I don't see why the two theories can't be merged. *shrug*
Excuse me, did you just suggest a reimplementation of the "Age of Enlightenment". (Which, despite its name and attempts to combine many religions, wasn't very enlightening.)
Science, Religion, etc. should all take a back seat to the truth. It's very easy to get caught up in "I believe it's this way, so therefore it is," but that doesn't get us any closer to reality.
The reality is this: Neither Science or Religion has all the answers to the universe we live in right now. Science should be perpetually trying to find them while Religion is more about answers beyond this world. Science started as an outcropping of Religion to handle the matters of this world we live in. Somehow to two became mortal enemies.
"Evolution" can be broken down into a long string of theories, 90% of which have been discarded along the way. The facts of nature's operation (e.g. the ability to adapt between generations, aka "micro" evolution) have been well established. But extending them to the matter of long term change still has many issues, the greatest of which is the lack of a provable theory for abiogenesis. Thus "Evolutionary Theory" is still "work in progress", and will probably remain so until we can reproduce some of the more difficult concepts of the theory.
This has led many to believe that the theory ought to be treated with far more care, especially since schools have been known to teach such misinformation as Dr. Jonathan Wells' theory of evolution in the womb.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have Religions trying to figure out how things started from a very simple description. Well, we can take our best shot at it, but any theories there also have to be treated as "Work in Progrss". At least to the degree that we're looking for a more precise answer that really isn't covered by works such as the Bible. (Creation spans a single chapter of Genesis. That isn't a lot to go on.)
Thus "combining" them is not the answer. The answer is to seek the answer, even at the expense of all prejudices. ID, Evolution, or whatever else is the fad of the moment can get in the friggin' back seat. Sadly, the ID argument won't be over until Evolution is handled better in schools, and Evolution won't be handled better in schools until certain people get off their duffs and stop insisting on pushing it to "save children from religion."
Now excuse me, I'm about to be modded down for taking a truthful and thoughtful position.
1. Hemos, I find your sarcasm disappointing. There are quite a few factions when it comes to different religions, and you've just compared two related, yet completely different religions to one another. i.e. It's about the same as if you mentioned that Chrisitians are bemused by Mormons. The two religions don't think of one another as "correct" even though one builds on the other. The only difference is that the Jewish and Christian faiths tend to be much more amicable toward one another.
2. The Vatican embraced the evolutionary theory several years ago under Pope John Paul III. Opponents like to point out that the Vatican also accepted a geocentric view of the Universe. As a result, only devote Catholics take the Vatican seriously on matters of science.
Amusingly, quite a bit of science in history was done by priests and other church members. However, the Vatican regularly declared heresy against anyone who challenged the accepted "facts" of the Universe. Galileo is often cited as an example, but that was partly his own fault. He used satire to insult the pope (a good friend of his) and the pope was forced to respond. Galileo should have counted himself lucky to only get house arrest.
3. If you're going to mention Yahweh (aka YHWH, aka Jehovah, aka God of Israel) in proper Jewish context, you need to mark out some of the letters as a sign of respect. e.g. "Y-WH" or "G-d"
4. Save your flames. This is intended as an informational post only, and I probably won't respond to any replies. Don't like it? Too bad. Find some objectivity.
Hey, I've already got something like that! You see, my wife and I were watching the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy last night. When the movie got to the point where they activated the vortex, all the stuff on my desk suddenly moved as if the vortex were real! Let me tell you, that's a very frightening experience when it suddenly seems like your living room is going to get sucked into a make believe portal. Your head keeps telling you it can't be real, but your instincts tell you to grab ahold of something!
Of course, it was actually just the cat sitting behind the keyboard. He decided to stretch at an odd time and shoved everything on the desk. He's colored black, so he's nearly invisible, thus making for a rather incredible special effect.;-)
Why, if someone was investing in steganography, would they go and put, say, an image of a kitten with a secret message in it hidden in a directory of spaceships?
This is you -> Hi! This is my point -> Whoosh!
When I say it's a game of "one of these things, is not like the other one", I don't mean that it's a matter of looking for odd images. I'm talking about applying a sophiticated Baysian Algorithm to determine the likelihood of each stored message being the one you're looking for. Since we can safely assume that the "fake" messages will have either random, or completely off-topic content, we're looking for the encrypted message that differs the most from the rest. This can be done even through the encryption because the encrypted data still carries the same probability aspects of the original data. Attempts to disguise this will only make the real message stand out even more. (Similar to how spammers try to defeat spam filters with random characters. In the end, it only makes it easier to trap.)
They [Steganography] just then store that data intermixed into an existing lossy format so that you can't see it's encrypted.
Yes, but images with steganography applied still show up in a pattern analysis. Why? Because they're different. They're not compressing like they should, or the color balance is different than expected, or the file is only lightly compressed, etc. All these things scream "Steganography! Right here!"
Look up Baysian probabilities sometime. It's a real eye opener.
From the desteg website: "Steg is not a perfect program. Since anyone with deSteg could potentially extract your data, make sure that it is encrypted as well as Stegged."
If you have to rely on the encryption, then the steganography is useless. The cops will capture your key store, and begin brute forcing the password to that store.
The entire point of the steganography is that it's so obscure that it's unlikely to be noticed in the first place. i.e. An extreme form of security through obscurity.
Oh, but I do. Except in Steganography, the extraction algo *IS* the key. Now you can use encryption above and beyond the steganography, but that doesn't make the message any more secure than if you'd sent the encrypted message by itself.
The whole intent of using steganography is to obscure the fact that the message was sent. Once that line of defense is down, you're on to more traditional lines of defense.
If this is not so then an attacker would be able to knock up a quick shell script that scanned every file on the system to detect hidden data--thus making the use of steganography pointless in the first place!
As another fellow pointed out, you can already do that. There are a variety of methods that can be used to detect its use. The key is that there's no way to tell *which* image might be carrying a message among all the images floating around the internet. Now if I capture your computer and find images of cute kittens, I'll start looking for signs that this machine was engaged in steganography. However, if I'm looking at random postings to alt.binaries.cute.kittens, I'm going to have a hard time sorting through the sheer amount of data to find what I'm looking for. For all I know, it may not even exist! That is the *real* quandry that steganography poses.
For example, if I embedded information in a picture in my ~/pics dir, I have thousands of pictures in there. Now lets say I embedded information in every single picture, most of it useless.
All you're doing here is attempting to create security through obscurity. Considering that modern computers can process terrabytes of data in short order, this is not an effective move.
Now take it a step further and implement a system for embeddeding multiple, encrypted, messages in each picture, where upon the message revealed depends on the key used.
The first part is more security through obscurity. The temp files, registry entiries, recent files lists, and other computer droppings would make it fairly easy to figure out which file and which sub-message.
The second part of this (encryption) is the REAL barrier. But that is irrelevant to the steganography. The worst case scenario is that I have to apply algorithms against your encrypted messages to generate probablilities of which messages are of importance and which ones are random garbage. This isn't as hard as it might seen. Probabilistically, it's nothing more than a game of, "one of these things, is not like the other one." Once you have the messages scored by probability, you start running decryption attacks on them (assuming you didn't capture the keys, which is unlikely) in the order of their probablity until you find the message you need.
Again, it's the encryption that's making the difference. NOT the steganography.
even with completly knowledge of the algorithm it should be computationally infeasible to determine a secret message is implanted in the cover text.
Uh, oookkaay. So you're telling me that if I can capture a script that shows how to perform a series of operations on the image to reveal the steganography (or perhaps a program that extracts a file based on a particular spacing of bits), you're telling me that the algorithm I captured is useless?
Then law enforcement is screwed. (Or at least has to do a brute force on a number of common algorithms.) The key is that the technical knowledge required to keep the full procedure in your head is not something that a technically uninclined person (say, someone looking to blow himself up) can keep track of. Thus they're likely to have a script of some sort that does the conversion for them.
Even if we assume that no script can be found, then your tools may betray you. For example, most image programs use temporary files for large images operations, undos, and tiling of an image currently being worked on. If it's important enough, enforcement agencies may be able to use the bits and pieces the tools left behind to guess at your method. Perhaps they could even capture a full thumbnail or partial image data of the decrypted image. In other words, you're not decrypting in a vacuum.
They're really going to hate it when suspects start using steganography.
Generally they try to capture a complete computer containing all the algos used for the steganography. That way they don't have to search for a needle in a haystack.
It's a bit like the code devices of WWII. It was always easier to capture a code machine than try to brute force the code itself.
There are perfectly good ways to do similar things to what Apple is doing without causing problems for the Linux community as a whole. As Linux fans as yourself are always so fond of pointing out, Linux is nothing more than a kernel. I agree. So when are we going to stop treating it as a singular entity and more as an OS Construction Kit? I made my point on this months ago, yet everyone seems to think that all we need is a slightly better Linux distro, or that what we have is "good enough".
NO!
If you want to see Linux used everywhere, how about allowing more focus in each distro? Today you get crucified if you're server only. ("I can't run it as a desktop!") Yet you get crucified if you're desktop only. ("I can't run it as a server!") Thus we have some weird amalgamations of OSes that look like Desktops but act like Servers, making no one's lives easier except for Workstation users. People keep trying to stop Linux from diverging down different paths. "We don't need that! It's fine as it is!" Let it diverge! That's what it was designed to do, and it will not truly hit its element unless you let it.
If people would help instead of hinder, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a Desktop-focused, Hardware and Linux bundle tomorrow. (Actually, you can today. Except that they screw up the marketting every time. They keep trying to sell workstations to regular desktop users. Grandma doesn't know or care what the hell the/usr vs./var vs. root partitioning is. Just slap the DVD player in there and ship the damn thing!)
Perhaps my friend accidentally destroyed his system in another way and thought it was a virus.
There was an early upgrade to a Mac software package (an iTunes Beta, I think) that had a bug that could delete your home directory. It was a particularly nasty bug, and some of the parcipants in the open beta program got bitten by it. That's probably what happened to your friend.
The fact that there are a couple Linux viruses has absolutely no impact on this.
I don't think you understand the full marketing implications of this. Regardless of what Apple actually says, they get free press from their users as well as their opponents. (USer: "My Mac has no viruses!" Opponent: "Yeah? Just wait!")
Linux, OTOH, cannot claim to have never had a virus. It has had several, as well as tons of serious security holes. For awhile there, a RedHat box lasted only slightly longer than a Windows machine before getting p0wned. Regardless of whether this is fixed or not, it doesn't reflect well on the OS. That's part of the reason why commercial companies broadcast new versions as being completely different. e.g. "Win98 is more secure than ever!"
In reality, the risk of being sent a virus via email is essentially zero on Mac or Linux.
You have to be careful here. Modern viruses are only rarely spread through email. Most make use of holes in network services. The Mac comes configured with NO network services running, thus helping to explain why there's never been an exploit.
The reason Windows tends to slow down is because every second device and application has another little system tray icon and system service that starts up.
Precisely. While you really don't pay for anything run through initd, you DO pay for each little GNOME icon you have in the corner. It's not as bad as Windows yet (users actually CHOSE the icons they put there), but there are plenty of the little buggers that come bundled that people like to run. If Linux went mainstream, I guarantee the problem would amplify significantly.
Indeed. It's been years since I've seen a raised floor. As far as I know, most new datacenters use racks and overhead wire guides instead. The reason for this is obviously not the air flow. The raised floor made sense when you had only a few big machines that ran an ungodly number of cables to various points in the building. (At a whopping 19.2K, I'll have you know!) Using a raised floor allowed you to simply walk *over* the cabling while still allowing you to yank some tiles for easy troubleshooting.
(Great way to keep your boss at bay, too. "Don't come in here! We've got tiles up and you may fall in a hole! thenthegruewilleastyouandnoonewillnoticebwhahaha")
With computers being designed as they are now, the raised floor no longer makes sense. For one, all your plugs tend to go to the same place. i.e. Your power cords go to the power mains in one direction, your network cables go to the switch (and ultimately the patch panel) in another, and your KVM console is built into the rack itself. With the number of computers being managed, you'd be spending all day pulling up floor tiling and crawling around in tight spaces trying to find the right cable! With guided cables, you simply unhook the cable and drag it out. (Or for new cables, you simply loop a them through the guides.)
So in sort, times change and so do the datacenters.:-)
And if Apple had bought BeOS it wouldn't be considered a failure.
Pff. You say that as if it's a bad thing. Apple did much better than they ever possibly could have done by buying BeOS. They got a far more mature, Unix-based OS, AND they snagged key BeOS developers to add cool things like Spotlight. The only real advantage that BeOS had was that it was much faster with Multimedia, something that doesn't matter in a day when it's all hardware accelerated anyway.
Of course. I'm just amused that Microsoft has made "a sudden discovery!" that real OS designers have known about for an incredibly long time. In fact, OSes designed in C are actually a step back from some of the Mainframe OSes designed in languages such as ALGOL. The key was that C could give you maximum performance by letting you perform hacks no sane person would ever make. But it was fast, so people ran with it.
VMS's "relationship" with NT has to do with Dave Cutler,
You're ignoring the fact that the relationship was Dave Cutler, and 20 of his team members.
a respected former DEC engineer who worked on later versions of VMS, being the primary designer of the original NT kernel, and using many of the same ideas (as you'd expect him to do.)
The story actually goes much farther than that. You see, when Cutler was working at DEC, he was pushing a complete rewrite of the VMS Operating System. His new version of the OS would have all kinds of neato features that no one had ever seen before. DEC gave him the go-ahead and development commenced. After the project had gotten far along, DEC decided to pull the plug on it, and moved Cutler elsewhere. Cutler (predictably) quit.
Microsoft then sapped up Cutler on the agreement that Microsoft would also hire all the team members who'd been working on the Next-Gen VMS project with him. Microsoft agreed, and development on "Windows NT" (which doesn't actually mean anything, the marketdriods just liked the "NT" letters) began in earnest.
DEC eventually found out about the whole thing, and wanted to sue. However, an agreement was reached to where Windows NT would run on Digital Alpha hardware. DEC *thought* they got a good deal (all the technology, none of the development costs) but didn't realize quite the deal they were getting into. The Alpha version of NT worked, but absolutely no one targetted software to it. Oops.
Some people, as you appear to suggest, have chosen to go further than this and claim there's code from VMS in NT.
It's irrelevant if that is true or not. (Though it might be, given the amount of resources directly transferred to Microsoft.) What's relevant is the fact that each engineer carried a metric boatload of proprietary technology to another company. That's simply not legal for employees, especially when they're under contract. Thus Microsoft benefitted from all the work that DEC had already paid for.
As for the similar naming scheme, I had to chuckle at that. I had never read the Windows NT Magazine article on this until just now. While his ducks are mostly in order, the comparisons are a bit silly. No, I actually learned from a much more interesting source: DiskKeeper. They used to make Defrag software for VAX VMS, then converted it to run on NT when it came out. Funny thing that. You'd almost think that the two systems were so similar that it would be a natural port, now wouldn't you?
(Sarcasm aside, DiskKeeper actually had to distribute a custom version of NT 3.x because Microsoft hadn't provided any method of relocating file system blocks. Microsoft eventually worked this feature into NT 4.0.)
Actually, NT was a kitbash of a VMS kernel with OS/2 usermode components, which themselves were "upgrades" to Windows 3.1 components, which were mostly "simple" concepts stolen from Mac OS. Confused yet?
Now take Windows 95 (which was Windows 3.1 running in full protected mode, but with a new UI and a Virtualized DOS window) and bash it together with NT 3.51. Remove various security considerations and compile the graphics subsystem into the kernel and you have the makings of NT 4.0.
2000 and XP have since reflected that Microsoft has experienced no major increases in technology. Thus 2000 bashed various bits of Unix into itself (to make it "Enterprise Ready") and XP just added lots'o'pretty-stuff and a Win95 virtualizer.
Now if Microsoft manages to get their HotOS into production (not bloody likely, considering that Microsoft Research is merely a place for good researchers to die) then Microsoft will have managed to reinvent Symbolics LISP from 20+ years earlier. Yay for progress!
Yes, but NASDAQ allows reverse stock splits. So SGI could easily (I say that with my tongue firmly in cheek) reintegrate its stocks to bring them back up to a level that NASDAQ would approve of.
It's probably necessary anyway. It's not that SGI isn't big enough to list, they simply don't have the market value they once had. Under NYSE rules, the dillution of their stocks is enough to get them kicked out. Under NASDAQ rules, they could continue on as a smaller company. (Question to the market geeks: Would SGI now be considered MidCap or SmallCap?) Or at least that's my understanding.
That being said, I'm not certain what SGI would hope to gain by relisting. Until they get their ducks in a row and stop hemorrhaging market capital, they'll be seen as nothing more than junk stocks. Very likely, they're looking to sell to a larger company right now. The purchasing company could then strip SGI bare and use their name for marketing clout.
See? There slashdotters go again. If you overanalyze a joke, it's not funny. Do you need a funny-bone transplant?
Of course I know that hell is frozen in the 9th circle. But that's not the joke. The joke is that we don't have "Dante's Inferno" any more, because "hell has frozen over". (A common idiom, even if it is inaccurate when applied to Dante's Divine Comedy.) Understand now?
Oh, damn. Now you've gone and killed the joke now. Are you happy now!? *sob*
(For the humorless: Yes I'm joking again. I'm not really sobbing. Really. *SOB*)
And of course, if I'm just annoyin' ya, that's ok too... but I apologize!
Never! I never turn away a fella' who's willing to help. As I always tell people, my door is always open. Shoot me an email and we'll discuss what we can put you to work on.
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I don't see why the two theories can't be merged. *shrug*
Excuse me, did you just suggest a reimplementation of the "Age of Enlightenment". (Which, despite its name and attempts to combine many religions, wasn't very enlightening.)
Science, Religion, etc. should all take a back seat to the truth. It's very easy to get caught up in "I believe it's this way, so therefore it is," but that doesn't get us any closer to reality.
The reality is this: Neither Science or Religion has all the answers to the universe we live in right now. Science should be perpetually trying to find them while Religion is more about answers beyond this world. Science started as an outcropping of Religion to handle the matters of this world we live in. Somehow to two became mortal enemies.
"Evolution" can be broken down into a long string of theories, 90% of which have been discarded along the way. The facts of nature's operation (e.g. the ability to adapt between generations, aka "micro" evolution) have been well established. But extending them to the matter of long term change still has many issues, the greatest of which is the lack of a provable theory for abiogenesis. Thus "Evolutionary Theory" is still "work in progress", and will probably remain so until we can reproduce some of the more difficult concepts of the theory.
This has led many to believe that the theory ought to be treated with far more care, especially since schools have been known to teach such misinformation as Dr. Jonathan Wells' theory of evolution in the womb.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have Religions trying to figure out how things started from a very simple description. Well, we can take our best shot at it, but any theories there also have to be treated as "Work in Progrss". At least to the degree that we're looking for a more precise answer that really isn't covered by works such as the Bible. (Creation spans a single chapter of Genesis. That isn't a lot to go on.)
Thus "combining" them is not the answer. The answer is to seek the answer, even at the expense of all prejudices. ID, Evolution, or whatever else is the fad of the moment can get in the friggin' back seat. Sadly, the ID argument won't be over until Evolution is handled better in schools, and Evolution won't be handled better in schools until certain people get off their duffs and stop insisting on pushing it to "save children from religion."
Now excuse me, I'm about to be modded down for taking a truthful and thoughtful position.
1. Hemos, I find your sarcasm disappointing. There are quite a few factions when it comes to different religions, and you've just compared two related, yet completely different religions to one another. i.e. It's about the same as if you mentioned that Chrisitians are bemused by Mormons. The two religions don't think of one another as "correct" even though one builds on the other. The only difference is that the Jewish and Christian faiths tend to be much more amicable toward one another.
2. The Vatican embraced the evolutionary theory several years ago under Pope John Paul III. Opponents like to point out that the Vatican also accepted a geocentric view of the Universe. As a result, only devote Catholics take the Vatican seriously on matters of science.
Amusingly, quite a bit of science in history was done by priests and other church members. However, the Vatican regularly declared heresy against anyone who challenged the accepted "facts" of the Universe. Galileo is often cited as an example, but that was partly his own fault. He used satire to insult the pope (a good friend of his) and the pope was forced to respond. Galileo should have counted himself lucky to only get house arrest.
3. If you're going to mention Yahweh (aka YHWH, aka Jehovah, aka God of Israel) in proper Jewish context, you need to mark out some of the letters as a sign of respect. e.g. "Y-WH" or "G-d"
4. Save your flames. This is intended as an informational post only, and I probably won't respond to any replies. Don't like it? Too bad. Find some objectivity.
Hey, I've already got something like that! You see, my wife and I were watching the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy last night. When the movie got to the point where they activated the vortex, all the stuff on my desk suddenly moved as if the vortex were real! Let me tell you, that's a very frightening experience when it suddenly seems like your living room is going to get sucked into a make believe portal. Your head keeps telling you it can't be real, but your instincts tell you to grab ahold of something!
;-)
Of course, it was actually just the cat sitting behind the keyboard. He decided to stretch at an odd time and shoved everything on the desk. He's colored black, so he's nearly invisible, thus making for a rather incredible special effect.
Why, if someone was investing in steganography, would they go and put, say, an image of a kitten with a secret message in it hidden in a directory of spaceships?
This is you -> Hi!
This is my point -> Whoosh!
When I say it's a game of "one of these things, is not like the other one", I don't mean that it's a matter of looking for odd images. I'm talking about applying a sophiticated Baysian Algorithm to determine the likelihood of each stored message being the one you're looking for. Since we can safely assume that the "fake" messages will have either random, or completely off-topic content, we're looking for the encrypted message that differs the most from the rest. This can be done even through the encryption because the encrypted data still carries the same probability aspects of the original data. Attempts to disguise this will only make the real message stand out even more. (Similar to how spammers try to defeat spam filters with random characters. In the end, it only makes it easier to trap.)
They [Steganography] just then store that data intermixed into an existing lossy format so that you can't see it's encrypted.
Yes, but images with steganography applied still show up in a pattern analysis. Why? Because they're different. They're not compressing like they should, or the color balance is different than expected, or the file is only lightly compressed, etc. All these things scream "Steganography! Right here!"
Look up Baysian probabilities sometime. It's a real eye opener.
From the desteg website: "Steg is not a perfect program. Since anyone with deSteg could potentially extract your data, make sure that it is encrypted as well as Stegged."
If you have to rely on the encryption, then the steganography is useless. The cops will capture your key store, and begin brute forcing the password to that store.
The entire point of the steganography is that it's so obscure that it's unlikely to be noticed in the first place. i.e. An extreme form of security through obscurity.
Then you don't know much about cryptogrphy!
Oh, but I do. Except in Steganography, the extraction algo *IS* the key. Now you can use encryption above and beyond the steganography, but that doesn't make the message any more secure than if you'd sent the encrypted message by itself.
The whole intent of using steganography is to obscure the fact that the message was sent. Once that line of defense is down, you're on to more traditional lines of defense.
If this is not so then an attacker would be able to knock up a quick shell script that scanned every file on the system to detect hidden data--thus making the use of steganography pointless in the first place!
As another fellow pointed out, you can already do that. There are a variety of methods that can be used to detect its use. The key is that there's no way to tell *which* image might be carrying a message among all the images floating around the internet. Now if I capture your computer and find images of cute kittens, I'll start looking for signs that this machine was engaged in steganography. However, if I'm looking at random postings to alt.binaries.cute.kittens, I'm going to have a hard time sorting through the sheer amount of data to find what I'm looking for. For all I know, it may not even exist! That is the *real* quandry that steganography poses.
For example, if I embedded information in a picture in my ~/pics dir, I have thousands of pictures in there. Now lets say I embedded information in every single picture, most of it useless.
All you're doing here is attempting to create security through obscurity. Considering that modern computers can process terrabytes of data in short order, this is not an effective move.
Now take it a step further and implement a system for embeddeding multiple, encrypted, messages in each picture, where upon the message revealed depends on the key used.
The first part is more security through obscurity. The temp files, registry entiries, recent files lists, and other computer droppings would make it fairly easy to figure out which file and which sub-message.
The second part of this (encryption) is the REAL barrier. But that is irrelevant to the steganography. The worst case scenario is that I have to apply algorithms against your encrypted messages to generate probablilities of which messages are of importance and which ones are random garbage. This isn't as hard as it might seen. Probabilistically, it's nothing more than a game of, "one of these things, is not like the other one." Once you have the messages scored by probability, you start running decryption attacks on them (assuming you didn't capture the keys, which is unlikely) in the order of their probablity until you find the message you need.
Again, it's the encryption that's making the difference. NOT the steganography.
even with completly knowledge of the algorithm it should be computationally infeasible to determine a secret message is implanted in the cover text.
Uh, oookkaay. So you're telling me that if I can capture a script that shows how to perform a series of operations on the image to reveal the steganography (or perhaps a program that extracts a file based on a particular spacing of bits), you're telling me that the algorithm I captured is useless?
That's the most rediculous thing I've ever heard.
What if I don't use a programmed algorithm?
Then law enforcement is screwed. (Or at least has to do a brute force on a number of common algorithms.) The key is that the technical knowledge required to keep the full procedure in your head is not something that a technically uninclined person (say, someone looking to blow himself up) can keep track of. Thus they're likely to have a script of some sort that does the conversion for them.
Even if we assume that no script can be found, then your tools may betray you. For example, most image programs use temporary files for large images operations, undos, and tiling of an image currently being worked on. If it's important enough, enforcement agencies may be able to use the bits and pieces the tools left behind to guess at your method. Perhaps they could even capture a full thumbnail or partial image data of the decrypted image. In other words, you're not decrypting in a vacuum.
They're really going to hate it when suspects start using steganography.
Generally they try to capture a complete computer containing all the algos used for the steganography. That way they don't have to search for a needle in a haystack.
It's a bit like the code devices of WWII. It was always easier to capture a code machine than try to brute force the code itself.
Try Movielink. The only downside is that you'll need Windows and IE. (Well, that and the fact that their good selection is transitory.) :-(
This is you -> Hi!
/usr vs. /var vs. root partitioning is. Just slap the DVD player in there and ship the damn thing!)
This is the point -> Whoosh!
There are perfectly good ways to do similar things to what Apple is doing without causing problems for the Linux community as a whole. As Linux fans as yourself are always so fond of pointing out, Linux is nothing more than a kernel. I agree. So when are we going to stop treating it as a singular entity and more as an OS Construction Kit? I made my point on this months ago, yet everyone seems to think that all we need is a slightly better Linux distro, or that what we have is "good enough".
NO!
If you want to see Linux used everywhere, how about allowing more focus in each distro? Today you get crucified if you're server only. ("I can't run it as a desktop!") Yet you get crucified if you're desktop only. ("I can't run it as a server!") Thus we have some weird amalgamations of OSes that look like Desktops but act like Servers, making no one's lives easier except for Workstation users. People keep trying to stop Linux from diverging down different paths. "We don't need that! It's fine as it is!" Let it diverge! That's what it was designed to do, and it will not truly hit its element unless you let it.
If people would help instead of hinder, I wouldn't be surprised if you could get a Desktop-focused, Hardware and Linux bundle tomorrow. (Actually, you can today. Except that they screw up the marketting every time. They keep trying to sell workstations to regular desktop users. Grandma doesn't know or care what the hell the
Perhaps my friend accidentally destroyed his system in another way and thought it was a virus.
There was an early upgrade to a Mac software package (an iTunes Beta, I think) that had a bug that could delete your home directory. It was a particularly nasty bug, and some of the parcipants in the open beta program got bitten by it. That's probably what happened to your friend.
The fact that there are a couple Linux viruses has absolutely no impact on this.
I don't think you understand the full marketing implications of this. Regardless of what Apple actually says, they get free press from their users as well as their opponents. (USer: "My Mac has no viruses!" Opponent: "Yeah? Just wait!")
Linux, OTOH, cannot claim to have never had a virus. It has had several, as well as tons of serious security holes. For awhile there, a RedHat box lasted only slightly longer than a Windows machine before getting p0wned. Regardless of whether this is fixed or not, it doesn't reflect well on the OS. That's part of the reason why commercial companies broadcast new versions as being completely different. e.g. "Win98 is more secure than ever!"
In reality, the risk of being sent a virus via email is essentially zero on Mac or Linux.
You have to be careful here. Modern viruses are only rarely spread through email. Most make use of holes in network services. The Mac comes configured with NO network services running, thus helping to explain why there's never been an exploit.
The reason Windows tends to slow down is because every second device and application has another little system tray icon and system service that starts up.
Precisely. While you really don't pay for anything run through initd, you DO pay for each little GNOME icon you have in the corner. It's not as bad as Windows yet (users actually CHOSE the icons they put there), but there are plenty of the little buggers that come bundled that people like to run. If Linux went mainstream, I guarantee the problem would amplify significantly.
Indeed. It's been years since I've seen a raised floor. As far as I know, most new datacenters use racks and overhead wire guides instead. The reason for this is obviously not the air flow. The raised floor made sense when you had only a few big machines that ran an ungodly number of cables to various points in the building. (At a whopping 19.2K, I'll have you know!) Using a raised floor allowed you to simply walk *over* the cabling while still allowing you to yank some tiles for easy troubleshooting.
)
:-)
(Great way to keep your boss at bay, too. "Don't come in here! We've got tiles up and you may fall in a hole! thenthegruewilleastyouandnoonewillnoticebwhahaha"
With computers being designed as they are now, the raised floor no longer makes sense. For one, all your plugs tend to go to the same place. i.e. Your power cords go to the power mains in one direction, your network cables go to the switch (and ultimately the patch panel) in another, and your KVM console is built into the rack itself. With the number of computers being managed, you'd be spending all day pulling up floor tiling and crawling around in tight spaces trying to find the right cable! With guided cables, you simply unhook the cable and drag it out. (Or for new cables, you simply loop a them through the guides.)
So in sort, times change and so do the datacenters.
Add one letter to HAL, and you've got IBM. Coincidence?
:-)
Oh yeah.
It's just funny how things work sometimes.
And if Apple had bought BeOS it wouldn't be considered a failure.
Pff. You say that as if it's a bad thing. Apple did much better than they ever possibly could have done by buying BeOS. They got a far more mature, Unix-based OS, AND they snagged key BeOS developers to add cool things like Spotlight. The only real advantage that BeOS had was that it was much faster with Multimedia, something that doesn't matter in a day when it's all hardware accelerated anyway.
Of course. I'm just amused that Microsoft has made "a sudden discovery!" that real OS designers have known about for an incredibly long time. In fact, OSes designed in C are actually a step back from some of the Mainframe OSes designed in languages such as ALGOL. The key was that C could give you maximum performance by letting you perform hacks no sane person would ever make. But it was fast, so people ran with it.
VMS's "relationship" with NT has to do with Dave Cutler,
You're ignoring the fact that the relationship was Dave Cutler, and 20 of his team members.
a respected former DEC engineer who worked on later versions of VMS, being the primary designer of the original NT kernel, and using many of the same ideas (as you'd expect him to do.)
The story actually goes much farther than that. You see, when Cutler was working at DEC, he was pushing a complete rewrite of the VMS Operating System. His new version of the OS would have all kinds of neato features that no one had ever seen before. DEC gave him the go-ahead and development commenced. After the project had gotten far along, DEC decided to pull the plug on it, and moved Cutler elsewhere. Cutler (predictably) quit.
Microsoft then sapped up Cutler on the agreement that Microsoft would also hire all the team members who'd been working on the Next-Gen VMS project with him. Microsoft agreed, and development on "Windows NT" (which doesn't actually mean anything, the marketdriods just liked the "NT" letters) began in earnest.
DEC eventually found out about the whole thing, and wanted to sue. However, an agreement was reached to where Windows NT would run on Digital Alpha hardware. DEC *thought* they got a good deal (all the technology, none of the development costs) but didn't realize quite the deal they were getting into. The Alpha version of NT worked, but absolutely no one targetted software to it. Oops.
Some people, as you appear to suggest, have chosen to go further than this and claim there's code from VMS in NT.
It's irrelevant if that is true or not. (Though it might be, given the amount of resources directly transferred to Microsoft.) What's relevant is the fact that each engineer carried a metric boatload of proprietary technology to another company. That's simply not legal for employees, especially when they're under contract. Thus Microsoft benefitted from all the work that DEC had already paid for.
As for the similar naming scheme, I had to chuckle at that. I had never read the Windows NT Magazine article on this until just now. While his ducks are mostly in order, the comparisons are a bit silly. No, I actually learned from a much more interesting source: DiskKeeper. They used to make Defrag software for VAX VMS, then converted it to run on NT when it came out. Funny thing that. You'd almost think that the two systems were so similar that it would be a natural port, now wouldn't you?
(Sarcasm aside, DiskKeeper actually had to distribute a custom version of NT 3.x because Microsoft hadn't provided any method of relocating file system blocks. Microsoft eventually worked this feature into NT 4.0.)
s/HotOS/Singularity/g
:-P
I saw the conference above and it got stuck in my head.
NT / XP / Vista - Built off of OS/2
Actually, NT was a kitbash of a VMS kernel with OS/2 usermode components, which themselves were "upgrades" to Windows 3.1 components, which were mostly "simple" concepts stolen from Mac OS. Confused yet?
Now take Windows 95 (which was Windows 3.1 running in full protected mode, but with a new UI and a Virtualized DOS window) and bash it together with NT 3.51. Remove various security considerations and compile the graphics subsystem into the kernel and you have the makings of NT 4.0.
2000 and XP have since reflected that Microsoft has experienced no major increases in technology. Thus 2000 bashed various bits of Unix into itself (to make it "Enterprise Ready") and XP just added lots'o'pretty-stuff and a Win95 virtualizer.
Now if Microsoft manages to get their HotOS into production (not bloody likely, considering that Microsoft Research is merely a place for good researchers to die) then Microsoft will have managed to reinvent Symbolics LISP from 20+ years earlier. Yay for progress!
Thanks for that. Someone else pointed me to MorningStar Research. They have SGI listed as Small Value. (!) Talk about falling from grace.
Yes, but NASDAQ allows reverse stock splits. So SGI could easily (I say that with my tongue firmly in cheek) reintegrate its stocks to bring them back up to a level that NASDAQ would approve of.
It's probably necessary anyway. It's not that SGI isn't big enough to list, they simply don't have the market value they once had. Under NYSE rules, the dillution of their stocks is enough to get them kicked out. Under NASDAQ rules, they could continue on as a smaller company. (Question to the market geeks: Would SGI now be considered MidCap or SmallCap?) Or at least that's my understanding.
That being said, I'm not certain what SGI would hope to gain by relisting. Until they get their ducks in a row and stop hemorrhaging market capital, they'll be seen as nothing more than junk stocks. Very likely, they're looking to sell to a larger company right now. The purchasing company could then strip SGI bare and use their name for marketing clout.
See? There slashdotters go again. If you overanalyze a joke, it's not funny. Do you need a funny-bone transplant?
Of course I know that hell is frozen in the 9th circle. But that's not the joke. The joke is that we don't have "Dante's Inferno" any more, because "hell has frozen over". (A common idiom, even if it is inaccurate when applied to Dante's Divine Comedy.) Understand now?
Oh, damn. Now you've gone and killed the joke now. Are you happy now!? *sob*
(For the humorless: Yes I'm joking again. I'm not really sobbing. Really. *SOB*)
And of course, if I'm just annoyin' ya, that's ok too... but I apologize!
:-)
Never! I never turn away a fella' who's willing to help. As I always tell people, my door is always open. Shoot me an email and we'll discuss what we can put you to work on.
Thanks for volunteering!
It's a joke, laugh. ;-)