Alright. You win. It's just linux is retarded in a way I understand. Me and linux are two mutually compatible neurosis. Windows is like my evil step-sister who comes to steal my boyfriends and I want to scratch her eyes out. That, and linux fanboys are easier to ply into helping me and they have social skills. Windows programmers... I don't know what's wrong with them but it's like they core dump at the sight of tits and only offer condescending advice. I sure hope they fix that bug someday.
The solution is simple -- the government already has PDAs that tie into their networks and are secure. He will use that for classified information, as required by law anyway. His blackberry will be used for non-classified information. Separation between the two is also required by law. Now, why are we fangirling over Obama like this? This wasn't news when Bush was in office and he used a cell phone and a PDA too. Now I wait for my -1, didn't fangirl score.
Well, you're probably right on all counts..NET is not my environment. But when my manager throws me an intractable problem that's going to result in a legion of poorly trained kids being thrown at it otherwise, in less than a month, I adapt. I also scream "Train! Train! Get off the tracks--TRAIN!" to the aforementioned manager while doing so. -_- I basically had an O'Reilly book on Visual Basic and the online references to work with. And I had to bust a few people's nuts in another department to get Visual Studio installed on my system. Oh yeah -- and no dev boxes. Every test I did was against a production system, because wouldn't give me access to the dev boxes ("You're in software deployment, not development!"). So yeah... My knowledge of.NET is entirely trial-by-fire. Add that to the endless frustrations of the SMS/WMI SDK and a total lack of training on SMS (again, I worked in deployment, so why would I need access to the console?)... well, you get the idea.
Maybe your experiences were better (maybe owing to not being in a pressure-cooker environment), but my experience of.NET was that the documentation was there but it was confusing at best and the code examples left something to be desired -- like "Why X instead of Y?" But I don't think you'll argue with me that Windows programming is helluva more complicated than Linux/Unix, and unnecessarily so.
I wonder if it can resolve individual dendrite connections in the brain. If so, we've just developed our first brain scanner capable of mapping a living brain's circuitry. Which means, in principle, we now possess all the technology required to model a human brain, or for that matter (but at extreme cost), create a synthetic one. Though, at present, we have no way of truly providing it with the interface necessary for communication or interaction with the physical world.
Some serial killer goes and and murders dozens of innocent people; and we reward him with veneration, books written about him, endless press coverage, etc. Scumbags don't deserve our respect, our veneration, or polite treatment.
We're not here to discuss his moral infirmities. We're here to discuss effective ways of countering the threat the aforementioned poses. It is logical to begin by questioning those we've found engaged in such behaviors as to their motivations, goals, and methods. However, if you do not wish to dissect the frog due to moral outrage, I can give you some music to listen to but you will not pass the course.
I think the Windows programming model is at fault for much of the obfusciation tactics used by malware. Entire classes of exploits have arisen due entirely to the complexities and obscurities of the interface. Modern anti-malware tactics have to monitor many different parts of the operating system, and in some cases due to architectural constraints the methods of doing so can make the entire operating system unstable. Not only that, but race conditions and the use of special trap conditions/exception handling can make safely disabling malware a frustrating experience. Even professionally designed applications can sometimes tank the Operating System. Trying disabling Symantec Anti-virus on an XP system without a reboot, for example, and then doing a reinstall of it remotely. In the field, I saw failure rates of about 6% for SAV10. On a hundred thousand systems, let's just say I was not happy on that deployment! Killing malware is even more risky.
Windows is layers upon layers of earlier APIs that cannot be removed due to "backwards compatibility" concerns. I have some limited exposure to the.NET framework, and it has perhaps a half-dozen APIs for threading, and the documentation is riddled with exposed interfaces that have the note "Do not use. Not safe. bullet in the brain pan squish" in it. Over a third of the API is already depreciated (as far as I can tell), and there is an ever-shifting set of best practices standards. I can only imagine the hell a proper programmer endures in developing truly complex applications for.NET -- all I was doing was a few WMI calls and a database interface and I still crashed the kernel many times trying to figure out what to trap -- in many cases, error handling is mostly about creating a catch-all and then trying to break your code to see what is generated and then guessing what to trap accordingly. With an interface this complicated and unstable, it will always be a cat and mouse game between the white and black hats on this architecture, a game predicated on undocumented interfaces, obscurity, and deep knowledge of layers of the operating system that interact in unpredictable ways.
Compare this to linux, where the interfaces haven't changed that much, and when they do, depreciated means "We're going to remove this in a year or so and we mean it." Open source has one huge advantage here -- if it's not maintained, it ceases to be relevant and there's no 20 year old code lurking about in an unused API long forgotten. At least not nearly to the degree Windows has it. If you ask me, Microsoft is complicit in allowing malware to exist because they are unwilling to modernize Windows. They need to start over from scratch on their codebase and have a good hard think about what those APIs and interfaces are going to look like and then stick to it. Or at the very least, they could start by documenting these interfaces and releasing some code so we can be more confident that our hooks into their black-boxed APIs won't tear the operating system's heart out...
Management is a different skill set than technology. Whats important in a leader is being able to listen to people who are experts, learn from them, and then make a reasoned decision. Its not so concerning if he's not a techy if he has a track record of listening to informed techies and making good decisions based on that information. A track record of leading companies that effectively utilize the internet is such a track record.
That's an excellent point. But I don't think the credentials listed so far speak to that. It only speaks to him knowing where and how to invest. That isn't leadership ability, that's financial know-how. What is there here that speaks to his ability to lead?
That page doesn't indicate he authored it. And the page you gave looks like a power-point presentation, not a policy paper. That does not inspire my confidence.
The FCC isn't charged with creating standards and products, it's about policy.
Flip over whatever you typed that with. There should be a sticker there that says "Part 16, FCC rules." Read it.
I know it's the cool thing today to be cynical about Obama's decisions, and I haven't agreed with many of them lately as well, but this is a good pick.
I'm not cynical about his decisions, I'm cynical about his administration. He hasn't been sworn in yet, so he hasn't made any decisions yet per-se.
So far the media's use of flash and java has been a major reason for the development and wide-spread use of browser plug-ins to disable those technologies. I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Seriously, though, blaming the problem on economics is a copout.
Not all of us type "KeyserSoze 10000" at the console whenever faced with a gold shortage.
Why are costs to lay redundant cables so high?
Perhaps designing something that is several thousand miles long, and under several hundred PSI of pressure, to lay at the bottom of an environment that contains sulphuric acid plumbs, volcanic pits, and large numbers of angry monsters, is not easy.
What can be done to convince the telcos that laying redundant cables is a good idea? What can tip the CBA to the B side?
Threats of violence, regulation, and regular bombing of the opposition has worked well for us in other areas.
How much money do the telcos lose when a line goes down? Over time, is that more than the cost of running redundant lines?
Obviously, it is not more than the cost of running redundant lines or they would have done so by now.
So yes, it's economics, but saying it's economics is glossing over the important details.
Circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works because...
We need both managers and engineers, the problem is... Where are the engineers in the FCC and why don't they have a voice in how things are going? Because a lot of the FCC's decisions lately seem to be rolling out the doors with glaring implementation problems. Do they even employ them anymore?
My point isn't that policy is one of their roles. My point is that it is not their only role and putting someone in charge that only knows the policy side of the equation will not make effective decisions about implementation of those policies. His policies could be the best thing since sliced bread but if the implementation is crap it doesn't matter. And given that the FCC has legal power over just about every electronic device sold, used, and produced in the United States... I'd like to know the man has some fundamental grasp of how they actually work. If not, well.. here's some history for you:
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" --David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.
In the 90s it was backhoes. Now it's giant cable-eating squid. What next, volcanic eruptions? Really, the problem is two-fold -- first, cables break. Hey, it's several thousand miles long and several thousand feet down, and it's just laying there. Of course it's going to break. You could make the cables out of Unobtainium and they will still wither and break eventually. It's a fact of life. The real problem isn't that they fail, the problem is that the telecommunications companies don't have redundant links because of the expense. So, in summary, the problem is economics. And Cthulu. But you can't stop one of the great old ones, so let's focus on redundant links instead. -_-
I'd rather have someone who didn't spend their life in management making decisions about how the internet should work. And that's all this guy has... Funding, venture capital, management. So he's great at money! Good--I'm sure he'll make a bunch of businesses very rich. But does he know what TCP/IP is? Does he understand what makes effective QoS policy? How about the difference between bandwidth and latency or (shudder) the OSI 7 layer [burrito] model of networking? Bluntly stated -- does this guy give two sh*ts about consumer interests?
This guy will be head of the FCC. Isn't that organization also very much about engineering, not just policy. If the FCC has become a policy-making organization and left its engineering roots, well how shall I say -- "Houston, we have a problem." And yes, the comparison to NASA I think is fitting, given it was another engineering-based governmental body that later become all about policies and management and has now sent two shuttles smashing into the ground because of it.
Change we can believe in. Heh--Yeah. Right. Looks like more of the same to me.
The next advancement in military tech will probably be anti-UAV technology. Since they're so lightweight and small, there's no real chance for them to survive electromagnetic weapons (hardening costs weight). I suspect miniturization and economizing of EMP delivery systems will become a priority for many militaries in the next decade. Counter-surveillance will also become a priority for many groups, both domestically and abroad.
The technology is already being abused to spy on large public gatherings where there is no evidence of illegal activity. Eventually, people are going to start fighting back, and the government can piss off on that because one shotgun blast (cost: $1) will blow a several thousand dollar UAV out of the sky without too much trouble. A baseball bat and a can of gasoline later, and it's a total loss. Unlike most counter-technology, I'm betting anti-UAV tech will spring from civilian interests.
It'll be like those HARM systems... That got defeated by people who'd stick a fork into a microwave's door interlock and then turn it on and point it up. $280,000 missile blows up $15 microwave. Very economical!
This is like those cans of oxygen (for welding) my friend found at Home Depot that read WARNING: This product is known to cause cancer in the State of California.
How about this: We affix a label to all political offices that say "WARNING: There is no proven link between intelligence and holding public office. Political Science is really only a theory and should be judged critically and with consideration to other theories."
It's just another "I have 40 years of experience doing X... Damn kids these days. Get off my lawn." Hey, here's something to chew on -- I bet he screwed up his pointers and data structures just as much when he was at the same experience level. Move along, slashdot, nothing to see here. I will never understand the compulsion to compare people with five years experience to those with twenty and then try to use age as the relevant factor. Age is a number... Unless you're over the age of 65, or under the age of about 14, your experience level is going to mean more in any industry. This isn't about new technology versus old, or people knowing their history, or blah blah blah -- it's all frosting on the poison cake of age discrimination.
P.S. Old man -- reading a book won't make you an expert. Doubly so for programming books. I'd have thought you'd know that by now. Why not get off your high horse and side-saddle with the younger generation and try to impart some of that knowledge with a little face time instead?
he was also 5'6", and average male height is 5'8", and standard deviation for height is approximately 2.3 inches for humans. Do the math... he was shorter than most men.
I am not a doctor, however -- isn't the main problem with cancer cells being that they have the same protein coating as normal cells that identify them to the immune system as "yours" versus "other"? The only way to kill a cancer cell that way would be with something that actually enters the cell and can then interact with the malignant protein. On the outside, cancer cells "look" the same to the immune system. Or is there a protein that expresses in cancer cells that can be differentiated from non-cancer cells?
Go to some GLBT outings. There are more of us, and geeks are generally welcome because they listen, they're smart, and are gender-blind. Good conversation, if they will blossom you know? Which is so rare and awesome you don't even know... -_- Stay away from the women's studies gatherings though... They're on the whole an angry lot who will just pick their teeth with you however nice you are. They simmer down once they're out IRL for awhile, but in college the lack of RL experience is a real downer. And vegans... Avoid.
Slashdot Mirror
Alright. You win. It's just linux is retarded in a way I understand. Me and linux are two mutually compatible neurosis. Windows is like my evil step-sister who comes to steal my boyfriends and I want to scratch her eyes out. That, and linux fanboys are easier to ply into helping me and they have social skills. Windows programmers... I don't know what's wrong with them but it's like they core dump at the sight of tits and only offer condescending advice. I sure hope they fix that bug someday.
The solution is simple -- the government already has PDAs that tie into their networks and are secure. He will use that for classified information, as required by law anyway. His blackberry will be used for non-classified information. Separation between the two is also required by law. Now, why are we fangirling over Obama like this? This wasn't news when Bush was in office and he used a cell phone and a PDA too. Now I wait for my -1, didn't fangirl score.
Yes, but malware authors are a bit gamey. I suggest buying a lot of rosemary before hunting them.
Well, you're probably right on all counts. .NET is not my environment. But when my manager throws me an intractable problem that's going to result in a legion of poorly trained kids being thrown at it otherwise, in less than a month, I adapt. I also scream "Train! Train! Get off the tracks--TRAIN!" to the aforementioned manager while doing so. -_- I basically had an O'Reilly book on Visual Basic and the online references to work with. And I had to bust a few people's nuts in another department to get Visual Studio installed on my system. Oh yeah -- and no dev boxes. Every test I did was against a production system, because wouldn't give me access to the dev boxes ("You're in software deployment, not development!"). So yeah... My knowledge of .NET is entirely trial-by-fire. Add that to the endless frustrations of the SMS/WMI SDK and a total lack of training on SMS (again, I worked in deployment, so why would I need access to the console?)... well, you get the idea.
Maybe your experiences were better (maybe owing to not being in a pressure-cooker environment), but my experience of .NET was that the documentation was there but it was confusing at best and the code examples left something to be desired -- like "Why X instead of Y?" But I don't think you'll argue with me that Windows programming is helluva more complicated than Linux/Unix, and unnecessarily so.
I wonder if it can resolve individual dendrite connections in the brain. If so, we've just developed our first brain scanner capable of mapping a living brain's circuitry. Which means, in principle, we now possess all the technology required to model a human brain, or for that matter (but at extreme cost), create a synthetic one. Though, at present, we have no way of truly providing it with the interface necessary for communication or interaction with the physical world.
Some serial killer goes and and murders dozens of innocent people; and we reward him with veneration, books written about him, endless press coverage, etc. Scumbags don't deserve our respect, our veneration, or polite treatment.
We're not here to discuss his moral infirmities. We're here to discuss effective ways of countering the threat the aforementioned poses. It is logical to begin by questioning those we've found engaged in such behaviors as to their motivations, goals, and methods. However, if you do not wish to dissect the frog due to moral outrage, I can give you some music to listen to but you will not pass the course.
It's real progress when many web developers don't know about the BLINK tag anymore. Oh god... it still haunts my dreams.
I think the Windows programming model is at fault for much of the obfusciation tactics used by malware. Entire classes of exploits have arisen due entirely to the complexities and obscurities of the interface. Modern anti-malware tactics have to monitor many different parts of the operating system, and in some cases due to architectural constraints the methods of doing so can make the entire operating system unstable. Not only that, but race conditions and the use of special trap conditions/exception handling can make safely disabling malware a frustrating experience. Even professionally designed applications can sometimes tank the Operating System. Trying disabling Symantec Anti-virus on an XP system without a reboot, for example, and then doing a reinstall of it remotely. In the field, I saw failure rates of about 6% for SAV10. On a hundred thousand systems, let's just say I was not happy on that deployment! Killing malware is even more risky.
Windows is layers upon layers of earlier APIs that cannot be removed due to "backwards compatibility" concerns. I have some limited exposure to the .NET framework, and it has perhaps a half-dozen APIs for threading, and the documentation is riddled with exposed interfaces that have the note "Do not use. Not safe. bullet in the brain pan squish" in it. Over a third of the API is already depreciated (as far as I can tell), and there is an ever-shifting set of best practices standards. I can only imagine the hell a proper programmer endures in developing truly complex applications for .NET -- all I was doing was a few WMI calls and a database interface and I still crashed the kernel many times trying to figure out what to trap -- in many cases, error handling is mostly about creating a catch-all and then trying to break your code to see what is generated and then guessing what to trap accordingly. With an interface this complicated and unstable, it will always be a cat and mouse game between the white and black hats on this architecture, a game predicated on undocumented interfaces, obscurity, and deep knowledge of layers of the operating system that interact in unpredictable ways.
Compare this to linux, where the interfaces haven't changed that much, and when they do, depreciated means "We're going to remove this in a year or so and we mean it." Open source has one huge advantage here -- if it's not maintained, it ceases to be relevant and there's no 20 year old code lurking about in an unused API long forgotten. At least not nearly to the degree Windows has it. If you ask me, Microsoft is complicit in allowing malware to exist because they are unwilling to modernize Windows. They need to start over from scratch on their codebase and have a good hard think about what those APIs and interfaces are going to look like and then stick to it. Or at the very least, they could start by documenting these interfaces and releasing some code so we can be more confident that our hooks into their black-boxed APIs won't tear the operating system's heart out...
Straight up text and regular pictures or video even isn't appropriate for everything. They can be abused just as much as Flash or Java can be.
Yes, but not nearly so annoyingly.
Management is a different skill set than technology. Whats important in a leader is being able to listen to people who are experts, learn from them, and then make a reasoned decision. Its not so concerning if he's not a techy if he has a track record of listening to informed techies and making good decisions based on that information. A track record of leading companies that effectively utilize the internet is such a track record.
That's an excellent point. But I don't think the credentials listed so far speak to that. It only speaks to him knowing where and how to invest. That isn't leadership ability, that's financial know-how. What is there here that speaks to his ability to lead?
The guy pretty much wrote Obama's tech plan
That page doesn't indicate he authored it. And the page you gave looks like a power-point presentation, not a policy paper. That does not inspire my confidence.
The FCC isn't charged with creating standards and products, it's about policy.
Flip over whatever you typed that with. There should be a sticker there that says "Part 16, FCC rules." Read it.
I know it's the cool thing today to be cynical about Obama's decisions, and I haven't agreed with many of them lately as well, but this is a good pick.
I'm not cynical about his decisions, I'm cynical about his administration. He hasn't been sworn in yet, so he hasn't made any decisions yet per-se.
So far the media's use of flash and java has been a major reason for the development and wide-spread use of browser plug-ins to disable those technologies. I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Seriously, though, blaming the problem on economics is a copout.
Not all of us type "KeyserSoze 10000" at the console whenever faced with a gold shortage.
Why are costs to lay redundant cables so high?
Perhaps designing something that is several thousand miles long, and under several hundred PSI of pressure, to lay at the bottom of an environment that contains sulphuric acid plumbs, volcanic pits, and large numbers of angry monsters, is not easy.
What can be done to convince the telcos that laying redundant cables is a good idea? What can tip the CBA to the B side?
Threats of violence, regulation, and regular bombing of the opposition has worked well for us in other areas.
How much money do the telcos lose when a line goes down? Over time, is that more than the cost of running redundant lines?
Obviously, it is not more than the cost of running redundant lines or they would have done so by now.
So yes, it's economics, but saying it's economics is glossing over the important details.
Circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works because circular logic works because...
We need both managers and engineers, the problem is... Where are the engineers in the FCC and why don't they have a voice in how things are going? Because a lot of the FCC's decisions lately seem to be rolling out the doors with glaring implementation problems. Do they even employ them anymore?
My point isn't that policy is one of their roles. My point is that it is not their only role and putting someone in charge that only knows the policy side of the equation will not make effective decisions about implementation of those policies. His policies could be the best thing since sliced bread but if the implementation is crap it doesn't matter. And given that the FCC has legal power over just about every electronic device sold, used, and produced in the United States... I'd like to know the man has some fundamental grasp of how they actually work. If not, well.. here's some history for you:
"The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" --David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.
You'd make an awful manager.
Probably, but the same could be said of Scotty. And without Scotty, Kirk wouldn't have a ship.
In the 90s it was backhoes. Now it's giant cable-eating squid. What next, volcanic eruptions? Really, the problem is two-fold -- first, cables break. Hey, it's several thousand miles long and several thousand feet down, and it's just laying there. Of course it's going to break. You could make the cables out of Unobtainium and they will still wither and break eventually. It's a fact of life. The real problem isn't that they fail, the problem is that the telecommunications companies don't have redundant links because of the expense. So, in summary, the problem is economics. And Cthulu. But you can't stop one of the great old ones, so let's focus on redundant links instead. -_-
I'd rather have someone who didn't spend their life in management making decisions about how the internet should work. And that's all this guy has... Funding, venture capital, management. So he's great at money! Good--I'm sure he'll make a bunch of businesses very rich. But does he know what TCP/IP is? Does he understand what makes effective QoS policy? How about the difference between bandwidth and latency or (shudder) the OSI 7 layer [burrito] model of networking? Bluntly stated -- does this guy give two sh*ts about consumer interests?
This guy will be head of the FCC. Isn't that organization also very much about engineering, not just policy. If the FCC has become a policy-making organization and left its engineering roots, well how shall I say -- "Houston, we have a problem." And yes, the comparison to NASA I think is fitting, given it was another engineering-based governmental body that later become all about policies and management and has now sent two shuttles smashing into the ground because of it.
Change we can believe in. Heh--Yeah. Right. Looks like more of the same to me.
The next advancement in military tech will probably be anti-UAV technology. Since they're so lightweight and small, there's no real chance for them to survive electromagnetic weapons (hardening costs weight). I suspect miniturization and economizing of EMP delivery systems will become a priority for many militaries in the next decade. Counter-surveillance will also become a priority for many groups, both domestically and abroad.
The technology is already being abused to spy on large public gatherings where there is no evidence of illegal activity. Eventually, people are going to start fighting back, and the government can piss off on that because one shotgun blast (cost: $1) will blow a several thousand dollar UAV out of the sky without too much trouble. A baseball bat and a can of gasoline later, and it's a total loss. Unlike most counter-technology, I'm betting anti-UAV tech will spring from civilian interests.
It'll be like those HARM systems... That got defeated by people who'd stick a fork into a microwave's door interlock and then turn it on and point it up. $280,000 missile blows up $15 microwave. Very economical!
This is like those cans of oxygen (for welding) my friend found at Home Depot that read WARNING: This product is known to cause cancer in the State of California.
How about this: We affix a label to all political offices that say "WARNING: There is no proven link between intelligence and holding public office. Political Science is really only a theory and should be judged critically and with consideration to other theories."
Over half the world population has been able to create life for some time. Aren't you all a little late to the party? -_-
It's just another "I have 40 years of experience doing X... Damn kids these days. Get off my lawn." Hey, here's something to chew on -- I bet he screwed up his pointers and data structures just as much when he was at the same experience level. Move along, slashdot, nothing to see here. I will never understand the compulsion to compare people with five years experience to those with twenty and then try to use age as the relevant factor. Age is a number... Unless you're over the age of 65, or under the age of about 14, your experience level is going to mean more in any industry. This isn't about new technology versus old, or people knowing their history, or blah blah blah -- it's all frosting on the poison cake of age discrimination.
P.S. Old man -- reading a book won't make you an expert. Doubly so for programming books. I'd have thought you'd know that by now. Why not get off your high horse and side-saddle with the younger generation and try to impart some of that knowledge with a little face time instead?
he was also 5'6", and average male height is 5'8", and standard deviation for height is approximately 2.3 inches for humans. Do the math... he was shorter than most men.
I am not a doctor, however -- isn't the main problem with cancer cells being that they have the same protein coating as normal cells that identify them to the immune system as "yours" versus "other"? The only way to kill a cancer cell that way would be with something that actually enters the cell and can then interact with the malignant protein. On the outside, cancer cells "look" the same to the immune system. Or is there a protein that expresses in cancer cells that can be differentiated from non-cancer cells?
[and being outgeeked by a girl is awesome! ;)]
Go to some GLBT outings. There are more of us, and geeks are generally welcome because they listen, they're smart, and are gender-blind. Good conversation, if they will blossom you know? Which is so rare and awesome you don't even know... -_- Stay away from the women's studies gatherings though... They're on the whole an angry lot who will just pick their teeth with you however nice you are. They simmer down once they're out IRL for awhile, but in college the lack of RL experience is a real downer. And vegans... Avoid.