GNOME, KDE and Windows desktops were great when they were in catch-up mode (with Mac OS).
Windows peaked at Windows 98 SE; every change since then has been negative; Windows 8 is its death rattle.
KDE peaked with v3.5; I haven't been a regular user of GNOME so I don't know when the rot set in, but it is not the highly usable system that it once was.
I no longer migrate non-technical friends to Linux; I recommend Windows 7 in "Classic" mode, which will not reach its EOL until 2020. For techies I still recommend KDE 4, which I use myself, but I have given up on kmail, which committed suicide when it gave up maildirs and switched to the temperamental Akonadi backend. Please! How do you explain to someone that they need to restart a database before they can read their email?
It is not that all the innovations have been bad; it is that, when a system is close to perfection, most changes will be downhill; and while amateurs can code as well as the professionals, the creative skill needed to imagine a new yet workable GUI/desktop paradigm is exceptionally rare. Therefore, many projects reach feature-completeness, and then commit suicide because their developers feel the need to innovate.
2. It's completely impractical. Try a practice run in Death Valley, but without outdoor agriculture, and without going outside unless you are wearing a spacesuit. How many years do you expect your spacesuits and other high-tech equipment to last, especially in the high-radiation environment of a planet with no magnetic field?
3. If the whole thing is media-driven for TV viewing, it's an invitation to do Capricorn One for real - with $500 million - and pocket the rest of the investors' money.
Perhaps this is the plan. If you can make a good film by mashing up Abraham Lincoln and Buffy, then this scheme is a mashup of Capricorn One and The Producers. It would be very funny - unless they actually try to do it.
'Ritz falsely stated in his interrogatory answers that his only name on the Internet was David Ritz, when he actually went by names including... "BOFH" ("Bastard Operator From Hell").'
It's the same with a lot of our secure protocols. SSL, SSH, PGP and so on all assume the endpoints are secure, and the threat is in the communications system. But we know the real risks are the endpoints.
Rather, the threat was everywhere, and SSH etc solved (at least the technical aspects of) countering the threats in the communications system. The real risks today are only at the endpoints precisely because SSH, SSL, and PGP have been so successful.
So possessing a file of pseudo-random numbers could land you in jail - unless you retain the seed and the generator algorithm. Possessing a file of genuinely random numbers (e.g. generated from the noise source on a VIA CPU) is worse - there is no seed or algorithm to retain for your defence.
Your school project work requires you to roll a dice a thousand times and record the results for statistical analysis. Your brother gets into a bad crowd, and the police want the decryption key for your file, believing it to contain a hit list. You go to jail because you cannot produce the key.
Steorn's spinning wheel demo doesn't prove much, as the parent points out. If, on the other hand, Steorn could boil a cup of water, it would be worth paying a lot more attention.
Permanent magnets have high internal (magnetic) energy. It is possible that the very small amount of energy needed to keep the wheel spinning is at the expense of a small reduction in the magnetisation of the permanent magnets.
Alan Cox pointed out in 2005 that there are patent reasons for the non-adoption of IPv6:
"The whole history of the steam engine was held up because the original creators of the steam engine thought high-pressure steam was a dangerous evil and sort of refused to grant rights to their patents to any of the high-pressure steam people. High-pressure steam was the future, as it turns out, but it was held up for almost 20 years.
"The same has happened with IP version 6. You notice that everyone is saying IP version 6 is this, is that, and there's all this research software up there. No one at Cisco is releasing big IPv6 routers. Not because there's no market demand, but because they want 20 years to have elapsed from the publication of the standard before the product comes out - because they know that there will be hundreds of people who've had guesses at where the standard would go and filed patents around it. And it's easier to let things lapse for 20 years than fight the system."
You might think that, in the era of "internet time", 20 years would be an impossibly long delay. Amazingly, we're already 12 years down, only 8 to go.
If IPv4 addresses will run out in 7.5 years, here's a prediction: some of the class-A blocks assigned to large companies and mostly unused will be reclaimed, even though this will extend the useful life of IPv4 by only a year or so, because that will allow sufficient time for the patents to expire.
IPv6 is a prime example of how intellectual property law sometimes stifles progress: where patents are wrongly granted for obvious incremental improvements to an existing technology, and the mess has to be resolved by either litigation or procrastination.
I have just analysed the last month's script kiddie attacks on my web server. 71% of them were to php-related URLs. When I first went through this exercise some years ago, the overwhelming majority of attacks were URLs related to IIS. The significance of this change cannot be overestimated.
Yes, a lot of the problems are sloppy coding, but too many are in the PHP core. How many web pages use the PHP-array-specific query-string
?foo[]=bar - not many, you might think. How many use a PHP nested array
?foo[][][][][]=bar - quite an unusual structure, you might agree.
The real stinger is that PHP will let this array be as deep as an attacker likes - and it's the same for a POST as for a query string, so there's no practical limit. An attacker can exhaust the space available for the stack, with several adverse consequences. This bug has a lot in common with the gravest bugs in PHP's history, in that it is a mistake in PHP's input processing: in this case, PHP trusts the sanity of user input. According to MOPB, Zend's attitude to this bug is "won't fix".
The arrogance of this attitude is breathtaking. PHP is now the most insecure package on my internet server, probably surpassing the old BIND 8 in the frequency and gravity of its exploitable bugs. I sincerely hope that Zend will get its act together and make security their number one priority. The predominance of PHP on the web is not theirs as of right - if they do not act, then either their product will be forked, or an alternative will take its place.
This news is a real shame. A search for "fuckwit" used to lead to the official page of the (UK) deputy prime minister, John Prescott, who fits the description admirably.
It's outright political pandering. Google should be ashamed of themselves.
Some years ago, evidence for superconductivity was found in a gallium arsenide epitaxial device. The work was duly published, and only some time later was it realised that the superconductivity was occurring in metallic indium on the back of the device - the indium had been used as a good thermal conductor for mounting the GaAs substrate in the epitaxial growth chamber, and had not been completely removed.
If these guys have done their work carefully, they will have gone to great lengths to ensure that they really are measuring doped silicon, and not boron-rich precipitates, which might be formed at these very high boron doses.
Conventional superconductivity arises in a metal when there is a strong interaction between the conduction electrons and the atoms of the crystal lattice. Distortion of the lattice by the electrons gives rise to a weak long range attraction between electrons. At low temperatures, this weak attraction causes the electrons to form pairs, and superconductivity is the result.
At higher temperatures, binding of the pairs is destroyed by thermal agitation, and the metal becomes a normal conductor. The electron-lattice interaction causes electrical resistance (electrons colliding with the atoms of the lattice). Copper and gold are good conductors because they have a weak electron-lattice interaction; for the same reason they are not superconductors.
"...I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They're not playing the video games. They're killing real people over there."
Perhaps we should give a free PS3 to every Iraqi male under 45. If Bill O'Reilly's right, it would help us win the war. It would be cheaper than the conventional military solution, too.
Someone mod up the parent - Shawyer has indeed neglected (A), the "vertical" component of the force on the tapered side walls, as a reading of the pdf paper linked from the New Scientist verifies. He should have spotted this error because his results violate (B), the conservation of momentum.
Although Virtuozzo is "built on top of OpenVZ", is Virtuozzo's kernel component a publicly available version of OpenVZ, built without using any proprietary patches or modules?
and goes on to list, among Virtuozzo's advantages over OpenVZ:
"Higher VPS density. Virtuozzo(TM) provides efficient memory and file sharing mechanisms enabling higher VPS density and better performance of VPSs.
"Improved Stability, Scalability, and Performance. Virtuozzo(TM) is designed to run 24×7 environments with production workloads on hosts with up-to 32 CPUs."
Why should Linux accept a kernel patch if (unlike Linux itself) it is not designed to run 24×7 environments with production workloads on hosts with up-to 32 CPUs?
Can't any copy-protection mechanism be defeated by using an encrypted filesystem? Or am I missing something here? An encrypted filesystem would slow down disk access, because encryption and decryption consume CPU cycles, but CPU is cheap.
The proposed standard will not prevent organised copyright theft, or even a knowledgeable hacker; user-friendly software for installing an encrypted filesystem will quickly become available, so that even ordinary users will be able to copy whatever they want, just like they can now.
Slashdot Mirror
GNOME, KDE and Windows desktops were great when they were in catch-up mode (with Mac OS).
Windows peaked at Windows 98 SE; every change since then has been negative; Windows 8 is its death rattle.
KDE peaked with v3.5; I haven't been a regular user of GNOME so I don't know when the rot set in, but it is not the highly usable system that it once was.
I no longer migrate non-technical friends to Linux; I recommend Windows 7 in "Classic" mode, which will not reach its EOL until 2020. For techies I still recommend KDE 4, which I use myself, but I have given up on kmail, which committed suicide when it gave up maildirs and switched to the temperamental Akonadi backend. Please! How do you explain to someone that they need to restart a database before they can read their email?
It is not that all the innovations have been bad; it is that, when a system is close to perfection, most changes will be downhill; and while amateurs can code as well as the professionals, the creative skill needed to imagine a new yet workable GUI/desktop paradigm is exceptionally rare. Therefore, many projects reach feature-completeness, and then commit suicide because their developers feel the need to innovate.
1. $6 billion is nowhere near enough.
2. It's completely impractical. Try a practice run in Death Valley, but without outdoor agriculture, and without going outside unless you are wearing a spacesuit. How many years do you expect your spacesuits and other high-tech equipment to last, especially in the high-radiation environment of a planet with no magnetic field?
3. If the whole thing is media-driven for TV viewing, it's an invitation to do Capricorn One for real - with $500 million - and pocket the rest of the investors' money.
Perhaps this is the plan. If you can make a good film by mashing up Abraham Lincoln and Buffy, then this scheme is a mashup of Capricorn One and The Producers. It would be very funny - unless they actually try to do it.
Someone please mod the parent up.
http://www.spamsuite.com/node/351
... "BOFH" ("Bastard Operator From Hell").'
'He also disguised himself as a mail server.'
'Ritz falsely stated in his interrogatory answers that his only name on the Internet was David Ritz, when he actually went by names including
Bruce Schneier said:
It's the same with a lot of our secure protocols. SSL, SSH, PGP and so on all assume the endpoints are secure, and the threat is in the communications system. But we know the real risks are the endpoints.
Rather, the threat was everywhere, and SSH etc solved (at least the technical aspects of) countering the threats in the communications system. The real risks today are only at the endpoints precisely because SSH, SSL, and PGP have been so successful.
So possessing a file of pseudo-random numbers could land you in jail - unless you retain the seed and the generator algorithm. Possessing a file of genuinely random numbers (e.g. generated from the noise source on a VIA CPU) is worse - there is no seed or algorithm to retain for your defence.
Your school project work requires you to roll a dice a thousand times and record the results for statistical analysis. Your brother gets into a bad crowd, and the police want the decryption key for your file, believing it to contain a hit list. You go to jail because you cannot produce the key.
Steorn's spinning wheel demo doesn't prove much, as the parent points out. If, on the other hand, Steorn could boil a cup of water, it would be worth paying a lot more attention.
Permanent magnets have high internal (magnetic) energy. It is possible that the very small amount of energy needed to keep the wheel spinning is at the expense of a small reduction in the magnetisation of the permanent magnets.
Alan Cox pointed out in 2005 that there are patent reasons for the non-adoption of IPv6:
"The whole history of the steam engine was held up because the original creators of the steam engine thought high-pressure steam was a dangerous evil and sort of refused to grant rights to their patents to any of the high-pressure steam people. High-pressure steam was the future, as it turns out, but it was held up for almost 20 years.
"The same has happened with IP version 6. You notice that everyone is saying IP version 6 is this, is that, and there's all this research software up there. No one at Cisco is releasing big IPv6 routers. Not because there's no market demand, but because they want 20 years to have elapsed from the publication of the standard before the product comes out - because they know that there will be hundreds of people who've had guesses at where the standard would go and filed patents around it. And it's easier to let things lapse for 20 years than fight the system."
You might think that, in the era of "internet time", 20 years would be an impossibly long delay. Amazingly, we're already 12 years down, only 8 to go.
If IPv4 addresses will run out in 7.5 years, here's a prediction: some of the class-A blocks assigned to large companies and mostly unused will be reclaimed, even though this will extend the useful life of IPv4 by only a year or so, because that will allow sufficient time for the patents to expire.
IPv6 is a prime example of how intellectual property law sometimes stifles progress: where patents are wrongly granted for obvious incremental improvements to an existing technology, and the mess has to be resolved by either litigation or procrastination.
I have just analysed the last month's script kiddie attacks on my web server. 71% of them were to php-related URLs. When I first went through this exercise some years ago, the overwhelming majority of attacks were URLs related to IIS. The significance of this change cannot be overestimated.
l
Yes, a lot of the problems are sloppy coding, but too many are in the PHP core. How many web pages use the PHP-array-specific query-string
?foo[]=bar
- not many, you might think. How many use a PHP nested array
?foo[][][][][]=bar
- quite an unusual structure, you might agree.
The real stinger is that PHP will let this array be as deep as an attacker likes - and it's the same for a POST as for a query string, so there's no practical limit. An attacker can exhaust the space available for the stack, with several adverse consequences. This bug has a lot in common with the gravest bugs in PHP's history, in that it is a mistake in PHP's input processing: in this case, PHP trusts the sanity of user input. According to MOPB, Zend's attitude to this bug is "won't fix".
The arrogance of this attitude is breathtaking. PHP is now the most insecure package on my internet server, probably surpassing the old BIND 8 in the frequency and gravity of its exploitable bugs. I sincerely hope that Zend will get its act together and make security their number one priority. The predominance of PHP on the web is not theirs as of right - if they do not act, then either their product will be forked, or an alternative will take its place.
The nested array bug is described here:
http://www.php-security.org/MOPB/MOPB-03-2007.htm
This news is a real shame. A search for "fuckwit" used to lead to the official page of the (UK) deputy prime minister, John Prescott, who fits the description admirably.
It's outright political pandering. Google should be ashamed of themselves.
Some years ago, evidence for superconductivity was found in a gallium arsenide epitaxial device. The work was duly published, and only some time later was it realised that the superconductivity was occurring in metallic indium on the back of the device - the indium had been used as a good thermal conductor for mounting the GaAs substrate in the epitaxial growth chamber, and had not been completely removed.
If these guys have done their work carefully, they will have gone to great lengths to ensure that they really are measuring doped silicon, and not boron-rich precipitates, which might be formed at these very high boron doses.
Conventional superconductivity arises in a metal when there is a strong interaction between the conduction electrons and the atoms of the crystal lattice. Distortion of the lattice by the electrons gives rise to a weak long range attraction between electrons. At low temperatures, this weak attraction causes the electrons to form pairs, and superconductivity is the result.
At higher temperatures, binding of the pairs is destroyed by thermal agitation, and the metal becomes a normal conductor. The electron-lattice interaction causes electrical resistance (electrons colliding with the atoms of the lattice). Copper and gold are good conductors because they have a weak electron-lattice interaction; for the same reason they are not superconductors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BCS_theory
"...I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They're not playing the video games. They're killing real people over there."
Perhaps we should give a free PS3 to every Iraqi male under 45. If Bill O'Reilly's right, it would help us win the war. It would be cheaper than the conventional military solution, too.
Someone mod up the parent - Shawyer has indeed neglected (A), the "vertical" component of the force on the tapered side walls, as a reading of the pdf paper linked from the New Scientist verifies. He should have spotted this error because his results violate (B), the conservation of momentum.
Although Virtuozzo is "built on top of OpenVZ", is Virtuozzo's kernel component a publicly available version of OpenVZ, built without using any proprietary patches or modules?
..."
http://openvz.org/documentation/tech/virtuozzo states "Differently from OpenVZ, Virtuozzo(TM) is developed and designed to run production workloads in 24×7 environments
and goes on to list, among Virtuozzo's advantages over OpenVZ:
"Higher VPS density. Virtuozzo(TM) provides efficient memory and file sharing mechanisms enabling higher VPS density and better performance of VPSs.
"Improved Stability, Scalability, and Performance. Virtuozzo(TM) is designed to run 24×7 environments with production workloads on hosts with up-to 32 CPUs."
Why should Linux accept a kernel patch if (unlike Linux itself) it is not designed to run 24×7 environments with production workloads on hosts with up-to 32 CPUs?
Can't any copy-protection mechanism be defeated by using an encrypted filesystem? Or am I missing something here? An encrypted filesystem would slow down disk access, because encryption and decryption consume CPU cycles, but CPU is cheap.
The proposed standard will not prevent organised copyright theft, or even a knowledgeable hacker; user-friendly software for installing an encrypted filesystem will quickly become available, so that even ordinary users will be able to copy whatever they want, just like they can now.