The computer is a tool, something to make things easier, not an end unto itself. I think we forget that on Slashdot sometimes.
This attitude itself is a problem.
You wouldnt say that about mathematics, or language, or basic logic.
All are difficult things one must master to make a useful contribution to the science, and I dont see why a computer is any different.
You are taking a very common albiet luddite position, imo.
A computer is a powerful tool which rewards your investment into learning how to use it accordingly.
A computer is not unqiue devices which simply submits to you the fruits of a skill without requiring the corresponding investment by learning.
That sort of fuzzy thinking, "do what I mean", "AI" nonsense is a staple of science fiction, and not of the real world.
Get off your physicist laurels and learn to use the machine to an level that gives you what you need. (personally a non-programmer physicist seems dreadfully antiquated to me these days)
And the concept of a wand changing owners was introduced to make sure that Harry owned it? None of this was ever mentioned before? Come on.
Meh, you are wrong.
The phrase "The wand chooses the Wizard" has been with us since book 1.
Borrowing a wand that never chose you has certainly been around for a long time, as well as transfer of ownership, since the wand clearly doesnt die with its owner and can outlive him.
I simply don't see it as a stretch, allthough the emphasis it was given did create some obvious foreshadowing.
X-windows together with any of the popular graphical toolkits is every bit as fast as windows GDI primitives, and very similar to what apple's DPS does to draw widgets. The old fashioned integration of graphical primitives directly into the operating system is exactly what everyone is trying to get away from, as it tends to make everything suck. Take one look at beryl and youll see the future of eye candy is going to be coming from the free software camp.
Now, in addition to that, you are taking the licensing issue 100% backwards. With any OSS toolkit, the terms and source are 100% disclosed, and many times simpler than proprietary licenses. The toolkit you choose will be around forever as surely as if you own it yourself. I don't suppose you have ever read one of MS or Apple's EULA's, but to sum them up you are essentially placing yourself and your company at their mercy when you develop for their platforms.
If your reason for choosing proprietary products is because you plan to make proprietary products, that at least would make sense. But keep in mind that the product model for software is receding into history, and you may need a change of business model in the forseeable future.
Of course there is. You can encrypt drives, encrypt information, use secure Mobos, etc.
In a production environment you don't necessarily get to set the policy on what servers you are running, and off of what boxes.
Those two assumptions are somewhat conflicting I would say.
On the first point The performance tradeoff for encrypted filesystems is seldom worth it on servers when you can physically secure them fairly trivially. If your building is regularly invaded, you have bigger problems. In any case, even if you can stop data loss with disk encryption, the guy could just take a hammer to your server and cause a DoS at the very least, and there is nothing you can do if you allow him physical access.
On the second point: if you are such a low level peon in the a company that you are forced to accept bug ridden systems, then security is a forgone conclusion. Heck- acheiving it might compromise job security. I might suggest looking for a better job. Instead, if you are in a position to offer "services" to the company, such as email, DNS, or NAS then YOU (The IT dept) get to decide how to provide them, and then you can make decisions with security in mind. Before we get too separated from reality, we have to remember that the point of computers is to offer data services to the users, not to offer brand names. The rest of the company shouldnt even have to know whats behind the curtain, just that everything is up and running smoothly.
Being asked to secure pre-owned windows servers is like being asked to levitate. Just give it up and re-install something else. The entirety of the O/S is analogous to trojan horse malware to start with, being that you do not get the source code. Trying to hold back the tide with a spoon and a colander is not my idea of security.
It was a task guaranteed to take out boxes, to see which team could best slow down the inevitable onslaught.
That would be uninteresting. Why even try. I think it should be not only possible, but fairly easy to setup a network that would provide service and not be penetratable over the network. You could even go for extra points by detecting unwanted probing or intrusions and blackholing the attacker's traffic so that you don't even suffer from a degradation of service. But assuming you will lose is the wrong mindset, imo. You have to play to win.
However, what you can't see is the rough access point that was installed behind the firewall in the 10.10.20.x range. You also can't see the pre-installed rootkit/keylogger that resides on the server.
Okay, so they have a pre-installed rootkits on the machines, and 2/3rd of the boxen they are given are windows machines running fundamentally insecure protocols. ( such as ms's infamous technique of sending cleartext LM hashes over the local network) It also seems the machines are setup with easily guessable passwords to boot.
Furthermore, they seemed to stress the "firewall" as if it was some sort of solution rather than just a roadbump as it is in reality. Disabling all blocking rules and simply serving as a router should have more than enough, since firewalls only ever provide the illusion of security anyway.
As the red team clearly illustrated, it only takes a few minutes to gain access to a Linux box via single user mode, bypass BIOS passwords by shorting out the motherboard,
This also has nothing to do with a sysadmins job. If you put your servers physically in the hands of an attacker, there is nothing you can do to stop them quite by definition.
It seems that the only way to win this competition on the defensive would have been to re-install the latest fedora core on all four machines, and setup services that you trust instead of MS services, then hunker down and physically guard the boxes.
The first mistake you are making is a very common misperception, and that is a big part of the reason why most software development sucks.
Design and Implementation of software are one and the same. There is no physical "building" stage for a program, because it has no physical component. The blueprint is the finished form. Trying to artificially separate them is only going to cause delays and inefficiencies. Modelling software design after bridge construction is a recipe for failure.
If you are a designer, then when you are finished designing, you should have a working product, otherwise you need to improve the tools and libraries you use. If you can create a design then foist it on to programmers, then you really arent designing anything. Instead you are coming up with detailed design requirements, and they are doing the real design. When they encounter reality and change the de facto design to make it actually work, you won't even know about it.
If think you are a just programmer who cannot design, you cannot really help but can only get in the way. In a creative field, simple repetitive implementation tasks are best replaced with small shell scripts. (or simple code re-use stemming from good design)
The second mistake you are making is thinking that there is any correlation between someone's degree and their ability to create software. After having interview, hired, and reviewed programmers for 6 years now, I don't even consider education as a factor anymore. It is the least predictive field of any in a resume.
There is no reason to avoid matroska containers and vorbis audio streams. Why let the patent mongers lead us around by the nose?
Instead, once a free replacement is available for h.264, then we'll have a complete solution that the industry can follow. (or if the patents on it are ruled invalid)
You seem to think that the patent terms are "reasonable" which shows your shortsightedness on this issue.
My understanding is that, due to the way TLS/SSL works, the weaknesses in SHA-1 do not really affect TLS transport-layer security.
very true.
but when NIST says not to use it, your hands are tied one way or the other.
They have long turned a blind eye to MD5, because sha-1 was also present. But now its looking like the protocol itself will have to change, since both hashes used are now considered unacceptable:(
Not to mention that the vast majority of existing implemtations would not be interoperable, even if it is technically possible to update the protocol to support newer hash algorithms. (there are asn.1 id's allocated, but the fixed sized buffers for the output of various hash functions may be different, etc, so protocol changes seem mandatory)
Again.. If linux had any dev environment that was ANYWHERE NEAR as good as VC++, maybe I wouldn't despise working on it.
I find that extremely humorous.
I have an entire development team that all started out working in IDE's and over the years as they gained experience have all moved on to work on the command line (mostly bash) with editors such vim or emacs.
None of them will go back, because their productivity is leaps and bounds higher with a symbolic interface rather than a play-skool one.
who missed an episode of Lost and just wants to watch that one without having to spend 6 hours hunting through download pages and message boards just to get the entire house of cards perfectly balanced on my PC long enough to watch the damnded thing.
Registrars shouldnt accept such names in the first place though: Is there a valid reason to ever have a domain name with stray characters mixed in from different languages?
If a standard were to specify that a domain name must use a subset of unicode that is self-consistent, and that browsers should turn the address bar red to warn anytime a domain uses characters not in the users selected languages subsets, that would go a long way towards minimizing the phishing problem.
There would still be issues between users of the same orthography, but in general there is no way to prevent phishing style attacks completely, which fundamentally rely upon people to be careless. Even the current DNS system is vulnerable: spoofing "cnn.com" with "cnn-news.com" or "cnn.newsnetwork.com" doesnt need i18n support to work at all.
much even when Windows solved the problem soooo long ago
i18n on windows is far from "solved". I do admit that MS had a huge benefit when they started pushing unicode. (It takes a company with microsoft's level of clout to push around national governments )
And the ASCII problem isn't just bad because it forces people to use inefficient encodings like UTF-8 (THREE bytes per character?)
Perhaps you don't realize that UTF-8 is moving on to become the most dominant character encoding, and the legacy cruft such as UTF-16 (designed to deal with design flaws in windows) is being phased out.
Even languages that would end up as mostly 3 byte characters tend to benefit from the savings on single byte characters for control and formatting markup.
I'm not going to harp on about it, but a few basic web searches could enlighten you here.
Code like that *works* in UTF-8, which is one of the things that makes it beatiful. (among many others)
It allows you to deal with world characters sets when it matters, and allows you to ignore them when it does not. (for example, a lexical analyzer that specifies its tokens does not want to support punctuation from every language ever conceived)
And if you think code like that doesnt exist in the windows world, you are sadly quite naive. In my experience internationalizing applications, its typically far easier to upate unix applications, which on occaision need nearly no changes at all, compared to the laborious grind and near total re-write often needed for ms-windows applications.
You have a pretty faced popular guy who gets acclaimed as the hero, and a snarling rough-edged guy behind the scenes who is the real hero.
Linus isnt a charlatan or a bad guy, he just doesnt want to change the world. RMS isnt entirely grouchy, but its popular to credit him with being so. Meh, maybe its not such a good analogy.
But the main point stands: Real "Heroes" are not always the popular/friendly/nice to look at types.
Lol, if you really believe that you've been sold a nice tall glass of snake oil.
Everytime something is deemed too hard we just default to genetic programming, because that will magically solve the problem and we wont have to understand it.
In reality, "genetic" programming so far has been essentially a crock, with extremely limited applications.
The other side of AI says that "my brain is magic, and I'm really smart and you can't possibly produce a robot as clever as me". I don't subscribe to that one - I think that's nonsense.
Tells me all I need to know about this guy's predictions. He fails to understand that in the 40+ year history of AI research noone has demonstrated even the inklings or foundations upon which actual AI can be built upon.
They may be nothing special about the human mind, but what ever the case is, we certainly havent figured it out yet. It's more likely that we'll have cold fusion by 2015 than AI.
Yes but as the RIAA discovered actually using the courts of law to enforce copyright is a losing proposition. Too many violators and court time is too expensive. So DRM makes sense for copyright owners because it cuts the number of violators in a cost effective fashion.
Suing individual downloaders for contributory infringement is not efficient or cheap. But its not cheap for those who get sued either, and they generally end up forced to pay an outlandish settlement to a party they have caused no measurable damage too.
Obviously, I can circumvent DRM by simply humming the tune to myself. Copyright and DRM are not absolutes. You can "violate" copyright to a certain extent under fair use rights. You can evade DRM by using the analog hole or your memory.
The fact that DRM interferes with one's ability to make fair use of material, such as making backup copies, or quoting sections of content are effectively diminishing the value of the content and extending copyright into places it was never meant to reach.
The so-called "hackers" who want to eliminate DRM for philosophical reasons would do better to engage in some economic R&D. If there was something like the market but which worked in the presence of infinite supply, nobody would care about DRM. It wouldn't be worth the (considerable) cost, effort and risk. But so far nobody figured out a better way to pay for content creation than a hacked-up market.
There is nothing more noble than defending the basic human right to think, and thus those hackers are defending our very freedom.
There is a way for a market to work in the presence of inifinite supply: get paid in advance. The old patron of the art's system could easily be re-vamped for the modern age, and it requires none of the monopolies or invasions upon personal liberty thrust upon us by the copyright system.
Copyright is a failed experiment in oppression, and with any luck the internet and the pirates may eventually break that system's back. The alternative end-game is fairly bleak, and has been illustrated in science fiction several times.
Copyright was supposed to be a means to and ends, not and end in itself.
It is the government's grant of copyright which makes the bits effectively finite, NOT DRM.
If its goal is to limit supply, DRM is a failed technology concept: Thah would be much like an attempt to make dry water. You cannot show someone something without them being able to see it. You cannot tell someone a secret without allowing them to know it.
So why would they push such a flawed technology: the true goals are likely much more insidious. I believe they are more along the lines of controlling what you are allowed to view, and controlling who is allowed to produce content.
>The people behind this movement also act as if pronunciation is fixed, while of course, it is not.
That was once the case, but no longer so. Now in the age of mass communications, the level of isolation needed for languages to drift have largely disappeared. Nowadays, regional accents that formed in the US are slowly receding, and most people have generally softened to or wholly adapted the US comman accent and sound.
The levels of isolation needed for entire new languages to formed dissappeared at the dawn of the industrial age, with fast ships able to cross the globe, the required several generations of isolation needed simply did not exist on the planet any longer.
Regional dialects continued to form, such as in the US, as waves of immagrants did not fully assimilate. But telecommunications, television, radio, and the vast storehouse of recorded words, voices, and movies have reversed this trend, and the languages of the world have begun normalizing.
If there was ever a use for standardizing english pronunciation, now is a better time then ever before.
Its very easy to rig up a computer so that it can only be used for test-taking, and has no ability to send IM's or otherwise help the test-taker cheat.
If you allow a student access to a general purpose computer with network access of any kind, then you are basically allowing them full access to all information on the internet. (for many things, this degrades the test into a test of their search skills)
For some subjects, there is nothing wrong with that type of "cheating": if you can find the answer than you can do the job. (in the real world you'll have a desktop and google available to you, so have at it) That does not apply to all subjects however.
Another way to discourage cheating is to have the students compete against one another. (the downside is that curves punish the brightest and reward mediocrity in many cases) I wouldnt advise curves, standards should be objective.
Yet another way is to make each student take a unique test: Even simple shuffling the order of the questions around, while making sure that the test-taker cannot view more than one question at a time and cannot backtrack, effectively squelches many forms of synchronized or low-bandwidth cheating.
More subtle techniques involve giving similar questions that have slight differences, so that cheaters who assume two questions are the same without looking too closely will be misled to choose the wrong answer. Another technique is to "camouflage" questions by changing trivial details such as proper nouns/advectives/contants and other details that do not affect the answer to the question.
In reality, a minimal effort should be able to prevent 99% of cheating attempts, and this should not be a big problem. Lack of effort on part of the test administrators, or simple lack of confidience are to blame when cheating is high.
In any case, you cannot blame the students: they need to score high compared to their peers, or it will have a negative impact on their lives. If they don't take advantage of every tool at their disposal, then they will do poorly.
Slashdot Mirror
The computer is a tool, something to make things easier, not an end unto itself. I think we forget that on Slashdot sometimes.
This attitude itself is a problem.
You wouldnt say that about mathematics, or language, or basic logic.
All are difficult things one must master to make a useful contribution to the science, and I dont see why a computer is any different.
You are taking a very common albiet luddite position, imo.
A computer is a powerful tool which rewards your investment into learning how to use it accordingly.
A computer is not unqiue devices which simply submits to you the fruits of a skill without requiring the corresponding investment by learning.
That sort of fuzzy thinking, "do what I mean", "AI" nonsense is a staple of science fiction, and not of the real world.
Get off your physicist laurels and learn to use the machine to an level that gives you what you need. (personally a non-programmer physicist seems dreadfully antiquated to me these days)
And the concept of a wand changing owners was introduced to make sure that Harry owned it? None of this was ever mentioned before? Come on.
Meh, you are wrong.
The phrase "The wand chooses the Wizard" has been with us since book 1.
Borrowing a wand that never chose you has certainly been around for a long time, as well as
transfer of ownership, since the wand clearly doesnt die with its owner and can outlive him.
I simply don't see it as a stretch, allthough the emphasis it was given did create some obvious foreshadowing.
Wow, that is an amazingly uninformed post.
X-windows together with any of the popular graphical toolkits is every bit as fast as windows GDI primitives, and very similar to what apple's DPS does to draw widgets. The old fashioned integration of graphical primitives directly into the operating system is exactly what everyone is trying to get away from, as it tends to make everything suck. Take one look at beryl and youll see the future of eye candy is going to be coming from the free software camp.
Now, in addition to that, you are taking the licensing issue 100% backwards. With any OSS toolkit, the terms and source are 100% disclosed, and many times simpler than proprietary licenses. The toolkit you choose will be around forever as surely as if you own it yourself. I don't suppose you have ever read one of MS or Apple's EULA's, but to sum them up you are essentially placing yourself and your company at their mercy when you develop for their platforms.
If your reason for choosing proprietary products is because you plan to make proprietary products, that at least would make sense. But keep in mind that the product model for software is receding into history, and you may need a change of business model in the forseeable future.
About your point #2:
On linux (any unix really) you want to avoid wchars and wide functions like the plague.
The way to go for i18n is using utf-8 and bytes for character strings everywhere. (look into the gtk+ library for examples of this)
The whole wchar experiment has been declared a failure, and is deprecated for any usage really.
Just to point out two things you said:
Of course there is. You can encrypt drives, encrypt information, use secure Mobos, etc.
In a production environment you don't necessarily get to set the policy on what servers you are running, and off of what boxes.
Those two assumptions are somewhat conflicting I would say.
On the first point
The performance tradeoff for encrypted filesystems is seldom worth it on servers when you can physically secure them fairly trivially. If your building is regularly invaded, you have bigger problems. In any case, even if you can stop data loss with disk encryption, the guy could just take a hammer to your server and cause a DoS at the very least, and there is nothing you can do if you allow him physical access.
On the second point: if you are such a low level peon in the a company that you are forced to accept bug ridden systems, then security is a forgone conclusion. Heck- acheiving it might compromise job security. I might suggest looking for a better job. Instead, if you are in a position to offer "services" to the company, such as email, DNS, or NAS then YOU (The IT dept) get to decide how to provide them, and then you can make decisions with security in mind. Before we get too separated from reality, we have to remember that the point of computers is to offer data services to the users, not to offer brand names. The rest of the company shouldnt even have to know whats behind the curtain, just that everything is up and running smoothly.
Being asked to secure pre-owned windows servers is like being asked to levitate. Just give it up and re-install something else. The entirety of the O/S is analogous to trojan horse malware to start with, being that you do not get the source code. Trying to hold back the tide with a spoon and a colander is not my idea of security.
It was a task guaranteed to take out boxes, to see which team could best slow down the inevitable onslaught.
That would be uninteresting. Why even try.
I think it should be not only possible, but fairly easy to setup a network that would provide service and not be penetratable over the network. You could even go for extra points by detecting unwanted probing or intrusions and blackholing the attacker's traffic so that you don't even suffer from a degradation of service. But assuming you will
lose is the wrong mindset, imo. You have to play to win.
However, what you can't see is the rough access point that was installed behind the firewall in the 10.10.20.x range. You also can't see the pre-installed rootkit/keylogger that resides on the server.
Okay, so they have a pre-installed rootkits on the machines, and 2/3rd of the boxen they are given are windows machines running fundamentally insecure protocols. ( such as ms's infamous technique of sending cleartext LM hashes over the local network) It also seems the machines are setup with easily guessable passwords to boot.
Furthermore, they seemed to stress the "firewall" as if it was some sort of solution rather than just a roadbump as it is in reality. Disabling all blocking rules and simply serving as a router should have more than enough, since firewalls only ever provide the illusion of security anyway.
As the red team clearly illustrated, it only takes a few minutes to gain access to a Linux box via single user mode, bypass BIOS passwords by shorting out the motherboard,
This also has nothing to do with a sysadmins job. If you put your servers physically in the hands of an attacker, there is nothing you can do to stop them quite by definition.
It seems that the only way to win this competition on the defensive would have been to re-install the latest fedora core on all four machines, and setup services that you trust instead of MS services, then hunker down and physically guard the boxes.
The first mistake you are making is a very common misperception, and that is a big part of the reason why most software development sucks.
Design and Implementation of software are one and the same. There is no physical "building" stage for a program, because it has no physical component. The blueprint is the finished form. Trying to artificially separate them is only going to cause delays and inefficiencies. Modelling software design after bridge construction is a recipe for failure.
If you are a designer, then when you are finished designing, you should have a working product, otherwise you need to improve the tools and libraries you use. If you can create a design then foist it on to programmers, then you really arent designing anything. Instead you are coming up with detailed design requirements, and they are doing the real design. When they encounter reality and change the de facto design to make it actually work, you won't even know about it.
If think you are a just programmer who cannot design, you cannot really help but can only get in the way. In a creative field, simple repetitive implementation tasks are best replaced with small shell scripts. (or simple code re-use stemming from good design)
The second mistake you are making is thinking that there is any correlation between someone's degree and their ability to create software. After having interview, hired, and reviewed programmers for 6 years now, I don't even consider education as a factor anymore. It is the least predictive field of any in a resume.
There is no reason to avoid matroska containers and vorbis audio streams.
Why let the patent mongers lead us around by the nose?
Instead, once a free replacement is available for h.264, then we'll have a complete solution that the industry can follow. (or if the patents on it are ruled invalid)
You seem to think that the patent terms are "reasonable" which shows your shortsightedness on this issue.
My understanding is that, due to the way TLS/SSL works, the weaknesses in SHA-1 do not really affect TLS transport-layer security.
very true.
but when NIST says not to use it, your hands are tied one way or the other.
They have long turned a blind eye to MD5, because sha-1 was also present. But now its looking like the protocol itself will have to change, since both hashes used are now considered unacceptable
That doesnt seem to be the case.
Looking at the RFC for TLS:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2246.txt
It seems sha-1 and md5 are the only options for hashes in 1.0.
Not to mention that the vast majority of existing implemtations would not be interoperable, even if it is technically possible to update the protocol to support newer hash algorithms. (there are asn.1 id's allocated, but the fixed sized buffers for the output of various hash functions may be different, etc, so protocol changes seem mandatory)
Does anyone know whether or not common protocols and formats such as TLS, ssh, X.509 certs, etc are being updated to use newer hash functions?
Its easy to change parts of a self-contained system, such as password hashes, but common protocols require interoperability and standards compliance.
This is actually fairly interesting situation, where NIST certification and platform interoperability may actually be at odds with each other.
Obviously it's a much more complex issue, we are trying to impose our own idea of order, and put up people in power that we can at least stand.
Lol, so that would make the "French Resistance" fighters of WWII "insurgents" as well, because they were opposing the vichy government?
Wouldn't ousting what is perceived by them to be a "puppet goverment" of the US be a natural part of any resistance movement ?
Again.. If linux had any dev environment that was ANYWHERE NEAR as good as VC++, maybe I wouldn't despise working on it.
I find that extremely humorous.
I have an entire development team that all started out working in IDE's and over the years as they gained experience have all moved on to work on the command line (mostly bash) with editors such vim or emacs.
None of them will go back, because their productivity is leaps and bounds higher with a symbolic interface rather than a play-skool one.
The level of technology needed for a useful ebook reader is quite available.
The reason why we don't have ebooks is very simple: DRM.
who missed an episode of Lost and just wants to watch that one without having to spend 6 hours hunting through download pages and message boards just to get the entire house of cards perfectly balanced on my PC long enough to watch the damnded thing.
You should try the CCCP:
http://www.cccp-project.net/
I hear it works well for windows.
OTOH, you could switch to mplayer on linux and have everything work automatically.
Thats a good start.
Registrars shouldnt accept such names in the first place though: Is there a valid reason to ever have a domain name with stray characters mixed in from different languages?
If a standard were to specify that a domain name must use a subset of unicode that is self-consistent, and that browsers should turn the address bar red to warn anytime a domain uses characters not in the users selected languages subsets, that would go a long way towards minimizing the phishing problem.
There would still be issues between users of the same orthography, but in general there is no way to prevent phishing style attacks completely, which fundamentally rely upon people to be careless. Even the current DNS system is vulnerable:
spoofing "cnn.com" with "cnn-news.com" or "cnn.newsnetwork.com" doesnt need i18n support to work at all.
much even when Windows solved the problem soooo long ago
i18n on windows is far from "solved".
I do admit that MS had a huge benefit when they started pushing unicode.
(It takes a company with microsoft's level of clout to push around national governments )
And the ASCII problem isn't just bad because it forces people to use inefficient encodings like UTF-8 (THREE bytes per character?)
Perhaps you don't realize that UTF-8 is moving on to become the most dominant character encoding,
and the legacy cruft such as UTF-16 (designed to deal with design flaws in windows) is being phased out.
Even languages that would end up as mostly 3 byte characters tend to benefit from the savings on single byte
characters for control and formatting markup.
I'm not going to harp on about it, but a few basic web searches could enlighten you here.
if(string[index] == '.' || string[index] == '?' || string[index] == '!') sentenceEnd = true;
Code like that *works* in UTF-8, which is one of the things that makes it beatiful. (among many others)
It allows you to deal with world characters sets when it matters, and allows you to ignore them when it does not.
(for example, a lexical analyzer that specifies its tokens does not want to support punctuation from every language ever conceived)
And if you think code like that doesnt exist in the windows world, you are sadly quite naive.
In my experience internationalizing applications, its typically far easier to upate unix applications, which
on occaision need nearly no changes at all, compared to the laborious grind and near total re-write often needed
for ms-windows applications.
You have a pretty faced popular guy who gets acclaimed as the hero, and a snarling rough-edged guy behind the
scenes who is the real hero.
Linus isnt a charlatan or a bad guy, he just doesnt want to change the world.
RMS isnt entirely grouchy, but its popular to credit him with being so.
Meh, maybe its not such a good analogy.
But the main point stands: Real "Heroes" are not always the popular/friendly/nice to look at types.
Lol, if you really believe that you've been sold a nice tall glass of snake oil.
Everytime something is deemed too hard we just default to genetic programming, because that will
magically solve the problem and we wont have to understand it.
In reality, "genetic" programming so far has been essentially a crock, with extremely limited applications.
The other side of AI says that "my brain is magic, and I'm really smart and you can't possibly produce a robot as
clever as me". I don't subscribe to that one - I think that's nonsense.
Tells me all I need to know about this guy's predictions.
He fails to understand that in the 40+ year history of AI research noone has demonstrated even the inklings or foundations upon which actual AI can be built upon.
They may be nothing special about the human mind, but what ever the case is, we certainly havent figured it out yet. It's more likely that we'll have cold fusion by 2015 than AI.
I dont think you are realizing this:
The maximum energy the bullet will apply to the target is the same as the recoil it applied to the firer.
If you can hold a 45 magnum and fire it, then an ideal body armor can make the hit on the target have no worse
an impact than it did on you.
Suing individual downloaders for contributory infringement is not efficient or cheap.
But its not cheap for those who get sued either, and they generally end up forced to pay
an outlandish settlement to a party they have caused no measurable damage too.
The fact that DRM interferes with one's ability to make fair use of material, such as making backup copies, or quoting sections of content are effectively diminishing the value of the content and extending copyright into places it was never meant to reach.
There is nothing more noble than defending the basic human right to think, and thus those hackers are defending our very freedom.
There is a way for a market to work in the presence of inifinite supply: get paid in advance. The old patron of the art's system could easily be re-vamped for the modern age, and it requires none of the monopolies or invasions upon personal liberty thrust upon us by the copyright system.
Copyright is a failed experiment in oppression, and with any luck the internet and the pirates may eventually break that system's back. The alternative end-game is fairly bleak, and has been illustrated in science fiction several times.
Copyright was supposed to be a means to and ends, not and end in itself.
It is the government's grant of copyright which makes the bits effectively finite, NOT DRM.
If its goal is to limit supply, DRM is a failed technology concept:
Thah would be much like an attempt to make dry water.
You cannot show someone something without them being able to see it.
You cannot tell someone a secret without allowing them to know it.
So why would they push such a flawed technology: the true goals are likely much more insidious.
I believe they are more along the lines of controlling what you are allowed to view, and
controlling who is allowed to produce content.
>The people behind this movement also act as if pronunciation is fixed, while of course, it is not.
That was once the case, but no longer so.
Now in the age of mass communications, the level of isolation needed for languages to drift have largely
disappeared. Nowadays, regional accents that formed in the US are slowly receding, and most people have
generally softened to or wholly adapted the US comman accent and sound.
The levels of isolation needed for entire new languages to formed dissappeared at the dawn of the industrial age, with fast ships able to cross the globe, the required several generations of isolation needed simply did not exist on the planet any longer.
Regional dialects continued to form, such as in the US, as waves of immagrants did not fully assimilate.
But telecommunications, television, radio, and the vast storehouse of recorded words, voices, and movies have
reversed this trend, and the languages of the world have begun normalizing.
If there was ever a use for standardizing english pronunciation, now is a better time then ever before.
Sounds like incompetence.
Its very easy to rig up a computer so that it can only be used for test-taking, and has
no ability to send IM's or otherwise help the test-taker cheat.
If you allow a student access to a general purpose computer with network access of any kind,
then you are basically allowing them full access to all information on the internet. (for many
things, this degrades the test into a test of their search skills)
For some subjects, there is nothing wrong with that type of "cheating": if you can find the answer than you
can do the job. (in the real world you'll have a desktop and google available to you, so have at it)
That does not apply to all subjects however.
Another way to discourage cheating is to have the students compete against one another.
(the downside is that curves punish the brightest and reward mediocrity in many cases)
I wouldnt advise curves, standards should be objective.
Yet another way is to make each student take a unique test: Even simple shuffling the order of the
questions around, while making sure that the test-taker cannot view more than one question at a time
and cannot backtrack, effectively squelches many forms of synchronized or low-bandwidth cheating.
More subtle techniques involve giving similar questions that have slight differences, so that cheaters
who assume two questions are the same without looking too closely will be misled to choose the wrong answer.
Another technique is to "camouflage" questions by changing trivial details such as proper nouns/advectives/contants
and other details that do not affect the answer to the question.
In reality, a minimal effort should be able to prevent 99% of cheating attempts, and this should not be a big problem.
Lack of effort on part of the test administrators, or simple lack of confidience are to blame when cheating is high.
In any case, you cannot blame the students: they need to score high compared to their peers, or it will have a negative
impact on their lives. If they don't take advantage of every tool at their disposal, then they will do poorly.