Except that they could, oh, I don't know... do it asynchronously! For example, the site could start the check as soon as you start editing, or in the background after the first preview.
In practice, there are multiple layers of security, and this is just one of them.
There really isn't. For web SSL/TLS, there's exactly one layer of trust: the certificate authorities.
There's no other check that the browser performs. If a trusted CA signed a cert, it hasn't expired, and it's not in a revocation list (maintained by the CA), then it's OK.
Because he's got a good point that the internet community has been ignoring until the Diginotar fiasco. It wasn't that obvious a problem for most people, it was just one of those things that happens "behind the scenes", and nobody except some paranoid security researchers cared.
But really, think about it for a second: why are we allowing a country-specific CAs to issue certificates for a TLD other than their country TLD?
I can understand why a Root CA certificate doesn't have any restrictions in it (that would be annoying for the CA), but why does the browser have to take that certificate at face value?
For example, the Windows operating system can be told to restrict its trust of a Root CA certificate to a specific set of purposes. It's a bit obscure, but it's there. Firefox has a system for this as well, but it just has a set of check boxes: "web", "email", and "software". Neither system is fine-grained or easily customisable.
Why can't web browser developers take a few hours out of their time to add a "list of DNS suffixes" to the restriction options, and populate them when releasing the root CA updates? For example, Firefox trusts "TURKTRUST Elektronik Sertifika Hizmet Saglayicisi" by default -- which I'm perfectly fine with, as long as it's for "*.tr" domains only! I'm not so fine with trusting that organisation for ".com".
Sure, that change would break some websites -- but that's the point.
The only reasons against a sustained human presence in space are economic and political.
Those might be the only reasons against it, but there's no compelling reasons for it!
We went to the moon precisely because back then there was a good reason to do it -- competing with the Russians. It was pissing contest played on an international scale. You'll note that the Apollo program was cut early, because once we've pissed higher than the other guy, there was no compelling reason to keep going back the moon.
From a scientific perspective, humans were the best way to explore the moon, robot technology just wasn't good enough back then. Robots are already better than humans at exploration today, and keep getting better all the time. Meanwhile, humans are still just as squishy as they've always been.
Read your list again... it's all about the process: making access to space cheaper, safer, or faster. You dreamers never say what you'll do up there when you get there that you couldn't do down here for a fraction of the cost. You need a goal other than the journey.
There's nothing up there, just hard vacuum and cold rocks. It's never going to be a welcoming place to live, no matter how cheaply you can get there.
If you want the experience of going into space, right now, for a lot less money, move to an uninhabited island in the middle of the Antarctic ocean. Live in an airtight building that you never leave without full scuba gear. Take all your air with you, and melting ice for water is cheating, so you'll want to extract it from the rocks. Buy a one-way ticket from the ship captain, and collect sufficient wealth on the island to pay for a return ticket plus $100 per pound of equipment that you took with you.
You keep going on about how "we just need it to be cheap", well, there you go. Crossing an ocean is cheap. You don't need mission control, or space-rated equipment, nothing has to be super light or strong, and you can go right now. Nothing is stopping you.
Oh yeah, one more thing... convince your neighbors to fund your journey, because that's what you're proposing: that taxes be spent for some dude to go live on an uninhabitable rock.
The idea that only profitable things are worth doing is utterly without merit.
I never said that! What I said that things that are entirely without profit ought to have sufficient merit to justify the expense. I'm perfectly fine with spending billions of dollars on, say, the James Webb Space Telescope. That thing is going to take awesome pictures! Spending trillions of dollars to send people to mars... huge waste of money with no hope of a useful return.
Money is not an end.
Of course not. But money can be directly exchanged for things that are 'ends'. Like... food, shelter, safety, stability, education, and entertainment.
Money isn't separate from those things, it's a generic placeholder for the labor required to obtain those things. You waste money, then you also waste the important things!
Education isn't profitable - let's axe it.
Actually, it's hugely profitable. That's why companies have internship programs, and governments spend a huge chunk of tax on education. The money invested into education is returned as profit when the next-generation applies their learned skills in performing useful labor.
Providing assistance to Haiti or Japan isn't profitable
You'd be surprised. Governments sending aid to each other is more or less an informal insurance system. One government has a disaster, everyone else helps to stop their economy from collapsing under the strain. The helpers benefit -- their international trading partners don't stop trading! Stability is very important to corporate profits.
why not waste it on a grand endeavor
Because exploring space (specifically with organic fleshy humans) isn't all that relevant to the vast, vast majority of people on Earth. Think about it like this: you will not get to go. Not ever. The vast majority of people currently alive will not get to go either. Neither will their children, or their grandchildren. Other than the lucky few dozen astronauts, the rest of us will get nothing other than pictures taken with cameras. The camera will be held either by a meat robot, or a metal robot. The pictures will look the same either way. The meat robot pictures will cost trillions, the metal robot pictures will cost merely billions.
Why should we all be taxed 999 billion more dollars for the knowledge that the exact same pictures were taken by the meat robots instead of the metal type? Or more importantly, why should we settle for one set of pictures in exchange for our trillion dollars of labor instead of a thousand sets of pictures of a thousand different places? Because you have some naive, childish dream? Because you have a fantasy?
Given that space exploration really comprises a trivial amount of human and financial capital
Yeah... now, but that's because we aren't really going anywhere. What NASA is doing is talking about going to Mars, which is cheap.
All the realistic proposals I've seen for anything of interest involving humans in space such as a Moon base, a Mars colony, or interstellar travel required funds that are a substantial fraction of the world's GDP. Think tens of trillions of dollars.
So lets say that at some point in the future we do end up spending those trillions of dollars and end up with a Mars colony or whatever. What return will we get for that money? I don't mean some spin-off technology like Velcro or whatever giving back 0.01% of what was spent. I mean 110% return. Will we, as a human race, profit? Will we actually get a benefit from that money that we couldn't obtain, right here, on Earth?
The simple harsh answer is no. The entire project will be a giant money-sink that returns nothing of tangible value to anybody on Earth. Any scientific research done could have been done orders of magnitude cheaper with robots. Even a permanent base somewhere is pointless -- at best it will be a stepping-stone towards another pointless money-sink.
This is why congress doesn't fund human space exploration. It's just not worth spending trillions of dollars to make some geek's scifi adventure fantasies come true, when all of the tangible benefits like scientific research and pretty pictures can done by robots at orders of magnitude less cost.
Your dreams just aren't worth that much to the rest of the world.
No amount of software tuning or tweaking is ever going to make 5ms random seek times magically disappear. Eliminating the last moving part still used to perform computation will.
A lot of engineering is refinement, yes, but scientific advancements are often revolutionary.
Electricity for example had no equivalent before it -- it was an entirely new concept. One could argue that the internal combustion engine is just a variant of a piston steam engine, but the steam engine itself was a new concept: converting thermal energy to work by allowing hot gases to expand against a piston in a reciprocal way. That was so revolutionary that it started the Industrial Revolution!
Seriously, there's a bad trend among some "modern" languages of piling up constructs without regards for efficiency, simplicity or sanity.
It's not so much the languages, but the standard libraries. I've spent a lot of time writing performance optimised code (3D engines, large database-type apps, etc...), and the thing that shits me is this:
foreach( x in list_of_x ) { foo( x ); }
where 'foo' does something like:
prep();
work_on( x );
cleanup();
That is bad, especially if 'work_on(x)' has a couple of layers of the same kind of thing -- then there's virtually no hope of the compiler ever optimising that loop in any significant way, and there's nothing the programmer can do either. Magic tricks like static call analysis can sometimes help, but usually not.
When that kind of pattern is baked into a wide range of interfaces, there's just no avoiding it, and performance goes right out the window.
What would work a lot better if more APIs supported batch operations, e.g.:
foo( list_of_x )
or more elegantly:
foo( iterator_over_x )
That way, the 'prep()' and 'cleanup()' only happens once. If the list is big enough, the language overhead becomes irrelevant. Even if 'foo' is some expensive virtual function call, the cost is spread out over many items.
Unfortunately, efficient batch-style programming APIs are few and far between. While most of the old-school low level APIs use buffers (think file IO), the majority of business-oriented libraries and APIs are very inefficient. This is one of the reasons that complex business apps can take minutes to perform trivial processing over megabytes of data, but the same computer can pump gigabytes through a 3D game engine every second.
By far the worst offenders are n-tier applications, where some of those overheads can be network traffic. If an RPC function is called inside a loop, it's game over. This is why any time someone comes up with a marvellous framework that "unifies local and remote computing", or makes "RPC calls and local calls work the same", I just laugh and laugh....
We need scientists to be believable to the general public.
What you're really asking for is for scientists to shut up and stop saying things the public doesn't want to hear, so why not just come straight out and say that?
We need a wall between science and politics more than a wall between politics and religion.
I can understand this poorly written application usually have very long start up times.
Nothing to do with code quality, unless you consider "using the standard libraries" poor programming practice!
You can precompile EE applications as well and have them start up in milliseconds.
Maybe, with some containers. I said that. My point is that 90% of Java environments don't or can't do this. It's certainly not the default.
In SE that is being addressed in Java 8
That's my point! Java 7, which is now 16 years old, still doesn't have minor, unimportant features like... fast start time, even though, as you put it, other people have solved the problem decades ago.
Dot NET is snazzy in the fact that the VM is loaded with the OS so you only incur the cost at startup and shutdown
Not true! The VM is only loaded if an application needs it. The operating system doesn't -- Windows XP and 2003 certainly don't, and even newer versions usually don't load it. Heck, Server 2008 R2 doesn't even fully install it by default for security.
It's also another difference between.NET and Java -- automatic sharing of DLLs between running processes. On Citrix or Terminal Servers, this makes a massive difference to resource usage. Java reloads and recompiles everything for every user! On a 100 user server, that's about 50x the overhead of a comparable.NET app.
Do you think they use the same.NET VM in Windows Server
It's the same install package and binaries, but there are some small differences, like the default GC mode. You can override it if needed with a configuration entry. Not that I've ever seen anyone having to do this, because the defaults are fine, unlike the Java workstation VM, which is too slow to use for some workstation GUI apps! One of my tricks is to switch to a 64-bit server JVM to run IDEs because the speed boost is quite noticeable.
The problem with Java is that the startup time is poor, which is often ignored by benchmarks.
First, for an apples-to-apples comparison, this is the startup of a typical installed.NET app:
* Operating system loads the cached, fully compiled EXE or DLL. * Operating system loads the cached, fully compiled System library DLLs.
If the app is not cacheable (not signed, not properly installed, or whatever), then the process is almost the same, except that the first step changes to "Operating system loads the bytecode, and compiles it one method at a time on demand and runs it". All of the system libraries are always fully pre-compiled. No code ever runs in an interpreter.
Compare to Java:
* Decompress Application JAR files (this is a ZIP file internally) -- this is slow. At best, you get 30MB/sec for typical compression ratios. * Decompress Java system JAR files -- this is also slow, and there's a lot of it to load. At this point, anyone without an SSD gets to twiddle their thumbs while the disk makes crunching sounds for a while. * Start running application (including the system libraries) using an interpreter -- this is several times slower than compiler code. * At some point, some of the code (usually not all of it) is compiled -- now your app is probably fast.
Even for server apps, this is bad. I've seen a large J2EE app thrash a server (100% CPU!) for tens of minutes before it settled down. Compare that to, say, ASP.NET, which if precompiled can launch in a few hundred milliseconds!
Sure, in long running benchmarks, Java is faster, but the user experience is less than stellar.
There's no good reason for this. Oracle could use a container format that's uncompressed by default, pre-compile, cache, etc... but they don't. I know there's third-party JVMs that do that kind of thing, but the majority of users stick to the "official" JVM.
There's also still this attitude of having "User" vs "Server" JVMs, as if people still had single-core PCs. My laptop has 8 logical 64-bit CPUs!
Read my post again -- it doesn't matter -- because I don't really care who did what to whom in history. It's interesting and entertaining, not a moral code and a way of life!
People take religion seriously, to the point that they're cheerfully willing to kill each other over it, even though the basis for their religion is just a single book. That's insane.
Try reading a book one day. Then read another one, and another one, and then some more, until you come to the realisation that books don't all agree with each other, or with reality. Just because something is written down doesn't mean anything special. Calling a book a holy book doesn't make it any more special either.
You do realise that I was just picking something as a random example, right? I didn't actually believe or care in it one way or another, so that trying to disprove the example is futile. I wasn't asking for a justification or an explanation -- not that I think a justification is really possible. Try finding the biggest, angriest black man you can, and try justifying slavery to that guy, see how well your moral argument works for you.
It doesn't matter if it's slavery, or rape -- the example could be anything that is popularly attributed to be the word of God, controversial or not. It could be whether homosexuality is a sin or not, or if wearing mixed fibres is just as bad or no longer relevant. It could be that murder is bad, or that's it's good. Disrespecting your father. Working on the sabbath. Any and all rules, prescriptions, moral codes, rituals, rights, or beliefs. Anything. For each and every one of those in the Bible, you have no idea if they're valid or not. For one thing, the Bible has contradictions in it as well as known edits at various times in history. At some point, you have to chose which contradicting passage you believe in (or neither!), because it can't possibly be both. By editing the Bible, someone has also chosen for you, whether you know it or not.
It doesn't matter how I have read it, or how you think you've read it, or what your pastor/minister/priest/whatever told you about it. Not you, or I, or anyone else has a hope of ever pointing to a passage -- any passage -- and be able to say with certainty that it's the true word of God.
That's my point -- this is why religion is such a waste of time -- everybody goes around believing in stuff that is indistinguishable from stuff someone just made up.
Why even bother with history, when you must admit it contains errors?
History books can be checked against and cross-referenced with other facts -- ruins, fossil evidence, artefacts, multiple sources, geological evidence, art, and linguistics.
The theological content of the Bible is the whole thing, in and of itself. There's few "real world" facts that it can be verified against. The few parts that can be verified -- like the creation story -- prove to be false, or otherwise are plain historical content instead of theological material.
And truthfully, I don't bother all that much about history. It's interesting, entertaining even, but at the back of my mind I always know that the accuracy and authenticity is limited. I don't base my life on history. I don't force rules or behaviour onto others based on history. I don't change my vote based on history.
Theres a lot of good stuff in there
But which part is the "true word of God", and which part is myth, fabrication, or distortion? Based on authority or faith alone, you can't possibly know, not even in principle!
Decide what part of it (none, some, most, all) you believe.
You are in no position to 'decide', and nobody else is either. That's the problem. It doesn't matter how you feel about a passage, or whether you agree with it or not. The only thing that ought to matter is if the passage is the true word of God or not -- and that's not something that can ever be determined from ink on dead trees.
For example, what if God approves of rape and slavery? It says so right in the Bible, so there's a decent chance that he does! You might decide to skip over those bits -- but then you no longer believe in the word of God -- and you are no longer a Christian.
My denomination tends...
Exactly. You're not a true Christian who believes in the word of God. You picked some random mishmash to believe in that made you feel good.
Don't worry though -- I'm yet to meet two theists who could agree with each other on the specifics, so you're not exactly unique in that regard. I bet that if I quizzed two random people from your denomination, they wouldn't agree with each other, let alone with some other random theist...
That's all fine and good, but in a large enterprise, that's just not practical.
No matter how much you pay your employees, or how nicely you treat them, you just can't be that certain about people. A substantial portion of the population has mental issues. Given enough employees, it's virtually guaranteed that you have at least a couple of psychotic or psychopathic employees. Even if your IT people are all carefully vetted, their managers need to be too, otherwise they could be mistreated until they snap. I've been to government organisations with 800+ IT employees, where the vast majority of the critical systems were a part of a single AD domain. One guy with one password can blow away a chunk of the government in about a minute!
It's like bad memory in a computer -- no matter how good your software, your hardware can cause anything to crash. Currently, organisations have to completely trust their employees, but what if they didn't have to?
My point is that if we can protect against bad memory (ECC, lockstep computing, etc...), then it ought to be possible to protect against rogue employees?
For example, turnkey, tamper-proof systems that can be installed in such a way that the corporation doesn't have to completely trust a single employee. Or systems that could be only be set up with full trust, but then could enter a "production" mode after which full trust is no longer required.
Most of their data is pure disk. There's been several articles floating about on the internet about it. Some critical stuff is backed up, like the old-school relational databases, source code, etc... but the vast majority of their data isn't. Sure, they could reproduce their indexes by re-scanning the internet, but how long would that take?
Has anyone noticed that every system claiming "enterprise" robustness only ever protect against untrusted third parties or component failure? I think there's an enormous amount of research waiting to be done to develop systems that are robust against attacks by rogue administrators. Think about it this way: a modern distributed cluster can be made robust against nuclear warfare, but not a grumpy admin!
Technologies like the kind developed by internet pirates could be applied to enterprise systems. For example, protocols like Bittorrent are designed to be robust against malicious peers. The lessons learned by Wikipedia (where everyone is an 'admin') could be applied too, such as enforced versioning of all configuration changes.
Similarly, multi-party authentication should be an option for critical enterprise systems. It should be possible to mark objects such as VMs or service accounts as "critical", allowing configuration changes only if, say, three admins authenticate together, like in a nuclear launch. This isn't a new concept -- Certificate Authorities often require secondary approval to issue certain types of certificates.
The need will become ever greater as the trend of moving away from tape towards snapshots and replicas accelerates. Do you seriously think Google backs up to tape? Or Amazon? Or any cloud provider? They don't! They just keep two to thee copies of everything, and hope that none of their thousands of administrators ever cracks and does the equivalent of "rm -rf *" on the entire cloud all at once!
Unfortunately, a business with general purpose servers running Windows or Linux are out of luck. Even if someone were to come up with, say, a virtual hosting environment that's robust against even administrators, that wouldn't prevent other mass attacks, such as formatting the SAN (shudder), deleting every object from the Active Directory domain, or my favourite: setting an encryption key on the backups for a month before leaving, wiping the password, and then formatting every server in parallel. Just resetting every password in the system at once is enough to bring most organisations to their knees, and can be done in seconds! How long would it take your organisation to recover from that? You'll just restore the AD from tape, right? Step one: log on to the backup server... err...
Remember: Mirrors won't help. Replicas won't save you. Snapshots can be deleted just like everything else. If the business didn't have off-site tape backups of everything, it's game over.
I've only seen the Sixth Sense once, and I doubt I'll watch it again. The whole point of that movie was the shock of the revelation at the end. That got me in a way that would have been impossible if I had even a suspicion up front of what was going on.
Even for people that like to know an ending, that movie would have been ruined for them if they knew the ending, or nowhere near as enjoyable at any rate. Here's the thing: even if they swear up and down that it was still a great movie, they'll never know how much more they could have enjoyed having not known the ending!
Not everyone reads books or enjoys movies the same way. I actually have a preference for material where I don't even know the genre up front, let alone the plot! Some of the most enjoyable books for me have been random selections. One of the reasons I stopped watching TV was the obnoxious trailers, ads, previews, and interviews would conspire to ruin every single blockbuster movie, without exception.
There's been a trend recently for movie trailers to show every character, all of the funniest jokes, the plot twist, and it's resolution. That's just obnoxious.
Try running "gpresult" at the command prompt and see what "Site" your PC thinks that it's in.
Quite often what happens is that the "Sites & Services" configuration is messed up, and PCs pick their domain controllers randomly instead of locating the nearest one. This is murder on logon times, because everybody logs on all at once in the morning, taxing WAN links and underpowered domain controllers.
I had the same experience -- time to Outlook + Visual Studio was ~15 minutes.
I got an SSD, copied across the exact same system image, and it dropped to 40 seconds, of which 20 seconds was the BIOS, and that took as long as it did only because my computer had 8GB of RAM and had no option for skipping the memory check.
There aren't that many papers that even begin to cover the reasoning behind the simplifications made. A meta-study done recently showed that even the few papers that did mention the simplifications often just hand-waved it away without rigorously proving that a simplification can be made at all.
If reality doesn't match a theory, and the theory chosen is known to be wrong, the very first step must be to redo everything with the more complex, more correct theory. Anything else is a huge waste of everyone's time.
Secondly, most people assume that dark matter theories say something like: "matter in a galaxy is spinning with some radial velocity distribution X, has Y mass with distribution Z, but requires +W mass to explain X."
In fact, it's more like: "we can barely tell what mass the galaxy is, we're guessing based on luminosity, and based on observed velocity distribution X, we can determine the mass distribution Z using a simulation, but the simulation doesn't work unless we tweak the hell out of it. Adding a bunch of mass +W helps, but it's still wonky." The only "known" is the velocity distribution. Everything else is a wild guess, and the curve fitting is done using a long-running simulation with huge amounts of non-linear feedback using the wrong equations. What could possibly go wrong?
Slashdot Mirror
YES, fine.
Except that they could, oh, I don't know... do it asynchronously! For example, the site could start the check as soon as you start editing, or in the background after the first preview.
In practice, there are multiple layers of security, and this is just one of them.
There really isn't. For web SSL/TLS, there's exactly one layer of trust: the certificate authorities.
There's no other check that the browser performs. If a trusted CA signed a cert, it hasn't expired, and it's not in a revocation list (maintained by the CA), then it's OK.
That's it.
Because he's got a good point that the internet community has been ignoring until the Diginotar fiasco. It wasn't that obvious a problem for most people, it was just one of those things that happens "behind the scenes", and nobody except some paranoid security researchers cared.
But really, think about it for a second: why are we allowing a country-specific CAs to issue certificates for a TLD other than their country TLD?
I can understand why a Root CA certificate doesn't have any restrictions in it (that would be annoying for the CA), but why does the browser have to take that certificate at face value?
For example, the Windows operating system can be told to restrict its trust of a Root CA certificate to a specific set of purposes. It's a bit obscure, but it's there. Firefox has a system for this as well, but it just has a set of check boxes: "web", "email", and "software". Neither system is fine-grained or easily customisable.
Why can't web browser developers take a few hours out of their time to add a "list of DNS suffixes" to the restriction options, and populate them when releasing the root CA updates? For example, Firefox trusts "TURKTRUST Elektronik Sertifika Hizmet Saglayicisi" by default -- which I'm perfectly fine with, as long as it's for "*.tr" domains only! I'm not so fine with trusting that organisation for ".com".
Sure, that change would break some websites -- but that's the point.
The only reasons against a sustained human presence in space are economic and political.
Those might be the only reasons against it, but there's no compelling reasons for it!
We went to the moon precisely because back then there was a good reason to do it -- competing with the Russians. It was pissing contest played on an international scale. You'll note that the Apollo program was cut early, because once we've pissed higher than the other guy, there was no compelling reason to keep going back the moon.
From a scientific perspective, humans were the best way to explore the moon, robot technology just wasn't good enough back then. Robots are already better than humans at exploration today, and keep getting better all the time. Meanwhile, humans are still just as squishy as they've always been.
Read your list again... it's all about the process: making access to space cheaper, safer, or faster. You dreamers never say what you'll do up there when you get there that you couldn't do down here for a fraction of the cost. You need a goal other than the journey.
There's nothing up there, just hard vacuum and cold rocks. It's never going to be a welcoming place to live, no matter how cheaply you can get there.
If you want the experience of going into space, right now, for a lot less money, move to an uninhabited island in the middle of the Antarctic ocean. Live in an airtight building that you never leave without full scuba gear. Take all your air with you, and melting ice for water is cheating, so you'll want to extract it from the rocks. Buy a one-way ticket from the ship captain, and collect sufficient wealth on the island to pay for a return ticket plus $100 per pound of equipment that you took with you.
You keep going on about how "we just need it to be cheap", well, there you go. Crossing an ocean is cheap. You don't need mission control, or space-rated equipment, nothing has to be super light or strong, and you can go right now. Nothing is stopping you.
Oh yeah, one more thing... convince your neighbors to fund your journey, because that's what you're proposing: that taxes be spent for some dude to go live on an uninhabitable rock.
The idea that only profitable things are worth doing is utterly without merit.
I never said that! What I said that things that are entirely without profit ought to have sufficient merit to justify the expense. I'm perfectly fine with spending billions of dollars on, say, the James Webb Space Telescope. That thing is going to take awesome pictures! Spending trillions of dollars to send people to mars... huge waste of money with no hope of a useful return.
Money is not an end.
Of course not. But money can be directly exchanged for things that are 'ends'. Like... food, shelter, safety, stability, education, and entertainment.
Money isn't separate from those things, it's a generic placeholder for the labor required to obtain those things. You waste money, then you also waste the important things!
Education isn't profitable - let's axe it.
Actually, it's hugely profitable. That's why companies have internship programs, and governments spend a huge chunk of tax on education. The money invested into education is returned as profit when the next-generation applies their learned skills in performing useful labor.
Providing assistance to Haiti or Japan isn't profitable
You'd be surprised. Governments sending aid to each other is more or less an informal insurance system. One government has a disaster, everyone else helps to stop their economy from collapsing under the strain. The helpers benefit -- their international trading partners don't stop trading! Stability is very important to corporate profits.
why not waste it on a grand endeavor
Because exploring space (specifically with organic fleshy humans) isn't all that relevant to the vast, vast majority of people on Earth. Think about it like this: you will not get to go. Not ever. The vast majority of people currently alive will not get to go either. Neither will their children, or their grandchildren. Other than the lucky few dozen astronauts, the rest of us will get nothing other than pictures taken with cameras. The camera will be held either by a meat robot, or a metal robot. The pictures will look the same either way. The meat robot pictures will cost trillions, the metal robot pictures will cost merely billions.
Why should we all be taxed 999 billion more dollars for the knowledge that the exact same pictures were taken by the meat robots instead of the metal type? Or more importantly, why should we settle for one set of pictures in exchange for our trillion dollars of labor instead of a thousand sets of pictures of a thousand different places? Because you have some naive, childish dream? Because you have a fantasy?
Given that space exploration really comprises a trivial amount of human and financial capital
Yeah... now, but that's because we aren't really going anywhere. What NASA is doing is talking about going to Mars, which is cheap.
All the realistic proposals I've seen for anything of interest involving humans in space such as a Moon base, a Mars colony, or interstellar travel required funds that are a substantial fraction of the world's GDP. Think tens of trillions of dollars.
So lets say that at some point in the future we do end up spending those trillions of dollars and end up with a Mars colony or whatever. What return will we get for that money? I don't mean some spin-off technology like Velcro or whatever giving back 0.01% of what was spent. I mean 110% return. Will we, as a human race, profit? Will we actually get a benefit from that money that we couldn't obtain, right here, on Earth?
The simple harsh answer is no. The entire project will be a giant money-sink that returns nothing of tangible value to anybody on Earth. Any scientific research done could have been done orders of magnitude cheaper with robots. Even a permanent base somewhere is pointless -- at best it will be a stepping-stone towards another pointless money-sink.
This is why congress doesn't fund human space exploration. It's just not worth spending trillions of dollars to make some geek's scifi adventure fantasies come true, when all of the tangible benefits like scientific research and pretty pictures can done by robots at orders of magnitude less cost.
Your dreams just aren't worth that much to the rest of the world.
Now, it should be obvious that the blame here is not entirely on Microsoft.
It's got nothing to do with Microsoft, and everything to do with using mechanical drives. Upgrade to an SSD, and your problems will vanish.
Get an SSD.
No amount of software tuning or tweaking is ever going to make 5ms random seek times magically disappear. Eliminating the last moving part still used to perform computation will.
A lot of engineering is refinement, yes, but scientific advancements are often revolutionary.
Electricity for example had no equivalent before it -- it was an entirely new concept. One could argue that the internal combustion engine is just a variant of a piston steam engine, but the steam engine itself was a new concept: converting thermal energy to work by allowing hot gases to expand against a piston in a reciprocal way. That was so revolutionary that it started the Industrial Revolution!
Seriously, there's a bad trend among some "modern" languages of piling up constructs without regards for efficiency, simplicity or sanity.
It's not so much the languages, but the standard libraries. I've spent a lot of time writing performance optimised code (3D engines, large database-type apps, etc...), and the thing that shits me is this:
foreach( x in list_of_x ) { foo( x ); }
where 'foo' does something like:
prep();
work_on( x );
cleanup();
That is bad, especially if 'work_on(x)' has a couple of layers of the same kind of thing -- then there's virtually no hope of the compiler ever optimising that loop in any significant way, and there's nothing the programmer can do either. Magic tricks like static call analysis can sometimes help, but usually not.
When that kind of pattern is baked into a wide range of interfaces, there's just no avoiding it, and performance goes right out the window.
What would work a lot better if more APIs supported batch operations, e.g.:
foo( list_of_x )
or more elegantly:
foo( iterator_over_x )
That way, the 'prep()' and 'cleanup()' only happens once. If the list is big enough, the language overhead becomes irrelevant. Even if 'foo' is some expensive virtual function call, the cost is spread out over many items.
Unfortunately, efficient batch-style programming APIs are few and far between. While most of the old-school low level APIs use buffers (think file IO), the majority of business-oriented libraries and APIs are very inefficient. This is one of the reasons that complex business apps can take minutes to perform trivial processing over megabytes of data, but the same computer can pump gigabytes through a 3D game engine every second.
By far the worst offenders are n-tier applications, where some of those overheads can be network traffic. If an RPC function is called inside a loop, it's game over. This is why any time someone comes up with a marvellous framework that "unifies local and remote computing", or makes "RPC calls and local calls work the same", I just laugh and laugh....
Sigh... climate != weather.
Try this: You know that a pot of water will boil at 100 Celsius degrees at sealevel, right? Where's the first bubble going to pop on the surface?
Can't predict that, can you?
We need scientists to be believable to the general public.
What you're really asking for is for scientists to shut up and stop saying things the public doesn't want to hear, so why not just come straight out and say that?
We need a wall between science and politics more than a wall between politics and religion.
Close enough, never mind.
I can understand this poorly written application usually have very long start up times.
Nothing to do with code quality, unless you consider "using the standard libraries" poor programming practice!
You can precompile EE applications as well and have them start up in milliseconds.
Maybe, with some containers. I said that. My point is that 90% of Java environments don't or can't do this. It's certainly not the default.
In SE that is being addressed in Java 8
That's my point! Java 7, which is now 16 years old, still doesn't have minor, unimportant features like... fast start time, even though, as you put it, other people have solved the problem decades ago.
Dot NET is snazzy in the fact that the VM is loaded with the OS so you only incur the cost at startup and shutdown
Not true! The VM is only loaded if an application needs it. The operating system doesn't -- Windows XP and 2003 certainly don't, and even newer versions usually don't load it. Heck, Server 2008 R2 doesn't even fully install it by default for security.
It's also another difference between .NET and Java -- automatic sharing of DLLs between running processes. On Citrix or Terminal Servers, this makes a massive difference to resource usage. Java reloads and recompiles everything for every user! On a 100 user server, that's about 50x the overhead of a comparable .NET app.
Do you think they use the same .NET VM in Windows Server
It's the same install package and binaries, but there are some small differences, like the default GC mode. You can override it if needed with a configuration entry. Not that I've ever seen anyone having to do this, because the defaults are fine, unlike the Java workstation VM, which is too slow to use for some workstation GUI apps! One of my tricks is to switch to a 64-bit server JVM to run IDEs because the speed boost is quite noticeable.
The problem with Java is that the startup time is poor, which is often ignored by benchmarks.
First, for an apples-to-apples comparison, this is the startup of a typical installed .NET app:
* Operating system loads the cached, fully compiled EXE or DLL.
* Operating system loads the cached, fully compiled System library DLLs.
If the app is not cacheable (not signed, not properly installed, or whatever), then the process is almost the same, except that the first step changes to "Operating system loads the bytecode, and compiles it one method at a time on demand and runs it". All of the system libraries are always fully pre-compiled. No code ever runs in an interpreter.
Compare to Java:
* Decompress Application JAR files (this is a ZIP file internally) -- this is slow. At best, you get 30MB/sec for typical compression ratios.
* Decompress Java system JAR files -- this is also slow, and there's a lot of it to load. At this point, anyone without an SSD gets to twiddle their thumbs while the disk makes crunching sounds for a while.
* Start running application (including the system libraries) using an interpreter -- this is several times slower than compiler code.
* At some point, some of the code (usually not all of it) is compiled -- now your app is probably fast.
Even for server apps, this is bad. I've seen a large J2EE app thrash a server (100% CPU!) for tens of minutes before it settled down. Compare that to, say, ASP.NET, which if precompiled can launch in a few hundred milliseconds!
Sure, in long running benchmarks, Java is faster, but the user experience is less than stellar.
There's no good reason for this. Oracle could use a container format that's uncompressed by default, pre-compile, cache, etc... but they don't. I know there's third-party JVMs that do that kind of thing, but the majority of users stick to the "official" JVM.
There's also still this attitude of having "User" vs "Server" JVMs, as if people still had single-core PCs. My laptop has 8 logical 64-bit CPUs!
Oh for crying out loud, it is a point of contention! See: Shakespeare authorship question.
Read my post again -- it doesn't matter -- because I don't really care who did what to whom in history. It's interesting and entertaining, not a moral code and a way of life!
People take religion seriously, to the point that they're cheerfully willing to kill each other over it, even though the basis for their religion is just a single book. That's insane.
Try reading a book one day. Then read another one, and another one, and then some more, until you come to the realisation that books don't all agree with each other, or with reality. Just because something is written down doesn't mean anything special. Calling a book a holy book doesn't make it any more special either.
You do realise that I was just picking something as a random example, right? I didn't actually believe or care in it one way or another, so that trying to disprove the example is futile. I wasn't asking for a justification or an explanation -- not that I think a justification is really possible. Try finding the biggest, angriest black man you can, and try justifying slavery to that guy, see how well your moral argument works for you.
It doesn't matter if it's slavery, or rape -- the example could be anything that is popularly attributed to be the word of God, controversial or not. It could be whether homosexuality is a sin or not, or if wearing mixed fibres is just as bad or no longer relevant. It could be that murder is bad, or that's it's good. Disrespecting your father. Working on the sabbath. Any and all rules, prescriptions, moral codes, rituals, rights, or beliefs. Anything. For each and every one of those in the Bible, you have no idea if they're valid or not. For one thing, the Bible has contradictions in it as well as known edits at various times in history. At some point, you have to chose which contradicting passage you believe in (or neither!), because it can't possibly be both. By editing the Bible, someone has also chosen for you, whether you know it or not.
It doesn't matter how I have read it, or how you think you've read it, or what your pastor/minister/priest/whatever told you about it. Not you, or I, or anyone else has a hope of ever pointing to a passage -- any passage -- and be able to say with certainty that it's the true word of God.
That's my point -- this is why religion is such a waste of time -- everybody goes around believing in stuff that is indistinguishable from stuff someone just made up.
Why even bother with history, when you must admit it contains errors?
History books can be checked against and cross-referenced with other facts -- ruins, fossil evidence, artefacts, multiple sources, geological evidence, art, and linguistics.
The theological content of the Bible is the whole thing, in and of itself. There's few "real world" facts that it can be verified against. The few parts that can be verified -- like the creation story -- prove to be false, or otherwise are plain historical content instead of theological material.
And truthfully, I don't bother all that much about history. It's interesting, entertaining even, but at the back of my mind I always know that the accuracy and authenticity is limited. I don't base my life on history. I don't force rules or behaviour onto others based on history. I don't change my vote based on history.
Theres a lot of good stuff in there
But which part is the "true word of God", and which part is myth, fabrication, or distortion? Based on authority or faith alone, you can't possibly know, not even in principle!
Decide what part of it (none, some, most, all) you believe.
You are in no position to 'decide', and nobody else is either. That's the problem. It doesn't matter how you feel about a passage, or whether you agree with it or not. The only thing that ought to matter is if the passage is the true word of God or not -- and that's not something that can ever be determined from ink on dead trees.
For example, what if God approves of rape and slavery? It says so right in the Bible, so there's a decent chance that he does! You might decide to skip over those bits -- but then you no longer believe in the word of God -- and you are no longer a Christian.
My denomination tends ...
Exactly. You're not a true Christian who believes in the word of God. You picked some random mishmash to believe in that made you feel good.
Don't worry though -- I'm yet to meet two theists who could agree with each other on the specifics, so you're not exactly unique in that regard. I bet that if I quizzed two random people from your denomination, they wouldn't agree with each other, let alone with some other random theist...
That's all fine and good, but in a large enterprise, that's just not practical.
No matter how much you pay your employees, or how nicely you treat them, you just can't be that certain about people. A substantial portion of the population has mental issues. Given enough employees, it's virtually guaranteed that you have at least a couple of psychotic or psychopathic employees. Even if your IT people are all carefully vetted, their managers need to be too, otherwise they could be mistreated until they snap. I've been to government organisations with 800+ IT employees, where the vast majority of the critical systems were a part of a single AD domain. One guy with one password can blow away a chunk of the government in about a minute!
It's like bad memory in a computer -- no matter how good your software, your hardware can cause anything to crash. Currently, organisations have to completely trust their employees, but what if they didn't have to?
My point is that if we can protect against bad memory (ECC, lockstep computing, etc...), then it ought to be possible to protect against rogue employees?
For example, turnkey, tamper-proof systems that can be installed in such a way that the corporation doesn't have to completely trust a single employee. Or systems that could be only be set up with full trust, but then could enter a "production" mode after which full trust is no longer required.
Most of their data is pure disk. There's been several articles floating about on the internet about it. Some critical stuff is backed up, like the old-school relational databases, source code, etc... but the vast majority of their data isn't. Sure, they could reproduce their indexes by re-scanning the internet, but how long would that take?
Has anyone noticed that every system claiming "enterprise" robustness only ever protect against untrusted third parties or component failure? I think there's an enormous amount of research waiting to be done to develop systems that are robust against attacks by rogue administrators. Think about it this way: a modern distributed cluster can be made robust against nuclear warfare, but not a grumpy admin!
Technologies like the kind developed by internet pirates could be applied to enterprise systems. For example, protocols like Bittorrent are designed to be robust against malicious peers. The lessons learned by Wikipedia (where everyone is an 'admin') could be applied too, such as enforced versioning of all configuration changes.
Similarly, multi-party authentication should be an option for critical enterprise systems. It should be possible to mark objects such as VMs or service accounts as "critical", allowing configuration changes only if, say, three admins authenticate together, like in a nuclear launch. This isn't a new concept -- Certificate Authorities often require secondary approval to issue certain types of certificates.
The need will become ever greater as the trend of moving away from tape towards snapshots and replicas accelerates. Do you seriously think Google backs up to tape? Or Amazon? Or any cloud provider? They don't! They just keep two to thee copies of everything, and hope that none of their thousands of administrators ever cracks and does the equivalent of "rm -rf *" on the entire cloud all at once!
Unfortunately, a business with general purpose servers running Windows or Linux are out of luck. Even if someone were to come up with, say, a virtual hosting environment that's robust against even administrators, that wouldn't prevent other mass attacks, such as formatting the SAN (shudder), deleting every object from the Active Directory domain, or my favourite: setting an encryption key on the backups for a month before leaving, wiping the password, and then formatting every server in parallel. Just resetting every password in the system at once is enough to bring most organisations to their knees, and can be done in seconds! How long would it take your organisation to recover from that? You'll just restore the AD from tape, right? Step one: log on to the backup server... err...
Remember: Mirrors won't help. Replicas won't save you. Snapshots can be deleted just like everything else. If the business didn't have off-site tape backups of everything, it's game over.
I've only seen the Sixth Sense once, and I doubt I'll watch it again. The whole point of that movie was the shock of the revelation at the end. That got me in a way that would have been impossible if I had even a suspicion up front of what was going on.
Even for people that like to know an ending, that movie would have been ruined for them if they knew the ending, or nowhere near as enjoyable at any rate. Here's the thing: even if they swear up and down that it was still a great movie, they'll never know how much more they could have enjoyed having not known the ending!
Not everyone reads books or enjoys movies the same way. I actually have a preference for material where I don't even know the genre up front, let alone the plot! Some of the most enjoyable books for me have been random selections. One of the reasons I stopped watching TV was the obnoxious trailers, ads, previews, and interviews would conspire to ruin every single blockbuster movie, without exception.
There's been a trend recently for movie trailers to show every character, all of the funniest jokes, the plot twist, and it's resolution. That's just obnoxious.
Try running "gpresult" at the command prompt and see what "Site" your PC thinks that it's in.
Quite often what happens is that the "Sites & Services" configuration is messed up, and PCs pick their domain controllers randomly instead of locating the nearest one. This is murder on logon times, because everybody logs on all at once in the morning, taxing WAN links and underpowered domain controllers.
I had the same experience -- time to Outlook + Visual Studio was ~15 minutes.
I got an SSD, copied across the exact same system image, and it dropped to 40 seconds, of which 20 seconds was the BIOS, and that took as long as it did only because my computer had 8GB of RAM and had no option for skipping the memory check.
Best hardware purchase ever.
You really think that hasn't been done?
There aren't that many papers that even begin to cover the reasoning behind the simplifications made. A meta-study done recently showed that even the few papers that did mention the simplifications often just hand-waved it away without rigorously proving that a simplification can be made at all.
If reality doesn't match a theory, and the theory chosen is known to be wrong, the very first step must be to redo everything with the more complex, more correct theory. Anything else is a huge waste of everyone's time.
Secondly, most people assume that dark matter theories say something like: "matter in a galaxy is spinning with some radial velocity distribution X, has Y mass with distribution Z, but requires +W mass to explain X."
In fact, it's more like: "we can barely tell what mass the galaxy is, we're guessing based on luminosity, and based on observed velocity distribution X, we can determine the mass distribution Z using a simulation, but the simulation doesn't work unless we tweak the hell out of it. Adding a bunch of mass +W helps, but it's still wonky." The only "known" is the velocity distribution. Everything else is a wild guess, and the curve fitting is done using a long-running simulation with huge amounts of non-linear feedback using the wrong equations. What could possibly go wrong?