I fear the the gov't may very well outlaw encryption for the masses outright. I mean, what with terrorists and all, it wouldn't be terribly difficult for them to shove that down our throats.
First, Lindows _does_ compete directly against MS's premiere software product, the OS. And it really does have a name that's easily confused w/ Windows. That's how trademark law works. Second, Ford suing MS, or MS suing SC Johnson would be dumb, since they're not in the same market. MS doesn't sell SUV's, and SC Johnson doesn't sell computers or software.
Honestly, I've been waiting for this to happen somewhere, and I'm surprised that it happenned first overseas, given that I'd expect the US has more case history for this kind of thing.
19 tons of heavy metal radioisotope doesn't take up much space. These elements are quite dense.
I remember seeing a demo of this stuff in school.. It's so safe to use in a reactor it's crazy; they referred to it as "walk-away" safe. Lose _all_ cooling in the core, leave it over the weekend, fix it on Monday. It was going to bring about a revolution in safety WRT nuclear power generation. It's nice to see this finally coming to fruition.
yah, and there's a reason. The Altivec vector instruction set specifically provides an instruction in hardware that the RC5 routines (and most encryption in general) make heavy use of. 1GHz G4 procs kill the Intel hardware by about 3:1 (approx 9mil on the above #s)
That said, the intel hardware should rip thru properly vectorized FP code about as well (for functions it directly supports in hardware), and should kill the G5 on integer performance. Mostly has to do with the G5 having fewer integer units than the P4/Xeon. This has been pretty much proven with the SPEC scores we've seen thus far, with both sides using top-of-class compilers (none of this GCC crap).
And now, back on topic, I think that this says alot about the IBM FP hardware with regards to Intel. Intel bent over backwards for an architecture that's not much faster per clock, and given the apparent lack of clock scalability in the Itanium, they're going to be hard-pressed to keep up. Their lack of FSB bandwidth is going to hurt them as well, esp. in the server market. I know of at least two scientific apps (nothing big, just school stuff) that the Itanium chews thru faster than the G5, but only for small datasets. The guy showing me his results mentioned that when the dataset goes from 10MB to 500MB, the G5 ends up around 2-3 times faster, as the memory interface becomes a bottleneck on Intel.
This may be one of the core reasons LINPACK on hugely parallel systems brings the Itanium and G5 so close to each other.
It doesn't help that the PPC970 looks to cost about a third what the Itanium costs.
Actually, even tho OSX makes better use of VRAM, the window manager/compositor still has a local copy of each window in system memory. My current memory load for the window manager w/ two Safari windows, Mail, two Terminal windows, iTunes, a console, and the Activity Monitor open is 100MB. It helps that the display adapter has a relatively fast path through which to move the window textures, and that they're compressed, but still, that's a bunch of memory.
Altho, the user experience is nice, and w/ 2.5GB to spare, 100MB is a drop in the bucket.
However, for users on stock systems, having only.5GB, that kind of memory usage would get problematic fast.
I submit to the reader that Geer's article _is_ in fact in accordance with @Stake's opinion; as a security consulting company, they should be painfully aware of exactly what the full implications of MS's combination of shoddy product quality and monopoly are.
Which brings us to the Hidden Agenda. It's also painfully obvious (or if not, it should be) that @Stake is willing to forsake an accurate accounting of a system's security for a few bucks. Granted, it's a whole lot of few bucks, but they're effectively tarnishing their reputation (if they've even got one to start with).
I feel bad for Mr. Geer; what happenned to him is truly a shame. I also don't think it'll help much. MS today is like IBM in the late 70's/early 80's. They walk around with all this marketsshare, pissing on the entire rest of the computing industry (including their customers!), and will end up losing to market forces, as their customerbase, increasingly sick of the "where ya gonna go?" attitude, abandons them in droves. It's going to take a while, but it'll happen.
With regards to the ice melting: the water displaced is exactly equal in mass to the mass of the block of ice. Upon melting, the water level doesn't change. What we _do_ have to worry about is all the ice on top of the Antarctic continent that's not floating in water. _That_ ice will raise the ocean level. Although AFAIK it's only by about 30 feet. Coastal regions are screwed in the long run, but here in Dallas, it just means I'll be closer to the beach:)
Apparently, they don't accept _anything_. I submitted the exact same story, only to get rejected. I'd like to know what I'm doing wrong as well. Exactly what _does_ it take to get something accepted? Because whatever the criteria are, they're not in the FAQ.
but ultimately redundant. The laws of thermodynamics preclude this kind of an ending to our local reality. Unless someone figures out how to manipulate vacuum energy fluctuations (or the strings directly), and reverses entropy.
Although that may have disatrous consequences. We might end up with another superinflationary universe within our own. Good luck dodging a few million light-years out of the way of that one!
Re:What's the story here?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
This man speaks the truth. I've (along with about a dozen or so coworkers) just spent the last four months of my life working 70+ hour weeks attempting to fix a project that, by our own internal product acceptance and lab testing standards, was never supposed to have made it to the production environment. It's killed morale throughout the entire department, and we're pretty certain that when the time comes for recognition of our sacrifice, our supreme efforts will be glossed over.
There Aint No Justice. There's Just Us. (and Death. and Death of Rats.)
Re:Learned Professionals?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Your math is wrong. what that says is that for high-income citizens, they could only defer up to 50% of their taxes (Roth IRAs, 401K, etc). They still paid tax on the rest of their income.
you also miss the point that the guy who's paying 30% of 50% of 200k/yr paid 30k in taxes. That's more than the total tax burden for 20 guys each making 15k/yr. Hell, his taxes could have _directly_ paid two of their gross incomes for that year.
And I guarantee, the guy making 200k/yr (or more) uses significantly fewer of those social programs he's paying for.
Most Applications Crash If Not The Operating System Hangs
heh...
Re:So much for M$'s one redeeming contribution...
on
Microsoft's Athens PC
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· Score: 1
Okay, you really missed my point. If what you said were the case, all the competing architectures out there would have had zero sales. Amiga, the Mac, the entire Apple II line, Atari STs, the whole thing was a wash because they didn't have Windows. Except that they _did_ have sales. People wanted to do things with this new consumer appliance. Granted, for the most part it was a hobbyist market, but the need was there.
Windows didn't bring PCs to the masses. I'll repeat this again, because you obviously didn't get it the first time. There has been, since the early 80's, a need for a general-purpose computer. I submit that there potentially has _always_ been a need for a general purpose computer, and the major hurdle there was the lack of powerful, inexpensive hardware. Remember the TRS-80 machines? The Apple II used in classrooms and homes everywhere? The Commodore 64? The reason these systems died out is because businesses wanted a name they could turn to (IBM), and IBM had the cashflow to actually produce a beefy system. Remember, the original PC supported up to 256KB, over four times the RAM of the C64. This allowed for bigger programs and (what really mattered) larger datasets. Suddenly, there was a machine available at commodity pricing (for businesses, anyway) that could do _real_work_. Eventually, the business market allowed IBM to fund development of the XT, the AT, the PS/2, while Compaq's reverse-engineering feat allowed standards-based competition. At this point, MS only provided the OS and some development tools, and had IBM kept a tighter lid on the system (which they really couldn't), even MS would have been in a stranglehold. The fact that IBM wouldn't license DOS to anyone else gave MS the fingerhold they needed. The only reason MS got where they are is because of restrictive (monopolistic) licensing and pricing practices.
People bought computers because they either had a great interest in them, or they had some task that only a computer could perform. Not because they came with Windows.
At this point, given your severe lack of knowledge of the history of the computing market, I'm giving serious thought to the possiblity that you may be a troll.
Re:So much for M$'s one redeeming contribution...
on
Microsoft's Athens PC
·
· Score: 1
Bullshit. What brought PCs down in price was the relentless march of technology and manufacturing. It also didn't hurt that with the death of Commodore, Atari, Tandy, and to some extent Apple, the PC market accounts for >90% of the general purpose computing market. Volume makes up for large R&D costs in consumer electronics.
There has _always_ been a need for a general-purpose computer (at least since the mid 1980's). Whether the OS was brought to you by IBM, Microsoft, Apple or Commodore didn't matter.
Not really. You don't actually broadcast packets, even at layer 2. In every case, there's a specific destination to the frame. It's like the gov't spying on your mail by opening them all in the post office. And while yes, they can do this, it requires a court order and probably cause to do so (someone back me up, I'm not actually certain of this fact).
As for private entities, packet capture is a time consuming task to perform constantly. I know for a fact that the ISP at which I work moves about a terabyte a day thru the network I maintain. It's not cost-effective (and there's not really any juicy stuff to be garnered), so they (corporations) won't do it.
Plus, the litigious backlash should ISPs start doing this of their own volition would be prohibitively expensive.
Except that computers _can_ scan all the traffic, and there are IDS systems that can flag transactions that the user doesn't like. Which translates into the gov't looking you up when you discuss stuff _they_ don't want the citizenry talking about.
The next step is to delete the traffic, then park a black van outside your house for two weeks, then to "disappear" you. It already happenned to the guy from Intel. I can't wait for it to happen to me.
How exactly is this helping? Control the information flow? How is it then, that links to, and a discussion of, the flaw and possible exploits were publicly available six hours ago on this very website? I wouldn't exactly call a discussion thread on one of the world's largest weblogs "controlling the flow of information."
This is about the level of competency I've come to expect from Large Government Entities.
Okay. That makes more sense. I just tend to break the separate parts you mention (availability, integrity, etc) into separate functions, and don't group them all under the umbrella of "Security." Integrity and Availability to me seem better suited as a reliability planning task, not one concerned w/ security.
And I'm not saying that physical security is the end-all-be-all of this particular scenario. It does, however, play a very big part. It may just be my environment, but most of the storage I deal with is locally attached, or via NFS/CIFS shares. Both are relatively easy to secure, from an access standpoint (woo-hoo RFC1918), and both are relatively simple to maintain. In this scenario, system remote access is granted to very few trusted persons, with the actual greatest threat to the data being hardware failure, or someone tailgating the datacenter door and then proceeding to rip drives out of systems.
Why is this something you'd need a book for? It comes down to the basics.
One, never allow physical access to what you're trying to secure.
Two, _never_ allow physical access to what you're trying to secure.
Three and so on: log all security events, break users into groups for simplification of manageability, set permissions properly, protect network shares and device access, and be aware of the content that's being secured (what it is, how it's used, etc.)
Beyond that, there's not much else to consider. However, from the review it looks like they go beyond security issues to stuff like, "what hardware is best for my particular application." Sure, it's a big consideration. For example, you wouldn't want a two million row database running off a Network Appliance over NFS across switched fast ethernet, but there's enough free information out there that making decisions like that should be trivial. Furthermore, if you're doing system specifications w/o knowing about the technologies you have to choose from, I sure hope you're not an employee of the place for which you're building a system, because they're not going to like you very much when it dies on a regular basis.
Not having actually read the book, I may be way off base, but from the title and the review above, I don't see how it would be all that helpful except maybe as a primer to a junior-level engineer.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you've never been an athlete, or pushed your body to extremes in order to overcome a challenge. I know, I know, it doesn't fit the geek credo, but using your body for more than just punching keys and moving joysticks (he said "joysticks") can be fun, you know.
I swim and bicycle regularly, and used to skate with a modicum of proficiency, before I fell four lousy feet off a stage, destroying my right ankle. I suffered what the surgeon termed, "the equivalent of a professional sports career-ending injury." I'm lucky enough to walk with no problems whatsoever, but running more than 50 yards, or jumping, annoys the hell out of it. I guess I should be glad that basketball isn't one of my passions.
Plus, what's with the "considered lunch for pretty much everything on this earth..." comment? I mean, when's the last time ANY creature other than a human was a threat to you?
I dunno. Let me introduce you to a few things like Haemophilus influenzae, or Mycobacterium avium, or Staphylococcus aureus, or Streptococcus pyogenes (which I just recently managed to beat down, _again_). And that's just the short list of upper respiratory bacteria. I haven't even gotten to the nasty stuff, like the plague, or hell, the whole range of viruses, like Ebola.
Furthermore, myself, naked, in the wilderness, is lunch for pretty much anything in or above my weight class (about 80 kilos). The only reason I'm not regularly on the menu is because I'm surrounded by about five million other members of my species, and nearly everything w/ four legs on my continent is terrified of even small groups of humans. Even 1000Kg bears get the hell out of our way in the forests. It's because over the last several millennia, they've come to realize that humans will kill them, with frightening efficiency.
Cyborg sex? Uh... if you're into airbrushed Japanese dorm art, I guess it's appealing, but I'll take the good old fashioned organic variety any day.:-)
Sex? Oh, you mean that half-billion-year-old endorphinic response that so regularly twists the mind to it's bidding? Apparently you haven't noticed, but that smug intellect you're sporting is a cruel trick of your DNA to ensure _its_ survival, not yours. Along with that comes the aformentioned biological response, set up so that your mind can't make an end run around the real purpose of your existence, which is to madly screw any and all females in the vicinity, in the hopes of producing a viable offspring, so that the species can continue.
Granted, the endorphin release is fun, and I don't like to rant on this subject to my girlfriend, who's caught up in ideas like love and romance, but I'm bothered by the ring zero process in my head that interrupts any meaningful thought every time a cute piece of ass walks into my field of vision. It gets old after a while. And I don't think it ever gets any less intrusive.
I'd say there's an even 50/50 chance that you're just leg-pulling with this whole "who needs biology" notion, but due to the lack of emoticonifcation, I'm left wondering.
I'm _dead_serious_. I think that the major causes of our society's lack of advancement (not that it's not occuring, but in fits and starts) is due to the millions of years of leftover evolution that's gone into our half-assed bodies. There's behavioral tendencies in there that sicken me. Greed, for one. The need to have more than your neighbor leads back hundreds of thousands of years; to impress a potential mate, to look good for the tribe. It's pathetic. The fact that someone can want something and just nonchalantly kill for it. You say nurture, I say reptilian hindbrain. In truth, we're both right. But then there's the stupidity brought about by love, and the red mist of murderous rage, both cases where rational thought goes right out the window, and we're left to our baser, more animal instincts. And don't even get me started on the gross inadequacies of our current physical frame. It's barely functional, with more engineering hacks than a Rube Goldberg device. Have you ever seen the method that the proteins use to make your muscles contact? There's a method begging for a clean-sheet design.
I, for one, would prefer we left these things behind ASAP, or at least refined mind and body, so as not to usurp our humanity for our primatism.
(Mods: I'm pretty sure this has escalated right to the edge of flamewar, and it's potentially off topic, please treat as you see fit)
well, inasmuch as the borg are _written_ to be big and scary, sure, it doesn't seem like much of a life, but if you're simply a digital copy of a mind that occasionally inhabits a semi-meat body...
Furthermore, there wouldn't be much of a meat body anyway. Besides, you could make the outside look just like normal Homo sapiens sapiens, and assuming we've figured neuronal functions out well enough to build an artificial replacement, I'm pretty sure that the sensory experience of being in my supposed manufactured body could be made to exactly duplicate that of being in a live body.
Plus, the prospect of neuron-by-neuron replacement whilst still going about your daily life would draw much fewer complaints from the more luddite elements of our society. If you're only replacing one brain cell, how is that so different from having a myoelectric arm? and if you're only replacing two cells? Three? Three dozen? Half? All? Where would you draw the line? If you've built a functioning replica of someone's brain while they're still using it, and there's a perfect copy of them inside, it's still them, right? There's been no real death there, has there? I mean, if alcoholics kill millions of brain cells on a regular basis, and we still call them human, what's the difference in simply having brain cells replaced one by one with a mechanical analogue?
Slashdot Mirror
no moving parts? hello, hard drive? sooner or later, bearings fail, esp. w/ start and stop operations
Plus, rechargeable batteries fail as well. it's going to happen.
It does bother me that replacing the battery's such a chore.
I fear the the gov't may very well outlaw encryption for the masses outright. I mean, what with terrorists and all, it wouldn't be terribly difficult for them to shove that down our throats.
But MACINTOSH _is_ an acronym!
i ng
Most
Applications
Crash
If
Not
The
Operat
System
Hangs
okay, it's not _really_ true, esp. w/ the advent of OS X, but it _is_ clever.
mods: i know, i know, off topic. do what you will...
First, Lindows _does_ compete directly against MS's premiere software product, the OS. And it really does have a name that's easily confused w/ Windows. That's how trademark law works. Second, Ford suing MS, or MS suing SC Johnson would be dumb, since they're not in the same market. MS doesn't sell SUV's, and SC Johnson doesn't sell computers or software.
Honestly, I've been waiting for this to happen somewhere, and I'm surprised that it happenned first overseas, given that I'd expect the US has more case history for this kind of thing.
19 tons of heavy metal radioisotope doesn't take up much space. These elements are quite dense.
I remember seeing a demo of this stuff in school.. It's so safe to use in a reactor it's crazy; they referred to it as "walk-away" safe. Lose _all_ cooling in the core, leave it over the weekend, fix it on Monday. It was going to bring about a revolution in safety WRT nuclear power generation. It's nice to see this finally coming to fruition.
yah, and there's a reason. The Altivec vector instruction set specifically provides an instruction in hardware that the RC5 routines (and most encryption in general) make heavy use of. 1GHz G4 procs kill the Intel hardware by about 3:1 (approx 9mil on the above #s)
That said, the intel hardware should rip thru properly vectorized FP code about as well (for functions it directly supports in hardware), and should kill the G5 on integer performance. Mostly has to do with the G5 having fewer integer units than the P4/Xeon. This has been pretty much proven with the SPEC scores we've seen thus far, with both sides using top-of-class compilers (none of this GCC crap).
And now, back on topic, I think that this says alot about the IBM FP hardware with regards to Intel. Intel bent over backwards for an architecture that's not much faster per clock, and given the apparent lack of clock scalability in the Itanium, they're going to be hard-pressed to keep up. Their lack of FSB bandwidth is going to hurt them as well, esp. in the server market. I know of at least two scientific apps (nothing big, just school stuff) that the Itanium chews thru faster than the G5, but only for small datasets. The guy showing me his results mentioned that when the dataset goes from 10MB to 500MB, the G5 ends up around 2-3 times faster, as the memory interface becomes a bottleneck on Intel.
This may be one of the core reasons LINPACK on hugely parallel systems brings the Itanium and G5 so close to each other.
It doesn't help that the PPC970 looks to cost about a third what the Itanium costs.
Actually, even tho OSX makes better use of VRAM, the window manager/compositor still has a local copy of each window in system memory. My current memory load for the window manager w/ two Safari windows, Mail, two Terminal windows, iTunes, a console, and the Activity Monitor open is 100MB. It helps that the display adapter has a relatively fast path through which to move the window textures, and that they're compressed, but still, that's a bunch of memory.
.5GB, that kind of memory usage would get problematic fast.
Altho, the user experience is nice, and w/ 2.5GB to spare, 100MB is a drop in the bucket.
However, for users on stock systems, having only
I submit to the reader that Geer's article _is_ in fact in accordance with @Stake's opinion; as a security consulting company, they should be painfully aware of exactly what the full implications of MS's combination of shoddy product quality and monopoly are.
Which brings us to the Hidden Agenda. It's also painfully obvious (or if not, it should be) that @Stake is willing to forsake an accurate accounting of a system's security for a few bucks. Granted, it's a whole lot of few bucks, but they're effectively tarnishing their reputation (if they've even got one to start with).
I feel bad for Mr. Geer; what happenned to him is truly a shame. I also don't think it'll help much. MS today is like IBM in the late 70's/early 80's. They walk around with all this marketsshare, pissing on the entire rest of the computing industry (including their customers!), and will end up losing to market forces, as their customerbase, increasingly sick of the "where ya gonna go?" attitude, abandons them in droves. It's going to take a while, but it'll happen.
With regards to the ice melting: the water displaced is exactly equal in mass to the mass of the block of ice. Upon melting, the water level doesn't change. What we _do_ have to worry about is all the ice on top of the Antarctic continent that's not floating in water. _That_ ice will raise the ocean level. Although AFAIK it's only by about 30 feet. Coastal regions are screwed in the long run, but here in Dallas, it just means I'll be closer to the beach :)
Assuming I live long enough...
Apparently, they don't accept _anything_. I submitted the exact same story, only to get rejected. I'd like to know what I'm doing wrong as well. Exactly what _does_ it take to get something accepted? Because whatever the criteria are, they're not in the FAQ.
so sad. so sad.
but ultimately redundant. The laws of thermodynamics preclude this kind of an ending to our local reality. Unless someone figures out how to manipulate vacuum energy fluctuations (or the strings directly), and reverses entropy.
Although that may have disatrous consequences. We might end up with another superinflationary universe within our own. Good luck dodging a few million light-years out of the way of that one!
This man speaks the truth. I've (along with about a dozen or so coworkers) just spent the last four months of my life working 70+ hour weeks attempting to fix a project that, by our own internal product acceptance and lab testing standards, was never supposed to have made it to the production environment. It's killed morale throughout the entire department, and we're pretty certain that when the time comes for recognition of our sacrifice, our supreme efforts will be glossed over.
There Aint No Justice. There's Just Us.
(and Death. and Death of Rats.)
Your math is wrong. what that says is that for high-income citizens, they could only defer up to 50% of their taxes (Roth IRAs, 401K, etc). They still paid tax on the rest of their income.
you also miss the point that the guy who's paying 30% of 50% of 200k/yr paid 30k in taxes. That's more than the total tax burden for 20 guys each making 15k/yr. Hell, his taxes could have _directly_ paid two of their gross incomes for that year.
And I guarantee, the guy making 200k/yr (or more) uses significantly fewer of those social programs he's paying for.
Mostg
Applications
Crash
If
Not
The
Operatin
System
Hangs
heh...
Okay, you really missed my point. If what you said were the case, all the competing architectures out there would have had zero sales. Amiga, the Mac, the entire Apple II line, Atari STs, the whole thing was a wash because they didn't have Windows. Except that they _did_ have sales. People wanted to do things with this new consumer appliance. Granted, for the most part it was a hobbyist market, but the need was there.
Windows didn't bring PCs to the masses. I'll repeat this again, because you obviously didn't get it the first time. There has been, since the early 80's, a need for a general-purpose computer. I submit that there potentially has _always_ been a need for a general purpose computer, and the major hurdle there was the lack of powerful, inexpensive hardware. Remember the TRS-80 machines? The Apple II used in classrooms and homes everywhere? The Commodore 64? The reason these systems died out is because businesses wanted a name they could turn to (IBM), and IBM had the cashflow to actually produce a beefy system. Remember, the original PC supported up to 256KB, over four times the RAM of the C64. This allowed for bigger programs and (what really mattered) larger datasets. Suddenly, there was a machine available at commodity pricing (for businesses, anyway) that could do _real_work_. Eventually, the business market allowed IBM to fund development of the XT, the AT, the PS/2, while Compaq's reverse-engineering feat allowed standards-based competition. At this point, MS only provided the OS and some development tools, and had IBM kept a tighter lid on the system (which they really couldn't), even MS would have been in a stranglehold. The fact that IBM wouldn't license DOS to anyone else gave MS the fingerhold they needed. The only reason MS got where they are is because of restrictive (monopolistic) licensing and pricing practices.
People bought computers because they either had a great interest in them, or they had some task that only a computer could perform. Not because they came with Windows.
At this point, given your severe lack of knowledge of the history of the computing market, I'm giving serious thought to the possiblity that you may be a troll.
Bullshit. What brought PCs down in price was the relentless march of technology and manufacturing. It also didn't hurt that with the death of Commodore, Atari, Tandy, and to some extent Apple, the PC market accounts for >90% of the general purpose computing market. Volume makes up for large R&D costs in consumer electronics.
There has _always_ been a need for a general-purpose computer (at least since the mid 1980's). Whether the OS was brought to you by IBM, Microsoft, Apple or Commodore didn't matter.
Not really. You don't actually broadcast packets, even at layer 2. In every case, there's a specific destination to the frame. It's like the gov't spying on your mail by opening them all in the post office. And while yes, they can do this, it requires a court order and probably cause to do so (someone back me up, I'm not actually certain of this fact).
As for private entities, packet capture is a time consuming task to perform constantly. I know for a fact that the ISP at which I work moves about a terabyte a day thru the network I maintain. It's not cost-effective (and there's not really any juicy stuff to be garnered), so they (corporations) won't do it.
Plus, the litigious backlash should ISPs start doing this of their own volition would be prohibitively expensive.
Except that computers _can_ scan all the traffic, and there are IDS systems that can flag transactions that the user doesn't like. Which translates into the gov't looking you up when you discuss stuff _they_ don't want the citizenry talking about.
The next step is to delete the traffic, then park a black van outside your house for two weeks, then to "disappear" you. It already happenned to the guy from Intel. I can't wait for it to happen to me.
How exactly is this helping? Control the information flow? How is it then, that links to, and a discussion of, the flaw and possible exploits were publicly available six hours ago on this very website? I wouldn't exactly call a discussion thread on one of the world's largest weblogs "controlling the flow of information."
This is about the level of competency I've come to expect from Large Government Entities.
Actually, it's really easy to flood the Qwest backbone. Slammer did it.
Okay. That makes more sense. I just tend to break the separate parts you mention (availability, integrity, etc) into separate functions, and don't group them all under the umbrella of "Security." Integrity and Availability to me seem better suited as a reliability planning task, not one concerned w/ security.
And I'm not saying that physical security is the end-all-be-all of this particular scenario. It does, however, play a very big part. It may just be my environment, but most of the storage I deal with is locally attached, or via NFS/CIFS shares. Both are relatively easy to secure, from an access standpoint (woo-hoo RFC1918), and both are relatively simple to maintain. In this scenario, system remote access is granted to very few trusted persons, with the actual greatest threat to the data being hardware failure, or someone tailgating the datacenter door and then proceeding to rip drives out of systems.
Why is this something you'd need a book for? It comes down to the basics.
One, never allow physical access to what you're trying to secure.
Two, _never_ allow physical access to what you're trying to secure.
Three and so on: log all security events, break users into groups for simplification of manageability, set permissions properly, protect network shares and device access, and be aware of the content that's being secured (what it is, how it's used, etc.)
Beyond that, there's not much else to consider. However, from the review it looks like they go beyond security issues to stuff like, "what hardware is best for my particular application." Sure, it's a big consideration. For example, you wouldn't want a two million row database running off a Network Appliance over NFS across switched fast ethernet, but there's enough free information out there that making decisions like that should be trivial. Furthermore, if you're doing system specifications w/o knowing about the technologies you have to choose from, I sure hope you're not an employee of the place for which you're building a system, because they're not going to like you very much when it dies on a regular basis.
Not having actually read the book, I may be way off base, but from the title and the review above, I don't see how it would be all that helpful except maybe as a primer to a junior-level engineer.
I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that you've never been an athlete, or pushed your body to extremes in order to overcome a challenge. I know, I know, it doesn't fit the geek credo, but using your body for more than just punching keys and moving joysticks (he said "joysticks") can be fun, you know.
:-)
I swim and bicycle regularly, and used to skate with a modicum of proficiency, before I fell four lousy feet off a stage, destroying my right ankle. I suffered what the surgeon termed, "the equivalent of a professional sports career-ending injury." I'm lucky enough to walk with no problems whatsoever, but running more than 50 yards, or jumping, annoys the hell out of it. I guess I should be glad that basketball isn't one of my passions.
Plus, what's with the "considered lunch for pretty much everything on this earth..." comment? I mean, when's the last time ANY creature other than a human was a threat to you?
I dunno. Let me introduce you to a few things like Haemophilus influenzae, or Mycobacterium avium, or Staphylococcus aureus, or Streptococcus pyogenes (which I just recently managed to beat down, _again_). And that's just the short list of upper respiratory bacteria. I haven't even gotten to the nasty stuff, like the plague, or hell, the whole range of viruses, like Ebola.
Furthermore, myself, naked, in the wilderness, is lunch for pretty much anything in or above my weight class (about 80 kilos). The only reason I'm not regularly on the menu is because I'm surrounded by about five million other members of my species, and nearly everything w/ four legs on my continent is terrified of even small groups of humans. Even 1000Kg bears get the hell out of our way in the forests. It's because over the last several millennia, they've come to realize that humans will kill them, with frightening efficiency.
Cyborg sex? Uh... if you're into airbrushed Japanese dorm art, I guess it's appealing, but I'll take the good old fashioned organic variety any day.
Sex? Oh, you mean that half-billion-year-old endorphinic response that so regularly twists the mind to it's bidding? Apparently you haven't noticed, but that smug intellect you're sporting is a cruel trick of your DNA to ensure _its_ survival, not yours. Along with that comes the aformentioned biological response, set up so that your mind can't make an end run around the real purpose of your existence, which is to madly screw any and all females in the vicinity, in the hopes of producing a viable offspring, so that the species can continue.
Granted, the endorphin release is fun, and I don't like to rant on this subject to my girlfriend, who's caught up in ideas like love and romance, but I'm bothered by the ring zero process in my head that interrupts any meaningful thought every time a cute piece of ass walks into my field of vision. It gets old after a while. And I don't think it ever gets any less intrusive.
I'd say there's an even 50/50 chance that you're just leg-pulling with this whole "who needs biology" notion, but due to the lack of emoticonifcation, I'm left wondering.
I'm _dead_serious_. I think that the major causes of our society's lack of advancement (not that it's not occuring, but in fits and starts) is due to the millions of years of leftover evolution that's gone into our half-assed bodies. There's behavioral tendencies in there that sicken me. Greed, for one. The need to have more than your neighbor leads back hundreds of thousands of years; to impress a potential mate, to look good for the tribe. It's pathetic. The fact that someone can want something and just nonchalantly kill for it. You say nurture, I say reptilian hindbrain. In truth, we're both right. But then there's the stupidity brought about by love, and the red mist of murderous rage, both cases where rational thought goes right out the window, and we're left to our baser, more animal instincts. And don't even get me started on the gross inadequacies of our current physical frame. It's barely functional, with more engineering hacks than a Rube Goldberg device. Have you ever seen the method that the proteins use to make your muscles contact? There's a method begging for a clean-sheet design.
I, for one, would prefer we left these things behind ASAP, or at least refined mind and body, so as not to usurp our humanity for our primatism.
(Mods: I'm pretty sure this has escalated right to the edge of flamewar, and it's potentially off topic, please treat as you see fit)
well, inasmuch as the borg are _written_ to be big and scary, sure, it doesn't seem like much of a life, but if you're simply a digital copy of a mind that occasionally inhabits a semi-meat body...
Furthermore, there wouldn't be much of a meat body anyway. Besides, you could make the outside look just like normal Homo sapiens sapiens, and assuming we've figured neuronal functions out well enough to build an artificial replacement, I'm pretty sure that the sensory experience of being in my supposed manufactured body could be made to exactly duplicate that of being in a live body.
Plus, the prospect of neuron-by-neuron replacement whilst still going about your daily life would draw much fewer complaints from the more luddite elements of our society. If you're only replacing one brain cell, how is that so different from having a myoelectric arm? and if you're only replacing two cells? Three? Three dozen? Half? All? Where would you draw the line? If you've built a functioning replica of someone's brain while they're still using it, and there's a perfect copy of them inside, it's still them, right? There's been no real death there, has there? I mean, if alcoholics kill millions of brain cells on a regular basis, and we still call them human, what's the difference in simply having brain cells replaced one by one with a mechanical analogue?