Uh, don't tell me you'd be sad if you receive less spam.
After all, since you don't seem to have difficulty getting job offers in the first place, this is a GOOD THING.
This way you don't have to waste time with companies that aren't interested in hiring people based on merit. No need to apply to, interview for, or even work in a crappy company with crappy management/bosses.
Think about it, if they select people that way, what sort of people will you be working with and for, AND what are the odds that you'd be promoted or given pay rises based on merit?
I'm assuming you are looking for a long term job, and not just a short stint, and aren't desperate to find _any_ job.
Well it's a data entry job if they want no errors @ 9500 wph and you can't do that, why should they hire you? Doesn't matter what colour you are, or whether you wear dress shoes or sneakers or are barefoot. That sort of job seems easy to measure.
You cost significantly less than 7000/9500 of the candidate who can do 9500 wph? Or you are willing to work more than 9500/7000 longer (but remember there are only 24 hours in a day).
If the tasks involves entering ordered sets of data by a certain date, it could cost more to split tasks to 7000 wph people in such a way that a deadline can be met.
Now if you can show that a 5000 wph candidate with the same costs etc got the job and you didn't then something is fishy.
All the current x86 virtualization stuff is going to be out of date soon. It will be just adding kludges to the kernel to implement stuff that required by virtualization deficiencies in old x86 stuff. If you need those kludges, Xen should be enough.
This is because Intel and AMD are going to allow new and far more efficient ways of doing virtualization, with hardware assistance (lookup Intel Vanderpool and AMD Pacifica).
So, I don't see much long term gain for the effort for all the minuses.
You risk lower quality and increased maintenance costs. And you might also increase exposure to patent claims (but I bet IBM can smash anyone to pulp especially with virtualization patents).
You will still need developers to work on Vanderpool and Pacifica stuff, and I think you'd get better "bang for buck" with that (plus I think it will be a lot more fun).
Re:Perl 6 is evolving the language into awesome!
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Because in Perl "1"."2" eq "12"
and 1 + 2 == 3
If a loosely typed language is using + for concatenation, it's poorly designed (you'd end up typing more to specify what you want done).
You need to know that the concatenation of two variables is not the same as adding them together.
Slightly relieved that Perl 6 switched from using underscore to tilde for concat - underscore is overloaded with so many other tasks already. Unfortunately ~ still requires shift to be pressed on my keyboards, but I guess they are running out of symbols, and at least I think ~ won't require you to keep putting spaces around it to disambiguate it from other meanings.
Easy things easy and hard things possible
on
What is Perl 6?
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· Score: 1
Uh wasn't it "Make easy things easy, and hard things possible"?
That's as close to "management speak" as possible without losing meaning and usefulness.
And to me that statement shows a great insight in the part of the Perl people.
Just as you can't compress everything well, you can't make everything easy.
You would like to make the easy and common stuff easy. But not make the hard things impossible (gzip works on everything even though it makes some files bigger).
So far Perl has been a good match to solving very many problems.
In contrast Python's favourite motto appears to be "one obvious way". I suppose if the one obvious way is rarely hard then it'll be fine, but I don't find that concept as reassuring.
PHP seems to be "Make it extremely easy to do common things, even if not correctly" (examples: addslashes, magic quotes, track vars etc).
1) get a cluster of Intel PCs (especially those that use 250W or more of power under load). A slashdotter can always find a way to use more computers;).
2) run lm_sensors on the PCs - this is how you get your temperature readings.
3) Depending on the time, date, derived ambient temperature and other customizable info, decide whether to run CPU intensive jobs on your computers.
Voila - temperature control:).
Notes:
There are many useful CPU intensive jobs you can run. Go look for them.
Wake-on-LAN can be useful.
Controlling non-heatpump heating with some expensive home automation rig or furnace seems as silly as my suggestion;).
Heck my proposal wastes less energy- after all you could say the energy is used twice. Computers are cheap compared to some of the stuff proposed here.
If you are going to use wireless networking you should already be securing your computer and network configuration in ways where this "flaw" won't be an issue at all.
Because, if you associate with a malicious network you're pretty much in danger anyway. So if you actually care about security, the best way is to turn off your wireless network, or only allow connection using safe WLAN protocols e.g. EAP-TLS and similar stuff. Once you have that, your computer isn't going to automatically connect to any strange network.
Otherwise your computer may try to connect to its previous AP with a given SSID, and a malicious AP could then just say "yes that's me"[1], and then a malicious DHCP server could take over your machine if you have a vulnerable DHCP client. Even if your DHCP client is fine, there's plenty of other stuff - you might have IM/POP3/IMAP clients that automatically try to log on with your credentials.
How many of those clients will securely check to see that the server they connect to is genuine? All using TLS?
[1] Or maybe there's worse it could do? I wonder if there's room in the protocol to mess up WiFi client/server software - e.g. specify some weird reply fields and buffer overflow the victim.
"I don't know anyone who empties out their wallet or purse and throws away all the low denomination coins, so why waste even a little bit of energy if you don't need to?"
It's called prioritizing. It's foolish to spend most of your hours trying to save a few coins, if there are big bucks that can be saved for the same amount of time and effort.
Where people on the street can make an immediate significant difference:
1) Transportation 2) Heating/Cooling
Lighting is insignificant compared to 1) and 2).
Instead of just using normal electrical heaters or gas heaters - where you use 1kW of fuel and get 900W-1kW of heat, people should supplement them with heat pumps where possible. With heat pumps you could use say 700W of fuel and get 1kW of heat (unfortunately current heatpumps might not provide adequate heating cheaply).
Alternative heat sources: people could use their PCs to do one of those useful distributed calculation stuff. Seriously instead of just burning 200W just to get heat, you might as well use 200W to do useful calculations and also get 200W of heat.
I wonder if it would be cost effective to have homes that allow you to coordinate and organize heating and cooling from various sources. It seems a waste to have airconditioners pumping heat out of the house and at the same time have to heat frigid water from scratch to get hot water.
I guess pumping fluids around is expensive. Maybe if there's an advance in solid-state heating/cooling stuff we'd be able to pump it around in the form of electricity.
Regarding a meeting announcement of 30,000GBP/year saved by not having screensavers, if the college needs heating most of the time, and the heating system isn't that efficient, you'd actually save less in total. Was that factored in?
Plus holding meetings to discuss such stuff etc costs money as well. Heh, I bet you'd save more money if you just had someone going around auditing random meetings to see which meetings were useless[1], and then recommend the sacking of the people who were responsible for the most useless meetings of the year. Or just threaten to do that (and give the guidelines for effective meetings)...
[1] It's not too difficult to tell that a meeting was totally crap.
So what if your computer automatically sets up an IP that doesn't clash, and then sets up adhoc wireless networking with the previous SSID _if_ you have your wlan interface on?
How is that a flaw? That's a _feature_ in many cases. Especially if you really want to share files and you don't have a WAP.
From the article: "First of all, if you are running any kind of network firewall -- including the firewall that comes built in to Windows XP -- you won't have to worry about some stranger connecting to your laptop. In fact, I had to shut down my firewall for both of us to successfully conduct our test. "
Doh.
If you actually care about security you'd already know that wireless networking is a lot less secure than wired networking.
To "wise guys" trying to connect to other peoples stuff. You yourself could be exploited if you connect to any untrusted wireless LAN and try using the internet or connecting to "open" shares[1]. There's so much that can be done to _you_ that it's not funny.
What are you going to do if your computer gets "owned" or fubared after you open a share that's called "Do Not Open" or something like that?
People who think they are smart and connect to "open" wireless LANs run by "stupid" people should also assume the possibility that someone can sniff, hijack and fake their traffic.
If turns out those "stupid" people aren't that stupid and are evil, your usernames and passwords could be taken, or your data. Or you could be victim of a MITM attack. What you see may not be the real thing.
Even if they aren't actively hostile, they could log your activities too and I doubt they are under the same limitations/restrictions as ISPs.
The company I work for provides systems that make it _easy_ for people to get connected to the internet and do their stuff - they don't have to fool around with their internet or browser settings.
Malicious folk can do the sort of stuff we do and more for nefarious purposes.
[1] You're running windows and you think you're smart to open some "stupid" person's unsecured shared folder? Well you better make sure you've set your My Computer and Local Intranet security settings to something safe[2]. And it's probably best to turn off "view as a webpage" and all that junk...
Whatever O/S you are using, you better be fully patched when you expose yourself to an untrusted network. I believe many modern Linux distros have file managers that generate image previews, and there was an image library bug not so long ago.
[2] See: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=315933 and http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=182569
Uh that's just because most Linux distros aren't "easy" enough for Joe Average yet. Once they start getting easy to use you'd probably see the same thing. Making things easy AND secure is sometimes possible, but usually hard.
But how is this behaviour a flaw anyway? I don't get it.
I switched some years back when I got a bit of RSI on right hand. So it's not for the same reason, but there's no real disadvantage.
Now I can use the mouse with both hands, but left hand is more for normal desktop mousing, right hand is for games - FPS etc;).
Some of my colleagues thought I was left handed...
Oh yeah, I suggest you don't change the mouse button settings, that way you can use most people's mouse configs with either hand.
Re:Picking and choosing...
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God Mode
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· Score: 1
Yeah. It does make one wonder. I have been struggling with a few things myself.
That said, I personally think things aren't as simple as the fundamentalists (whether christians or atheists;) ) believe, so I shouldn't wish to make any premature conclusions.
For example, the first miracle Jesus did was to turn water into wine.
The "obvious"/"efficient" thing would have been to just create wine from nothing (those "creationists" might like that sort of thing, heh).
But, no as pointed out by someone recently, he asks some servants to get stone jars, and to fill them with water. Only then does he turn the water in the jars to wine (good wine too reportedly[1]).
Same for the feeding of the thousands. He gets someone to donate fish and bread first[2].
Why all that? And why be born as a baby? It seems that God really wants to work with us and through us. Strange, but I'm currently guessing that sort of thing might help explain why the world is the way it is.
And because of those incidents many of us will remember the servants who filled up the jars, and the boy with five barley loaves and two small fish.
[1] I do wonder how good the wine was;).
[2] I also wonder if the thousands ended up with only fish and bread. e.g. it would have been "required" for someone to donate something else for there to be more than just fish and bread.
Yeah I suppose if you make a country shitty enough, people will stop going there;).
So far it seems the US is still a lot better than Mexico. You guys will have to work a bit harder at it. Just a few stupid laws isn't going to do it.
Personally though, if I controlled a country I'd be happy about immigration. Immigration is the only way most countries get to pick their citizens.
Otherwise you just get whatever your citizens "produce", which is fairly random (and average).
Re:Picking and choosing...
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God Mode
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· Score: 1
Of course there's tons of murder and killing in the bible, no surprise there's tons of bad stuff recorded there - much of it is about history.
And yeah God does kill people. Why? Well for one I figure he loves some people more than others and plays favourites, and for another it's the way he's chosen to do stuff in this world[1].
e.g. he picked the Jews to be his chosen people (well, one reason is because of Abraham but I guess there must be other reasons as well). Even today it is obvious to nonbelievers the Jews still have a significant role in this world and its timeline (past, present and future). Tons of Muslims are anti-Jew to the point of near irrationality, which probably sets things up for the stuff mentioned in Revelations.
[1] If one goes according to popular Christian belief, it seems inevitable to me that billions will end up in hell, unless there's some twist in the final plot. I find the former quite disagreeable myself.
Believe me, I'm definitely not ignoring the troublesome bits. However, to me there's definitely something to it, it sure doesn't seem like a "bunch of fairy tales or myths".
So while one shouldn't pick and choose, I think it is even more important that one shouldn't ignore it completely just because of inconvenient/difficult bits, which is what many people are doing nowadays.
Trouble is the bad guys are probably already in charge.
After all, you have a president who thought it was a great idea to appoint a convicted felon like Poindexter to lead the DARPA's Information Assurance Office.
And so far Mr President's track record hasn't been too awe-inspiring in that front...
Re:Picking and choosing...
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God Mode
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· Score: 1
"And yet the bible says people asked Jesus whether they should then ignore the old testament, and he replied that they must not. So how to fix this paradox?"
Which paradox are you talking about?
If you look at the bulk of the laws in the Pentateuch, they were given to the Jews/Israelites as part of their "contract" with God.
I'm not sure whether those laws are to binding to non-jews living out of Israel (still investigating). However, I figure the laws from God are good, so even if they aren't binding, one can learn a fair bit from them. Go look up the Jubilee law. Also see the law where if you enter your neighbours vineyard, you can eat all the grapes you want but not put any in your basket, similarly if you enter your neighbour's grainfield you may pick kernels with your hands but you must not put a sickle to his standing grain.
Most people just don't actually bother to read and try to understand the Bible (both Christians and nonchristians - check out the skeptics annotated bible for an example of people who go through the bible but totally don't get it, nor even want to[1]).
Christians also have commandments and teachings from Jesus to follow that are in some ways stricter.
There are many other things that I haven't totally figured out, but I find it fairly interesting how some of the stuff makes more and more sense after you actually bother doing some investigation or thinking.
[1] They point out all the incest, murder etc in the bible, proving that they totally miss the point.
Well, it would be better if they also did the following tests:
openssl speed (see which crypto tasks/ciphers the CPUs are better at) Building the linux kernel and modules apache bench (ab, ab2) of apache serving static file with 1, 5, 10, 50, 100 concurrency apache bench of apache running a simple perl cgi with 1, 5, 10, 50, 100 concurrency (may wish to turn off logging for apache - to avoid disk write bottlenecks)
data compression and decompression:
gzip of a text file (cached in memory)
gzip of a binary file (cached in memory)
and corresponding gunzips to/dev/null.
(may also wish to test bzip and lzop) transferring cached data from one machine to/dev/null on another machine over ssh (using default cipher) and gigabit LAN. e.g. time cat datafile | ssh user@hostb cat >/dev/null; (where hostb has appropriate key installed so no password prompt, and datafile is fully cached in RAM e.g. 256MB file file ). The MySQL and Postgresql database benchmarks/regression tests.
The maximum rate of tiny udp packets per second (over gigabit LAN) the machine can take via INPUT with zero firewall rules, and with 5, 10, 50, 100 firewall rules the packet passes through, and the similar maximum rate for packet _forwarding_ (to another interface). Anyone remember Slammer?
Simple java benchmarks, compile, run, web? running apache bench tests in a vmware virtual machine?;)
By the way, I notice an annoying thing when people benchmark kernel builds. Most sites use a smaller value like make -j 3 for single core CPUs and skip the higher values (like -j 4 , -j 8 etc) which they do use for the multicores/chips. If they don't want to do all values of X, they should stop increasing X when performance stops improving - and _show_ the point where things stop improving.
Novel idea? Bullshit, it should be obvious to anyone working in that field, and even to me years before 1991 (I was figuring out ways of adding CVT to my brother's RC car). Back then (and before) tons of people were doing infinitely variable transmissions, slapping on regenerative braking to such is NOT a novel idea.
The problem with ideas is usually getting a chance and financing to actually do the implementation. I didn't have much in financing to actually modify my bro's RC car...
Personally, I figure with 6 billion people in the world patents that last longer than say 7 years are a stupid idea (and software patents should be prohibited). If you can't make money within the 7 years, too bad. There are so many people who'd come up with the same ideas, and it's just they don't have the means (or time) to patent all of them or fight the patenting of something they'd already thought of years ago, but thought it was pretty obvious (e.g. one-click, or this silly patent).
Toyota's hybrid and regenerative braking design is not really innovative. But they're one of the few car manufacturers who could make a practical _implementation_ for passenger cars AND actually made it available.
I mean, even I can come up with an idea for a car with electric motors, hydrocarbon fuel-cells, catalysts (for cleaning the petroleum/hydrocarbon fuel, and splitting the fuel), regenerative braking, energy storage (battery/capacitor bank).
e.g. petrol -> filter+ catalysts ->fuel-cells (e.g. hydrogen fuel cell + carbon fuel cell) -> energy storage <-> motor/generator.
(and alternative could be to use catalyst+ air + water + hydrocarbons to generate the alcohol for an alcohol fuel cell, which could be less troublesome than the carbon fuel cell).
Once the battery/capacitors are full, one could also use regenerated energy to create fuel for the fuel cells from the fuel cell waste (e.g. electrolise water), but that probably makes things more complicated.
BUT the implementation part is the main tricky bit. So there isn't such a car yet.
But it would be great - think of it, no need to muck around with storing and distributing troublesome hydrogen (hydrogen is a stupid idea too), the cars just run on petrol like old-style cars, but they are just a LOT more efficient.
Ah, Konqueror has a much better track record. Heh I've been modded down for saying that Mozilla was insecure, dunno why;).
With regards to the google desktop thing, I don't run google desktop myself, the problem is there may be other stuff in the background that go about doing similar things (maybe not on my personal PC but other people's PCs e.g. mom's), and I worry that those processes just might be running with higher privileges than normal restricted user (which I've got mom etc to run as - with no complaints so far).
That's what they call future trends? If that's right we're pretty safe then.
What would be interesting would be malware written in popular high level scripting or bytecode languages - e.g. perl, python, lisp. These do and will run on windows - with broadband becoming widespread it doesn't take long to download and run the relevant packed perl/python/lisp executable, and such executables do have legitimate uses anyway.
You can very easily write games/utils in such languages to help them spread as trojans.
It'll be interesting to see how the AV people will cope with these.
An attacker should be able to rapidly generate multiple versions of the malware faster than the AV people can generate signatures.
The malware can search for updates and download them with the help of search engines like google (google groups) and various blog/discussion sites. They might even be able to communicate with each other via spam email.
I'm not even sure if the code signing stuff will help.
After all the initial code could be innocuous with perhaps one or two really terrible "bugs". But subsequent code could be totally different. Because with such languages once the first bit is in, fetching and executing new code isn't as hard as downloading a new executable binary (which may require passing checks by the O/S and AV software), it's just downloading/finding the correctly identified/tagged string and running the equivalent of "eval" on it. Heck, one could just blindly run a string and catch the resulting exceptions if it's not proper code.
I'm not a malware author, but I think most malware is rather primitive (esp those on windows[1]). I'm wondering how advanced the malware detection and prevention stuff really is.
[1] I guess they don't need to be very sophisticated when the users actually do stuff like help enter the right passwords to unzip the malware and then voluntarily run the payload! Even better those users usually run as admin.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, don't tell me you'd be sad if you receive less spam.
After all, since you don't seem to have difficulty getting job offers in the first place, this is a GOOD THING.
This way you don't have to waste time with companies that aren't interested in hiring people based on merit. No need to apply to, interview for, or even work in a crappy company with crappy management/bosses.
Think about it, if they select people that way, what sort of people will you be working with and for, AND what are the odds that you'd be promoted or given pay rises based on merit?
I'm assuming you are looking for a long term job, and not just a short stint, and aren't desperate to find _any_ job.
Well it's a data entry job if they want no errors @ 9500 wph and you can't do that, why should they hire you? Doesn't matter what colour you are, or whether you wear dress shoes or sneakers or are barefoot. That sort of job seems easy to measure.
You cost significantly less than 7000/9500 of the candidate who can do 9500 wph? Or you are willing to work more than 9500/7000 longer (but remember there are only 24 hours in a day).
If the tasks involves entering ordered sets of data by a certain date, it could cost more to split tasks to 7000 wph people in such a way that a deadline can be met.
Now if you can show that a 5000 wph candidate with the same costs etc got the job and you didn't then something is fishy.
All the current x86 virtualization stuff is going to be out of date soon. It will be just adding kludges to the kernel to implement stuff that required by virtualization deficiencies in old x86 stuff. If you need those kludges, Xen should be enough.
This is because Intel and AMD are going to allow new and far more efficient ways of doing virtualization, with hardware assistance (lookup Intel Vanderpool and AMD Pacifica).
So, I don't see much long term gain for the effort for all the minuses.
You risk lower quality and increased maintenance costs. And you might also increase exposure to patent claims (but I bet IBM can smash anyone to pulp especially with virtualization patents).
You will still need developers to work on Vanderpool and Pacifica stuff, and I think you'd get better "bang for buck" with that (plus I think it will be a lot more fun).
Because in Perl
"1"."2" eq "12"
and
1 + 2 == 3
If a loosely typed language is using + for concatenation, it's poorly designed (you'd end up typing more to specify what you want done).
You need to know that the concatenation of two variables is not the same as adding them together.
Slightly relieved that Perl 6 switched from using underscore to tilde for concat - underscore is overloaded with so many other tasks already. Unfortunately ~ still requires shift to be pressed on my keyboards, but I guess they are running out of symbols, and at least I think ~ won't require you to keep putting spaces around it to disambiguate it from other meanings.
Uh wasn't it "Make easy things easy, and hard things possible"?
That's as close to "management speak" as possible without losing meaning and usefulness.
And to me that statement shows a great insight in the part of the Perl people.
Just as you can't compress everything well, you can't make everything easy.
You would like to make the easy and common stuff easy. But not make the hard things impossible (gzip works on everything even though it makes some files bigger).
So far Perl has been a good match to solving very many problems.
In contrast Python's favourite motto appears to be "one obvious way". I suppose if the one obvious way is rarely hard then it'll be fine, but I don't find that concept as reassuring.
PHP seems to be "Make it extremely easy to do common things, even if not correctly" (examples: addslashes, magic quotes, track vars etc).
How about this instead:
;).
:).
;).
0) get better insulation.
1) get a cluster of Intel PCs (especially those that use 250W or more of power under load). A slashdotter can always find a way to use more computers
2) run lm_sensors on the PCs - this is how you get your temperature readings.
3) Depending on the time, date, derived ambient temperature and other customizable info, decide whether to run CPU intensive jobs on your computers.
Voila - temperature control
Notes:
There are many useful CPU intensive jobs you can run. Go look for them.
Wake-on-LAN can be useful.
Controlling non-heatpump heating with some expensive home automation rig or furnace seems as silly as my suggestion
Heck my proposal wastes less energy- after all you could say the energy is used twice. Computers are cheap compared to some of the stuff proposed here.
If you are going to use wireless networking you should already be securing your computer and network configuration in ways where this "flaw" won't be an issue at all.
Because, if you associate with a malicious network you're pretty much in danger anyway. So if you actually care about security, the best way is to turn off your wireless network, or only allow connection using safe WLAN protocols e.g. EAP-TLS and similar stuff. Once you have that, your computer isn't going to automatically connect to any strange network.
Otherwise your computer may try to connect to its previous AP with a given SSID, and a malicious AP could then just say "yes that's me"[1], and then a malicious DHCP server could take over your machine if you have a vulnerable DHCP client. Even if your DHCP client is fine, there's plenty of other stuff - you might have IM/POP3/IMAP clients that automatically try to log on with your credentials.
How many of those clients will securely check to see that the server they connect to is genuine? All using TLS?
[1] Or maybe there's worse it could do? I wonder if there's room in the protocol to mess up WiFi client/server software - e.g. specify some weird reply fields and buffer overflow the victim.
"I don't know anyone who empties out their wallet or purse and throws away all the low denomination coins, so why waste even a little bit of energy if you don't need to?"
It's called prioritizing. It's foolish to spend most of your hours trying to save a few coins, if there are big bucks that can be saved for the same amount of time and effort.
Where people on the street can make an immediate significant difference:
1) Transportation
2) Heating/Cooling
Lighting is insignificant compared to 1) and 2).
Instead of just using normal electrical heaters or gas heaters - where you use 1kW of fuel and get 900W-1kW of heat, people should supplement them with heat pumps where possible. With heat pumps you could use say 700W of fuel and get 1kW of heat (unfortunately current heatpumps might not provide adequate heating cheaply).
Alternative heat sources: people could use their PCs to do one of those useful distributed calculation stuff. Seriously instead of just burning 200W just to get heat, you might as well use 200W to do useful calculations and also get 200W of heat.
I wonder if it would be cost effective to have homes that allow you to coordinate and organize heating and cooling from various sources. It seems a waste to have airconditioners pumping heat out of the house and at the same time have to heat frigid water from scratch to get hot water.
I guess pumping fluids around is expensive. Maybe if there's an advance in solid-state heating/cooling stuff we'd be able to pump it around in the form of electricity.
Regarding a meeting announcement of 30,000GBP/year saved by not having screensavers, if the college needs heating most of the time, and the heating system isn't that efficient, you'd actually save less in total. Was that factored in?
Plus holding meetings to discuss such stuff etc costs money as well. Heh, I bet you'd save more money if you just had someone going around auditing random meetings to see which meetings were useless[1], and then recommend the sacking of the people who were responsible for the most useless meetings of the year. Or just threaten to do that (and give the guidelines for effective meetings)...
[1] It's not too difficult to tell that a meeting was totally crap.
So what if your computer automatically sets up an IP that doesn't clash, and then sets up adhoc wireless networking with the previous SSID _if_ you have your wlan interface on?
How is that a flaw? That's a _feature_ in many cases. Especially if you really want to share files and you don't have a WAP.
From the article: "First of all, if you are running any kind of network firewall -- including the firewall that comes built in to Windows XP -- you won't have to worry about some stranger connecting to your laptop. In fact, I had to shut down my firewall for both of us to successfully conduct our test. "
Doh.
If you actually care about security you'd already know that wireless networking is a lot less secure than wired networking.
To "wise guys" trying to connect to other peoples stuff. You yourself could be exploited if you connect to any untrusted wireless LAN and try using the internet or connecting to "open" shares[1]. There's so much that can be done to _you_ that it's not funny.
What are you going to do if your computer gets "owned" or fubared after you open a share that's called "Do Not Open" or something like that?
People who think they are smart and connect to "open" wireless LANs run by "stupid" people should also assume the possibility that someone can sniff, hijack and fake their traffic.
If turns out those "stupid" people aren't that stupid and are evil, your usernames and passwords could be taken, or your data. Or you could be victim of a MITM attack. What you see may not be the real thing.
Even if they aren't actively hostile, they could log your activities too and I doubt they are under the same limitations/restrictions as ISPs.
The company I work for provides systems that make it _easy_ for people to get connected to the internet and do their stuff - they don't have to fool around with their internet or browser settings.
Malicious folk can do the sort of stuff we do and more for nefarious purposes.
[1] You're running windows and you think you're smart to open some "stupid" person's unsecured shared folder? Well you better make sure you've set your My Computer and Local Intranet security settings to something safe[2]. And it's probably best to turn off "view as a webpage" and all that junk...
Whatever O/S you are using, you better be fully patched when you expose yourself to an untrusted network. I believe many modern Linux distros have file managers that generate image previews, and there was an image library bug not so long ago.
[2] See: http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=315933 and http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=182569
Uh that's just because most Linux distros aren't "easy" enough for Joe Average yet. Once they start getting easy to use you'd probably see the same thing. Making things easy AND secure is sometimes possible, but usually hard.
But how is this behaviour a flaw anyway? I don't get it.
(the enter keys are on the right side too...)
;).
I switched some years back when I got a bit of RSI on right hand. So it's not for the same reason, but there's no real disadvantage.
Now I can use the mouse with both hands, but left hand is more for normal desktop mousing, right hand is for games - FPS etc
Some of my colleagues thought I was left handed...
Oh yeah, I suggest you don't change the mouse button settings, that way you can use most people's mouse configs with either hand.
Yeah. It does make one wonder. I have been struggling with a few things myself.
;) ) believe, so I shouldn't wish to make any premature conclusions.
;).
That said, I personally think things aren't as simple as the fundamentalists (whether christians or atheists
For example, the first miracle Jesus did was to turn water into wine.
The "obvious"/"efficient" thing would have been to just create wine from nothing (those "creationists" might like that sort of thing, heh).
But, no as pointed out by someone recently, he asks some servants to get stone jars, and to fill them with water. Only then does he turn the water in the jars to wine (good wine too reportedly[1]).
Same for the feeding of the thousands. He gets someone to donate fish and bread first[2].
Why all that? And why be born as a baby? It seems that God really wants to work with us and through us. Strange, but I'm currently guessing that sort of thing might help explain why the world is the way it is.
And because of those incidents many of us will remember the servants who filled up the jars, and the boy with five barley loaves and two small fish.
[1] I do wonder how good the wine was
[2] I also wonder if the thousands ended up with only fish and bread. e.g. it would have been "required" for someone to donate something else for there to be more than just fish and bread.
Yeah I suppose if you make a country shitty enough, people will stop going there ;).
So far it seems the US is still a lot better than Mexico. You guys will have to work a bit harder at it. Just a few stupid laws isn't going to do it.
Personally though, if I controlled a country I'd be happy about immigration. Immigration is the only way most countries get to pick their citizens.
Otherwise you just get whatever your citizens "produce", which is fairly random (and average).
Of course there's tons of murder and killing in the bible, no surprise there's tons of bad stuff recorded there - much of it is about history.
And yeah God does kill people. Why? Well for one I figure he loves some people more than others and plays favourites, and for another it's the way he's chosen to do stuff in this world[1].
e.g. he picked the Jews to be his chosen people (well, one reason is because of Abraham but I guess there must be other reasons as well). Even today it is obvious to nonbelievers the Jews still have a significant role in this world and its timeline (past, present and future). Tons of Muslims are anti-Jew to the point of near irrationality, which probably sets things up for the stuff mentioned in Revelations.
[1] If one goes according to popular Christian belief, it seems inevitable to me that billions will end up in hell, unless there's some twist in the final plot. I find the former quite disagreeable myself.
Believe me, I'm definitely not ignoring the troublesome bits. However, to me there's definitely something to it, it sure doesn't seem like a "bunch of fairy tales or myths".
So while one shouldn't pick and choose, I think it is even more important that one shouldn't ignore it completely just because of inconvenient/difficult bits, which is what many people are doing nowadays.
"Which is pretty likely if all the crops die and there's no more food."
Yeah, the seeds would make nice last snack.
Trouble is the bad guys are probably already in charge.
After all, you have a president who thought it was a great idea to appoint a convicted felon like Poindexter to lead the DARPA's Information Assurance Office.
And so far Mr President's track record hasn't been too awe-inspiring in that front...
"And yet the bible says people asked Jesus whether they should then ignore the old testament, and he replied that they must not. So how to fix this paradox?"
Which paradox are you talking about?
If you look at the bulk of the laws in the Pentateuch, they were given to the Jews/Israelites as part of their "contract" with God.
I'm not sure whether those laws are to binding to non-jews living out of Israel (still investigating). However, I figure the laws from God are good, so even if they aren't binding, one can learn a fair bit from them. Go look up the Jubilee law. Also see the law where if you enter your neighbours vineyard, you can eat all the grapes you want but not put any in your basket, similarly if you enter your neighbour's grainfield you may pick kernels with your hands but you must not put a sickle to his standing grain.
Most people just don't actually bother to read and try to understand the Bible (both Christians and nonchristians - check out the skeptics annotated bible for an example of people who go through the bible but totally don't get it, nor even want to[1]).
Christians also have commandments and teachings from Jesus to follow that are in some ways stricter.
There are many other things that I haven't totally figured out, but I find it fairly interesting how some of the stuff makes more and more sense after you actually bother doing some investigation or thinking.
[1] They point out all the incest, murder etc in the bible, proving that they totally miss the point.
How about Duke Nukem 3D?
Well, it would be better if they also did the following tests:
/dev/null. /dev/null on another machine over ssh (using default cipher) and gigabit LAN. e.g. time cat datafile | ssh user@hostb cat > /dev/null; (where hostb has appropriate key installed so no password prompt, and datafile is fully cached in RAM e.g. 256MB file file ).
;)
openssl speed (see which crypto tasks/ciphers the CPUs are better at)
Building the linux kernel and modules
apache bench (ab, ab2) of apache serving static file with 1, 5, 10, 50, 100 concurrency
apache bench of apache running a simple perl cgi with 1, 5, 10, 50, 100 concurrency
(may wish to turn off logging for apache - to avoid disk write bottlenecks)
data compression and decompression:
gzip of a text file (cached in memory)
gzip of a binary file (cached in memory)
and corresponding gunzips to
(may also wish to test bzip and lzop)
transferring cached data from one machine to
The MySQL and Postgresql database benchmarks/regression tests.
The maximum rate of tiny udp packets per second (over gigabit LAN) the machine can take via INPUT with zero firewall rules, and with 5, 10, 50, 100 firewall rules the packet passes through, and the similar maximum rate for packet _forwarding_ (to another interface). Anyone remember Slammer?
Simple java benchmarks, compile, run, web? running apache bench tests in a vmware virtual machine?
By the way, I notice an annoying thing when people benchmark kernel builds.
Most sites use a smaller value like make -j 3 for single core CPUs and skip the higher values (like -j 4 , -j 8 etc) which they do use for the multicores/chips. If they don't want to do all values of X, they should stop increasing X when performance stops improving - and _show_ the point where things stop improving.
Did Hotmail have a higher server (or hardware cost) to subscriber ratio after they migrated to windows?
Novel idea? Bullshit, it should be obvious to anyone working in that field, and even to me years before 1991 (I was figuring out ways of adding CVT to my brother's RC car). Back then (and before) tons of people were doing infinitely variable transmissions, slapping on regenerative braking to such is NOT a novel idea.
The problem with ideas is usually getting a chance and financing to actually do the implementation. I didn't have much in financing to actually modify my bro's RC car...
Personally, I figure with 6 billion people in the world patents that last longer than say 7 years are a stupid idea (and software patents should be prohibited). If you can't make money within the 7 years, too bad. There are so many people who'd come up with the same ideas, and it's just they don't have the means (or time) to patent all of them or fight the patenting of something they'd already thought of years ago, but thought it was pretty obvious (e.g. one-click, or this silly patent).
Toyota's hybrid and regenerative braking design is not really innovative. But they're one of the few car manufacturers who could make a practical _implementation_ for passenger cars AND actually made it available.
I mean, even I can come up with an idea for a car with electric motors, hydrocarbon fuel-cells, catalysts (for cleaning the petroleum/hydrocarbon fuel, and splitting the fuel), regenerative braking, energy storage (battery/capacitor bank).
e.g. petrol -> filter+ catalysts ->fuel-cells (e.g. hydrogen fuel cell + carbon fuel cell) -> energy storage <-> motor/generator.
(and alternative could be to use catalyst+ air + water + hydrocarbons to generate the alcohol for an alcohol fuel cell, which could be less troublesome than the carbon fuel cell).
Once the battery/capacitors are full, one could also use regenerated energy to create fuel for the fuel cells from the fuel cell waste (e.g. electrolise water), but that probably makes things more complicated.
BUT the implementation part is the main tricky bit. So there isn't such a car yet.
But it would be great - think of it, no need to muck around with storing and distributing troublesome hydrogen (hydrogen is a stupid idea too), the cars just run on petrol like old-style cars, but they are just a LOT more efficient.
Not only that, the processed oil is cheaper than bottled water (which often has practically nothing done to it in comparison).
Ah, Konqueror has a much better track record. Heh I've been modded down for saying that Mozilla was insecure, dunno why ;).
With regards to the google desktop thing, I don't run google desktop myself, the problem is there may be other stuff in the background that go about doing similar things (maybe not on my personal PC but other people's PCs e.g. mom's), and I worry that those processes just might be running with higher privileges than normal restricted user (which I've got mom etc to run as - with no complaints so far).
Trouble is due to the placebo effect, it might fool the brain so well that it behaves as if it is indeed caffeinated.
See Neuropharmacological Dissection of Placebo Analgesia,The Neurobiology of Placebo Analgesia and "13 things that do not make sense".
Then there's also the homeopathy thingy - see num 4 in the newscientist article.
That's what they call future trends? If that's right we're pretty safe then.
What would be interesting would be malware written in popular high level scripting or bytecode languages - e.g. perl, python, lisp. These do and will run on windows - with broadband becoming widespread it doesn't take long to download and run the relevant packed perl/python/lisp executable, and such executables do have legitimate uses anyway.
You can very easily write games/utils in such languages to help them spread as trojans.
It'll be interesting to see how the AV people will cope with these.
An attacker should be able to rapidly generate multiple versions of the malware faster than the AV people can generate signatures.
The malware can search for updates and download them with the help of search engines like google (google groups) and various blog/discussion sites. They might even be able to communicate with each other via spam email.
I'm not even sure if the code signing stuff will help.
After all the initial code could be innocuous with perhaps one or two really terrible "bugs". But subsequent code could be totally different. Because with such languages once the first bit is in, fetching and executing new code isn't as hard as downloading a new executable binary (which may require passing checks by the O/S and AV software), it's just downloading/finding the correctly identified/tagged string and running the equivalent of "eval" on it. Heck, one could just blindly run a string and catch the resulting exceptions if it's not proper code.
I'm not a malware author, but I think most malware is rather primitive (esp those on windows[1]). I'm wondering how advanced the malware detection and prevention stuff really is.
[1] I guess they don't need to be very sophisticated when the users actually do stuff like help enter the right passwords to unzip the malware and then voluntarily run the payload! Even better those users usually run as admin.