What this shows is the priorities of the development team behind IE8.
If what you say is true, then the team leaders are saying, "Keep coding, we'll fix the memory problems later." It's as if memory usage isn't important. Memory usage is result of fundamental design considerations. I don't see how they will make a significant improvement on memory when they ship. With a few possible exceptions...
Microsoft's Steve Maguire wrote a book, "Writing Solid Code" (ISBN: 1556155514). He cited technique of self-checking code. In Excel, they have development versions of formulas which run in parallel to the optimized versions of the formulas. So long as they both produce the same result, it is presumed to be correct. (An example would be using a linear search to validate a hashed search) The downside is they take much longer to run. The shipped a preview version of Excel to the media with the development formulas still active. The media bashed that version of Excel.
This is because you are confusing cause and effect. You call it Simplicity, I call it lowest common denominator. Most people use the standard fonts because the have to, not because they want to. I work at an organization with a corporate branding strategy that uses a font that isn't one of the "standards." This automatically makes all the web sites I build non-compliant with the branding strategy unless I can somehow embed that font in the web page or render parts of the site as graphics.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Enough people will lose their private keys or have them stolen that fraud will still be a problem. I just don't have enough confidence that the average people will take the required precautions.
Okay, all this stuff (SSL, PKI, etc...) does is provide better and better identity proxies - my numeric personae if you will. Who I am is a flesh and blood person. I am not a number or a certificate. But the problem is that companies and governments have long stopped dealing with my flesh and blood self but deal with my numeric personae instead. My personae may or may not have a great credit score; may or may not pay taxes on time; may or may not have committed felonies; may or may not be a terrorist. As long as companies and governments insist upon tracking personae instead of people, fraud will continue.
The only reason they're calling it a technical flaw is because there is a computer in the mix somewhere. If you replace it with a paper, pencil, and a billion trained monkeys, you would have the same flaw.
It all depends on the skill-set your admins already have. If you have a shop of 100% Linux admins with no Solaris experience, stay away. If your shop already has some Solaris machines on Sparc, go for it - although you should double check the license.
From my own perspective, I've invested several hours getting it running. Granted, I was running the 200805 OpenSolaris installed on ZFS which had some bugs in the boot process which left my system unbootable a few times. Some follow up releases fixed those problems. But as a guy who's been using Linux since 1993, old habits are hard to break.
Of course most customers will use this as is. I'm thankful that HP isn't so paranoid of what their niche customers might do. The right of people to tweak products to suit their needs is a right that needs to be preserved.
I have total confidence that the blocks could have been done using only humans. Whether or not it was done that way is another question. I would suggest that the "pistons" you saw where probably the rails that the blocks slid along.
The one thing I noticed is the massive numbers of ear-pieces worn by the performers. There were a few who didn't, but they had a massive number of ear monitors. The in-ear program was almost certainly not the music we were hearing, but it was probably a pre-recorded choreographer doing the equivalent of "5.. 6.. 7.. 8... turn.. 2.. 3.."
The commentary I listened to indicated that rehearsals went on for a year. To put that in perspective, most live theatre shows only rehearse for a few weeks, most musicals double that. I compare what happened with high school marching band, we typically learned a new show every two weeks.
I fully respect that from time to time, horrible things must be done.
That said, I hope the USAF has only limited success with brainwashing all the guilt away. Guilt is important. Guilt is what reminds us what is morally right. When the operator pushes the button that fires the missile people die. Again, I understand that sometimes it must be done. But the decision to kill should be tough and difficult and fraught with guilt.
Quite often pediatricians are at the mercy of the equipment makers. One of the doctors at the pediatric hospital where I work explained an example: They bought an MRI machine. The machine needs to know the patient weight so that it can make adjustments to energy levels accordingly. The machine as installed refused to allow patient weights under about 6 pounds (3kg). They went back and forth with the manufacture. The manufacturer was like "Who's under 6 pounds?" The hospital was like "We have a level 3 neo-natal intensive care unit. On any given week, we have dozens of patients under six pounds."
My biggest failed prediction in the world of computers was the CD-ROM.
I was an audio CD early adopter and I knew from articles I read that audio CD's often had a certain defect rate. The defect rate was usually such that you would never hear it. One artist even published all the defects in the liner notes.
Based upon this, I presumed that you would never get the defect rate to zero and that no one would trust a data medium with anything less than perfection - and thus predicted the CD-ROM would never catch on.
They don't have to get the rate to zero. Just close enough to zero for the RS to function.
I agree completely. Apple have always... (at least under Job's tenure)... been about the end-to-end experience.
Having complete control over the end-to-end experience makes supporting Apple easier. Think about the problems that one of the recent Vista service packs had because the OEM didn't include critical AMD specific files which caused the service pack to brick those systems. Microsoft (and Linux for that matter) have a HUGE regression problem caused by the thousands of different hardware configurations that exist in the PC world. Apple only need to test about 25 or so.
In this respect, Apple behave like the IBM of yesteryear and Sun and Sequent and Unisys and HP where they have full control over both the Operating System and the Hardware.
I'm suddenly reminded of the line from the movie "Sneakers."
Cosmo: There I was in prison. And one day I help a couple of older gentlemen make some free telephone calls. They turn out to be, let us say, good family men.
Martin Bishop: Organized crime?
Cosmo: Hah. Don't kid yourself. It's not that organized.
I don't think so. This is an article for lawyers. Of course, Intellectual Property is well understood amongst lawyers. However, most lawyers are only acquainted with using IP for commercial advantage. This shouldn't be a surprise because most lawyers work for organisations that seek commercial success. What is surprising is how few lawyers are acquainted with idea that anyone would try to use IP to prevent someone else from abusing their altruism. For lack of a better word, there is "friction" between those who use IP for commercial advantage and those who use IP to prevent commercial advantage. This article seeks to both inform lawyers about open source as well as caution them about potential risks associated with trying to blend these two different IP models.
Yeah, that would be silly. That's why the professionals use a snake to move the mouse along, and of course a mongoose can be used to hurry the snake along.
Many are commenting on using checksums (MD5, SHA,....) to validate the file hasn't changed. This is good. However, none of these can actually tell if the PDF was is good to begin with. I would suggest using Ghostscript to verify that the PDF is properly structured. Ghostscript is an opensource tool that can convert PDF and Postscript files to several other formats. If Ghostscript can interpret the PDF file without errors, then odds are the file is good too.
I'd like to second the parent posters remarks. I'm currently contracting in the biomedical informatics department in the research foundation of a large mid-western paediatric hospital.
The fields of study here are wide and varied. They include Semantic Web, Natural Language Processing, Massive Parallel Processing, Data Warehousing and more.
The key things I'd suggest is to get great in one of the following areas: Computational, Statistical or Biological. Then get good in one of the others (hint: Statistics). The other will be filled in by someone else. Data are everything and the shelf life of data are measured in weeks. I'll echo the parent posters remarks about good programming skills. Most of the BMI grad students here have never heard of unit-testing, version control and tend to use object-oriented languages in a procedural way. To be fair, I find that true of many recent CS grads too.
Wow, I didn't intend for this to degrade into a heated debate. I was trying to articulate the reasons why I and perhaps a few other like minded people would refuse military service. My reasons are founded in part in my theology. I'm not asking anyone to agree with my theological interpretations. I only ask that you respect my point of view as I respect those who hold different opinions.
We all know that the most horrible acts of war and genocide have been committed in the name of Christianity. In my opinion, these acts are most un-Christian. The world has no shortage of examples of atrocities waged against humanity in the name of God or other gods.
I see no reason to run off on distracting tangents like things called "Gun" that are not harmful. Glue guns and paper punching guns are only called gun because their grips resemble the very machines they're named after. The militaries of the world do not issue glue guns to soldiers, they issue guns. The kind of gun that is designed to kill whatever appears in the crosshairs.
Bickering over the difference between murdering and killing is exactly the kind of argument that the Sadducees and Pharisees would have loved. I do not believe that God is a lawyer who makes a commandment and then enumerates dozens of loopholes and exceptions where it doesn't apply. If someone dies at my hand, it might be important to call it murder in a courtroom. But I will feel little consolation from anyone who tries to suggest that calling it murder no longer makes it my fault.
I'll be the first to admit that a pacifistic stance is difficult in the face of the savagery present in the world. Today's newspapers are full of belligerent nations bent on destroying their neighbors and history books are full of the names of extinct civilizations that died under the sword.
However, I can not find redemption for a personal act of barbarism in the belligerence of a rogue state or the violence of a criminal.
As for military service, It would do most of the slashdot community some good.
But, it comes with some very serious strings attached. I abhor the idea that killing is a solution to any problem. A soldier (or airman, seaman, marine) is given a gun. A gun is a machine designed to kill. The idea is kill your killer before he kills you. This is a morally dubious proposition and incompatible with the Christian theology I grew up with.
My personal theory is that McBride just doesn't know any better. Just because they work the same way doesn't make Linux a copy of UNIX any more than a Ford is a copy of a Chevy just because they work the same way.
I think HTML5 is "doomed". I quoted doomed because it will happen, but it's a mess. The big problem is its name. I don't like mixing payload with transport. HTML can be delivered over a zillion different transports, hell even carrier pigeon. HTTP can be used to transport all kinds of bits and bytes. HTML5 is really Browser-Spec-5 which covers everything and the kitchen sink.
My gut feeling is that the drive data are encrypted until the host computer sends the drive key to drive. All data on the drive are encrypted using drive key. The host computer might send the drive key either from BIOS or from an operating system that was booted from a non-encrypted drive. Hopefully, it does so in a method that isn't unattended.
Attack vectors might include allowing the host BIOS to send the password, then boot using a thumbdrive; using a connector extension cable, power-up the drive and host system, then switch cable to another system; connect a "dummy drive" to the host computer and wait for the host system to send the key.
For me, the whole point of Free (as in freedom) Software is that Free Software is liberated from artificial constraints that prevent interoperability and restrict users from doing what they want their computers to do. The "True Goal" needs to be one where a users and developers and administrators are free to chose platforms that meet their requirements instead of being locked in to one platform because of vendor lock-in due to formats or protocols or software limitations.
While it's easy to paint Microsoft as some big giant ogre, that's not very helpful to the achieving the "True Goal." So long as the Linux Foundation doesn't allow Linux and the GNU Stack (or any other Free Software) to incur artificial limitations, any relationship with Microsoft is healthy for both.
Slashdot Mirror
The article cites the price of the USB key is £30 - which is close to $60.00US.
Even if 20% of the price covered the value of the USB key (generous, I think) that leaves £24 ($48US) for the movie. This is ridiculously overpriced.
What this shows is the priorities of the development team behind IE8.
If what you say is true, then the team leaders are saying, "Keep coding, we'll fix the memory problems later." It's as if memory usage isn't important. Memory usage is result of fundamental design considerations. I don't see how they will make a significant improvement on memory when they ship. With a few possible exceptions ...
Microsoft's Steve Maguire wrote a book, "Writing Solid Code" (ISBN: 1556155514). He cited technique of self-checking code. In Excel, they have development versions of formulas which run in parallel to the optimized versions of the formulas. So long as they both produce the same result, it is presumed to be correct. (An example would be using a linear search to validate a hashed search) The downside is they take much longer to run. The shipped a preview version of Excel to the media with the development formulas still active. The media bashed that version of Excel.
This is because you are confusing cause and effect. You call it Simplicity, I call it lowest common denominator. Most people use the standard fonts because the have to, not because they want to. I work at an organization with a corporate branding strategy that uses a font that isn't one of the "standards." This automatically makes all the web sites I build non-compliant with the branding strategy unless I can somehow embed that font in the web page or render parts of the site as graphics.
Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. Enough people will lose their private keys or have them stolen that fraud will still be a problem. I just don't have enough confidence that the average people will take the required precautions.
Okay, all this stuff (SSL, PKI, etc ...) does is provide better and better identity proxies - my numeric personae if you will. Who I am is a flesh and blood person. I am not a number or a certificate. But the problem is that companies and governments have long stopped dealing with my flesh and blood self but deal with my numeric personae instead. My personae may or may not have a great credit score; may or may not pay taxes on time; may or may not have committed felonies; may or may not be a terrorist. As long as companies and governments insist upon tracking personae instead of people, fraud will continue.
So you would replace a 30bit number that can be stolen with a 1024bit number that can be stolen?
It's not that the SSN is used as a password, it's used as a unique id and no password at all!.
The only reason they're calling it a technical flaw is because there is a computer in the mix somewhere. If you replace it with a paper, pencil, and a billion trained monkeys, you would have the same flaw.
It all depends on the skill-set your admins already have. If you have a shop of 100% Linux admins with no Solaris experience, stay away. If your shop already has some Solaris machines on Sparc, go for it - although you should double check the license.
From my own perspective, I've invested several hours getting it running. Granted, I was running the 200805 OpenSolaris installed on ZFS which had some bugs in the boot process which left my system unbootable a few times. Some follow up releases fixed those problems. But as a guy who's been using Linux since 1993, old habits are hard to break.
Of course most customers will use this as is. I'm thankful that HP isn't so paranoid of what their niche customers might do. The right of people to tweak products to suit their needs is a right that needs to be preserved.
I have total confidence that the blocks could have been done using only humans. Whether or not it was done that way is another question. I would suggest that the "pistons" you saw where probably the rails that the blocks slid along.
The one thing I noticed is the massive numbers of ear-pieces worn by the performers. There were a few who didn't, but they had a massive number of ear monitors. The in-ear program was almost certainly not the music we were hearing, but it was probably a pre-recorded choreographer doing the equivalent of "5 .. 6 .. 7 .. 8 ... turn .. 2 .. 3 .."
The commentary I listened to indicated that rehearsals went on for a year. To put that in perspective, most live theatre shows only rehearse for a few weeks, most musicals double that. I compare what happened with high school marching band, we typically learned a new show every two weeks.
I fully respect that from time to time, horrible things must be done.
That said, I hope the USAF has only limited success with brainwashing all the guilt away. Guilt is important. Guilt is what reminds us what is morally right. When the operator pushes the button that fires the missile people die. Again, I understand that sometimes it must be done. But the decision to kill should be tough and difficult and fraught with guilt.
Well, yes and no.
Quite often pediatricians are at the mercy of the equipment makers. One of the doctors at the pediatric hospital where I work explained an example: They bought an MRI machine. The machine needs to know the patient weight so that it can make adjustments to energy levels accordingly. The machine as installed refused to allow patient weights under about 6 pounds (3kg). They went back and forth with the manufacture. The manufacturer was like "Who's under 6 pounds?" The hospital was like "We have a level 3 neo-natal intensive care unit. On any given week, we have dozens of patients under six pounds."
My biggest failed prediction in the world of computers was the CD-ROM.
I was an audio CD early adopter and I knew from articles I read that audio CD's often had a certain defect rate. The defect rate was usually such that you would never hear it. One artist even published all the defects in the liner notes.
Based upon this, I presumed that you would never get the defect rate to zero and that no one would trust a data medium with anything less than perfection - and thus predicted the CD-ROM would never catch on.
They don't have to get the rate to zero. Just close enough to zero for the RS to function.
I agree completely. Apple have always ... (at least under Job's tenure) ... been about the end-to-end experience.
Having complete control over the end-to-end experience makes supporting Apple easier. Think about the problems that one of the recent Vista service packs had because the OEM didn't include critical AMD specific files which caused the service pack to brick those systems. Microsoft (and Linux for that matter) have a HUGE regression problem caused by the thousands of different hardware configurations that exist in the PC world. Apple only need to test about 25 or so.
In this respect, Apple behave like the IBM of yesteryear and Sun and Sequent and Unisys and HP where they have full control over both the Operating System and the Hardware.
I'm suddenly reminded of the line from the movie "Sneakers."
Cosmo: There I was in prison. And one day I help a couple of older gentlemen make some free telephone calls. They turn out to be, let us say, good family men.
Martin Bishop: Organized crime?
Cosmo: Hah. Don't kid yourself. It's not that organized.
I don't think so. This is an article for lawyers. Of course, Intellectual Property is well understood amongst lawyers. However, most lawyers are only acquainted with using IP for commercial advantage. This shouldn't be a surprise because most lawyers work for organisations that seek commercial success. What is surprising is how few lawyers are acquainted with idea that anyone would try to use IP to prevent someone else from abusing their altruism. For lack of a better word, there is "friction" between those who use IP for commercial advantage and those who use IP to prevent commercial advantage. This article seeks to both inform lawyers about open source as well as caution them about potential risks associated with trying to blend these two different IP models.
They already did .... http://www.pcworld.com/ and http://networks.silicon.com/
Counterfeiting was the public reasoning for the RFID chips in the 2006 World Cup tickets.
I'm suddenly having a flashback to an episode of Studio Sixty .... http://www.studio60-guide.com/113-harriet-dinner/.
Many are commenting on using checksums (MD5, SHA, ....) to validate the file hasn't changed. This is good. However, none of these can actually tell if the PDF was is good to begin with. I would suggest using Ghostscript to verify that the PDF is properly structured. Ghostscript is an opensource tool that can convert PDF and Postscript files to several other formats. If Ghostscript can interpret the PDF file without errors, then odds are the file is good too.
I'd like to second the parent posters remarks. I'm currently contracting in the biomedical informatics department in the research foundation of a large mid-western paediatric hospital.
The fields of study here are wide and varied. They include Semantic Web, Natural Language Processing, Massive Parallel Processing, Data Warehousing and more.
The key things I'd suggest is to get great in one of the following areas: Computational, Statistical or Biological. Then get good in one of the others (hint: Statistics). The other will be filled in by someone else. Data are everything and the shelf life of data are measured in weeks. I'll echo the parent posters remarks about good programming skills. Most of the BMI grad students here have never heard of unit-testing, version control and tend to use object-oriented languages in a procedural way. To be fair, I find that true of many recent CS grads too.
Wow, I didn't intend for this to degrade into a heated debate. I was trying to articulate the reasons why I and perhaps a few other like minded people would refuse military service. My reasons are founded in part in my theology. I'm not asking anyone to agree with my theological interpretations. I only ask that you respect my point of view as I respect those who hold different opinions.
We all know that the most horrible acts of war and genocide have been committed in the name of Christianity. In my opinion, these acts are most un-Christian. The world has no shortage of examples of atrocities waged against humanity in the name of God or other gods.
I see no reason to run off on distracting tangents like things called "Gun" that are not harmful. Glue guns and paper punching guns are only called gun because their grips resemble the very machines they're named after. The militaries of the world do not issue glue guns to soldiers, they issue guns. The kind of gun that is designed to kill whatever appears in the crosshairs.
Bickering over the difference between murdering and killing is exactly the kind of argument that the Sadducees and Pharisees would have loved. I do not believe that God is a lawyer who makes a commandment and then enumerates dozens of loopholes and exceptions where it doesn't apply. If someone dies at my hand, it might be important to call it murder in a courtroom. But I will feel little consolation from anyone who tries to suggest that calling it murder no longer makes it my fault.
I'll be the first to admit that a pacifistic stance is difficult in the face of the savagery present in the world. Today's newspapers are full of belligerent nations bent on destroying their neighbors and history books are full of the names of extinct civilizations that died under the sword. However, I can not find redemption for a personal act of barbarism in the belligerence of a rogue state or the violence of a criminal.
But, it comes with some very serious strings attached. I abhor the idea that killing is a solution to any problem. A soldier (or airman, seaman, marine) is given a gun. A gun is a machine designed to kill. The idea is kill your killer before he kills you. This is a morally dubious proposition and incompatible with the Christian theology I grew up with.
My personal theory is that McBride just doesn't know any better. Just because they work the same way doesn't make Linux a copy of UNIX any more than a Ford is a copy of a Chevy just because they work the same way.
I think HTML5 is "doomed". I quoted doomed because it will happen, but it's a mess. The big problem is its name. I don't like mixing payload with transport. HTML can be delivered over a zillion different transports, hell even carrier pigeon. HTTP can be used to transport all kinds of bits and bytes. HTML5 is really Browser-Spec-5 which covers everything and the kitchen sink.
My gut feeling is that the drive data are encrypted until the host computer sends the drive key to drive. All data on the drive are encrypted using drive key. The host computer might send the drive key either from BIOS or from an operating system that was booted from a non-encrypted drive. Hopefully, it does so in a method that isn't unattended.
Attack vectors might include allowing the host BIOS to send the password, then boot using a thumbdrive; using a connector extension cable, power-up the drive and host system, then switch cable to another system; connect a "dummy drive" to the host computer and wait for the host system to send the key.
The bottom line: Encryption is hard.
For me, the whole point of Free (as in freedom) Software is that Free Software is liberated from artificial constraints that prevent interoperability and restrict users from doing what they want their computers to do. The "True Goal" needs to be one where a users and developers and administrators are free to chose platforms that meet their requirements instead of being locked in to one platform because of vendor lock-in due to formats or protocols or software limitations.
While it's easy to paint Microsoft as some big giant ogre, that's not very helpful to the achieving the "True Goal." So long as the Linux Foundation doesn't allow Linux and the GNU Stack (or any other Free Software) to incur artificial limitations, any relationship with Microsoft is healthy for both.