Many, many years ago I worked on Computer Aided Architectural Design systems. The systems I worked on designed many major buildings.
The person here is asking for something to help them sketch something out for the architect. They are not asking for final plans. An architect can draw, but not everyone can. In any case, the person wants to explore a new design.
The engineering and Bill-of-Materials aren't needed here just something that will give the architect an idea of what the client wants. the client should expect their original idea to be hacked to pieces, but at least it gives a basis for a dialogue.
I respect your points about architects having to follow a long and hard education process. However, isn't it much easier when a customer is able to illustrate their requirements?
The Bombes used to crack Ultra (the intercepts that were encoded on the Enigma machine) were indeed electromechanical. The ones used to attach Fish (a stream cipher from the Lorenz teletype devices) were somewhat more electronic and were called Colussus. Both were designed on Turing's concepts, but the electronics for the second were by Tommy Flowers, a PO telecoms engineer.
Colussus was hardwired and its only electronic memory was a shift register. However the work on Colussus gave the basis for the Pilot Ace developed at the National Physical Laboratory in 1946. Around the same time ENIAC appeared in the US, initially for ballistic calculations.
The Manchester Mark 1 (fully electronic design) was created at Manchester University in the late forties and by 1951 it had been made and sold as a product by Ferranti for research use.
Also in 1951, the Lyons Tea and Cake company produced the first commercial electronic computer which in turn was based on EDSAC, a research computer built at the University of Cambridge. This system was a real computer and by 1953 was running the payroll.
What is interesting is that all of the British inventions fed off each other. Although the work of the cryptographers at Bletchley park was a state secret for some 30 years, many of the top mathematicians had worked at Bletchley during the war were aware of at least some of the principles. Pilot Ace, the first British computer openly produced had staff members that worked at Bletchley. Ideas bounced around without any major issues of IP. Some individual parts may have been protected by patents (such as the WIlliams Tube), but not concepts like the ALU which would have killed development.
I think we must agree to differ on this one. I agree about the letter to a friend, but what about a conference blogger? If the audiance is more than one, then I see little difference.
Someone who has been trained as a journalist may have a certain professional detachment, but that goes, and indeed we expect it to go when they witness something particularly distateful. Does a journalist stop reporting because they are attacked, either deliberately (Sarajevo - journos were considered targets) or accidentally (Reuters in the Palastine Hotel in Baghdad).
However, we do not expect journalists not to have opinions, however we want to see the opinions separated from the facts. The mixing, we can leave to politicians.
A reporter writes a story, which they want to make interesting (note the word 'story'), the reporter presents it to the editor who then adjusts the story to fit in with the paper's policy set by the proprietor or editorial board. Sometimes, the opinion of the owner is very evident in what is being said. Some local papers have an editor/propietor who also writes the stories - is that person not a journalist?
Maybe bloggers don't always do the separation but they write what they want and we can choose whether or not to give the store credance. A blogger can report things that are almost impossible for a professional journalist because they have access.
All sources of information are slanted, so it becomes useful to have access to differring points of view. If some of that comes out of a blog, that is fine - but we need to understand where the blog comes from.
However, I seem to remember having the exercise of evaluating newspaper stories taught in high school. Take one story and see how it it is reported in a number of different newspapers. I think most people reading the web have stayed in high school long enough to understand that sources must be evaluated.
What GnuCash really needs are a lot of Howtos - for example, "How to do VAT" - this is really important throughout the EU (even in other countries), however it isn't intuitive and the documentation 'as-is' is orientated more towards sales-tax.
The form of accounting is relatively standard througout the world and GNUCash tries to provide standard schemes of accounts for many countries. However even these could do with better commentary along the lines of QuickBooks.
The business objects are coded in C, but written in a C++ way. Actually, that makes it easier to work with.
However the business logic and reporting is written in Guile. This in turn is based directly on Scheme, to quote the home page:
a statically scoped and properly tail-recursive dialect of the Lisp programming language
This is an incredibally powerful language, but it isn't easy to get into for dabblers. I understand its advantages over Tcl, but not so much over other more recent languages such as Perl or Python.
The thing is that when you work with this kind of program, you need to implement the objects in something that is fast, however the upper layers need to be at a higher level so this approach works well.
I'm still debating whether or not I should take down MI6's headquarter pix
If the Feds bother you, just point them in the direction of a recent bond Film that features MI6s Vauxhall Cross building in all its glory. MI5s is less well known but, it is still public knowledge.
Well what is? Impartiality in the news gathering process is a total illusion, one person's terrorist is another's freedom fighter. News is biased to a lesser or greater degree. Some organisations try to be independent (i.e., BBC), but they still have their own 'point of view'. And then the embedded journalists duirng the last conflict, were they in any position to be independent?
If someone reports what is happening, then that is journalism. If they speculate too, that is also valid if that speculation is identified as such. What isn't journalism is the reporting of something that never happened as though it did.
What the web allows us to do is to get many more sources of input. They may be biased, but it doesn't matter, because the biases can balance themselves out.
Stock markets are important but not directly to money itself. What is more important is the establishment of the international money markets. This could only happen with the existance of one other piece of technology, the telephone.
and normally he would not be permitted to marry a foreigner. His bride, Yekatrina Dmitryevna although Russian born, is a US citizen. Luckily things have been sorted due to public pressure. It seems the Russian people told the military not to be stupid.
The wedding was planned a long time before , and before the shuttle disaster and the disruption to the usual schedule and the extended missions.
He may not be allowed up again, but hopefully with some skillful publicity (the video rights were sold), he won't need it. He would certainly not be well paid from the military.
In St. Petersburg (Russia not Florida) there are only a few hours of darkness at this time of year. In June, that is about a couple of hours of true darkness and you can read a newspaper after midnight with natural light only.
They consider the "White Nights" to be a good reason for a party. One of the problems is the the annual bipolar depression, feel great in Summer, but like shit in Winter.
My son is in Germany and his girlfriend has moved back to the states for studying. My son has broadband, and his girlfriend has through the university dorms where she will stay.
Even using cheap carriers, the phones pay for themselves after just 43 hrs of calls (not a lot for two teenagers in love). IM and Email are free, but its not the same thing as voice.
SIP has many problems as a standard (they want to stretch to IM too) - but it seems to work in the basic case. Selling two phones together is good idea because compatibility is ensured.
The preferred creditors get first shot. This is generally the tax man followed by their bankers. The next class are employees who weren't paid salary, this isn't a legal preference as such but usually they get this shot. After that comes the normal creditors, such as suppliers.
After that come the bond holders and after that the shareholders. Mind you, Venture capitalists can be quite aggressive about recovering assets.
The RFC2554 (SASL) authentication is somewhat flawed. A key point of SMTP is that the Email transmission can be differentiated between originators and forwarders and the reception can be differentiated between post-offices and recipients.
RFC2554 seems to get to a lot of hand waving when we get to the 'on-behalf-of'. That is, my ISP's SMTP gateway can't easily pass on that I was authenticated to the recipients POP server.
As for handling multiple CAs, this is akin to a routing problem. I have a set of key certs from CAs {A,B,C,D} and you trust key certs from {D,E,F,G} - ok we can agree on D. However if there is no coincidental certification authority, then we need to be able to find trust intermediaries by a process akin to routing.
To reject spam, what I need to know is that the originator has been authenticated. Spam is rarely sent by people using correct Email addresses because they can be filtered.
As for binaries, the support for RFC3030 is problematic and it only applies to the body (when it is sent and accepted - the RFC has only existed for three years). Also the character set support is limited because binary encapsulation applies to the body, not the header. It gets really fun trying to interpret Cyrillic subject lines, when it isn't the natice character set of your system.
RFC-822 is about ASCII. Anything else causes hiccups - even foreign characters such as German umlauts. The messages are sent as text, which means anything that isn't must be encoded. MIME and so on is handled transparently, but it shouldn't have to be. Each byte I send down the wire is 8 bits, using a subset of seven of them is a waste unless all I am sending is US/UK text.
A closer one would be that after fencing mself in from the stray animals, there are so many by my gate that nobody can get in or out.
When SPAM hists the wire, it costs resources. If it has to go all the way to a POP server, or even to the recipients own system before it is rejected then it is one big waste of space.
On your last note about volunteering yourslef to receive spam, well sorry that doesn't work. I have seen enough Emails come through with generated name combinations, i.e., Adam.Smith, Adrian.Smith until they hit something. VFY from SMTP will even help.
The problem is with hierarchical systems. Compromise the CA and everything else goes out of the window. With distributed trust systems such as pgp/gpg, a person's key may be certified by multiple CAs. In such a case, there is no real dependancy. Of course, I'm making the perhaps erroneus assumption that people can assign levels of trust to a particular certifier.
I disagree with you about SMTP, first the authentication sucks, secondly the need to encode binary data is a major shortcoming.
If you turn the volume up, you can almost follow the english - a kind of subliminal language learning tool.
What makes me laugh though are the ones where one voice reads both male and female parts. Seeing some starlet in a moment of ecstasy whilst hearing a montonic male voice saying "Da, Da" is entertaining by itself.
One of the obstinate companies was the DoD, they have a contract guaranteeing support for n years. Some major customers in the private sector also had similar agreements. HPaq now says that OpenVMS will run on Itanium (it already boots).
These guys also pay for 24x7 support - lots of cash. HPaq suddenly found that they had a little gold mine.
A right-thinking Russian would never think of actually paying $10k for some piece of software; he'll get the bootleg version for $5.
Actually, larger companies will buy original software rather than bootlegs - they may install it on more than one machine though.
Video is something else. Russian dubbing is some of the worst I have ever seen. Usually between one and two voices reading all bad translations of all the parts with little attempt to lip synch it. However most Russian are happy with the VCDs that they buy at $2 each.
Every so often, the US state dept has an official moan and the militia makes a couple of raids to keep them happy. Unofficially, the staff at the embassies are buying up the cheap VCDs like every one else.
A long time ago, I was asked to verify a security tool for deployment at a financial exchange. My client was quite worried about security so they asked the vendor to provide source for inspection and then we would build it on a standalone system. The resulting binary was then PGP signed so that anyone could verify that the tool that we examined was the very probably the one that was deployed.
As for the hardware, that too is doable, especially if it is comparatively stupid, so the intelligence is contained in the program and only in the program.
I could well be wrong about recounts as I haven't taken any US civics courses (I'm currently living and working in Germany).
The Digital engineers loved to play with code and Linux suited them well. Many liked it and had it installed. I guess that after two takeovers, they are still running it. However, not the PHB marketing types.
If your program was signed during formal testing by the producer and the verifier, then it should be possible to verify that signature upon receipt of the software at the testing centre. I should not need modify access to your code to verify it, just the ability to create a cryptographic checksum.
As far as implementation is concerned, it is just a matter of ensuring that the verification is simple to execute so the software is validated before the polling station opens. This is not a novel technology and apart from anything else the voting machine s/w and OS are single purpose so easier to verify.
At least your system does have a paper trail. Many don't now and this is an even greater problem. Even with the system that you worked on, remember a recount may only be called under certain circumstances.
Using computers may be cheaper than paying all those pesky humans, but it must be as open a process as possible. Frankly, thats why I would prefer open source voting machines or human counters.
I shouldn't have to trust you or any other person who has written the code. There should just be a chain of trust so at any point we can be certain that the software deployed is that which was tested.
Voting machines seem to be an interesting business. This is one reason why outside the US, all the other western countries have chosen to stick to pencil and paper and to build in oversight to the counting process.
I agree, have run on all my overseas assignments as well as at home. In Uzbekistan, it was the best way to find out from the other expats what was really going on.
It depends upon a lot of things. Some clubs like to run through deserts or rubber plantations. Others will just have a gentle saunter through the woods. Ours (http://www.frankfurt-hash.de) tends to usually do about an hour to an hour and a half of mixed terrain in moderate (i.e., German) conditions. It can easily be run at varying paces.
As a general rule, men only hashes tend to be a little more extreme.
However, I have run on hashes that have performed a climbs up a frozen waterfall, going through disused railway tunnels, and running the top of elevated pipes (and that was just the on-trail activities, the off-trail included things like the hole in the ice).
Slashdot Mirror
The person here is asking for something to help them sketch something out for the architect. They are not asking for final plans. An architect can draw, but not everyone can. In any case, the person wants to explore a new design.
The engineering and Bill-of-Materials aren't needed here just something that will give the architect an idea of what the client wants. the client should expect their original idea to be hacked to pieces, but at least it gives a basis for a dialogue.
I respect your points about architects having to follow a long and hard education process. However, isn't it much easier when a customer is able to illustrate their requirements?
Colussus was hardwired and its only electronic memory was a shift register. However the work on Colussus gave the basis for the Pilot Ace developed at the National Physical Laboratory in 1946. Around the same time ENIAC appeared in the US, initially for ballistic calculations.
The Manchester Mark 1 (fully electronic design) was created at Manchester University in the late forties and by 1951 it had been made and sold as a product by Ferranti for research use.
Also in 1951, the Lyons Tea and Cake company produced the first commercial electronic computer which in turn was based on EDSAC, a research computer built at the University of Cambridge. This system was a real computer and by 1953 was running the payroll.
What is interesting is that all of the British inventions fed off each other. Although the work of the cryptographers at Bletchley park was a state secret for some 30 years, many of the top mathematicians had worked at Bletchley during the war were aware of at least some of the principles. Pilot Ace, the first British computer openly produced had staff members that worked at Bletchley. Ideas bounced around without any major issues of IP. Some individual parts may have been protected by patents (such as the WIlliams Tube), but not concepts like the ALU which would have killed development.
Someone who has been trained as a journalist may have a certain professional detachment, but that goes, and indeed we expect it to go when they witness something particularly distateful. Does a journalist stop reporting because they are attacked, either deliberately (Sarajevo - journos were considered targets) or accidentally (Reuters in the Palastine Hotel in Baghdad).
However, we do not expect journalists not to have opinions, however we want to see the opinions separated from the facts. The mixing, we can leave to politicians.
A reporter writes a story, which they want to make interesting (note the word 'story'), the reporter presents it to the editor who then adjusts the story to fit in with the paper's policy set by the proprietor or editorial board. Sometimes, the opinion of the owner is very evident in what is being said. Some local papers have an editor/propietor who also writes the stories - is that person not a journalist?
Maybe bloggers don't always do the separation but they write what they want and we can choose whether or not to give the store credance. A blogger can report things that are almost impossible for a professional journalist because they have access.
All sources of information are slanted, so it becomes useful to have access to differring points of view. If some of that comes out of a blog, that is fine - but we need to understand where the blog comes from.
However, I seem to remember having the exercise of evaluating newspaper stories taught in high school. Take one story and see how it it is reported in a number of different newspapers. I think most people reading the web have stayed in high school long enough to understand that sources must be evaluated.
The form of accounting is relatively standard througout the world and GNUCash tries to provide standard schemes of accounts for many countries. However even these could do with better commentary along the lines of QuickBooks.
However the business logic and reporting is written in Guile. This in turn is based directly on Scheme, to quote the home page:
This is an incredibally powerful language, but it isn't easy to get into for dabblers. I understand its advantages over Tcl, but not so much over other more recent languages such as Perl or Python.The thing is that when you work with this kind of program, you need to implement the objects in something that is fast, however the upper layers need to be at a higher level so this approach works well.
If someone reports what is happening, then that is journalism. If they speculate too, that is also valid if that speculation is identified as such. What isn't journalism is the reporting of something that never happened as though it did.
What the web allows us to do is to get many more sources of input. They may be biased, but it doesn't matter, because the biases can balance themselves out.
Stock markets are important but not directly to money itself. What is more important is the establishment of the international money markets. This could only happen with the existance of one other piece of technology, the telephone.
The wedding was planned a long time before , and before the shuttle disaster and the disruption to the usual schedule and the extended missions.
He may not be allowed up again, but hopefully with some skillful publicity (the video rights were sold), he won't need it. He would certainly not be well paid from the military.
They consider the "White Nights" to be a good reason for a party. One of the problems is the the annual bipolar depression, feel great in Summer, but like shit in Winter.
Even using cheap carriers, the phones pay for themselves after just 43 hrs of calls (not a lot for two teenagers in love). IM and Email are free, but its not the same thing as voice.
SIP has many problems as a standard (they want to stretch to IM too) - but it seems to work in the basic case. Selling two phones together is good idea because compatibility is ensured.
After that come the bond holders and after that the shareholders. Mind you, Venture capitalists can be quite aggressive about recovering assets.
RFC2554 seems to get to a lot of hand waving when we get to the 'on-behalf-of'. That is, my ISP's SMTP gateway can't easily pass on that I was authenticated to the recipients POP server.
As for handling multiple CAs, this is akin to a routing problem. I have a set of key certs from CAs {A,B,C,D} and you trust key certs from {D,E,F,G} - ok we can agree on D. However if there is no coincidental certification authority, then we need to be able to find trust intermediaries by a process akin to routing.
To reject spam, what I need to know is that the originator has been authenticated. Spam is rarely sent by people using correct Email addresses because they can be filtered.
As for binaries, the support for RFC3030 is problematic and it only applies to the body (when it is sent and accepted - the RFC has only existed for three years). Also the character set support is limited because binary encapsulation applies to the body, not the header. It gets really fun trying to interpret Cyrillic subject lines, when it isn't the natice character set of your system.
RFC-822 is about ASCII. Anything else causes hiccups - even foreign characters such as German umlauts. The messages are sent as text, which means anything that isn't must be encoded. MIME and so on is handled transparently, but it shouldn't have to be. Each byte I send down the wire is 8 bits, using a subset of seven of them is a waste unless all I am sending is US/UK text.
When SPAM hists the wire, it costs resources. If it has to go all the way to a POP server, or even to the recipients own system before it is rejected then it is one big waste of space.
On your last note about volunteering yourslef to receive spam, well sorry that doesn't work. I have seen enough Emails come through with generated name combinations, i.e., Adam.Smith, Adrian.Smith until they hit something. VFY from SMTP will even help.
I disagree with you about SMTP, first the authentication sucks, secondly the need to encode binary data is a major shortcoming.
What makes me laugh though are the ones where one voice reads both male and female parts. Seeing some starlet in a moment of ecstasy whilst hearing a montonic male voice saying "Da, Da" is entertaining by itself.
These guys also pay for 24x7 support - lots of cash. HPaq suddenly found that they had a little gold mine.
Video is something else. Russian dubbing is some of the worst I have ever seen. Usually between one and two voices reading all bad translations of all the parts with little attempt to lip synch it. However most Russian are happy with the VCDs that they buy at $2 each.
Every so often, the US state dept has an official moan and the militia makes a couple of raids to keep them happy. Unofficially, the staff at the embassies are buying up the cheap VCDs like every one else.
As for the hardware, that too is doable, especially if it is comparatively stupid, so the intelligence is contained in the program and only in the program.
I could well be wrong about recounts as I haven't taken any US civics courses (I'm currently living and working in Germany).
The Digital engineers loved to play with code and Linux suited them well. Many liked it and had it installed. I guess that after two takeovers, they are still running it. However, not the PHB marketing types.
As far as implementation is concerned, it is just a matter of ensuring that the verification is simple to execute so the software is validated before the polling station opens. This is not a novel technology and apart from anything else the voting machine s/w and OS are single purpose so easier to verify.
At least your system does have a paper trail. Many don't now and this is an even greater problem. Even with the system that you worked on, remember a recount may only be called under certain circumstances.
Using computers may be cheaper than paying all those pesky humans, but it must be as open a process as possible. Frankly, thats why I would prefer open source voting machines or human counters.
Voting machines seem to be an interesting business. This is one reason why outside the US, all the other western countries have chosen to stick to pencil and paper and to build in oversight to the counting process.
I agree, have run on all my overseas assignments as well as at home. In Uzbekistan, it was the best way to find out from the other expats what was really going on.
As a general rule, men only hashes tend to be a little more extreme.
However, I have run on hashes that have performed a climbs up a frozen waterfall, going through disused railway tunnels, and running the top of elevated pipes (and that was just the on-trail activities, the off-trail included things like the hole in the ice).