Why bother with either really? Motorcycles can get 45 or so miles per gallon and they are safe provided:
They are safe provided you don't get into an accident. If you do, you're pretty much screwed. Safety aside though, the real reason I wouldn't want a motorcycle is comfort: if you want to ride a motorcycle at night or in lousy weather, you need to bundle up like a South Park character. Cars have the advantage of putting you inside a climate controlled, wind-free environment where you can listen to the radio.
most virtualizers fail miserably under another virtualizer
Really? That's disappointing. I'd even call that a bug, since the VM is supposed to be able to run any software that the machine it is emulating can run, and the machine it is emulating can run a VM...
If they want solar to REALLY catch on someone is going to need to develop not just a cost-effective solar cell, but also a cost-effective way to store and reuse the energy collected during the day.
In developed areas, at least, there is already an easy way to do that: use the power grid as your energy store, by selling power to the grid during the day and buying it back again at night.
In any case, costs of any solar tech will need to go down quite a bit to support more widespread use, especially in developing countries.
The other possibility is that the price of the alternatives might go up. If that happens, then solar will look more attractive even at its current pricing.
How are companies supposed to distribute copies of their closed, binary only applications.
I'd say, the same way they do now, except that the executable would contain enough information so that the installer process can swizzle the code around in a random fashion. To the user there would be no visible difference, but to a virus that was relying on the code or data being laid out in memory in a certain way, it would be completely different from what the virus was "expecting".
This would appear to be an attempt to increase security by hiding the instruction set. Security through obscurity is not effective for long and anyone interested in hardening their system would be much better advised to use defence in depth.
The idea is to protect against automated attacks that currently rely on undefined behaviour that is the same for all targets. Example: Currently, if you can figure out how to fool Internet Explorer into munging memory at the right spot, you can use that knowledge to inject code and take over Windows. So all you need to do is add that hardcoded routine to your virus, and pretty soon you've got your Legion of Spam Zombies.
Now imagine if Microsoft used a technique like the one described in this article. Suddenly, there is no "one right spot" that will work for every copy of IE, because now every copy of IE has had its configuration redone in a randomized way. Now your virus is only good for taking over the machine you developed it on -- it might make other machines crash, but it won't be able to take control of them. Hence your virus can't spread.
correct if i am wrong but what kind of cop out is this to make yet another closed VM?
Unless there was a coincidence in naming, I think valgrind refers to the (really quite awesome) open source debugging tool for Linux. Valgrind's primary purpose is to let you run your x86 Linux executables in an emulation environment where any memory-access errors can be detected and reported; it makes debugging much easier than in the "real world", where an error might only cause a crash or other visible symptom 1% of the time. I suspect this researcher merely "appropriated" the valgrind source code as a test harness for her ideas. It's certainly much cheaper to do it that way than do build your own x86 fab...
As far as security holes in the VM itself: yes, that is a possibility, but keep in mind that the complexity of a VM is finite, which means that sooner or later (hopefully sooner) it can be fully debugged and thus be secure. The complexity of the programs it runs, on the other hand, is infinite, because new programs are being created all the time. So the advantage of a VM is that you can get the small amount of "golden" secure VM code to protect you against from the buggy code that runs inside it.
Consider this: an Intel chip is just a VM implemented in hardware. Hardware security flaws do exist, of course, but they are also quite rare compared to software flaws, mainly because there are so few hardware implementations being built.
Is Parallels Workstation able to run a MacOS/X image as a guest under MacOS/X? That would be rather useful for testing software compatibility under multiple versons of the OS (and of course for the ever popular "infinite recursion" trick)
So why are we there? [...] Maybe you have some insight most people don't.... care to share?
I guess I didn't make myself clear enough in my previous post. To clarify: At one point or another, a large enough portion of Congress believed that Saddam colluded with Al-Qaeda in the planning and execution of 9-11, and a large enough portion of the American public believed the same, to allow the Bush Administration to go to war. Perhaps the Bush Administration also believed it, or perhaps they merely propagated the idea because it helped them achieve their goals. In any case, the "terrorist connections" meme, along with the "Saddam has WMDs" meme, are what convinced the USA to go to war with Iraq. Both ideas were false, of course, but nonetheless that's how we got there.
Note that I'm not at all trying to justify the invasion: I think it was a self-defeating fiasco at best, and a war crime at worst. I'm just saying that our reasons may be invalid but they are nevertheless the reasons we gave; and perhaps that is what the soldiers meant.
I wonder how good their access to news is considering that 85% of our troops think that their role in Iraq is to retaliate against Saddam for his role in 9-11.
Well, isn't that true? Just because it turns out that Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11 doesn't mean it's not our reason for being there.
I don't think the author quite gets nerds. Hitting on someone? Don't think so mate.
Oh, I think he gets nerds quite well. Keep in mind that in this case, "hitting on" the receptionist consists of offering her a sugary soda that she doesn't want, then slinking back to his cubicle to sulk when she turns down the offer. The receptionist, of course, never realizes an attempt was made (because "she doesn't think of him that way", natch). That sounds about right to me...
Okay, Mister I'm-pissed-off-because-my-sense-of-humour-has-gone -missing, I'll explain it to you: monkeys don't actually talk at all. However, it's hard to express humorous lyrics using only grunting and screeching, so the author tried to imagine what monkeys might sound like if they were able to talk, and came up with a form of pidgin English that resembles what some people imagine cave to sound like.
Frankly, all the justification required for resumption of hostilities occurred on a regular basis when Iraqi missile crews lit up their radars and tracked a US or British fighter in the no-fly zones.
So we invaded Iraq because Saddam turned on a radar dish? That's kind of a thin thread to hang $10 billion a month in operating costs on, don't you think?
Face it, the US government wanted to invade Iraq, and it was going to find an excuse to do so no matter what. The problem is that they didn't forsee the consequences and didn't bother to plan ahead, and now our country is being bankrupted, both financially and ethically, by the resulting fiasco.
Because we have power. Because we are not afraid to use that power. [...] Because we are human and we make mistakes.
Because we have a powerful military and we think that military force is the way to solve problems. Therefore our "human mistakes" often cause thousands or tens of thousands of deaths. You may recall how a few thousand deaths in New York affected the emotions of Americans; now scale that effect up to match the number of deaths caused by American aggression in other parts of the world, and you'll understand one cause of anti-Americanism abroad.
People aren't that different anywhere. If you run roughshod over them, don't be surprised that they resent you for it.
What he did say, according to the article, was: "the government funded research in microdrive storage, electrochemistry and signal compression. They did so for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod."
I don't think there's anything outrageous or untrue in there.
Maybe not outrageous, but it is (a) untrue and (b) stupid. It's ludicrous to imagine the government R&D meeting back in, say, 1994, where the director says "gentlemen, in 2001 the Apple Corporation will be releasing a product called the iPod. In order for them to do so on schedule, they will need technologies A, B, and C, so we've got to start researching those technologies now. Get to work!"
It might be that the research was done with the idea of enabling portable computing devices, and they might have even imagined a portable music player as one possible application, but to assert that the research was done "for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod" suggests that somebody has a very poor understanding of cause and effect.
Granted, it's probable just that Bush simply bungled his delivery of the line, something he is famous for. But either way it reflects poorly on the world's sole superpower to have a leader whose thinking is so muddled that he can't communicate properly.
I haven't seen the codebase, but from using the Win32 API a bit, I noticed the following:
"Fill in a struct and pass it to the function" interfaces, which are very error prone (forget to fill in a field? Oops, now you have a program that works 80% of the time and does something weird the other 20%, due to uninitialized memory reads)
Hungarian notation used everywhere, making things hard to read
Unnecessary obfuscation of types (e.g. DWORD instead of long or int32)
Focus on backwards compatibility to the point where there are often five or six APIs for every function (granted there are some valid business reasons for doing that, but it still makes for an extremely messy and hard-to-validate interface)
Functions that are broken, and instead of fixing them, Microsoft simply publishes a http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb; en-us;274323, forcing every Win32 developer in the known universe to have to hack up their code with an ugly band-aid instead
A tendency to create Yet Another New API for everything, instead of re-using existing interfaces. For example: you have a program that communicates over a TCP stream, and you want to make it communicate the same data over a serial port instead: Under MacOS/X or Linux, this is trivial: just pass in the file descriptor to the serial device instead of to the TCP socket, and you're done. Under Win32, you'll have to completely redesign your program with a custom event loop, because there is no way to select() on a HANDLE.
Anyway, those are my observations... hopefully things are better in.net land or whatever the new thing is these days.
You're just out there enjoying nature and the entire view is filled with man-made nonsense that is supposedly envrionmentally "friendly."
Freeways weren't designed to be places to "enjoy nature". They were designed for transportation. If you want to enjoy nature, go to a national park.
So instead of generating some invisible CO2 which plants need to generate oxygen, we instead use "clean" alternatives that destroy thousands of acres from a visual, natural, and ecosystem standpoint. Which is really worse on the environment?
The air pollution is worse. Nature doesn't care about how things look, only about how they effect the lives of the plants and animals nearby. Windmills have much less of an effect on the environment than their conventional equivalent does, and that's not even counting the environmental effect of the various wars that are being fought (and will be fought in the future) to control the remaining fossil fuels. If we built renewable energy infrastructure now, we can avoid those later.
Apple probably had to do very little to get it running since they just grab M$ source...no need to re-invent the wheel
I think you'd find that Apple would need to include most or all of Windows' source code in order for things to work properly. At that point, it's equivalent to Apple simply licensing Windows and including a copy of Windows with each Mac sold. Which is possible, but unlikely IMHO.
As to whether or not this really is a realistic scenario (Microsoft and Windows Apps running transparently in OS X), please, please, please let it be true! (We can all hope, right?)
I think it will come true, except for the part about "not requiring an installed copy of WinXP". What Cringely is proposing is just silly: he thinks that Apple can essentially write its own implementation of WINE, but somehow won't suffer from all the problems that WINE has. If you think that strategy works well, look at what happened when OS/2 tried it.
On the other hand, adding a spiffed-out VMWare-style layer would be much easier for Apple to do, would leave most of the maintenance/compatibility problems for Microsoft to deal with, and would be less likely to piss off Microsoft's legions of winged monkeys (since they would still get money from Mac users buying WinXP sales).
Trying to implement Microsoft's APIs natively is foolish: even if Apple somehow got them to work reliably in a foreign OS (fat chance considering the trouble Microsoft has getting them to work reliably in the native OS), things would break every time Microsoft released another service pack. Apple would spend the rest of their lives chasing Windows compatibility bugs.
What are the chances that they coincide with an actual suspicious device, which the screener would then assume was part of the "test" which happened to occur simultaneously
What difference would that make? Whether it's assumed to be part of a test or not, sole acceptable action is the same: report it and don't let the luggage through until the issue is resolved.
Because "GiB" is stupid. GB means 2^30 bytes, and that's just the way it is.
Pound the table all you want, but it simply isn't "just the way it is". Keep in mind that the http://www.essex1.com/people/speer/large.html predate computers by decades or centuries (depending on your precise definition of "computer"). According to the metric system:
1 kilometer = 1000 meters
1 kilowatt = 1000 watts
1 kilogram = 1000 grams
1 kilojoule = 1000 joules
1 kiloXXX = 1000 XXXs
1 kilobyte = 1000 bytes
The only way you could say that 1 kilobyte is 1,024 bytes is to make a special exception to the metric system's prefix rules, and the whole point of the metric system is to have a system of measurement without silly exceptions like that. If they had wanted a system where you had to memorize different rules for different units, they would have stuck with the imperial system.
So to sum up: some computer geeks thought it would be convenient for them to redefine the metric system to work using powers of two rather than powers of ten. This was fine as long as they were only interacting with other computer geeks. When computers spilled over into the world at large, however, this little shortcut conflicted with the way the terms were/are used by everyone else. Since the traditional (powers of ten) definition has both seniority and wider usage, it is now winning out, and rightly so.
They might as well call it AOL++. It's debatable whether moving all the training-wheels users from AOL to "the Internet proper" is a good thing, but I think that it is. It's one step closer towards having everyone using the Internet as it was intended to be used -- without being tied to a single giant ISP -- and for those of us who don't want to visit MySpace, nobody is forcing us to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
No. All you have to do is treat everyone with respect (whether you think they deserve it or not). The golden rule is not gender specific.
As someone who has had the privilidge to be around women, they treat men like objects to.
True (sometimes), but irrelevant. You can be a decent human being, even if other people aren't.
They are safe provided you don't get into an accident. If you do, you're pretty much screwed. Safety aside though, the real reason I wouldn't want a motorcycle is comfort: if you want to ride a motorcycle at night or in lousy weather, you need to bundle up like a South Park character. Cars have the advantage of putting you inside a climate controlled, wind-free environment where you can listen to the radio.
I think he what he meant was, you can get by with fewer power plants, period, because the peak loads during the day would be reduced.
Really? That's disappointing. I'd even call that a bug, since the VM is supposed to be able to run any software that the machine it is emulating can run, and the machine it is emulating can run a VM...
In developed areas, at least, there is already an easy way to do that: use the power grid as your energy store, by selling power to the grid during the day and buying it back again at night.
The other possibility is that the price of the alternatives might go up. If that happens, then solar will look more attractive even at its current pricing.
I'd say, the same way they do now, except that the executable would contain enough information so that the installer process can swizzle the code around in a random fashion. To the user there would be no visible difference, but to a virus that was relying on the code or data being laid out in memory in a certain way, it would be completely different from what the virus was "expecting".
The idea is to protect against automated attacks that currently rely on undefined behaviour that is the same for all targets. Example: Currently, if you can figure out how to fool Internet Explorer into munging memory at the right spot, you can use that knowledge to inject code and take over Windows. So all you need to do is add that hardcoded routine to your virus, and pretty soon you've got your Legion of Spam Zombies.
Now imagine if Microsoft used a technique like the one described in this article. Suddenly, there is no "one right spot" that will work for every copy of IE, because now every copy of IE has had its configuration redone in a randomized way. Now your virus is only good for taking over the machine you developed it on -- it might make other machines crash, but it won't be able to take control of them. Hence your virus can't spread.
Unless there was a coincidence in naming, I think valgrind refers to the (really quite awesome) open source debugging tool for Linux. Valgrind's primary purpose is to let you run your x86 Linux executables in an emulation environment where any memory-access errors can be detected and reported; it makes debugging much easier than in the "real world", where an error might only cause a crash or other visible symptom 1% of the time. I suspect this researcher merely "appropriated" the valgrind source code as a test harness for her ideas. It's certainly much cheaper to do it that way than do build your own x86 fab...
As far as security holes in the VM itself: yes, that is a possibility, but keep in mind that the complexity of a VM is finite, which means that sooner or later (hopefully sooner) it can be fully debugged and thus be secure. The complexity of the programs it runs, on the other hand, is infinite, because new programs are being created all the time. So the advantage of a VM is that you can get the small amount of "golden" secure VM code to protect you against from the buggy code that runs inside it.
Consider this: an Intel chip is just a VM implemented in hardware. Hardware security flaws do exist, of course, but they are also quite rare compared to software flaws, mainly because there are so few hardware implementations being built.
Is Parallels Workstation able to run a MacOS/X image as a guest under MacOS/X? That would be rather useful for testing software compatibility under multiple versons of the OS (and of course for the ever popular "infinite recursion" trick)
I guess I didn't make myself clear enough in my previous post. To clarify: At one point or another, a large enough portion of Congress believed that Saddam colluded with Al-Qaeda in the planning and execution of 9-11, and a large enough portion of the American public believed the same, to allow the Bush Administration to go to war. Perhaps the Bush Administration also believed it, or perhaps they merely propagated the idea because it helped them achieve their goals. In any case, the "terrorist connections" meme, along with the "Saddam has WMDs" meme, are what convinced the USA to go to war with Iraq. Both ideas were false, of course, but nonetheless that's how we got there.
Note that I'm not at all trying to justify the invasion: I think it was a self-defeating fiasco at best, and a war crime at worst. I'm just saying that our reasons may be invalid but they are nevertheless the reasons we gave; and perhaps that is what the soldiers meant.
Well, isn't that true? Just because it turns out that Saddam had nothing to do with 9-11 doesn't mean it's not our reason for being there.
Oh, I think he gets nerds quite well. Keep in mind that in this case, "hitting on" the receptionist consists of offering her a sugary soda that she doesn't want, then slinking back to his cubicle to sulk when she turns down the offer. The receptionist, of course, never realizes an attempt was made (because "she doesn't think of him that way", natch). That sounds about right to me...
Okay, Mister I'm-pissed-off-because-my-sense-of-humour-has-gon
So we invaded Iraq because Saddam turned on a radar dish? That's kind of a thin thread to hang $10 billion a month in operating costs on, don't you think?
Face it, the US government wanted to invade Iraq, and it was going to find an excuse to do so no matter what. The problem is that they didn't forsee the consequences and didn't bother to plan ahead, and now our country is being bankrupted, both financially and ethically, by the resulting fiasco.
Because we have a powerful military and we think that military force is the way to solve problems. Therefore our "human mistakes" often cause thousands or tens of thousands of deaths. You may recall how a few thousand deaths in New York affected the emotions of Americans; now scale that effect up to match the number of deaths caused by American aggression in other parts of the world, and you'll understand one cause of anti-Americanism abroad.
People aren't that different anywhere. If you run roughshod over them, don't be surprised that they resent you for it.
I don't think there's anything outrageous or untrue in there.
Maybe not outrageous, but it is (a) untrue and (b) stupid. It's ludicrous to imagine the government R&D meeting back in, say, 1994, where the director says "gentlemen, in 2001 the Apple Corporation will be releasing a product called the iPod. In order for them to do so on schedule, they will need technologies A, B, and C, so we've got to start researching those technologies now. Get to work!"
It might be that the research was done with the idea of enabling portable computing devices, and they might have even imagined a portable music player as one possible application, but to assert that the research was done "for one reason: It turned out that those were the key ingredients for the development of the iPod" suggests that somebody has a very poor understanding of cause and effect.
Granted, it's probable just that Bush simply bungled his delivery of the line, something he is famous for. But either way it reflects poorly on the world's sole superpower to have a leader whose thinking is so muddled that he can't communicate properly.
I haven't seen the codebase, but from using the Win32 API a bit, I noticed the following:
Anyway, those are my observations... hopefully things are better in
Freeways weren't designed to be places to "enjoy nature". They were designed for transportation. If you want to enjoy nature, go to a national park.
So instead of generating some invisible CO2 which plants need to generate oxygen, we instead use "clean" alternatives that destroy thousands of acres from a visual, natural, and ecosystem standpoint. Which is really worse on the environment?
The air pollution is worse. Nature doesn't care about how things look, only about how they effect the lives of the plants and animals nearby. Windmills have much less of an effect on the environment than their conventional equivalent does, and that's not even counting the environmental effect of the various wars that are being fought (and will be fought in the future) to control the remaining fossil fuels. If we built renewable energy infrastructure now, we can avoid those later.
I think you'd find that Apple would need to include most or all of Windows' source code in order for things to work properly. At that point, it's equivalent to Apple simply licensing Windows and including a copy of Windows with each Mac sold. Which is possible, but unlikely IMHO.
I think it will come true, except for the part about "not requiring an installed copy of WinXP". What Cringely is proposing is just silly: he thinks that Apple can essentially write its own implementation of WINE, but somehow won't suffer from all the problems that WINE has. If you think that strategy works well, look at what happened when OS/2 tried it.
On the other hand, adding a spiffed-out VMWare-style layer would be much easier for Apple to do, would leave most of the maintenance/compatibility problems for Microsoft to deal with, and would be less likely to piss off Microsoft's legions of winged monkeys (since they would still get money from Mac users buying WinXP sales).
Trying to implement Microsoft's APIs natively is foolish: even if Apple somehow got them to work reliably in a foreign OS (fat chance considering the trouble Microsoft has getting them to work reliably in the native OS), things would break every time Microsoft released another service pack. Apple would spend the rest of their lives chasing Windows compatibility bugs.
suspicious device, which the screener would then assume was part of the "test" which happened to occur simultaneously
What difference would that make? Whether it's assumed to be part of a test or not, sole acceptable action is the same: report it and don't let the luggage through until the issue is resolved.
Pound the table all you want, but it simply isn't "just the way it is". Keep in mind that the http://www.essex1.com/people/speer/large.html predate computers by decades or centuries (depending on your precise definition of "computer"). According to the metric system:
The only way you could say that 1 kilobyte is 1,024 bytes is to make a special exception to the metric system's prefix rules, and the whole point of the metric system is to have a system of measurement without silly exceptions like that. If they had wanted a system where you had to memorize different rules for different units, they would have stuck with the imperial system.
So to sum up: some computer geeks thought it would be convenient for them to redefine the metric system to work using powers of two rather than powers of ten. This was fine as long as they were only interacting with other computer geeks. When computers spilled over into the world at large, however, this little shortcut conflicted with the way the terms were/are used by everyone else. Since the traditional (powers of ten) definition has both seniority and wider usage, it is now winning out, and rightly so.
Not to mention a prime example of "be careful what you wish for, because you might get it."
Thanks for nothing, Mr. Berners-Lee.
They might as well call it AOL++. It's debatable whether moving all the training-wheels users from AOL to "the Internet proper" is a good thing, but I think that it is. It's one step closer towards having everyone using the Internet as it was intended to be used -- without being tied to a single giant ISP -- and for those of us who don't want to visit MySpace, nobody is forcing us to do so.