Nonsense: there's 802.11b, already running and on the ground. Coupled with IPv6 and the QoS guarantees it has, tell me what I can do with Bluetooth that I can't do with wireless Ethernet?
And at this rate, by the time Bluetooth comes out, there will already be 802.11c devices on line, running at 40Mb/sec.
The problem with the FTC's plan is that this is a bankruptcy proceding. The very act of entering bankruptcy releases an entity from all contracts between it and other entities. For instance, it releases the entity from the requirements between it and any employees it might have, and between it and any lien-holders it might have. Damaged individuals may be able to recoup some of their losses through the bankruptcy court when the entity's assets are liquidated, but that's all.
I don't like this, but I rather suspect that the FTC is about to lose. Why should the contract between Toysmart and those customers who gave away information be any more binding than that between Toysmart and those customers who ordered merchandise which they will now never recceive?
the 3rds and 5ths are just a little bit flat, something Bach would have shuddered at
Not quite. The equally-tempered 12-tone "major third" is just a trifle sharp (ratio = 1.2599+, vs. a platonic ratio of 1.25). The 12-tone "perfect fifth" is, by contrast, a trifle flat (ratio 1.4983+, vs. a platonic ratio of 1.5) Helmholz (1890 -- yes, the physicist) describes the 12-tone third as "bright and metallic", and I like that terminology.
As to whether Bach would have shuddered at the sound, I dunno. Helmholz, like many modern Western musicologists, was a bit of a snob about temperament in general. The pure temperament is what comes "naturally" from a vocalist or a performer on an unfretted instrument, and the resonance of the chords is stunning. On the other hand, equally tempered scales have a unique and interesting sound of their own.
Besides, for pure dissonance, the 12-tone scale is unmatched: the augmented fourth/diminished fifth, at the square root of two (1.41421+) is truly wonderful. For many years, it was used by American (US + Canada; I don't know about Mexico, but I assume so, since we use the same rail stock...) freight train klaxons, precisely because it is so hair-raising.
For what it's worth, I'm actually somewhat ambivalent on the birds as tiny therapods thesis. At this point, I think that it's quite plausible that the birds arose from saurians; no obviously non-saurean precursors to the birds have been found, and a number of homologous structure in the therapoda and the avians have been discovered.
That doesn't mean that birds are baby dinosaurs, though. It's certainly reasonable to assume that the therapods and the birds share close a common ancestor, but it seems hardly likely that the birds actually are derived from any of the dinosaurs that we know and love. (I've always liked Steve Gould's comment on why dinosaurs are so popular: "They're big, they're mean...and they're dead.")
All these people who confuse C-sharp with D-flat. My god, aren't any of you real musicians? The two notes are completely different! You need a good microtonal scale to distinguish them in an equally tempered world (48 steps/octave works particularly well), but they are different.
So, of course Microsoft released a Microtonal language. Is anybody really surprised?
GAs tend to be useful in discrete problems, where standard non-linear optimizers don't apply. Even there, GAs are often inferior to other stochastic algorithms. In general, the use of a genetic algorithm requires more performance evaluations than simulated annealing, and frequently more than simple stochastic hill-climbing.
There's one key exception, however. If the objective function has essentially cylindrical optima (e.g. the function f(x, y) = (1 - x^2) * (1 - y^2)), then the crossover operator allows the system to use "hyperplane search": the "crossover operator" (used in the generation of the new population members) will frequently tend to take the good parts of different candidates and glue them together, making better offspring.
What's sometimes surprising is how many objective functions can be encoded so that they have roughly cylindrical optima relative to the cross-over operator. For instance, in the old work on the Travelling Salesman Problem, van Gucht et al. used segments of circuits as crossovers, and that gives a roughly hypercylindrical objective function, thus speeding up convergence.
All this means that without actually looking at the particular objective function and encoded, we can't really tell whether the use of the GA was wise or not. It depends on the constraints of the problem.
How hard can it be? Just write your story. Then do some research: do you describe something that hasn't been invented yet? Okay, send your story to Amazing. Otherwise, send it to the New Yorker.
Nah...if it's already been invented, just send it to the US Patent Office.
First, the Netcraft survey you cite makes no attempt to correlate IP address to MAC address. The vast majority of IP addresses are on multi-addressed boxes in ISP server farms; those boxes tend to run Unix or Linux. This has two consequences: first, we can't determine the relative frequencies of NT boxes and *n.x boxes on the net, and, second, we can assume that the ISP farms are reasonably well-secured. (After all, that's what they do full time.) This would tend to indicate that NT sites would be more likely to be administered by people who aren't quite as attuned to keeping up with the necessary patches, and hence would be more likely to be vulnerable.
Second, though, these vulnerabilities refer to machines on the network generally, and not to web servers in particular. So the frequency with which IIS-based servers are compromised has little or nothing to do with the vulnerabilities of the systems on the Web. How many people still run naked Win98 boxes with always-on connections? Similarly, how many people run unhardened Linux on the network? These vulnerabilities are still there, even if they're not visible on attrition.org.
Am I just dense, or am I missing some weird kind of logic here?
Both. You're being dense by assuming that a piece of intellectual property is necessarily sold when you buy the material upon which it is recorded. It sounds weird to you, but that is not, in fact, necessarily the case.
Let's look at a piece of sheet music as a first example. If I buy that sheet music, I buy the right to use it for performance. I do not buy the right to make copies of it. If I want to make limited use of it -- say, by making a small number of copies which I distribute for an orchestra to practice from -- I may be able to claim fair use if I'm charged with infringement. Beyond that, however, I do not have the right to redistribute the sheet music.
That's how copyright is intended to work. I bought a piece of paper and some ink. The arrangment of the ink constitutes valuable information. I can sell the paper, and I can sell the ink -- but I can't copy that arrangment of ink on paper, or, by extension, the information carried by that arrangement.
In your example, if your architect had copyrighted the plans, and had retained the copyright, then, yes, in fact, you cannot copy those plans. Sorry. If the work of architecture was held to be a work for hire, and part of the contract said that owned the copyright on the plans, then, yes, you would be able to copy them -- because you own the copyright. Again, you can always sell the paper and the ink. You can't sell the information encoded thereon, though; that's what copyright protects.
You're conflating what's usually referred to as "Proof theory" with what's usually referred to as "Model theory". By Godel's Completeness Theorem (not Incompleteness, Completeness -- they're different), if a statement is provable in first order logic from a theory, then it is true in all models of that theory -- and vice versa. (If the statement is provable, then it's true everywhere.) 2a doesn't actually follow from 2. 2a follows (after a highly non-trivial proof!) from the stronger statement "If Q is false, then there is a counterexample in all models."
Think about the axioms for the Theory of Groups. There are perfectly good groups in which multiplication isn't commutative. That means that the Abelian axiom (for all x and y, xy == yx) isn't provable from the standard axioms of group theory. It's not a proof of a contradiction, it's just a proof that a sentence isn't decided.
A theory in which all sentences are decided is called "complete". Very few theories are complete, and, in fact, what Godel's incompleteness theorem shows is that any theory which codes up the notion of proof in a non-trivial way relative to itself -- pretty much, any interesting theory -- is, ipso facto, not complete.
Stop thinking of them as memorabilia. Think of them as the propaganda tools of a regime that slaughtered millions of innocent people, whether in the camps or in the nations they conquered. If you had spent time in Vichy France during the Occupation, or had spent time in Yugoslavia during Hitler's massacre there, or had survived the Siege of Stalingrad, you would be perfectly reasonable to find those symbols not just "memorabilia", but outright "hate speech". (I'm ignoring the most obviously persecuted groups, like gay men, the Gipsies, or, of course, the Jews, exterminated to feed the war machine. They feel a particular horror all their own, and their experience only makes it worse.) Now add to that the fact that many of those who buy Nazi regalia are neo-Nazi sympathizers, and you wind up with an even better reason for a rational person in France to fear those symbols. (Yes, yes, not all collectors of Nazi regalia or artifacts are neo-Nazis. That's not my point. Many of them are.)
That's why it's wrong to trade in Nazi memorabilia. Whether it should be illegal, of course, is another matter. I don't think so; banning such trash just raises its value. But that doesn't mean it isn't trash.
So, on another note, anyone know of anyplace (on the web or otherwise) that I can find out exactly what IS up with BIG_ENDIAN and LITTLE_ENDIAN? I'm not going to be using a BIG_ENDIAN machine anytime soon, but I've always been interested.
Do you want the literary reference from which the names are taken? (Swift, _Gulliver's Travels_, Book 1, "The Voyage to Lilliput". There were two tribes of Lilliputians who were fighting a war over whether one should eat one's breakfast egg from the big end (the Big-Endians) or the little end (the Little-Endians). I never can remember which tribe Gulliver was allied with, so don't ask me.) Or do you want the technical explanation of why Intel puts the bytes in a word "backwards", so that you can't read the characters in a UCS-2 string from the bytes? (It turns out that arithmetic operators cost half as many transistors/operator if the bit order goes from lowest-order bit to highest-order bit, as in an Intel chip, than they do if the bit order is highest-order bit first. It doesn't make all that much of a difference any more, since the transistor count on the ALU is only a tiny fraction of the cost of the chip, but in the old days, it mattered very much indeed. I can't ever remember which tribe I'm allied with, so don't ask me.)
You know, there's no doubt in my mind that this will be better than passwords. Given that my fingers are a part of me, I can't forget them at home. So, I guess that it's better than the classic yellow sticky on the side of the monitor. But I wonder if this won't wind up being less useful than it appears at first glance. Sure, no two people's fingerprints are alike, but that's only half the story. Using biometric data assumes there's no way to create a mechanical device that simulates the fingerprint. I wouldn't want to bet a lot of money on that not being possible -- and using my fingerprints to unlock my bank account is doing just that.
The "linux-base PDAs" don't even qualify as vaporware: they are vacuumware. To my mind, a workable Yopy or equivalent is at least three to five years away. The nature of the OS kernel won't help much one way or another, although using an OS designed for a small device makes life easier. The truth is, creating a PDA is much harder than anyone imagines until they get into it.
The key thing to understand is that, despite how it's sold, a PDA is a consumer device, not a business device. So you get into all of the oddities of trying to second guess the real consumer marketplace. The user is making a <shudder> style statement. The device must be more like a toaster than a computer. It has to turn on instantly: when the user punches the on button, the screen must show up within 500 msec. You have to worry about cultural conventions -- Americans like design x, Europeans like design y...
The applications on the device don't have to be "simple", but they have to be convenient and "intuitive". UI design counts a lot -- if your UI doesn't "make sense", consumers won't spend $500 to carry around in the palm of their hands. If you support a feature, it has to "just work". Configuration has to be driven by the program itself asking questions. Don't even think about "text-based, editable config files." They won't work.
Can it be done? Of course. But it won't happen anytime soon. It takes the kind of monolithic maniacal management that commercial firms do well...and OSS does poorly. That means spending big big money, and I can't see anybody getting funding to do it adequately. The market is already defined, and without the kind of money the MS can throw at it, you're not going to break in.
First, Intel with its bizarre names: Pentium. Celeron. Now AMD with Althon and Duron? What's next?
The AMD Enduron? Or perhaps the AMD Marathlon?
The Intel Vegetron? The Intel SafeSexium?
The mind boggles.
Re:Preach on brutha man.
on
Boo No More
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Some consultant in Massachusetts did a wonderful study of Web site effectiveness about four years ago. He compared a bunch of car information sites. One of them was Edmunds.com. The others were the usual suspects (for the time; a lot has changed in four years.)
Edmunds had, by graphical standards, an awful design. Too much text, no "visual flow", information on cars that ran on for page after page after page. Yuck...but users loved it. They felt like they were making progress quickly when they were looking for information. The other sites were well designed, good, high-contrast graphics, limited text, easy to read. Users hated them.
Four years later, Edmunds is still in business. The others? They're gone. And, when my wife and I went looking for a new car this spring, we looked at all the sites...Edmunds, with its awful, clunky, visually unappealing design is still the best out there for getting things done.
Web site design has little to do with prettiness. Right now, the Web is only secondarily a visual entertainment medium. The standard rules for visual entertainment don't yet apply, if they ever will.
Russ, you're trolling, old man. You know better than this...:-)
1) Several people have asserted that a firewall somehow magically has more resources to deal with an attack. Sorry, no. If you have N+1 hosts, calling the one a firewall doesn't create more resources to deal with an attack.
You're assuming a homogeneous packet stream. Attacks are rarely homogeneous. In fact, asystem under a k1dd13 DDOS attack is seeing a heterogeneous packet stream: a (relatively) low frequency of legitimate requests interspersed among an overwhelming stream of bogus packets. You can tune the intermediary box (that extra + 1) to filter out the bogus packets; then, the machines in the back aren't exposed to the extra demand at all, and can continue to serve legitimate customers.
More than that, filtering helps during an attempted invasion. A firewall conceals the machines behind the wall; if I run nmap against slash, it ought to tell me they're running FreeBSD, not Linux. (Similarly, if you run nmap against my home network, you'll see it running FreeBSD, even though all the machines except those in the firewall are running some version of Windows.) Since the firewall isn't vulnerable to attacks that the back end boxes would fall under, it can act as a store-and-forward filter, intercepting packets that would cause trouble in the backend. (So, for instance, if you try to connect to any the SMB ports on any machine behind my home firewall, your packet will simply evaporate.)
Is it enough? Of course not -- but nothing can possibly be enough.
3) C'mon, you're running Unix, stop acting so helpless. If you can secure a Unix firewall, you can secure a Unix server. This is not rocket science. If you have to communicate with a service that you don't want to expose to the world, you bind it to a private IP address on NET10.
No! If I can secure a firewall that I control, then I can secure a firewall that I control. I can also make it harder for an attacker to find an exploit behind the firewall by intercepting known vulnerabilities at the firewall. I can't prevent the group behind the firewall from introducing vulnerabilities on their side of the street: "All software has bugs" -- Linus Torvalds.
Is a firewall enough? Of course not! Do I run vulnerability scanners across my networks? Better believe it! But that's not enough. Like I said before: nothing can possibly be enough. There's only one of me, and there are a lot of them.
First, in the event of an attack, a single point of failure isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you know exactly what has fallen over, you're more than half way to knowing how to fix it. A firewall is easy to secure precisely because it isn't a general purpose box; the BOFH knows exactly what's running on it. The worker bees behind the firewall are a different matter; they presumably run a wide variety of different software. Failure analysis becomes much more complicated. (Not to mention that diverse software allows for interaction among the different components, which exposes flaws.)
In a DDOS attack, if your firewall falls over, then the odds are that your network would have fallen over, too. Slashdot "only" handles 100Mb/sec, though -- one high end machine should be able to handle a pipe that wide. But, if the pipe gets wider, then they can get a virtual "choke" with a load balancer in front of the firewall.
First, any public system on the web should be behind a firewall. The amount of load that a firewall takes during an attack can easily drive even a very fast machine to 100% utilization; if you want your other servers to still be serving legitimate customers, you need a firewall.
Also, a firewall acts like a choke point -- any attack must pass through it. By monitoring the health of that one machine, you can monitor the health of the entire networks. In addition, if you want to allow remote administration of the items in the cluster, you can provide a secured path through the firewall; again, you have only the one point of failure.
It's usually wise to have stacked firewalls (an "airgap") in front of a popular site, though, and it's often best to use a variety of operating systems on those firewalls. Somehow, though, I can't see Slashdot doing the wise thing there, though, and putting a FreeBSD->W2K airgap at the front, with the Linux-based Slash behind it.
Unfortunately for the guy who used unrar, seeing the EULA makes the case better for the him, and bypassing it makes it worse. Without the EULA, he has no rights to reproduce the text at all (beyond those implicit in fair use for review): unless otherwise specified in writing (that is, under a license), any copyrighted document is issued with all rights reserved. (To forestall your next objection, no, a document doesn't have to include the notice, the bug or the year of copyright to be copyrighted. Under the most recent international treaty on copyright, any document is copyrighted, unless the copyright has been explicitly released or has expired. So, for instance, you hold the copyright to the post to which I'm responding...so including the entire text could, technically, be construed as an infringement.) The License actually grants him rights not implicit in copyrighted usage.
ARM chips already have a vast amount of market share -- they dominate the cellular phone market. (In fact, I don't know of a single cellular phone chip set based on any processor core except the ARM7 or ARM9. Somebody help me here -- there has to be one...)
The thing is, that market is a great deal more power sensitive than anything you or I can imagine in a desktop machine, or even in a laptop or palmtop configuration. All the power cost of the system in the processor (except when the user is actually transmitting), and any increases in processor power consumption come at the expense of standby battery life. If you want to add rich content to a cell phone, you need a faster processor, and standby life can't be reduced much more without losing users...bottom line, without improvements in processor technology, smart phones won't ever be a reality. We may have smart briefcases, but, in that case, why use a phone and not a wirelessly connected laptop?
I'm no fan of Vonnegut, but he fought in the trenches in World War Two. He earned his right to criticize. Somewhere on my bookshelf I have his nonfiction treatment of the aftermath in Dresden. You should read it.
You know what's wierd? If you have a sib just a few years older than you are, he or she won't have a smallpox scar like yours, either. We got injections, just like in Jenner's time.
I know that the newer style of innoculation was cheaper, more effective, and less painful, but it still looks barbaric to me.
To this day, I have really mixed feelings about the Cold War. It's easy to forget just how dangerous and aggressive the Stalinist Soviet Union was, and how awful a place it was. But when you balance that against the "police action" in Korea and the wars in Viet Nam and the Congo, not to mention the other stupid things that we did while fighting it, it just seems like such a waste, now that sanity has prevailed.
But history isn't a controlled experiment. Would there have been a Velvet Revolution without a Prague Spring? Frankly, I doubt it, but I don't know.
Slashdot Mirror
Nonsense: there's 802.11b, already running and on the ground. Coupled with IPv6 and the QoS guarantees it has, tell me what I can do with Bluetooth that I can't do with wireless Ethernet?
And at this rate, by the time Bluetooth comes out, there will already be 802.11c devices on line, running at 40Mb/sec.
The problem with the FTC's plan is that this is a bankruptcy proceding. The very act of entering bankruptcy releases an entity from all contracts between it and other entities. For instance, it releases the entity from the requirements between it and any employees it might have, and between it and any lien-holders it might have. Damaged individuals may be able to recoup some of their losses through the bankruptcy court when the entity's assets are liquidated, but that's all.
I don't like this, but I rather suspect that the FTC is about to lose. Why should the contract between Toysmart and those customers who gave away information be any more binding than that between Toysmart and those customers who ordered merchandise which they will now never recceive?
the 3rds and 5ths are just a little bit flat, something Bach would have shuddered at
Not quite. The equally-tempered 12-tone "major third" is just a trifle sharp (ratio = 1.2599+, vs. a platonic ratio of 1.25). The 12-tone "perfect fifth" is, by contrast, a trifle flat (ratio 1.4983+, vs. a platonic ratio of 1.5) Helmholz (1890 -- yes, the physicist) describes the 12-tone third as "bright and metallic", and I like that terminology.
As to whether Bach would have shuddered at the sound, I dunno. Helmholz, like many modern Western musicologists, was a bit of a snob about temperament in general. The pure temperament is what comes "naturally" from a vocalist or a performer on an unfretted instrument, and the resonance of the chords is stunning. On the other hand, equally tempered scales have a unique and interesting sound of their own.
Besides, for pure dissonance, the 12-tone scale is unmatched: the augmented fourth/diminished fifth, at the square root of two (1.41421+) is truly wonderful. For many years, it was used by American (US + Canada; I don't know about Mexico, but I assume so, since we use the same rail stock...) freight train klaxons, precisely because it is so hair-raising.
For what it's worth, I'm actually somewhat ambivalent on the birds as tiny therapods thesis. At this point, I think that it's quite plausible that the birds arose from saurians; no obviously non-saurean precursors to the birds have been found, and a number of homologous structure in the therapoda and the avians have been discovered.
That doesn't mean that birds are baby dinosaurs, though. It's certainly reasonable to assume that the therapods and the birds share close a common ancestor, but it seems hardly likely that the birds actually are derived from any of the dinosaurs that we know and love. (I've always liked Steve Gould's comment on why dinosaurs are so popular: "They're big, they're mean...and they're dead.")
So you cannot write the Melissa/ILOVEYOU-style worms in Java.
Actually, you can. They depend on the user double-clicking the attachment. Hey, presto -- you can do anything.
All these people who confuse C-sharp with D-flat. My god, aren't any of you real musicians? The two notes are completely different! You need a good microtonal scale to distinguish them in an equally tempered world (48 steps/octave works particularly well), but they are different.
So, of course Microsoft released a Microtonal language. Is anybody really surprised?
GAs tend to be useful in discrete problems, where standard non-linear optimizers don't apply. Even there, GAs are often inferior to other stochastic algorithms. In general, the use of a genetic algorithm requires more performance evaluations than simulated annealing, and frequently more than simple stochastic hill-climbing.
There's one key exception, however. If the objective function has essentially cylindrical optima (e.g. the function f(x, y) = (1 - x^2) * (1 - y^2)), then the crossover operator allows the system to use "hyperplane search": the "crossover operator" (used in the generation of the new population members) will frequently tend to take the good parts of different candidates and glue them together, making better offspring.
What's sometimes surprising is how many objective functions can be encoded so that they have roughly cylindrical optima relative to the cross-over operator. For instance, in the old work on the Travelling Salesman Problem, van Gucht et al. used segments of circuits as crossovers, and that gives a roughly hypercylindrical objective function, thus speeding up convergence.
All this means that without actually looking at the particular objective function and encoded, we can't really tell whether the use of the GA was wise or not. It depends on the constraints of the problem.
How hard can it be? Just write your story. Then do some research: do you describe something that hasn't been invented yet? Okay, send your story to Amazing. Otherwise, send it to the New Yorker.
Nah...if it's already been invented, just send it to the US Patent Office.
Hmm. I have two problems with your argument.
First, the Netcraft survey you cite makes no attempt to correlate IP address to MAC address. The vast majority of IP addresses are on multi-addressed boxes in ISP server farms; those boxes tend to run Unix or Linux. This has two consequences: first, we can't determine the relative frequencies of NT boxes and *n.x boxes on the net, and, second, we can assume that the ISP farms are reasonably well-secured. (After all, that's what they do full time.) This would tend to indicate that NT sites would be more likely to be administered by people who aren't quite as attuned to keeping up with the necessary patches, and hence would be more likely to be vulnerable.
Second, though, these vulnerabilities refer to machines on the network generally, and not to web servers in particular. So the frequency with which IIS-based servers are compromised has little or nothing to do with the vulnerabilities of the systems on the Web. How many people still run naked Win98 boxes with always-on connections? Similarly, how many people run unhardened Linux on the network? These vulnerabilities are still there, even if they're not visible on attrition.org.
Am I just dense, or am I missing some weird kind of logic here?
Both. You're being dense by assuming that a piece of intellectual property is necessarily sold when you buy the material upon which it is recorded. It sounds weird to you, but that is not, in fact, necessarily the case.
Let's look at a piece of sheet music as a first example. If I buy that sheet music, I buy the right to use it for performance. I do not buy the right to make copies of it. If I want to make limited use of it -- say, by making a small number of copies which I distribute for an orchestra to practice from -- I may be able to claim fair use if I'm charged with infringement. Beyond that, however, I do not have the right to redistribute the sheet music.
That's how copyright is intended to work. I bought a piece of paper and some ink. The arrangment of the ink constitutes valuable information. I can sell the paper, and I can sell the ink -- but I can't copy that arrangment of ink on paper, or, by extension, the information carried by that arrangement.
In your example, if your architect had copyrighted the plans, and had retained the copyright, then, yes, in fact, you cannot copy those plans. Sorry. If the work of architecture was held to be a work for hire, and part of the contract said that owned the copyright on the plans, then, yes, you would be able to copy them -- because you own the copyright. Again, you can always sell the paper and the ink. You can't sell the information encoded thereon, though; that's what copyright protects.
The flaw's in your logic.
You're conflating what's usually referred to as "Proof theory" with what's usually referred to as "Model theory". By Godel's Completeness Theorem (not Incompleteness, Completeness -- they're different), if a statement is provable in first order logic from a theory, then it is true in all models of that theory -- and vice versa. (If the statement is provable, then it's true everywhere.) 2a doesn't actually follow from 2. 2a follows (after a highly non-trivial proof!) from the stronger statement "If Q is false, then there is a counterexample in all models."
Think about the axioms for the Theory of Groups. There are perfectly good groups in which multiplication isn't commutative. That means that the Abelian axiom (for all x and y, xy == yx) isn't provable from the standard axioms of group theory. It's not a proof of a contradiction, it's just a proof that a sentence isn't decided.
A theory in which all sentences are decided is called "complete". Very few theories are complete, and, in fact, what Godel's incompleteness theorem shows is that any theory which codes up the notion of proof in a non-trivial way relative to itself -- pretty much, any interesting theory -- is, ipso facto, not complete.
Stop thinking of them as memorabilia. Think of them as the propaganda tools of a regime that slaughtered millions of innocent people, whether in the camps or in the nations they conquered. If you had spent time in Vichy France during the Occupation, or had spent time in Yugoslavia during Hitler's massacre there, or had survived the Siege of Stalingrad, you would be perfectly reasonable to find those symbols not just "memorabilia", but outright "hate speech". (I'm ignoring the most obviously persecuted groups, like gay men, the Gipsies, or, of course, the Jews, exterminated to feed the war machine. They feel a particular horror all their own, and their experience only makes it worse.) Now add to that the fact that many of those who buy Nazi regalia are neo-Nazi sympathizers, and you wind up with an even better reason for a rational person in France to fear those symbols. (Yes, yes, not all collectors of Nazi regalia or artifacts are neo-Nazis. That's not my point. Many of them are.)
That's why it's wrong to trade in Nazi memorabilia. Whether it should be illegal, of course, is another matter. I don't think so; banning such trash just raises its value. But that doesn't mean it isn't trash.
So, on another note, anyone know of anyplace (on the web or otherwise) that I can find out exactly what IS up with BIG_ENDIAN and LITTLE_ENDIAN? I'm not going to be using a BIG_ENDIAN machine anytime soon, but I've always been interested.
Do you want the literary reference from which the names are taken? (Swift, _Gulliver's Travels_, Book 1, "The Voyage to Lilliput". There were two tribes of Lilliputians who were fighting a war over whether one should eat one's breakfast egg from the big end (the Big-Endians) or the little end (the Little-Endians). I never can remember which tribe Gulliver was allied with, so don't ask me.) Or do you want the technical explanation of why Intel puts the bytes in a word "backwards", so that you can't read the characters in a UCS-2 string from the bytes? (It turns out that arithmetic operators cost half as many transistors/operator if the bit order goes from lowest-order bit to highest-order bit, as in an Intel chip, than they do if the bit order is highest-order bit first. It doesn't make all that much of a difference any more, since the transistor count on the ALU is only a tiny fraction of the cost of the chip, but in the old days, it mattered very much indeed. I can't ever remember which tribe I'm allied with, so don't ask me.)
You know, there's no doubt in my mind that this will be better than passwords. Given that my fingers are a part of me, I can't forget them at home. So, I guess that it's better than the classic yellow sticky on the side of the monitor. But I wonder if this won't wind up being less useful than it appears at first glance. Sure, no two people's fingerprints are alike, but that's only half the story. Using biometric data assumes there's no way to create a mechanical device that simulates the fingerprint. I wouldn't want to bet a lot of money on that not being possible -- and using my fingerprints to unlock my bank account is doing just that.
The "linux-base PDAs" don't even qualify as vaporware: they are vacuumware. To my mind, a workable Yopy or equivalent is at least three to five years away. The nature of the OS kernel won't help much one way or another, although using an OS designed for a small device makes life easier. The truth is, creating a PDA is much harder than anyone imagines until they get into it.
The key thing to understand is that, despite how it's sold, a PDA is a consumer device, not a business device. So you get into all of the oddities of trying to second guess the real consumer marketplace. The user is making a <shudder> style statement. The device must be more like a toaster than a computer. It has to turn on instantly: when the user punches the on button, the screen must show up within 500 msec. You have to worry about cultural conventions -- Americans like design x, Europeans like design y...
The applications on the device don't have to be "simple", but they have to be convenient and "intuitive". UI design counts a lot -- if your UI doesn't "make sense", consumers won't spend $500 to carry around in the palm of their hands. If you support a feature, it has to "just work". Configuration has to be driven by the program itself asking questions. Don't even think about "text-based, editable config files." They won't work.
Can it be done? Of course. But it won't happen anytime soon. It takes the kind of monolithic maniacal management that commercial firms do well...and OSS does poorly. That means spending big big money, and I can't see anybody getting funding to do it adequately. The market is already defined, and without the kind of money the MS can throw at it, you're not going to break in.
First, Intel with its bizarre names: Pentium. Celeron. Now AMD with Althon and Duron? What's next?
The AMD Enduron? Or perhaps the AMD Marathlon?
The Intel Vegetron?
The Intel SafeSexium?
The mind boggles.
Some consultant in Massachusetts did a wonderful study of Web site effectiveness about four years ago. He compared a bunch of car information sites. One of them was Edmunds.com. The others were the usual suspects (for the time; a lot has changed in four years.)
Edmunds had, by graphical standards, an awful design. Too much text, no "visual flow", information on cars that ran on for page after page after page. Yuck...but users loved it. They felt like they were making progress quickly when they were looking for information. The other sites were well designed, good, high-contrast graphics, limited text, easy to read. Users hated them.
Four years later, Edmunds is still in business. The others? They're gone. And, when my wife and I went looking for a new car this spring, we looked at all the sites...Edmunds, with its awful, clunky, visually unappealing design is still the best out there for getting things done.
Web site design has little to do with prettiness. Right now, the Web is only secondarily a visual entertainment medium. The standard rules for visual entertainment don't yet apply, if they ever will.
Russ, you're trolling, old man. You know better than this... :-)
1) Several people have asserted that a firewall somehow magically has more resources to deal with an attack. Sorry, no. If you have N+1 hosts, calling the one a firewall doesn't create more resources to deal with an attack.
You're assuming a homogeneous packet stream. Attacks are rarely homogeneous. In fact, asystem under a k1dd13 DDOS attack is seeing a heterogeneous packet stream: a (relatively) low frequency of legitimate requests interspersed among an overwhelming stream of bogus packets. You can tune the intermediary box (that extra + 1) to filter out the bogus packets; then, the machines in the back aren't exposed to the extra demand at all, and can continue to serve legitimate customers.
More than that, filtering helps during an attempted invasion. A firewall conceals the machines behind the wall; if I run nmap against slash, it ought to tell me they're running FreeBSD, not Linux. (Similarly, if you run nmap against my home network, you'll see it running FreeBSD, even though all the machines except those in the firewall are running some version of Windows.) Since the firewall isn't vulnerable to attacks that the back end boxes would fall under, it can act as a store-and-forward filter, intercepting packets that would cause trouble in the backend. (So, for instance, if you try to connect to any the SMB ports on any machine behind my home firewall, your packet will simply evaporate.)
Is it enough? Of course not -- but nothing can possibly be enough.
3) C'mon, you're running Unix, stop acting so helpless. If you can secure a Unix firewall, you can secure a Unix server. This is not rocket science. If you have to communicate with a service that you don't want to expose to the world, you bind it to a private IP address on NET10.
No! If I can secure a firewall that I control, then I can secure a firewall that I control. I can also make it harder for an attacker to find an exploit behind the firewall by intercepting known vulnerabilities at the firewall. I can't prevent the group behind the firewall from introducing vulnerabilities on their side of the street: "All software has bugs" -- Linus Torvalds.
Is a firewall enough? Of course not! Do I run vulnerability scanners across my networks? Better believe it! But that's not enough. Like I said before: nothing can possibly be enough. There's only one of me, and there are a lot of them.
First, in the event of an attack, a single point of failure isn't necessarily a bad thing. If you know exactly what has fallen over, you're more than half way to knowing how to fix it. A firewall is easy to secure precisely because it isn't a general purpose box; the BOFH knows exactly what's running on it. The worker bees behind the firewall are a different matter; they presumably run a wide variety of different software. Failure analysis becomes much more complicated. (Not to mention that diverse software allows for interaction among the different components, which exposes flaws.)
In a DDOS attack, if your firewall falls over, then the odds are that your network would have fallen over, too. Slashdot "only" handles 100Mb/sec, though -- one high end machine should be able to handle a pipe that wide. But, if the pipe gets wider, then they can get a virtual "choke" with a load balancer in front of the firewall.
First, any public system on the web should be behind a firewall. The amount of load that a firewall takes during an attack can easily drive even a very fast machine to 100% utilization; if you want your other servers to still be serving legitimate customers, you need a firewall.
Also, a firewall acts like a choke point -- any attack must pass through it. By monitoring the health of that one machine, you can monitor the health of the entire networks. In addition, if you want to allow remote administration of the items in the cluster, you can provide a secured path through the firewall; again, you have only the one point of failure.
It's usually wise to have stacked firewalls (an "airgap") in front of a popular site, though, and it's often best to use a variety of operating systems on those firewalls. Somehow, though, I can't see Slashdot doing the wise thing there, though, and putting a FreeBSD->W2K airgap at the front, with the Linux-based Slash behind it.
Unfortunately for the guy who used unrar, seeing the EULA makes the case better for the him, and bypassing it makes it worse. Without the EULA, he has no rights to reproduce the text at all (beyond those implicit in fair use for review): unless otherwise specified in writing (that is, under a license), any copyrighted document is issued with all rights reserved. (To forestall your next objection, no, a document doesn't have to include the notice, the bug or the year of copyright to be copyrighted. Under the most recent international treaty on copyright, any document is copyrighted, unless the copyright has been explicitly released or has expired. So, for instance, you hold the copyright to the post to which I'm responding...so including the entire text could, technically, be construed as an infringement.) The License actually grants him rights not implicit in copyrighted usage.
In a click-through (aka "ignorable") license...
Police Officer: Sir, did you not see the stop sign?
Motorist: Of course I saw the stop sign! It was drive-through (aka "Ignorable").
Police Officer: Sir, would you please get out of the car?
Just because you can ignore something does not mean that you may ignore it.
ARM chips already have a vast amount of market share -- they dominate the cellular phone market. (In fact, I don't know of a single cellular phone chip set based on any processor core except the ARM7 or ARM9. Somebody help me here -- there has to be one...)
The thing is, that market is a great deal more power sensitive than anything you or I can imagine in a desktop machine, or even in a laptop or palmtop configuration. All the power cost of the system in the processor (except when the user is actually transmitting), and any increases in processor power consumption come at the expense of standby battery life. If you want to add rich content to a cell phone, you need a faster processor, and standby life can't be reduced much more without losing users...bottom line, without improvements in processor technology, smart phones won't ever be a reality. We may have smart briefcases, but, in that case, why use a phone and not a wirelessly connected laptop?
Kurt Vonnegut? An armchair ideologue? Uh, no.
I'm no fan of Vonnegut, but he fought in the trenches in World War Two. He earned his right to criticize. Somewhere on my bookshelf I have his nonfiction treatment of the aftermath in Dresden. You should read it.
You know what's wierd? If you have a sib just a few years older than you are, he or she won't have a smallpox scar like yours, either. We got injections, just like in Jenner's time.
I know that the newer style of innoculation was cheaper, more effective, and less painful, but it still looks barbaric to me.
To this day, I have really mixed feelings about the Cold War. It's easy to forget just how dangerous and aggressive the Stalinist Soviet Union was, and how awful a place it was. But when you balance that against the "police action" in Korea and the wars in Viet Nam and the Congo, not to mention the other stupid things that we did while fighting it, it just seems like such a waste, now that sanity has prevailed.
But history isn't a controlled experiment. Would there have been a Velvet Revolution without a Prague Spring? Frankly, I doubt it, but I don't know.