I think you'd be surprised how many real world day to day task can be and are parallelized: [...] searching
I thought searching a large collection of documents was disk-bound, and traversing an index was an inherently serial process. Or what parallel data structure for searching did I miss?
Searching a large collection of non-indexed documents from disk is likely disk-bound, yes - except you somehow formulated a very complex search or stream from multiple disks at a time - but maybe you are searching data already in RAM. Traversing an index isn't necessarily a serial process, depending on your data structure. There are parallel implementations for binary and red-black trees, as far as I know. Or one could simply use a forest of as many trees as one has searching threads. (will get worse performance when using less threads than trees). If you only have a sorted list or array you could use a parallel search. If your data is not indexed you are likely to be faster with multiple threads (if there is no other bottle neck like, for example, disk throughput). Maybe you are searching multiple things at the same time (like a string in authors and contents of e-mails) or you are searching with multiple parameters (filetype [type], last access after [date], string in content [foo]) where not all parameters are indexed.
rendering web pages
I don't see how rendering a web page can be fully parallelized. Decoding images, yes. Compositing, yes. Parsing and reflow, no. The size of one box affects every box below it, especially when float: is involved. And JavaScript is still single-threaded unless a script is 1. being displayed from a web server (Chrome doesn't support Web Workers in file:// for security reasons), 2. being displayed on a browser other than IE on XP, IE on Vista, and Android Browser <= 4.3 (which don't support Web Workers at all), and 3. not accessing the DOM.
I never stated that my problems are 100% parallelizable.;) Parsing: Why not? Reflow: And if I have multiple boxes at the same layer? At least as long the dimension are fixed or bounded some parallel processing could be possible, if it would benefit I can't tell. Often enough there is more than one page opened at a time. With every open page the likelihood of executing multiple JavaScripts rises and with multiple pages getting rendered at the same time you can use parallelism, too.
compiling
True, each translation unit can be combined in parallel if you choose not to enable whole-program optimization. But I don't see how whole-program optimization can be done in parallel.
Many steps can be parallelized, not all, as you pointed out. And even than I am not sure if there wouldn't be a solution for whole-program / link-time optimization, but I'm no professional concerning compiler building. And even then: I happen to compile multiple binary files with one run of make most of the time, so using multiple threads is for free (there is a reason make has the -j option).
I think you'd be surprised how many real world day to day task can be and are parallelized: almost everything concerning audio and video (images or movies), searching, analyzing, rendering web pages, compiling, computing physics and AI for games.
I can't think of one computing intensive day to day action that is not parallelized or wouldn't be easy to do so.
I have to correct myself. I can't prove something stating: "All swans are white", but I can prove "There is a black swan." if I happen to catch one. Going back to religion: imho one could only prove the existence but not the non-existence of something supernatural. Concluding: if at all religious people could prove non-believers wrong.
I would agree with many of your points, but: Do not mix up a mathematical proof with a "proof" in general science.;) A mathematical proof says something is or is not. There is no doubt (if we accept some axioms). In general "proofs" (better: validation) of theories describing nature can only say, something seems likely or unlikely (and to what extend). To be more specific: One formulates a hypothesis and a null hypothesis (often saying the effect described in the hypothesis is non-existent) and then look at the data and say whether one can show the null hypothesis to be highly unlikely. Your are not saying your hypothesis is right, your just saying the null hypothesis is likely wrong and your hypothesis _could_ explain why.
To support your claim: As we can we only say what likely is wrong, any theory has to be falsifiable. Everything else is not science. I can't say: "My god is out of reach of man and their tools, he can't be perceived or measured, neither it's actions. And science hasn't proven me wrong about it's existence, so it must exist." and expect science to take me serious, as it is impossible to (in)validate this claim with tools of science.
To the general topic: I have no problem of people being religious in general (as long those don't rub it under my nose all the time, play missionary or try to use it for their advantage), but there is a big misunderstanding about science, what it can achieve and how it works. On both ends. How often have I read post saying science is just another kind of religion. No it's not. Maybe some pseudo sciences make non-invalidatable claims, but definitely not natural sciences and mathematics. On the other hand people trying science to disprove religious believe will not succeed, for reasons mentioned above. The only thing you could do imho is to argue, why you consider it not reasonable to have religious believe.
To the OP: Please refer to the provided documentation or use a search engine to find tutorials, if you dare. There is an official API for this. We won't recite manuals here.
To./ community: Why is a question that can be answered with a "rtfm" landing on the front page?
The article is about _businesses_. Their IT staff _will_ care at least it should considering whats on the stakes. It's not about what Joe Sixpack does on his private machine running a "spatial distributed backup" of windows xp without service packs.
Sorry but a) software errors are _everywhere_ and b) why do you think some sociopath with enough power would _not_ order to kill innocent people? Just take a look at this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history. Do you really think genocides are _less_ likely if your "soldiers" won't question anything or riot?
Remove the hyberbole from your argument and people are much more likely to take you seriously.
I'm sorry but I don't find any hyperbole in his comment.
My problem isn't the fact that they are building killer robots.... it's the fact that the other side doesn't have anything close
For an example of something where the two sides had something close you need only look at WWI. The two sides had very close capacity, the result was a multiyear quagmire that resulted in the death in tens of millions of people as neither side was able to quickly 'win'.
In WW II many more people died than in WW I, just in case you didn't knew.
Wars that are "fair" are wars that kill far more people than wars that aren't and history is riddle with countless millions of dead bodies that prove my point.
these will be used to hit non-military targets and/or populations of civilians
Ever heard of the Thirty Years' War? Less casualties than WW I. You should reconsider your "proof" maybe.
The US hasn't targeted civilian centers since WW2, luckily technology has changed quite a bit since then.
Wrong, see other comment.
The reality is that they have spent billions of dollars developing better technology for the sole purpose of not hitting civilians.
Yup, like on cluster bombs, prohibited by a convention most countries of the world signed, like the chemical weapons developed and produced in masses and the biological weapons developed and the atomic and hydrogen bombs developed. Sorry what world do you life in?
Then we'll use our robot army to ensure no one has the power to ever be a considerable threat to the US and bully the planet with it forever.
The US provides more foreign aid than other country on earth and has done so for decades. Any number of nations depend of the US for medical and food aid for basic survival and have for decades. I know it's popular in certain circles to hate on the US, but try doing a little actual research before hopping on the hype train.
Can't comment on that but likely wrong, as stated in other reply. But undoubtedly the US are fighting more wars than every other country in this world.
You know if you take the fighting away from the human, you take it away from empathy, reasoning and responsibility. Robots won't resist killing innocent people like women, children and elderly. People will question wars even less, as they and their relatives are not in danger by fighting the war anymore and neither they nor their ancestors and relatives never experienced the ugliness of fighting themselves. Combine this with the many wars the USA is fighting already and you get a quite dark picture of a possibly upcoming society. You saying "stop whining, this is just the way the world goes" underlines your lack of empathy and reasoning.
Your postulation that human nature would always be the same is actually no more than your personal thesis. Show me some evidence, that society is unable to learn to cooperate and empathize. In fact what defines humanity and society _is_ cooperation, trust and empathy. I think what you allude to is that sociopaths with power will behave like sociopaths with power (if not stopped).
I wont bet on the "They can't arrest them all." part. Sadly everything seems possible. Now the harassed student is even bullied by the state instead of the bullies being taken care of. If you ask me this seems a) totally insane and b) like a perfect way to force someone even more into a corner, leading to potentially even bigger problems.
tl;dr; I am disgusted by this society punishing the victim.
Even though neither I have a hat or am a security professional, let's just view it from an overly paranoid view.
There is one fundamental problem with your first idea. You assume your operating system behaves secure / sane. How could you prove it? Even though you compiled all your code by hand and read all the source code (good luck at that), how can you guarantee your compiler compiles only the code and doesn't introduce back doors? I think of two possible ways: First, it could just have a bug in the compiler, making even perfect code vulnerable. Second, it could intentionally introduce unwanted and unknown behavior. See the Ken Thompson hack for a reference. [0] In the end your only way would be doing it _all_ from scratch, software _and_ hardware.
So, I would guess you are way better off transferring the data by typing it by hand, as you suggested with the second idea. This seems reasonable secure, but quite error prone and time consuming.
It happens that I just read an article in the CACM (DOI:10.1145/2492007.2492018) stating why exactly an air gap will not work, most of all because in most cases there isn't one (practical).
Let's say you have all the required software on this laptop. How do you import new keys? Typing them in by hand? Since you want to send and receive encrypted messages: How do you transfer the encrypted and plain-text messages between your PC and laptop?
The concept of an air gap sounds very easy on the first look, but in reality it requires heavy overhead and if not applied correctly it gives a false sense of security which will ultimately do more harm than good.
But it actually is. Even though you solve _all_ other bits, you will only get rid of as many combinations as this first bit did. I would suggest that this is a huge progress.;)
Well actually: If you guessed one bit correctly and you knew this, you would have made the problem half as easy. But maybe I just understood you wrong, so feel free to correct me.;)
Slashdot Mirror
I think you'd be surprised how many real world day to day task can be and are parallelized: [...] searching
I thought searching a large collection of documents was disk-bound, and traversing an index was an inherently serial process. Or what parallel data structure for searching did I miss?
Searching a large collection of non-indexed documents from disk is likely disk-bound, yes - except you somehow formulated a very complex search or stream from multiple disks at a time - but maybe you are searching data already in RAM. Traversing an index isn't necessarily a serial process, depending on your data structure. There are parallel implementations for binary and red-black trees, as far as I know. Or one could simply use a forest of as many trees as one has searching threads. (will get worse performance when using less threads than trees). If you only have a sorted list or array you could use a parallel search. If your data is not indexed you are likely to be faster with multiple threads (if there is no other bottle neck like, for example, disk throughput). Maybe you are searching multiple things at the same time (like a string in authors and contents of e-mails) or you are searching with multiple parameters (filetype [type], last access after [date], string in content [foo]) where not all parameters are indexed.
rendering web pages
I don't see how rendering a web page can be fully parallelized. Decoding images, yes. Compositing, yes. Parsing and reflow, no. The size of one box affects every box below it, especially when float: is involved. And JavaScript is still single-threaded unless a script is 1. being displayed from a web server (Chrome doesn't support Web Workers in file:// for security reasons), 2. being displayed on a browser other than IE on XP, IE on Vista, and Android Browser <= 4.3 (which don't support Web Workers at all), and 3. not accessing the DOM.
I never stated that my problems are 100% parallelizable. ;) Parsing: Why not? Reflow: And if I have multiple boxes at the same layer? At least as long the dimension are fixed or bounded some parallel processing could be possible, if it would benefit I can't tell.
Often enough there is more than one page opened at a time. With every open page the likelihood of executing multiple JavaScripts rises and with multiple pages getting rendered at the same time you can use parallelism, too.
compiling
True, each translation unit can be combined in parallel if you choose not to enable whole-program optimization. But I don't see how whole-program optimization can be done in parallel.
Many steps can be parallelized, not all, as you pointed out. And even than I am not sure if there wouldn't be a solution for whole-program / link-time optimization, but I'm no professional concerning compiler building. And even then: I happen to compile multiple binary files with one run of make most of the time, so using multiple threads is for free (there is a reason make has the -j option).
I think you'd be surprised how many real world day to day task can be and are parallelized: almost everything concerning audio and video (images or movies), searching, analyzing, rendering web pages, compiling, computing physics and AI for games.
I can't think of one computing intensive day to day action that is not parallelized or wouldn't be easy to do so.
Not only does this "news" in no way matter for people reading /. it is even wrong on so many levels, that it actually does more harm than good.
I have to correct myself. I can't prove something stating: "All swans are white", but I can prove "There is a black swan." if I happen to catch one. Going back to religion: imho one could only prove the existence but not the non-existence of something supernatural. Concluding: if at all religious people could prove non-believers wrong.
I would agree with many of your points, but: Do not mix up a mathematical proof with a "proof" in general science. ;)
A mathematical proof says something is or is not. There is no doubt (if we accept some axioms). In general "proofs" (better: validation) of theories describing nature can only say, something seems likely or unlikely (and to what extend). To be more specific: One formulates a hypothesis and a null hypothesis (often saying the effect described in the hypothesis is non-existent) and then look at the data and say whether one can show the null hypothesis to be highly unlikely. Your are not saying your hypothesis is right, your just saying the null hypothesis is likely wrong and your hypothesis _could_ explain why.
To support your claim: As we can we only say what likely is wrong, any theory has to be falsifiable. Everything else is not science. I can't say: "My god is out of reach of man and their tools, he can't be perceived or measured, neither it's actions. And science hasn't proven me wrong about it's existence, so it must exist." and expect science to take me serious, as it is impossible to (in)validate this claim with tools of science.
To the general topic: I have no problem of people being religious in general (as long those don't rub it under my nose all the time, play missionary or try to use it for their advantage), but there is a big misunderstanding about science, what it can achieve and how it works. On both ends. How often have I read post saying science is just another kind of religion. No it's not. Maybe some pseudo sciences make non-invalidatable claims, but definitely not natural sciences and mathematics. On the other hand people trying science to disprove religious believe will not succeed, for reasons mentioned above. The only thing you could do imho is to argue, why you consider it not reasonable to have religious believe.
To the OP: Please refer to the provided documentation or use a search engine to find tutorials, if you dare. There is an official API for this. We won't recite manuals here.
To ./ community: Why is a question that can be answered with a "rtfm" landing on the front page?
This whole GUI thing is totally bloated. We shouldn't have gone further after DOS 6.0.
The article is about _businesses_. Their IT staff _will_ care at least it should considering whats on the stakes.
It's not about what Joe Sixpack does on his private machine running a "spatial distributed backup" of windows xp without service packs.
Obvious troll is obvious...
Anyone who likes security holes fixed, when they come up, is concerned.
You may call me unfair from now on.
The good news is online cloud-based platforms are gaining traction [...]
How is this good news?
Better start a second cold war.
Sorry but a) software errors are _everywhere_ and b) why do you think some sociopath with enough power would _not_ order to kill innocent people? Just take a look at this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history. Do you really think genocides are _less_ likely if your "soldiers" won't question anything or riot?
Remove the hyberbole from your argument and people are much more likely to take you seriously.
I'm sorry but I don't find any hyperbole in his comment.
For an example of something where the two sides had something close you need only look at WWI. The two sides had very close capacity, the result was a multiyear quagmire that resulted in the death in tens of millions of people as neither side was able to quickly 'win'.
In WW II many more people died than in WW I, just in case you didn't knew.
Wars that are "fair" are wars that kill far more people than wars that aren't and history is riddle with countless millions of dead bodies that prove my point.
The US hasn't targeted civilian centers since WW2, luckily technology has changed quite a bit since then.
Wrong, see other comment.
The reality is that they have spent billions of dollars developing better technology for the sole purpose of not hitting civilians.
Yup, like on cluster bombs, prohibited by a convention most countries of the world signed, like the chemical weapons developed and produced in masses and the biological weapons developed and the atomic and hydrogen bombs developed. Sorry what world do you life in?
The US provides more foreign aid than other country on earth and has done so for decades. Any number of nations depend of the US for medical and food aid for basic survival and have for decades. I know it's popular in certain circles to hate on the US, but try doing a little actual research before hopping on the hype train.
Can't comment on that but likely wrong, as stated in other reply. But undoubtedly the US are fighting more wars than every other country in this world.
You know if you take the fighting away from the human, you take it away from empathy, reasoning and responsibility. Robots won't resist killing innocent people like women, children and elderly. People will question wars even less, as they and their relatives are not in danger by fighting the war anymore and neither they nor their ancestors and relatives never experienced the ugliness of fighting themselves. Combine this with the many wars the USA is fighting already and you get a quite dark picture of a possibly upcoming society. You saying "stop whining, this is just the way the world goes" underlines your lack of empathy and reasoning.
Your postulation that human nature would always be the same is actually no more than your personal thesis. Show me some evidence, that society is unable to learn to cooperate and empathize. In fact what defines humanity and society _is_ cooperation, trust and empathy. I think what you allude to is that sociopaths with power will behave like sociopaths with power (if not stopped).
Sixty? You are lucky. For me it was around 200 seconds.
Then you haven't seen the "WHOA ctrl+shift+t opens closed windows in firefox again"-article some weeks ago.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/08/26/0010239/the-greatest-keyboard-shortcut-ever
I wont bet on the "They can't arrest them all." part. Sadly everything seems possible. Now the harassed student is even bullied by the state instead of the bullies being taken care of. If you ask me this seems a) totally insane and b) like a perfect way to force someone even more into a corner, leading to potentially even bigger problems.
tl;dr;
I am disgusted by this society punishing the victim.
Well, if I would interpolate from the code I saw in open source projects to closed source projects, being closed source because of bad code... oh boy.
I am always fascinated of our software driven society still working, despite our often really bad, ugly, bug ridden, ill-documented codes.
As if laser communication would be something new...
Even though neither I have a hat or am a security professional, let's just view it from an overly paranoid view.
There is one fundamental problem with your first idea. You assume your operating system behaves secure / sane. How could you prove it? Even though you compiled all your code by hand and read all the source code (good luck at that), how can you guarantee your compiler compiles only the code and doesn't introduce back doors? I think of two possible ways: First, it could just have a bug in the compiler, making even perfect code vulnerable. Second, it could intentionally introduce unwanted and unknown behavior. See the Ken Thompson hack for a reference. [0] In the end your only way would be doing it _all_ from scratch, software _and_ hardware.
So, I would guess you are way better off transferring the data by typing it by hand, as you suggested with the second idea. This seems reasonable secure, but quite error prone and time consuming.
[0] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheKenThompsonHack
It happens that I just read an article in the CACM (DOI:10.1145/2492007.2492018) stating why exactly an air gap will not work, most of all because in most cases there isn't one (practical).
Let's say you have all the required software on this laptop. How do you import new keys? Typing them in by hand? Since you want to send and receive encrypted messages: How do you transfer the encrypted and plain-text messages between your PC and laptop?
The concept of an air gap sounds very easy on the first look, but in reality it requires heavy overhead and if not applied correctly it gives a false sense of security which will ultimately do more harm than good.
But it actually is. Even though you solve _all_ other bits, you will only get rid of as many combinations as this first bit did. I would suggest that this is a huge progress. ;)
Well actually: If you guessed one bit correctly and you knew this, you would have made the problem half as easy. But maybe I just understood you wrong, so feel free to correct me. ;)