Security through obscurity is never an effective strategy.
You got the meme wrong. Security through obscurity alone is not enough, but obscurity in addition to other measures certainly helps. Or are you sugegsting that our secret CIA operatives inside the Taliban would be more effective if they stood up in the middle of prayers and announced they worked for the Agency?
The headline and summary are misleading but the main point of the paper stands. Once we are talking about probabilities of one-in-a-million or less, other second order terms come into effect.
Example: the probability of the blood "not being from OJ Simpson" was declared to be "one-in-six-billion". Well at those orders of magnitude the probability of an unknown-to-him twin brother are higher than that. Of course I'm not claiming he has one. In all likelihood he doesn't, it's just that the probability of that event is around 1-in-100 million, which far outweighs the 1-in-6,000,000,000 given by the genetics "expert".
So the correct thing to say is that the chances of the blood not being OJs is one-in-100,000,000. Good enough for me to convict and scientifically accurate. The other figure is nonsense.
Show me one first-world nation that's been running without oil,
I don't need to. The end of the coal era didn't mean we couldn't use any coal whatsoever. It only meant we had to move away from coal being the sole primary source of energy. One could argue that Iceland, Denmark, and France are current first-world nations which do not rely on oil as their sole primary source of energy.
The planet is not infinite. Exponential growth will hit a ceiling, whether you want to believe it or not. Any nerd should know that.
Calm down. Step away from the mouse. Haven't you heard? exponential growth has stopped, seriously. The world population is already falling rapidly in most of Europe, Japan, Korea and Rusia. It will start falling worldwide around 2050 if not earlier. Population will start falling in China in 25 years or so and plummet so rapidly as to possibly create a crisis (too many old retired people, to few workers to support them).
By the year 2300 there will be less than a billion people in the entire planet. At that rate we can increase the amount of resource consumption per capita sevenfold compared to today. No need to panic. Furthermore, since people would be replaced one-to-one (or less), the need for new houses, roads, and other infrastructure will go down. One can easily envision a scenario in which supporting today's standard of living would take less that 20% of the energy it does today, even before we account for advances in efficiency and renewable sources of energy (solar, wind).
With China and India increasing demand for oil, could we afford the price when the recession ends?
Yes absolutely, because we are wasting so much of it. This might sound counterintuitive, but think about it. If you have cut to the bone and you still have a shortage, then you are in trouble. But if you are driving SUVs, commuting 100 miles a day and living in a McMansion then no problem. It would take minimal effort and little sacrifice to solve your problem. Sell your SUV and buy a Camry (no need to go granola and get a Prius) and move to a 3 bedroom condo near your job.
That is why peak oil is not such a worry in the short term. One day, perhaps fifty years into the future we will have cut to the bone, and there would be no more oil. If by then we haven't deployed enough solar, wind and geothermal sources then and only then we will be in big trouble.
They are either riding on someone's coattails initially or shoved down people's throats
There you go. They should have shipped a zune device with every copy of microsoft windows, and had they done so by now they would own the digital music player market.
Zune had to stand on it's own
That was their tragic mistake. The poor thing never had a chance. If only they had bundled it with windows. There's still time to bundle an XBox 360 with every copy of Microsoft Windows 7 though.
Would you be able to tell that the sine wave had ever been there?
If I can substract the square wave, sure I can. Not every atom responds to the recording signal, so the background noise reflects what used to be there. So step one is read the current data. Step two is create a model about the intensity of the square wave for the current data. Step three is to measure signal with enough accuracy so that I can subtract the square signal and have media noise left (as opposed to measuring device noise).
The noise will not look like a sine wave at all, but once is normalized for the intensity of the square signal it will.
You are overstating the case. In many instances one can make good guesses at how strongly overwritten it was. This works particularly well if the data being recovered is in some well understood format where one can look for markers. Say is there a sequence of 000s which act as a header? do we expect to see the sequence CR LF every so often?
Only on slashdot can you have front page articles featuring original "research" done with no controls, no baselines, dissimilar base conditions, and sample bases of one single result, and have the headline speak conclusively in favour of the observed results.
All of that is acceptable, provided the study is critical of Microsoft. If the results went the other way the absence of a single comma would disqualify the whole project.
A while back we found ourselves in a small island in the middle of nowhere. It was remarkable how much brighter it is compared to the rest of the sky. Since I'm usually never more than 100 km away from a really large metropolis, I'd forgotten what an amazing sight it is.
American cars are better engineered and their quality is as good as any car in the world.
It might make you fell better to say that, but it doesn't make it true.
Buy the latest Consumer Reports issue. Turn the page to the list of top ten cars, what stands out? few American cars there. Then turn the page to the list of the worst models, what do we see there? Mostly American cars.
American cars could be well engineered, but they'll spend more money in a silly ad campaign and some useless gadget to make your car look better, than in the extra five cents it costs to make the turning tail light yellow instead of red, to give but one example.
GM, even early in its history, understood that the largest market for cars, by far, was used cars. So, they targeted their builds only for people that were slightly more affluent and wanted new cars.
Planned obsolescence, major changes from year to year, and large rental sales fleet are used car value killers. So I fail to see in what way GM was addressing its used car market.
They didn't have the resources to do marketing rollouts of all new brands, so they just kept the same brand in place to build on for a customer experience.
This ignores that smaller changes tend to (i) preserve the resale value of the car and (ii) reduce the number of design defects year over year. These two changes are lot more than just "marketing". You sound like a big three manager, who think that all of their problems are about marketing and customer perception, rather than better engineering and manufacturing.
Like many people on Slashdot, you arrogantly mistake your technology desires with the needs of the masses.
Funny, that is exactly the philosophy behind the mediocre offerings from Microsoft. Yet when Microsoft does it is eee-vil and when Apple does it is good for you.
1. GM, back in its day, would have never have pushed out Windows upgrades after upgrades.
And what exactly do you think a different looking new model every year is then?
Japanese car manufacturers saw the folly on this and moved to much less dramatic changes year/year.
Microsoft doesn't ignore the customer.
We reported a serious bug with their compiler. Their answer, written in legalese, was a f**k off letter. This is the kind of bug that most other outfit would have released a patch together with an advisory.
Do you want the university as a business partner and owner of your invention?
Actually they do and the answer is generally yes. They'll ask for little and give back lots, provided that you don't disclose the whole thing ahead of time. If you publish the paper first explaining the whole trick, then you might be SOL.
Akamai, Sun, Google, Yahoo and countless others thrived with joint university ownership. In fact, Mark Andressen's biggest beef was that UIUC-NCSA did not partner with Netscape but chose to go with Spyglass instead.
This is shortsighted advice. It shows little knowledge of how inventions in academia actually take place.
- First, in real life, your "really great idea" likely isn't and you'd benefit from developing further in class with the advice of your professor(s).
- If it ever matures to the state that it can hit the market, approach the university (without revealing the exact details of your invention) and negotiate a workable fee structure.
- They are as interested as you are in making your company succeed as otherwise your invention is worthless to them.
- I'm going to say that again. You are dealing with IP pencil pushers which get evaluated by number of start ups created. If you threaten to walk and simply not develop the idea, they'll panic.
- Universities will make resources available to help you get started. Likely in the form of IP lawyers for patents, incubator space on campus, a small investment $10-$20K to get you off the ground, and put you in touch with their list of VC friends.
- Along the way, you might pick up your first batch of employees among your fellow students and professors (see Akamai for an example of how it is done).
RMS is equivocating on purpose. Whenever confronted he claims the gratis interpretation of free, but when you read his speeches, he often hints at gratis, which is why he has never fixed the name of his foundation.
In contrast the OSS movement started by removing this ambiguity.
A significant impact in the deceleration of PC sales was the war on third party developers started by microsoft. By absorbing so many features into the OS, vc's could no longer confidently fund software start-ups. This reduces the usefulness of the PC. In contrast Apple has said: don't worry, *you* develop the nifty apps and we make it easy for you to sell it.
It is unbelievable, but an underpowered, minimum size screen gadget has more nifty utilities than my multi-touch laptop with 300GB HD and super fast processor.
The Big 3 aren't the ones having problems. The AUTO INDUSTRY is having problems.
You must be a manager in the big three. This sort of "in denial" attitude which they have had since their problems started in the previous oil crisis is what got them where they are today. While other companies were busy building the cars of tomorrow, the big-3 specialized in overpriced gas guzzlers.
Yes sales are going down across the board, but only the big-3 are on the verge of bankruptcy. Hello, does that tell you anything?
There is a class of employee in Detroit who refuses to see the writing on the wall. Who refuses to alter the way they've been doing things for decades, convinced of their inherent superiority.
This is so true. Recently they were interviewing some middle guy in CNN who was talking about how the quality of the Detroit 3 car makers is the same as the Japanese**.
According to this guy, Detroit had nothing else to do. All they needed to do is get bailout money and wait for the economy to improve. No wonder they are in so much trouble!!
** Reading the consumer reports ratings and one can see that this is just not true. While some offerings from Detroit are not bad, and some imports suck, as whole the Asian car companies dominate the top 10 rankings while the American car companies dominate the bottom 10.
I call BS. Japanese automakers had no problem making and selling economy cars in the US. It is only the big three who seem incapable of selling a quality economy car in America.
Heck, the European Ford Focus has been quite a success there, yet Ford HQ refused to sell it here. Currently it is slated to hit the dealerships in 2010, many years after being first introduced in Europe!
Firewire isn't dead; Firewire 400 is being eased out in favour of faster versions.
I have several devices that use Firewire alone, and it is becoming harder to find computers who support FW natively. At the same time, some of the new upgraded versions of these electronics have switched to USB2 and no longer support FW.
I'm sorry to say, but it looks pretty much dead to me now. Even my IPod did not come with a FW cable by default.
Actually, a while back I was reading Pentagon reports from Vietnam battles, and the numbers of casualties were not making any sense, until it became clear that by "casualties" they included both dead and injured.
Slashdot Mirror
Medusa, Maria Antoinette, Robespierre, Danton, Hidalgo, Boleyn, Howard, Holofernes...
Security through obscurity is never an effective strategy.
You got the meme wrong. Security through obscurity alone is not enough, but obscurity in addition to other measures certainly helps. Or are you sugegsting that our secret CIA operatives inside the Taliban would be more effective if they stood up in the middle of prayers and announced they worked for the Agency?
The headline and summary are misleading but the main point of the paper stands. Once we are talking about probabilities of one-in-a-million or less, other second order terms come into effect.
Example: the probability of the blood "not being from OJ Simpson" was declared to be "one-in-six-billion". Well at those orders of magnitude the probability of an unknown-to-him twin brother are higher than that. Of course I'm not claiming he has one. In all likelihood he doesn't, it's just that the probability of that event is around 1-in-100 million, which far outweighs the 1-in-6,000,000,000 given by the genetics "expert".
So the correct thing to say is that the chances of the blood not being OJs is one-in-100,000,000. Good enough for me to convict and scientifically accurate. The other figure is nonsense.
Show me one first-world nation that's been running without oil,
I don't need to. The end of the coal era didn't mean we couldn't use any coal whatsoever. It only meant we had to move away from coal being the sole primary source of energy. One could argue that Iceland, Denmark, and France are current first-world nations which do not rely on oil as their sole primary source of energy.
The planet is not infinite. Exponential growth will hit a ceiling, whether you want to believe it or not. Any nerd should know that.
Calm down. Step away from the mouse. Haven't you heard? exponential growth has stopped, seriously. The world population is already falling rapidly in most of Europe, Japan, Korea and Rusia. It will start falling worldwide around 2050 if not earlier. Population will start falling in China in 25 years or so and plummet so rapidly as to possibly create a crisis (too many old retired people, to few workers to support them).
By the year 2300 there will be less than a billion people in the entire planet. At that rate we can increase the amount of resource consumption per capita sevenfold compared to today. No need to panic. Furthermore, since people would be replaced one-to-one (or less), the need for new houses, roads, and other infrastructure will go down. One can easily envision a scenario in which supporting today's standard of living would take less that 20% of the energy it does today, even before we account for advances in efficiency and renewable sources of energy (solar, wind).
Now back to regular programming.
With China and India increasing demand for oil, could we afford the price when the recession ends?
Yes absolutely, because we are wasting so much of it. This might sound counterintuitive, but think about it. If you have cut to the bone and you still have a shortage, then you are in trouble. But if you are driving SUVs, commuting 100 miles a day and living in a McMansion then no problem. It would take minimal effort and little sacrifice to solve your problem. Sell your SUV and buy a Camry (no need to go granola and get a Prius) and move to a 3 bedroom condo near your job.
That is why peak oil is not such a worry in the short term. One day, perhaps fifty years into the future we will have cut to the bone, and there would be no more oil. If by then we haven't deployed enough solar, wind and geothermal sources then and only then we will be in big trouble.
They are either riding on someone's coattails initially or shoved down people's throats
There you go. They should have shipped a zune device with every copy of microsoft windows, and had they done so by now they would own the digital music player market.
Zune had to stand on it's own
That was their tragic mistake. The poor thing never had a chance. If only they had bundled it with windows. There's still time to bundle an XBox 360 with every copy of Microsoft Windows 7 though.
Would you be able to tell that the sine wave had ever been there?
If I can substract the square wave, sure I can. Not every atom responds to the recording signal, so the background noise reflects what used to be there. So step one is read the current data. Step two is create a model about the intensity of the square wave for the current data. Step three is to measure signal with enough accuracy so that I can subtract the square signal and have media noise left (as opposed to measuring device noise).
The noise will not look like a sine wave at all, but once is normalized for the intensity of the square signal it will.
you've no idea how strongly overwritten it is.
You are overstating the case. In many instances one can make good guesses at how strongly overwritten it was. This works particularly well if the data being recovered is in some well understood format where one can look for markers. Say is there a sequence of 000s which act as a header? do we expect to see the sequence CR LF every so often?
Only on slashdot can you have front page articles featuring original "research" done with no controls, no baselines, dissimilar base conditions, and sample bases of one single result, and have the headline speak conclusively in favour of the observed results.
All of that is acceptable, provided the study is critical of Microsoft. If the results went the other way the absence of a single comma would disqualify the whole project.
A while back we found ourselves in a small island in the middle of nowhere. It was remarkable how much brighter it is compared to the rest of the sky. Since I'm usually never more than 100 km away from a really large metropolis, I'd forgotten what an amazing sight it is.
American cars are better engineered and their quality is as good as any car in the world.
It might make you fell better to say that, but it doesn't make it true.
Buy the latest Consumer Reports issue. Turn the page to the list of top ten cars, what stands out? few American cars there. Then turn the page to the list of the worst models, what do we see there? Mostly American cars.
American cars could be well engineered, but they'll spend more money in a silly ad campaign and some useless gadget to make your car look better, than in the extra five cents it costs to make the turning tail light yellow instead of red, to give but one example.
Wolves are generally pretty leery of human beings and go out of their way to avoid us.
Only if they are alone and not hungry. A pack of hungry wolves (for that matter, hungry feral dogs) will hunt you down.
GM, even early in its history, understood that the largest market for cars, by far, was used cars. So, they targeted their builds only for people that were slightly more affluent and wanted new cars.
Planned obsolescence, major changes from year to year, and large rental sales fleet are used car value killers. So I fail to see in what way GM was addressing its used car market.
They didn't have the resources to do marketing rollouts of all new brands, so they just kept the same brand in place to build on for a customer experience.
This ignores that smaller changes tend to (i) preserve the resale value of the car and (ii) reduce the number of design defects year over year. These two changes are lot more than just "marketing". You sound like a big three manager, who think that all of their problems are about marketing and customer perception, rather than better engineering and manufacturing.
Like many people on Slashdot, you arrogantly mistake your technology desires with the needs of the masses.
Funny, that is exactly the philosophy behind the mediocre offerings from Microsoft. Yet when Microsoft does it is eee-vil and when Apple does it is good for you.
1. GM, back in its day, would have never have pushed out Windows upgrades after upgrades.
And what exactly do you think a different looking new model every year is then?
Japanese car manufacturers saw the folly on this and moved to much less dramatic changes year/year.
Microsoft doesn't ignore the customer.
We reported a serious bug with their compiler. Their answer, written in legalese, was a f**k off letter. This is the kind of bug that most other outfit would have released a patch together with an advisory.
Do you want the university as a business partner and owner of your invention?
Actually they do and the answer is generally yes. They'll ask for little and give back lots, provided that you don't disclose the whole thing ahead of time. If you publish the paper first explaining the whole trick, then you might be SOL.
Akamai, Sun, Google, Yahoo and countless others thrived with joint university ownership. In fact, Mark Andressen's biggest beef was that UIUC-NCSA did not partner with Netscape but chose to go with Spyglass instead.
This is shortsighted advice. It shows little knowledge of how inventions in academia actually take place.
- First, in real life, your "really great idea" likely isn't and you'd benefit from developing further in class with the advice of your professor(s).
- If it ever matures to the state that it can hit the market, approach the university (without revealing the exact details of your invention) and negotiate a workable fee structure.
- They are as interested as you are in making your company succeed as otherwise your invention is worthless to them.
- I'm going to say that again. You are dealing with IP pencil pushers which get evaluated by number of start ups created. If you threaten to walk and simply not develop the idea, they'll panic.
- Universities will make resources available to help you get started. Likely in the form of IP lawyers for patents, incubator space on campus, a small investment $10-$20K to get you off the ground, and put you in touch with their list of VC friends.
- Along the way, you might pick up your first batch of employees among your fellow students and professors (see Akamai for an example of how it is done).
RMS is equivocating on purpose. Whenever confronted he claims the gratis interpretation of free, but when you read his speeches, he often hints at gratis, which is why he has never fixed the name of his foundation.
In contrast the OSS movement started by removing this ambiguity.
A significant impact in the deceleration of PC sales was the war on third party developers started by microsoft. By absorbing so many features into the OS, vc's could no longer confidently fund software start-ups. This reduces the usefulness of the PC. In contrast Apple has said: don't worry, *you* develop the nifty apps and we make it easy for you to sell it.
It is unbelievable, but an underpowered, minimum size screen gadget has more nifty utilities than my multi-touch laptop with 300GB HD and super fast processor.
The Big 3 aren't the ones having problems. The AUTO INDUSTRY is having problems.
You must be a manager in the big three. This sort of "in denial" attitude which they have had since their problems started in the previous oil crisis is what got them where they are today. While other companies were busy building the cars of tomorrow, the big-3 specialized in overpriced gas guzzlers.
Yes sales are going down across the board, but only the big-3 are on the verge of bankruptcy. Hello, does that tell you anything?
There is a class of employee in Detroit who refuses to see the writing on the wall. Who refuses to alter the way they've been doing things for decades, convinced of their inherent superiority.
This is so true. Recently they were interviewing some middle guy in CNN who was talking about how the quality of the Detroit 3 car makers is the same as the Japanese**.
According to this guy, Detroit had nothing else to do. All they needed to do is get bailout money and wait for the economy to improve. No wonder they are in so much trouble!!
** Reading the consumer reports ratings and one can see that this is just not true. While some offerings from Detroit are not bad, and some imports suck, as whole the Asian car companies dominate the top 10 rankings while the American car companies dominate the bottom 10.
I call BS. Japanese automakers had no problem making and selling economy cars in the US. It is only the big three who seem incapable of selling a quality economy car in America.
Heck, the European Ford Focus has been quite a success there, yet Ford HQ refused to sell it here. Currently it is slated to hit the dealerships in 2010, many years after being first introduced in Europe!
Firewire isn't dead; Firewire 400 is being eased out in favour of faster versions.
I have several devices that use Firewire alone, and it is becoming harder to find computers who support FW natively. At the same time, some of the new upgraded versions of these electronics have switched to USB2 and no longer support FW.
I'm sorry to say, but it looks pretty much dead to me now. Even my IPod did not come with a FW cable by default.
in American media often refers only to the dead
Actually, a while back I was reading Pentagon reports from Vietnam battles, and the numbers of casualties were not making any sense, until it became clear that by "casualties" they included both dead and injured.