Place the ideal state, where everyone has their ideal partner at infinity (nirvana). Zero is
the state where noone has any partner.
If you choose a partner based upon criteria where the selection you make will cause a certain number of others to be unable to find their ideal mate, you are reducing the sum. (For example if you choose someone who is ideal to you, but you are not ideal to them)
If you choose the ideal partner for yourself and you are your partner's ideal partner, then you are increasing the sum.
Also, if you make yourself a better person, you become more desirable, and could be an ideal mate for more people. This would make the sum go up.
Conversely being slovenly would decrease the sum.
(Since completely solving for every person on earth would be a travelling salesman class problem, its fair to call the nirvana state an infinity even with a mere 6 billion people.)
Well, Life is a zero-sum game. We cant all be rich billionaires on cruise ships. Somebody has got to build things.Somebody has to serve the food at restraunts. Someones got to come around and collect the trash.
Money is relative, what the real commodity being traded is time. What percent of your time is spent serving others, and what percent is spent having fun? For one person to have extreme material wealth means that lots&lots of people have to spend their time working for that person.
(building his houses, cooking his food, penning his FUD, tracking his taxes, piloting his personal jet, etc), whereas he spends his time having fun- or working for himself.
In simple terms: For each "rich" person there must exist a small army of "poor" people.
First of all, they are written in their own special language "patentese", which is a dialect
of "lawyerese" with some suspicious sci-jargon thrown in. They are desinged to be read and written be specially trained individuals who can properly encode/decode them.
Second of all, the Patent applies to any use of the described technology, so the title of the patent and its overview do not tell you all the applications of the patent. In order to understand
a patent you must understand all of the patent.
Thirdly, even if part of a patent is invalidated, the balance remains in force, so you must understand every part of a patent.
Say you are trying to invent something new on your own.
Now imagine that you are charged with making sure
that there is no patent you would be infriging upon. This means you are responsible for knowing and understanding every part of every patent ever issued. Even disregarding the fecundity of the patent office- this is impossible.
The purpose of the JEDEC was to avoid this problem. All parties agreed not to lay a patent minefield. RAMBUS broke the rules- they are trying to gain from the work of others- they should lose.
In a likely possible future, it becomes even more necessary for the government to provide access to the communications network to each of its citizens if:
Its required to pay taxes
Its the method used for Emergency broadcast
Its the method used for emergency service requests (911)
Its how you vote from home.
Its where you pay all you bills from, in fact its where all payments from your bank account are authorized from. (since there is no more cash)
You need the net to access your private keyring at home so that you can enter into contracts (signed digital documents)
Network access to each citizen then becomes a fundamental right and necesity on par with clean air, water, and (sadly still) access to the physical car/road network.
No private company seems willing to step up and invest the billions in a fiber to the curb national network- this kind of project is government domain. It should be done not for profit, but as a basic service. Then, for more bandwidth a premuim could be charged perhaps.
And IP will never work- we will need a new user-level protocol. Something hardware switched with fixed cell sizes I'd say. (We need low-latency and
high bandwidth here)
Is the ease with with the encrypted files were broken. If you read the article, its says that the most it took the government to break a file, using their mathematicians and supercomputers, was 1 year- most being broken well within time to take action.
Mathematically, RSA itself should take the age of the universe to brute-force- so I wonder what technique they were really using. The article doesnt give any hint what types of cryptanalysis was used.
Perhaps they merely tried to guess the passphrase- probably the easiest way since most people are simply going to use a handfull of ascii characters leaving a really small keyspace. Or maybe they know of a weakness in the random number generator their implementation used.
I bet they started with a dictionary attack, then
tried common variations with capital letters, numbers and symbols mixed it( the goal being to decode his secret keyring ).
Regardless- the point seems to be that if they government whats to know whats on your computer they will find out- even if they cant do it casually and cheaply. The best way to send secret messages remains steganography and anonimity.
Whatever laws come out here inevitably ripple throughout the world. Whatever tech standards are set here generally propagate in one direction. "Piracy" laws, copyright extensions, patent absurdities are like a virus- spreading out into europe, asia, and south america.
Dont get me wrong-
I would love to see the day when a consumer technology from another country actually made an impact back here. Especially ones that would help to allow fair use- not to restrict it.
And the scare story is needed. We've got to get up to support open-source hardware- software alone is not enough. DVD has already become the next VHS- the blockbuster near where I live is already at 50% DVD. And DVD is full of (weak but extant) rights resticting tech that your are legally resticted from trivially bypassing.
You dont want to wait until content pretection logic from a proprietary corp is legally required in all multimedia capable devices do you?
Some people, like the canadian who posted above, would argue that it is an intrisic right to listen to the public airwaves that are coursing through your body right now.
So long as the is a technological chess match, and no lawyers are involved, Its actually kind of interesting to watch.
Is is possible for Hughes to limit reception broadcast of a signal using only technological measures? (Their recent victory hints that they may)
Will the "non-paying listeners" be able to come back from this crippling blow? (Theyll need new hardware)
Will the effort required to decode the signal exceed the decoder's satisfaction in doing so?
(Perhaps if Hughes make changes frequently enough, it just wont be interesting to continue to jump though their hoops)
Re:You must not do anything interesting on them
on
Microsoft's DNS Down
·
· Score: 4
For instance, if you're not an adminsitrator, running any program called setup.exe causes a dialog to pop up asking if you'd like to install as Administrator or as the current user. There's no way to "forget" to become one.
Here you are assuming that all install programs are called setup.exe. I have seen that dialog once, for a certain 3rd party utility(cygwin). I got no warnings of any kind for several others (adobe acrobat). I also discovered a bug in the user creation dialogs as well while messing around with my user profiles.
Second, you seldom need to reboot when installing new software, but lots of software just pops up a "reboot" message anyways.
Plenty of software does really need a reboot. Some install scripts try to make you do an uneeded one, but those are not what I'm talking about. Install Single-Step on Chip or W2kPacket Capture Driver and you will need a reboot.
Third, there is in fact a "Home" directory, and has been even in NT4. It was in Profiles then, and it's under Documents and Settings now.
Applications default to your "home" directory (My Documents) so long as they don't specify a specific directory (which most apps don't do).
I am aware of the documents and settings directory. First its a horrible directory name to try and navigate to from within a cmd shell. Second many applications support it by starting all the save dialogs there- but this sucks if you are trying to save in the directory you started the application in. The idea of a unix home directory is not only are they standard, easy to use with scripts, and universally supported in thier OS, but they are the only place you can save files as a user.
If you're going to pretend you know something, you shouldn't make comments which immediately give away your lack of knowledge.
Well, you seem to know a bit about W2k. Just enough to be dangerous...
Re:You must not do anything interesting on them
on
Microsoft's DNS Down
·
· Score: 2
Well, as long as you dont get a bug in something low level- such as complicated registry modifications, low-level access to GDI resources, esoteric D3D calls, window message dispatch routines, explorer extensions, API system calls that take large stuct pointers, etc, you should be relatively safe.
You could probably get around hacking some high level stuff with a reasonable expectation of non-bsoding, but thats not what im talking about:)
An even bigger difference is that people don't expect a bridge to fall down every third or fourth time they use it, whereas with software they think that's normal.
Expect this to change in the future. The reign of propreitary consumers operating systems and applications is in check right now.
I think you meant to say, nothing that you hold valuable.
Dont get me wrong, I think that learning the easy half of C++ is important. I think getting a few months of insight into an assembly is important. So is an introduction to basic data structures and algorithms. Producing a dinky piece of software with some classmates may be of marignal value.
What I meant was that the courses were too shallow, that they dont go deep enough. That I wouldnt expect anyone with a 4.0gpa BS CS to know how to handle the simplest of real world problems.
The stuff they teach in undergrad CS should probably be moved into high school CS. As soon a kid knows a little algebra, he should be offered a chance to learn some basic programming.
And frankly, I think the cure for reliable software is going to come from the adoption of formals methods and other mathematical stuff that I'll never be very good at.
Math is great and all, but I havent seen anyone even lay down a framework for a purely mathematical programming environment. The basic process of life is still optimization. (optimization in the broadest possible sense: assignment, procedural logic, conditional logic)
You must not do anything interesting on them
on
Microsoft's DNS Down
·
· Score: 2
I use win2k at work(not my choice) an I dont find them to be much more stable than NT. The interface is much nicer, and they've upgraded some of their convenience features. But it still freezes up all the time whenever you put a heavy load on it, or when youre doing development. If you have a bug in your program, depending upon severity, it can take down the whole OS.
And they still havent fixed the problem of window management being crappy. Its a pain to minmize windows with modal dialog boxes up. The only option is the "show desktop" command- which minimizes everything and sometimes causes programs to freeze up- which causes the os to freeze up. And there is still no decent multiple desktop option that comes with the OS. This is an area where windows lags behind unices.
And as a server OS, well its riddled with problems. Its still a moot option to run your database and webserver and DNS server from the same machine.
As a desktop OS- you said it. You still have to do an astonishing number of reboots to do the simplest things- like installing software. And if you forget to become administrator- most software will still install without warning but will be flaky when you try to run it. It still has suspect utility as a multi-user desktop- because any user can mess things up for any other user. Also, there is no good paradigm equivalent to the home directory. Each application has a different and conflicting idea where a user should keep his files- which leads to clusterfuck for the unwary.
20 days uptime sounds reasonable- assuming you dont do any heavy development. (My linux box at home only goes down for kernel upgrades.)
I wouldnt say that *nix users are biased againt Microsoft. They are merely expressing common sense in a world driven my marketroids and mob opinion.
The difference is that building a bridge or an engine takes huge amounts of capital, and very few if any of the people who study the "physical world" engineering will get a chance to design and build a bridge, or to fab thier own microchip before being weeded through an educational system.
On the other hand, software engineers with a home computer have all the tools they need to go full life cycle. They can get hands on experience doing everything a professional engineer would do. They can learn from their mistakes, and explore techniques and possibilites.
All the knowledge they need is avaiable online. You can buy books for any level of software enginnering learning cheaply, if you prefer dead-tree medium. There are huge online and IRL communities to give you free help as well.
College is porbably irrelevant so far as becoming a good software architect goes. Noone can make you learn; Its something you have to take for yourself.
I know this first hand- Ive been coding my entire life. When I looked at the curriculae at a few colleges offering degrees in CS, I had to laugh. They teach almost nothing.
So I went straight into the industry- got a job. Ive met PhD's I wouldnt wipe my shoes on. It seems like programming skill is inversely proportional to academic accreditation.
Starcraft on the other hand uses a peer/servant networking paradigm. The reason for this is so: A hosts a game. B and C join the game. A dies. The game must continue so that B and C can continue to fight each other even if A's machine is powered off. In a pure client/server model- the game is over when A quits. In starcraft, ever computer is an equal, so B and C are both clients and servers= the game goes on.
Just because you dont have any special insight or knowledge into these people/the future doesnt mean that there is nobody reading slashdot that does.
That idea is that if you do know something that you could post it, even better if you include a link to something. If not, and you still want to contribute, then weed through the posts and mod up the good ones.
As for JK, well, he's part of the medium. Can't begrudge him the right to dig for interesting ideas and repeat them.
I am trying to find out if iptables does remasqing:
Masquerading a packet with a destination back inside the masq'd LAN.
I know ipchains doesnt do this, and its been a considerable headache. Some of the things I cannot do are:
access my port forwarded apache box from its external internet address from within the LAN; I must use its internal LAN address.
join a battlenet game of starcraft hosted by someone on the same LAN.
I know there is a kernel patch for 2.2 that will introduce this ability, but it breaks the ipchains code's security.
Looking at the way iptables works, I think this should be possible (Port forwarding would be done before routing, and masqing done post-routing), but it is not addressed specifically anywhere that ive seen.
Anybody know?
Disclaimer: Ive asked this question before on K5, but nobody seemed to have a ready answer. Maybe the broader audience
There are two versions of the AIM protocol, one used by the nice AOL clients, and a less feature-full one used by the Free clients.(called oscar)
In order to use the full AIM protocol, you have to reverse engineer it - besause the specs are not given out, and plus you are vulnerable to blocking and bugs if you dont interact well with the AIM servers.
Microsoft is also unlike Free developers, since it has a large concentrations of liability absorbing capital. I.E., they can be sued. Until they get out from under the "Antitrust" issue, they are not likely to countersue or do any "Microsoft pressure" tactics to force the issue.
I worked at safeway when they were just recently coming out with the new "Safeway Club Card" scheme. Basically you get the same prices you used to get by clipping cupons but now you have to surrender your ID for every purchase.
Some customers where furious that all of their purchasing habits were going to tracked in a database, and refused to sign up for a card. Since they would be paying MUCH more for the privelege of privacy, they said they would be forced to shop elsewhere.
I tried to convince them to do what everyone else including myself-an employee, was doing: fill the application form with bullshit. (they give you the card before they check the form) However they objected to this as well, for philosophical reasons.
Maybe thats the problem: most people are pragmatic enough not to worry about the erosion of privacy/anonimity, and they are content just to spoof the system whenever they can.
Well I would say that you really have to understand what type of code you are going to be generating.
If you have a good foundation in C and C++, you can imagine how all the C++ code will be "translated" into C code, and then from there into assembly. (C++ code is not really translated into C) This allows you to create efficient code, because you can tell when using an object poorly will result in inefficiency.
For example, using a call such as
cout << "hello" << 59 << 10.2;
uses 3 function calls, whereas
printf( "hello%d%f", 59, 10.2 );
uses only 1, and is more efficient overall.
The other aspect, designing good object abstractions is much more subtle. Some people seem to come at it naturally, others never do. I suspect the answer is simple: If you like creating object heirarchies, and are flexible in changing them when you realize that they are flawed, you should do well. The only way to get good at that is to practice it. You will feel the point when your designs are more often helpful than harmful.
Perhaps the (human) mind is a "quantum computer". It has AI and natural language processing built in.
If that were true, then QC's would have the advantages of a living mind, but not those of a computer.
If on the other hand, these QC's were to have both advantages, well then we have begun creating the new humanity, which will inevitable replace us- because there is no way a human could compete with such a mystical beast.
What I'm getting at is the I believe that, like conservation on energy, there is a principle perhaps of conservation of perspective. You cannot have both the speed of a computer and the versatility of a mind: Once we build a neural net or QC complex enough to be a mind, it will cease to be a computer.
As to widely accepted theories: well the earth was once widely accepted as flat... I think the theorists are missing something.
Many people learn an OO programming language in order to hop onto the bandwagon. They are actually, for the most part fairly easy to learn, and pretty soon you can be defining classes, adding members, etc.
The problem is that most people dont get far past that point. The hardest part of using an object oriented programming technique is deciding how to structure your class heirarchy. Even for a trivial program, deciding how to throw up an elegant, scalable, and expandable set of classes to implement it can be a non-trivial problem.
There are countless bad coders who dont concern themselves with that aspect of the problem, and go around creating mob's of classes that work, but are not ideal for the problem domain. Pretty soon their code degrades into spaghetti worse than procedural coding styles. Also, they tend to use the good interfaces available to them in horrible ineffecient ways (doing alot more work than needed to solve the problem).
They give the whole technique a bad name, and I think wrongly so. It is possible to gain advantage from OO code, and to minimize the drawbacks, but its alot harder than some think. Many programmers fail to make the jump from procedural style to OO style without realizing it.
The fundamental problem with non-functional programming is something called side-effects. C code is rife with side effects stemming from global data, static function variables, assignment, the environment etc. Object Oriented programming is a technique for minimizing side effects, and confining them to small manageable sections of code. This is known as "encapsulation".
When used properly, changing how one part of the program works will only break things in a small part of the program (one source file usually). This can be a tremendous benefit.
OO programming techniques, combined with C or C++, give you the best combination of application efficiency, portability, and development expediancy avaiable today.
What it wont do is turn bad coders into good ones. Actually quite the opposite: it tends to turn bad coders into horrible ones.
This MathML is an XML DTD, and that is what causes the observed verbosity and non-user friendlyness of it.
XML is a very strict and confining data format. It was desinged to be optimal for ease of parsing, defining document types, and to separate content from formatting. A side effect of this is that it becomes much more difficult to read or write XML code by hand.
To see what I mean compare any hand written HTML document with a compliant XHTML document. What it comes down to is this: non-trivial XML documents basically have to be machine generated.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing is left as an excersize for the reader. I personanly think that no matter how many open-source/portable/perfect document generators there are, there will always be a market for typing this stuff in straight text, in a format designed to be hand-editable.
I really personally dont see what the big deal is with XML. Its a nice system for defining text document formats that follow a narrow set of rules and can be edited by hand (but doing that is error prone and unforgiving of mistakes). Its not going to change the world per-se, though it might help to unify formatted documents.
Slashdot Mirror
The only currency will be attention.
Place the ideal state, where everyone has their ideal partner at infinity (nirvana). Zero is the state where noone has any partner.
If you choose a partner based upon criteria where the selection you make will cause a certain number of others to be unable to find their ideal mate, you are reducing the sum. (For example if you choose someone who is ideal to you, but you are not ideal to them)
If you choose the ideal partner for yourself and you are your partner's ideal partner, then you are increasing the sum.
Also, if you make yourself a better person, you become more desirable, and could be an ideal mate for more people. This would make the sum go up. Conversely being slovenly would decrease the sum.
(Since completely solving for every person on earth would be a travelling salesman class problem, its fair to call the nirvana state an infinity even with a mere 6 billion people.)
Money is relative, what the real commodity being traded is time. What percent of your time is spent serving others, and what percent is spent having fun? For one person to have extreme material wealth means that lots&lots of people have to spend their time working for that person. (building his houses, cooking his food, penning his FUD, tracking his taxes, piloting his personal jet, etc), whereas he spends his time having fun- or working for himself.
In simple terms: For each "rich" person there must exist a small army of "poor" people.
Second of all, the Patent applies to any use of the described technology, so the title of the patent and its overview do not tell you all the applications of the patent. In order to understand a patent you must understand all of the patent.
Thirdly, even if part of a patent is invalidated, the balance remains in force, so you must understand every part of a patent.
Say you are trying to invent something new on your own. Now imagine that you are charged with making sure that there is no patent you would be infriging upon. This means you are responsible for knowing and understanding every part of every patent ever issued. Even disregarding the fecundity of the patent office- this is impossible.
The purpose of the JEDEC was to avoid this problem. All parties agreed not to lay a patent minefield. RAMBUS broke the rules- they are trying to gain from the work of others- they should lose.
Network access to each citizen then becomes a fundamental right and necesity on par with clean air, water, and (sadly still) access to the physical car/road network.
No private company seems willing to step up and invest the billions in a fiber to the curb national network- this kind of project is government domain. It should be done not for profit, but as a basic service. Then, for more bandwidth a premuim could be charged perhaps.
And IP will never work- we will need a new user-level protocol. Something hardware switched with fixed cell sizes I'd say. (We need low-latency and high bandwidth here)
Mathematically, RSA itself should take the age of the universe to brute-force- so I wonder what technique they were really using. The article doesnt give any hint what types of cryptanalysis was used.
Perhaps they merely tried to guess the passphrase- probably the easiest way since most people are simply going to use a handfull of ascii characters leaving a really small keyspace. Or maybe they know of a weakness in the random number generator their implementation used.
I bet they started with a dictionary attack, then tried common variations with capital letters, numbers and symbols mixed it( the goal being to decode his secret keyring ).
Regardless- the point seems to be that if they government whats to know whats on your computer they will find out- even if they cant do it casually and cheaply. The best way to send secret messages remains steganography and anonimity.
Dont get me wrong- I would love to see the day when a consumer technology from another country actually made an impact back here. Especially ones that would help to allow fair use- not to restrict it.
And the scare story is needed. We've got to get up to support open-source hardware- software alone is not enough. DVD has already become the next VHS- the blockbuster near where I live is already at 50% DVD. And DVD is full of (weak but extant) rights resticting tech that your are legally resticted from trivially bypassing.
You dont want to wait until content pretection logic from a proprietary corp is legally required in all multimedia capable devices do you?
So long as the is a technological chess match, and no lawyers are involved, Its actually kind of interesting to watch.
Is is possible for Hughes to limit reception broadcast of a signal using only technological measures? (Their recent victory hints that they may)
Will the "non-paying listeners" be able to come back from this crippling blow? (Theyll need new hardware)
Will the effort required to decode the signal exceed the decoder's satisfaction in doing so? (Perhaps if Hughes make changes frequently enough, it just wont be interesting to continue to jump though their hoops)
Here you are assuming that all install programs are called setup.exe. I have seen that dialog once, for a certain 3rd party utility(cygwin). I got no warnings of any kind for several others (adobe acrobat). I also discovered a bug in the user creation dialogs as well while messing around with my user profiles.
Second, you seldom need to reboot when installing new software, but lots of software just pops up a "reboot" message anyways.
Plenty of software does really need a reboot. Some install scripts try to make you do an uneeded one, but those are not what I'm talking about. Install Single-Step on Chip or W2kPacket Capture Driver and you will need a reboot.
Third, there is in fact a "Home" directory, and has been even in NT4. It was in Profiles then, and it's under Documents and Settings now. Applications default to your "home" directory (My Documents) so long as they don't specify a specific directory (which most apps don't do).
I am aware of the documents and settings directory. First its a horrible directory name to try and navigate to from within a cmd shell. Second many applications support it by starting all the save dialogs there- but this sucks if you are trying to save in the directory you started the application in. The idea of a unix home directory is not only are they standard, easy to use with scripts, and universally supported in thier OS, but they are the only place you can save files as a user.
If you're going to pretend you know something, you shouldn't make comments which immediately give away your lack of knowledge.
Well, you seem to know a bit about W2k. Just enough to be dangerous...
You could probably get around hacking some high level stuff with a reasonable expectation of non-bsoding, but thats not what im talking about :)
Expect this to change in the future. The reign of propreitary consumers operating systems and applications is in check right now.
I think you meant to say, nothing that you hold valuable.
Dont get me wrong, I think that learning the easy half of C++ is important. I think getting a few months of insight into an assembly is important. So is an introduction to basic data structures and algorithms. Producing a dinky piece of software with some classmates may be of marignal value.
What I meant was that the courses were too shallow, that they dont go deep enough. That I wouldnt expect anyone with a 4.0gpa BS CS to know how to handle the simplest of real world problems. The stuff they teach in undergrad CS should probably be moved into high school CS. As soon a kid knows a little algebra, he should be offered a chance to learn some basic programming.
And frankly, I think the cure for reliable software is going to come from the adoption of formals methods and other mathematical stuff that I'll never be very good at.
Math is great and all, but I havent seen anyone even lay down a framework for a purely mathematical programming environment. The basic process of life is still optimization. (optimization in the broadest possible sense: assignment, procedural logic, conditional logic)
And they still havent fixed the problem of window management being crappy. Its a pain to minmize windows with modal dialog boxes up. The only option is the "show desktop" command- which minimizes everything and sometimes causes programs to freeze up- which causes the os to freeze up. And there is still no decent multiple desktop option that comes with the OS. This is an area where windows lags behind unices.
And as a server OS, well its riddled with problems. Its still a moot option to run your database and webserver and DNS server from the same machine.
As a desktop OS- you said it. You still have to do an astonishing number of reboots to do the simplest things- like installing software. And if you forget to become administrator- most software will still install without warning but will be flaky when you try to run it. It still has suspect utility as a multi-user desktop- because any user can mess things up for any other user. Also, there is no good paradigm equivalent to the home directory. Each application has a different and conflicting idea where a user should keep his files- which leads to clusterfuck for the unwary. 20 days uptime sounds reasonable- assuming you dont do any heavy development. (My linux box at home only goes down for kernel upgrades.)
I wouldnt say that *nix users are biased againt Microsoft. They are merely expressing common sense in a world driven my marketroids and mob opinion.
On the other hand, software engineers with a home computer have all the tools they need to go full life cycle. They can get hands on experience doing everything a professional engineer would do. They can learn from their mistakes, and explore techniques and possibilites.
All the knowledge they need is avaiable online. You can buy books for any level of software enginnering learning cheaply, if you prefer dead-tree medium. There are huge online and IRL communities to give you free help as well.
College is porbably irrelevant so far as becoming a good software architect goes. Noone can make you learn; Its something you have to take for yourself.
I know this first hand- Ive been coding my entire life. When I looked at the curriculae at a few colleges offering degrees in CS, I had to laugh. They teach almost nothing.
So I went straight into the industry- got a job. Ive met PhD's I wouldnt wipe my shoes on. It seems like programming skill is inversely proportional to academic accreditation.
Starcraft on the other hand uses a peer/servant networking paradigm. The reason for this is so: A hosts a game. B and C join the game. A dies. The game must continue so that B and C can continue to fight each other even if A's machine is powered off. In a pure client/server model- the game is over when A quits. In starcraft, ever computer is an equal, so B and C are both clients and servers= the game goes on.
That idea is that if you do know something that you could post it, even better if you include a link to something. If not, and you still want to contribute, then weed through the posts and mod up the good ones.
As for JK, well, he's part of the medium. Can't begrudge him the right to dig for interesting ideas and repeat them.
I am trying to find out if iptables does remasqing: Masquerading a packet with a destination back inside the masq'd LAN.
I know ipchains doesnt do this, and its been a considerable headache. Some of the things I cannot do are:
I know there is a kernel patch for 2.2 that will introduce this ability, but it breaks the ipchains code's security.
Looking at the way iptables works, I think this should be possible (Port forwarding would be done before routing, and masqing done post-routing), but it is not addressed specifically anywhere that ive seen.
Anybody know?
Disclaimer: Ive asked this question before on K5, but nobody seemed to have a ready answer. Maybe the broader audience
The idea is not that they would be trying to communicate with us, but rather we would detect very old traces of aliens communicating with each other.
Sounds better to me.
In order to use the full AIM protocol, you have to reverse engineer it - besause the specs are not given out, and plus you are vulnerable to blocking and bugs if you dont interact well with the AIM servers.
Microsoft is also unlike Free developers, since it has a large concentrations of liability absorbing capital. I.E., they can be sued. Until they get out from under the "Antitrust" issue, they are not likely to countersue or do any "Microsoft pressure" tactics to force the issue.
Some customers where furious that all of their purchasing habits were going to tracked in a database, and refused to sign up for a card. Since they would be paying MUCH more for the privelege of privacy, they said they would be forced to shop elsewhere.
I tried to convince them to do what everyone else including myself-an employee, was doing: fill the application form with bullshit. (they give you the card before they check the form) However they objected to this as well, for philosophical reasons.
Maybe thats the problem: most people are pragmatic enough not to worry about the erosion of privacy/anonimity, and they are content just to spoof the system whenever they can.
I was quoting him and fixing his terminology.
Attaching a certificate to a message doesnt prove the person wrote that message. A signature does.
The certificate is supposed to help you ensure that the public key used to check the signature belongd to the person you think it does.
read better
If you have a good foundation in C and C++, you can imagine how all the C++ code will be "translated" into C code, and then from there into assembly. (C++ code is not really translated into C) This allows you to create efficient code, because you can tell when using an object poorly will result in inefficiency.
For example, using a call such as
cout << "hello" << 59 << 10.2;
uses 3 function calls, whereas
printf( "hello%d%f", 59, 10.2 );
uses only 1, and is more efficient overall.
The other aspect, designing good object abstractions is much more subtle. Some people seem to come at it naturally, others never do. I suspect the answer is simple: If you like creating object heirarchies, and are flexible in changing them when you realize that they are flawed, you should do well. The only way to get good at that is to practice it. You will feel the point when your designs are more often helpful than harmful.
Perhaps the (human) mind is a "quantum computer". It has AI and natural language processing built in.
If that were true, then QC's would have the advantages of a living mind, but not those of a computer.
If on the other hand, these QC's were to have both advantages, well then we have begun creating the new humanity, which will inevitable replace us- because there is no way a human could compete with such a mystical beast.
What I'm getting at is the I believe that, like conservation on energy, there is a principle perhaps of conservation of perspective. You cannot have both the speed of a computer and the versatility of a mind: Once we build a neural net or QC complex enough to be a mind, it will cease to be a computer.
As to widely accepted theories: well the earth was once widely accepted as flat... I think the theorists are missing something.
The problem is that most people dont get far past that point. The hardest part of using an object oriented programming technique is deciding how to structure your class heirarchy. Even for a trivial program, deciding how to throw up an elegant, scalable, and expandable set of classes to implement it can be a non-trivial problem.
There are countless bad coders who dont concern themselves with that aspect of the problem, and go around creating mob's of classes that work, but are not ideal for the problem domain. Pretty soon their code degrades into spaghetti worse than procedural coding styles. Also, they tend to use the good interfaces available to them in horrible ineffecient ways (doing alot more work than needed to solve the problem).
They give the whole technique a bad name, and I think wrongly so. It is possible to gain advantage from OO code, and to minimize the drawbacks, but its alot harder than some think. Many programmers fail to make the jump from procedural style to OO style without realizing it.
The fundamental problem with non-functional programming is something called side-effects. C code is rife with side effects stemming from global data, static function variables, assignment, the environment etc. Object Oriented programming is a technique for minimizing side effects, and confining them to small manageable sections of code. This is known as "encapsulation".
When used properly, changing how one part of the program works will only break things in a small part of the program (one source file usually). This can be a tremendous benefit.
OO programming techniques, combined with C or C++, give you the best combination of application efficiency, portability, and development expediancy avaiable today.
What it wont do is turn bad coders into good ones. Actually quite the opposite: it tends to turn bad coders into horrible ones.
To see what I mean compare any hand written HTML document with a compliant XHTML document. What it comes down to is this: non-trivial XML documents basically have to be machine generated.
Whether this is a good or a bad thing is left as an excersize for the reader. I personanly think that no matter how many open-source/portable/perfect document generators there are, there will always be a market for typing this stuff in straight text, in a format designed to be hand-editable.
I really personally dont see what the big deal is with XML. Its a nice system for defining text document formats that follow a narrow set of rules and can be edited by hand (but doing that is error prone and unforgiving of mistakes). Its not going to change the world per-se, though it might help to unify formatted documents.