Proof that I'm an old timer: my used of the term "anti virus." It's not called that nowadays. It's Malware Detection, Security Software and Shields and Bad Guy Blockers(tm). I must update my terminology and get with the times.:)
I'm anything but a Microsoft lover, but I have to defend them.
About a million years ago, back during the DOS era, a friend and I wrote an anti-virus suite (the ARF Antivirus, maybe you can still find it online, though I don't recommend that you use it!). It was quite effective; we used the file integrity approach, and stored the integrity information in the files themselves. (We were up front about it; some people don't like that, so we said, hey, you don't like it, just don't use our stuff. No hard feelings.)
Ergo, I think I can at least offer an opinion that's slightly above drooling moron status.
One of my biggest complaints about AV tests is that they're unrealistic. This has been years ago, now, so maybe it has changed, but back then, the folks who did the testing were arrogant and very hard to deal with. Your software had to produce a.TXT log file; it had to do this, it had to do that, or they would just fail it outright.
Once you made them happy, then they tested it against every virus they could find, including some that WERE NOT (and never would be) in the wild.
Bottom line, and to make a long story short: the people who were writing AV software back then were writing it for these tests, and not for the real world. I don't know if that's the case nowadays; I just don't know. (For that matter, maybe Microsoft's stuff really does suck. Given how badly their stuff worked back in the DOS era, it wouldn't surprise me. But I just don't know.)
But fair is fair. I ran from that circus after about a year of endless arguments with the pompous egotists in Compuserve's Anti Virus forum. I don't know if it's still that way, but I haven't used anyone else's anti virus stuff in years (I protect my stuff a different way, primarily by using secured Linux with good backups, and with periodic integrity checks).
(A pedantic self-correction: it would be more accurate to say that the copper traces must be "controlled" lengths, rather than "equal." I was thinking "equal" in terms of a single, discrete data buss.)
> Don't electrical pulses along a copper wire go at the speed of light already?
That's not the problem, it's propagation effects and timing issues. As someone else here pointed out, these high-frequency signals are essentially radio waves and behave like radio waves. You have interference issues from other, nearby signals. The copper traces on your current motherboard must be carefully routed and kept at equal lengths (because they're essentially transmission lines), or you'll have some bits arriving later than others. Chaos. Using optical eliminates that problem.
(This is also why, if you've ever tried to repair a damaged motherboard, you probably weren't successful. Even if you could successfully identify all the damaged traces -- not easy, what with the "sandwich" layered design -- when you use little jumper wires to bridge the gaps, it just won't work reliably.)
By the way, these propagation effects are the reason why (counter intuitively) SATA and USB can more easily be made faster than older-style parallel connections. Once you get into the 100 megabit range, interference and the precise arrival time of the parallel bits becomes very hard to control. If it's a bit stream, even though it's several orders of magnitude faster, it's just easier to predict and control.
If everyone in the media would just agree that they'd never, ever mention the name or show an image of the perpetrator, that would go a long way toward solving the problem. I fully agree.
Absolutely. Most of these mutts have a death wish and want to go out as spectacularly as possible. They WANT the attention and notoriety. I say take it from them.
And OK, I'll break my own rule and say this, too. The thing is, something like the Sandy Hook tragedy is just that: a tragedy. Anyone with any human emotion at all is going to be heartsick. I certainly was.
But because of the way the media covers events like these, they get all of the attention. (Disclaimer: I WORK in the media. Radio.) But what doesn't get attention are the countless children who are slowly tortured, or sexually abused, or simply abducted and THEN tortured and abused.
We're fascinated with numbers. Sandy Hook was a horrible, horrible tragedy. I'm not taking away from it for a moment. But there was a little girl who was brutally raped and murdered (when they found her body, her PELVIS had been crushed by the force of the rape) back in NC, where I used to live. Most of you have never heard of her. She never even made the news, save for a brief mention in the local papers.
The truth is that we have a sick society, but we're spraying water on the flames instead of at the root of the problem.
To date, this remains the deadliest school killing. The guy had a gun, but chose explosives.
I'm not going to pitch in on this emotional debate, save to point out that if you outlaw guns, crazy people will still find ways to kill other people, and in mass numbers.
The entrepreneur starts the business, makes it successful, then brings in a PHB to watch the money and keep it running. This has been the case for as long as there have been businesses.
Entrepreneurs tend to be creative, driven, and willing to work around the clock. They also tend to be terrible at the "boring" things (like money management). They're often terrible at details, too.
This same basic principle works for established businesses, too. I worked with a company that turned around radio stations many years ago. We'd send in a "hit" team to do the makeover, then put in a PHB to run it after it was successful. Likewise with restaurants: when a new eatery opens, they send in the "A" team to make sure everything is perfect. A few months later, if the restaurant takes off, they send in a "detail" guy to keep it running and making money.
I wouldn't have thought that it'd take a study to discover something this obvious, but it's nice to see it confirmed scientifically.:)
As I said above, I don't trust any of them. None. Nada.
I trust Linux and KDE on my desktop at home, in a home office that only my wife has access to. That's where I do my banking and online shopping.
I have an old nasty credit card with a low limit that I use when I just must download an app on my smartphone (Android, Samsung hardware, thus Google Play). But that's it. No banking apps, no shopping apps, no Latest Thing! apps on my phone.
And I never, ever send sensitive email or texts from that thing, either.
I'm a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide. But I hide it anyway just because it ain't "Their" bidness.:)
> The problem then is that the software AND the hardware are closed.
Dead on the money. In an ideal world, there would be open standards. I could download my choice of a compatible mobile OS, build from source and install it without any fears that it might not work on the hardware, and without fear that my service provider could hassle me for not using their crap.
> If it's open source YOU have the power to stop it from doing anything like that
In principle and theory, yes. In practice, maybe not. You would almost certainly use libraries installed on the device, unless you plan to roll your own from scratch (and that's going to eat a lot of SRAM). They could still sniff and snoop at the library level.
Or, they could simply sniff and snoop whatever is displayed on the screen. Your open-source browser is "clean," but Nokia is, in essence, a snoop looking over your shoulder. Character-recognition software is small and fast nowadays.
Waiting for a Slashdot story about how THAT is happening, by the way. Some manufacturers and providers are already admitting that they can access the mike and the camera on your smartphone to "see" and "hear" what you're up to...
Ergo, I have no doubt whatsoever that even using an open-source browser won't protect you. The only real answer is to ensure that you never do anything really sensitive on a smartphone. I certainly don't.
> are we (programming job seekers) as a group that dumb?
I can't answer that. But the value of tests like this are to confirm that the applicant can think, and not just answer problems by rote.
Great example from the dark ages: the old Disk Operating Systems had to Do It(tm) in very, very limited RAM. They also had to be fast on (by today's standards) dismally-slow processors. Thus, they commonly used a "jump table" (usually written in assembler) to handle system calls. Simple and effective:
function_number * size_of_each_table_element = pointer to the function code that handles the call.
You'd be astonished at the number of people who will try to implement a 50 or 100-function table with "goto" and "switch" statements (or the equivalent in assembler, which is usually something like a "cmp value" and a "jump-if-zero" instruction).
I've said for years that a really good programmer will know his/her math. It makes for neater, tighter code.
Folks, this is the future. Computers can cross-reference and correlate things at lightning speeds and, once something approaching true artificial intelligence comes along, they'll be able to tell (with 99% accuracy) when someone is lying or telling the truth.
Recommended reading: the "Troy Rising" series by John Ringo. Even if you're not into the "oo-rah" and military stuff, Ringo's one of the best when it comes to realistic artificial intelligences. By the third book ("The Hot Gate") one of the protagonists has struck up a friendship with one of the fabber AIs. The AI admits as much to her, that it can not only tell when a human is lying, it can tell when that person is engaged in illegal activity, just by observing behavior.
In the Troy series, the privacy issues are handled with strict "protocols" (i.e., laws hard-coded into the programming) that govern AI behavior, but this is something that we're going to be facing in the future. What the FBI is doing here is going to look like the first crude steam locomotives compared to what AIs will be capable of in not too many years from now.
> Business always takes the cheapest route for everything from labor to purchasing.
And government always puts loopholes in the rules for their patrons/donors.
To be honest, I've never understood this either-or mentality: that EITHER we have big business running everything, OR we have government running everything. I have no use for either. Simply put: I don't want to bow to a dictator and laugh at his terrible jokes, but I also don't want to bow to some corporate lordling who thinks he's too good to mingle in the slums with folks like me for any length of time.
There's no such thing as utopia, because there will always be crooks. The answer is simple: if it can be proven that an airline allowed a crash to happen because of poor maintenance or some other issue, put the management of that company in jail. Preferably in a Turkish prison. Naked. With a target painted on some extremely private portion of their bodies.
> Free speech can not cause aircraft instruments to malfunction
I think his Penguinisto's point is quite valid. No, free speech won't cause an aircraft to malfunction, but it can set off riots, start wars and cause all other sorts of "issues" in society.
So... some might indeed argue that we should prove that our free speech won't "harm" anyone before being allowed to exercise that right.
As for this specific story, I think that's all it is. Youngsters have no idea how much fun it is to start getting old.
My wife has the same birthday as my boss. I know I've told her this; she acted surprised yesterday to "discover" it again.
But I'm not picking on her; I've forgotten things, too -- and the only reason I can't provide an example is because I can't remember one at the moment!:)
Armstrong probably pondered what to say some time before the moon landing, then it lapsed into subconscious. He's not lying when he says that it came to him on the moon, but it might be more accurate to say, "I forgot that I remembered it and said it on the spur of the moment!"
Right. Most folks, even amateur space enthusiasts like us, don't really understand the gravity "slingshot" and how it works. Some have the idea that you can just accelerate like a demon toward a given planet or moon, whip around it and somehow gain all sorts of new velocity. That's not so.
What you will gain is part of the orbital velocity of the object that you're "slingshotting" around. Nice boost and it makes a difference -- our space probes use it all the time -- but it's not some magical means by which you can accelerate to C-fractional speeds.
Please note that I found that in a quick Google search. In this case, an antibiotic-susceptible organism jumped into pigs, became methicillin resistant. OK, that's not cows, but that shows me that the concern is based in real science.
Bacteria don't care where they live, as long as it's a suitable environment. In any such environment, if regularly exposed to antibiotics, they could develop resistance. This is true in food animals, humans, or petri dishes in the laboratory.
For you to make that assertion, I can only assume that either you are (a) uninformed or (b) a shill for Big Pharma, who make megatons of money off dumping antibiotics into the food chain.
I guess the day will come (I suspect that it'll be long after Musk has assumed room temp) when SpaceX is a giant, ossified fossil that can't adapt to changing markets. It seems to be inevitable.
My brother is the business guru in our family, and one of his favorite stories involves pizza chains. There's a TON of profit in pizza. Ergo, big chains like Pizza Hut were able to build these fancy restaurants with beautiful decor... and then along came discounters like Little Caesars to eat away at their market share.
Smaller, leaner retailers like Dollar General are giving Wal Mart a run for the money nowadays, too.
Call the Economic Circle of Life. You're born, you go through a rapid growth phase, then you become hidebound and eventually just fade away.
> SpaceX would need to have solids, which they've quite deliberately eschewed.
ULA's Common Booster Core (CBC) is liquid-fueled only. Solids are indeed more storable for the long term, but if you need to vary the thrust for different orbital profiles and payloads, liquid is the only way to go.
I don't know that SpaceX is even interested in the ICBM market. Elon Musk is a space head who just wants to see people in the stars, and his company is a way to achieve his boyhood dream while making it pay for itself.
What I want to know is when someone is going to take on the jetliner market. Maybe a SpaceX-like company could come along and eat into that market a swell. Then Airbus will join Boeing and the others in complaining and sweating.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Proof that I'm an old timer: my used of the term "anti virus." It's not called that nowadays. It's Malware Detection, Security Software and Shields and Bad Guy Blockers(tm). I must update my terminology and get with the times. :)
I'm anything but a Microsoft lover, but I have to defend them.
About a million years ago, back during the DOS era, a friend and I wrote an anti-virus suite (the ARF Antivirus, maybe you can still find it online, though I don't recommend that you use it!). It was quite effective; we used the file integrity approach, and stored the integrity information in the files themselves. (We were up front about it; some people don't like that, so we said, hey, you don't like it, just don't use our stuff. No hard feelings.)
Ergo, I think I can at least offer an opinion that's slightly above drooling moron status.
One of my biggest complaints about AV tests is that they're unrealistic. This has been years ago, now, so maybe it has changed, but back then, the folks who did the testing were arrogant and very hard to deal with. Your software had to produce a .TXT log file; it had to do this, it had to do that, or they would just fail it outright.
Once you made them happy, then they tested it against every virus they could find, including some that WERE NOT (and never would be) in the wild.
Bottom line, and to make a long story short: the people who were writing AV software back then were writing it for these tests, and not for the real world. I don't know if that's the case nowadays; I just don't know. (For that matter, maybe Microsoft's stuff really does suck. Given how badly their stuff worked back in the DOS era, it wouldn't surprise me. But I just don't know.)
But fair is fair. I ran from that circus after about a year of endless arguments with the pompous egotists in Compuserve's Anti Virus forum. I don't know if it's still that way, but I haven't used anyone else's anti virus stuff in years (I protect my stuff a different way, primarily by using secured Linux with good backups, and with periodic integrity checks).
(A pedantic self-correction: it would be more accurate to say that the copper traces must be "controlled" lengths, rather than "equal." I was thinking "equal" in terms of a single, discrete data buss.)
> Don't electrical pulses along a copper wire go at the speed of light already?
That's not the problem, it's propagation effects and timing issues. As someone else here pointed out, these high-frequency signals are essentially radio waves and behave like radio waves. You have interference issues from other, nearby signals. The copper traces on your current motherboard must be carefully routed and kept at equal lengths (because they're essentially transmission lines), or you'll have some bits arriving later than others. Chaos. Using optical eliminates that problem.
(This is also why, if you've ever tried to repair a damaged motherboard, you probably weren't successful. Even if you could successfully identify all the damaged traces -- not easy, what with the "sandwich" layered design -- when you use little jumper wires to bridge the gaps, it just won't work reliably.)
By the way, these propagation effects are the reason why (counter intuitively) SATA and USB can more easily be made faster than older-style parallel connections. Once you get into the 100 megabit range, interference and the precise arrival time of the parallel bits becomes very hard to control. If it's a bit stream, even though it's several orders of magnitude faster, it's just easier to predict and control.
> Don't give people their 15 minutes
If everyone in the media would just agree that they'd never, ever mention the name or show an image of the perpetrator, that would go a long way toward solving the problem. I fully agree.
Absolutely. Most of these mutts have a death wish and want to go out as spectacularly as possible. They WANT the attention and notoriety. I say take it from them.
> improvised bomb attacks
And OK, I'll break my own rule and say this, too. The thing is, something like the Sandy Hook tragedy is just that: a tragedy. Anyone with any human emotion at all is going to be heartsick. I certainly was.
But because of the way the media covers events like these, they get all of the attention. (Disclaimer: I WORK in the media. Radio.) But what doesn't get attention are the countless children who are slowly tortured, or sexually abused, or simply abducted and THEN tortured and abused.
We're fascinated with numbers. Sandy Hook was a horrible, horrible tragedy. I'm not taking away from it for a moment. But there was a little girl who was brutally raped and murdered (when they found her body, her PELVIS had been crushed by the force of the rape) back in NC, where I used to live. Most of you have never heard of her. She never even made the news, save for a brief mention in the local papers.
The truth is that we have a sick society, but we're spraying water on the flames instead of at the root of the problem.
Or with a bomb.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
To date, this remains the deadliest school killing. The guy had a gun, but chose explosives.
I'm not going to pitch in on this emotional debate, save to point out that if you outlaw guns, crazy people will still find ways to kill other people, and in mass numbers.
The entrepreneur starts the business, makes it successful, then brings in a PHB to watch the money and keep it running. This has been the case for as long as there have been businesses.
Entrepreneurs tend to be creative, driven, and willing to work around the clock. They also tend to be terrible at the "boring" things (like money management). They're often terrible at details, too.
This same basic principle works for established businesses, too. I worked with a company that turned around radio stations many years ago. We'd send in a "hit" team to do the makeover, then put in a PHB to run it after it was successful. Likewise with restaurants: when a new eatery opens, they send in the "A" team to make sure everything is perfect. A few months later, if the restaurant takes off, they send in a "detail" guy to keep it running and making money.
I wouldn't have thought that it'd take a study to discover something this obvious, but it's nice to see it confirmed scientifically. :)
As I said above, I don't trust any of them. None. Nada.
I trust Linux and KDE on my desktop at home, in a home office that only my wife has access to. That's where I do my banking and online shopping.
I have an old nasty credit card with a low limit that I use when I just must download an app on my smartphone (Android, Samsung hardware, thus Google Play). But that's it. No banking apps, no shopping apps, no Latest Thing! apps on my phone.
And I never, ever send sensitive email or texts from that thing, either.
I'm a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide. But I hide it anyway just because it ain't "Their" bidness. :)
(Hey, that'd make a great tag line. Hmmm ... )
> The problem then is that the software AND the hardware are closed.
Dead on the money. In an ideal world, there would be open standards. I could download my choice of a compatible mobile OS, build from source and install it without any fears that it might not work on the hardware, and without fear that my service provider could hassle me for not using their crap.
I don't think that'll happen, though.
> If it's open source YOU have the power to stop it from doing anything like that
In principle and theory, yes. In practice, maybe not. You would almost certainly use libraries installed on the device, unless you plan to roll your own from scratch (and that's going to eat a lot of SRAM). They could still sniff and snoop at the library level.
Or, they could simply sniff and snoop whatever is displayed on the screen. Your open-source browser is "clean," but Nokia is, in essence, a snoop looking over your shoulder. Character-recognition software is small and fast nowadays.
Waiting for a Slashdot story about how THAT is happening, by the way. Some manufacturers and providers are already admitting that they can access the mike and the camera on your smartphone to "see" and "hear" what you're up to ...
Ergo, I have no doubt whatsoever that even using an open-source browser won't protect you. The only real answer is to ensure that you never do anything really sensitive on a smartphone. I certainly don't.
> are we (programming job seekers) as a group that dumb?
I can't answer that. But the value of tests like this are to confirm that the applicant can think, and not just answer problems by rote.
Great example from the dark ages: the old Disk Operating Systems had to Do It(tm) in very, very limited RAM. They also had to be fast on (by today's standards) dismally-slow processors. Thus, they commonly used a "jump table" (usually written in assembler) to handle system calls. Simple and effective:
function_number * size_of_each_table_element = pointer to the function code that handles the call.
You'd be astonished at the number of people who will try to implement a 50 or 100-function table with "goto" and "switch" statements (or the equivalent in assembler, which is usually something like a "cmp value" and a "jump-if-zero" instruction).
I've said for years that a really good programmer will know his/her math. It makes for neater, tighter code.
It's not only a great idea to weed out the wannabes, watch how they react when you challenge them.
The ones whose eyes light up and are eager to prove themselves? That's your guy or your gal. :)
Folks, this is the future. Computers can cross-reference and correlate things at lightning speeds and, once something approaching true artificial intelligence comes along, they'll be able to tell (with 99% accuracy) when someone is lying or telling the truth.
Recommended reading: the "Troy Rising" series by John Ringo. Even if you're not into the "oo-rah" and military stuff, Ringo's one of the best when it comes to realistic artificial intelligences. By the third book ("The Hot Gate") one of the protagonists has struck up a friendship with one of the fabber AIs. The AI admits as much to her, that it can not only tell when a human is lying, it can tell when that person is engaged in illegal activity, just by observing behavior.
In the Troy series, the privacy issues are handled with strict "protocols" (i.e., laws hard-coded into the programming) that govern AI behavior, but this is something that we're going to be facing in the future. What the FBI is doing here is going to look like the first crude steam locomotives compared to what AIs will be capable of in not too many years from now.
> However, methane is an issue on Uranus.
Must ... not ... make ... stupid ... joke .. .. ..
> Business always takes the cheapest route for everything from labor to purchasing.
And government always puts loopholes in the rules for their patrons/donors.
To be honest, I've never understood this either-or mentality: that EITHER we have big business running everything, OR we have government running everything. I have no use for either. Simply put: I don't want to bow to a dictator and laugh at his terrible jokes, but I also don't want to bow to some corporate lordling who thinks he's too good to mingle in the slums with folks like me for any length of time.
There's no such thing as utopia, because there will always be crooks. The answer is simple: if it can be proven that an airline allowed a crash to happen because of poor maintenance or some other issue, put the management of that company in jail. Preferably in a Turkish prison. Naked. With a target painted on some extremely private portion of their bodies.
> Free speech can not cause aircraft instruments to malfunction
I think his Penguinisto's point is quite valid. No, free speech won't cause an aircraft to malfunction, but it can set off riots, start wars and cause all other sorts of "issues" in society.
So ... some might indeed argue that we should prove that our free speech won't "harm" anyone before being allowed to exercise that right.
> While it appears that his mind is going
As for this specific story, I think that's all it is. Youngsters have no idea how much fun it is to start getting old.
My wife has the same birthday as my boss. I know I've told her this; she acted surprised yesterday to "discover" it again.
But I'm not picking on her; I've forgotten things, too -- and the only reason I can't provide an example is because I can't remember one at the moment! :)
Armstrong probably pondered what to say some time before the moon landing, then it lapsed into subconscious. He's not lying when he says that it came to him on the moon, but it might be more accurate to say, "I forgot that I remembered it and said it on the spur of the moment!"
Nothing to see here, move along.
> Thinking that a gravity assist can help significantly ...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist
Right. Most folks, even amateur space enthusiasts like us, don't really understand the gravity "slingshot" and how it works. Some have the idea that you can just accelerate like a demon toward a given planet or moon, whip around it and somehow gain all sorts of new velocity. That's not so.
What you will gain is part of the orbital velocity of the object that you're "slingshotting" around. Nice boost and it makes a difference -- our space probes use it all the time -- but it's not some magical means by which you can accelerate to C-fractional speeds.
No, not trolling, just making a morbid joke. But after I posted it, and having re-read it, it wasn't in very good taste. My apologies.
> We reap what we sow.
Granted. So why don't we insist that those who did the sowing get the first fruits of the harvest?
In other words: make the management of these food factories eat and drink these foodstuffs before they are shipped off to the market.
Problem solved in a matter of DAYS. :)
> If we had 1/10 of the human population on earth
May I assume that you would volunteer to be one of those who die in order to decrease the surplus population?
(Echoes of Scrooge .. .. )
> no recorded case of a resistant strain being developed due to antibiotics used on cows
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/02/21/147190101/how-using-antibiotics-in-animal-feed-creates-superbugs
Please note that I found that in a quick Google search. In this case, an antibiotic-susceptible organism jumped into pigs, became methicillin resistant. OK, that's not cows, but that shows me that the concern is based in real science.
Bacteria don't care where they live, as long as it's a suitable environment. In any such environment, if regularly exposed to antibiotics, they could develop resistance. This is true in food animals, humans, or petri dishes in the laboratory.
For you to make that assertion, I can only assume that either you are (a) uninformed or (b) a shill for Big Pharma, who make megatons of money off dumping antibiotics into the food chain.
> bureaucracy
This, this and this again.
I guess the day will come (I suspect that it'll be long after Musk has assumed room temp) when SpaceX is a giant, ossified fossil that can't adapt to changing markets. It seems to be inevitable.
My brother is the business guru in our family, and one of his favorite stories involves pizza chains. There's a TON of profit in pizza. Ergo, big chains like Pizza Hut were able to build these fancy restaurants with beautiful decor ... and then along came discounters like Little Caesars to eat away at their market share.
Smaller, leaner retailers like Dollar General are giving Wal Mart a run for the money nowadays, too.
Call the Economic Circle of Life. You're born, you go through a rapid growth phase, then you become hidebound and eventually just fade away.
> SpaceX would need to have solids, which they've quite deliberately eschewed.
ULA's Common Booster Core (CBC) is liquid-fueled only. Solids are indeed more storable for the long term, but if you need to vary the thrust for different orbital profiles and payloads, liquid is the only way to go.
I don't know that SpaceX is even interested in the ICBM market. Elon Musk is a space head who just wants to see people in the stars, and his company is a way to achieve his boyhood dream while making it pay for itself.
What I want to know is when someone is going to take on the jetliner market. Maybe a SpaceX-like company could come along and eat into that market a swell. Then Airbus will join Boeing and the others in complaining and sweating. :)