The first rule of software is that all software beyond the barest of trivial examples will have bugs. Compilers are software, and have the same long and sordid history of bugs. Since compilers have been mentioned specifically, you might be interested in the classic work Reflections on Trusting Trust (it was apparently written by a guy who knows a thing or two about the topic, some Ken Thompson fellow).The same goes for test suites. In many cases, bugs translate to security vulnerabilities. In some cases, perfectly rational behavior demonstrated by entities known as programs results in unexpected behavior when they are made to exchange data. This phenomenon is referred to as "novel outcomes" in some circles, and "wow, that's some fucked up shit" in others. There is a reason the field of information security is as broad as it always has been, is, and always will be.
Your post proves you have never worked as a professional developer, or for an organization where your role was deeply connected to systems or development work. Heck, it proves you've never worked on any major open source project either, for that matter. I suppose we should all stop using anything resembling software immediately to prevent the planet from caving in under the weight of its own failure. Or perhaps you should take your obviously extremely advanced software engineering skills and produce the one true invulnerable platform for everyone, one layer and application at a time.
As Bruce Schneier famously said, "security is a process, not a product." That process never ends, and involves complexities I believe could be delicately framed as things that aren't exactly your area of expertise. That's okay, though; you can always start educating yourself immediately. We're all looking forward to your next batch of brilliant revelations on infosec strategy.
Man, I must be using my MacBook wrong, too. About a third of my active desktop real estate is perpetually occupied by a terminal window, and I've even got an icon for it in two places. It's almost like some people use Unix-based operating systems for, well, things that Unix-based operating systems are historically used for. Crazy.
Is it better to have a visible kidney in the hand, or an invisible hand in the market?
You appear to presume the creation of some mystical system whereby the automatic availability of the former is assured, which would be a miraculous medical and social development even in the western world. In other words, without the latter, you may find yourself lacking the former. Yes Virginia, organ availability is primarily a social problem. It's a problem that isn't solvable in the political context, as the core of the issue deals with aspects of human rights and human nature that can't by any stretch of the imagination be forced or otherwise ethically regulated.
Depending upon the severity of your need, this may be of grave concern to you, and you may find yourself willing to rethink your personal system of ethics accordingly.
Given that conciliatory is a synonym for propitiatory, I suspect any scenarios involving Red Hat becoming litigious are unlikely to involve Red Hat acting in a conciliatory fashion on the matter at any point in the next decade or so thereafter.
Which branch of service do you hail from? There are a great many highly effective and honorable service members who have done their duty as ordered, and not only loathe the act of killing but also suffer from issues related to it for the rest of their lives. Ask their husbands, wives, or children about it.
There is a distinct difference between innate clinical psychopathy and behavior drilled into soldiers through military training. Perhaps you're a mental health professional; would you care to explain your background a bit more?
Mod parent up. I know several people whose lives have been saved by organ transplants, and the parent poster speaks directly to the fact that if not for these life-saving operations, there are people on the planet now who otherwise wouldn't exist.
I meant what I wrote. The impact of this gentleman's work is beyond measure, and is therefore immeasurable. Please acquaint yourself with the English language before commenting again, and have a nice day in the interim.
It was simply a reference to his surgical specialization, one which was honed by performing reconstructive surgeries on horribly disfigured World War II service members. You should probably go read the article before commenting further.
Your work, and the work and research from countless medical professionals following in your footsteps, has had an immeasurably postive impact on the lives of millions. Sir, rest in peace knowing that your leave is well earned.
One might say the entire TLD is PhuKed. The teachable moment here is that security rolls downhill, and depending on any single layer of public infrastructure, at least for authentication of who you're talking to without giving serious consideration to cryptographic concerns, is asking for trouble. This is still something that the world is failing at on, well, a global scale.
Well, that and taking perimeter security seriously in terms of access to critical components, and having short order failover to components with completely different codebases ready to roll into production for select services in the event of something nasty happening. These days, virtualization on multiple platforms running in parallel makes that easier, although it does have the effect of acting as a cost multiplier (sliding scale factor-wise) depending on what you're trying to make as bulletproof as possible.
TLDR = Security is hard. Be prepared to be compromised. Have alternate plans in place that assume at least one $major_thing is already silently compromised. Yeah, it's tough. Life is tough.
As with any position in federal service, you do what is asked of you. This isn't meant to sound trite; speaking as someone who has drawn paychecks from the military and has worked in the private sector in various information technology roles both before and after the DoD (and some gray in between), it's a reality that should be given serious thought. Take it for what it's worth, the primary point being that regardless of your job title, your first priority is your orders.
This has advantages and disadvantages, which measured against one another may invoke the urge the urge to seriously consider your personal value system, i.e. the value system you expressly agree to largely discount on the basis of placing your faith in your particular chain of command. If anything, it's a fun ride.
There's a difference between defending dogma and noting that someone appears to be making gross generalizations. I did the latter, and if anything you seem to be persisting in defending your own dogma at this point.
I'll ask another question. Do you believe there might be value in sitting down over a cup of coffee with someone like me, with my admitted political leanings (again, not to be confused with the particular beliefs of anyone else), and just having a nice afternoon talk about whatever comes up? That's how I prefer to have these sorts of discussions, as it seems the participants gain the opportunity learn more about who the other person actually is as a whole being.
So again, my objective in the previous post was quite removed from any attempt to defend or assail any particular approach to politics. Instead, it was to see if you might be interested in slowing down for a moment to think of someone as a person, instead of a cog in some political collective. I look forward to your reply.
Please reference this comment thread, which contains a comment I posted in response to what some might perceive as an "attack" on Ayn Rand (a person who undoubtedly doesn't care a bit about it, as she's dead). In broad strokes, if pushed to classify myself in terms of political affiliation, I might reasonably be described as strongly identifying with many of the principles espoused by the Libertarian party.
Based on that single comment thread and my open admission of apparent LP affiliation, I'm curious whether you would presume to make a summary judgement of my character per your post. In different terms, I wonder if you would not only believe that you have a deep understanding of me as a whole person based on this limited criteria, but would also act upon that belief if you believed it would serve to reinforce your particular worldview. I look forward to your reply.
I'm probably wasting my time here as you're posting AC, and it's certainly offtopic, but I feel compelled to respond to this. What you've posted is a perfect example of rejecting a message you would otherwise hold in esteem because you have a personal problem with the core philosophy of the messenger, followed by substitution of a message with that is quite nearly functionally equivalent, yet represents the work of someone you happen to like more.
If anything, I would characterize your behavior as irrational, and thus amusingly at odds with both your reference to meds and the point of both quotes. The end result, at least to my perception, is apparent manifestation of quite an elitist attitude. Are you perchance employed in academia?
That doesn't seem to make any sense. The whole point of multiple DNS servers is to have them distributed across separate hosts and preferably separate networks, but putting them on exclusive hardware doesn't provide any gain unless you're handling a ridiculous number of queries per second (in which case there's no point to virtualizing the servers in first place). That is, unless you actually meant to say you make sure the second sentence applies, instead of potentially saying no other VMs run on hosts that happen to host your DNS servers.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait just a second. If his listeners are sheep, and he shows up wearing a kilt, you know about those jokes; man I'm just going to stop right here.
To quote my original post:
and I've even got an icon for it in two places
Apparently you cannot read more than 25 words in sequence before losing track of what you're doing. Please go away until your focus improves.
The first rule of software is that all software beyond the barest of trivial examples will have bugs. Compilers are software, and have the same long and sordid history of bugs. Since compilers have been mentioned specifically, you might be interested in the classic work Reflections on Trusting Trust (it was apparently written by a guy who knows a thing or two about the topic, some Ken Thompson fellow).The same goes for test suites. In many cases, bugs translate to security vulnerabilities. In some cases, perfectly rational behavior demonstrated by entities known as programs results in unexpected behavior when they are made to exchange data. This phenomenon is referred to as "novel outcomes" in some circles, and "wow, that's some fucked up shit" in others. There is a reason the field of information security is as broad as it always has been, is, and always will be.
Your post proves you have never worked as a professional developer, or for an organization where your role was deeply connected to systems or development work. Heck, it proves you've never worked on any major open source project either, for that matter. I suppose we should all stop using anything resembling software immediately to prevent the planet from caving in under the weight of its own failure. Or perhaps you should take your obviously extremely advanced software engineering skills and produce the one true invulnerable platform for everyone, one layer and application at a time.
As Bruce Schneier famously said, "security is a process, not a product." That process never ends, and involves complexities I believe could be delicately framed as things that aren't exactly your area of expertise. That's okay, though; you can always start educating yourself immediately. We're all looking forward to your next batch of brilliant revelations on infosec strategy.
Man, I must be using my MacBook wrong, too. About a third of my active desktop real estate is perpetually occupied by a terminal window, and I've even got an icon for it in two places. It's almost like some people use Unix-based operating systems for, well, things that Unix-based operating systems are historically used for. Crazy.
Actually, /. has always been like this. I've been a reader here since 2000, and suspect you're suffering from Gool Ol' Days Syndrome.
This is not always true. Consider the case of the emancipated minor.
Film at 11, courtesy of components manufactured in part by Samsung.
Is it better to have a visible kidney in the hand, or an invisible hand in the market?
You appear to presume the creation of some mystical system whereby the automatic availability of the former is assured, which would be a miraculous medical and social development even in the western world. In other words, without the latter, you may find yourself lacking the former. Yes Virginia, organ availability is primarily a social problem. It's a problem that isn't solvable in the political context, as the core of the issue deals with aspects of human rights and human nature that can't by any stretch of the imagination be forced or otherwise ethically regulated.
Depending upon the severity of your need, this may be of grave concern to you, and you may find yourself willing to rethink your personal system of ethics accordingly.
Given that conciliatory is a synonym for propitiatory, I suspect any scenarios involving Red Hat becoming litigious are unlikely to involve Red Hat acting in a conciliatory fashion on the matter at any point in the next decade or so thereafter.
Which branch of service do you hail from? There are a great many highly effective and honorable service members who have done their duty as ordered, and not only loathe the act of killing but also suffer from issues related to it for the rest of their lives. Ask their husbands, wives, or children about it.
There is a distinct difference between innate clinical psychopathy and behavior drilled into soldiers through military training. Perhaps you're a mental health professional; would you care to explain your background a bit more?
Mod parent up. I know several people whose lives have been saved by organ transplants, and the parent poster speaks directly to the fact that if not for these life-saving operations, there are people on the planet now who otherwise wouldn't exist.
I meant what I wrote. The impact of this gentleman's work is beyond measure, and is therefore immeasurable. Please acquaint yourself with the English language before commenting again, and have a nice day in the interim.
It was simply a reference to his surgical specialization, one which was honed by performing reconstructive surgeries on horribly disfigured World War II service members. You should probably go read the article before commenting further.
Your work, and the work and research from countless medical professionals following in your footsteps, has had an immeasurably postive impact on the lives of millions. Sir, rest in peace knowing that your leave is well earned.
Maybe as progress continues with Wine on ARM you won't have to worry about that.
One might say the entire TLD is PhuKed. The teachable moment here is that security rolls downhill, and depending on any single layer of public infrastructure, at least for authentication of who you're talking to without giving serious consideration to cryptographic concerns, is asking for trouble. This is still something that the world is failing at on, well, a global scale.
Well, that and taking perimeter security seriously in terms of access to critical components, and having short order failover to components with completely different codebases ready to roll into production for select services in the event of something nasty happening. These days, virtualization on multiple platforms running in parallel makes that easier, although it does have the effect of acting as a cost multiplier (sliding scale factor-wise) depending on what you're trying to make as bulletproof as possible.
TLDR = Security is hard. Be prepared to be compromised. Have alternate plans in place that assume at least one $major_thing is already silently compromised. Yeah, it's tough. Life is tough.
As with any position in federal service, you do what is asked of you. This isn't meant to sound trite; speaking as someone who has drawn paychecks from the military and has worked in the private sector in various information technology roles both before and after the DoD (and some gray in between), it's a reality that should be given serious thought. Take it for what it's worth, the primary point being that regardless of your job title, your first priority is your orders.
This has advantages and disadvantages, which measured against one another may invoke the urge the urge to seriously consider your personal value system, i.e. the value system you expressly agree to largely discount on the basis of placing your faith in your particular chain of command. If anything, it's a fun ride.
I see what you did there. Or maybe I don't.
It's not a matter of competency. It's a matter of others outside your network not giving a shit about your QoS preferences.
In the race card demo
It's quite saddening to see Mozilla playing the race card. However, I'm glad to report that I'm getting ~22 FPS using Firefox 16.0.2 on OS X 10.7.5.
There's a difference between defending dogma and noting that someone appears to be making gross generalizations. I did the latter, and if anything you seem to be persisting in defending your own dogma at this point.
I'll ask another question. Do you believe there might be value in sitting down over a cup of coffee with someone like me, with my admitted political leanings (again, not to be confused with the particular beliefs of anyone else), and just having a nice afternoon talk about whatever comes up? That's how I prefer to have these sorts of discussions, as it seems the participants gain the opportunity learn more about who the other person actually is as a whole being.
So again, my objective in the previous post was quite removed from any attempt to defend or assail any particular approach to politics. Instead, it was to see if you might be interested in slowing down for a moment to think of someone as a person, instead of a cog in some political collective. I look forward to your reply.
Please reference this comment thread, which contains a comment I posted in response to what some might perceive as an "attack" on Ayn Rand (a person who undoubtedly doesn't care a bit about it, as she's dead). In broad strokes, if pushed to classify myself in terms of political affiliation, I might reasonably be described as strongly identifying with many of the principles espoused by the Libertarian party.
Based on that single comment thread and my open admission of apparent LP affiliation, I'm curious whether you would presume to make a summary judgement of my character per your post. In different terms, I wonder if you would not only believe that you have a deep understanding of me as a whole person based on this limited criteria, but would also act upon that belief if you believed it would serve to reinforce your particular worldview. I look forward to your reply.
Charitable donations aren't the only way of creating value in the world.
I'm probably wasting my time here as you're posting AC, and it's certainly offtopic, but I feel compelled to respond to this. What you've posted is a perfect example of rejecting a message you would otherwise hold in esteem because you have a personal problem with the core philosophy of the messenger, followed by substitution of a message with that is quite nearly functionally equivalent, yet represents the work of someone you happen to like more.
If anything, I would characterize your behavior as irrational, and thus amusingly at odds with both your reference to meds and the point of both quotes. The end result, at least to my perception, is apparent manifestation of quite an elitist attitude. Are you perchance employed in academia?
That doesn't seem to make any sense. The whole point of multiple DNS servers is to have them distributed across separate hosts and preferably separate networks, but putting them on exclusive hardware doesn't provide any gain unless you're handling a ridiculous number of queries per second (in which case there's no point to virtualizing the servers in first place). That is, unless you actually meant to say you make sure the second sentence applies, instead of potentially saying no other VMs run on hosts that happen to host your DNS servers.