I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned finite element analysis as the most important algorithm. Just about any modern structure built today is analyzed to determine it's structural characteristics using FE analysis. From a car bumper to the Sears Tower, it's all about FE.
It's a remarkable parallel to playing the game of badminton. The air resistance of the shuttlecock is much higher than that of a normal ball, so the flight trajectory is not what a person used to playing other games would expect. As a result a novice player has an adjustment period before he can really anticipate where a shot is going to go.
One thing to consider is that rigorous threat assesment is based on CAPABILITY, not INTENT. Clearly it seems that there now many organizations that may have the capability seriously compromise a significant and growing part of the world economy.
cars have killed more ppl than guns and bombs ever did
Not even close. Armed conflict in WWII alone killed 20 million people at least. Even in the worst years world-wide traffic fatalities have barely exceeded 100,000.
The devil they say is in the details. DeCSS is a very weak encryption scheme, but even as such it wasn't cracked until a Finnish teenager found that a DVD player that had unprotected keys stored in it's firmware. If those keys had been protected according to CSS standards, DeCSS would probably not exist today.
It is quite plausible that an encryptioon scheme could be embedded in something like a DVD player that would be much stronger than DeCSS; a scheme that would effectively be unbreakable for the life of the format, say 20 years. Thinks like DVD Audio and SACD have much stronger encryption than DVD does. Whether or not the execution of these schemes will turn out to be good enough to resist cracking is a much more debatable point. This is where attacks are most likely to succeed.
There is, of course, another issue - making a direct bit-for-bit copy of encrypted media. This is a problem of controlling the duplication hardware which will be very difficult to do world-wide.
The CD player is a different issue altogether - the hardware does not support encyrption, and the schemes being tried now to protect ordinary music CD's are weak hacks being done on an ad-hoc basis.
Hmmm - we are running a server rack with Dell 2550 poweredges, Compaq DM360 + DM 370 a HP LH with internal RAID and a EMC Celera supplying 2TB of NFS mounts on RH 7.2/ 2.4.9 without a burp.
Dod you just download a vanilla 2.4 kernel, or did you use something from RedHat? The -ac series is generally more stable than the stuff you get from kernel.org.
I work for a small company that has traditionally used a 'get it done and worry about the right way later' method. And of course by the time later comes it's too late.
What happens is that we never get the projects that would take us to the next level because we can't show the the skill set needed to handle the large project to a customer.
We are constantly bogged down maintaining poorly or undocumented web sites that work only by accident and fire fighting on servers that have not properly been maintained. Every server that we have has been hacked or infected by viruses at least once, some times multiple times. Our main web server is also where we keep credit card numbers and is also where we do development.
None of the code we have can be reused on the next project because it is crap.
Projects take 2-3 times longer than needed because there was no written specification of what the customer wanted - so when we show him something he says, nope - it's all wrong and has to be redone.
Our proposals to the customer are so vague that they come back and say that you were supposed to supply feature xyz as part of the project, and there is no way to argue the point.
The result is a company that doesn't learn from it's mistakes, and hasn't grown over the years, and can only handle one major customer at a time. Employees are hired with a minimal level of experience because that is all the company can afford - and leave as soon as they realize that they can do better elsewhere.
Management is always underbidding projects because they have no record of how long it actually takes to build such and such a feature. The result is many projects that lose money.
The fact is that best practices are known, and unless you make a real effort to follow them you will never be able to get to a point where you will really be able to prosper as both an individual and as a company.
I probably won't be prioritizing government traffic on any of my routers.
When you consider the increasing pervasiveness of the internet as a communications medium in the wireless arena, its not hard to imagine a firefighter trying to locate a building exit using a GPS and blueprints via a wireless handheld.
OOPS. He didn't have priority access through your router.
The fact is that the government is not a monolith; it is often individuals who are risking their lives to serve and protect the public, as we found out with vivid clarity six months ago.
Until I saw this, I had, for some reason, been under the impression that IBM drives were the most reliable IDE drives around...
Rule 1: Don't believe ANYTHING you read on slashdot.
Rule 2: Note that none of these IBM drive bashing articles contain comparitive data - including, say what the duty cycle of Maxtor et al is... For all we know 333 hr/mo is on the high end. and everyone else is 200 hours or less.
Who needs a floppy disk, when you can boot your machine off of PAPER? Yes folks, my very own FSMOS is able to do just that.
Prior art man. 30 years ago I used to boot a PDP-8 off punched paper tape. Just load that tape into the reader and let it fly. 20 minutes later and the computer was ready to rip, all 4K of 12 bit work memory ripped to go.
And I would think a legally binding contract would somehow involve a lawyer.
Hey, if EULA's are legally binding despite the fact that no sane person would actually agree to such a one-sided deal, E-Mail exchange has got to be 10^40 times stronger grounds for establishing a legal contract.
I think there's an even more compelling argument against gene patents- they aren't "non-obvious". Anyone with sufficient training and funding can perform the protocols the biotechs use to find genes for patenting. There's absolutely no innovation involved.
Most/. readers have no concept what a gene patent is. A gene patent is NOT merely a patent on the genetic code; in fact such a patent is specifically barred under law - rather it is a patent on the USE of the structure of the gene in some application. The USPTO has a discussion of this very important issue that/. readers would do well to understand so they don't look totally unwashed when writing about this topic.
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/3607.ht ml http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc .cgi ?dbname=2001_register&docid=01-322-filed
I must have missed the corporation bashing part of the article, but everybody knows that patents are mostly bad for innovation.
I think that everybody does NOT know this at all. The fact of the matter is that the almost all industrial R&D, from the time of Edison has depended on the use of patents to provide the commercial incentives for justification of investment into the development of new technologies. Without patents we would have never had the development of large industrial research organizations at companies like DuPont, Intel, Merkh etc. etc.
These organizations have supplied tremendous advances to society - synthetic polymers and fabrics, the CPU, streptomycin, to name a few. All developed with the incentive and goal of obtaining a commercially exploitable patent as the business incentive for funding the R&D.
The idea that patents hinder innovation cannot be justified by any evidence drawn from the history of technological process. It is no accident that Great Britain, the country that first adopted a patent system was also the first country to experience the fruits in it's 18th century industrail revolution.
The article cited in this story bears out all to well the issue of the necessity of patents in a modern industrial society - both Switzerland and the Netherlands adopted patent systems 100 years ago. Countries in today's world that do not support a patent system are countries with no significant technological infrastructure.
But in this case, we've got the world's superpower, announcing that it's ready (yes, what do you think a contingency plan means? it means they're ready to do it) to use nuclear weapons of all sizes against whomever they believe to be the enemy. On its own, without giving a damn about the rest of the world.
So exactly what is the point in maintaining a large nuclear arsenal, but stating that you will NEVER use it? The fact is that if you build such a thing, you must also have your enemy believe that you will use it as well. Perhaps you hope and pray that day will never come. But if you don't give the impression that you might use it, there is no purpose to having it.
In the world tody we now have a very bad situation - one where we have several countries that really hate each other AND that have nuclear weapons. Not only this, but there are radicals that are attempting to get control of a nuclear weapon that would not hesitate one iota to use it. Do you think that New York City would have been under a mushroom cloud if Bin Laden or similar radicals could have delivered such a weapon? Or Tel Aviv? You bet.
The fact is that the day where nuclear weapons are available only to superpowers has ended. The day where nuclear weapons are available to those planning insurrections is coming. You had better think quite carefully as to what lengths you are willing to go to to prevent New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome and Tokyo from disappearing in a series of nuclear blasts before you criticize contingency planning of this nature.
3% loss in revenue over last year. That's what the music industry is worried about. Nevermind that there was an economic downturn this year and many more industries lost more both in percentages and money.
Of course the movie industry (like the beer industry) is normally completely recession proof - economic downturns often give people more leisure time to visit the theaters.
It seems to me that people are missing a point - the Nimda worm affected not only Windows users, but the network as a whole. I can see how courts might hold Microsoft harmless in the case where a purchaser of their software might want to recover damages, but what about a situation where a third party running, say BSD is damaged by Microsoft software. What legal theory would prevent the third party from suing?
The fascist states come to mind immediately: not just Nazi Germany but fascist Italy and Franco's Spain.
Faciast Italy, Nazi Germany and Franco's Spain were clearly NOT capitalistic. These states controlled EVERY aspect of production. Franco's government included wonderful policies such as the destruction of trade unions and establishment of vertical state-run syndicates in their place. His attempts at running the economy led to massive inflation, acute shortages and starvation. As the result post WWII Spain had the lowest level of economic development in Western Europe.
Similarly, for non-capitalist democracies, look at Sweden, France, and Kerala
I am not intimately familiar with the economy of Kerala, however I am with France's, and somewhat with Sweden's. There is no way that you can sell me on the concept that France and Sweden are not capitalistic societies.
Next time, come back with some examples that have a shred of fact behind them.
If this quite plausible story turns out to be true, we see that the unregulated US marketplace treats the repressive Chinese legal system as a customer to the extent that the system can afford services. In other words, this amounts to a collaboration of the most and the least regulated systems to suppress freedom, whether that fits your preconceived notions or not.
More baloney. The fact is that China until very recently has had a ban on foreign investment in their Internet infrastructure. The involvement of the US in this area is both recent and minor, despite the hooraw in this article.
It is in fact the more highly regulated nations of Europe that are primarily responsible for supplying technology to the repressive Chinese regime. While the US held China at arms length because of political differences, the Europeans and Eastern Tigers were in China making hay while the sun shined. If you don't believe me, look at the massive investments of companies like Bayer, BASF and Mitsubishi in China - long before the US had any major presence.
Now tell me, what is worse? Supplying a few firewalls to limit internet accesss, or providing the means to supply the largest standing army in the world the means to surpress it's population and neighbors?
American millitary spending needs to decrease. No more multi-million dollar cruise missles, and cut the amount of nuclear arms in half to help decrease the load spent on maintaining them.
While I agree that US military spending needs to decrease I think that decommissioning nuclear weapons will probably be quite costly due to the disposal and handling issues, and cruise missles don't cost multi-millions - most are less than $1 million.
If it were up to me the first thing I would do is close all US military bases in Europe. A fifty-year free ride on defense is way more than we have any reason to pay for. Europe is planty well capable of footing the bill for it's own defense. The time is long past to pull the plug there.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned finite element analysis as the most important algorithm. Just about any modern structure built today is analyzed to determine it's structural characteristics using FE analysis. From a car bumper to the Sears Tower, it's all about FE.
It's a remarkable parallel to playing the game of badminton. The air resistance of the shuttlecock is much higher than that of a normal ball, so the flight trajectory is not what a person used to playing other games would expect. As a result a novice player has an adjustment period before he can really anticipate where a shot is going to go.
One thing to consider is that rigorous threat assesment is based on CAPABILITY, not INTENT. Clearly it seems that there now many organizations that may have the capability seriously compromise a significant and growing part of the world economy.
cars have killed more ppl than guns and bombs ever did
Not even close. Armed conflict in WWII alone killed 20 million people at least. Even in the worst years world-wide traffic fatalities have barely exceeded 100,000.
Any DVD player can just unlock it.
The devil they say is in the details. DeCSS is a very weak encryption scheme, but even as such it wasn't cracked until a Finnish teenager found that a DVD player that had unprotected keys stored in it's firmware. If those keys had been protected according to CSS standards, DeCSS would probably not exist today.
It is quite plausible that an encryptioon scheme could be embedded in something like a DVD player that would be much stronger than DeCSS; a scheme that would effectively be unbreakable for the life of the format, say 20 years. Thinks like DVD Audio and SACD have much stronger encryption than DVD does. Whether or not the execution of these schemes will turn out to be good enough to resist cracking is a much more debatable point. This is where attacks are most likely to succeed.
There is, of course, another issue - making a direct bit-for-bit copy of encrypted media. This is a problem of controlling the duplication hardware which will be very difficult to do world-wide.
The CD player is a different issue altogether - the hardware does not support encyrption, and the schemes being tried now to protect ordinary music CD's are weak hacks being done on an ad-hoc basis.
Hmmm -
Good for Canada, but Western Europe surely had a dismal showing. Nothing in the top ten at all.
What is so hard about a file-URL and a creation time-stamp key, that hashes into an HTML file in an PDF2HTML database?
That still requires dowloading the original file on every request, thus slashdotting the original.
Hmmm - we are running a server rack with Dell 2550 poweredges, Compaq DM360 + DM 370 a HP LH with internal RAID and a EMC Celera supplying 2TB of NFS mounts on RH 7.2/ 2.4.9 without a burp.
Dod you just download a vanilla 2.4 kernel, or did you use something from RedHat? The -ac series is generally more stable than the stuff you get from kernel.org.
I work for a small company that has traditionally used a 'get it done and worry about the right way later' method. And of course by the time later comes it's too late.
What happens is that we never get the projects that would take us to the next level because we can't show the the skill set needed to handle the large project to a customer.
We are constantly bogged down maintaining poorly or undocumented web sites that work only by accident and fire fighting on servers that have not properly been maintained. Every server that we have has been hacked or infected by viruses at least once, some times multiple times. Our main web server is also where we keep credit card numbers and is also where we do development.
None of the code we have can be reused on the next project because it is crap.
Projects take 2-3 times longer than needed because there was no written specification of what the customer wanted - so when we show him something he says, nope - it's all wrong and has to be redone.
Our proposals to the customer are so vague that they come back and say that you were supposed to supply feature xyz as part of the project, and there is no way to argue the point.
The result is a company that doesn't learn from it's mistakes, and hasn't grown over the years, and can only handle one major customer at a time. Employees are hired with a minimal level of experience because that is all the company can afford - and leave as soon as they realize that they can do better elsewhere.
Management is always underbidding projects because they have no record of how long it actually takes to build such and such a feature. The result is many projects that lose money.
The fact is that best practices are known, and unless you make a real effort to follow them you will never be able to get to a point where you will really be able to prosper as both an individual and as a company.
I probably won't be prioritizing government traffic on any of my routers.
When you consider the increasing pervasiveness of the internet as a communications medium in the wireless arena, its not hard to imagine a firefighter trying to locate a building exit using a GPS and blueprints via a wireless handheld.
OOPS. He didn't have priority access through your router.
The fact is that the government is not a monolith; it is often individuals who are risking their lives to serve and protect the public, as we found out with vivid clarity six months ago.
Until I saw this, I had, for some reason, been under the impression that IBM drives were the most reliable IDE drives around...
Rule 1: Don't believe ANYTHING you read on slashdot.
Rule 2: Note that none of these IBM drive bashing articles contain comparitive data - including, say what the duty cycle of Maxtor et al is... For all we know 333 hr/mo is on the high end. and everyone else is 200 hours or less.
Rule 3: Backup, backup, backup!
Who needs a floppy disk, when you can boot your machine off of PAPER?
Yes folks, my very own FSMOS is able to do just that.
Prior art man. 30 years ago I used to boot a PDP-8 off punched paper tape. Just load that tape into the reader and let it fly. 20 minutes later and the computer was ready to rip, all 4K of 12 bit work memory ripped to go.
As opposed to trying to find a specific CDR in a huge pile of them, in less than 10 minutes?
Eh.
You need to make two piles. A L1 cache of CDs for frequently used/important ones and a main pile fo the rest.
That way you will reduce your access times considerably.
Names CAN be trademarked.
o ct 96.html
Clan McDonald has had some problems with the McDonald's hamburger chain.
http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/press/herald_7
There was also a narty bit of business when the Taylor wine company was bought out by Coca-Cola.
And I would think a legally binding contract would somehow involve a lawyer.
Hey, if EULA's are legally binding despite the fact that no sane person would actually agree to such a one-sided deal, E-Mail exchange has got to be 10^40 times stronger grounds for establishing a legal contract.
This is the way science has developed in Europe during the renaissance and later, free exchange of information and knowledge.
The industrial revolution, however, did not occur until after England adopted a patent system.
I think there's an even more compelling argument against gene patents- they aren't "non-obvious". Anyone with sufficient training and funding can perform the protocols the biotechs use to find genes for patenting. There's absolutely no innovation involved.
/. readers have no concept what a gene patent is. A gene patent is NOT merely a patent on the genetic code; in fact such a patent is specifically barred under law - rather it is a patent on the USE of the structure of the gene in some application. The USPTO has a discussion of this very important issue that /. readers would do well to understand so they don't look totally unwashed when writing about this topic.
t mlc .cgi ?dbname=2001_register&docid=01-322-filed
Most
http://www.ama-assn.org/ama/pub/category/3607.h
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdo
I must have missed the corporation bashing part of the article, but everybody knows that patents are mostly bad for innovation.
I think that everybody does NOT know this at all. The fact of the matter is that the almost all industrial R&D, from the time of Edison has depended on the use of patents to provide the commercial incentives for justification of investment into the development of new technologies. Without patents we would have never had the development of large industrial research organizations at companies like DuPont, Intel, Merkh etc. etc.
These organizations have supplied tremendous advances to society - synthetic polymers and fabrics, the CPU, streptomycin, to name a few. All developed with the incentive and goal of obtaining a commercially exploitable patent as the business incentive for funding the R&D.
The idea that patents hinder innovation cannot be justified by any evidence drawn from the history of technological process. It is no accident that Great Britain, the country that first adopted a patent system was also the first country to experience the fruits in it's 18th century industrail revolution.
The article cited in this story bears out all to well the issue of the necessity of patents in a modern industrial society - both Switzerland and the Netherlands adopted patent systems 100 years ago. Countries in today's world that do not support a patent system are countries with no significant technological infrastructure.
But in this case, we've got the world's superpower, announcing that it's ready (yes, what do you think a contingency plan means? it means they're ready to do it) to use nuclear weapons of all sizes against whomever they believe to be the enemy. On its own, without giving a damn about the rest of the world.
So exactly what is the point in maintaining a large nuclear arsenal, but stating that you will NEVER use it? The fact is that if you build such a thing, you must also have your enemy believe that you will use it as well. Perhaps you hope and pray that day will never come. But if you don't give the impression that you might use it, there is no purpose to having it.
In the world tody we now have a very bad situation - one where we have several countries that really hate each other AND that have nuclear weapons. Not only this, but there are radicals that are attempting to get control of a nuclear weapon that would not hesitate one iota to use it. Do you think that New York City would have been under a mushroom cloud if Bin Laden or similar radicals could have delivered such a weapon? Or Tel Aviv? You bet.
The fact is that the day where nuclear weapons are available only to superpowers has ended. The day where nuclear weapons are available to those planning insurrections is coming. You had better think quite carefully as to what lengths you are willing to go to to prevent New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Rome and Tokyo from disappearing in a series of nuclear blasts before you criticize contingency planning of this nature.
This guy is a jackass. There are a number of ways to allow his friends to send mail without running an open relay.
What else out there continues to climb in price year after year?
College tuition, health care, cable TV.
3% loss in revenue over last year. That's what the music industry is worried about. Nevermind that there was an economic downturn this year and many more industries lost more both in percentages and money.
Of course the movie industry (like the beer industry) is normally completely recession proof - economic downturns often give people more leisure time to visit the theaters.
It seems to me that people are missing a point - the Nimda worm affected not only Windows users, but the network as a whole. I can see how courts might hold Microsoft harmless in the case where a purchaser of their software might want to recover damages, but what about a situation where a third party running, say BSD is damaged by Microsoft software. What legal theory would prevent the third party from suing?
The fascist states come to mind immediately: not just Nazi Germany but fascist Italy and Franco's Spain.
Faciast Italy, Nazi Germany and Franco's Spain were clearly NOT capitalistic. These states controlled EVERY aspect of production. Franco's government included wonderful policies such as the destruction of trade unions and establishment of vertical state-run syndicates in their place. His attempts at running the economy led to massive inflation, acute shortages and starvation. As the result post WWII Spain had the lowest level of economic development in Western Europe.
Similarly, for non-capitalist democracies, look at Sweden, France, and Kerala
I am not intimately familiar with the economy of Kerala, however I am with France's, and somewhat with Sweden's. There is no way that you can sell me on the concept that France and Sweden are not capitalistic societies.
Next time, come back with some examples that have a shred of fact behind them.
If this quite plausible story turns out to be true, we see that the unregulated US marketplace treats the repressive Chinese legal system as a customer to the extent that the system can afford services. In other words, this amounts to a collaboration of the most and the least regulated systems to suppress freedom, whether that fits your preconceived notions or not.
More baloney. The fact is that China until very recently has had a ban on foreign investment in their Internet infrastructure. The involvement of the US in this area is both recent and minor, despite the hooraw in this article.
It is in fact the more highly regulated nations of Europe that are primarily responsible for supplying technology to the repressive Chinese regime. While the US held China at arms length because of political differences, the Europeans and Eastern Tigers were in China making hay while the sun shined. If you don't believe me, look at the massive investments of companies like Bayer, BASF and Mitsubishi in China - long before the US had any major presence.
Now tell me, what is worse? Supplying a few firewalls to limit internet accesss, or providing the means to supply the largest standing army in the world the means to surpress it's population and neighbors?
American millitary spending needs to decrease. No more multi-million dollar cruise missles, and cut the amount of nuclear arms in half to help decrease the load spent on maintaining them.
While I agree that US military spending needs to decrease I think that decommissioning nuclear weapons will probably be quite costly due to the disposal and handling issues, and cruise missles don't cost multi-millions - most are less than $1 million.
If it were up to me the first thing I would do is close all US military bases in Europe. A fifty-year free ride on defense is way more than we have any reason to pay for. Europe is planty well capable of footing the bill for it's own defense. The time is long past to pull the plug there.