Or unless clipboard copy and paste actions are logged.... You'd still need to log all mouse activity and stuff like that, and pasting things over other things would make it trickier still. Without that sort of info, you still can't capture a password (or even a scrambled version of a password).
Mind you, I for one am totally unsurprised by this. But then I've never entrusted a password to a machine that I didn't control, and for that matter I don't trust the network in cybercafes either. Paranoia is good policy (despite not having a tinfoil hat...)
However, in one sense, the idea that it's not unusual for large groups of miners to die due to insufficient safety measures...is itself newsworthy. Sure it is, but on slashdot? The technical solution is trivial. Similarly, the political/managerial parts of the solution are also no-brainers. All we're really left with is the observation that some people (certain mine owners and local officials in this case, if they're distinct categories) are scum. But that's not news anywhere; it's just depressing (and its consequences, statistics).
It's a bit harder in a self-managed datacenter, like the one I work at. Plenty of exploited Linux boxen there, too, by the way. Not necessarily rooted, but quite, quite exploited. (PHP, MySQL) It's not harder. You can still block outbound tcp/25; there's nothing special about Linux boxes (or any other kind of computing kit) that means they have to be able to send email directly...
Suing the person that's meant to be mediating the dispute is taking things a little far, even for him... If he keeps suing the judges and courts, who's going to finally judge the case, and where? I don't know how things work where you are, but in the UK people who do that tend to get declared to be Vexatious Litigants and can end up losing the right to take cases to the law. Now, if someone can't bring any cases before the law, can you imagine just how thoroughly everyone else can mess them over? Now to my (non-expert) eyes, it seems that Jack is going for just such a declaration...
For those of you wanting to make a proverbial killing of this 'phenomenon' I refer you to a vital dictionary of terms. I work with people who like to spout that sort of thing, and that link demonstrates more good sense than they often do...
They just use the magic words "Oh, I'm sure IT will take care of that for us". And IT will. By deleting the accounts of all concerned and getting security to escort the offenders off the premises. Remember that, to a BOFH, if users are the problem, "no users" is the solution.
For data that changes a lot (either on the data element or added) column wise would be crap performance wise. For data that is fairly 'static' and unchanging such as legacy data it would smoke. Having seen a number of databases that have column-oriented store management, it is my (meagre) experience that in fact columns work quite well even when you get into more updates since you can avoid writing those columns that hold the default value (many datasets have many default values). Moreover, writes are almost always less common than reads (an update may involve both, of course.)
As an aside, column-wise storage allows the DB to do more disk space optimization it seems. I never quite understood why though; I had someone explain it to me, but I still didn't grok it.
Most Linux users seem to understand that it is unwise to surf while logged in as root, but at the same time they setup the Windows systems at their friends homes to do so, because "it would be too much of a hassle to use separate accounts for admin and working".
As long as the situation remains like this, there is little Microsoft can do. No, they could arrange for the majority of their own user-targetted apps (e.g. Office) to refuse to run in read-write mode when run from an account with Admin privileges. They could clamp down on giving "Windows Certification" to things like printer drivers that require Admin privs to work (after installation). They could get similarly strict with applications. All those sorts of things. Make life actually workable for people who are running without high privs. And without doing that, they'll never manage to inculcate a culture of security, and there's an awful long way to go there, alas...
(BTW, if you're writing a GUI application for Linux, maybe you should think about taking similar steps. We cannot preach to others if our own house is not in order.)
Bad choice. In a well run shop, you'd get a "division by zero" error. You're not using IEEE arithmetic correctly. Since that's a positive zero you're talking about, you'd get "+Inf" instead.
Myself, I prefer "dollars-worth of business supported without a hitch".
Think about it, a CD is 16 bit, so the max volume is obviously 2^16=65536 for any particular data sample. Actually that's the peak-to-peak height, but since you're actually storing a waveform you have to halve that value (to 2^15=32768 or there abouts) to get the real maximum (digital) amplitude. Your other points are correct though.
That means the person next to you, or a few feet/meters away could be stealing the car keys. So now we need tinfoil pocket protectors as well as tinfoil hats?
It's "quackery". "Quakery" is something to do with porridge oats.
Or railguns. I admit I thought of that, but it wasn't funny enough. Even for this crowd. Something to do with the Religious Society of Friends was better (stronger match on the mistaken term) but it's a bit mean to make fun of basically harmless folks. But boring breakfast sludge... associating Gillian McKeith with that is so much more appropriate.
And no, I've no plan to raise the level of my regard for her to the point where I'll admit that ersatz honorific of hers into use in my description of her. Am I snobbish? Youbetcha!
This is all very well, but of course it also includes a bunch of quakery about eating leaves so that their photosynthesis can oxegenate your gut. It's "quackery". "Quakery" is something to do with porridge oats.
In the current ISP model, both customers and content providers already pay. In effect, both pay for connection to the backbone. (Yes, Google pay for their bandwidth.) But some ISPs think that they should get paid from both sides despite not being the backbone. That's wrong: they should ask their customers for the money instead. That the customers might instead say "I'll go elsewhere and get worse service for less cash!" is just tough. But that's the essence of a free market.
The real problem is that the market in the USA isn't nearly free enough.
In any case, my phone is effectively a 1 way device. Smart move! I prefer to just tell people that they have the wrong number; our internal directory is enough out of date that they'll believe it and I only give out my number to external people that I really want to call me.
I use it to make non-work-related calls, or to dial into conference calls that aren't using pc/ip based audio streaming. Having done a lot of conference calls the past few years, the main thing for them to work seems to be to have some sort of screen-sharing set up. Without that, life is painful. And IP-based audio streaming doesn't work too well with such systems alas: very few sites have enough bandwidth to support proper screen sharing and a non-choppy audio stream at the same time (remember, it's the uplink bandwidth that's the limiting factor!) Having a real phone for the audio (the best you can do without real QoS for the IP audio stream) at least means that everyone in the conference call gets to hear what's going on, since telephones use a bandwidth reservation system (circuit switching) for their data channel. Choppy audio (and I've heard it go as far as losing 75-80% of every second) is truly impossible to use.
(Oh no! I've mentioned QoS! This'll bring out the net neutrality kooks! Well, this is good QoS I'm talking about, in that it is serving the customer who is paying for the connection.)
A unit of measure large enough for "astronomical" purposes. You mean the parsec? "Voyager's now gone a bit over 500 microparsecs." Yeah, that works for me.
There's a neat trick you can play with Markov chains to generate this sort of text. It may not be as good as your handcrafted version, but it makes it easier to generate larger texts. For the sake of my poor braincells, please don't do that! A longer piece would give me nightmares (and probably cause a stack overflow on my parser...)
Vandalising a wall with something relatively permanent is a different issue to this kind of investigation, though. Not if the vandals use water-soluble paints. (We are talking an exterior wall here, yes?) Not that I condone defacing buildings, but if the point is to make a point, the paint really doesn't have to last more than a few hours.
Damnit, it's a paradigm shift that Linus is talking about. True distributed source code management brings an entirely new way of working. It enables very fast merging at a very fine granularity, which lets you use casually use this information (about what changed and when) in a way that changes the nature of how you work! It's the same sort of difference that code completion or Google search made. Once a certain kind of very useful information -- that has always been available, but a bit inconveniently -- becomes like running water out of the tap, it enables ways of working that just wouldn't have been practical before. You know, that sounds so much like an advertorial! Would you care to provide a little bit of original analysis to go with your otherwise-unleavened hype? In exactly what way does a distributed source code management system change the way you work? (Remember, some of us have been using 'cvs annotate' and 'svn blame' over high-bandwidth networks for a long time now.) While you're at it, do distinguish between the various aspects (e.g. multiple repositories vs. braided versioning) even if one really implies the other.
And do try to go easy on the phrase "paradigm shift" in your explanation even if this is one; marketdroids love over-using it and it's come to be a code phrase for "same old, same old". Focus on how things have changed for you and you'll get a better response.
Can you add sheer stupidity and pigheadedness to that? Alas, no. Those two things are technically legal, even if they are the ultimate cause of many other things that are illegal...
Huh? Are we using JBuilder? Bean... ah, we're talking J2EE. Something to build...something to build... if only we had 'factories' or something. You do realize that 'factories' are old hat? You need a factory factory factory these days...
What I'm claiming is that all modern computer are basically Turing machines, and that human minds aren't Turing machines. Human minds are simply another kind of system or device, one that we don't yet understand, and therefore haven't yet built an artificial version of. It's no different than saying that human minds aren't a kind of steam engine, as was claimed at the turn of the 18th century. You can characterize the processing of a single neuron as a computer program; it's been done IIRC. To go from that to a full brain just requires that you run lots of copies of that program together and arrange for them to communicate. Of course, you need lots of copies; the brain has a lot of neurons and many many synapses, but it could be done in principle. And any parallel composition of programs (i.e. turing machines, TMs) can be described as a humungous merged TM, even though the way you do that scales horribly. Hence there exists a TM which can simulate a brain. The size of the program will be absolutely jaw-dropping though; even fairly simple programs need large TMs. Given that size, it's little wonder nobody's actually done it...
AI is founded on the principle that there's got to be an easier way to do intelligence than building a full-brain simulation. On the other hand, since nobody really knows what intelligence is, is it any wonder that nobody's succeeded in building an intelligent computer? Myself, I expect that intelligence will turn out to be fairly simple once we understand it, but it is that understanding which has taken a long time coming. (Right now, AI has a long list of things that intelligence isn't...)
First of all, we've been promised AI for a long time, and we don't have anything near it. Think about the amount of processing power that an ant has, and compare it's ability to navigate the environment. We have machines that have immensely more computing power, but still cannot perform the ambulatory feats of a simple ants ( and I'm not talking about swarming, just moving an ant body with six legs). [...]
I see you don't work in the field of robotics.:-) The deep problems in there aren't to do with managing the movement of six-legged robots (that's been solved for a long time now) but rather deeper things like navigation. Ants aren't that good at navigation, but do know how to follow a scent trail. But then people have been building robots that do an equivalent task (following a painted track or electric wire on the ground) for many years now.
Secondly, Goedel's theorem, in my understanding, shows that the human mind can do things that no Turing machines can. Since Goedel's theorem doesn't say that (it actually says that there cannot be a complete consistent mathematical system over a certain complexity with a finite number of axioms) what you then claim about it saying that human minds are allowed and end run around it is just plain wrong. It's just that humans tend are processing at a higher level of abstraction that allows them to conceive of more axioms. Note that this higher level of abstraction does not mean that humans are granted a get-out-of-jail-free card in relation to Goedel's theorem. Instead, we just know that we must be either incomplete or inconsistent (since we know we are finite...)
I've also had a lot of arguments on slashdot. Yeah, and it's because you don't know what you're talking about.;-)
(Awww shucks! I've defended AI in this article! Normal service will be restored shortly...)
Take SimCity for example - if you could adapt it to instead be used for city-planning in works departments (water, gas, civil/construction, hydro, etc.), it would make things more simple/easy, and it could simulate the future. The main problem with SimCity is that' it's fundamentally grid-based, and cities by and large aren't (though some in North America come close). Adapting the code so that it can support real city layouts is non-trivial, since it forces you to stop using simplifying assumptions (e.g. can't use manhattan distance metrics).
Slashdot Mirror
Mind you, I for one am totally unsurprised by this. But then I've never entrusted a password to a machine that I didn't control, and for that matter I don't trust the network in cybercafes either. Paranoia is good policy (despite not having a tinfoil hat...)
I so wish I could be less cynical about this all.
As an aside, column-wise storage allows the DB to do more disk space optimization it seems. I never quite understood why though; I had someone explain it to me, but I still didn't grok it.
As long as the situation remains like this, there is little Microsoft can do. No, they could arrange for the majority of their own user-targetted apps (e.g. Office) to refuse to run in read-write mode when run from an account with Admin privileges. They could clamp down on giving "Windows Certification" to things like printer drivers that require Admin privs to work (after installation). They could get similarly strict with applications. All those sorts of things. Make life actually workable for people who are running without high privs. And without doing that, they'll never manage to inculcate a culture of security, and there's an awful long way to go there, alas...
(BTW, if you're writing a GUI application for Linux, maybe you should think about taking similar steps. We cannot preach to others if our own house is not in order.)
Bad choice. In a well run shop, you'd get a "division by zero" error. You're not using IEEE arithmetic correctly. Since that's a positive zero you're talking about, you'd get "+Inf" instead.
Myself, I prefer "dollars-worth of business supported without a hitch".
And no, I've no plan to raise the level of my regard for her to the point where I'll admit that ersatz honorific of hers into use in my description of her. Am I snobbish? Youbetcha!
In the current ISP model, both customers and content providers already pay. In effect, both pay for connection to the backbone. (Yes, Google pay for their bandwidth.) But some ISPs think that they should get paid from both sides despite not being the backbone. That's wrong: they should ask their customers for the money instead. That the customers might instead say "I'll go elsewhere and get worse service for less cash!" is just tough. But that's the essence of a free market.
The real problem is that the market in the USA isn't nearly free enough.
(Oh no! I've mentioned QoS! This'll bring out the net neutrality kooks! Well, this is good QoS I'm talking about, in that it is serving the customer who is paying for the connection.)
And do try to go easy on the phrase "paradigm shift" in your explanation even if this is one; marketdroids love over-using it and it's come to be a code phrase for "same old, same old". Focus on how things have changed for you and you'll get a better response.
- Boobies (or anything else that might get me fired)
You mean a link like this would be unacceptable to your employer? Is it the fact that the subject is not wearing any clothes?AI is founded on the principle that there's got to be an easier way to do intelligence than building a full-brain simulation. On the other hand, since nobody really knows what intelligence is, is it any wonder that nobody's succeeded in building an intelligent computer? Myself, I expect that intelligence will turn out to be fairly simple once we understand it, but it is that understanding which has taken a long time coming. (Right now, AI has a long list of things that intelligence isn't...) First of all, we've been promised AI for a long time, and we don't have anything near it. Think about the amount of processing power that an ant has, and compare it's ability to navigate the environment. We have machines that have immensely more computing power, but still cannot perform the ambulatory feats of a simple ants ( and I'm not talking about swarming, just moving an ant body with six legs). [...]
I see you don't work in the field of robotics.
(Awww shucks! I've defended AI in this article! Normal service will be restored shortly...)