say that at any given point in history one group of people really has anything like total control. Really it seems to me that history shows a repeating pattern of dominance by one power, which fails to realize the positive way forward, followed by another which repeats mostly the same mistakes. We would see the reign of the US on the world stage as an example of one of the best sorts of periods in human history overall except for our unique position at the pinnacle of techno-industrial culture. We had both the most impressive means to do good available to any people in history and at the same time face the most serious challenges. I think we were demanded more of than anyone before us in history and we performed only as well as any of the rest. Humanity will pay harshly for that, and yet we shouldn't be judged too harshly. Still, we'll probably go down in history as the society that wrecked the earth. Ah well...
But I think the key issue may well be that we're stuck with a system that was at least adequate and maybe even ideal for a time that existed 230 years ago. Many of the principles were and are good, but the structure hasn't adapted to the modern world.
I think in many ways the British have it right. A system of government that grows, adapts and changes. Ours is fossilized.
Sure seems like it. We could have risen to that but honestly I'm not terribly convinced the US is really the epitome of anything, except consumerism. Or ever was. Maybe power is overrated.
Yeah, its the end of the US lording it over the rest of the world for sure. We did make this bed though and now we're going to have to sleep in it. We could have gotten off oil 30 years ago when the handwriting was on the wall, stayed out of Vietnam, kept the CIA out of everyone else's business etc. Doesn't make us worse than anyone else, but we sure didn't make things better. Ah well, so it goes. Whoever's the next whip hand will get theirs in turn as well no doubt.
I was thinking of the nice approach of the EU to Canada over IP stuff. It is all kind of part and parcel though. Google gets spanked, Canada gets spanked. Looks like they're going to throw their weight around a bit now.
Lets all remember, Europe, those nice fellas that enslave... er I mean enlightened the rest of the world! lol.;)
Didn't even imply it. Just noting that what goes around comes around. Of course in this case the US dished it out to everyone and now the EU is dishing it out to the Canadians. Guess it sucks in this violentist world to be a small power.
But hey, pretty soon the US will be wishing it still had the clout of Canada. I think the short end of that stick is going to be a hard whipping.
If I were to build a "space warship" kind of weapons system I'd make the ship itself as small as possible and carrying the smallest possible crew. I'd arm it with weapons and sensor platforms that were automated if at all possible. Launch a whole bunch of drones with the weapons and sensors on them and let them drift slowly and silently into position, possibly never using active sensor systems at all. Box in as many of the escape trajectories as possible and launch a strike that would get him with the highest possible priority.
The real trick in this kind of warfare would be passive sensing. You don't want to light up a radar or anything like that because it can be detected FAR beyond its own detection threshold unless you're very sure you need a positive firing solution and that's the way to get it. Probably very much like submarine warfare or modern small unit naval tactics.
Yeah, and that COULD be the better solution, we really don't know. Depends on the cost etc of a nuke vs the cost etc of a whole bunch of bullets. There could be a lot of factors to weigh.
Bullets could be a lot heavier than a nuke, weight is probably costly or at least slows you down.
It may not be all that much cheaper to heave 10 tons of bullets around the Solar system than one 500 lb nuke.
And then the question of effectiveness. If you were shooting at a target 50m in diameter, your bullet has to actually hit it, the nuke has to maybe hit a volume of space a mile (or whatever, but a LOT bigger than 50m). To pepper a space say 1km on a side with bullets, one every 50m, is a whole lot of bullets. That's 1x10^6 M^2 / 250 M^2 = 4,000 bullets. Probably a good bit cheaper than a nuke, but will one bullet kill the target? Will it actually hit? If you REALLY want the other guy dead, you might favor the nuke.
So maybe you'd snipe at someone with bullets until they figure out you're there, then if you haven't hit them yet, you sic your nuke tipped seeker missile on them and scat out of there.
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So your answer is what? Continue with the losing proposition that is the status quo? lol. That isn't any answer at all.
My point is there is good money being made by people making the tools that the crooks use. Take that money out of the hands of those people. Its not going to solve the problem but sooner or later everyone has to realize that there IS no "better" solution. At least it mitigates a part of the problem.
Of course if you have a better idea, then by all means go out there and make your multi-billion $ fortune hocking it! I got a hint for you though, it isn't going to be found "inside the box".
We should just give away copies of all the best hack tools. As soon as they appear they should be all over the net for free. What will this do? Simple. It removes the monetary incentive to write good hacking tools. If what any idiot can download for free is as good as it gets then the money is sucked right out of the market for supplying tools.
On top of that when you have every idiot out there using the best tools vendors WILL be forced to deal with the flaws a lot more quickly and release higher quality code to start with. It won't stop the people using the tools from using them and stealing money, but nothing is going to stop that.
The first property crime happened the day property was invented. Nothing we do is going to stop it, but we can suck some of the wind out of the blackhats sails.
I can go you one better even, lol. My boss dropped Mint on his laptop on his own initiative. I won't say he's totally tech illiterate but he's not any kind of genius at that kind of stuff either. Give him Power Basic and he can write some simple ETL scripts and he knows enough to set up stuff thats not too complex. Still, Mint gave him no problems, came up onto his wireless network fine and does everything he normally needs to do. When I fired the machine up the other day to take a look it was pretty nice. There are a few Ubuntuisms that don't excite me that much, but for the average user its a VERY clean looking setup Gnome isn't my favorite but I had no problems and he's happy with it.
I'm confident that any legacy software issues aside I could set up an office using any of several decent desktop distros like Ubuntu, openSuSe, Fedora, or Mandriva and things would work fine. Drop in a CentOS based LDAP server for centralized auth and file serving. Probably not quite as slick as a Windows small office setup, but a LOT cheaper and less costly to support.
Really I don't quite get why OpenMoko exists as an independent project either except that nobody seemed able to agree to all get together. Fragmentation in server and desktop space isn't a big deal and the choices made available to users are valuable, but in the mobile marketplace those considerations really don't apply so much. All that is really left as a justification for various mobile Linux projects has always been no more than technical disagreements about how to implement certain things and a desire for various vendors like Intel to focus on elements specific to their hardware architecture.
I think its been inevitable that at some point all these various mobile Linux projects would collapse together into one uber project. Some may instead simply fade away of course, but I suspect eventually even Android will be sucked in. OpenMoko too is unlikely to continue to exist as a completely distinct project for too much longer.
Always seemed to me like these were redundant projects though. 12 flavors of mobile Linux kinda defeats the whole point?
Yeah, as a few others have said, I agree with you and I was going to post something similar. At least up to a point. Most software development projects are highly cooperative affairs and its rarely a matter of success hinging on one's brilliance as a coder. Still, you have to be able to contribute and at least some members of the team need good design skills of various types.
The reality is that successful projects mostly succeed because someone in charge is good at utilizing the strengths of the other team members. Even a technically weak team can do quite well on many classes of projects if well led. CS courses have gotten better at teaching team building but still overemphasize coding. One wonders if some of the 'cheaters' might not actually be on the right track...
Better not be playing 4e when you burn those stumps, might stun your drive and I don't think they get saving throws...
If I had to guess I'd say Skylon will probably fail. Your right, its the only viable approach in the long run, and they may well be able to produce an operational vehicle. The trick will be to make an operational vehicle that is cheap, safe, and reliable. I think basically its one of those "pick 2 of the these three" situations.
The fundamental problem with ALL rockets is you're operating at the very most hairy edge of what is possible. Everything has to be feather light, withstand huge aerodynamic stresses, monster vibration, large temperature variations and heat flux. Its a real nightmare. Even simple stuff is hard. All we worked on were avionics packages. Way simpler than structure or power. Still, try to make a piece of electronics that has to be able to work with 100% certainty after sitting on a pad for weeks, survive 180db plus vibration at all modes, temperatures from -20C to 200C. Oh, and weigh next to nothing of course. One tiny box with the simplest function, millions of dollars to develop and maybe $250k a copy. You could build the same thing for $100 if all it had to do was work in a shirtsleeve environment.
Power systems? OMG. An SSME is the size of a VW bus and has the power output of California. Its insane.
SSTO is basically a dead issue. Nobody has figured out how to build one. It may not even be feasible to build such a thing. Having worked in the field I can tell you one thing, its JUST barely possible to hurl stuff into orbit at all. The engineering is a nightmare. We aren't even close to anything like SSTO and its not even clear that if you could build such a thing it would be cheaper than disposable rockets.
The best idea anyone has come up with yet that is provably viable is essentially what the Russians do, a big dumb rocket. The concept could be pushed further but essentially the idea is you build a rocket using simple low performance systems. It will be BIG, but it can be built cheap and mass produced. Reliability comes from simplicity and when its cheap you really can launch on a fairly aggressive schedule and make it even more reliable.
The whole concept was mapped out pretty thoroughly in early 70's and many components were even built and tested. Engines fabricated out of ordinary grade materials with what were called "shipyard tolerances" etc. Totally gravity flow design with no turbo pumps or other moving parts. They're just big, but so what?
Sorry guys, but I do a LOT of really large perl based projects. CPAN is fine. Hell, it works better than the supposedly wonderful rpm and apt based package managers. At least when you install from CPAN you know the stuff WORKS because it actually gets tested. The CPAN dependency system works fine too. All I can conclude is that people who have had problems with it have a whole lot of RPM installed packages that were guess what? BADLY PACKAGED by the distro.
I agree, it would be great if CPAN and package managers coordinated. There are things CPAN certainly lacks, like transactions and any real ability to uninstall. What it does do, it does well.
Yeah, I'm just saying, when you look at it from the perspective of people on the other end of it, they see something that doesn't always look good. Eh, ultimately someone always has to get the blame for whatever isn't right with the world.
I think you miss a lot of the details of what goes on. You only get a very 10,000 foot view of things at best from the news media, if they even report something at all.
Look at the details of the kinds of low level agreements the US makes with other countries. Look at the way we refuse to participate on an equal basis in major areas of international law. The US is not often willing to live by the same rules it wants the rest of the world to follow. Go to some of these developing countries and look at what's actually going on on the ground. Its a LOT uglier than you think.
I'm not really a believer in some kind of "the US is evil" meme. In a lot of cases its the opposite, but at the same time the way we operate when it comes down to the details is like its a zero sum game.
Look at most of the money we supposedly contribute to development overseas. 86% or so of it is tied up with stipulations that it has to be spent HERE. Oh, you can have this 50 million $ to build X piece of infrastructure, but you have to hire Bechtel to do all the work, at some ridiculously inflated prices and all the jobs go to overseas contractors.
Of course there are a whole slew of things we never get credit for either, but there's a heck of a lot of arm twisting that goes on. And a heck of a lot of supporting of some very shady people that do a lot of very shady things behind the scenes.
It would take a really serious amount of in-depth analysis of the server application to even approach knowing what the efficiency impact of using a compiled language vs an interpreter would be on any specific stack. Or even stacks in general. Plus we don't even know what it really means to be "using PHP". What is PHP doing? Is it processing templates, doing just some post or pre processing with some kind of XML pipeline in the middle, how is the PHP deployed, etc?
It is simply ridiculous to make any assertions and claim accuracy for them. I'm no PHP fan boy by a LONG shot, but I know from hard experience that often a higher level tool which is optimized for a particular job can get the job done quite a lot MORE efficiently than a lower level one that isn't.
It is pretty hard to say which is governing better. The US system just seems rather slow to adapt.
Personally I think we could use a major reformulation of institutions over here right now, but then again I'm not sure I think there's a process for doing that which wouldn't create something worse.
Kind of makes me think about digging out various old game designs from the past, lol.
They can mod all they want. As soon as it falls below infinite I just get handed a big wad of mod points, lol.
I don't the US has been a particularly harsh "master" either. Nor is it really all that correct to say that at any given point in history one group of people really has anything like total control. Really it seems to me that history shows a repeating pattern of dominance by one power, which fails to realize the positive way forward, followed by another which repeats mostly the same mistakes. We would see the reign of the US on the world stage as an example of one of the best sorts of periods in human history overall except for our unique position at the pinnacle of techno-industrial culture. We had both the most impressive means to do good available to any people in history and at the same time face the most serious challenges. I think we were demanded more of than anyone before us in history and we performed only as well as any of the rest. Humanity will pay harshly for that, and yet we shouldn't be judged too harshly. Still, we'll probably go down in history as the society that wrecked the earth. Ah well...
But I think the key issue may well be that we're stuck with a system that was at least adequate and maybe even ideal for a time that existed 230 years ago. Many of the principles were and are good, but the structure hasn't adapted to the modern world.
I think in many ways the British have it right. A system of government that grows, adapts and changes. Ours is fossilized.
Sure seems like it. We could have risen to that but honestly I'm not terribly convinced the US is really the epitome of anything, except consumerism. Or ever was. Maybe power is overrated.
Yeah, its the end of the US lording it over the rest of the world for sure. We did make this bed though and now we're going to have to sleep in it. We could have gotten off oil 30 years ago when the handwriting was on the wall, stayed out of Vietnam, kept the CIA out of everyone else's business etc. Doesn't make us worse than anyone else, but we sure didn't make things better. Ah well, so it goes. Whoever's the next whip hand will get theirs in turn as well no doubt.
I was thinking of the nice approach of the EU to Canada over IP stuff. It is all kind of part and parcel though. Google gets spanked, Canada gets spanked. Looks like they're going to throw their weight around a bit now.
Lets all remember, Europe, those nice fellas that enslave... er I mean enlightened the rest of the world! lol. ;)
Didn't even imply it. Just noting that what goes around comes around. Of course in this case the US dished it out to everyone and now the EU is dishing it out to the Canadians. Guess it sucks in this violentist world to be a small power.
But hey, pretty soon the US will be wishing it still had the clout of Canada. I think the short end of that stick is going to be a hard whipping.
Has treated the rest of the world for the last 50 years or so would it? Don't like it when the shoe is on the other foot I take it...
If I were to build a "space warship" kind of weapons system I'd make the ship itself as small as possible and carrying the smallest possible crew. I'd arm it with weapons and sensor platforms that were automated if at all possible. Launch a whole bunch of drones with the weapons and sensors on them and let them drift slowly and silently into position, possibly never using active sensor systems at all. Box in as many of the escape trajectories as possible and launch a strike that would get him with the highest possible priority.
The real trick in this kind of warfare would be passive sensing. You don't want to light up a radar or anything like that because it can be detected FAR beyond its own detection threshold unless you're very sure you need a positive firing solution and that's the way to get it. Probably very much like submarine warfare or modern small unit naval tactics.
Yeah, and that COULD be the better solution, we really don't know. Depends on the cost etc of a nuke vs the cost etc of a whole bunch of bullets. There could be a lot of factors to weigh.
Bullets could be a lot heavier than a nuke, weight is probably costly or at least slows you down.
It may not be all that much cheaper to heave 10 tons of bullets around the Solar system than one 500 lb nuke.
And then the question of effectiveness. If you were shooting at a target 50m in diameter, your bullet has to actually hit it, the nuke has to maybe hit a volume of space a mile (or whatever, but a LOT bigger than 50m). To pepper a space say 1km on a side with bullets, one every 50m, is a whole lot of bullets. That's 1x10^6 M^2 / 250 M^2 = 4,000 bullets. Probably a good bit cheaper than a nuke, but will one bullet kill the target? Will it actually hit? If you REALLY want the other guy dead, you might favor the nuke.
So maybe you'd snipe at someone with bullets until they figure out you're there, then if you haven't hit them yet, you sic your nuke tipped seeker missile on them and scat out of there.
But who knows.