While it doesn't exactly refute your argument, I do think that it's important to point out that China, the world's biggest polluter, is also the world's largest producer of solar panels (see Suntech). So while China's cheap labor costs and lax environmental policies are certainly helping to push the world toward the brink of destruction via global warming, they are also working toward a solution by making solar power prices more competitive with traditional forms of energy.
I do agree completely after watching the recent (and ongoing) conflict between China and Japan that the US seriously needs to take measures to be less reliant on China for.. well.. everything.
There are technologies that we take for granted today that would have seemed preposterous only a few years ago. For example - if someone told me five years go that Google was working on technology to predict what I am searching for, and display the results before I can finish typing - my response would have been "I'll believe it when I see it". Now, after using real-time search for a week, I am sure there will be a time when I expect every search engine to deliver results in real time as I type.
I can understand being skeptical about the "mood sensing mobile phones" being discussed in this article. But to get all bent out of shape about a technology that doesn't even exist yet, and that you will not be obligated to use if it ever is created - I just don't see the point.
After thinking about this technology for a couple minutes, here's one potential use that I might like to see. If you're driving and listening to music at the same time, and the device senses that you are overwhelmed with information (you're lost, for example, and looking for a specific street) - it could lower the volume on your radio to help you think. Nothing earth shattering - just a simple incremental improvement over my car radio today, which is smart enough to raise and lower the volume based on my current speed (another example of a feature I never thought I needed, but appreciate, and will expect to have in any car I buy from now on).
I've seen enough negative comments on this subject. Are there any other positive uses that people can imagine?
The story refers to accounts of power grids outside of the US falling victim to cyber attacks (real "production" systems), and a lab demonstration of a successful software attack on a US power generator. The article is extremely short on details, of course, so I'm skeptical as to how severe the problem is in reality. But to assume a system is secure just because it ought to be secured, would be to go against most of what I've witnessed working as a software engineer.
For those of you wondering, as I was, about the definition of poopsock...
A sock that is used as a temporary contained for faecal matter.
A vital part of any dedicated EverQuest player's equipment. A poopsock eliminates the need to go all the way to the bathroom, which wastes valuable levelling time.
An insult used to refer to an obsessive MMORPG player who gains an unusually high number of levels in one day.
Dave's a little too into World of Warcraft. He's been poopsocking for about 12 hours now.
Dammit, casual players can't get anywhere in this game. The good stuff is all camped by poopsockers
SpawnSlayer13 is such a poopsock. He got from level 1 to 60 in the space of a day.
And to think there are people who would be so bold as to claim that the Internet has never done anything good for the English language...
That doesn't mean anything. Given sufficient time the amount of effort spent trying to prevent a successful attack can be much larger than amount of effort required to recover from a successful attack.
To put it into monetary terms, would you choose to spend $50,000 over a 10-year period in order to prevent an attack that will only cost you $10,000? Even if there is a 99% chance that attack will occur in that period?
I'll revise my previous equation describing rational expenditure on security as follows:
preventionEffort <= attackProbability * recoveryEffort + x
where x is "small" (single digit percentage or lower) relative to attackProbability*recoveryEffort. This leaves room for the overhead charged by insurance companies to make a profit. It also doesn't change my previous assertion that SSH is sufficiently secure for the vast majority of conceivable personal uses.
The internet is already secure enough for me, when using SSH to a trusted host.
Fixed parent's post for him.
I like the approach to personal security suggested in this article that was posted on Slashdot a while back. The basic gist is that the amount of effort we put into preventing an attack should be less than the probability of a successful attack occurring times the expected loss from a successful attack.
Now, I didn't RTFA, but I assume the types of attacks that the NSA director is referring to are more severe than loss of credit card theft and loss of personal data. Things like taking down our air traffic control systems or power grid. For those sorts of systems - yes I think we would want to invest the same level of effort into keeping those systems secure as we do keeping, say, our nuclear reactors secure.
I wasn't the person who modded you down so I can't say for certain... but from my perspective it appears that you were modded down for making a bad (as in not clever or funny) joke rather than for any political opinion you have have expressed.
P.S. Wouldn't it be crazy if "TheGratefulNet" and other similar internet personalities were actually 'bots created by Chinese hackers in order to disrupt democracy and destabilize the Unites States?
Perhaps we should administer a Turing test just to be sure??
While I find Fox News just as reprehensible as you or any other rational human being - I really can't agree with the tone of your postings all over this thread. I find it very reminiscent of the sort of "right wing" comments I see over the internet. You know, the "Obama is a SOCIALIST", and the "LIBERAL FASCISTS want to take away our freedom" type comments. In short - by omitting the "why" part of the argument and jumping straight into attacks (with various negative keywords emphasized in capital letters), you are creating noise.
Noise - no matter which side it comes from - makes it harder for people to think rationally. And when people can't think rationally, it makes it impossible for democracy to function as originally intended.
According to the LA Times, it will publish customised content that will be tailored both to the digital medium and the tastes of the target readership. Stories will be short and snappy, the Times's source said.
As a young person (does 26 still count as young?), I find the whole premise insulting to my intelligence. The internet is full of short, snappy, and FREE content. Why would I want to pay for more crap? For me to consider paying for an online publication, it would have to be informative, and probably confined to a niche in which I have a strong personal or professional interest.
"Formal Language Theory" - an undergrad course at my university that dealt with Finite State Automata, Touring Machines, Computability Theory, Complexity Theory, and the formal proofs thereof, was the most interesting class that I've ever taken. That being said, I always felt when doing homework for that class that I was taking a dive off the deep end (i.e. pushing the limits of human sanity). And that's only from studying the "low hanging fruit" that people were publishing papers on several decades ago when theoretical computer science was still relatively young. I can't imagine things have gotten any less mind-warpingly complex since then.
I have tremendous respect for the folks who continue to "dabble" in this stuff. I'm sure that for their efforts they have been rewarded with glimpses of indescribably beautiful works of both man and of nature.
It depends. With a suitably small linux build (say, the firmware running on my router) you could probably go much, much higher than 16 VMs.
At some point though after you've started up enough VMs, the probability that a given virtual memory location necessary to continue processing is actually residing in your RAM effectively drops to 0, and you spend all of your time waiting on disk IO. At that point your system is effectively hosed.
Really? That was your conclusion upon reading this article??
Virtual memory has been around for quite a while now, and I don't think its inventors came up with the idea with the intention to scam anyone. I'd your outrage at "the designers of this stuff" may be misplaced.
The question you should be asking isn't "how can I get money out of the 900k people who are playing but not paying" but "how many of my 100,000 paying customers would I have lost had I released it with DRM".
Actually, it would make sense to ask both questions.
Doing the first hard and costly 80% of the debugging work on each current issue
They already have this. This is the sort of thing that goes on every single day on the Ubuntu forums. It's why the forums exist.
and passing that upstream
Here's where it sounds like they are dropping the ball. Bugs, fixes, and workarounds are discovered, but they are not being communicated upstream. Take that extra step and get that information to where it can really make a difference.
for someone else to get the credit for the patches is very likely not in their best interest, either.
Canonical does not want to be perceived as being a freeloader, or non-free-as-in-speech. Having that sort of reputation would alienate a large number of the volunteers that they rely on. It is in their best interest to do whatever they can to maintain a healthy image in the developer community.
But it does look to me like the Ubuntu forums are easily available for anyone who wants to extract and distill useful bug reports from them. So have at it!
You mean get involved in the Linux community? That sounds like a good idea. I think I will!
Canonical is the living proof that you cannot survive on a consumer desktop Linux offering, that's why they are trying to leverage Ubuntu's installation base to get into the Enterprise server market, and are looking at different possibilities to sell you services on top of Ubuntu (think cloud).
Shouldn't this be "dying proof"?:)
The fact that they are still living seems to contradict your statement. Also - I don't agree that their attempts to build in value-added "cloud" services to Ubuntu signal a move out of the consumer Linux market. Just the opposite, really.
The "Ubuntu One" cloud storage and music download services actually seemed pretty ingenious to me. Unfortunately, they seem to have dropped the ball on the implementation, as there are other companies out there that offer similar services, but with more features/better prices (i.e. Amazon for mp3 downloads and Jungle Disk/Dropbox for cloud storage).
Does anyone use RHEL on the desktop? Serious question... not trying to be a jerk here. I tried out an install of CentOS 5 (should be the same thing, if I'm not mistaken) earlier this year and it seemed to be *years* behind Ubuntu in terms of the packages that it supported.
I am a relative newcomer to the world of Linux on the desktop. As a Java developer it is entirely possible to run a Windows windows and get by with only a very shallow understanding of Linux - but I decided six months ago to switch my workstations (at work and home) over to Linux because it was interesting and I figured it would be helpful for my career. I was able to back up some files, blast away my Windows install, and be back up and running in Ubuntu with everything that I need to do my job (efficiently) in a single weekend. I do not think that it would have been possible to make such a seamless transition with most of the other distros out there (including RHEL).
Now that I am beginning to learn my way around the Linux universe, I am beginning to experiment with other distros and even other Unices such as FreeBSD. In another 6 months time I figure that I'll probably have moved on to a different distro because, from what I can tell, there are more-stable distros out there with better user communities than Ubuntu for experienced Linux users. But for a complete newb? Yeah, I would definitely recommend Ubuntu.
So I agree with just about everything posted above. I disagree in that I don't see anything wrong in taking the piss out of Canonical for not playing nicer with the broader Linux community. They've got more desktop users than any other distro out there. At the very least they should be taking all of the user feedback (read: complaints) that they receive on their forums, distilling it into useful bug reports, and passing that information up to the core developers to be fixed at the level where it can do the most good. If they want to hire a few coders to fix some of those issues themselves, that would be even better.
In short: Ubuntu is awesome, but there is no harm in criticizing Canonical in areas where they could improve. When Linux improves, EVERYONE (including Canonical) stands to benefit.
Slashdot Mirror
While it doesn't exactly refute your argument, I do think that it's important to point out that China, the world's biggest polluter, is also the world's largest producer of solar panels (see Suntech). So while China's cheap labor costs and lax environmental policies are certainly helping to push the world toward the brink of destruction via global warming, they are also working toward a solution by making solar power prices more competitive with traditional forms of energy.
I do agree completely after watching the recent (and ongoing) conflict between China and Japan that the US seriously needs to take measures to be less reliant on China for.. well.. everything.
Ummm... citation needed?
There are technologies that we take for granted today that would have seemed preposterous only a few years ago. For example - if someone told me five years go that Google was working on technology to predict what I am searching for, and display the results before I can finish typing - my response would have been "I'll believe it when I see it". Now, after using real-time search for a week, I am sure there will be a time when I expect every search engine to deliver results in real time as I type.
I can understand being skeptical about the "mood sensing mobile phones" being discussed in this article. But to get all bent out of shape about a technology that doesn't even exist yet, and that you will not be obligated to use if it ever is created - I just don't see the point.
After thinking about this technology for a couple minutes, here's one potential use that I might like to see. If you're driving and listening to music at the same time, and the device senses that you are overwhelmed with information (you're lost, for example, and looking for a specific street) - it could lower the volume on your radio to help you think. Nothing earth shattering - just a simple incremental improvement over my car radio today, which is smart enough to raise and lower the volume based on my current speed (another example of a feature I never thought I needed, but appreciate, and will expect to have in any car I buy from now on).
I've seen enough negative comments on this subject. Are there any other positive uses that people can imagine?
Standard convention is to place the dollar sign before the number.
Maybe a few years from now the damages will be limited to 25 cents. What's your point?
Can you please provide citations for all of the above statements?
(This should be amusing...)
Here's the story I was referencing: CIA Says Hackers Have Cut Power Grid.
The story refers to accounts of power grids outside of the US falling victim to cyber attacks (real "production" systems), and a lab demonstration of a successful software attack on a US power generator. The article is extremely short on details, of course, so I'm skeptical as to how severe the problem is in reality. But to assume a system is secure just because it ought to be secured, would be to go against most of what I've witnessed working as a software engineer.
Dave's a little too into World of Warcraft. He's been poopsocking for about 12 hours now.
Dammit, casual players can't get anywhere in this game. The good stuff is all camped by poopsockers
SpawnSlayer13 is such a poopsock. He got from level 1 to 60 in the space of a day.
And to think there are people who would be so bold as to claim that the Internet has never done anything good for the English language...
That doesn't mean anything. Given sufficient time the amount of effort spent trying to prevent a successful attack can be much larger than amount of effort required to recover from a successful attack.
To put it into monetary terms, would you choose to spend $50,000 over a 10-year period in order to prevent an attack that will only cost you $10,000? Even if there is a 99% chance that attack will occur in that period?
I'll revise my previous equation describing rational expenditure on security as follows:
preventionEffort <= attackProbability * recoveryEffort + x
where x is "small" (single digit percentage or lower) relative to attackProbability*recoveryEffort. This leaves room for the overhead charged by insurance companies to make a profit. It also doesn't change my previous assertion that SSH is sufficiently secure for the vast majority of conceivable personal uses.
The internet is already secure enough for me, when using SSH to a trusted host.
Fixed parent's post for him.
I like the approach to personal security suggested in this article that was posted on Slashdot a while back. The basic gist is that the amount of effort we put into preventing an attack should be less than the probability of a successful attack occurring times the expected loss from a successful attack.
Now, I didn't RTFA, but I assume the types of attacks that the NSA director is referring to are more severe than loss of credit card theft and loss of personal data. Things like taking down our air traffic control systems or power grid. For those sorts of systems - yes I think we would want to invest the same level of effort into keeping those systems secure as we do keeping, say, our nuclear reactors secure.
My bad... I modded you as a troll for correcting your own spelling mistake. I thought it was someone else being a jerk.
:)
Posting here to undo my mod.
I wasn't the person who modded you down so I can't say for certain... but from my perspective it appears that you were modded down for making a bad (as in not clever or funny) joke rather than for any political opinion you have have expressed.
P.S. Wouldn't it be crazy if "TheGratefulNet" and other similar internet personalities were actually 'bots created by Chinese hackers in order to disrupt democracy and destabilize the Unites States?
Perhaps we should administer a Turing test just to be sure??
TheGratefulNet:
While I find Fox News just as reprehensible as you or any other rational human being - I really can't agree with the tone of your postings all over this thread. I find it very reminiscent of the sort of "right wing" comments I see over the internet. You know, the "Obama is a SOCIALIST", and the "LIBERAL FASCISTS want to take away our freedom" type comments. In short - by omitting the "why" part of the argument and jumping straight into attacks (with various negative keywords emphasized in capital letters), you are creating noise.
Noise - no matter which side it comes from - makes it harder for people to think rationally. And when people can't think rationally, it makes it impossible for democracy to function as originally intended.
According to the LA Times, it will publish customised content that will be tailored both to the digital medium and the tastes of the target readership. Stories will be short and snappy, the Times's source said.
As a young person (does 26 still count as young?), I find the whole premise insulting to my intelligence. The internet is full of short, snappy, and FREE content. Why would I want to pay for more crap? For me to consider paying for an online publication, it would have to be informative, and probably confined to a niche in which I have a strong personal or professional interest.
I predict failure of epic proportions.
"Formal Language Theory" - an undergrad course at my university that dealt with Finite State Automata, Touring Machines, Computability Theory, Complexity Theory, and the formal proofs thereof, was the most interesting class that I've ever taken. That being said, I always felt when doing homework for that class that I was taking a dive off the deep end (i.e. pushing the limits of human sanity). And that's only from studying the "low hanging fruit" that people were publishing papers on several decades ago when theoretical computer science was still relatively young. I can't imagine things have gotten any less mind-warpingly complex since then.
I have tremendous respect for the folks who continue to "dabble" in this stuff. I'm sure that for their efforts they have been rewarded with glimpses of indescribably beautiful works of both man and of nature.
It depends. With a suitably small linux build (say, the firmware running on my router) you could probably go much, much higher than 16 VMs.
At some point though after you've started up enough VMs, the probability that a given virtual memory location necessary to continue processing is actually residing in your RAM effectively drops to 0, and you spend all of your time waiting on disk IO. At that point your system is effectively hosed.
Really? That was your conclusion upon reading this article??
Virtual memory has been around for quite a while now, and I don't think its inventors came up with the idea with the intention to scam anyone. I'd your outrage at "the designers of this stuff" may be misplaced.
The question you should be asking isn't "how can I get money out of the 900k people who are playing but not paying" but "how many of my 100,000 paying customers would I have lost had I released it with DRM".
Actually, it would make sense to ask both questions.
Doing the first hard and costly 80% of the debugging work on each current issue
They already have this. This is the sort of thing that goes on every single day on the Ubuntu forums. It's why the forums exist.
and passing that upstream
Here's where it sounds like they are dropping the ball. Bugs, fixes, and workarounds are discovered, but they are not being communicated upstream. Take that extra step and get that information to where it can really make a difference.
for someone else to get the credit for the patches is very likely not in their best interest, either.
Canonical does not want to be perceived as being a freeloader, or non-free-as-in-speech. Having that sort of reputation would alienate a large number of the volunteers that they rely on. It is in their best interest to do whatever they can to maintain a healthy image in the developer community.
But it does look to me like the Ubuntu forums are easily available for anyone who wants to extract and distill useful bug reports from them. So have at it!
You mean get involved in the Linux community? That sounds like a good idea. I think I will!
Obligatory Chris Crocker reference.
Canonical is the living proof that you cannot survive on a consumer desktop Linux offering, that's why they are trying to leverage Ubuntu's installation base to get into the Enterprise server market, and are looking at different possibilities to sell you services on top of Ubuntu (think cloud).
Shouldn't this be "dying proof"? :)
The fact that they are still living seems to contradict your statement. Also - I don't agree that their attempts to build in value-added "cloud" services to Ubuntu signal a move out of the consumer Linux market. Just the opposite, really.
The "Ubuntu One" cloud storage and music download services actually seemed pretty ingenious to me. Unfortunately, they seem to have dropped the ball on the implementation, as there are other companies out there that offer similar services, but with more features/better prices (i.e. Amazon for mp3 downloads and Jungle Disk/Dropbox for cloud storage).
Does anyone use RHEL on the desktop? Serious question... not trying to be a jerk here. I tried out an install of CentOS 5 (should be the same thing, if I'm not mistaken) earlier this year and it seemed to be *years* behind Ubuntu in terms of the packages that it supported.
I agree with just about everything above.
I am a relative newcomer to the world of Linux on the desktop. As a Java developer it is entirely possible to run a Windows windows and get by with only a very shallow understanding of Linux - but I decided six months ago to switch my workstations (at work and home) over to Linux because it was interesting and I figured it would be helpful for my career. I was able to back up some files, blast away my Windows install, and be back up and running in Ubuntu with everything that I need to do my job (efficiently) in a single weekend. I do not think that it would have been possible to make such a seamless transition with most of the other distros out there (including RHEL).
Now that I am beginning to learn my way around the Linux universe, I am beginning to experiment with other distros and even other Unices such as FreeBSD. In another 6 months time I figure that I'll probably have moved on to a different distro because, from what I can tell, there are more-stable distros out there with better user communities than Ubuntu for experienced Linux users. But for a complete newb? Yeah, I would definitely recommend Ubuntu.
So I agree with just about everything posted above. I disagree in that I don't see anything wrong in taking the piss out of Canonical for not playing nicer with the broader Linux community. They've got more desktop users than any other distro out there. At the very least they should be taking all of the user feedback (read: complaints) that they receive on their forums, distilling it into useful bug reports, and passing that information up to the core developers to be fixed at the level where it can do the most good. If they want to hire a few coders to fix some of those issues themselves, that would be even better.
In short: Ubuntu is awesome, but there is no harm in criticizing Canonical in areas where they could improve. When Linux improves, EVERYONE (including Canonical) stands to benefit.