For that matter, was that drunk guy with no shorts on even you? Or did someone just label it with your name? (Could be either by accident or on purpose.)
And the cute thing is, if you don't have a Facebook account, you won't even know about it.
I seem to recall around a week for claims that it was maintenance, or something. (I'm not real clear, as I won't buy anything with the Sony name on it, but that's my memory.)
The shame is that Sony was one a prime company. Of course, so was HP. I haven't quite gotten around to deciding to never do business with HP again, but I'm getting lots closer with various succeeding stories.
This story didn't make me decide not to do business with Steam. What decided me on that was the entire "We'll rent you access to merchandise that you purchase. When we stop bothering to host it, you're hosed" model. If you think that's an acceptable deal, then I can't really complain. It's your choice. I don't find it acceptable.
So I'm rather biased against Steam, and it still sounds like they pretty much did things right. Quite as opposed to Sony (though I'll admit that half my memories are from their root kit fiasco). Sony has in the past exhibited constructive malice towards their customers, so I don't see any reason to cut them any slack at all. And if an official spokesman for Sony says that credit card info was released in clear text, I'm going to take his word for it. If someone else who is also an official later denies it, there's been a huge number of people put to a tremendous amount of inconvenience, so I don't decline to blame Sony. These are the people who hired contractors to put a root kit on audio CDs. And then removed it so sloppily that your system would be wide open to any web site you visited it. And *THEN* refused to pay for the damages.
What I think is that we are well past several points of no return. But things could still be partially recovered.
FWIW, I believe that "global warming" is already irreversible. But is the temperature (globally averaged) going to increase by 3 degrees, or 10 degrees? It makes a big difference.
It's a slow system with a lot of feedback loops in it. But this doesn't mean that what you do doesn't have any effect, it just means it can take you a long time to notice it. FWIW the ocean is now warming. This means that we're more susceptible to additional warming. It also means that we'll be lucky to escape an ice age if the land temperature returns to what it was previously. (Warmer oceans means more water evaporating. If it falls as snow, it may or may not stick, depending on the land temperature. If it sticks, it will reflect light, cooling the land more...but the ocean takes a long time to either warm or cool, so it will continue evaporating lots of water, which increasingly falls on land as snow...etc.)
So we're in a tricky position. We need to cool things down, or we'll melt enough ice to drown most cities. But we need to cool it slowly enough that the ocean cools too. Warming the ocean was a bad mistake, and the warmer it gets, the less stable our situation. Heat waves that kill people are only a very minor part of the problem.
That other systems are worse doesn't make the claim as stated invalid.
I, personally, don't have any knowledge of the detailed workings of other systems. The capitalist system I have observed close up. So I can make particular claims about it, where about other systems I can only reason theoretically, and from reports that I haven't personally verified.
That said, they Lysenko affair is pretty good proof that the Soviet model did not respect science or evidence. Not when it was politically inconvenient. It may well have been worse about that than the system I live under, but I can't call it a capitalist system, as capitalism is only one piece of the controlling structure. Evidence tends to show that in previous generations a) capitalism was more dominant, and b) capitalism was more environmentally destructive. One can easily argue about the reasons for this, and about whether there is a causal relation. But I do note that the current "standard bearers" for "capitalism", i.e. the Republicans, tend to be less concerned with environmental damage than the Democrats. Neither is very concerned, however. They are politicians, and much more interested in politics than in other things. "The environment" is largely merely something that consider when counting who will support them. But you can hardly call that capitalism, except in an extremely metaphorical sense.
Actually, monarchy probably has the best record of environmental concern of any form of government. This may be because monarchs tend to consider the entire country to be the personal property of their family. And because they are more often quite concerned about the future of the country. (Not, note, the prosperity of the inhabitants except in as much as that contributes to their own prosperity, and to that of their descendants.) Certainly tribal governments don't have a particularly good record, despite their PR. They don't generally do much damage, but this is because they are generally relatively powerless. But in historic times they did things like driving game in a hunt by lighting fires in dry grass, and not intend to put out those same fires. Or driving an entire herd of animals over a cliff in a hunt, where they could only use (eat, treat as leather, etc.) a very few of them.
So. Theoretically capitalism isn't the worst offender, except for being more powerful. But this doesn't mean that they aren't a vile offender. Now we have evidence that we are destroying our environment. We know we live in a condition where there are finite resources, and wastefully expending them is detrimental to our long term wealth. But capitalism encourages such wasteful expenditure over a short time frame. (Actually, this isn't entirely capitalism. A part of it has to do with our tax structures. But capitalism is a large part of this, and it works to actively SHAPE the tax structures. E.g., lobbying against effective measures, like the carbon tax, back when they would still might have been sufficient.)
I think the report is flawed, by the way. It seems to me clear that we are already experiencing irreversible environmental degradation. But I haven't read the report. Perhaps they have some particular measure that they are using which is not yet beyond recovery. However, when a species goes extinct, it is an irreversible change, and many species have gone extinct recently. This must count as irreversible environmental degradation, unless you are using a strongly limited measure of "environmental degradation".
It's not so much a dumbing down, though that *is* happening too. It's designing the GUIs for phones and tablets. Maybe they're fine for that, I wouldn't know. I have a desktop, and that's the machine I *want* to use. Tablet GUIs are terrible. It's not that they're new, it's that they are unfit for the purpose.
FWIW, even KDE4 is inferior, but at least it's useable. Gnome3 and Unity aren't. (Admittedly, I'm basing this on screen shots and what I've seen on other people's computers. Mine won't run those. But Debian testing installed Gnome3, and the Gnome2 reversion for systems without accelerated graphics was so butt-ugly that I switched to Debian stable, which still has Gnome2. Unfortunately each of the other window managers has something badly wrong with it, e.g., one of them, I think it's LXDE, doesn't recognize a left-handed mouse. It's got the control panel, in fact it's got two different ones. But they don't do anything. I checked the buglist and it was reported, and acknowledged, over a year ago. So that one's out. At least until they fix that.
I may end up running KDE4, but perhaps not. Pearson is reporting that KDE3 is nearing readiness for release. And KDE3 is far superior (for my use case) to any of the alternatives, even to Gnome2, which is the only one that is close. So for now I'm staying with Debian stable, and hoping.
But it's not that it's new that's the problem. A few years ago I switched between KDE & Gnome several times, depending on which one was better at the time. It's that the new GUIs are unfit for the purpose. THAT I despise.
You're proposing something that's quite secure, but not *really* secure. Nobody has ever written the kind of system I proposed, because **it would be an incredible amount of work**. And you are proposing standard IP, which has known problems. E.g., you can't be sure who is on the other end of the line.
POSIX can't be used for real security, because it's got known holes. They aren't large, but they are there. SELinux is better in certain areas, but it's only better, not really secure.
It's true that the thing I was proposing wouldn't ever be done, but it would be secure. (Although, honestly, even that wouldn't be perfect. As others have said the only way to get real security is to melt down the disk drive, destroy all copies of the data, and then destroy the ram. And the CRTs. I had one system where I could read frequently displayed images on the CRT even with the power off. Don't know if LCD screens have the same weaknesses, so destroy them thoroughly also.)
Now a practical degree of security is reasonably available, but that's not what the summary said they were asking for. (And, in practice, the reports I've run across say they do an abysmal job of security. But I hear about banks & card companies being broken into more often...enough so that I won't activate electronic banking.)
This is probably meant about as seriously as the "petition submission site" was.
You can't assume that current public key systems will continue to be secure. Advances in Quantum Computing make that a dubious proposition. There are systems that will work, but they don't depend on prime factorization. (As for what they are, that's beyond the boundaries of my knowledge, but I don't believe they require quantum encryption, merely a system that can't be broken by a quantum computer, and actually, I'm told that they are rather limited in the areas where they have an advantage. (Though apparently elliptic encryption is one of them, so don't pick that one.)
As to how difficult it is to maintain a secure system, that depend partly on just how secure you want to make it, and for how long the data needs to be kept secret.
It's not clear that true security is possible short of dissolving the computers in acid and destroying all records. Reasonable security is much easier, the less secure it needs to be, the easier. But security on commodity hardware using commercial products...that has to be rated as towards the less secure end of the spectrum, especially if you allow network connections.
Unix was designed with security in mind. It was designed to run as a multi-user system on college campuses, with lots of snoopy students...or students that wanted extra time to complete their projects.
MSDos intentionally stripped out all the security, in order to run more efficiently on minimally powered single user computers. The security didn't even START getting added back in for nearly a decade, and then it was mainly PR gestures.
It's not just the age of the system, it's the history. Every time MSWind starts to implement serious security measures they break many programs that users depend on, so even when they want to, they are quire slow and hesitant. OTOH, I have heard that recently they've increased their security measures. Certainly Linux has weakened theirs. (Single user systems really *don't* usually require the kind of security needed by multi-user systems.) And Linux has never been as secure as it's reputation. E.g. in a really secure system tar wouldn't be able to untar a file and assign it executable permissions. That would require a manual intervention. A part of it's security has always been that it was a less targeted system. I'm not sure the Android has changed this, as the Android is so different from standard Linux that it's doubtful that the same attacks would work.
OK. Write your own operating system from scratch. You can use Linux or BSD as a model, but change all the system calls, factor things differently, and use a language that will prohibit wild pointers. There's a dialect of D (Digital Mars D) that would work. There's also supposed to be a dialect of Ada, but I don't know enough about it to be sure. DON'T use C or C++, as you can't secure array boundaries.
Then write your own network protocol. You can use IP as a guide, but change everything. I'm not just talking cryptogram here, refactor the protocols. And build in positive identification from the start. (Presume that Quantum Computers will be successful, and that you can't depend on prime factorization to keep your data safe, so you need a handshake that can't be broken that way.)
Yes, this would be a lot of work. Yes, you would never be able to make this public, so you'd need to maintain the whole system. And it would be just as well if the communications could masquerade as https sessions, but they better not BE https sessions.
Don't expect to keep this secret. So plan things so that they will work even if your opponent knows the entire system. But try. And really try to keep the details of the protocols secret. (This means that if someone attempts to break in over the internet, you lead them to a fake site. A kind of honeypot that they can't tell isn't the site they were trying to reach. And require enough id information for them accessing that site that you can tell where the vulnerability is that let them get that far, so that you'll be able to fix that.)
For that matter, use custom connectors for storage devices, so that only specially modified devices can be plugged in. USB keys have slightly different voltages supplied in slightly different locations on the plug. The part that's insulating and the part that's conducting aren't in the same places. Disk drives write oddly sized blocks in an unusual order. Etc. None of this can't be circumvented, of course, but when they get the file blocks in the "right order" the data itself wasn't written as expected. Different error correction coding, etc.
N.B.: Much of this is just an enhancement of things that were done in the 1960's. They stopped doing them for reasons of cost. But a secure network isn't going to be cheap. If you build a cheap network, it won't be secure. If you build a secure network, it won't be cheap. And if you want a REALLY secure network, it will be REALLY expensive.
E.g., foreign language classes are generally filler. Not totally, but most of them don't teach you enough to be useful. But they aren't political indoctrination. Or at least they didn't seem so to me. I found Philosophy 12 a total waste of time, as it was introduction to symbolic logic. For many students, however, it may be the only encounter they ever have with precision reasoning. But I'd worked my way through much or Russel's Principia Mathematica in high school.
U.S. History I thought would be a waste of time. It wasn't. I hated the exams, because I could never give the "correct" answers. (There usually weren't any.) But it covered aspect of US history that just about nobody ever hears about. As a result Ronald Reagan's character was no surprise to me. I'd already heard how when he was president of the screen actors guild GE hired him to give speeches to the workers about why they shouldn't unionize. I'm afraid I left that class as a bit of a cynic, so perhaps it was successful indoctrination. But I believe it was indoctrination with the truth.
And I definitely learned that if you want to take a class in a subject, don't take another department's version, even if it has the reputation of being easier. I nearly failed statistics given by the Psychology department. And Statistics ended up being my major. But "Introduction to..." classes taught in their own department were often well worthwhile.
IIRC, LXDE was the desktop that wouldn't recognize a left-handed mouse. I.e., it had an option to set it as left handed, but the option didn't do anything. This had been a know bug for over a year.... possibly over 2 years. I'm just not sure it was LXDE...It was one of the desktops I was trying after Debian Testing ruined the Gnome2 GUI. Currently I'm using Debian stable, and am unsatisfied with ALL of the alternatives to Gnome2, though Pearson is getting close to releasing a KDE3.x. KDE3 was better than Gnome2. Both are better than KDE4. And KDE4 is better than Gnome3. For my use case, KDE3 was nearly optimal.
All of the alternatives being pushed seem inferior to the ones that were being pushed a couple of years ago. (Well, to be honest at that time I only considered KDE3 and Gnome2.) I suspect that it's the race to grab the phone market, but that's no excuse to cripple the desktop environment.
Checkout Muse or MuseScore. (I think they're two names for the same program.)
Be warned that not all musicxml used by programs is compatible. I think this is bugs, but it was a problem the last time I tried to use it. And because of lack of features (and because I'm not a musician) I've decided that the next time I'm bounced in that direction I'll try going straight to lillypond. It lets me control the size of the note head and where the score line breaks. (Some score editing programs do one, some the other. I haven't found a Linux program that will let me do both.) I'm thinking of entering the basic score in Nted and then exporting the lillypond text which I'll then edit. But I may just just MuseScore. (N.B.: Several programs claim to import or export musicxml, but test each one, and then test the ones you want to use in combination. The last time I tried, I kept having problems with one program refusing to import the musicxml created by another. Then again, this was over a year ago, and just about everybody's rev'ed their versions since then.
That would make it seem smaller, as antarctic icebergs tend to be low and flat. I'd guess that it averages less than 500 meters thick, and it probably doesn't have the photogenic high peak that make arctic icebergs so spectacular. Saying an iceberg is 9/10 underwater may be true, but if there isn't anything high above water, that doesn't push them down very far.
Not sure about that. Usenet isn't a big part of the net anymore...well, it doesn't seem to be an important part. They may well be able to do this without being inconvenienced.
OTOH, it's a clear indication that communications need to be non-centralized. That which is centralized is relatively easy to corrupt or destroy. Mesh networks would seem to be indicated, but also mesh services to run on those networks. Ideally *all* centralized services would be replaced.
We were on service bureaus until sometime in the mid-1970's when the company switched to CP/M. At that point, and for most of the next decade, my professional programming was closely tied into databases and report generation. (When we went into CP/M, one of the main reasons was cost cutting. I maintained a 16 CPU system that ran 16 "independent" computers on top of the same disk drive. This was so that 16 external users could call in to access the database. When we switched to Unix, it was with the same database system on an Altos 386 micro-computer. I had to rewrite the database, because a lot of things changed. Some time in there the company switched to Macintoshes...then slowly switched to MSWind95. I think to save money. I didn't pay too much attention to that, as I was maintaining the Database system, and the computer I had in my office had been a Mac for quite awhile. Eventually the company decided that everyone except graphics had to switch to MSWind. Calling my activities "hobbyist" seems to be misunderstanding things. I had a computer at home that I used and bought things for. The term I used was "professional development".
Free Java compilers was a big win both at home and at work. It must have been around 1995 (a bit after, but before 1998) that I switched my computers at home AND at work to use MSWind95. I still *have* a MSWind95 computer at home, mainly because some work that my wife did can't be moved to another system. Fortunately it's becoming obsolescent, as nothing new has been created there in the last 9-10 years. But that was when I switched her to a Mac. On the Mac I kept tighter control, and everything that was created there is exportable, if sometimes with lack of precision. (Linux music score editing only became useable by her within the last year and a half. Graphics wasn't good enough until a "fairly recent" edition of Inkscape...though when bit-maps suffice, The Gimp has been used. Animation was the key that opened that door.)
If you call this "hobbyist", then either you don't understand the situation, or you mean something drastically different with that word than I do. I would have invested *MORE* money, but I don't like spending money on things that only last a short time, and the free (libre) versions became better than the alternatives. (Not saying there aren't commercial versions that are better in certain ways, but how many will allow me to work in a non-proprietary format? Well, compilers, of course. But compilers are only one piece of the environment. For that matter, I said that on the Mac system things could be moved? This often requires saving them in a different format than the format that they are saved to work in. As a result the Mac still has lots of files that *haven't* been moved, even though they can. Changing a Finale score to a portable form, e.g., means drastically decreasing it's usability by Finale. Which includes fine details of how the score is formatted on the page.)
I'm not an expert myself, but I've been told that for appropriate problems Common Lisp is as fast as C. I believe the person who told me. OTOH, I don't know either what problems you are considering, or what problems they were thinking of. But it seems quite likely that it depends on what you are doing.
(I've also heard some people claim that Java is faster than C. This can only even possibly be true when there's something strange going on, possibly with cache management. And that isn't something that one can count on. In my observation Java programs are often as slow as Python programs, but this seems to have something to do with the GUI.)
Mainframes are, indeed, a very different market. I have no idea what mainframe vendors were doing. When I used a mainframe, I used whatever language the service bureau put on the machine. (The company would occasionally contract for a special language, but that's not something I had any control over.) What this meant to me was that on mainframes I used either Fortran or, occasionally, PL/1.
Microcomputers I could control, but I had to buy my own languages. Or use basic. I probably bought 30 compilers for various different computers I owned ranging from UCSD Pascal to Lifeboat C. When Java came out with a free compiler, it was a big win. Otherwise I wouldn't even have looked at it. (This was after the company had switched to MSWind95, so I was doing my programming in MSAccessBasic or in Eiffel, because I didn't want to buy another compiler at the time. Java was considerably better than MSAccessBasic...so when I didn't need smooth connection to printing reports from a database, I switched to doing a lot of programming in Java. Linux wasn't yet ready for prime time, and GCC on MSWind was... difficult. (I also did some things in Squeak smalltalk, but not much. Couldn't lock down the GUI and it was too slow. [Actually, you could lock down the GUI, but only by converting a version of the program into a "locked GUI" version, and you better get everything right, because it's not only the data entry people who now can't change the GUI, neither can you! So keep a backup of every released version....and adding new data makes it a separate release.])
Now it's true that microcomputer compilers were pretty cheap. The prices I paid ranged from $20 to $200, and there was no relation at all between price and quality. Support, of course, was essentially non-existent. (Hold on to the phone for up to six hours waiting for someone who can understand what you're asking to take your call... YIKE! I didn't have that kind of time. If I couldn't solve the problem it usually meant either try something else, or do it in Basic, because the company could understand that Microsoft support was terrible.)
Free compilers were a TREMENDOUS win. They let me try something without going through accounting to justify the purchase. Or, more often, paying for it myself.
These days I don't use anything BUT Linux. Then I had one machine that was recycled because nobody wanted anything that slow to run MSWind on. (This is actually a bit after 1995, but I'm not sure of the exact data. It was before 2000, because that was the one that I read the license on and decided that I couldn't agree to those terms.)
OTOH, if I remember back to 1970, IBM would LICENSE compilers to you. And not cheaply. (I checked a couple of times.) And there was some reason that UC and LBL wouldn't use the compilers that CDC made for the CDC machines. Cost is a likely reason. (OTOH, they wrote their own compilers...so maybe it was just ego.)
Sorry, but it's not just people who are new to programming that use macros to make their code unintelligible. I've known some really foul examples that had been programming professionally for over a decade. I've got to assume that the macros fit in with how they thought about the code, because (well, in at least one case) he could pick up the code 6 months later and still readily understand it. But nobody else could.
For that matter, back in the days that structured programming was still fighting to get established I used to program (by my choice) in a thing called mortran, which was a thing that allowed you to emit structured Fortran 77 code, but write using while loops, and block structured code (i.e., without using go to statements). The code that was emitted was decent code, but totally unreadable. I could only debug the mortran source. (Not strictly true...sometimes I needed to trace things a far as a core dump...but quite rarely. It was generally easier to debug the source.) That could be considered a way of writing macros. But anyone who tried to maintain the fortran code would surely have been cursing my name.
There's a big difference between "capable of having a garbage collector implemented" and "comes standard with a garbage collector built in". In the first case the language must be designed with the assumption that a garbage collector is likely to not be available. So don't count the Boehm GC, or even Ada's. (Ada had one before C++ did...but it wasn't required, so it was usually an extra cost option. So code couldn't assume that it would be present.)
No, there's nothing magical about having a garbage collector. But it eliminates a wide set of errors, and renders feasible languages that presume that objects will come and go. It also strongly encourages that pointers not be used. (Which means that some alternative approach must be adopted.)
It's not magical, but it's so useful that I hate using languages without it. (Even Vala has implemented a garbage collector as a part of the core language, and it translates all it's code into C for C to compile.)
Yes. Java was (and is) a lot faster than Smalltalk. Sorry, but that *is* significant.
Of the languages that you list, only Lisp is faster, or even nearly as fast as, Java. And Lisp is hard to wrap your mind around. (And here I'm assuming that you mean compiled Common Lisp.) Also, in the early years of Java, a free compiler was unusual. Having a language with a free compiler was a real win. That's much less a consideration now, but now that shape of the language landscape has a lot more inertia.
I think that "finely tuned" here means that if you vary any of several basic rules just a little bit, the character of the universe shifts wildly. It's a common assertion, but I find it a bit unconvincing. Of course, it partially depends on what you mean by "just a little bit", but most projections tend to be either quite simplistic, or to vary things by what I would consider a lot.
That said, it could be a correct statement. I'm certainly not one capable of estimating what a minor variation on one of the physical laws would cause. I just find it dubious, and I've seen a refutation by a scientist as credentialed as the person who was making the original assertion. I think they're generally assertions made on the basis of really sloppy calculations. (I.e., they change one rule, calculate one effect, and ignore the rest of what would necessarily change.)
I've seen the argument made by professional cosmologists, but never even *heard* of a peer-reviewed article.
Actually, everyone seriously involved *knows* that the Standard Model is wrong. There's just no better replacement. If the breaks get a bit worse (as this might do) then some of the other models might start looking better. Assuming, of course, that they can deal with this any better than the Standard Model can.
Currently the main problem with the Standard Model is that it can't handle gravity. (There are other problems, but most of them could be patched.) Gravity is what has motivated String Theory, and all the other attempts at replacing the Standard Model. A varying "Fine Structure Constant" would imply a different set of problems. (For a variety of reasons we don't tend to think that constants need explanation [though we're always happier if one is present], but variables really NEED an explanation.)
The original reason the US didn't build Thorium reactors is they weren't useful for military purposes. So the military had no interest in them. Now it's because the path we *did* take left a very bad taste in the mouths of a very large number of people. It wasn't mainly technical problems, it was mainly political and managerial problems. This doesn't keep them from being very important problems.
*I* wouldn't be in favor of a new nuclear plant. And it's not because I think the technology isn't worth it, it's because of the past political games and managerial problems. And that I'm still paying for a reactor that was built in a totally insane location, and had to be shut down before it was started. N.B.: I'm paying. Not the company that chose the site. Not the company that built the thing. Not even the company that ordered it. The electric customers of PG&E are the ones who picked up the tab for something that should NEVER have been built where it was built.
It will be a very long time before I'm in favor of another nuclear plant. And then only if I'm convinced that while I may pay for the electricity, I don't pay for STUPIDLY IRRESPONSIBLE managerial decisions. As much as possible of the costs of that should have come out of the pockets of the top management and the members of the board of directors of PG&E. The rest divided between the company that irresponsibly sold the plant at a clearly unreasonable site and the stockholder of PG&E.
I hear people saying how irresponsibly Fukishima was located. It's not a patch on Diablo Canyon. A reactor built on an active earthquake fault in a canyon. (True, the fault hasn't moved recently, but it's active, so that just means it's storing up energy.)
And there we're getting close to one of the big problems. Nuclear plants are VERY expensive to build, and they don't use much care in siting them. Building one in a canyon on top of an earthquake fault (California) would seem foolish...but the people who paid for it are the electric customers in California. Actually, we're still paying for it, even though they had to close it down before they even put the fuel in.
The result is those who profit from building them have no need to use care in selecting sites. If it doesn't work out, they aren't the folk who pay. It's true that the companies may be damaged if the site is chosen carelessly, but the management will usually have moved on by then. And the engineers, even, aren't held culpable. They are, however, held culpable if they don't find a site to build the plant on.
And those things are dangerous. Not statistically, but in range and duration of damage.
There are other problems and benefits, but the most dangerous one is that the people causing the danger or damages don't suffer the consequences of their decisions. And do suffer if they don't make, or impede, a sale.
There are other problems in operation, but they can be dealt with. At least in principle. The major problem is that often the people choosing the danger or causing the problem don't pay for the consequences. It's more a problem of management than anything else, but it's an extremely bad problem of management. Safety and quarterly return are in opposition, and as a result safety is compromised.
And you're saying we should buy more of these??? First solve the management problems.
Slashdot Mirror
For that matter, was that drunk guy with no shorts on even you? Or did someone just label it with your name? (Could be either by accident or on purpose.)
And the cute thing is, if you don't have a Facebook account, you won't even know about it.
O? Not the way I remember the stories.
I seem to recall around a week for claims that it was maintenance, or something. (I'm not real clear, as I won't buy anything with the Sony name on it, but that's my memory.)
The shame is that Sony was one a prime company. Of course, so was HP. I haven't quite gotten around to deciding to never do business with HP again, but I'm getting lots closer with various succeeding stories.
This story didn't make me decide not to do business with Steam. What decided me on that was the entire "We'll rent you access to merchandise that you purchase. When we stop bothering to host it, you're hosed" model. If you think that's an acceptable deal, then I can't really complain. It's your choice. I don't find it acceptable.
So I'm rather biased against Steam, and it still sounds like they pretty much did things right. Quite as opposed to Sony (though I'll admit that half my memories are from their root kit fiasco). Sony has in the past exhibited constructive malice towards their customers, so I don't see any reason to cut them any slack at all. And if an official spokesman for Sony says that credit card info was released in clear text, I'm going to take his word for it. If someone else who is also an official later denies it, there's been a huge number of people put to a tremendous amount of inconvenience, so I don't decline to blame Sony. These are the people who hired contractors to put a root kit on audio CDs. And then removed it so sloppily that your system would be wide open to any web site you visited it. And *THEN* refused to pay for the damages.
What I think is that we are well past several points of no return. But things could still be partially recovered.
FWIW, I believe that "global warming" is already irreversible. But is the temperature (globally averaged) going to increase by 3 degrees, or 10 degrees? It makes a big difference.
It's a slow system with a lot of feedback loops in it. But this doesn't mean that what you do doesn't have any effect, it just means it can take you a long time to notice it. FWIW the ocean is now warming. This means that we're more susceptible to additional warming. It also means that we'll be lucky to escape an ice age if the land temperature returns to what it was previously. (Warmer oceans means more water evaporating. If it falls as snow, it may or may not stick, depending on the land temperature. If it sticks, it will reflect light, cooling the land more...but the ocean takes a long time to either warm or cool, so it will continue evaporating lots of water, which increasingly falls on land as snow...etc.)
So we're in a tricky position. We need to cool things down, or we'll melt enough ice to drown most cities. But we need to cool it slowly enough that the ocean cools too. Warming the ocean was a bad mistake, and the warmer it gets, the less stable our situation. Heat waves that kill people are only a very minor part of the problem.
That other systems are worse doesn't make the claim as stated invalid.
I, personally, don't have any knowledge of the detailed workings of other systems. The capitalist system I have observed close up. So I can make particular claims about it, where about other systems I can only reason theoretically, and from reports that I haven't personally verified.
That said, they Lysenko affair is pretty good proof that the Soviet model did not respect science or evidence. Not when it was politically inconvenient. It may well have been worse about that than the system I live under, but I can't call it a capitalist system, as capitalism is only one piece of the controlling structure. Evidence tends to show that in previous generations a) capitalism was more dominant, and b) capitalism was more environmentally destructive. One can easily argue about the reasons for this, and about whether there is a causal relation. But I do note that the current "standard bearers" for "capitalism", i.e. the Republicans, tend to be less concerned with environmental damage than the Democrats. Neither is very concerned, however. They are politicians, and much more interested in politics than in other things. "The environment" is largely merely something that consider when counting who will support them. But you can hardly call that capitalism, except in an extremely metaphorical sense.
Actually, monarchy probably has the best record of environmental concern of any form of government. This may be because monarchs tend to consider the entire country to be the personal property of their family. And because they are more often quite concerned about the future of the country. (Not, note, the prosperity of the inhabitants except in as much as that contributes to their own prosperity, and to that of their descendants.) Certainly tribal governments don't have a particularly good record, despite their PR. They don't generally do much damage, but this is because they are generally relatively powerless. But in historic times they did things like driving game in a hunt by lighting fires in dry grass, and not intend to put out those same fires. Or driving an entire herd of animals over a cliff in a hunt, where they could only use (eat, treat as leather, etc.) a very few of them.
So. Theoretically capitalism isn't the worst offender, except for being more powerful. But this doesn't mean that they aren't a vile offender. Now we have evidence that we are destroying our environment. We know we live in a condition where there are finite resources, and wastefully expending them is detrimental to our long term wealth. But capitalism encourages such wasteful expenditure over a short time frame. (Actually, this isn't entirely capitalism. A part of it has to do with our tax structures. But capitalism is a large part of this, and it works to actively SHAPE the tax structures. E.g., lobbying against effective measures, like the carbon tax, back when they would still might have been sufficient.)
I think the report is flawed, by the way. It seems to me clear that we are already experiencing irreversible environmental degradation. But I haven't read the report. Perhaps they have some particular measure that they are using which is not yet beyond recovery. However, when a species goes extinct, it is an irreversible change, and many species have gone extinct recently. This must count as irreversible environmental degradation, unless you are using a strongly limited measure of "environmental degradation".
It's not so much a dumbing down, though that *is* happening too. It's designing the GUIs for phones and tablets. Maybe they're fine for that, I wouldn't know. I have a desktop, and that's the machine I *want* to use. Tablet GUIs are terrible. It's not that they're new, it's that they are unfit for the purpose.
FWIW, even KDE4 is inferior, but at least it's useable. Gnome3 and Unity aren't. (Admittedly, I'm basing this on screen shots and what I've seen on other people's computers. Mine won't run those. But Debian testing installed Gnome3, and the Gnome2 reversion for systems without accelerated graphics was so butt-ugly that I switched to Debian stable, which still has Gnome2. Unfortunately each of the other window managers has something badly wrong with it, e.g., one of them, I think it's LXDE, doesn't recognize a left-handed mouse. It's got the control panel, in fact it's got two different ones. But they don't do anything. I checked the buglist and it was reported, and acknowledged, over a year ago. So that one's out. At least until they fix that.
I may end up running KDE4, but perhaps not. Pearson is reporting that KDE3 is nearing readiness for release. And KDE3 is far superior (for my use case) to any of the alternatives, even to Gnome2, which is the only one that is close. So for now I'm staying with Debian stable, and hoping.
But it's not that it's new that's the problem. A few years ago I switched between KDE & Gnome several times, depending on which one was better at the time. It's that the new GUIs are unfit for the purpose. THAT I despise.
You're proposing something that's quite secure, but not *really* secure. Nobody has ever written the kind of system I proposed, because **it would be an incredible amount of work**. And you are proposing standard IP, which has known problems. E.g., you can't be sure who is on the other end of the line.
POSIX can't be used for real security, because it's got known holes. They aren't large, but they are there. SELinux is better in certain areas, but it's only better, not really secure.
It's true that the thing I was proposing wouldn't ever be done, but it would be secure. (Although, honestly, even that wouldn't be perfect. As others have said the only way to get real security is to melt down the disk drive, destroy all copies of the data, and then destroy the ram. And the CRTs. I had one system where I could read frequently displayed images on the CRT even with the power off. Don't know if LCD screens have the same weaknesses, so destroy them thoroughly also.)
Now a practical degree of security is reasonably available, but that's not what the summary said they were asking for. (And, in practice, the reports I've run across say they do an abysmal job of security. But I hear about banks & card companies being broken into more often...enough so that I won't activate electronic banking.)
This is probably meant about as seriously as the "petition submission site" was.
You can't assume that current public key systems will continue to be secure. Advances in Quantum Computing make that a dubious proposition. There are systems that will work, but they don't depend on prime factorization. (As for what they are, that's beyond the boundaries of my knowledge, but I don't believe they require quantum encryption, merely a system that can't be broken by a quantum computer, and actually, I'm told that they are rather limited in the areas where they have an advantage. (Though apparently elliptic encryption is one of them, so don't pick that one.)
As to how difficult it is to maintain a secure system, that depend partly on just how secure you want to make it, and for how long the data needs to be kept secret.
It's not clear that true security is possible short of dissolving the computers in acid and destroying all records. Reasonable security is much easier, the less secure it needs to be, the easier. But security on commodity hardware using commercial products...that has to be rated as towards the less secure end of the spectrum, especially if you allow network connections.
Unix was designed with security in mind. It was designed to run as a multi-user system on college campuses, with lots of snoopy students...or students that wanted extra time to complete their projects.
MSDos intentionally stripped out all the security, in order to run more efficiently on minimally powered single user computers. The security didn't even START getting added back in for nearly a decade, and then it was mainly PR gestures.
It's not just the age of the system, it's the history. Every time MSWind starts to implement serious security measures they break many programs that users depend on, so even when they want to, they are quire slow and hesitant. OTOH, I have heard that recently they've increased their security measures. Certainly Linux has weakened theirs. (Single user systems really *don't* usually require the kind of security needed by multi-user systems.) And Linux has never been as secure as it's reputation. E.g. in a really secure system tar wouldn't be able to untar a file and assign it executable permissions. That would require a manual intervention. A part of it's security has always been that it was a less targeted system. I'm not sure the Android has changed this, as the Android is so different from standard Linux that it's doubtful that the same attacks would work.
OK. Write your own operating system from scratch. You can use Linux or BSD as a model, but change all the system calls, factor things differently, and use a language that will prohibit wild pointers. There's a dialect of D (Digital Mars D) that would work. There's also supposed to be a dialect of Ada, but I don't know enough about it to be sure. DON'T use C or C++, as you can't secure array boundaries.
Then write your own network protocol. You can use IP as a guide, but change everything. I'm not just talking cryptogram here, refactor the protocols. And build in positive identification from the start. (Presume that Quantum Computers will be successful, and that you can't depend on prime factorization to keep your data safe, so you need a handshake that can't be broken that way.)
Yes, this would be a lot of work. Yes, you would never be able to make this public, so you'd need to maintain the whole system. And it would be just as well if the communications could masquerade as https sessions, but they better not BE https sessions.
Don't expect to keep this secret. So plan things so that they will work even if your opponent knows the entire system. But try. And really try to keep the details of the protocols secret. (This means that if someone attempts to break in over the internet, you lead them to a fake site. A kind of honeypot that they can't tell isn't the site they were trying to reach. And require enough id information for them accessing that site that you can tell where the vulnerability is that let them get that far, so that you'll be able to fix that.)
For that matter, use custom connectors for storage devices, so that only specially modified devices can be plugged in. USB keys have slightly different voltages supplied in slightly different locations on the plug. The part that's insulating and the part that's conducting aren't in the same places. Disk drives write oddly sized blocks in an unusual order. Etc. None of this can't be circumvented, of course, but when they get the file blocks in the "right order" the data itself wasn't written as expected. Different error correction coding, etc.
N.B.: Much of this is just an enhancement of things that were done in the 1960's. They stopped doing them for reasons of cost. But a secure network isn't going to be cheap. If you build a cheap network, it won't be secure. If you build a secure network, it won't be cheap. And if you want a REALLY secure network, it will be REALLY expensive.
Depends. Some are, some aren't.
E.g., foreign language classes are generally filler. Not totally, but most of them don't teach you enough to be useful. But they aren't political indoctrination. Or at least they didn't seem so to me. I found Philosophy 12 a total waste of time, as it was introduction to symbolic logic. For many students, however, it may be the only encounter they ever have with precision reasoning. But I'd worked my way through much or Russel's Principia Mathematica in high school.
U.S. History I thought would be a waste of time. It wasn't. I hated the exams, because I could never give the "correct" answers. (There usually weren't any.) But it covered aspect of US history that just about nobody ever hears about. As a result Ronald Reagan's character was no surprise to me. I'd already heard how when he was president of the screen actors guild GE hired him to give speeches to the workers about why they shouldn't unionize. I'm afraid I left that class as a bit of a cynic, so perhaps it was successful indoctrination. But I believe it was indoctrination with the truth.
And I definitely learned that if you want to take a class in a subject, don't take another department's version, even if it has the reputation of being easier. I nearly failed statistics given by the Psychology department. And Statistics ended up being my major. But "Introduction to..." classes taught in their own department were often well worthwhile.
IIRC, LXDE was the desktop that wouldn't recognize a left-handed mouse. I.e., it had an option to set it as left handed, but the option didn't do anything. This had been a know bug for over a year. ... possibly over 2 years. I'm just not sure it was LXDE...It was one of the desktops I was trying after Debian Testing ruined the Gnome2 GUI. Currently I'm using Debian stable, and am unsatisfied with ALL of the alternatives to Gnome2, though Pearson is getting close to releasing a KDE3.x. KDE3 was better than Gnome2. Both are better than KDE4. And KDE4 is better than Gnome3. For my use case, KDE3 was nearly optimal.
All of the alternatives being pushed seem inferior to the ones that were being pushed a couple of years ago. (Well, to be honest at that time I only considered KDE3 and Gnome2.) I suspect that it's the race to grab the phone market, but that's no excuse to cripple the desktop environment.
Checkout Muse or MuseScore. (I think they're two names for the same program.)
Be warned that not all musicxml used by programs is compatible. I think this is bugs, but it was a problem the last time I tried to use it. And because of lack of features (and because I'm not a musician) I've decided that the next time I'm bounced in that direction I'll try going straight to lillypond. It lets me control the size of the note head and where the score line breaks. (Some score editing programs do one, some the other. I haven't found a Linux program that will let me do both.) I'm thinking of entering the basic score in Nted and then exporting the lillypond text which I'll then edit. But I may just just MuseScore. (N.B.: Several programs claim to import or export musicxml, but test each one, and then test the ones you want to use in combination. The last time I tried, I kept having problems with one program refusing to import the musicxml created by another. Then again, this was over a year ago, and just about everybody's rev'ed their versions since then.
That would make it seem smaller, as antarctic icebergs tend to be low and flat. I'd guess that it averages less than 500 meters thick, and it probably doesn't have the photogenic high peak that make arctic icebergs so spectacular. Saying an iceberg is 9/10 underwater may be true, but if there isn't anything high above water, that doesn't push them down very far.
Not sure about that. Usenet isn't a big part of the net anymore...well, it doesn't seem to be an important part. They may well be able to do this without being inconvenienced.
OTOH, it's a clear indication that communications need to be non-centralized. That which is centralized is relatively easy to corrupt or destroy. Mesh networks would seem to be indicated, but also mesh services to run on those networks. Ideally *all* centralized services would be replaced.
We were on service bureaus until sometime in the mid-1970's when the company switched to CP/M. At that point, and for most of the next decade, my professional programming was closely tied into databases and report generation. (When we went into CP/M, one of the main reasons was cost cutting. I maintained a 16 CPU system that ran 16 "independent" computers on top of the same disk drive. This was so that 16 external users could call in to access the database. When we switched to Unix, it was with the same database system on an Altos 386 micro-computer. I had to rewrite the database, because a lot of things changed. Some time in there the company switched to Macintoshes...then slowly switched to MSWind95. I think to save money. I didn't pay too much attention to that, as I was maintaining the Database system, and the computer I had in my office had been a Mac for quite awhile. Eventually the company decided that everyone except graphics had to switch to MSWind. Calling my activities "hobbyist" seems to be misunderstanding things. I had a computer at home that I used and bought things for. The term I used was "professional development".
Free Java compilers was a big win both at home and at work. It must have been around 1995 (a bit after, but before 1998) that I switched my computers at home AND at work to use MSWind95. I still *have* a MSWind95 computer at home, mainly because some work that my wife did can't be moved to another system. Fortunately it's becoming obsolescent, as nothing new has been created there in the last 9-10 years. But that was when I switched her to a Mac. On the Mac I kept tighter control, and everything that was created there is exportable, if sometimes with lack of precision. (Linux music score editing only became useable by her within the last year and a half. Graphics wasn't good enough until a "fairly recent" edition of Inkscape...though when bit-maps suffice, The Gimp has been used. Animation was the key that opened that door.)
If you call this "hobbyist", then either you don't understand the situation, or you mean something drastically different with that word than I do. I would have invested *MORE* money, but I don't like spending money on things that only last a short time, and the free (libre) versions became better than the alternatives. (Not saying there aren't commercial versions that are better in certain ways, but how many will allow me to work in a non-proprietary format? Well, compilers, of course. But compilers are only one piece of the environment. For that matter, I said that on the Mac system things could be moved? This often requires saving them in a different format than the format that they are saved to work in. As a result the Mac still has lots of files that *haven't* been moved, even though they can. Changing a Finale score to a portable form, e.g., means drastically decreasing it's usability by Finale. Which includes fine details of how the score is formatted on the page.)
I'm not an expert myself, but I've been told that for appropriate problems Common Lisp is as fast as C. I believe the person who told me. OTOH, I don't know either what problems you are considering, or what problems they were thinking of. But it seems quite likely that it depends on what you are doing.
(I've also heard some people claim that Java is faster than C. This can only even possibly be true when there's something strange going on, possibly with cache management. And that isn't something that one can count on. In my observation Java programs are often as slow as Python programs, but this seems to have something to do with the GUI.)
Mainframes are, indeed, a very different market. I have no idea what mainframe vendors were doing. When I used a mainframe, I used whatever language the service bureau put on the machine. (The company would occasionally contract for a special language, but that's not something I had any control over.) What this meant to me was that on mainframes I used either Fortran or, occasionally, PL/1.
Microcomputers I could control, but I had to buy my own languages. Or use basic. I probably bought 30 compilers for various different computers I owned ranging from UCSD Pascal to Lifeboat C. When Java came out with a free compiler, it was a big win. Otherwise I wouldn't even have looked at it. (This was after the company had switched to MSWind95, so I was doing my programming in MSAccessBasic or in Eiffel, because I didn't want to buy another compiler at the time. Java was considerably better than MSAccessBasic...so when I didn't need smooth connection to printing reports from a database, I switched to doing a lot of programming in Java. Linux wasn't yet ready for prime time, and GCC on MSWind was ... difficult. (I also did some things in Squeak smalltalk, but not much. Couldn't lock down the GUI and it was too slow. [Actually, you could lock down the GUI, but only by converting a version of the program into a "locked GUI" version, and you better get everything right, because it's not only the data entry people who now can't change the GUI, neither can you! So keep a backup of every released version....and adding new data makes it a separate release.])
Now it's true that microcomputer compilers were pretty cheap. The prices I paid ranged from $20 to $200, and there was no relation at all between price and quality. Support, of course, was essentially non-existent. (Hold on to the phone for up to six hours waiting for someone who can understand what you're asking to take your call... YIKE! I didn't have that kind of time. If I couldn't solve the problem it usually meant either try something else, or do it in Basic, because the company could understand that Microsoft support was terrible.)
Free compilers were a TREMENDOUS win. They let me try something without going through accounting to justify the purchase. Or, more often, paying for it myself.
These days I don't use anything BUT Linux. Then I had one machine that was recycled because nobody wanted anything that slow to run MSWind on. (This is actually a bit after 1995, but I'm not sure of the exact data. It was before 2000, because that was the one that I read the license on and decided that I couldn't agree to those terms.)
OTOH, if I remember back to 1970, IBM would LICENSE compilers to you. And not cheaply. (I checked a couple of times.) And there was some reason that UC and LBL wouldn't use the compilers that CDC made for the CDC machines. Cost is a likely reason. (OTOH, they wrote their own compilers...so maybe it was just ego.)
Sorry, but it's not just people who are new to programming that use macros to make their code unintelligible. I've known some really foul examples that had been programming professionally for over a decade. I've got to assume that the macros fit in with how they thought about the code, because (well, in at least one case) he could pick up the code 6 months later and still readily understand it. But nobody else could.
For that matter, back in the days that structured programming was still fighting to get established I used to program (by my choice) in a thing called mortran, which was a thing that allowed you to emit structured Fortran 77 code, but write using while loops, and block structured code (i.e., without using go to statements). The code that was emitted was decent code, but totally unreadable. I could only debug the mortran source. (Not strictly true...sometimes I needed to trace things a far as a core dump...but quite rarely. It was generally easier to debug the source.) That could be considered a way of writing macros. But anyone who tried to maintain the fortran code would surely have been cursing my name.
There's a big difference between "capable of having a garbage collector implemented" and "comes standard with a garbage collector built in". In the first case the language must be designed with the assumption that a garbage collector is likely to not be available. So don't count the Boehm GC, or even Ada's. (Ada had one before C++ did...but it wasn't required, so it was usually an extra cost option. So code couldn't assume that it would be present.)
No, there's nothing magical about having a garbage collector. But it eliminates a wide set of errors, and renders feasible languages that presume that objects will come and go. It also strongly encourages that pointers not be used. (Which means that some alternative approach must be adopted.)
It's not magical, but it's so useful that I hate using languages without it. (Even Vala has implemented a garbage collector as a part of the core language, and it translates all it's code into C for C to compile.)
Yes. Java was (and is) a lot faster than Smalltalk. Sorry, but that *is* significant.
Of the languages that you list, only Lisp is faster, or even nearly as fast as, Java. And Lisp is hard to wrap your mind around. (And here I'm assuming that you mean compiled Common Lisp.) Also, in the early years of Java, a free compiler was unusual. Having a language with a free compiler was a real win. That's much less a consideration now, but now that shape of the language landscape has a lot more inertia.
I think that "finely tuned" here means that if you vary any of several basic rules just a little bit, the character of the universe shifts wildly. It's a common assertion, but I find it a bit unconvincing. Of course, it partially depends on what you mean by "just a little bit", but most projections tend to be either quite simplistic, or to vary things by what I would consider a lot.
That said, it could be a correct statement. I'm certainly not one capable of estimating what a minor variation on one of the physical laws would cause. I just find it dubious, and I've seen a refutation by a scientist as credentialed as the person who was making the original assertion. I think they're generally assertions made on the basis of really sloppy calculations. (I.e., they change one rule, calculate one effect, and ignore the rest of what would necessarily change.)
I've seen the argument made by professional cosmologists, but never even *heard* of a peer-reviewed article.
Actually, everyone seriously involved *knows* that the Standard Model is wrong. There's just no better replacement. If the breaks get a bit worse (as this might do) then some of the other models might start looking better. Assuming, of course, that they can deal with this any better than the Standard Model can.
Currently the main problem with the Standard Model is that it can't handle gravity. (There are other problems, but most of them could be patched.) Gravity is what has motivated String Theory, and all the other attempts at replacing the Standard Model. A varying "Fine Structure Constant" would imply a different set of problems. (For a variety of reasons we don't tend to think that constants need explanation [though we're always happier if one is present], but variables really NEED an explanation.)
Caution IANAC. (I am not a cosmologist.)
The original reason the US didn't build Thorium reactors is they weren't useful for military purposes. So the military had no interest in them. Now it's because the path we *did* take left a very bad taste in the mouths of a very large number of people. It wasn't mainly technical problems, it was mainly political and managerial problems. This doesn't keep them from being very important problems.
*I* wouldn't be in favor of a new nuclear plant. And it's not because I think the technology isn't worth it, it's because of the past political games and managerial problems. And that I'm still paying for a reactor that was built in a totally insane location, and had to be shut down before it was started. N.B.: I'm paying. Not the company that chose the site. Not the company that built the thing. Not even the company that ordered it. The electric customers of PG&E are the ones who picked up the tab for something that should NEVER have been built where it was built.
It will be a very long time before I'm in favor of another nuclear plant. And then only if I'm convinced that while I may pay for the electricity, I don't pay for STUPIDLY IRRESPONSIBLE managerial decisions. As much as possible of the costs of that should have come out of the pockets of the top management and the members of the board of directors of PG&E. The rest divided between the company that irresponsibly sold the plant at a clearly unreasonable site and the stockholder of PG&E.
I hear people saying how irresponsibly Fukishima was located. It's not a patch on Diablo Canyon. A reactor built on an active earthquake fault in a canyon. (True, the fault hasn't moved recently, but it's active, so that just means it's storing up energy.)
On what basis can you claim it's not endangering your health? Not damaging, I could understand, but not this wider claim.
A danger is something that might happen, not something that is happening. Endangering you is placing you into danger, not damaging you.
And there we're getting close to one of the big problems. Nuclear plants are VERY expensive to build, and they don't use much care in siting them. Building one in a canyon on top of an earthquake fault (California) would seem foolish...but the people who paid for it are the electric customers in California. Actually, we're still paying for it, even though they had to close it down before they even put the fuel in.
The result is those who profit from building them have no need to use care in selecting sites. If it doesn't work out, they aren't the folk who pay. It's true that the companies may be damaged if the site is chosen carelessly, but the management will usually have moved on by then. And the engineers, even, aren't held culpable. They are, however, held culpable if they don't find a site to build the plant on.
And those things are dangerous. Not statistically, but in range and duration of damage.
There are other problems and benefits, but the most dangerous one is that the people causing the danger or damages don't suffer the consequences of their decisions. And do suffer if they don't make, or impede, a sale.
There are other problems in operation, but they can be dealt with. At least in principle. The major problem is that often the people choosing the danger or causing the problem don't pay for the consequences. It's more a problem of management than anything else, but it's an extremely bad problem of management. Safety and quarterly return are in opposition, and as a result safety is compromised.
And you're saying we should buy more of these??? First solve the management problems.