London is open and fairly unconcerned (although appalled); US and financial institutions are on alert or closed but they make up a very small part of the population.
I would normally agree but in this case the level of stupidity is too great to credit. It is more likely that they did it off their own bat rather than actually being paid by the Beast, but no security expert would really rate this trojan as a threat unless they were biased.
plus, M$ has a track record of this sort of thing.
...if he can throw virus alerts all the way from Redmond.
This "alert" is clearly bought and paid for by MS. The idea that a machine running Apache is "vunerable" to a trojan that depends on a superuser saving and running an email attachment of unkown origin (or a normal user somehow setting the suid bit on the attachment) is so stupid that it can't be stupid: it must originate with someone that has a vested interest in spreading FUD.
Let's see now, who do we know that doesn't like Linux, is having a major launch of a new version of their OS and is known for sponsoring "research" that shows that Linux is the tool of the Devil? Hmm....
Is it Bill, the mild mannered janitor? Could be, could be!
We've had a new office assistant (human, not software) working for us for the last week and I don't think he actually knows that I've put him on SO instead of MSO. For a lot of tasks at the lower-end day-to-day market SO is already more than many people need. It seems too limited for accountants but at a price of £30 as opposed to £511, it's pretty damn good.
TWW
Re:What a dog
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well its fairly obvious that you are an expert on cpu design.
I've programmed about a dozen chips in both the games field and compiler-writing field, I don't design chips any more than Eddie Irvine designs racing cars. But I don't think I'll ever see him getting into a tractor for his qualifying lap.
Raw speed became less important for most applications, so intel added mmx to speed up multimedia.
What planet are you on? MS and Intel have conspired to make raw speed as important as possibe for years. I personally have been offered payment by Intel to produce slower software as part of their "everybody must upgrade" roadmap. MMX came as a direct response to the increasing performance of 3D boards which reduced the need for a faster CPU. Intel fear anything which reduces the need to upgrade so they tried to fight back with MMX.
That fear led to the only sigificant addition to the instruction set since the 386.
Once a few quality compilers are around this won't even be an issue.
You grossly underestimate the difficulty of this instruction set. I doubt there will ever be more than one (ie Intel's) good compiler and I doubt there will ever be even one which is reliable and predictable.
Re:PXOR can do xor on 64bit numbers
on
Itanium Update
·
· Score: 2
Doesn't really matter if you're playing Japanese chess with 81 squares. The interesting point here is that it shows how over-specialised chess programs have become and how little they tell us about artificial intelligence. A really intelligent chess program could play either game (and any other varient) equally well. The 64bit transposition tables tell us nothing about how a human plays chess.
So you're saying the intel should have either broken backwards compatibility, or designed a super chip twenty years ago?
Backwards compatibility did not require the retension of a tiny register set (no general purpose registers - Jesus Christ!) and was a fairly bogus concept anyway when the 386 came in.
The 386 family is a bad design and if you'd ever programmed it you'd know. There is nothing good about the design.
It is dramatically reducing the complexity of the pipeline, thereby increasing throughput by orders of magnitude (see CISC vs. RISC).
Brought to us by the same people that told us the big pipeline would solve all our problems and that RISC was a deadend, that bought up and squashed the ARM, that thought that no one would need more than 8 registers or 640K of memory and all the other crap Intel have spouted since it invented the 4004 and then proceeded to get everything else wrong.
Intel has spent the last twenty years proving how little it knows and how much it depends on MS for a free ride onto the desktop.
It is an interesting solution to the performance problem: Rather than come up with an efficient design, come up with a bad one that wastes huge amounts of energy (where do you thing all that heat is comming from?) and try to make up for it by adding loads more complexity to the instruction decode.
but that is just expanding on what compiler writers have been doing for years.
What they've been doing wrong for years.
Simplicity is the correct answer, Intel clearly didn't understand the question.
This thing is garbage. The power and the insane complexity of writing a decent compiler for its instruction set just makes me wonder what Intel were thinking. Not to mention the speed.
There used to be three major laguage families: Algol, Lisp, and Forth-types (lots of varients on these and lots of others minor families, I know). Forth and Lisp were popular enough to support hardware systems running them natively but in the end the Algol family (in the form of C, C++, Java, and Perl etc.) became dominant.
Why?
Many people complain about the RPN and many other argue that factor that can't be enough of a reason to spurn a language of the quality of Forth, but is it actually that maths as taught in schools the world over really does give languages like C a huge "familiarity bonus"?
NTL couldn't run a bath. They are the single most incompetent company in the UK. No one likes them. The engineer that came to our house told us that it's a crap company to work for because they wind everyone up so much with their useless "service" that by the time the crews get to the cutomers' houses (usually with the wrong instructions - as in our case) the customers moan at the engineers just to get it off their chests.
In our particular case it took 23 phone calls and 2 weeks to arrange for a telephone and a cable modem in our new house which the previous occupants had already had NTL installed in!
If its instantanious, then its probably gravitational.
No, it would be fantasy. Gravitation does not travel intantaniously. The amount of evidence for this is huge, but the best is that someone would sell communications based on it. They don't.
MS will change the protocol and then shout "The Open Source version is broken; therefore it's unreliable". They will also claim that code used is copied from their "Shared Source" initiative and therefore is illegal. Since there will be areas where the code is similar, it is difficult to see how it can be proven (particularly in a court of non-techies) that the code is not copied.
Finally, C-hashed is just such an obvious bait-and-switch that it stuns me every time I see anyone advocate its use. Of course MS will change the definition to suit themselves and break competing compilers, what the hell else would they do?
I think the entire project is stupid and I'd expect nothing less from Ximian, but the threat is not huge, although the "Code pollution" threat might cause some difficulties.
my point was one entirely of sociology. (coolness factor)
Ah, well, in that case it's all subjective. I think it's cool and you don't. Personally, I don't like Mozart but plently of people do.
That's the trouble with sociology (and the other soft-sciences): no one is ever wrong (or right).
The ability or otherwise to translate from the binary digits is of no impact to someone looking for random data for encryption; taking 8 digits and converting them to an ASCII value is clearly nothing to do with getting the decimal data, but it's still what you need for XORing plain text.
It is one of the strange things in life that the old system here was easier for mental arithmetic than the decimal system (particularly division). Obviously, it took some getting used to if you weren't brought up in it, though.
Now that our education system has degenerated to the point where no one can handle simple fractions and two people on Big Brother can be confused by the word "monogamy" while a third is unsure what a dove is (for fuck's sake!), there's little reason to believe that a return to the old system would work.
No, 1 Kilogram is approx 2.2Lbs. We didn't give old Boney a bloody nose in 1815 just so we could start using his crackpot measurment system. I mean, base 10 - oh, that divides easily by LOTS of numbers, doesn't it?
The reason that HP didn't provide drivers for your scanner was because of the very small percentage of people would would buy that scanner who also use linux.
That was his point (or part of it): it's a vicious circle. HP (and other hardware companies) don't support Linux because the market is small; mass-market users don't use Linux because they can't understand why the hardware they see in Dixons or PC-World can't just be plugged in.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, calm down. Why does everything have to be made worse by people exagerating? Isn't the truth bad enough for you, for fuck's sake?
TWW
The problem is that Bush will kick the first ass he sees and the real criminals will be ignored. Fat lot of help that is.
plus, M$ has a track record of this sort of thing.
TWW
This "alert" is clearly bought and paid for by MS. The idea that a machine running Apache is "vunerable" to a trojan that depends on a superuser saving and running an email attachment of unkown origin (or a normal user somehow setting the suid bit on the attachment) is so stupid that it can't be stupid: it must originate with someone that has a vested interest in spreading FUD.
Let's see now, who do we know that doesn't like Linux, is having a major launch of a new version of their OS and is known for sponsoring "research" that shows that Linux is the tool of the Devil? Hmm.... Is it Bill, the mild mannered janitor? Could be, could be!
TWW
TWW
Well its fairly obvious that you are an expert on cpu design.
I've programmed about a dozen chips in both the games field and compiler-writing field, I don't design chips any more than Eddie Irvine designs racing cars. But I don't think I'll ever see him getting into a tractor for his qualifying lap.
Raw speed became less important for most applications, so intel added mmx to speed up multimedia.
What planet are you on? MS and Intel have conspired to make raw speed as important as possibe for years. I personally have been offered payment by Intel to produce slower software as part of their "everybody must upgrade" roadmap. MMX came as a direct response to the increasing performance of 3D boards which reduced the need for a faster CPU. Intel fear anything which reduces the need to upgrade so they tried to fight back with MMX. That fear led to the only sigificant addition to the instruction set since the 386.
Once a few quality compilers are around this won't even be an issue.
You grossly underestimate the difficulty of this instruction set. I doubt there will ever be more than one (ie Intel's) good compiler and I doubt there will ever be even one which is reliable and predictable.
Doesn't really matter if you're playing Japanese chess with 81 squares. The interesting point here is that it shows how over-specialised chess programs have become and how little they tell us about artificial intelligence. A really intelligent chess program could play either game (and any other varient) equally well. The 64bit transposition tables tell us nothing about how a human plays chess.
Backwards compatibility did not require the retension of a tiny register set (no general purpose registers - Jesus Christ!) and was a fairly bogus concept anyway when the 386 came in.
The 386 family is a bad design and if you'd ever programmed it you'd know. There is nothing good about the design.
TWW
It is dramatically reducing the complexity of the pipeline, thereby increasing throughput by orders of magnitude (see CISC vs. RISC).
Brought to us by the same people that told us the big pipeline would solve all our problems and that RISC was a deadend, that bought up and squashed the ARM, that thought that no one would need more than 8 registers or 640K of memory and all the other crap Intel have spouted since it invented the 4004 and then proceeded to get everything else wrong.
Intel has spent the last twenty years proving how little it knows and how much it depends on MS for a free ride onto the desktop.
TWW
but that is just expanding on what compiler writers have been doing for years.
What they've been doing wrong for years.
Simplicity is the correct answer, Intel clearly didn't understand the question.
TWW
This thing is garbage. The power and the insane complexity of writing a decent compiler for its instruction set just makes me wonder what Intel were thinking. Not to mention the speed.
Why?
Many people complain about the RPN and many other argue that factor that can't be enough of a reason to spurn a language of the quality of Forth, but is it actually that maths as taught in schools the world over really does give languages like C a huge "familiarity bonus"?
Usable.
It is now.
In our particular case it took 23 phone calls and 2 weeks to arrange for a telephone and a cable modem in our new house which the previous occupants had already had NTL installed in!
NTL are and talk shit.
TWW
Are you using the latest Cray or something? I loaded NS6.1 on to a 600Mhz Celeron and it was like treacle.
Now that Opera supports plugins and Java (at last), I can't imagine any reason to ever give Netscape another chance.
TWW
No, it would be fantasy. Gravitation does not travel intantaniously. The amount of evidence for this is huge, but the best is that someone would sell communications based on it. They don't.
TWW
Finally, C-hashed is just such an obvious bait-and-switch that it stuns me every time I see anyone advocate its use. Of course MS will change the definition to suit themselves and break competing compilers, what the hell else would they do?
I think the entire project is stupid and I'd expect nothing less from Ximian, but the threat is not huge, although the "Code pollution" threat might cause some difficulties.
TWW
Ah, well, in that case it's all subjective. I think it's cool and you don't. Personally, I don't like Mozart but plently of people do. That's the trouble with sociology (and the other soft-sciences): no one is ever wrong (or right).
TWW
TWW
Anyone who wants a good source of xor'ing digits for their encryption program. Just carve them into groups of 8 (or 16 or whatever you need).
TWW
Now that our education system has degenerated to the point where no one can handle simple fractions and two people on Big Brother can be confused by the word "monogamy" while a third is unsure what a dove is (for fuck's sake!), there's little reason to believe that a return to the old system would work.
TWW
TWW
That was his point (or part of it): it's a vicious circle. HP (and other hardware companies) don't support Linux because the market is small; mass-market users don't use Linux because they can't understand why the hardware they see in Dixons or PC-World can't just be plugged in.
TWW