Do you think I would post that if it wasn't possible to take the SS using the common ways?
Yes. No offense to you, but I don't know you personally so I can't automatically give you the benefit of the doubt. In my experience, there's one set of people more technically challenged than tech support callers: tech support staffers who make fun of people who ask questions the tech's don't understand.
So I'll assume that you're one of the good guys and know better. I can still hear some tech somewhere laughing: "that idiot took a picture of a DOS prompt! Hyuk hyuk!"
The real WTF is why the application didn't just trim the spaces off the password once it was entered.
I utterly, wholly disagree. My company has a fairly complex web app that our customers use for data entry, and we chose a long time ago that we wouldn't guess at what a user means. For example, we have a fixed set of supported date formats they can submit, and anything else throws a syntax error. The reason for this is that it's much better for all involved to set standards for acceptable input and then stick by them than try to act on any weird bit of data sent our way.
Frankly, I would treat a password field this way and assume that a user meant to send it exactly as you received it. Any other route leads to madness. For instance, should you also ignore case in their passwords? Helpfully convert punctuation to numbers and vice versa? Each of those would be convenient for users who occasionally mistype their passwords, but what a support (and security) nightmare! No, far better to take their input as face value and either accept or reject it as-is.
I'll never understand what it is about computers that brings out so much of what must be latent stupidity.
Well, it's like people believe that computers run on magic and that the normal rules of physics don't apply to them. Example questions:
"Why did you just tell my son he had to be online before he could check his mail?" (In the days of dialup ISPs)
"You should have told me I needed a computer before I signed up!" (I swear to God, hand on a stack of Bibles, that a woman told me this.)
"I'm paying $20 a month and I demand you let me online now!" (From a caller in a small town experiencing a power outage.)
I can understand ignorant questions, because a lot of the stuff we do is pretty complex and non-obvious. I just can't understand dumb questions, the ones that show a complete lack of critical thinking.
Another company's internet tanks. We can't ping their public ip, they're down. This happened on a Monday, 10AM. After dragging AT&T there on a leash so they could swap out some hardware (inside a locked box...), the net started working again, Tuesday, 2PM.
Oh, we had a fun one like that. Ping would work, then stop, then work, then stop. It seems our ISP (starts with an "S", rhymes with "print") forgot that they'd allocated our netblock to us and decided to give it to the loading docks of a shipping company. I was unamused to find that half of our inbound traffic was being redirected to the seediest place in the country, depending on which of two routers was winning the battle at any given moment.
I'm not working with support anymore (thank God!) but one case that I still remember was when the guy took a screen shot of an error message using *gasp* his camera.
I did that within the last month. Ever tried to jot down a FreeBSD kernel panic?
Maybe it's my naivety, but wouldn't a hash have to be of infinite length to be able to be used in a way that guarantees no collisions?
That's what I thought he was saying at first, but it's not. For an n-bit hash, the birthday paradox says you'll need to try an average of (n/2) bits to find a hit. The problem with MD5 is that you can find collisions in much fewer than 2^64 attempts. So sayeth Wikipedia:
On 18 March 2006, Klima published an algorithm[9] that can find a collision within one minute on a single notebook computer, using a method he calls tunneling.
So yes, all fixed-length hashes will have an infinite number of collisions. It's just that some hash algorithms make it a whole lot easier to find some of them.
NASA is being set up to fail, because of the prevailing pro-corporate attitude in the US. The idea is that private entities are efficient, responsible, and capable of long-term planning and technological development.
No. The idea is that greed is one hell of a motivator, and "let's get reliable space flight so that we can sell tickets to a space hotel" is potentially astronomically profitable. Consider an analogy with commercial aviation. The military gave airplanes a big bootstrap by proving the basic ideas useful and practical, but it really took off once pilots brought their war experience home and applied it to mail and cargo delivery, and later passenger travel.
Where would we be today if private companies had never risked air travel? Earthbound. Where are we today without private companies risking space travel? Earthbound. Don't get me wrong; I love NASA and I'm glad they're doing big projects. At the same time, I personally will never get to fly on a NASA mission. There's a real chance that I might get to reach space on a Virgin Galactic flight some day.
For reasons both selfish and historical, I really want to see private enterprise moving into space. As with airplanes, the government has proven the ideas to be useful and practical. Now it's time for corporations to make it common and cheap.
Then, last month, in a heated dispute with my spouse over whether she or my computer received more of my attention, she took the keyboard, ripped it out of the computer, and swung it like a 10 lb. sledgehammer against the desk.
This is totally off-topic, but... If you'd done that to her keyboard, you could very well be in jail for domestic violence. Aggressive destruction of the other's property is considered a physical threat and they can haul you in for it. Now, I'm not suggesting that you call the cops on your wife, but you might want to think about the implications of her getting so mad that she violently breaks your stuff.
No newfangled keys. The good old One True Way ANSI-101 design.
That's actually the one thing I wish was different on my Model M. I'd love having a nice meta key or two lateral to the the alt keys because it seems like most new desktops support lots of keybindings on them. Oh, and that the function keys weren't so pinky-stretchingly far up - I never learned to press ctrl-Fn with two hands, and at this point I've all but given up teaching myself.
Why would support for DRM restrictions impact performance or stability? That's just ridiculous. That's like saying having a password on your computer will make it slower.
Unrelated. A password prompt does its job and then normal execution continues. The DRM codepath is constantly checking the integrity of the restricted data as it works its way from media to monitor to make sure that Evil Pirates aren't making copies. If you don't understand that then you don't understand Windows's DRM support.
Your HO is wrong. Seriously. And while clockspeed may claim attosecond precision (which is far more precise than any common hardware would support), it's nowhere near that accurate. For example, you are reading this at June 3, 1983 at 4:15:03.000000000000000001 PM CDT. That's precise but not accurate.
At any rate, clockspeed is another weird DJBism that doesn't support the standard everyone else uses (UTC), and instead implements something fairly similar and arguably better (TAI) that no one else wants. Since TAI doesn't do leap seconds, neither does clockspeed so it's not really relevant to the subject at hand.
No, you can't. OpenNTPD and ntpd also adjust clock skew. The problem is that I've seen precious few servers that are consistently inaccurate. If you know that a ticker is off 21ms per day, then you can account for it. When it's off 21ms one day and -8 the next, there's jack that you can do other than keep an NTP daemon running and hope that the change in rate doesn't fluctuate too quickly.
The code you want doesn't belong to you. It belongs to IBM's shareholders. If you want it, make an offer.
How much did we pay Sun for OpenOffice.org or Java? How much did we pay Netscape for Mozilla? Shareholders aren't owed every single penny a company could possible eke out. A concept called "enlightened self interest" allows companies to do certain nice things for free in exchange for good PR and a firm footing in the communities surrounding them. Sometimes that's even good for the shareholders in following years.
The one item that was damaged from Amazon, out of the 30 or 40 I bought, they had the replacement in my hands 2 days after reporting it
I'll second that. I ordered a computer book and got a romance novel (probably intended for garcia). I filled out the form to have a customer service rep call me back and my phone was ringing within 5 seconds. They next-day shipped the correct book and included a pre-paid envelope to mail back the wrong item. Honestly, I can't think of a single thing they could have done to handle the problem better.
If you hate MS that much, a better tact would be to not underestimate the enemy in your little nerd battle. They're not irrelevant, to say they are is laughable and shows how provincial and limited your experience in the computing industry is.
I'd suggest that you replace "MS" with "Linux" and take your own advice.
Turns out not all NTP servers implemented leap seconds the same way, and many cluster based applications get upset when they aren't synchronized to within 100ms.
Given that most computers have utterly horrible tickers (irony: a $15 Timex watch keeps much better time than this $4,000 server), can you usually expect that much precision?
Look at it this way, I work at a college, we have thousands of computers. Only maybe 100 of which replaced in the last year are able to support 64bit operating systems and those still only have 1 -2 gigs of ram.
And how many of those old machines were you really going to upgrade to a newer OS anyway? Windows has always been tied to new machines, plus a small percent of upgrades.
If they released 64bit only the chance that we would switch anytime in the next 7 years (which would be how long it is going to take on our 5 year amortization cycle) is zero.
Every other 64-bit OS on the planet manages 32-bit backward compatibility. Heck, OS X even runs non-native binaries! You should demand no less from Microsoft.
Having support for DRM'd media in the OS (like BluRay / HDCP / etc) has absolutely ZERO impact on people who don't use DRM'd media.
That is simply not possible, if you define "support for DRM'd media" as "support for the restrictions of DRM'd media" as Microsoft has. They've jumped through great hoops to make sure you can't copy restricted content. Do you truly and sincerely believe that all of the extra defensive code has no effect on the system's performance and stability?
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Do you think I would post that if it wasn't possible to take the SS using the common ways?
Yes. No offense to you, but I don't know you personally so I can't automatically give you the benefit of the doubt. In my experience, there's one set of people more technically challenged than tech support callers: tech support staffers who make fun of people who ask questions the tech's don't understand.
So I'll assume that you're one of the good guys and know better. I can still hear some tech somewhere laughing: "that idiot took a picture of a DOS prompt! Hyuk hyuk!"
The real WTF is why the application didn't just trim the spaces off the password once it was entered.
I utterly, wholly disagree. My company has a fairly complex web app that our customers use for data entry, and we chose a long time ago that we wouldn't guess at what a user means. For example, we have a fixed set of supported date formats they can submit, and anything else throws a syntax error. The reason for this is that it's much better for all involved to set standards for acceptable input and then stick by them than try to act on any weird bit of data sent our way.
Frankly, I would treat a password field this way and assume that a user meant to send it exactly as you received it. Any other route leads to madness. For instance, should you also ignore case in their passwords? Helpfully convert punctuation to numbers and vice versa? Each of those would be convenient for users who occasionally mistype their passwords, but what a support (and security) nightmare! No, far better to take their input as face value and either accept or reject it as-is.
I'll never understand what it is about computers that brings out so much of what must be latent stupidity.
Well, it's like people believe that computers run on magic and that the normal rules of physics don't apply to them. Example questions:
I can understand ignorant questions, because a lot of the stuff we do is pretty complex and non-obvious. I just can't understand dumb questions, the ones that show a complete lack of critical thinking.
Another company's internet tanks. We can't ping their public ip, they're down. This happened on a Monday, 10AM. After dragging AT&T there on a leash so they could swap out some hardware (inside a locked box...), the net started working again, Tuesday, 2PM.
Oh, we had a fun one like that. Ping would work, then stop, then work, then stop. It seems our ISP (starts with an "S", rhymes with "print") forgot that they'd allocated our netblock to us and decided to give it to the loading docks of a shipping company. I was unamused to find that half of our inbound traffic was being redirected to the seediest place in the country, depending on which of two routers was winning the battle at any given moment.
I'm not working with support anymore (thank God!) but one case that I still remember was when the guy took a screen shot of an error message using *gasp* his camera.
I did that within the last month. Ever tried to jot down a FreeBSD kernel panic?
Smaller also means more powerful computers at the 'classic' scale
That's a major understatement. Assuming we're working with carbon:
(6*10^23 atoms / mole) * (1 mole / 12g) * (14 transistors / 30 atoms) * (1 core2duo / 1.5*10^8 transistors) = 155 trillion Core 2 Duo processors per gram.
Even if there's a billion-to-one overhead for interconnects and so on, that's still 150,000 processors per gram. Yeah, that counts as more powerful.
Maybe it's my naivety, but wouldn't a hash have to be of infinite length to be able to be used in a way that guarantees no collisions?
That's what I thought he was saying at first, but it's not. For an n-bit hash, the birthday paradox says you'll need to try an average of (n/2) bits to find a hit. The problem with MD5 is that you can find collisions in much fewer than 2^64 attempts. So sayeth Wikipedia:
So yes, all fixed-length hashes will have an infinite number of collisions. It's just that some hash algorithms make it a whole lot easier to find some of them.
Well, that's a different story, and why I started by reversing the roles. That's why I urged him to consider what it meant and take care of himself.
NASA is being set up to fail, because of the prevailing pro-corporate attitude in the US. The idea is that private entities are efficient, responsible, and capable of long-term planning and technological development.
No. The idea is that greed is one hell of a motivator, and "let's get reliable space flight so that we can sell tickets to a space hotel" is potentially astronomically profitable. Consider an analogy with commercial aviation. The military gave airplanes a big bootstrap by proving the basic ideas useful and practical, but it really took off once pilots brought their war experience home and applied it to mail and cargo delivery, and later passenger travel.
Where would we be today if private companies had never risked air travel? Earthbound. Where are we today without private companies risking space travel? Earthbound. Don't get me wrong; I love NASA and I'm glad they're doing big projects. At the same time, I personally will never get to fly on a NASA mission. There's a real chance that I might get to reach space on a Virgin Galactic flight some day.
For reasons both selfish and historical, I really want to see private enterprise moving into space. As with airplanes, the government has proven the ideas to be useful and practical. Now it's time for corporations to make it common and cheap.
Then, last month, in a heated dispute with my spouse over whether she or my computer received more of my attention, she took the keyboard, ripped it out of the computer, and swung it like a 10 lb. sledgehammer against the desk.
This is totally off-topic, but... If you'd done that to her keyboard, you could very well be in jail for domestic violence. Aggressive destruction of the other's property is considered a physical threat and they can haul you in for it. Now, I'm not suggesting that you call the cops on your wife, but you might want to think about the implications of her getting so mad that she violently breaks your stuff.
No newfangled keys. The good old One True Way ANSI-101 design.
That's actually the one thing I wish was different on my Model M. I'd love having a nice meta key or two lateral to the the alt keys because it seems like most new desktops support lots of keybindings on them. Oh, and that the function keys weren't so pinky-stretchingly far up - I never learned to press ctrl-Fn with two hands, and at this point I've all but given up teaching myself.
Why would support for DRM restrictions impact performance or stability? That's just ridiculous. That's like saying having a password on your computer will make it slower.
Unrelated. A password prompt does its job and then normal execution continues. The DRM codepath is constantly checking the integrity of the restricted data as it works its way from media to monitor to make sure that Evil Pirates aren't making copies. If you don't understand that then you don't understand Windows's DRM support.
IMHO clockspeed can.
Your HO is wrong. Seriously. And while clockspeed may claim attosecond precision (which is far more precise than any common hardware would support), it's nowhere near that accurate. For example, you are reading this at June 3, 1983 at 4:15:03.000000000000000001 PM CDT. That's precise but not accurate.
At any rate, clockspeed is another weird DJBism that doesn't support the standard everyone else uses (UTC), and instead implements something fairly similar and arguably better (TAI) that no one else wants. Since TAI doesn't do leap seconds, neither does clockspeed so it's not really relevant to the subject at hand.
No, you can't. OpenNTPD and ntpd also adjust clock skew. The problem is that I've seen precious few servers that are consistently inaccurate. If you know that a ticker is off 21ms per day, then you can account for it. When it's off 21ms one day and -8 the next, there's jack that you can do other than keep an NTP daemon running and hope that the change in rate doesn't fluctuate too quickly.
As long as they only bill you while you're actually having fun, I'd imagine that this would be a good deal for many of today's games.
Where "fun" will be defined as "watching the unskippable cut scenes in the new version of Tetris".
The code you want doesn't belong to you. It belongs to IBM's shareholders. If you want it, make an offer.
How much did we pay Sun for OpenOffice.org or Java? How much did we pay Netscape for Mozilla? Shareholders aren't owed every single penny a company could possible eke out. A concept called "enlightened self interest" allows companies to do certain nice things for free in exchange for good PR and a firm footing in the communities surrounding them. Sometimes that's even good for the shareholders in following years.
The one item that was damaged from Amazon, out of the 30 or 40 I bought, they had the replacement in my hands 2 days after reporting it
I'll second that. I ordered a computer book and got a romance novel (probably intended for garcia). I filled out the form to have a customer service rep call me back and my phone was ringing within 5 seconds. They next-day shipped the correct book and included a pre-paid envelope to mail back the wrong item. Honestly, I can't think of a single thing they could have done to handle the problem better.
Two, vista 32bit still has incompatibilities with software that runs fine on xp. If they can't even do that right do you trust them to do 64 to 32?
Well, I ended my post by saying that Microsoft should be held responsible for handling these transitions, especially since everyone else manages to.
No one has ever created anything could could even begin to rival Visual Studio.
You misspelled "Emacs". No, I'm not joking.
If you hate MS that much, a better tact would be to not underestimate the enemy in your little nerd battle. They're not irrelevant, to say they are is laughable and shows how provincial and limited your experience in the computing industry is.
I'd suggest that you replace "MS" with "Linux" and take your own advice.
Turns out not all NTP servers implemented leap seconds the same way, and many cluster based applications get upset when they aren't synchronized to within 100ms.
Given that most computers have utterly horrible tickers (irony: a $15 Timex watch keeps much better time than this $4,000 server), can you usually expect that much precision?
By the way, is ZFS any good or should I just stick to ext3?
To find out, your sister needs to upgrade to FreeBSD.
(dons flameproof jacket)
Look at it this way, I work at a college, we have thousands of computers. Only maybe 100 of which replaced in the last year are able to support 64bit operating systems and those still only have 1 -2 gigs of ram.
And how many of those old machines were you really going to upgrade to a newer OS anyway? Windows has always been tied to new machines, plus a small percent of upgrades.
If they released 64bit only the chance that we would switch anytime in the next 7 years (which would be how long it is going to take on our 5 year amortization cycle) is zero.
Every other 64-bit OS on the planet manages 32-bit backward compatibility. Heck, OS X even runs non-native binaries! You should demand no less from Microsoft.
Having support for DRM'd media in the OS (like BluRay / HDCP / etc) has absolutely ZERO impact on people who don't use DRM'd media.
That is simply not possible, if you define "support for DRM'd media" as "support for the restrictions of DRM'd media" as Microsoft has. They've jumped through great hoops to make sure you can't copy restricted content. Do you truly and sincerely believe that all of the extra defensive code has no effect on the system's performance and stability?
Looking back, it was good the conversation was over the phone, or I might still be in jail.
Umm, I thought you weren't supposed to have cell phones in prison.