I have mentioned this before, but it strikes me as wasteful in modern car engines that the engine is run hot enough to cause the burning of nitrogen. This takes in more energy than it releases, so you lose energy by doing this.
There would appear to be two solutions to this: try to reduce the temperature in any given cylinder, or alter the oxygen/nitrogen ratio.
(Oxygen ionizes easier, for example, so you can use a magnetic field or a static charge to separate the two gases. This probably wouldn't work as a practical solution in a car, but it does suggest a practical solution may exist.)
If you could get more power out of an engine AND consume less fuel in the process, albeit only up to a certain point, additives would become less attractive.
Well, yes, PostgreSQL is good. So is Ingres, now that there's a GPL version. Even fewer people use that. (Hell, I don't even know a distro that has Ingres packages.)
And, of course, those are only a few of the database engines out there. When you consider the sheer number of different types of database there are (hierarchical, relational, OLAP, object-oriented, indexed sequential flatfile, random access sequential, and so on), it's obvious that there's a lot of room for specialist engines.
Chances are, though, that users don't have meaningful access to even a fraction of the engines out there, or any sensible way to compare what their requirements are with the types of engines they can choose between.
Open Source is all about choice, but without the information or the means to make that choice, the choice is essentially an empty one.
How much of MySQL can be split off entirely and developed as a "common" frontend or a "common" backend? If there's a specific module or layer that everyone can more-or-less agree on in terms of code and API, then make that your "MySQL" and make the rest a dependency where the variations are interchangeable.
The benefit of this kind of approach is that you can have something that can be highly tuned and yet benefit from the large existing programmer base. But it only works if you can split the code meaningfully and keep the interface across the split stable.
(GCC is close-ish to this sort of idea - anyone can fork a frontend or develop a whole new one without colliding with the backend developers, but the interface is far more fluid. Which is fair enough for a compiler, but won't work if you're talking databases. glibc/newlib/ulibc could also be considered similar in that they're fairly interchangeable but that's a special case.)
How do you launch four-fifths of a satellite? Or do you launch a whole one and the four-fifths is the fraction of the debris that stay in orbit after a collision?
Although the wargames he used were not computer-based, he relied extensively on wargames and battle simulations to plan strategy and tactics. The main reason he lost in Africa, according to what I've read, was that the people he had feeding data into the simulations were nationalists who preferred jingo to honesty. Garbage in, garbage out. If not for that, he might well have stalemated his opponents or won.
This example is cited in a number of books on the history of wargaming that I've read on why it is essential that wargames be completely impartial and unbiased.
I'd also argue that accuracy is also a key element. "Old School" wargamers took pride in analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each side, presenting the simulation with at least a semblance of impartiality.
In this case, however, the game is biased, jingoistic and unrealistic. And, as you observe, it supports a cause that has been largely rejected.
The first part will have alienated the old school wargamers, the latter part will have alienated a lot of gamers who are not far right-wing.
I guess, ultimately, that's the true test of the OKness of a game - if you alienate the audience, it's not ok.
Perhaps that was a little bit ambiguous of me. What I was referring to were programming languages which reduce the possibility of error (eg: ADA) and/or which are designed to enforce good programming practice and rigorous standards (eg: Occam).
I consider these to be "secure by design" because they were designed to make the more common security flaws impossible and were also designed to make it possible to validate the software. (Both, if I understand the histories correctly, were linked to military efforts to produce highly robust, highly secure code.)
Whilst you are correct, if Microsoft is going to essentially replace the standard C library with one that has an incompatible API, why not just call it a new library and have done with it?
Or, better yet, if security really was the goal, develop a C-like language that was secure by design?
By simply making things awkward for people to write portable code, all they do is ensure that there are multiple code bases for projects (which increases the opportunity for error) or ensures that people won't write portably. Which is a more likely goal, given who we are talking about.
What might be nice is something like the Cell approach, so that different cores provide better support for different things. A bunch of crypto cores, a nice farm of FPUs, etc.
To an extent, perhaps, but the jury seems to have been provided not with evidence of firewall bypassing but rather with material the jury was likely to find offensive.
So, personally, although I have little sympathy for the guy, I believe the jury was emotionally manipulated to provide a guaranteed answer (a jury version of the leading question) rather than being provided with the facts of the case and the laws by which those facts should be examined.
The techniques you hear of in legal cases are not much different from the techniques used by cults and dictators who want you to make up your own mind... provided it agrees with what you're told to think.
The rest of the case, and indeed the anger at the allegations involved, is largely immaterial. If the jury is not being manipulated by a couple of con-artists trying to out-con each other, but rather is being presented evidence by two lawyers attempting to show that there's more to it than the other person's viewpoint, the jury could sort out for itself what was a sensible, mature use of law and what was bigotry.
Well, assuming the jury had 12 intelligent, rational people on it, which is even less likely than two non-cthulhic lawyers.
There'd be an entire domain available for Slashdot dupes to be kept in? That would be awesome! Then CmdrTaco wouldn't need to host them on the main site!
There were apparently psychological experiments in the 90s, where people would be deprived of any time cues (sunlight, clocks, television, radio, etc). Their body clock, IIRC, moved to 26 hours for a full wake/sleep cycle.
Since RSA relies on it being a Hard Problem to factor a number that is the product of two very large primes, it potentially introduces a weakness, as it presumably means some of those products will be easier to factor than others. A number that can be shown to be the product of two primes that both start with 9 should be much easier to work on than a number where both primes start with a 1, as there are far fewer 9- primes and therefore a smaller search space.
The obvious place to start looking would be the RSA's prime challenge. If I'm even vaguely close to being right, then you should start seeing crypto mailing lists looking for vulnerable targets amongst the numbers the RSA has published.
"Bad" as in you will see the Message as hinted at by Carl Sagan's "Contact". It's from God and apparently decodes to: "We apologize for the inconvenience".
I see you don't quite understand the process. Ok. If external machine A attempts an unauthorized connection type (say, a portscan), then not allowing it is not enough. What you want is to detect the attempt and then block all further connections from A, regardless of what they are. ie: You are actively updating the firewall to exclude known attackers. For this, you need Active IDS. That's what it is for, dynamic firewall updates and other countermeasures when a hostile source is identified.
This isn't a buzzword, either. Active network (and host) intrusion detection has existed a very long time and is quite a nice sub-discipline of computer security. There's even an IETF workgroup developing protocols for communicating between active IDS systems.
Passive IDS only reports problems, it makes no attempt to do anything (like add firewall rules). It is good for generating lots of noise, but it's quite useless for dealing with any real-time threat.
As for your point about unmanned software, ALL networks, indeed ALL computers take decisions. That's what we buy them for. If you don't want your computer to ever make a decision, don't install an OS on it, rip out all firmware and disable the clock chip. If you want any of those, then you are automatically deferring some decisions to the computer.
You are also completely ignorant, from the sounds of it, as to what active IDS actually does. It doesn't take decisions out of the hands of other pieces of software. In the case of detecting an intruder and adding a firewall rule, it is USING the decision-making logic of the other software. It isn't strictly taking decisions out of the users' hands either, as it is not deleting rules.
Slashdot Mirror
I have mentioned this before, but it strikes me as wasteful in modern car engines that the engine is run hot enough to cause the burning of nitrogen. This takes in more energy than it releases, so you lose energy by doing this.
There would appear to be two solutions to this: try to reduce the temperature in any given cylinder, or alter the oxygen/nitrogen ratio.
(Oxygen ionizes easier, for example, so you can use a magnetic field or a static charge to separate the two gases. This probably wouldn't work as a practical solution in a car, but it does suggest a practical solution may exist.)
If you could get more power out of an engine AND consume less fuel in the process, albeit only up to a certain point, additives would become less attractive.
/.ers are fractal, so the average is undefined.
You can extract ethanol from bacon? Sheesh, those farm animal injections are worse than I thought!
Surely you want a high-level authentication mechanism like SASL, and allow the mechanism to use underlying engines like Kerberos.
Well, yes, PostgreSQL is good. So is Ingres, now that there's a GPL version. Even fewer people use that. (Hell, I don't even know a distro that has Ingres packages.)
And, of course, those are only a few of the database engines out there. When you consider the sheer number of different types of database there are (hierarchical, relational, OLAP, object-oriented, indexed sequential flatfile, random access sequential, and so on), it's obvious that there's a lot of room for specialist engines.
Chances are, though, that users don't have meaningful access to even a fraction of the engines out there, or any sensible way to compare what their requirements are with the types of engines they can choose between.
Open Source is all about choice, but without the information or the means to make that choice, the choice is essentially an empty one.
How much of MySQL can be split off entirely and developed as a "common" frontend or a "common" backend? If there's a specific module or layer that everyone can more-or-less agree on in terms of code and API, then make that your "MySQL" and make the rest a dependency where the variations are interchangeable.
The benefit of this kind of approach is that you can have something that can be highly tuned and yet benefit from the large existing programmer base. But it only works if you can split the code meaningfully and keep the interface across the split stable.
(GCC is close-ish to this sort of idea - anyone can fork a frontend or develop a whole new one without colliding with the backend developers, but the interface is far more fluid. Which is fair enough for a compiler, but won't work if you're talking databases. glibc/newlib/ulibc could also be considered similar in that they're fairly interchangeable but that's a special case.)
ISIS is an interior gateway routing protocol.
If the trains crash into each other, will that constitute a data collision?
How do you launch four-fifths of a satellite? Or do you launch a whole one and the four-fifths is the fraction of the debris that stay in orbit after a collision?
Something cannot both be axiomatic and in the summary.
Although the wargames he used were not computer-based, he relied extensively on wargames and battle simulations to plan strategy and tactics. The main reason he lost in Africa, according to what I've read, was that the people he had feeding data into the simulations were nationalists who preferred jingo to honesty. Garbage in, garbage out. If not for that, he might well have stalemated his opponents or won.
This example is cited in a number of books on the history of wargaming that I've read on why it is essential that wargames be completely impartial and unbiased.
I'd also argue that accuracy is also a key element. "Old School" wargamers took pride in analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of each side, presenting the simulation with at least a semblance of impartiality.
In this case, however, the game is biased, jingoistic and unrealistic. And, as you observe, it supports a cause that has been largely rejected.
The first part will have alienated the old school wargamers, the latter part will have alienated a lot of gamers who are not far right-wing.
I guess, ultimately, that's the true test of the OKness of a game - if you alienate the audience, it's not ok.
Perhaps that was a little bit ambiguous of me. What I was referring to were programming languages which reduce the possibility of error (eg: ADA) and/or which are designed to enforce good programming practice and rigorous standards (eg: Occam).
I consider these to be "secure by design" because they were designed to make the more common security flaws impossible and were also designed to make it possible to validate the software. (Both, if I understand the histories correctly, were linked to military efforts to produce highly robust, highly secure code.)
That, I fear, seems very likely to me.
Whilst you are correct, if Microsoft is going to essentially replace the standard C library with one that has an incompatible API, why not just call it a new library and have done with it?
Or, better yet, if security really was the goal, develop a C-like language that was secure by design?
By simply making things awkward for people to write portable code, all they do is ensure that there are multiple code bases for projects (which increases the opportunity for error) or ensures that people won't write portably. Which is a more likely goal, given who we are talking about.
What might be nice is something like the Cell approach, so that different cores provide better support for different things. A bunch of crypto cores, a nice farm of FPUs, etc.
There needs to be a "-1 sad but +1 true" mod option.
Why not just buy Oracle and get Sun for free? Besides, they need to spend some of that 8 billion on chairs for Ballmer.
Add sufficient caffeine tablets to their coffee. They will soon switch to 28 hour days.
To an extent, perhaps, but the jury seems to have been provided not with evidence of firewall bypassing but rather with material the jury was likely to find offensive.
So, personally, although I have little sympathy for the guy, I believe the jury was emotionally manipulated to provide a guaranteed answer (a jury version of the leading question) rather than being provided with the facts of the case and the laws by which those facts should be examined.
The techniques you hear of in legal cases are not much different from the techniques used by cults and dictators who want you to make up your own mind... provided it agrees with what you're told to think.
The rest of the case, and indeed the anger at the allegations involved, is largely immaterial. If the jury is not being manipulated by a couple of con-artists trying to out-con each other, but rather is being presented evidence by two lawyers attempting to show that there's more to it than the other person's viewpoint, the jury could sort out for itself what was a sensible, mature use of law and what was bigotry.
Well, assuming the jury had 12 intelligent, rational people on it, which is even less likely than two non-cthulhic lawyers.
There'd be an entire domain available for Slashdot dupes to be kept in? That would be awesome! Then CmdrTaco wouldn't need to host them on the main site!
There were apparently psychological experiments in the 90s, where people would be deprived of any time cues (sunlight, clocks, television, radio, etc). Their body clock, IIRC, moved to 26 hours for a full wake/sleep cycle.
Since RSA relies on it being a Hard Problem to factor a number that is the product of two very large primes, it potentially introduces a weakness, as it presumably means some of those products will be easier to factor than others. A number that can be shown to be the product of two primes that both start with 9 should be much easier to work on than a number where both primes start with a 1, as there are far fewer 9- primes and therefore a smaller search space.
The obvious place to start looking would be the RSA's prime challenge. If I'm even vaguely close to being right, then you should start seeing crypto mailing lists looking for vulnerable targets amongst the numbers the RSA has published.
"Bad" as in you will see the Message as hinted at by Carl Sagan's "Contact". It's from God and apparently decodes to: "We apologize for the inconvenience".
I see you don't quite understand the process. Ok. If external machine A attempts an unauthorized connection type (say, a portscan), then not allowing it is not enough. What you want is to detect the attempt and then block all further connections from A, regardless of what they are. ie: You are actively updating the firewall to exclude known attackers. For this, you need Active IDS. That's what it is for, dynamic firewall updates and other countermeasures when a hostile source is identified.
This isn't a buzzword, either. Active network (and host) intrusion detection has existed a very long time and is quite a nice sub-discipline of computer security. There's even an IETF workgroup developing protocols for communicating between active IDS systems.
Passive IDS only reports problems, it makes no attempt to do anything (like add firewall rules). It is good for generating lots of noise, but it's quite useless for dealing with any real-time threat.
As for your point about unmanned software, ALL networks, indeed ALL computers take decisions. That's what we buy them for. If you don't want your computer to ever make a decision, don't install an OS on it, rip out all firmware and disable the clock chip. If you want any of those, then you are automatically deferring some decisions to the computer.
You are also completely ignorant, from the sounds of it, as to what active IDS actually does. It doesn't take decisions out of the hands of other pieces of software. In the case of detecting an intruder and adding a firewall rule, it is USING the decision-making logic of the other software. It isn't strictly taking decisions out of the users' hands either, as it is not deleting rules.