A business card-sized CDR would be awesome, but I can't use it. My CDR tray doesn't have a spindle in the center, so how would I center the thing in the tray? Or is the disc the same size as a mini-disc? I just noticed this now, but my CDR tray has a smaller circular indentation that appears to be the same size as a mini-disc.
I'd make a boot floppy. Gladly. If only I had a floppy drive.
Why should I buy and install an archaic piece of hardware just for disaster recovery? The distributions should supply programs to help me make boot CDROMs.
There are occasional engineering failures, but none as widespread as programming errors.
True, but when engineering failures occur they are usually absolutely catastrophic, whereas computer failures are mostly limited to blue-screening. How much effort is it worth to prevent occasional annoying failures that most people are willing to put up with? Life-critical applications like flight control and medical device control, which must work correctly, are just as robust as bridges and high-rise buildings.
I'm not trying to justify shoddy programming, but keep it in perspective. Software quality is a continuum. If everyone tried to write bug-free programs, then nothing would ever be released!
We have a hippie-type in my Alpine Environments class (I've been made fun of enough, no need no need). This guy is seriously f*cked in the head. He probably comes to class on acid or something. Anyway, we were discussing how solar radiation intensity (insolation) varies as a function of altitude, and the impacts on snow conditions, and this guy jumps up and yells out:
"You mean there's RADIATION COMING FROM THE SUN??!!?!?!?!"
It might be true that it's hard for the general population to grasp the deeper concepts behind technology, but how are we responsible for that? I wouldn't consider the tech industry "arrogant and elitist," just intelligent. It makes logical sense for a company to make their products as easy to use as possible if they are targeting the mass market. They couldn't make any money by creating products that are impossible to figure out.
If the people Katz seems to be trying to advocate for are really so upset that they don't understand tech, why don't they get off their butts and start figuring it out? I bet it's because they don't want to. If years go by and some people get left behind, so be it. How is that our fault?
This (and the argument that follows it) seems to imply that most, if not all, of the money saved on software ends up paying for GPl sofware. But it doesn't. Even if 50% ends up financing GPL in some indirect way, that means your 'software budget' has been cut in half.
I don't think that's what Perens meant. Recouped costs aren't going toward "paying for" GPL software, they are going back into the company's general budget. I can't even guess at how much money we save annually at my workplace by running Linux on all our servers. That money goes into marketing and product development (e.g. it pays my salary).
Even if Microsoft manages to make as much money on services as they do now on selling software, they'll have to increase their workforce to provide the services as well as create the SW that runs it. Which means it'll be a lot less profitable. For Microsoft, this may not be a problem, but lots of smaller software houses will be up shit creek.
I'm not sure I understand. Don't most businesses deal with this already? To continue using my workplace as an example, we've been growing our customer base at an astonishing rate, putting out new products nearly every year, and we still only have four tech support people (one of which just hired). Over time we've become more and more a "services" company and indeed it is our goal to move completely away from software sales and into services. This isn't an outrageous idea. The money that flows in at an increasing rate every day is one piece of proof that our business model is sound. The comments we receive from customers daily telling us how much ass we kick are more proof. Without Linux and GPL, we couldn't have done this.
For now, that will work because the amount of open-source SW is limited. But soon, we'll run out of programmers who are willing to donate free time. So I don't see the... larger development staff than any one company could support... happening in general. Only for the few Good Causes (in programmer community opinion) will an ample (free) workforce be available.
Apparently you aren't a programmer (or at least not the type of programmer who typically works on free software). The GPL and other licenses like it live on because the really good programmers (the ones you would gladly pay for their services) are also the ones who love doing their job so much that when they get home at night, they do it some more, for free (possibly to the detriment of their spouses). Because they want to. And the number of such people is growing. Quickly. To be really cheesy and quote the IBM commercial, why does Linux (or GPL, Bruce Perens, etc.) work for peanuts?
So, your telling me that a general manager created this? Riiiight.
My manager designed antenna assemblies for the space shuttle. He also designed parts of the Mariner system for the Venus landings. He wrote code for computer systems that are designed to reboot themselves every 30 milliseconds. You try coding under that kind of constraint.
The president of the company did spooky work on spy satellites. He still won't talk about it. But man, that guy hates Communists with a passion...
And both of them could code circles around 99% of the people on Slashdot. Just because a person becomes a manager doesn't mean he becomes an idiot.
most scholars accept them as being at least 10,000 years old and perhaps as old as 25,000 years. This beats anyone else by a long shot.
25,000 years? I took a class on North American Prehistory (focused entirely on the original colonization and cultural development thereafter) and I read that 11,500 years is the oldest known-for-certain date. There were some studies, one major one in South America, that purported to show evidence of people as early as 13,000 (I think that was the date). But I never heard anything about 25,000 years ago.
Can you explain?
Re:Is this really healthy?
on
To The Pain
·
· Score: 2
I don't think today's interfaces are an ergonomic nightmare. I've been programming and typing heavily for about 10 years and the only pain I've ever noticed was in my right arm from sitting in a chair too low and keeping my arm in a weird position while using a mouse for 8 hours. I learned from that experience and now I make sure my chair and desk surface are oriented safely.
Use a wrist elevator! Carpal tunnel happens when you type with your wrists bent up or down from the level, forcing the tendons to slide through the carpal tunnel around a corner. If you type with your wrists in line with your forearms, you'll find you can type for hours without significant problems, as long as you take frequent breaks -- which are, by the way, also good for your back.
Wrist exercises help also. I think most geeks perform wrist exercises daily.
How can something like this make its way into OpenSSH?! Off-by-one? It might be a common error to make, but I would think that people writing security software would constantly be thinking to themselves about the consequences of these kinds of errors.
It's also a real bonehead mistake. Everyone knows that to iterative over an array of n elements, you do this:
for(i = 0; i < n; i++)
{...
}
And everyone should also know that the array indices for an array with n elements range from 0 to n - 1. The actual mistake was something like this:
I'm sorry if this sounds conceited (that isn't my intention) but when I look at this I have an almost subconscious SCREAMING reaction. For whatever reason, the days when I made mistakes like this have come and gone -- whenever I loop over arrays I always think about it, and I cannot imagine someone not thinking about what they are doing. Especially in a piece of security software. How completely embarrassing.
So you could have a pointer to memory location X on IP address Y. Distributed memory access over a network.
Cute, but there are already frameworks available (look at MPI, which is standard) for remote memory access and procedure invocation. These standards take into account the latency associated with network access, and make it easier for you (as a parallel programmer) to write distributed code. Why pawn off this responsibility on the OS, when a perfectly usable system already exists in application space?
Timothy, I read another poster's comment in a different article that you'd been posting nearly non-stop for 24 hours. No wonder you're asleep at the keyboard.
100 hours between charges, yet charges in a minute? Let's examine the problems:
Suppose, conservatively, that your laptop draws 20 watts (I'm being very generous). You want it to run at this power for 100 hours (360000 seconds). This is 7.2 megajoules. Now, you want to transfer 7.2 MJ to the flywheel in 60 seconds. This is a power of 120 kilowatts. If you tried to draw 120 KW from a 120V AC supply (like your wall plug) you'll be pulling at an average rate of 1000 amps
How fast would the flywheel be spinning in order to store 7.2 MJ? Let's assume the flywheel is a cylinder 10 cm long and 1 cm across (so it can fit in the laptop). Let's assume it's made of lead, so it weighs 89 grams. You can check the calculation if you want, but that thing will be spinning at 410000 RPM.
Bored, and doing math...
The world would probably be a better place if more computer scientists had actually written the code that is being used to do real world things, because they would have cared more about abstract properties like "correctness" rather than concrete properties like "compiles, doesn't crash." And they wouldn't be programming it in C.
In fact, most CS people (I do not mean code-monkeys, I mean hardcore CS people) don't use C. The prof probably made this (excusable!) mistake because he's used to using more abstract, theoretical languages which don't allow this sort of foot-shooting.
I realize you're agreeing with me here (thank you) but I'll state it again. Computer science is not software engineering, nor is it intended to be. Various people have posted on this thread to the effect of "But CS people go out in the real world and write real code!" This, sadly, is quite true but that doesn't change the fact that CS is, at its heart, a theoretical pursuit. Most CS students don't seem to understand this.
So anyway, the point of this rant is that security will remain horrible until we start teaching people to write securely in the first place.
That isn't the prof's responsibility. He (she?) is a computer scientist, not a software engineer, and certainly not a security wacko. The relationship between computer science and software engineering is kind of like the relationship between physics and mechanical engineering -- the scientists create the knowledge and the engineers put it to use. You can't expect a physicist to design a perfect bridge, any more than you can expect a computer scientist to write secure code. It isn't what we do, and we really don't care about it. Computer science is really more about mathematics than programming; if you want to learn good design practices, take a software engineering course.
Alright. I thought you meant "prove" in a mathematical sense, when I knew for a fact that the pulse will disperse as it travels. I assumed (incorrectly) that a person would be able to tell. I guess I shouldn't take my electrodynamics knowledge and blindly apply it to acoustics. Thanks for catching me.
and its quite easy to prove that we can't guage distance from sound (because we don't know how loud it was at the point source).
You could prove that, if sound waves were perfectly linear. But they aren't. Sound media (such as air) are nonlinear, dispersive media, which means that sound of different frequencies propagate at slightly different speeds, meaning that wave packets will slowly disperse in air (or any other medium). If you have any familiarity with QM, it's the same principle that causes matter wave packets to disperse over time. Another example would be the dispersion of a polychromatic light pulse as it travels along an optic fiber. Since light of different frequencies travel at different speeds through anything that isn't vacuum, the light pulse will spread/smear out as it travels down the waveguide. The amount of spread depends on how far the pulse traveled.
A computer can definitely tell the difference between a sound pulse that has traveled 1 meter and a pulse that has traveled 100 meters, even if they are the same loudness when they reach the detector. I bet at least some humans can tell the difference also.
I may be wrong, but I don't think the Digital Millenium Copyright Act covers hardware interfaces. By building a competitive controller, you are not in any way endangering Microsoft's total control of its copyrighted property -- i.e., the game. You can't put a copyright on a hardware interface since it is not an intellectual "work." It might be intellectual property, but it isn't covered by copyright law (correct me if I'm wrong).
In fact, by building a competitive controller you are going up against another company in an effort to produce the best product -- this is the basis of capitalism. Microsoft is again executing monopolist strategy, but this time it's a little confusing -- what does Microsoft really have to lose by allowing others to manufacture game controllers? Is the game controller sector really a huge source of MS income? Highly doubt it...
If Microsoft had wanted this, they could have just come up with a proprietary interface protocol with a really weird connector, both of which would be patented.
Of course, doing this would mean they would have to write drivers for this weird device, which they were probably too lazy to do...
BTW, if you are a big company and you want to prevent competitors from manufacturing peripherals for your product, is there any law that would allow you do to so?
It could be even easier, I think. Couldn't you just build a little widget that sits between the controller and the X-Box that rewrites the USB ID on each packet that goes through? Such a device could be mass-produced for pennies...
Any people who are more familiar with USB than I am? Is this a feasible idea?
A "vast, alternative subculture?"
on
Disinformation.com
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
This seems oxymoronic to me. If a culture is vast, how can it be a subculture? It seems that as the net grows larger and more pervasive, the net culture will start to become the culture. Whether this is good or bad I leave as a question for the reader.
As for the "information" being disseminated on disinfo.com, it sounds pretty useless to me. The X-Men, Space Mutation, The Matrix, Real Jesus, Radiohead? How does this qualify as an alternative culture? It's just the standard, blank-stare, low-IQ pop culture that the USA, and increasingly other parts of the world, are already swamped with. We need less of this tripe, not more.
Also, I'd like to point out that the net can itself be a source of disinformation, particularly if you are trying to do scientific research. The net is full of bullshit scientific claims, proofs, and experiments, to the point where it is much more productive to just go to the library and get the information from the best source: peer-reviewed journals. The net has a long way to come until it's truly a source of unbiased, variegated, and correct information.
Slashdot Mirror
A business card-sized CDR would be awesome, but I can't use it. My CDR tray doesn't have a spindle in the center, so how would I center the thing in the tray? Or is the disc the same size as a mini-disc? I just noticed this now, but my CDR tray has a smaller circular indentation that appears to be the same size as a mini-disc.
Why should I buy and install an archaic piece of hardware just for disaster recovery? The distributions should supply programs to help me make boot CDROMs.
If you actually ask a Christian, a Jew, and a Muslim, they will tell you that they all worship the same God. They just disagree on the details.
True, but when engineering failures occur they are usually absolutely catastrophic, whereas computer failures are mostly limited to blue-screening. How much effort is it worth to prevent occasional annoying failures that most people are willing to put up with? Life-critical applications like flight control and medical device control, which must work correctly, are just as robust as bridges and high-rise buildings.
I'm not trying to justify shoddy programming, but keep it in perspective. Software quality is a continuum. If everyone tried to write bug-free programs, then nothing would ever be released!
"You mean there's RADIATION COMING FROM THE SUN??!!?!?!?!"
If the people Katz seems to be trying to advocate for are really so upset that they don't understand tech, why don't they get off their butts and start figuring it out? I bet it's because they don't want to. If years go by and some people get left behind, so be it. How is that our fault?
I don't think that's what Perens meant. Recouped costs aren't going toward "paying for" GPL software, they are going back into the company's general budget. I can't even guess at how much money we save annually at my workplace by running Linux on all our servers. That money goes into marketing and product development (e.g. it pays my salary).
Even if Microsoft manages to make as much money on services as they do now on selling software, they'll have to increase their workforce to provide the services as well as create the SW that runs it. Which means it'll be a lot less profitable. For Microsoft, this may not be a problem, but lots of smaller software houses will be up shit creek.
I'm not sure I understand. Don't most businesses deal with this already? To continue using my workplace as an example, we've been growing our customer base at an astonishing rate, putting out new products nearly every year, and we still only have four tech support people (one of which just hired). Over time we've become more and more a "services" company and indeed it is our goal to move completely away from software sales and into services. This isn't an outrageous idea. The money that flows in at an increasing rate every day is one piece of proof that our business model is sound. The comments we receive from customers daily telling us how much ass we kick are more proof. Without Linux and GPL, we couldn't have done this.
For now, that will work because the amount of open-source SW is limited. But soon, we'll run out of programmers who are willing to donate free time. So I don't see the ... larger development staff than any one company could support... happening in general. Only for the few Good Causes (in programmer community opinion) will an ample (free) workforce be available.
Apparently you aren't a programmer (or at least not the type of programmer who typically works on free software). The GPL and other licenses like it live on because the really good programmers (the ones you would gladly pay for their services) are also the ones who love doing their job so much that when they get home at night, they do it some more, for free (possibly to the detriment of their spouses). Because they want to. And the number of such people is growing. Quickly. To be really cheesy and quote the IBM commercial, why does Linux (or GPL, Bruce Perens, etc.) work for peanuts?
Because he loves the game.
My manager designed antenna assemblies for the space shuttle. He also designed parts of the Mariner system for the Venus landings. He wrote code for computer systems that are designed to reboot themselves every 30 milliseconds. You try coding under that kind of constraint.
The president of the company did spooky work on spy satellites. He still won't talk about it. But man, that guy hates Communists with a passion...
And both of them could code circles around 99% of the people on Slashdot. Just because a person becomes a manager doesn't mean he becomes an idiot.
25,000 years? I took a class on North American Prehistory (focused entirely on the original colonization and cultural development thereafter) and I read that 11,500 years is the oldest known-for-certain date. There were some studies, one major one in South America, that purported to show evidence of people as early as 13,000 (I think that was the date). But I never heard anything about 25,000 years ago.
Can you explain?
Use a wrist elevator! Carpal tunnel happens when you type with your wrists bent up or down from the level, forcing the tendons to slide through the carpal tunnel around a corner. If you type with your wrists in line with your forearms, you'll find you can type for hours without significant problems, as long as you take frequent breaks -- which are, by the way, also good for your back.
Wrist exercises help also. I think most geeks perform wrist exercises daily.
Far too many to call out in detail.
Why don't you turn that Discerning Grammatical Eye toward your own writing next time?
It's also a real bonehead mistake. Everyone knows that to iterative over an array of n elements, you do this:
for(i = 0; i < n; i++) { ...
}
And everyone should also know that the array indices for an array with n elements range from 0 to n - 1. The actual mistake was something like this:
if(idx < 0 || idx > arraySize) { error(); } else { ... }
I'm sorry if this sounds conceited (that isn't my intention) but when I look at this I have an almost subconscious SCREAMING reaction. For whatever reason, the days when I made mistakes like this have come and gone -- whenever I loop over arrays I always think about it, and I cannot imagine someone not thinking about what they are doing. Especially in a piece of security software. How completely embarrassing.
Cute, but there are already frameworks available (look at MPI, which is standard) for remote memory access and procedure invocation. These standards take into account the latency associated with network access, and make it easier for you (as a parallel programmer) to write distributed code. Why pawn off this responsibility on the OS, when a perfectly usable system already exists in application space?
What's up? Are you okay? Don't work so hard!
Suppose, conservatively, that your laptop draws 20 watts (I'm being very generous). You want it to run at this power for 100 hours (360000 seconds). This is 7.2 megajoules. Now, you want to transfer 7.2 MJ to the flywheel in 60 seconds. This is a power of 120 kilowatts. If you tried to draw 120 KW from a 120V AC supply (like your wall plug) you'll be pulling at an average rate of 1000 amps
How fast would the flywheel be spinning in order to store 7.2 MJ? Let's assume the flywheel is a cylinder 10 cm long and 1 cm across (so it can fit in the laptop). Let's assume it's made of lead, so it weighs 89 grams. You can check the calculation if you want, but that thing will be spinning at 410000 RPM. Bored, and doing math...
In fact, most CS people (I do not mean code-monkeys, I mean hardcore CS people) don't use C. The prof probably made this (excusable!) mistake because he's used to using more abstract, theoretical languages which don't allow this sort of foot-shooting.
I realize you're agreeing with me here (thank you) but I'll state it again. Computer science is not software engineering, nor is it intended to be. Various people have posted on this thread to the effect of "But CS people go out in the real world and write real code!" This, sadly, is quite true but that doesn't change the fact that CS is, at its heart, a theoretical pursuit. Most CS students don't seem to understand this.
That isn't the prof's responsibility. He (she?) is a computer scientist, not a software engineer, and certainly not a security wacko. The relationship between computer science and software engineering is kind of like the relationship between physics and mechanical engineering -- the scientists create the knowledge and the engineers put it to use. You can't expect a physicist to design a perfect bridge, any more than you can expect a computer scientist to write secure code. It isn't what we do, and we really don't care about it. Computer science is really more about mathematics than programming; if you want to learn good design practices, take a software engineering course.
Alright. I thought you meant "prove" in a mathematical sense, when I knew for a fact that the pulse will disperse as it travels. I assumed (incorrectly) that a person would be able to tell. I guess I shouldn't take my electrodynamics knowledge and blindly apply it to acoustics. Thanks for catching me.
You could prove that, if sound waves were perfectly linear. But they aren't. Sound media (such as air) are nonlinear, dispersive media, which means that sound of different frequencies propagate at slightly different speeds, meaning that wave packets will slowly disperse in air (or any other medium). If you have any familiarity with QM, it's the same principle that causes matter wave packets to disperse over time. Another example would be the dispersion of a polychromatic light pulse as it travels along an optic fiber. Since light of different frequencies travel at different speeds through anything that isn't vacuum, the light pulse will spread/smear out as it travels down the waveguide. The amount of spread depends on how far the pulse traveled.
A computer can definitely tell the difference between a sound pulse that has traveled 1 meter and a pulse that has traveled 100 meters, even if they are the same loudness when they reach the detector. I bet at least some humans can tell the difference also.
In fact, by building a competitive controller you are going up against another company in an effort to produce the best product -- this is the basis of capitalism. Microsoft is again executing monopolist strategy, but this time it's a little confusing -- what does Microsoft really have to lose by allowing others to manufacture game controllers? Is the game controller sector really a huge source of MS income? Highly doubt it...
Of course, doing this would mean they would have to write drivers for this weird device, which they were probably too lazy to do...
BTW, if you are a big company and you want to prevent competitors from manufacturing peripherals for your product, is there any law that would allow you do to so?
Any people who are more familiar with USB than I am? Is this a feasible idea?
As for the "information" being disseminated on disinfo.com, it sounds pretty useless to me. The X-Men, Space Mutation, The Matrix, Real Jesus, Radiohead? How does this qualify as an alternative culture? It's just the standard, blank-stare, low-IQ pop culture that the USA, and increasingly other parts of the world, are already swamped with. We need less of this tripe, not more.
Also, I'd like to point out that the net can itself be a source of disinformation, particularly if you are trying to do scientific research. The net is full of bullshit scientific claims, proofs, and experiments, to the point where it is much more productive to just go to the library and get the information from the best source: peer-reviewed journals. The net has a long way to come until it's truly a source of unbiased, variegated, and correct information.
Once again, Jon Katz takes aim and misses...
F*ck you, RMS.