So basically, you were very smug about breaking the law. They specifically tell you NOT to do things like this in SANS classes unless first getting permission in writing. In this case you would have needed permission from Starbucks and most likely from the University. Possibly even from the individual students in the class. Breaking these rules is generally a quick way to be removed from the class and having any prior certifications by SANS revoked.
On the other hand, if he clearly and obviously deleted those passwords after showing them to the victims and absolutely avoids repeating this trick, it's not worth reporting him. In addition, hopefully all those other idiots will have learned a small lesson in security (i.e., credentials should never go over the net in the clear, and never ever trust the network).
There's nothing like being in the same area as a cracker (even a white-hat one) for teaching you practical security measures.
Moc is a comparably small price to pay for the excellent and powerful API. [...] Also consider that Moc signals/slots allow for introspection and adjustable behavior [...]
Airplanes go pretty fast on asphalt actually. A typical commerical airliner takes off at about 200 mph and lands at 150-175. The Concorde took off at 250 mph. The shuttle is well over 200 at touchdown.
Sure, but the cornering is crap.
You try doing that speed in a big full bus towing a trailer load of goods and see if you want to turn...
Isle of Man isn't part of the UK or Great Britain. And since the island's only about 35 km long it would make for a very boring drive at > 200 kph.
Don't worry. The roads aren't straight there anyway, so holding even 150 kph is hard for a car, and much of the island does have speed restrictions in any case. It's only really along the TT course where you can go fast with any degree of safety.
Is it jut me, or are there others out there thinking that free public water fountains (and free public access WiFi points) should simply be open?
You're not required to use the free wifi; other mechanisms are still available. "Free" speech does not necessarily mean that it is zero cost, just unrestricted (especially with regard to the political domain). It also does not guarantee anonymity; free speech is public speech.
To put it a different way: why would the citizens of Venice feel that they have to subsidize your porn access with their taxes?
Could Computing is simply a service provided over the Internet that is scalable and virtualized.
In short the software is in the web browser, while the data is stored somewhere else like on the servers. The word "Cloud" is a metaphor for the Internet.
You've misunderstood. It's the servers that are virtualized, not (necessarily) the clients. Indeed, cloud computing is not about the clients (that's "Web 2.0" that you've got mixed up with there). [Leaving out lots of bits which stem from that basic error]
The reason why open source developers don't support cloud computing is because they feel that it locks the users into third party technology and exposes their data across the Internet in violation of privacy that others could spy on it or capture it via packet sniffers. So OSS developers try to avoid making cloud computing applications as a matter of personal ethics, etc.
Cloud computing does not need to be insecure (much of it is based on things like SSH and WS-Security, and nobody's claiming that they're desperately insecure) though it is up to you to make the best use of them. (Using them through a browser might be a less-good idea, but that's because browser security is a real nasty fight. But cloud computing is orthogonal to all that.)
There is also no inherent reason for lock-in at the basic service level (at the full Software-as-a-Service level, it's hard to avoid unless the software is available locally, but that usually involves dealing with the same software vendor anyway) though that will require some standardization. There are no real standards yet, of course, because this has all happened so rapidly; it's only now that we're getting to the point where it makes sense to standardize. You're welcome to come and participate, helping to make this a diverse way of handling computing power for many people for decades. But don't come expecting people to adapt just to fit your prejudices; if you want something, have a well-argued technical reason for it.
I really don't understand the long-term value proposition of running your stuff on a public cloud.
The big value propositions are this: Reduced spend on datacenters, and increased flexibility.
It costs a shitload of cash (which might or might not be similar in size to a fuckton of cash) to put together and operate a datacenter. In particular, the costs of the building, the power and the cooling are really large. A well-designed deployment can cut these costs dramatically, but that's hard to do right. Why do it yourself when you can pay for someone else's expertise and get what you really want (storage, computation, etc.) for less?
The other big gain is increased flexibility, especially for end users who can seize opportunities much more easily if they can get a new system up and going in a day or two. Contrast this with the situation with many traditional info-systems organizations where it might take 6 months or more (and a major project) just to get some small system going because of fights over provisioning and long-term support. Sometimes those fights are important, but if IS is imposing them on everyone then many chances are getting lost to the business overall because it is too hard to grab them.
This isn't to say that nobody can beat a cloud provider, and sometimes there are good reasons for not going to one even if it would make financial sense and take longer. But to say that you can't understand doing it at all, that's just demonstrating your lack of awareness of the real costs, financial and opportunity.
(As for Open Source, I can't see why there's a kerfuffle over this. Cloud Computing is all about services, some of which are implemented with OSS and some of which aren't. If the service interface is well-enough described, it should be possible to reimplement it - or at least the software part - in pure OSS without too much difficulty. But the non-software parts matter too, and have real ongoing costs.)
My uncle who had 500 head of free roaming grass fed Herefords on 2000 acres (Beef, Grain and Sheep) out in the Riverina sold all of his cattle rather than take on the extra burden of paperwork, large amount of labour and cost associated with complying with the NLIS.
He must have either been looking for an excuse to bail or really marginal. Or a crap businessman. In any case, he was probably better gone so that the land can be used more effectively, even if you think it sucks on a small-scale level.
If you mix sentimentality into modern farming, you'll regret it as it is a deeply unsentimental, even cynical, enterprise.
I'm afraid this advice doesn't translate well to programming projects, however. You can't skip bits of code and let the end user imagine them.
But you can make something that has just enough of everything to work for a specific case. Often that means you've solved a chunk of the nastiest bits (but not all) and from then on you can proceed iteratively, working to expand the space of working program until you've got something feature-complete.
If you're writing open source software, the iterative phase is the one where you can let other people help. It's getting to first base that's hard, and that's pretty much always got to be the work of one person (or two if you're doing pair programming).
That sounds good, but what happens when the code present in the replaced file is paged out to disk? Linux, like Windows I believe, doesn't page that to the swapfile/pagefile since it's *already* on the disk.
The kernel keeps the areas of the disk that were in use for mmap()ed things (i.e., applications and libraries) allocated even after they have been removed from the directory structure. The data will only be deleted when the final reference to it goes.
Also, like another poster said, you usually need to restart applications using libraries that have been replaced. The problem then becomes knowing which applications are using which libraries and when.
If you've got 'lsof', you've got exactly the right tool to find that out for you.
More of an issue is that not all applications can be restarted that way nicely. With a GUI app, or even a GUI, it might be actually easier to log out and log back in again; a good session manager will then restore you back at least close to where you were. (Assuming everything works, of course.)
If those coordinates are accurate that would mean the Air Comet flight was about 1400 miles away. If it was that bright shouldn't it also have been reported by closer observers?
You're in the middle of the Atlantic with big tropical storms about. What closer observers were you expecting? People on the ground in boats are going to be doing their best to stay inside (and afloat) and won't have a clear view of the sky. Who knows just how many flights there were nearby at the time where the pilots were looking in the right direction (forget the passengers; on an overnight flight they keep the blinds down), but it's not like the US/EU routes; there's just not that many planes going that way by comparison.
What would be interesting is if the flight was downed by a sprite. If they were flying over a big thunderstorm, that's altogether possible...
Yes. Apple uses Objective C. But I was including OO programs in the "procedural" bucket, because OO languages use imperative (procedural) coding to implement algorithms. Semantics!
You seem to be laboring under a few misconceptions.
OO does not imply imperative. There are OO functional languages (e.g., Ocaml).
Imperative languages often have well-defined semantics, and their semantics has been reasonably well understood for many decades.
Functional programming is not the best way to express all algorithms. Some, sure, but others are much neater in imperative style. (There are other styles too, but that's beside the point.)
There are formal systems for taking an algorithm and translating it into a program in a language like C, even when that transformation is non-trivial (i.e., where it takes human assistance). Such things are commonly used in safety-critical software development. Did you know that safety-critical systems typically prohibit many common techniques, like using dynamic memory management? It's because it can fail at unexpected times. Better hope though that the fixed-size buffers that you use instead are big enough...
Knowing the algorithm doesn't mean that you understand the real-world problem in the first place. It's real-world stuff that usually causes the trouble.
Anything can be solved by adding more layers of abstraction, except for those problems associated with having too many layers of abstraction. And that's a deep truth. Think about it a bit more if you don't understand.
I'm quite skeptical that the US government can create and run a reasonable socialized healthcare system, but I don't see any better alternatives. What we have now isn't working.
[...]
Medicine is one of those fields along with firefighting, law enforcement, and military defense where capitalism is a very poor fit.
You might contemplate a system where the government pays for basic/acute care and leaves the fancy stuff to the private sector. If you want plastic surgery to make your nose a little shorter, it's only fair that you pay.
Not really, or not initially (that can develop later). What it requires is two groups of people living approximately together who totally disagree about who should be in charge. And it is quite possible to have a civil war without any trace of secessionism; e.g., in the English Civil War, both sides wanted the whole of England and had no plans to split the country.
In the US, everyone agrees that the President is in charge and that they are in for a limited term. You might or might not particularly like the incumbent, but you at least agree over who is in the office and that you don't need to have an uprising to kick them out. These are powerful reasons why a civil war is unlikely for now (and probably less likely than back after the 2000 election, to be honest). You have problems, yes, but a civil war is nowhere near one of them.
If you read the literature on Description Logics you'll see that even PhD logicians have a hard time symbolically storing this kind of abstract data into a piece of software, let alone a doc with little computer training.
There are two big problems in this area.
The logics used are right at the limit of what can be reasoned about automatically; even after decades of work, it's still very very difficult to go beyond First Order Logic in an automated fashion.
Getting two clinicians to agree on a single description of one patient seems to be impossible, and the medical literature is deliberately inconsistent and often whimsical. What right do we have to expect mere logic to withstand such sabotage? If doctors had been essentially engineers-of-the-body, this would have been all solved years ago. Chemists and physicists don't have this difficulty either. Even programmers are usually on the same page (or can Google it to figure it out.) Medicine just has to be different/difficult.
Still, if EHRs were essentially just free plain text with images as attachments (or, thinking about it, perhaps a big MediaWiki installation) that would be a big step forward as they would capture current practice with little extra effort. But people had to insist on asking for the moon on a stick...
Re:Electronic Health Records is very hard
on
IT and Health Care
·
· Score: 4, Funny
neutrino? i think the odds of a neutrino hitting a transistor are about the same as the odds of a 1000-bed hospital's patients all going into spontaneous remission from everything simultaneously, then living to 120. photons or cosmic rays or something maybe, but neutrinos have a 50-50 chance of getting from here to alpha centauri through solid lead.
Indeed, there's a higher chance of the neutrino changing the state of the doctor's own neurons and making him flip out and start turning patients into mutant zombies in a plan to take over the world...
I think the UK is busy converting mostly to metric system, so maybe some UKians can chime in with their experience?
Almost everything now metric. Exceptions are for beer and milk (pints, though milk is also sold in metric units; total muddle), spirits (fractions of a gill) and road distances (miles). Next to nobody uses imperial weight measures any more.
Beer and spirits are imperial because it would take a major piece of legislation to change. (English law is very very strict there, and pints and gills do have precise metric definitions these days...)
"Tax and Spend" is better than "Drunken Sailor with a No-limit Credit Card"
It seems that the alternatives offered are "Tax and Spend" and "Spend but Don't Tax (the rich)". Neither really enthuses me, but aiming to keep income, savings and outgoings balanced seems... well, sane. Sure you can have a debate on the level of services that should be offered, but pretending that cakes can be both had and eaten simultaneously is plain stupid. (Cutting taxes can stimulate the economy and so restore or increase total tax income, but if it has the opposite effect then it's stupid to blindly try doing it again. Flexibility of mindset is more important...)
Slashdot Mirror
So basically, you were very smug about breaking the law. They specifically tell you NOT to do things like this in SANS classes unless first getting permission in writing. In this case you would have needed permission from Starbucks and most likely from the University. Possibly even from the individual students in the class. Breaking these rules is generally a quick way to be removed from the class and having any prior certifications by SANS revoked.
On the other hand, if he clearly and obviously deleted those passwords after showing them to the victims and absolutely avoids repeating this trick, it's not worth reporting him. In addition, hopefully all those other idiots will have learned a small lesson in security (i.e., credentials should never go over the net in the clear, and never ever trust the network).
There's nothing like being in the same area as a cracker (even a white-hat one) for teaching you practical security measures.
In my days, BT meant "big tits"!
It still does, even though it is referring to the phone company.
Moc is a comparably small price to pay for the excellent and powerful API. [...] Also consider that Moc signals/slots allow for introspection and adjustable behavior [...]
So... they've reinvented Objective-C?
That's how real men use the internet.
Meh. Real Men just touch the Cat-5 to their tongue and work it out from there (with muscle contractions to send electrical signals, of course).
Airplanes go pretty fast on asphalt actually. A typical commerical airliner takes off at about 200 mph and lands at 150-175. The Concorde took off at 250 mph. The shuttle is well over 200 at touchdown.
Sure, but the cornering is crap.
You try doing that speed in a big full bus towing a trailer load of goods and see if you want to turn...
Isle of Man isn't part of the UK or Great Britain. And since the island's only about 35 km long it would make for a very boring drive at > 200 kph.
Don't worry. The roads aren't straight there anyway, so holding even 150 kph is hard for a car, and much of the island does have speed restrictions in any case. It's only really along the TT course where you can go fast with any degree of safety.
Is it jut me, or are there others out there thinking that free public water fountains (and free public access WiFi points) should simply be open?
You're not required to use the free wifi; other mechanisms are still available. "Free" speech does not necessarily mean that it is zero cost, just unrestricted (especially with regard to the political domain). It also does not guarantee anonymity; free speech is public speech.
To put it a different way: why would the citizens of Venice feel that they have to subsidize your porn access with their taxes?
Cloud is going to bitchslap hosting and co-location in the same way that virtualization did.
Cloud is going to be how people do hosting and colo!
Could Computing is simply a service provided over the Internet that is scalable and virtualized.
In short the software is in the web browser, while the data is stored somewhere else like on the servers. The word "Cloud" is a metaphor for the Internet.
You've misunderstood. It's the servers that are virtualized, not (necessarily) the clients. Indeed, cloud computing is not about the clients (that's "Web 2.0" that you've got mixed up with there).
[Leaving out lots of bits which stem from that basic error]
The reason why open source developers don't support cloud computing is because they feel that it locks the users into third party technology and exposes their data across the Internet in violation of privacy that others could spy on it or capture it via packet sniffers. So OSS developers try to avoid making cloud computing applications as a matter of personal ethics, etc.
Cloud computing does not need to be insecure (much of it is based on things like SSH and WS-Security, and nobody's claiming that they're desperately insecure) though it is up to you to make the best use of them. (Using them through a browser might be a less-good idea, but that's because browser security is a real nasty fight. But cloud computing is orthogonal to all that.)
There is also no inherent reason for lock-in at the basic service level (at the full Software-as-a-Service level, it's hard to avoid unless the software is available locally, but that usually involves dealing with the same software vendor anyway) though that will require some standardization. There are no real standards yet, of course, because this has all happened so rapidly; it's only now that we're getting to the point where it makes sense to standardize. You're welcome to come and participate, helping to make this a diverse way of handling computing power for many people for decades. But don't come expecting people to adapt just to fit your prejudices; if you want something, have a well-argued technical reason for it.
I really don't understand the long-term value proposition of running your stuff on a public cloud.
The big value propositions are this: Reduced spend on datacenters, and increased flexibility.
It costs a shitload of cash (which might or might not be similar in size to a fuckton of cash) to put together and operate a datacenter. In particular, the costs of the building, the power and the cooling are really large. A well-designed deployment can cut these costs dramatically, but that's hard to do right. Why do it yourself when you can pay for someone else's expertise and get what you really want (storage, computation, etc.) for less?
The other big gain is increased flexibility, especially for end users who can seize opportunities much more easily if they can get a new system up and going in a day or two. Contrast this with the situation with many traditional info-systems organizations where it might take 6 months or more (and a major project) just to get some small system going because of fights over provisioning and long-term support. Sometimes those fights are important, but if IS is imposing them on everyone then many chances are getting lost to the business overall because it is too hard to grab them.
This isn't to say that nobody can beat a cloud provider, and sometimes there are good reasons for not going to one even if it would make financial sense and take longer. But to say that you can't understand doing it at all, that's just demonstrating your lack of awareness of the real costs, financial and opportunity.
(As for Open Source, I can't see why there's a kerfuffle over this. Cloud Computing is all about services, some of which are implemented with OSS and some of which aren't. If the service interface is well-enough described, it should be possible to reimplement it - or at least the software part - in pure OSS without too much difficulty. But the non-software parts matter too, and have real ongoing costs.)
If that ever came to be I would wholeheartedly endorse book burning.
Amazon would think that a very good idea; they'd be in with a chance of picking up replacement purchases.
My uncle who had 500 head of free roaming grass fed Herefords on 2000 acres (Beef, Grain and Sheep) out in the Riverina sold all of his cattle rather than take on the extra burden of paperwork, large amount of labour and cost associated with complying with the NLIS.
He must have either been looking for an excuse to bail or really marginal. Or a crap businessman. In any case, he was probably better gone so that the land can be used more effectively, even if you think it sucks on a small-scale level.
If you mix sentimentality into modern farming, you'll regret it as it is a deeply unsentimental, even cynical, enterprise.
I'm afraid this advice doesn't translate well to programming projects, however. You can't skip bits of code and let the end user imagine them.
But you can make something that has just enough of everything to work for a specific case. Often that means you've solved a chunk of the nastiest bits (but not all) and from then on you can proceed iteratively, working to expand the space of working program until you've got something feature-complete.
If you're writing open source software, the iterative phase is the one where you can let other people help. It's getting to first base that's hard, and that's pretty much always got to be the work of one person (or two if you're doing pair programming).
That sounds good, but what happens when the code present in the replaced file is paged out to disk? Linux, like Windows I believe, doesn't page that to the swapfile/pagefile since it's *already* on the disk.
The kernel keeps the areas of the disk that were in use for mmap()ed things (i.e., applications and libraries) allocated even after they have been removed from the directory structure. The data will only be deleted when the final reference to it goes.
Also, like another poster said, you usually need to restart applications using libraries that have been replaced. The problem then becomes knowing which applications are using which libraries and when.
If you've got 'lsof', you've got exactly the right tool to find that out for you.
More of an issue is that not all applications can be restarted that way nicely. With a GUI app, or even a GUI, it might be actually easier to log out and log back in again; a good session manager will then restore you back at least close to where you were. (Assuming everything works, of course.)
If those coordinates are accurate that would mean the Air Comet flight was about 1400 miles away. If it was that bright shouldn't it also have been reported by closer observers?
You're in the middle of the Atlantic with big tropical storms about. What closer observers were you expecting? People on the ground in boats are going to be doing their best to stay inside (and afloat) and won't have a clear view of the sky. Who knows just how many flights there were nearby at the time where the pilots were looking in the right direction (forget the passengers; on an overnight flight they keep the blinds down), but it's not like the US/EU routes; there's just not that many planes going that way by comparison.
What would be interesting is if the flight was downed by a sprite. If they were flying over a big thunderstorm, that's altogether possible...
Yes. Apple uses Objective C. But I was including OO programs in the "procedural" bucket, because OO languages use imperative (procedural) coding to implement algorithms. Semantics!
You seem to be laboring under a few misconceptions.
Did you know that safety-critical systems typically prohibit many common techniques, like using dynamic memory management? It's because it can fail at unexpected times. Better hope though that the fixed-size buffers that you use instead are big enough...
Anything can be solved by adding more layers of abstraction, except for those problems associated with having too many layers of abstraction. And that's a deep truth. Think about it a bit more if you don't understand.
I'm quite skeptical that the US government can create and run a reasonable socialized healthcare system, but I don't see any better alternatives. What we have now isn't working.
[...]
Medicine is one of those fields along with firefighting, law enforcement, and military defense where capitalism is a very poor fit.
You might contemplate a system where the government pays for basic/acute care and leaves the fancy stuff to the private sector. If you want plastic surgery to make your nose a little shorter, it's only fair that you pay.
Civil War requires geopolitical division
Not really, or not initially (that can develop later). What it requires is two groups of people living approximately together who totally disagree about who should be in charge. And it is quite possible to have a civil war without any trace of secessionism; e.g., in the English Civil War, both sides wanted the whole of England and had no plans to split the country.
In the US, everyone agrees that the President is in charge and that they are in for a limited term. You might or might not particularly like the incumbent, but you at least agree over who is in the office and that you don't need to have an uprising to kick them out. These are powerful reasons why a civil war is unlikely for now (and probably less likely than back after the 2000 election, to be honest). You have problems, yes, but a civil war is nowhere near one of them.
If you read the literature on Description Logics you'll see that even PhD logicians have a hard time symbolically storing this kind of abstract data into a piece of software, let alone a doc with little computer training.
There are two big problems in this area.
Still, if EHRs were essentially just free plain text with images as attachments (or, thinking about it, perhaps a big MediaWiki installation) that would be a big step forward as they would capture current practice with little extra effort. But people had to insist on asking for the moon on a stick...
neutrino? i think the odds of a neutrino hitting a transistor are about the same as the odds of a 1000-bed hospital's patients all going into spontaneous remission from everything simultaneously, then living to 120. photons or cosmic rays or something maybe, but neutrinos have a 50-50 chance of getting from here to alpha centauri through solid lead.
Indeed, there's a higher chance of the neutrino changing the state of the doctor's own neurons and making him flip out and start turning patients into mutant zombies in a plan to take over the world...
I think the UK is busy converting mostly to metric system, so maybe some UKians can chime in with their experience?
Almost everything now metric. Exceptions are for beer and milk (pints, though milk is also sold in metric units; total muddle), spirits (fractions of a gill) and road distances (miles). Next to nobody uses imperial weight measures any more.
Beer and spirits are imperial because it would take a major piece of legislation to change. (English law is very very strict there, and pints and gills do have precise metric definitions these days...)
"Tax and Spend" is better than "Drunken Sailor with a No-limit Credit Card"
It seems that the alternatives offered are "Tax and Spend" and "Spend but Don't Tax (the rich)". Neither really enthuses me, but aiming to keep income, savings and outgoings balanced seems... well, sane. Sure you can have a debate on the level of services that should be offered, but pretending that cakes can be both had and eaten simultaneously is plain stupid. (Cutting taxes can stimulate the economy and so restore or increase total tax income, but if it has the opposite effect then it's stupid to blindly try doing it again. Flexibility of mindset is more important...)
The only thing that's frightening about stupid cyclists is the possible legal fallout, if you're not too squeamish about the possible bloody mess.
Watch out for the ones carrying landmines. Running them over can spoil your whole day...
Trebuchets are alright.. but if you really want to hurt use Lucida Bold or Impact. Boy, those hurt. And don't get me started on wingdings.
Use Papyrus and Comic Sans on alternate letters. Guaranteed to make even the most hardened font geek shudder!
It's a fact. Go look it up.
He did - he looked it up in his gut.
Ah, good old gut feelings! Also known as "borborygmi". My advice? Avoid cheese late at night.