Good one. If I weren't at work I'd hunt down an example of what can go wrong when politicians tell scientist what to do. I'm sure it would involve some undisclosed experimenting on local citizens. Wasn't there an instance where the government was sterilizing people? I mean the no babies for you kind of sterilizing. I can't remember off the top of my head.
You obviously don't know what code obfuscation is. Code obfuscation involves modifying code or the compiled binaries to obfuscate code. I didn't describe anything that involves manipulating code or the program itself. Such a step usually I explicitly said "encrypts data by XOR'ing all bits". The keyword is data. Where did I say anything about obfuscating the source code? I didn't. This has absolutely nothing to do with code obfuscation. You obviously know absolutely nothing about security because you don't even know the basic definition of common terminology.
Does the new one have more of the corny computer science jokes the first one had? I remember lots of corny references to bits and bytes and things like that, which for someone with a CS background it was pretty funny.
So if I release a program that encrypts data by XOR'ing all bits, it is not security through obscurity simply if I release it as open source? That is the classic example of security through obscurity, and making it open source doesn't change that. The open source aspect of it only means that people will potentially discover this problem.
If you've ever released something on source forge you should compare your stats regarding people accessing the source code versus downloads. You will find the source code is next to never downloaded if you are providing binaries.
We have a really old machine where you put all coins in a slot for each coin, then crank a handle, kinda bubble gum machine style except multiple slots like a pool table(but it spins instead of a push lever), and I have never once lost money to it. Basically the mechanism that releases the drink is completely powered by you cranking the dial, rather than some motorized component. Very much a case of simple is more reliable.
We are actually probably within a 3-4 years of affordable mainstream 48 core servers. AMD is on track for delivering a 16 core cpu and probably another couple years at most for 32 cores. Considering a dual CPU system that puts us at 64 cores. Now consider how much time it might take for developing the OS modifications. Depending on how accurate/inaccurate this article is, rewriting an entire OS will take at least that long if they started right now, but I have doubts about if a complete rewrite is required. I think this is just another case of inaccurate sensationalistic writing getting attention.
Indeed that 25% was what I was wondering about. The long term effects of this on our health and the health of the gulf ecosystem will probably never fully be understood, but will likely be felt in many different ways. Unofrtunately, it will be one of those things that is explained away by skeptics because it is something where it is very difficult to measure and prove the impact.
While I don't want to downplay the misfortune of those who depend on the fishing and tourist industry, I think those losses would pale in comparison to the losses that will be experienced in our health and natural habitats. Consider if you were to try and measure these things in terms of the dollar value that it would take to restore and maintain them in a condition comparable to which they would have been in had there been no spill. Restoring a habitat to a pre-populated condition is sometimes very difficult, costly, or near impossible. If the damage is minor, a healthy ecosystem will heal itself, but if it is major then habitats will be destroyed beyond repair or may be in a vulnerable state, such that it may be destroyed by a natural disaster, which a healthy habitat would have normally recovered from.
Usually when you are talking about assigning a dollar value to measure suffering, death, and/or increased health care costs resulting from something like this, then you are talking big numbers. A human life statistically is often represented as a few million dollars. It's hard to say what the effects would be, but I wonder about how many carcinogens have been left behind in the gulf and might make their way through the food chain or get to us through other pathways:
Your biggest challenge will not be finding a solution, but getting the solution implemented. You will deal with a lot of officials who are ignorant, arrogant, or just don't care about human life as much as you do. Even when they do care, you have to deal with their ignorance. They will likely not lean on experts for advice, but instead rely on the local computer guy Bob for advise, or they will shell out big bucks to a local consulting firm where their acquaintance works, even though that firm has no experience in the task at hand.
If you want this to succeed, you will probably have to spend the rest of your life trying to become the head of your Department of Transportation or maybe Highway Safety, or whichever department has authority over the other. So that you can ensure first hand and with authority, that the solution is implemented correctly.
What you are proposing is a pilot project, and at the most you will get a "huh, that's cool." and that will be about as far as you get.
I don't mean to be overly negative, but I have been down this road before, and that fact is the people you will deal with are 9-5 people and all they really care about, despite their huffing and puffing, is how long till it's 5 o'clock.
BTW, reckless driving and speed are two different things. Speed makes little difference if you don't drive intelligently or are distracted and unfocused.
Sounds like he needs a database, not a file system, and then there would be no concept of "first" since rows are unordered until an order by clause is applied.
Indeed, but as typical here on slashdot, it is tradition for headlines to be inaccurate yet for the sake of being sensationalistic. Trying to make C#/VB.NET devs go "OMG MS is dropping support for.NET languages?" and then they read the article and realize the person authoring the headline is either not very smart or simply manipulative.
I've used lots of open source software where it was clear the programmers lost sight of usability or polish. I have found lots of attitudes of the form of "well it's free so don't complain if it crashes or you can't figure out how to use it". So trying to attribute this to Windows software only is a little tribalistic:)
Indeed. When viewed at a macro level, considering the entire country, the money spent by the rich is basically the allocation of a huge amount of resources to produce luxury goods and services that are consumed and do not improve the infrastructure of our country.
LOL, good observation. It is possible this was a planned strategy of Apple's to get people used to Apple products and eventually lure users into buying Mac's as well.
This is the problem with MS. They see another company become successful and decide to copy them, and they do it in a rush so it is never as good as the competing product. That's like a standup comic following another comic's routine by doing the same routine. They need to instead do something innovative that meets a yet to be met need.
Indeed. Lots of applications have gone the way of the dinosaurs when it probably would have been a few tweaks of some sourcecode to bring it back to life.
This is the kind of problem that has plagued legacy applications on the Windows platform. I'm not pointing fingers at MS or any vendor, just making the observation that as MS has changed and tightened the security model you see droves of applications that are made incompatible or become buggy in the context of these unexpected conditions.
For example, it was common practice that you would write your app to always request full read/write permissions to the registry even if you only needed to read the registry. No one thought in terms of privileged/unprivileged accounts and so no one put effort into thinking about granular requests for resources. A couple Windows versions later, that application is being under a user account without write permissions to that registry entry, and suddenly all those applications would crash in light of the new access denied exceptions that never occurred during testing/development years before.
I totally agree Chuck. When an application exposes metadata like this, and there is no more discrete/better alternative, then developers have no choice and you are going to end up with alot of applications tightly coupled to that metadata.
Slashdot Mirror
LOL I'm not surprised it's on Fox News.
Good one. If I weren't at work I'd hunt down an example of what can go wrong when politicians tell scientist what to do. I'm sure it would involve some undisclosed experimenting on local citizens. Wasn't there an instance where the government was sterilizing people? I mean the no babies for you kind of sterilizing. I can't remember off the top of my head.
You obviously don't know what code obfuscation is. Code obfuscation involves modifying code or the compiled binaries to obfuscate code. I didn't describe anything that involves manipulating code or the program itself. Such a step usually I explicitly said "encrypts data by XOR'ing all bits". The keyword is data. Where did I say anything about obfuscating the source code? I didn't. This has absolutely nothing to do with code obfuscation. You obviously know absolutely nothing about security because you don't even know the basic definition of common terminology.
Does the new one have more of the corny computer science jokes the first one had? I remember lots of corny references to bits and bytes and things like that, which for someone with a CS background it was pretty funny.
So if I release a program that encrypts data by XOR'ing all bits, it is not security through obscurity simply if I release it as open source? That is the classic example of security through obscurity, and making it open source doesn't change that. The open source aspect of it only means that people will potentially discover this problem.
If you've ever released something on source forge you should compare your stats regarding people accessing the source code versus downloads. You will find the source code is next to never downloaded if you are providing binaries.
We have a really old machine where you put all coins in a slot for each coin, then crank a handle, kinda bubble gum machine style except multiple slots like a pool table(but it spins instead of a push lever), and I have never once lost money to it. Basically the mechanism that releases the drink is completely powered by you cranking the dial, rather than some motorized component. Very much a case of simple is more reliable.
Indeed, because "'I don't want to live on this planet anymore'": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35TbGjt-weA
I'm not going to play Oblivion on a freaking iPad, nor am I going to do it through a web app...
LOL. I remember my friends mocking me when I bought a computer with 24mb ram. They said I would never need that much...
"we aren't anywhere near 48 "
We are actually probably within a 3-4 years of affordable mainstream 48 core servers. AMD is on track for delivering a 16 core cpu and probably another couple years at most for 32 cores. Considering a dual CPU system that puts us at 64 cores. Now consider how much time it might take for developing the OS modifications. Depending on how accurate/inaccurate this article is, rewriting an entire OS will take at least that long if they started right now, but I have doubts about if a complete rewrite is required. I think this is just another case of inaccurate sensationalistic writing getting attention.
Should have been pre-polluted, not populated
Indeed that 25% was what I was wondering about. The long term effects of this on our health and the health of the gulf ecosystem will probably never fully be understood, but will likely be felt in many different ways. Unofrtunately, it will be one of those things that is explained away by skeptics because it is something where it is very difficult to measure and prove the impact.
While I don't want to downplay the misfortune of those who depend on the fishing and tourist industry, I think those losses would pale in comparison to the losses that will be experienced in our health and natural habitats. Consider if you were to try and measure these things in terms of the dollar value that it would take to restore and maintain them in a condition comparable to which they would have been in had there been no spill. Restoring a habitat to a pre-populated condition is sometimes very difficult, costly, or near impossible. If the damage is minor, a healthy ecosystem will heal itself, but if it is major then habitats will be destroyed beyond repair or may be in a vulnerable state, such that it may be destroyed by a natural disaster, which a healthy habitat would have normally recovered from.
Usually when you are talking about assigning a dollar value to measure suffering, death, and/or increased health care costs resulting from something like this, then you are talking big numbers. A human life statistically is often represented as a few million dollars. It's hard to say what the effects would be, but I wonder about how many carcinogens have been left behind in the gulf and might make their way through the food chain or get to us through other pathways:
http://www.sciencesuperschool.com/crude-oil-spills-mdash-biological-medical-chemical-dangers.html
Your biggest challenge will not be finding a solution, but getting the solution implemented. You will deal with a lot of officials who are ignorant, arrogant, or just don't care about human life as much as you do. Even when they do care, you have to deal with their ignorance. They will likely not lean on experts for advice, but instead rely on the local computer guy Bob for advise, or they will shell out big bucks to a local consulting firm where their acquaintance works, even though that firm has no experience in the task at hand.
If you want this to succeed, you will probably have to spend the rest of your life trying to become the head of your Department of Transportation or maybe Highway Safety, or whichever department has authority over the other. So that you can ensure first hand and with authority, that the solution is implemented correctly.
What you are proposing is a pilot project, and at the most you will get a "huh, that's cool." and that will be about as far as you get.
I don't mean to be overly negative, but I have been down this road before, and that fact is the people you will deal with are 9-5 people and all they really care about, despite their huffing and puffing, is how long till it's 5 o'clock.
BTW, reckless driving and speed are two different things. Speed makes little difference if you don't drive intelligently or are distracted and unfocused.
I would make the educated guess that it could easily work on other Android platforms, not just the Nexus One, depending on their implementation.
Sounds like he needs a database, not a file system, and then there would be no concept of "first" since rows are unordered until an order by clause is applied.
He apparently just read the headline and not the article. A very poorly chosen headline it is.
Indeed, but as typical here on slashdot, it is tradition for headlines to be inaccurate yet for the sake of being sensationalistic. Trying to make C#/VB.NET devs go "OMG MS is dropping support for .NET languages?" and then they read the article and realize the person authoring the headline is either not very smart or simply manipulative.
Hey guys/gals, we were discussing software, not tea. K thx bye ;)
I've used lots of open source software where it was clear the programmers lost sight of usability or polish. I have found lots of attitudes of the form of "well it's free so don't complain if it crashes or you can't figure out how to use it". So trying to attribute this to Windows software only is a little tribalistic :)
Indeed. When viewed at a macro level, considering the entire country, the money spent by the rich is basically the allocation of a huge amount of resources to produce luxury goods and services that are consumed and do not improve the infrastructure of our country.
LOL, good observation. It is possible this was a planned strategy of Apple's to get people used to Apple products and eventually lure users into buying Mac's as well.
This is the problem with MS. They see another company become successful and decide to copy them, and they do it in a rush so it is never as good as the competing product. That's like a standup comic following another comic's routine by doing the same routine. They need to instead do something innovative that meets a yet to be met need.
Isn't that kind of like buying a painting and then painting your name over the painters name?
Indeed. Lots of applications have gone the way of the dinosaurs when it probably would have been a few tweaks of some sourcecode to bring it back to life.
This is the kind of problem that has plagued legacy applications on the Windows platform. I'm not pointing fingers at MS or any vendor, just making the observation that as MS has changed and tightened the security model you see droves of applications that are made incompatible or become buggy in the context of these unexpected conditions.
For example, it was common practice that you would write your app to always request full read/write permissions to the registry even if you only needed to read the registry. No one thought in terms of privileged/unprivileged accounts and so no one put effort into thinking about granular requests for resources. A couple Windows versions later, that application is being under a user account without write permissions to that registry entry, and suddenly all those applications would crash in light of the new access denied exceptions that never occurred during testing/development years before.
I totally agree Chuck. When an application exposes metadata like this, and there is no more discrete/better alternative, then developers have no choice and you are going to end up with alot of applications tightly coupled to that metadata.