When I was contracting at a Fortune 50 ten years ago, there was a strict company policy that no company confidential information was to pass through the French public telephone network. They had it on very good authority that the French equivalent of the NSA was handing information to French companies to enable them to underbid.
Where did they get this information? I don't know, but I've always surmised that the NSA found out about it while bugging the French.
Get off your high horse. The NSA is no more evil than the spook agencies of every other country in the world. It's just better funded.
How did a post that says, "Mac OSX won't run existing Mac software" get up to a 5?
Perhaps because the context was Mac OS X on Intel hardware? I very much doubt that a port would run OS 9 PPC software out of the box, and even if it did, it would be at a prohibitive decrease in processing speed.
I did not know that. Good to see that they have at least some of their priorities straight. Are they still spraying for malaria control as well?
If someone wanted to really make a difference in world healthcare, they'd refocus half of the current HIV money on prevention and throw the rest into malaria research. If I recall correctly, more people die of malaria every month than die of AIDS every year. But malaria doesn't really affect rich people in the West and is therefore ignored.
On second thought, scratch that. Take the money and devote it to getting potable water to 100% of the population. Goodbye cholera, typhus, tapeworms, and river blindness, not too mention childhood diarhea. It boggles the mind that we can't accomplish this seemingly simple task. Then I realize that it ain't all that simple.
It is, of course, a temporary solution. The big problem is that the total eradication of urban rat populations just isn't feasible right now, so they eventually come back. DDT can do a real number on the fleas, but it has other problems and isn't used anymore. The fleas do not seem to breed on humans to the extent that they do on rats (there are other species of fleas that thrive on humans, but they aren't plague vectors.) Of course as soon as one case of Bubonic move to Pneumonic, you've got an entirely different problem since it is directly contagious. This is what apparently happened in Surat, India in 1994. Pnemonic plague is just plain nasty, although modern antibiotics have a chance, if diagnosed early enough.
Like we eradicated smallpox and are working on polio? No, I have no problem with the eradication of the TseTse since it has become feasible before eradication of the trypanosome (sp?). Hopefully that will be extinct shortly after its main vector passes away.
In a plague epidemic you kill the rats, to kill the fleas, which means that good old Yersina Pestis ends up dying too.
No, no, he needs the new release, Uber Secure Extended Linux - Enhanced Services Support. The laptop module in this release also removes the Battery(tm) in addition to the PowerCord(tm).
And what would you think the reaction of the Chinese government would be if a Beijing newspaper ran a simliar report on the state of Tibet? There would be a hell of a lot more reaction that miscellaneous "attacks and threats" and I very much doubt that the editors of that newspaper would be "vindicated in the end" unless you mean "posthumously" by that statement.
Nixon was a thoroughly evil man, but the system he operated in mitigated the effect. The Chinese system has had no such mitigatory effect on the butchers of Tienamen.
Re:Once again, Slashdotters want to have it both w
on
Read the Fine Print
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· Score: 2
And who says that this will be used only (or even primarily)for security upgrades? It would be just as easy to introduce subtle file incompatibilities in Word or major differences in the.NET environment to screw potential competitors. How long before an automatic download kills MP3 playback and suggests conversion to Media Player?
A lot of us lost all trust in Microsoft a long time ago. Once lost, trust is a very difficult thing to regain.
A "taint" mode would do nothing to catch these. Perl doesn't let you manipulate pointers and storage directly, so it's no big thing there. C#'s unsafe mode code does, and that's the big problem.
You could also argue that the published spec for the GART states that it shouldn't worry and the OS developers didn't read the spec and assumed that everything worked just like a Pentium *.
Thus by conforming to a specific implementation, rather than the published spec, it is an OS bug. My architecture knowledge is rusty enough to be unsure which answer is correct.
There's an angle to this you may not be considering. Mass document retention can be used as against you if you are sued. The following happened at a friend's former employer:
Worker leaves company on bad terms and decides to sue for discrimination.
Discovery begins. Lawyers for former employee discover that the sysadmin has backup copies of the email system for the entire tenure of the former employee, over five years!
Accusing company of "broad widespread discrimination" including the passing of (race|sex)ist jokes in electronic mail, the lawyers demand the complete e-mail records of the company: on paper
Judge grants request, is upheld on appeal.
Firm is obstinate and goes through with it, even though the costs of restoring and printing the e-mails exceeded the former employee's settlement offer.
Firm wins lawsuit, but is still out the dollars, since we don't have loser pays.
This firm had nothing to hide, but was still burned badly by a poorly thought out document retention policy. Needless to say, they have since changed policies.
Please note that my friend had just taken over the IT department when this happened. He was not the individual suing.
That's an excellent idea. You should go and do that:)
I like this. It's sort of the MBA equivalent of Linus' "shut up and show me the code." Of course a lot of people like to complain about Free Software without contributing a lick of code, too...
Now my Computing Theory class was a long time ago, but I thought the Halting Problem proved that no program P existed that could take as input any program X and determine whether or not X halted on every possible input.
This is a long way from saying that no program can be proven to halt on every input! I offer the following assembly language program as a counterexample:
HALT
Okay, so I'm being a wise-ass here, but the point is you can prove programs correct, but it's a hell of a lot of work, and you can't automate the general case.
Some 60 year old senator who knows nothing about computer technology probably passed a law that said they had to use 9-track tapes.
More likely somebody got a tax cut by slashing the technology budget for the agency. I work for a small non-profit and we upgrade our hardware and software more often than some of the government agencies we work with.
We are seeing a mature market at work here. For the average user there is very very little to differentiate modern desktop computers from each other. The average user does not care that his/her machine has a 2 Gigahertz peni^wprocessor, they just want to get e-mail, write letters and possibly mess with the pictures from their brand new one megapixel digicam that they got at Wal-Mart for a hundred bucks.
Why have so many PT Cruisers and new Beetles been sold? An old boxy Buick outperforms both cars and is so much cheaper. Many people with large disposable incomes prefer form over function. That seems to be Apple's target market.
Yeah, but seeing as how/. is a 'news site', and this forum is discussing the new Apple - it would be fair use.
No, it isn't. The Washington Post can't run The New york Times' photos without paying them for the priviledge. You or I could photocopy the image and file it away to remind ourselves of what the new iMac looked like, or to use as toilet paper. Fair use doesn't include distribution, particularly commercial distribution.
We wouldn't want all the resulting water vapor polluting our atmosphere, and our poor mother earth.
Little known fact: H20 is a greenhouse gas. It's not nearly as bad as CO2, but it can contribute to warming the planet. Of course, I seriously doubt that shuttle launches contribute materially to any kind of warming. We don't launch them very often, and the atmosphere is big. It's just that the idea of "water-vapor pollution" might not be as far-fetched as you make it out to be.
On the other hand, lots of water vapor should also cause more cloud formation, which raises the albedo and should lower the average temperature. There are days that I think that climate science is even more dismal than economics...
Given the theory "An infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters"; with the random noise it has before formatting, the drive should already have your entire MP3 collection on it.:-\
It was interesting enough for the Soviets to use it as their main method when spying on the West. It's all a matter of how valuable the security of the message is. I believe that the US's nuclear launch codes are all one-time padded, for instance.
When the cost of a security breach is more expensive than couriering the keys, the one-time pad becomes very useful.
The only thing I can think of that would drive voice-driven navigation is access to the web through cell phones. Of course, there are a lot of other problems (screen-size anyone?) to overcome as well.
Still, I could see some use for a voice-driven interface to a web-mail portal, so my phone can read me my voice mail, and for things like news and stock quotes as well. Of course, these things may already exist, and I've just been too Neanderthal to figure out how to do them from my cell.
Slashdot Mirror
Other definitions of the word "geek"
Call Benjamin Moore?
When I was contracting at a Fortune 50 ten years ago, there was a strict company policy that no company confidential information was to pass through the French public telephone network. They had it on very good authority that the French equivalent of the NSA was handing information to French companies to enable them to underbid.
Where did they get this information? I don't know, but I've always surmised that the NSA found out about it while bugging the French.
Get off your high horse. The NSA is no more evil than the spook agencies of every other country in the world. It's just better funded.
Perhaps because the context was Mac OS X on Intel hardware? I very much doubt that a port would run OS 9 PPC software out of the box, and even if it did, it would be at a prohibitive decrease in processing speed.
If someone wanted to really make a difference in world healthcare, they'd refocus half of the current HIV money on prevention and throw the rest into malaria research. If I recall correctly, more people die of malaria every month than die of AIDS every year. But malaria doesn't really affect rich people in the West and is therefore ignored.
On second thought, scratch that. Take the money and devote it to getting potable water to 100% of the population. Goodbye cholera, typhus, tapeworms, and river blindness, not too mention childhood diarhea. It boggles the mind that we can't accomplish this seemingly simple task. Then I realize that it ain't all that simple.
It is, of course, a temporary solution. The big problem is that the total eradication of urban rat populations just isn't feasible right now, so they eventually come back. DDT can do a real number on the fleas, but it has other problems and isn't used anymore. The fleas do not seem to breed on humans to the extent that they do on rats (there are other species of fleas that thrive on humans, but they aren't plague vectors.) Of course as soon as one case of Bubonic move to Pneumonic, you've got an entirely different problem since it is directly contagious. This is what apparently happened in Surat, India in 1994. Pnemonic plague is just plain nasty, although modern antibiotics have a chance, if diagnosed early enough.
In a plague epidemic you kill the rats, to kill the fleas, which means that good old Yersina Pestis ends up dying too.
It's been a long day.
Nixon was a thoroughly evil man, but the system he operated in mitigated the effect. The Chinese system has had no such mitigatory effect on the butchers of Tienamen.
A lot of us lost all trust in Microsoft a long time ago. Once lost, trust is a very difficult thing to regain.
Yes, I just spent the last week resolving DLL-hell for someone. Someone please tell me that XP has adopted a sane shared library implementation!
A "taint" mode would do nothing to catch these. Perl doesn't let you manipulate pointers and storage directly, so it's no big thing there. C#'s unsafe mode code does, and that's the big problem.
I wonder what their poetry sounds like? At least it would be set to music, I suppose...
You could also argue that the published spec for the GART states that it shouldn't worry and the OS developers didn't read the spec and assumed that everything worked just like a Pentium *.
Thus by conforming to a specific implementation, rather than the published spec, it is an OS bug. My architecture knowledge is rusty enough to be unsure which answer is correct.
This firm had nothing to hide, but was still burned badly by a poorly thought out document retention policy. Needless to say, they have since changed policies.
Please note that my friend had just taken over the IT department when this happened. He was not the individual suing.
I like this. It's sort of the MBA equivalent of Linus' "shut up and show me the code." Of course a lot of people like to complain about Free Software without contributing a lick of code, too...
This is a long way from saying that no program can be proven to halt on every input! I offer the following assembly language program as a counterexample:
HALT
Okay, so I'm being a wise-ass here, but the point is you can prove programs correct, but it's a hell of a lot of work, and you can't automate the general case.
More likely somebody got a tax cut by slashing the technology budget for the agency. I work for a small non-profit and we upgrade our hardware and software more often than some of the government agencies we work with.
Maybe you should try Python? There's a lot fewer {}s! With a decent editor you rarely have to hit the key for indentation as well.
Now I've gone and done it. A language flamewar and an editor flamewar all in one message!
Why have so many PT Cruisers and new Beetles been sold? An old boxy Buick outperforms both cars and is so much cheaper. Many people with large disposable incomes prefer form over function. That seems to be Apple's target market.
No, it isn't. The Washington Post can't run The New york Times' photos without paying them for the priviledge. You or I could photocopy the image and file it away to remind ourselves of what the new iMac looked like, or to use as toilet paper. Fair use doesn't include distribution, particularly commercial distribution.
Little known fact: H20 is a greenhouse gas. It's not nearly as bad as CO2, but it can contribute to warming the planet. Of course, I seriously doubt that shuttle launches contribute materially to any kind of warming. We don't launch them very often, and the atmosphere is big. It's just that the idea of "water-vapor pollution" might not be as far-fetched as you make it out to be.
On the other hand, lots of water vapor should also cause more cloud formation, which raises the albedo and should lower the average temperature. There are days that I think that climate science is even more dismal than economics...
But finding a given song would be a real bitch...
When the cost of a security breach is more expensive than couriering the keys, the one-time pad becomes very useful.
Still, I could see some use for a voice-driven interface to a web-mail portal, so my phone can read me my voice mail, and for things like news and stock quotes as well. Of course, these things may already exist, and I've just been too Neanderthal to figure out how to do them from my cell.