USPO Ref: 5537-707
"
A device for the local or remote, via a communication network, authentication of a computer user upon a non-networked or networked computer work station or terminal via the user input and either local or network-transmitted communication and processing of non-secret unique identifier and a secret identifier such that permission to further access to said computer or workstation can be assessed and thence permitted or denied.
"
FP:-)
--
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
The wording of the article is aweful. One can dig out some other consequences from this mechanism too -
If bacterium B stops infected host H1 from mating with uninfected H2, then it's stopped _H1_ from reproducing, yup - the infected host. H2 _can_ reproduce with other uninfected wasps.
Our new twisted conclusion - the bacterium makes infected hosts less likely to propogate.
Of course it's not as simple as all that, but I'm just trying to warn against believing every part of everything you read.
FatPhil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
SH3 is fairly common in the embedded telecomms world as a general purpose processor. (Nowhere near the variaous ARMs and Moto processors though, and I'm not talking about the DSP side either - Moto and TI and AD have that side sown up).
FP. --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
I presently have 5 PCs, 4 of which were, when new, the biggest heat generators available. (Yup, it includes fast Athlons and an Alpha). It's -20 (centigrade, that's -5F) outside today, yet _none_ of my radiators are on! I heat my flat with PCs!
FatPhil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Anyway, there's no reason you shouldn't run any OS on any style device, it all depends on what you want to use it for. If you only want to play traffic jam (klotski or whatever) while on the bus, then all you need is a stylus, and it doesn't actually matter what OS you're running.
However, if you require more from the inteface for your application, then perhaps Linux cannot provide that for you. However, as alsays, you have 2 choices - run a different OS (and Palm OS is about as slick as I've seen for these things) or write the code yourself! Remember, this $179 pricetag is the _developer_ deal.
FatPhil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
You are right about that. However, your opponents loss isn't _materially_ your gain. To be strictly zero-sum you'd need to gain a pawn _or_ it would have to be in the rules that every turn someone must lost 1 pawn. See my other reply, and the duel paragraph.
FatPhil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Yeah, my dad was regional champ when he was younger. He taught me some, but would always beat me even if he gave me a 1 rook advantage.
> If my opponent loses a pawn, I am usually thrilled.
Because your opponent has lost something.
Your reaction is entirely reasonable.
> How can this be, if I've gained nothing?
Because your opponent has lost something.
> I have, in fact, gained an increased chance of > winning the game.
To be a pedant, not if (a) you had no chance of winning the game (b) your opponent had no chance of winning the game (c) neither of you had any chance of winning the game.
You're effectively saying that a pistols at dawn duel is a zero sum game. Despite the fact that before the game there are 2 live people, and after the game there is only one. The opponents loss is the oppenents loss, it's only a percieved win as it's not your loss.
If you and your opponent had to play chess and the winner got a liver transplant that you both desparately needed, then it would be closer to a zero sum game, as your victory would actually benefit you.
If the game wasn't a standalone game, but was part of a tournament, where each game counted then yes, you have gained something - one point. It's a zero sum game in that context as the three outcomes are
1-0, 1/2-1/2, 0-1. However, I meantioned no such tournament.
FatPhil
--
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
... if they want it to be.
What you need is a filesystem which is accessable from either/any virtual machine. There are cryptographic techniques so that any subset M (or more) from N passwords will permit decoding the data (see Schneier Applied Cryptography for how). Our case is effectively M=1, N=2. However, you're then in a state of having an idiot putting things on the shared filesystem rather than where it should go. In which case you'd need to impose some handling restrictions to prevent misuse. Enforcing these restrictions would be not 100% possible I'd guess, but little to do with humans is.
The other idea would be that the shared are should only be accessible if you can prove that you have both keys. That limits the number of people who can access the shared area, and may impose a bottleneck.
I'm sure anything's possible, it's just a simple matter of coding! (tongue in cheek, there:-))
Phil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
It seems to be benchmark flavour of last month.
I haven't kept in touch with the MPEG standards, but I assume at least some multi-processor usage is possible.
I don't car how long a kernel compile takes. With a monolithic kernel, you're going to spend most of your time in the link stage (my work project takes about 15 minutes to link (on a huge Sun server), purely because it can only use one of the 4 Ultrasparc chips) and thus isn't a good multi-processor benchmark.
FatPhil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
There's a third option. One I often use.
I make sure that I test my code with a debugging library and defensive code which will test everything, paranoia is good. However, as soon as the 'debug' switch is turned off the tests get turned off. In C this would be things like "assert()", and bounds-checker, electric fence or purify.
You've got to be sure of your testing though.
The code I write is generally speed oriented. I work in a real-time comms environment. The last few projects I've worked on could not have been programmed in any other language apart from C and 68360 assembly. Because of this we have _very_ intricate test harnesses which let us test in non-real-time, as the debugging code makes out code no longer real time!
FatPhil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
You'll end up with slow code then.
If you check _everything_ then everything takes longer.
If you know what needs checking, and only check the things which need checking, then you'll be safe and fast.
Do you also think that if software isn't fast enough you should just run it on a faster machine?
The two attitudes normally go hand in hand.
FatPhil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
It was my (female) partner who researched the origin of the billboard slogan for me. I'm real enough for her. She doesn't exactly share my view on porn, but that bothers neither one of us.
So you've tried to insult me, now have a go at my girlfriend if it will make you feel better.
FatPhil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Remember the old maxims:
"Memory allocation/deallocation is too important an issue to let the machine take control"
and
"Memory allocation/deallocation is too important an issue to let the programmer take control"
We've got exactly the same issue here.
The people who wrote
sprintf(buf, "..%s..", user_supplied_string); or whatever should be whipped to within inches of their lives. Is there a maximum string length? If so, use %80s or whatever. If not, use strlen and malloc.
If that's what you mean by "inventing a bounds-checked framework in which they then write the code" then I hardly think that's much of an overhead.
It's not hard to do things safely by hand. These vulnerabilities show that the code hasn't been code reviewed. (For solo projects, I code-review my own stuff, and I always make sure I know where the critical cutoffs for values/sizes are, and I always try to break them.)
FatPhil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Oh, we differ in the definition of 'span' then.
Does a piece of wood leaning on a river bank 'span' a river? No. Does a bridge? Yes.
See the difference?
I make 'spanning 2 decades' at least 20 years.
I also claim that a one year old does not have _any_ perspective on coding quality.
If you want me to spell it out in very simple terms:
I have been programming for over 20 years.
Happy?
FatPhil
--
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
I perhaps should have started the paragraph with "Until recently". I was aware of the benchmarks, but was thinking of the last 5 years as a whole. I only added the disclaimer to the last sentence.
You're right, the P4 has positioned itself in roughly joint #1 spot. And the near future seems to indicate nothing more than a tit-for-tat MHz-war #1 position exchange with the 264.
However, I view the P4 as a blip from the new generation from Intel. The revamped 264 is 'on its way', and that is predicted to take back the crown by a huge margin. Even more frightening is the predicted (and they've always been spot on in my memory) performance of the 364 (early next year we hope). I don't know what's happened to HPPA recently, and don't know what their future holds either.
Having said that, the P4 has so much broken about it, that I'm sure there's at least a 50% increase possible, if they fix all the niggles. However, this will take as long to do as API with their 364 which ought to be a 200% increase.
I think my main point was missed, and that that Apple need to pull their thumbs out. If they want to play number games then they need to achieve big numbers.
FatPhil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
"
Is code quality worse now that people are used to just sitting down and hacking it out?
"
I have a perspective which spans 2 decades, for reference.
In the past consumer products were not expected to do so much, and not expected to have uptimes which were that long (_consumer_ electronic, I'm not talking Tandem(tm) systems here).
However, nowadays there are s many links in the chain the connect what the user sees (a Java Applet pulled up from a web page, say) that a weakness in any one link can cause the system to appear broken. e.g. the applet example:
Applet itself : Java Engine; Browser; "Environment"; OS; kernel; device drivers.
(each of these can be sub-divided, e.g. Browser will have hopefully independent Model, View, and Controller code)
So on the whole I think quality has increased slightly, but I attribute that to having more structured languages to program in more than the skill of the individual programmers. The Knuths and the Dijkstras will never be equalled, IMHO.
Phil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
I've worked in the field, and we all used to test our code to detect a particular frequency by whistling a sweep. You only need a rough idea of where the note is and then you just sweep about a fifth in about 2 seconds. With practice you'd get it within a third. Piece of cake.
(I have a very good ear for pitch, and would never be more than a tone out).
A mate who couldn't whistle used a Bic pen...
Phil
--
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
MHz is as useless a benchmark as 'bogomips'.
If Apple want to market their machines as _performance_ machines, then they ought to use a _real_ benchmark.
PPC isn't even really a 'braniac' chip. The HPPA chips are the real brainiacs, and they out-perform x86 chips at numerical simulations even with a 4:1 clock ratio. Look at the SPEC/FP. Until recently HPPA were the only systems to come anywhere near Alpha performance (they beat it occasionally).
Apple can't compete in the meaningless MHz war - so they should _educate_ the market. 15 years ago noone even knew (or needed to know) what a MHz was (excpet that it was on their radio dial). Trying to beat a MHz claim with a 'photoshop filter' claim is _not_ a valid parry, it's an equally misleading statistic. Tell people to demand 100 SPEC/FP from their next system.
At the moment, SPEC is as independent a benchmark as you can find, so they ought to compete in that arena - if they can.
(It's not truly independent, but as I say it's about as good as you can get)
FatPhil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Yup. I'm lead to believe the term came from 'leaving yourself short'. Selling a bunch that you don't have so that if you had to settle you'd be short. The expectation is that you'll buy cheaper later, and thence can settle. (so you don't actually ever leave yourself short.)
FatPhil --
Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Slashdot Mirror
So it's like 'merge' in clearcase then?
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
USPO Ref: 5537-707
:-)
"
A device for the local or remote, via a communication network, authentication of a computer user upon a non-networked or networked computer work station or terminal via the user input and either local or network-transmitted communication and processing of non-secret unique identifier and a secret identifier such that permission to further access to said computer or workstation can be assessed and thence permitted or denied.
"
FP
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Don't believe it because it is in the article.
The wording of the article is aweful. One can dig out some other consequences from this mechanism too -
If bacterium B stops infected host H1 from mating with uninfected H2, then it's stopped _H1_ from reproducing, yup - the infected host. H2 _can_ reproduce with other uninfected wasps.
Our new twisted conclusion - the bacterium makes infected hosts less likely to propogate.
Of course it's not as simple as all that, but I'm just trying to warn against believing every part of everything you read.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
SH3 is fairly common in the embedded telecomms world as a general purpose processor. (Nowhere near the variaous ARMs and Moto processors though, and I'm not talking about the DSP side either - Moto and TI and AD have that side sown up).
FP.
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
I presently have 5 PCs, 4 of which were, when new, the biggest heat generators available. (Yup, it includes fast Athlons and an Alpha). It's -20 (centigrade, that's -5F) outside today, yet _none_ of my radiators are on! I heat my flat with PCs!
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Cor blimey, not a 'fp' fp, I'm impressed!
Anyway, there's no reason you shouldn't run any OS on any style device, it all depends on what you want to use it for. If you only want to play traffic jam (klotski or whatever) while on the bus, then all you need is a stylus, and it doesn't actually matter what OS you're running.
However, if you require more from the inteface for your application, then perhaps Linux cannot provide that for you. However, as alsays, you have 2 choices - run a different OS (and Palm OS is about as slick as I've seen for these things) or write the code yourself! Remember, this $179 pricetag is the _developer_ deal.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
I'm not jumping sides, but I notice others are disagreeing with you on things you're totally right about, so I feel obliged...
On the tournament scoring 0-1, 1/2-1/2, 1-0 level chess _is_ a zero sum game.
Proof - add up the scores, they always sum to 1.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
You are right about that. However, your opponents loss isn't _materially_ your gain. To be strictly zero-sum you'd need to gain a pawn _or_ it would have to be in the rules that every turn someone must lost 1 pawn. See my other reply, and the duel paragraph.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
> Um, have you ever played chess?
Yeah, my dad was regional champ when he was younger. He taught me some, but would always beat me even if he gave me a 1 rook advantage.
> If my opponent loses a pawn, I am usually thrilled.
Because your opponent has lost something.
Your reaction is entirely reasonable.
> How can this be, if I've gained nothing?
Because your opponent has lost something.
> I have, in fact, gained an increased chance of > winning the game.
To be a pedant, not if (a) you had no chance of winning the game (b) your opponent had no chance of winning the game (c) neither of you had any chance of winning the game.
You're effectively saying that a pistols at dawn duel is a zero sum game. Despite the fact that before the game there are 2 live people, and after the game there is only one. The opponents loss is the oppenents loss, it's only a percieved win as it's not your loss.
If you and your opponent had to play chess and the winner got a liver transplant that you both desparately needed, then it would be closer to a zero sum game, as your victory would actually benefit you.
If the game wasn't a standalone game, but was part of a tournament, where each game counted then yes, you have gained something - one point. It's a zero sum game in that context as the three outcomes are
1-0, 1/2-1/2, 0-1. However, I meantioned no such tournament.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Isn't chess non-zero-sum.
If you lose a pawn, the opponent actually gains nothing.
Zero sum games are the rare ones if you ask me.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
... if they want it to be.
:-))
What you need is a filesystem which is accessable from either/any virtual machine. There are cryptographic techniques so that any subset M (or more) from N passwords will permit decoding the data (see Schneier Applied Cryptography for how). Our case is effectively M=1, N=2. However, you're then in a state of having an idiot putting things on the shared filesystem rather than where it should go. In which case you'd need to impose some handling restrictions to prevent misuse. Enforcing these restrictions would be not 100% possible I'd guess, but little to do with humans is.
The other idea would be that the shared are should only be accessible if you can prove that you have both keys. That limits the number of people who can access the shared area, and may impose a bottleneck.
I'm sure anything's possible, it's just a simple matter of coding! (tongue in cheek, there
Phil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
It seems to be benchmark flavour of last month.
I haven't kept in touch with the MPEG standards, but I assume at least some multi-processor usage is possible.
I don't car how long a kernel compile takes. With a monolithic kernel, you're going to spend most of your time in the link stage (my work project takes about 15 minutes to link (on a huge Sun server), purely because it can only use one of the 4 Ultrasparc chips) and thus isn't a good multi-processor benchmark.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Perhaps I should pay as much attention to my slashdot posts as to code...
%.80s
is what I meant.
However, this is just per field, and you probably also want a maximum for the whole string.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Grow up.
There's nothing big or clever about sex.
Monkeys do it, dogs do it, rats do it, fleas do it. What elite company we're in!
FP.
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
There's a third option. One I often use.
I make sure that I test my code with a debugging library and defensive code which will test everything, paranoia is good. However, as soon as the 'debug' switch is turned off the tests get turned off. In C this would be things like "assert()", and bounds-checker, electric fence or purify.
You've got to be sure of your testing though.
The code I write is generally speed oriented. I work in a real-time comms environment. The last few projects I've worked on could not have been programmed in any other language apart from C and 68360 assembly. Because of this we have _very_ intricate test harnesses which let us test in non-real-time, as the debugging code makes out code no longer real time!
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
You'll end up with slow code then.
If you check _everything_ then everything takes longer.
If you know what needs checking, and only check the things which need checking, then you'll be safe and fast.
Do you also think that if software isn't fast enough you should just run it on a faster machine?
The two attitudes normally go hand in hand.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
I can't argue with Matt Groening.
I find it bizarre to say "coding for 4 decades" though.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
It was my (female) partner who researched the origin of the billboard slogan for me. I'm real enough for her. She doesn't exactly share my view on porn, but that bothers neither one of us.
So you've tried to insult me, now have a go at my girlfriend if it will make you feel better.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Remember the old maxims:
"Memory allocation/deallocation is too important an issue to let the machine take control"
and
"Memory allocation/deallocation is too important an issue to let the programmer take control"
We've got exactly the same issue here.
The people who wrote
sprintf(buf, "..%s..", user_supplied_string); or whatever should be whipped to within inches of their lives. Is there a maximum string length? If so, use %80s or whatever. If not, use strlen and malloc.
If that's what you mean by "inventing a bounds-checked framework in which they then write the code" then I hardly think that's much of an overhead.
It's not hard to do things safely by hand. These vulnerabilities show that the code hasn't been code reviewed. (For solo projects, I code-review my own stuff, and I always make sure I know where the critical cutoffs for values/sizes are, and I always try to break them.)
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Oh, we differ in the definition of 'span' then.
Does a piece of wood leaning on a river bank 'span' a river? No. Does a bridge? Yes.
See the difference?
I make 'spanning 2 decades' at least 20 years.
I also claim that a one year old does not have _any_ perspective on coding quality.
If you want me to spell it out in very simple terms:
I have been programming for over 20 years.
Happy?
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
I perhaps should have started the paragraph with "Until recently". I was aware of the benchmarks, but was thinking of the last 5 years as a whole. I only added the disclaimer to the last sentence.
You're right, the P4 has positioned itself in roughly joint #1 spot. And the near future seems to indicate nothing more than a tit-for-tat MHz-war #1 position exchange with the 264.
However, I view the P4 as a blip from the new generation from Intel. The revamped 264 is 'on its way', and that is predicted to take back the crown by a huge margin. Even more frightening is the predicted (and they've always been spot on in my memory) performance of the 364 (early next year we hope). I don't know what's happened to HPPA recently, and don't know what their future holds either.
Having said that, the P4 has so much broken about it, that I'm sure there's at least a 50% increase possible, if they fix all the niggles. However, this will take as long to do as API with their 364 which ought to be a 200% increase.
I think my main point was missed, and that that Apple need to pull their thumbs out. If they want to play number games then they need to achieve big numbers.
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
"
Is code quality worse now that people are used to just sitting down and hacking it out?
"
I have a perspective which spans 2 decades, for reference.
In the past consumer products were not expected to do so much, and not expected to have uptimes which were that long (_consumer_ electronic, I'm not talking Tandem(tm) systems here).
However, nowadays there are s many links in the chain the connect what the user sees (a Java Applet pulled up from a web page, say) that a weakness in any one link can cause the system to appear broken. e.g. the applet example:
Applet itself : Java Engine; Browser; "Environment"; OS; kernel; device drivers.
(each of these can be sub-divided, e.g. Browser will have hopefully independent Model, View, and Controller code)
So on the whole I think quality has increased slightly, but I attribute that to having more structured languages to program in more than the skill of the individual programmers. The Knuths and the Dijkstras will never be equalled, IMHO.
Phil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
I've worked in the field, and we all used to test our code to detect a particular frequency by whistling a sweep. You only need a rough idea of where the note is and then you just sweep about a fifth in about 2 seconds. With practice you'd get it within a third. Piece of cake.
(I have a very good ear for pitch, and would never be more than a tone out).
A mate who couldn't whistle used a Bic pen...
Phil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
"
Apples biggest problem currently is MHz...
"
MHz is as useless a benchmark as 'bogomips'.
If Apple want to market their machines as _performance_ machines, then they ought to use a _real_ benchmark.
PPC isn't even really a 'braniac' chip. The HPPA chips are the real brainiacs, and they out-perform x86 chips at numerical simulations even with a 4:1 clock ratio. Look at the SPEC/FP. Until recently HPPA were the only systems to come anywhere near Alpha performance (they beat it occasionally).
Apple can't compete in the meaningless MHz war - so they should _educate_ the market. 15 years ago noone even knew (or needed to know) what a MHz was (excpet that it was on their radio dial). Trying to beat a MHz claim with a 'photoshop filter' claim is _not_ a valid parry, it's an equally misleading statistic. Tell people to demand 100 SPEC/FP from their next system.
At the moment, SPEC is as independent a benchmark as you can find, so they ought to compete in that arena - if they can.
(It's not truly independent, but as I say it's about as good as you can get)
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards
Yup. I'm lead to believe the term came from 'leaving yourself short'. Selling a bunch that you don't have so that if you had to settle you'd be short. The expectation is that you'll buy cheaper later, and thence can settle. (so you don't actually ever leave yourself short.)
FatPhil
-- Real Men Don't Use Porn. -- Morality In Media Billboards