I had occasion to visit Alaska this last summer, and one can walk up to some of the glaciers and see the markers on rocks showing where the front of the glacier was in, say, 1973. Glaciers are always moving, and they are generally fed by ice fields. The rate of retreat of a glacier is dependent on how quickly the ice field grows and how quickly the face calves.
Glaciers advance more slowly in the winter, because everything is frozen, if anything I might expect the seasonal front of the glacier advance further during the summer.
script kiddies have had access to a plethora of off the shelf rootkits for some time. There's even one they can install just by putting a SonyBMG music CD in the machine for a few minutes. =+P
Okay, so the sony one won't obfuscate processes, but wandering around the darker corners of the 'net will find you plenty of free or cheap commodity rootkit kits.
Students should have their own computers. I remember having to work my ass off one summer to afford my first computer in college, and I couldn't afford a printer so I was always having to run to the lab fifteen minutes before my English Composition GE class to print out my essays. Fortunately I was able to stop using printers once my course load switched completely to CS. My point, however, is that if I could earn the $2k needed for a decent computer ten years ago working a summer at a boy scout camp, then you can earn the $500 needed to buy a Dell Back-To-School speacial today. Go ahead, try to prove me wrong.
That being said, I know what it's like to be without an internet connection or a computer of my own for extended periods of time. My solution was to get a shell account on a departmental server and carry around a floppy with putty-ssh and a private key. Keyloggers can pick up my private key password, but they won't be able to log in to the server without the private key itself. These days do a simple s/floppy/usbfob/ and that's pretty doable. Also, keep a (free as in beer) webmail account which you use for non-sensitive communications in case you need to contact someone from a public terminal that seems sketchy.
Speaking as the son of portrait and wedding photographers:
Wedding photographers earn their income using a model that depends on the labor they expend on actually photographing the wedding. If you are hiring a wedding photographer, you are paying them to spend a certain number of hours taking pictures at your ceremony/reception. This involves a certain level of effort, skill, and judgement on the part of the photographer.
Most photographers will sell you a package that gives you an album and a certain number of prints included in the price. Most wedding photographers do not do their own printing, it's not worth the time, effort and risk when it can be done by professional photo labs for a reasonable price and with a guarantee of quality.
I don't know about the majority of wedding photographers, but my parents only charge a small percentage of the fabrication cost as a service fee for reproductions and extra prints, though they do maintain rights to the originals for the explicit purpose of not being sued by the clients if one of their photos ends up at the county fair or on their website.
You, sir, discredit the open source movement with your fanaticism by making such outlandish statements.
While the original poster is undoubtably a linux fan, I think it's unfair to suggest he's being unreasonable. There are several articles, studies, and analyses that conclude running unpatched windows on a network is dangerous. You seem to be a diligent user who probably runs a gateway firewall, personal firewalls, and/or anti-virus software on all of your connected windows boxen as well as keeping them up to date through Microsoft's security patches, etc. However, the sad truth is that the majority of home users are not so diligent.
Here is an article on survival time of unpatched windows machines connected to the internet. I have heard anecdotes from friends associated with SANS that the mean time between hostile probes of any given internet address is about 24 seconds. Given that most people do not take proper precautions when installing windows, most machines are comprimised before they are able to log into the windows update servers to check for critical patches.
So, where the initial poster was incorrect about it being possible to run windows securely connected to the internet, their defeatist opinioned posture is founded in some strong factual evidence.
Haven't we learned by now that the current administration thrives on deficiencies in information? Won't DDOSing republican sites simply help them in their strategy of spreading ignorance and blind faith?
I think the best thing that could happen to the Bush campaign would be an attack on the republican convention which knocked out all news feeds. Then they can point fingers at the "Evil Terrorists" who don't want Americans to express their "Freedom" by hearing from, and voting for, the current Anti-Terrorist administration.
Remember that the campaign in 2000 was won by a candidate who refused all public debates until the final days leading up to November 2nd.
Not all things that exist have proper measurements. Not all measurements really guage the extent of a thing. Measurements are developed by people, and measurements are somewhat subjective. Measurements are also "Theories", they are not proveably correct.
Now, given these observations:
We can measure "ruining the environment" by the percentage of irreplaceable natural resources consumed. it's a difficult number to calculate, but I think it would be a good measure.
We might also take a more humanist measurement, looking at an indicator such as mortality. How many people each year become ill or die from pollution. How many birth defects from mothers living in industrial areas.
Bird populations might also be a good indicator for regional environments.
There are many things, even in the hard sciences, that we can only measure by effects. There are many effects we can measure that don't really exist as well. Put a cat in a sealed box. can you measure the cat while it is in the box? you might measure the frequency of the sounds eminating from the box; you may measure the subtle movements as the cat paces back and forth or scratches the side of the box, you may *infer* that there is a cat in the box, but measurements will never tell you for sure.
Measurements are only useful in creating, and applying to, theories in order to make predictions. Theories are not facts, they are creations of imagination, and they are fallable.
Finally, examples are instances of observations. Observations are measurements too. I think what you are asking for is a ruler. rulers are netoriously difficult inventions, and it takes a wealth of experience with observations of corner cases to produce an accurate one. Unfortunately with the environment there is very little opportunity to observe it's destruction. I suppose we need to finish the job properly so we can have an accurate measure. Then we will be better able to predict the environment's demise the next time around...
I don't agree with some posters' assertion that this is security through obscurity, though it is probably equivalent to a plain text password (since anyone sniffing the network could easily ascertain the winning combination). However, you could accomplish the same thing with, say, a UDP packet carrying encrypted contents. One could use a shared key to exchange a hash of a password or some other time based secret. One could even reply with the ICMP Port Unreachable message to throw off UDP port scanners. On a succesfully authenticated UDP packet, the server could open a service port and listen only for the address that sent the UDP packet for a period of time. I think as far as security protocols go, this has about the same characteristics as a call-back protocol.
Actually, colored light is used in communications to add bandwidth over optical fiber networks, it's called Frequency Division Multiplexing. Apparently there are PHY chips commercially available now that will multiplex quite a few different 'colors'.
I'm more interested in the analogue possibilities. I read a paper about a year ago that featured theory on how to do certain quantum computing operations using 'white' light and refraction.
Think about a "search oracle" that you could stuff into a database system. =+)
"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports, autonomous military systems, high-definition multimedia broadcast systems and advanced next-generation communications systems."
I seem to remember the same claims about the 486. Just wait till the software guys get a hold of this...
well, to be fair, this is a DSP, and perhaps we could get another big leap in commercial graphics and network applications out of this.
Only 19 points for explaining string theory with sock puppets? I know theoretical physisists who don't understand string theory well enough to explain in a years worth of lectures. IMHO this is an extremely underrated item =+/
I'm just afraid that apple might do something like switch to Intel because it's more "cost effective". (read "higher profit")
I'm sorry for the unsupported flame, but the PowerPC architecture is just so much... NICer. I feel more secure when I have an ISA under the hood that I could concievably understand reading through.
I don't believe the "Golden Handcuffs" of reverse compatibility is worth the inherent complexity and constraints of what is essentially an "extended 8-bit architecture".
While I agree that you get most of the benefits from BSD that you would get from OS X on an intel box, there is one other issue that may be taken into account: Developer's Market.
I would expect that most commercial developers would jump for a platform that allows them to market to both architectures with just a simple recompile. This could benefit more "main-stream" users by letting them buy the commercial "user-friendly", "buzzword compliant", and "developer supported" software they may want.
Wouldn't it be cool if you could buy FileMaker or Photoshop for OS X/Intel and have absolutely no change in paradigm?
mind I would sort of like to see a distribution of Aqua/Quartz for *BSD/L*nux, but then there might be... ooo, something shiny!
Where I have to agree with just about everything you have said, I thought the movie had it's merrits.
I laughed and hid under my cloak through the entire movie! You can't intend to make a film this bad =+).
It seemed to be a consensus among the friends I saw it with that this movie was the result of someone's first poorly laid out campaign, where all the players were still struggling with the idea of "acting the part". (note the extremely dramatic dialogue where the characters pause __ between __ every __ word!)
We went to this movie expecting it to be bad, and we were right, but it was a lot of fun!
I seem to remember a study (may have been done by
CAIDA) in which
it was theorized that the internet is only 19 links "wide".
This was meant to mean that any site can be reached through following 19 links or less from any other site. I would guess that this would not
apply to linkless pages, but otherwise wouldn't every site containing any kind of valid link link to DeCSS through "a series of links"?
Here's another application which hits home for me;
if you are building an autonomous flying helicopter which can only lift a total of about 25 pounds including power supply, fuel, and control hardware, you need something very small (both mass and form), something with enough processor speed to handle polling of devices at several hundred times per second (including video, GPS, and rangefinder/leveler), and have to do it for at least as long as the whole thing can fly on available fuel, preferably a full tank on a.60 engine (approximately 15 minutes), then something like this might be vary usefull. On the other hand, there are general purpose embedded systems which probably do better on the power requirements with comparable form factor (not quite that small) which are a whole lot cheaper and may be better suited to those specific (embedded) applications.
Data collection doesn't usually need such form factor; nor does it need a general purpose machine such as a 486 w/ a huge hard drive. I wonder if there are any general purpose applications which require such a form factor? That would be the niche for this device.
My school just got a brand new G3 lab [UCSD AP&M basement, next to UAPE, for my fellow students] I'm not sure which version, but StarOffice is installed on every one of the new machines. The interface isn't completely Mac-ified, but it's elegant in a number of ways and fairly intuitive.
As far as the linux version is concerned, if they're not going to release the source, I wish Sun would precompile SO for all those other architectures (ppc, alpha, etc.)
One of the things that make the internet such a wonderfull place is it's freedom. Another is the posibility of viable static or passive defenses.
And if a fourteen year old suburbanite script kiddie can have a chance to crack a major corporation, then why not some hostile military? It shouldn't make a difference. If they've got their security act together, there oughtent be a reason to deny the opportunity to attack.
... I'm currently involved in a very slow moving project (school affiliated) where the ONLY documentation we have, outside the *extremely* well commented code, is a napkin I picked up at a cafeteria on a DoE site while travelling through Washington state which is currently holding my place about 2/3 the way through Hofstadter's G.E.B. --mind you, this project isn't progressing very quickly, but, as far as I know, poor documentation has never been a setback. =+P
On my first big project (as an intern mind you, but I think this gives me a bit of "beginners insight"), I learned that documentation takes up about 40% of the allotted time on a major project. We started with UML diagrams, the whole thing taking four coders and a manager the better part of a day. by the end of the week 90% of the UML stuff had been rewritten, resubmitted to managers, and integrated into the project. Each coder was responsible for logging docs on functions/subroutines/algorithms/objects/etc. that they had written (along with a brief description of usage and functionality) into a central database, and everything we wrote was peer reviewed at least once... Come to think of it, the whole thing seems a bit tedious now, but at the time it was really no big deal, and it got the job done.
Slashdot Mirror
I had occasion to visit Alaska this last summer, and one can walk up to some of the glaciers and see the markers on rocks showing where the front of the glacier was in, say, 1973. Glaciers are always moving, and they are generally fed by ice fields. The rate of retreat of a glacier is dependent on how quickly the ice field grows and how quickly the face calves.
Glaciers advance more slowly in the winter, because everything is frozen, if anything I might expect the seasonal front of the glacier advance further during the summer.
script kiddies have had access to a plethora of off the shelf rootkits for some time. There's even one they can install just by putting a SonyBMG music CD in the machine for a few minutes.
=+P
Okay, so the sony one won't obfuscate processes, but wandering around the darker corners of the 'net will find you plenty of free or cheap commodity rootkit kits.
Students should have their own computers. I remember having to work my ass off one summer to afford my first computer in college, and I couldn't afford a printer so I was always having to run to the lab fifteen minutes before my English Composition GE class to print out my essays. Fortunately I was able to stop using printers once my course load switched completely to CS. My point, however, is that if I could earn the $2k needed for a decent computer ten years ago working a summer at a boy scout camp, then you can earn the $500 needed to buy a Dell Back-To-School speacial today. Go ahead, try to prove me wrong.
That being said, I know what it's like to be without an internet connection or a computer of my own for extended periods of time. My solution was to get a shell account on a departmental server and carry around a floppy with putty-ssh and a private key. Keyloggers can pick up my private key password, but they won't be able to log in to the server without the private key itself. These days do a simple s/floppy/usbfob/ and that's pretty doable. Also, keep a (free as in beer) webmail account which you use for non-sensitive communications in case you need to contact someone from a public terminal that seems sketchy.
Speaking as the son of portrait and wedding photographers:
Wedding photographers earn their income using a model that depends on the labor they expend on actually photographing the wedding. If you are hiring a wedding photographer, you are paying them to spend a certain number of hours taking pictures at your ceremony/reception. This involves a certain level of effort, skill, and judgement on the part of the photographer.
Most photographers will sell you a package that gives you an album and a certain number of prints included in the price. Most wedding photographers do not do their own printing, it's not worth the time, effort and risk when it can be done by professional photo labs for a reasonable price and with a guarantee of quality.
I don't know about the majority of wedding photographers, but my parents only charge a small percentage of the fabrication cost as a service fee for reproductions and extra prints, though they do maintain rights to the originals for the explicit purpose of not being sued by the clients if one of their photos ends up at the county fair or on their website.
While the original poster is undoubtably a linux fan, I think it's unfair to suggest he's being unreasonable. There are several articles, studies, and analyses that conclude running unpatched windows on a network is dangerous. You seem to be a diligent user who probably runs a gateway firewall, personal firewalls, and/or anti-virus software on all of your connected windows boxen as well as keeping them up to date through Microsoft's security patches, etc. However, the sad truth is that the majority of home users are not so diligent. Here is an article on survival time of unpatched windows machines connected to the internet. I have heard anecdotes from friends associated with SANS that the mean time between hostile probes of any given internet address is about 24 seconds. Given that most people do not take proper precautions when installing windows, most machines are comprimised before they are able to log into the windows update servers to check for critical patches.
So, where the initial poster was incorrect about it being possible to run windows securely connected to the internet, their defeatist opinioned posture is founded in some strong factual evidence.
Haven't we learned by now that the current administration thrives on deficiencies in information? Won't DDOSing republican sites simply help them in their strategy of spreading ignorance and blind faith?
I think the best thing that could happen to the Bush campaign would be an attack on the republican convention which knocked out all news feeds. Then they can point fingers at the "Evil Terrorists" who don't want Americans to express their "Freedom" by hearing from, and voting for, the current Anti-Terrorist administration.
Remember that the campaign in 2000 was won by a candidate who refused all public debates until the final days leading up to November 2nd.
Not all things that exist have proper measurements. Not all measurements really guage the extent of a thing. Measurements are developed by people, and measurements are somewhat subjective. Measurements are also "Theories", they are not proveably correct.
Now, given these observations:
We can measure "ruining the environment" by the percentage of irreplaceable natural resources consumed. it's a difficult number to calculate, but I think it would be a good measure.
We might also take a more humanist measurement, looking at an indicator such as mortality. How many people each year become ill or die from pollution. How many birth defects from mothers living in industrial areas.
Bird populations might also be a good indicator for regional environments.
There are many things, even in the hard sciences, that we can only measure by effects. There are many effects we can measure that don't really exist as well. Put a cat in a sealed box. can you measure the cat while it is in the box? you might measure the frequency of the sounds eminating from the box; you may measure the subtle movements as the cat paces back and forth or scratches the side of the box, you may *infer* that there is a cat in the box, but measurements will never tell you for sure.
Measurements are only useful in creating, and applying to, theories in order to make predictions. Theories are not facts, they are creations of imagination, and they are fallable.
Finally, examples are instances of observations. Observations are measurements too. I think what you are asking for is a ruler. rulers are netoriously difficult inventions, and it takes a wealth of experience with observations of corner cases to produce an accurate one. Unfortunately with the environment there is very little opportunity to observe it's destruction. I suppose we need to finish the job properly so we can have an accurate measure. Then we will be better able to predict the environment's demise the next time around...
I don't agree with some posters' assertion that this is security through obscurity, though it is probably equivalent to a plain text password (since anyone sniffing the network could easily ascertain the winning combination). However, you could accomplish the same thing with, say, a UDP packet carrying encrypted contents. One could use a shared key to exchange a hash of a password or some other time based secret. One could even reply with the ICMP Port Unreachable message to throw off UDP port scanners. On a succesfully authenticated UDP packet, the server could open a service port and listen only for the address that sent the UDP packet for a period of time. I think as far as security protocols go, this has about the same characteristics as a call-back protocol.
Otherwise, nifty idea.
I'm all for option 3.
Actually, colored light is used in communications to add bandwidth over optical fiber networks, it's called Frequency Division Multiplexing. Apparently there are PHY chips commercially available now that will multiplex quite a few different 'colors'.
I'm more interested in the analogue possibilities. I read a paper about a year ago that featured theory on how to do certain quantum computing operations using 'white' light and refraction.
Think about a "search oracle" that you could stuff into a database system. =+)
"Processing at the speed of light, you can have safer airports, autonomous military systems, high-definition multimedia broadcast systems and advanced next-generation communications systems."
I seem to remember the same claims about the 486. Just wait till the software guys get a hold of this...
well, to be fair, this is a DSP, and perhaps we could get another big leap in commercial graphics and network applications out of this.
Only 19 points for explaining string theory with sock puppets?
I know theoretical physisists who don't understand string theory well enough to explain in a years worth of lectures.
IMHO this is an extremely underrated item =+/
Now that this article has hit, I can't access Ace's site...
=+P
I'm just afraid that apple might do something like switch to Intel because it's more "cost effective". (read "higher profit")
I'm sorry for the unsupported flame, but the PowerPC architecture is just so much ... NICer. I feel more secure when I have an ISA under the hood that I could concievably understand reading through.
I don't believe the "Golden Handcuffs" of reverse compatibility is worth the inherent complexity and constraints of what is essentially an "extended 8-bit architecture".
While I agree that you get most of the benefits from BSD that you would get from OS X on an intel box, there is one other issue that may be taken into account: Developer's Market.
I would expect that most commercial developers would jump for a platform that allows them to market to both architectures with just a simple recompile. This could benefit more "main-stream" users by letting them buy the commercial "user-friendly", "buzzword compliant", and "developer supported" software they may want.
Wouldn't it be cool if you could buy FileMaker or Photoshop for OS X/Intel and have absolutely no change in paradigm?
mind I would sort of like to see a distribution of Aqua/Quartz for *BSD/L*nux, but then there might be... ooo, something shiny!
Where I have to agree with just about everything you have said, I thought the movie had it's merrits.
I laughed and hid under my cloak through the entire movie! You can't intend to make a film this bad =+).
It seemed to be a consensus among the friends I saw it with that this movie was the result of someone's first poorly laid out campaign, where all the players were still struggling with the idea of "acting the part". (note the extremely dramatic dialogue where the characters pause __ between __ every __ word!)
We went to this movie expecting it to be bad, and we were right, but it was a lot of fun!
I seem to remember a study (may have been done by CAIDA) in which it was theorized that the internet is only 19 links "wide".
This was meant to mean that any site can be reached through following 19 links or less from any other site. I would guess that this would not apply to linkless pages, but otherwise wouldn't every site containing any kind of valid link link to DeCSS through "a series of links"?
Just my two cents...
--dgc
Here's another application which hits home for me; .60 engine (approximately 15 minutes), then something like this might be vary usefull. On the other hand, there are general purpose embedded systems which probably do better on the power requirements with comparable form factor (not quite that small) which are a whole lot cheaper and may be better suited to those specific (embedded) applications.
if you are building an autonomous flying helicopter which can only lift a total of about 25 pounds including power supply, fuel, and control hardware, you need something very small (both mass and form), something with enough processor speed to handle polling of devices at several hundred times per second (including video, GPS, and rangefinder/leveler), and have to do it for at least as long as the whole thing can fly on available fuel, preferably a full tank on a
Data collection doesn't usually need such form factor; nor does it need a general purpose machine such as a 486 w/ a huge hard drive. I wonder if there are any general purpose applications which require such a form factor? That would be the niche for this device.
My school just got a brand new G3 lab
[UCSD AP&M basement, next to UAPE, for my fellow students]
I'm not sure which version, but StarOffice is installed on every one of the new machines. The interface isn't completely Mac-ified, but it's elegant in a number of ways and fairly intuitive.
As far as the linux version is concerned, if they're not going to release the source, I wish Sun would precompile SO for all those other architectures (ppc, alpha, etc.)
One of the things that make the internet such a wonderfull place is it's freedom. Another is the posibility of viable static or passive defenses.
And if a fourteen year old suburbanite script kiddie can have a chance to crack a major corporation, then why not some hostile military?
It shouldn't make a difference. If they've got their security act together, there oughtent be a reason to deny the opportunity to attack.
=+)
obfuscated swearing via scrambling
I'll have to remember that
... I'm currently involved in a very slow moving project (school affiliated) where the ONLY documentation we have, outside the *extremely* well commented code, is a napkin I picked up at a cafeteria on a DoE site while travelling through Washington state which is currently holding my place about 2/3 the way through Hofstadter's G.E.B.
--mind you, this project isn't progressing very quickly, but, as far as I know, poor documentation has never been a setback.
=+P
On my first big project (as an intern mind you, but I think this gives me a bit of "beginners insight"), I learned that documentation takes up about 40% of the allotted time on a major project. We started with UML diagrams, the whole thing taking four coders and a manager the better part of a day. by the end of the week 90% of the UML stuff had been rewritten, resubmitted to managers, and integrated into the project. Each coder was responsible for logging docs on functions/subroutines/algorithms/objects/etc. that they had written (along with a brief description of usage and functionality) into a central database, and everything we wrote was peer reviewed at least once...
Come to think of it, the whole thing seems a bit tedious now, but at the time it was really no big deal, and it got the job done.