There are lots of genetic problems that technology is able to overcome. Do you have vision problems? Surely you arent suggesting that folks with inferior vision shouldnt have been born in the first place, rather than having their vision corrected via glasses and / or medication? Do you suffer from asthma? Today, with the proper medication, there are asthma sufferers who are able to compete in the Olympics. Do you have diabetes (OK - not sure if this is a genetic defect, but the point still stands)? Should people with diabetes be allowed to die in order to "purify" the gene pool?
Human evolution is a different ballgame. People today are physically larger overall than their medievial ancestors because of better nutrition. They live a lot longer because of better health care and dentistry. They can live in harsh environments thanks to technological solutions like air-conditioners and winter jackets, and shoes. Why do you think the Luddite way is any better? IMHO, the good old days werent really that good - and if people do think so, its only because they tend to forget the numerous small nits from earlier days rather easily.
Your question is somewhat pointless when directed towards these folks (the executive branch of the government). You should ask that to the legislative branch. The DOJ implements the laws - they dont make them.
Deja vu. This is exactly what I experienced when I read "The Tao of Physics". Couldnt he have just talked about physics instead of sounding like John Edward from "Crossing over with John Edward"?
Your comment exemplifies a major cause of the problem. The PC-based, Java only, mind view of so called "architects" are incapable of solving problems without using the platforms that they are familiar with. If a data format is your problem, fix the data format. Todays mainframes are perfectly capable of interfacing / integrating with any hardware / software platform. Yet, when faced with such problems, these "architects" apply the only hammer (PC solutions and Java designs) that they know off to the nail.
I'm not sure why these people reach architect level positions. Just the other day, one of these architects was advocating Adobe Distiller as a cost saving solution, when GNU/Ghostscript solves the same problem (converting.ps to.pdf) for much much less. Another one was re-architecting an asynchronous application to use SOAP when the existing email based solution had no known problems (other than it used a technology (sendmail and PERL) that the Java-only architect didnt want to learn about.
Some authors write books that are obviously self-contained and when reading these works it is intuitively obvious that there were no sequels planned by the author. Yet, a few years later, you find that the author has succumbed to sequel-mania. More often than not, these sequels detract from the original work. A disastrous (set of) sequel(s) that comes to mind are the sequels to "Rendezvous with Rama". While your Ringworld sequels arent as bad those, nevertheless, those works prod me to ask "Why?". Couldnt you leave that story line alone and let your masterpiece be a monument by itself? Sometimes, the Washington monument is what one needs rather than a Stonehenge.
Note that I am not against sequels per se. It is possible to plan sequels ahead of time when authoring the first book, and sometimes, the effect is well done. Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead", and "Xenocide" comes to mind as examples of the good variety of sequels. But a lot of sequels to bestsellers were written because the first book was a bestseller, and those are the variety that more often than not make readers cringe.
Competency isnt the issue here. I am assuming that whoever the actual developer of the fix is, that they will be extremely competent in fixing the problem. With an external entity, contractual terms of delivery will twist their arms into fixing severity 1 problems with the urgency that they deserve regardless of whether the fix is the best possible coding / architectural solution for the overall Postgres project. With an internal entity, the pressure will be less on them because if management threatens to "chop the head off" because of trying to do the "right thing" instead of just fixing the problem, they will have to stop and consider that they are damaging their own organization. It is always easier for management to be brutal with external entities rather than one of their own.
Please, please, please tell me that there is some commercial entity that they have contracted to for support. I really dont want my domain to be unreachable because they do their own support and are debating about which fix is the "right thing to do" so that upstream accepts it.
If you are willing to use a non-free solution like IIS, then a non-free product based upon Apache that provides SSL should be attractive to you. I am referring to IHS (IBM HTTP Server) which is a value added (to Apache) product from IBM.
Re:Please don't take this the wrong way
on
Deadly Perversions
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Thats ridiculous. Your argument could also be directed to science-fiction writers in general : "If you love science so much that you spend all day writing about it, why dont you do science?". Well, the answer is often that it is very rare that a good scientist can write about science well and it is also rare that a good writer can do good science. So why not have writers write about science?
Corruption is a way of life, especially if you are in the government. While corruption is not unknown in the US, these are usually exceptions (most law buying takes place over the table rather than under it and is thus not "corrupt" behaviour). In India, the honest politicians would be the exception. Odds are that someone in Karnataka did take a bribe.
Madhya Pradesh is not one of the technologically advanced states. Karnataka (which has Bangalore) is - hence Bill Gates would naturally spend more money on Karnataka. Even if Madhya Pradesh chose to stick to WinXX, it is doubtful that it would constitute a good market for MS.
All, in all, it does look like a bid in the poker game.
I dont know why you are feeling uncomfortable with your methodology. What you are doing is exactly what needs to be done. There is no one program or set of programs that can be run to assess the security level of any organization. The best that can be achieved is to take a snapshot in time of the currently known security exposures and then check to see whether there are defenses against the exposures. However, this doesnt guarantee that new exposures are covered. The only way one can have an assurance that future exposures will be covered is by examining the process that the organization has and the level to which the process is being followed.
Now, why exactly do you think that this only results in "adequate" security measures? Strike out Win2000 in your post above and replace it with Linux / Solaris / whatever you think is secure. What could you do when auditing installations of those operating systems that you arent already doing for Win2000?
...or people who dont know any better will insist that they need to spend $5000 on Adobe Distiller to convert Postscript documents to PDF, even though there exists a free tool that does the same (ghostscript)on Linux. This is just an example of the problems that are caused by having people who arent familiar with open-source solutions. If you hire people who know only about Microsoft, then all solutions that they come up with will involve running on Microsoft solutions, and this will negate your efforts to move off that platform. You need to either hire different people or educate the ones that you have.
Does any/. reader have any info on this? Is this a network / distributed filesystem? Why did they choose to write a new filesystem rather than pick from any of the existing filesystems out there? More importantly, is this code publicly available?
I concur. I had great hopes of the Star Wars sequel books amounting to something after reading the first one by Timothy Zahn. Then I read one of the sequels by KJA. That ruined it for me.
..But look at it from the point of voice recognition. Malayalam and Tamil sound very much alike, and a person with the knowledge of one with absolutely no knowledge of the other can actually understand the other one....
I'm afraid thats not quite accurate. My experience has been that while it is somewhat easy for people who speak Malayalam to roughly understand Tamil, the converse for some reason is not true. Perhaps this has more to do with the literacy (and by implication the educational levels) of the people in the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, rather than any inherent complexities in the languages themselves. Malayalam, by any objective measure is a more complex language than Tamil (more consonants, and a more complex vocabulary), so one would intuitively tend to expect that lack of equivalence in understanding though.
My experience has been that it is relatively easy for speakers of Kannada, Telegu, and Tamil to figure out roughly what is spoken in the other languages. As a speaker of Malayalm, I can somewhat get the gist of Kannada and Tamil, but not Telegu.
But even with these kinds of similarities, your point is totally false. These similarities are very superficial and do not present enough commonality to help out voice recognition. When communicating through the language barrier, a lot of information is conveyed through context and gestures. And that is of no help in voice recognition.
Ah - you are missing the point then. dpkg certainly doesnt install dependancies. However, Debian packagers package with care : they specify dependancies intelligently (definitely not the case with Redhat). Hence at install time, dpkg will complain if you havent met dependancies, and these complaints are more intelligent than the ones you see with Redhat (rpm).
Thanks for the valuable info. I shall certainly read up on that program. Its a bit counter-intuitive that the installer (rpm) wouldnt be the program that takes care of the dependancies, though.
Its always a good idea to have/home on a different partition than your OS essentials. For one thing, when you do a backup, you have a lot of options when it comes to backing up a distinct partition. You can do separate backups for your system directories and user data (home directories). That way, if your OS ever goes South you can reinstall just the OS without sweating over what happens to user data. Conversely, if your user data needs to be recovered, its easier to restore without sweating over whether you'll kill the entire system.
The point of having a server OS is to get it to do useful work without having it hinder / annoy / frustrate you. The ease of install is important in getting the OS installed. Debian certainly lacks in that area. But only a novice would consider the ease of installation a detraction so severe that it overshadows the other good or excellent properties of the server. And trust me : you do not want a novice to administer a production server.
I confess that I am a Debian fan. Despite that, I am able to percieve Debian's deficiencies. The install certainly sucks. I had the pleasure of recently installing Redhat v7.3 . After dealing with Debian's install, the Redhat installer simply took my breath away. It was that smooth. However, the time came to put the OS to use. I needed a way to convert postscript files to pdf. For that, I installed ghostscript on Redhat. It did the conversion alright, but the generated document was useless to me because the fonts werent installed on the system. I repeated the same process on Debian : the dependancies took care to install all required fonts. Voila - the document displayed correctly!
Now would you prefer an OS that works easier over an OS that installs better?
Quite frankly it had never occurred to me to borrow books from the library for my son. Just as well. At the age of 8 months, his favourite form of information processing was to chew on the books. I shudder to think of the fines I would have had to pay if those were library books.
Looking through the comments here I see two main threads : (1) Squeezing out the last few overhead in a program leads to hard to understand / maintain program and thus is not worth the effort. (2) Whats the big deal anyway in this era of 100 GB disks and 2GHz processors?
While both these criticisms are valid, they miss the point. Firstly, it wasnt the objective of the author to squeeze the last few bytes out of that program to save resources. He was just putting his hard-earned knowledge to use. He was doing it because he could! This is the same motivation for people who climb mountains : because the mountain is there, and because they can climb it. Indeed, if the author were seriously looking into saving resources, he'd hardly be wasting his time on a trivial program, would he?
Secondly, one of the authors intentions was to demonstrate the limits to which austerity could be taken to. Certainly, this was a trivial program - but the same principles could be used to shrink larger non-trivial programs, and it those cases, the savings could possibly be larger. Of course, it those cases, the largest savings would come from a good optimizing compiler rather than crunching the headers together. More importantly, the author has exposed whole new ideas and lines of possibilities to programmers.
1. Ph.d's will start flipping burgers again to survive while desperately hunting for a buyer for their houses. (Yes, I know for a fact this actually happened in the early nineties when IBM decimated its plant in Kingston, NY).
2. Folks who had the idea of waiting out the tech downturn by going to college are going to graduate only to find out that the tech downturn isnt over yet. Worse still, now they have to pay off loans.
3. All challenges to the DMCA, Copright laws, etc are going to be beaten down. Consumers will have no rights whatsoever unless they all incorporate themselves.
4. Symptomatic treatments of security will keep increasing. This is what I refer to as the treatment of brain tumours by prescribing aspirin. For example, the banning of nail clippers and other small personal items on flights when it is the mental state of the terrorist that is the true danger - not the everyday personal effects that can be transformed into weapons.
I'm not arguing with the 2% number you mention for English-speaking folks - that seems about right. I think your numbers about Hindi speaking is way overinflated. The three South Indian states of Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu speak little or no Hindi at all. Lets factor in the fact that the literacy rate stands at around 55% and therefore it can be reasonably assumed that 45% of the population know only one language. Now add in the fact that there are 21 major languages in India, and you'll see why I say that 90% of the population speaking Hindi is too high a figure. I would place it down to around 65%. Still a rather large number though.
On an interesting side note - the IBM announcement for AIXv5.2 states that the locale for Hindi will now be supported.
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There are lots of genetic problems that technology is able to overcome. Do you have vision problems? Surely you arent suggesting that folks with inferior vision shouldnt have been born in the first place, rather than having their vision corrected via glasses and / or medication? Do you suffer from asthma? Today, with the proper medication, there are asthma sufferers who are able to compete in the Olympics. Do you have diabetes (OK - not sure if this is a genetic defect, but the point still stands)? Should people with diabetes be allowed to die in order to "purify" the gene pool?
Human evolution is a different ballgame. People today are physically larger overall than their medievial ancestors because of better nutrition. They live a lot longer because of better health care and dentistry. They can live in harsh environments thanks to technological solutions like air-conditioners and winter jackets, and shoes. Why do you think the Luddite way is any better? IMHO, the good old days werent really that good - and if people do think so, its only because they tend to forget the numerous small nits from earlier days rather easily.
Your question is somewhat pointless when directed towards these folks (the executive branch of the government). You should ask that to the legislative branch. The DOJ implements the laws - they dont make them.
Deja vu. This is exactly what I experienced when I read "The Tao of Physics". Couldnt he have just talked about physics instead of sounding like John Edward from "Crossing over with John Edward"?
Your comment exemplifies a major cause of the problem. The PC-based, Java only, mind view of so called "architects" are incapable of solving problems without using the platforms that they are familiar with. If a data format is your problem, fix the data format. Todays mainframes are perfectly capable of interfacing / integrating with any hardware / software platform. Yet, when faced with such problems, these "architects" apply the only hammer (PC solutions and Java designs) that they know off to the nail.
I'm not sure why these people reach architect level positions. Just the other day, one of these architects was advocating Adobe Distiller as a cost saving solution, when GNU/Ghostscript solves the same problem (converting .ps to .pdf) for much much less. Another one was re-architecting an asynchronous application to use SOAP when the existing email based solution had no known problems (other than it used a technology (sendmail and PERL) that the Java-only architect didnt want to learn about.
Some authors write books that are obviously self-contained and when reading these works it is intuitively obvious that there were no sequels planned by the author. Yet, a few years later, you find that the author has succumbed to sequel-mania. More often than not, these sequels detract from the original work. A disastrous (set of) sequel(s) that comes to mind are the sequels to "Rendezvous with Rama". While your Ringworld sequels arent as bad those, nevertheless, those works prod me to ask "Why?". Couldnt you leave that story line alone and let your masterpiece be a monument by itself? Sometimes, the Washington monument is what one needs rather than a Stonehenge.
Note that I am not against sequels per se. It is possible to plan sequels ahead of time when authoring the first book, and sometimes, the effect is well done. Orson Scott Card's "Speaker for the Dead", and "Xenocide" comes to mind as examples of the good variety of sequels. But a lot of sequels to bestsellers were written because the first book was a bestseller, and those are the variety that more often than not make readers cringe.
Competency isnt the issue here. I am assuming that whoever the actual developer of the fix is, that they will be extremely competent in fixing the problem. With an external entity, contractual terms of delivery will twist their arms into fixing severity 1 problems with the urgency that they deserve regardless of whether the fix is the best possible coding / architectural solution for the overall Postgres project. With an internal entity, the pressure will be less on them because if management threatens to "chop the head off" because of trying to do the "right thing" instead of just fixing the problem, they will have to stop and consider that they are damaging their own organization. It is always easier for management to be brutal with external entities rather than one of their own.
Please, please, please tell me that there is some commercial entity that they have contracted to for support. I really dont want my domain to be unreachable because they do their own support and are debating about which fix is the "right thing to do" so that upstream accepts it.
If you are willing to use a non-free solution like IIS, then a non-free product based upon Apache that provides SSL should be attractive to you. I am referring to IHS (IBM HTTP Server) which is a value added (to Apache) product from IBM.
Thats ridiculous. Your argument could also be directed to science-fiction writers in general : "If you love science so much that you spend all day writing about it, why dont you do science?". Well, the answer is often that it is very rare that a good scientist can write about science well and it is also rare that a good writer can do good science. So why not have writers write about science?
Facts to keep in mind :
Corruption is a way of life, especially if you are in the government. While corruption is not unknown in the US, these are usually exceptions (most law buying takes place over the table rather than under it and is thus not "corrupt" behaviour). In India, the honest politicians would be the exception. Odds are that someone in Karnataka did take a bribe.
Madhya Pradesh is not one of the technologically advanced states. Karnataka (which has Bangalore) is - hence Bill Gates would naturally spend more money on Karnataka. Even if Madhya Pradesh chose to stick to WinXX, it is doubtful that it would constitute a good market for MS.
All, in all, it does look like a bid in the poker game.
I dont know why you are feeling uncomfortable with your methodology. What you are doing is exactly what needs to be done. There is no one program or set of programs that can be run to assess the security level of any organization. The best that can be achieved is to take a snapshot in time of the currently known security exposures and then check to see whether there are defenses against the exposures. However, this doesnt guarantee that new exposures are covered. The only way one can have an assurance that future exposures will be covered is by examining the process that the organization has and the level to which the process is being followed.
Now, why exactly do you think that this only results in "adequate" security measures? Strike out Win2000 in your post above and replace it with Linux / Solaris / whatever you think is secure. What could you do when auditing installations of those operating systems that you arent already doing for Win2000?
...or people who dont know any better will insist that they need to spend $5000 on Adobe Distiller to convert Postscript documents to PDF, even though there exists a free tool that does the same (ghostscript)on Linux. This is just an example of the problems that are caused by having people who arent familiar with open-source solutions. If you hire people who know only about Microsoft, then all solutions that they come up with will involve running on Microsoft solutions, and this will negate your efforts to move off that platform. You need to either hire different people or educate the ones that you have.
Does any /. reader have any info on this? Is this a network / distributed filesystem? Why did they choose to write a new filesystem rather than pick from any of the existing filesystems out there? More importantly, is this code publicly available?
I concur. I had great hopes of the Star Wars sequel books amounting to something after reading the first one by Timothy Zahn. Then I read one of the sequels by KJA. That ruined it for me.
Could you elaborate on your statement please? What specifically are the problems you encountered with the SOAP API?
I'm afraid thats not quite accurate. My experience has been that while it is somewhat easy for people who speak Malayalam to roughly understand Tamil, the converse for some reason is not true. Perhaps this has more to do with the literacy (and by implication the educational levels) of the people in the states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu, rather than any inherent complexities in the languages themselves. Malayalam, by any objective measure is a more complex language than Tamil (more consonants, and a more complex vocabulary), so one would intuitively tend to expect that lack of equivalence in understanding though.
My experience has been that it is relatively easy for speakers of Kannada, Telegu, and Tamil to figure out roughly what is spoken in the other languages. As a speaker of Malayalm, I can somewhat get the gist of Kannada and Tamil, but not Telegu.
But even with these kinds of similarities, your point is totally false. These similarities are very superficial and do not present enough commonality to help out voice recognition. When communicating through the language barrier, a lot of information is conveyed through context and gestures. And that is of no help in voice recognition.
If my memory serves me right, an alternative term is "chelate" compounds. And I believe its Magnesium - not Manganese that is present in chlorophyll.
Ah - you are missing the point then. dpkg certainly doesnt install dependancies. However, Debian packagers package with care : they specify dependancies intelligently (definitely not the case with Redhat). Hence at install time, dpkg will complain if you havent met dependancies, and these complaints are more intelligent than the ones you see with Redhat (rpm).
Thanks for the valuable info. I shall certainly read up on that program. Its a bit counter-intuitive that the installer (rpm) wouldnt be the program that takes care of the dependancies, though.
Its always a good idea to have /home on a different partition than your OS essentials. For one thing, when you do a backup, you have a lot of options when it comes to backing up a distinct partition. You can do separate backups for your system directories and user data (home directories). That way, if your OS ever goes South you can reinstall just the OS without sweating over what happens to user data. Conversely, if your user data needs to be recovered, its easier to restore without sweating over whether you'll kill the entire system.
The point of having a server OS is to get it to do useful work without having it hinder / annoy / frustrate you. The ease of install is important in getting the OS installed. Debian certainly lacks in that area. But only a novice would consider the ease of installation a detraction so severe that it overshadows the other good or excellent properties of the server. And trust me : you do not want a novice to administer a production server.
I confess that I am a Debian fan. Despite that, I am able to percieve Debian's deficiencies. The install certainly sucks. I had the pleasure of recently installing Redhat v7.3 . After dealing with Debian's install, the Redhat installer simply took my breath away. It was that smooth. However, the time came to put the OS to use. I needed a way to convert postscript files to pdf. For that, I installed ghostscript on Redhat. It did the conversion alright, but the generated document was useless to me because the fonts werent installed on the system. I repeated the same process on Debian : the dependancies took care to install all required fonts. Voila - the document displayed correctly!
Now would you prefer an OS that works easier over an OS that installs better?
Quite frankly it had never occurred to me to borrow books from the library for my son. Just as well. At the age of 8 months, his favourite form of information processing was to chew on the books. I shudder to think of the fines I would have had to pay if those were library books.
Looking through the comments here I see two main threads : (1) Squeezing out the last few overhead in a program leads to hard to understand / maintain program and thus is not worth the effort. (2) Whats the big deal anyway in this era of 100 GB disks and 2GHz processors?
While both these criticisms are valid, they miss the point. Firstly, it wasnt the objective of the author to squeeze the last few bytes out of that program to save resources. He was just putting his hard-earned knowledge to use. He was doing it because he could! This is the same motivation for people who climb mountains : because the mountain is there, and because they can climb it. Indeed, if the author were seriously looking into saving resources, he'd hardly be wasting his time on a trivial program, would he?
Secondly, one of the authors intentions was to demonstrate the limits to which austerity could be taken to. Certainly, this was a trivial program - but the same principles could be used to shrink larger non-trivial programs, and it those cases, the savings could possibly be larger. Of course, it those cases, the largest savings would come from a good optimizing compiler rather than crunching the headers together. More importantly, the author has exposed whole new ideas and lines of possibilities to programmers.
In no particular order :
1. Ph.d's will start flipping burgers again to survive while desperately hunting for a buyer for their houses. (Yes, I know for a fact this actually happened in the early nineties when IBM decimated its plant in Kingston, NY).
2. Folks who had the idea of waiting out the tech downturn by going to college are going to graduate only to find out that the tech downturn isnt over yet. Worse still, now they have to pay off loans.
3. All challenges to the DMCA, Copright laws, etc are going to be beaten down. Consumers will have no rights whatsoever unless they all incorporate themselves.
4. Symptomatic treatments of security will keep increasing. This is what I refer to as the treatment of brain tumours by prescribing aspirin. For example, the banning of nail clippers and other small personal items on flights when it is the mental state of the terrorist that is the true danger - not the everyday personal effects that can be transformed into weapons.
I'm not arguing with the 2% number you mention for English-speaking folks - that seems about right. I think your numbers about Hindi speaking is way overinflated. The three South Indian states of Karnataka, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu speak little or no Hindi at all. Lets factor in the fact that the literacy rate stands at around 55% and therefore it can be reasonably assumed that 45% of the population know only one language. Now add in the fact that there are 21 major languages in India, and you'll see why I say that 90% of the population speaking Hindi is too high a figure. I would place it down to around 65%. Still a rather large number though.
On an interesting side note - the IBM announcement for AIXv5.2 states that the locale for Hindi will now be supported.