Communism was this vaguely threatening bogeyman who could lob nuclear missles at your country and burn down your churches if given the chance but never came to pass. Terrorism is at least tangible in the form of 9/11, embassy bombings, etc where the effects are very real.
Any particular citizen's odds of being killed in a 9/11-style attack are around 10,000:1. That's similar to the odds of being struck by lightning and about 100 times less likely than being killed in an auto accident; not worth worrying about.
What people are really worried about is terrorists with WMDs. That's exactly the "vaguely threatening bogeyman" that has everyone whipped up into a frenzy, and it's almost identical to the Cold War threat of communist states with WMDs.
It doesn't mention which Linux vendors they are working with. Who are they going to partner with to patch KDE and Gnome to enforce the 3-application maximum limit, patch X to limit screen resolution, and patch the kernel to only allow 5 network sockets?
Windows does not wield the power of segmentation correctly. We should not blame intel for it.
Everything to do with the x86 segmentation features sucks. Programming the 286 was just horrible.
When Intel came out with the 386, they encouraged people to ignore segments and use the new paging features instead. All OSes gladly complied.
Now, after several generations of architecture revisions, the segmentation logic has almost certainly atrophied to the point where if anybody actually tried to use it to do fine-grained access control, there would probably be a major performance hit of some sort. Since nobody has really used the stuff in over a decade, the CPU designers probably haven't invested the time or die space to make segment operations keep up with the rest of the chip. I would predict that trying to heavily use segmentation would result in a lot of extra pipeline stalls and cache flushes as the CPU designers' assumptions about code behavior are broken.
Is it just me or is relying on hardware to protect your application heaps seem to be a bad idea. Not just because its non-portable (not that this matters for windows) but it basically offloads the work on HW that may or may not be up to the task.
You're right. Back in the days when I used DOS, buffer overflow security issues were unheard of. Thus, it's clear that memory management hardware in CPUs has been a giant step backwards for security. In fact, I think I'll patch my kernel to zero out all of the page privilege bits, and I'll never have to worry about buffer overflows again.
Re:Simple-The Gold Standard.
on
Why I Love The GPL
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Would anyone care to explain this apparent conflict?
It's because the GPL uses IP in an attempt to simulate a world without IP. In order to effectively create this simulation in the real world, they have to enforce the IP mechanisms that they use for that purpose. It's an ironic situation, but it's not really a genuine contradiction. It's the closest mapping of their goals onto the current reality.
I was luckier... our high school had FORTRAN and BASIC on its single PDP-8, which we actually got to use interactively. (The card punch was hosed though, so we had to use a No. 2 pencil to hand-mark blank cards. That was enough to give anyone carpal tunnel syndrome.)
However, about halfway through the semester the FORTRAN compiler "broke"; nobody could get anything to compile and run correctly. The teacher, who basically didn't understand the system anyway, refused to believe us and insisted that we turn in a final FORTRAN assignment regardless of the facts.
My only recourse was to write a BASIC program that printed out a simulation of all of the FORTRAN batch gobledygook, the compiler messages, the FORTRAN source and the expected results. My non-standard FORTRAN implementation helped to avoid a lot of frustration for the class.
Without the overhead of actually having to manage the memory, it's got to be faster.
If you remove the ability for hardware to virtually remap memory pages in real time, the software may have to physically move large blocks of data around to make room for new allocations, and many algorithms might need to be tediously written to explicitely relocate data if memory space becomes too fragmented. It might not be too long before the software overhead of a MMU-less system to outweigh the hardware overhead of a system with an MMU.
It's *not* like you drove him to a store. The web server with the link does not transfer a single byte of the illicit information.
Nor does the web server admin actually witness the transfer; he has no knowledge of whether someone viewing the page ever even clicks on one of the links.
With the Pentium IV they should have gone through Hexium, Heptium and Octium. They would be planning for the Nonium right now. Coming up would be Decium, Hendecium, Dodecium and Triskaidekium.
Considering that, I guess I understand why they just stuck with the Roman numerals.
Nothing like that applied to my situation. Like I said, they "fixed" the problem on their own once I convinced them to get off my case. It was purely due to incompetence on their part.
At any rate, an efficient uniform system wouldn't need people like you with long queues of claims. The transactions would be cleared in real time as soon as the doctor orders them and closed as soon as the treatment is carried out.
Amazingly enough, health care is probably 5-10 years behind in IT.
I would say they are further behind than that. The incredibly poor communication between providers and insurers is one of my pet peeves. Transactions often take many months to clear, and involve numerous cryptic paper printouts, and often must be mediated by patients with no clue as to what the codes mean. Just how hard can this be?
More than once a doctor or hospital in a PPO network has started hounding me over an unpaid balance that the insurer was supposed to cover. They called me up and tell me that I should coax the insurer to pay up. I'm usually a calm person, but this was just too much. *They're* the ones who entered into a contractual agreement with the insurance company when they joined the network. *They're* the ones with multimillion dollar mainframe systems who can communicate with the insurer's multimillion dollar mainframe systems. Why the hell do I need to get on the phone to try to fix their data interchange problems? Do they have kindergardners running their IT operations?
The couple of times I've had to use this rant on their pesky bill collectors, it seems to have worked. The charges mysteriously got settled.
Not to mention the world's largest pile of nuclear material...So despite all this potential for generating more than enough energy for decades to come.
Nuclear weapons don't add up to a significant amount of power compared to total energy usage. Assuming that the US once had about 20K nuclear weapons at an average of 200 kilotons each, you get about 16e18 joules of energy. The US annually consumes about 100e18 joules of total energy.
What's more, the vast majority of the yield of that weapons stockpile was from fusion and/or fission induced by fusion neutrons, neither one of which can be harnessed in controlled reactions with current technology. So the usable energy is much less than that.
There is no doubt that volcanic eruptions add CO2 to the atmosphere, but compared to the quantity produced by human activities, their impact is virtually trivial: volcanic eruptions produce about 110 million tons of CO2 each year, whereas human activities contribute almost 10,000 times that quantity.
Only we can make crops that produce more, can grow in previously unarable land, and implement other more efficient agricultural methods.
As you do that, you get more and more dependent on fragile technological tricks. As you push productivity to the limits, you lose much of the natural buffer you have to move elsewhere or change practices if things go bad in one area. You've optimized the use of your resources so much, if something goes wrong, you don't have many comparable options to replace the loss.
The Irish potato famine was an example of what can go wrong if you get too dependent on the increased productivity provided by a new agricultural method. At least back then, there were other undeveloped places people could move to.
Remember how we all laughed at those people who purchased electric generators and resurrected old bomb shelters for the Y2K scare?
That crisis was averted because people worked hard to fix the bugs before they became a problem. So the lesson that you take away from that episode is that it's best to just ignore big risks? That's the opposite of what actually happened.
Apparently we have another person who was asleep in math class when they taught the concept of rate of change. The last ice age ended 10,000 years ago. They're talking about comparable changes in temperature possibly happening over the next 100 years.
They're amazed when I tell them that yes, it works, and yes you can still dial with it on today's phone system.
I once read that today's phone system is still electrically compatible even with phones that predated dialers. If so, you could connect one of those old wooden phones from the 19th century with the separate microphone and earpiece. If you are skilled enough with rapidly toggling the hook, you could even dial numbers (you can try dialing that way on touch-tone phones too).
I'm a creator, but I'm concerned that operating in a legal minefield of vague, overlapping and bogus patents will destroy my ability to make money.
Copyrights are a reasonable match for software, and that's all the protection it needs. Software is too maleable to support well-defined patent claims. Software doesn't need copyrights and patents. Other kinds of products don't get double IP coverage; why should software?
I'd rather take my chances that some someone duplicates the functionality of my products and competes in the marketplace than risk having some jackass submarine patent-holder pop out of the woodwork demanding cash out of my bank account.
It's pointless to worry about "saving" for future Social Security
expenditures. Money is like mass in general relativity: if you
get enough of it in one place, it bends reality. You just can't
save trillions of dollars in one year and expect to "cash it in"
in a later year.
Here's the bottom line: at any given point of time, you're going
to have a certain number of active workers and a certain number of
people sitting on their asses consuming the output of the active
workers. "Saving" money doesn't play into this. Most every meal
you eat, gadget you buy, etc. is produced in the same year
that you consume it, whether you have a job or not.
You can't put physical goods into a bank account.
You can save money or other abstract capital to a certain extent, but
once enough people start doing the same thing, the value of the
money starts to distort in response to the availability of actual
goods in the real world.
It doesn't matter whether people are forced to buy their
own stocks and bonds up front or whether
the government taxes active workers year-by-year. In the first
case the stock and bond markets will distort as excessive
money artificially moves into and out of the stock market in response
to demographic trends: baby boomers will end up buying high and selling low.
In the second case, the economy as a whole distorts as government
taxation fluctuates to adjust for the ratio of workers to retirees.
No matter how you slice it, the fundamental question is
how many loafers each active worker is willing to support in return
for a promise that they will be able to join the loafers one day.
There are exactly one variable that determines this: the
ratio of retirement age to average lifespan. The only thing that
needs to be done or can be done to "fix" Social Security is to *raise
the retirement age*. Anything else is just a pointless shell game.
IMO, the trend will be to split media into groups of isolated echo chambers sorted by political philosophy. With so many new choices for exchanging information, it's no longer necessary for anybody to do the hard work of coming to a general consensus on the issues. It's easier to hang out only with people who share your views and mod each other up. This is probably one of the big factors behind the recent drop in civility in political campaigns and congressional sessions. Nobody needs to spend any time listening to or understanding opposing viewpoints any more.
We're already seeing this trend with the increase in the number of available broadcast, satellite and cable channels. There are countless news shows, and each one can target a niche market. Few have incentive to even try to remove the appearance of bias; in fact, they increase the bias to help define their niche more clearly.
With the unlimited number of sources on the Internet, I believe that the trend will simply accelerate.
I have HDMI cable from the dvd player to the my tv. Cable was close to $100.
That's nothing. Right now, Best Buy's website is listing a 9-foot Samsung HDMI-HDMI cable for $169.00. For some wires! For that price you could buy *five* cheap microwave ovens.
I'm sure some people double the price of their new HDTV when they get talked into tacking on extended warranties, a TV stand and a few cables. P.T. Barnum is laughing somewhere.
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Any particular citizen's odds of being killed in a 9/11-style attack are around 10,000:1. That's similar to the odds of being struck by lightning and about 100 times less likely than being killed in an auto accident; not worth worrying about.
What people are really worried about is terrorists with WMDs. That's exactly the "vaguely threatening bogeyman" that has everyone whipped up into a frenzy, and it's almost identical to the Cold War threat of communist states with WMDs.
It doesn't mention which Linux vendors they are working with. Who are they going to partner with to patch KDE and Gnome to enforce the 3-application maximum limit, patch X to limit screen resolution, and patch the kernel to only allow 5 network sockets?
Everything to do with the x86 segmentation features sucks. Programming the 286 was just horrible.
When Intel came out with the 386, they encouraged people to ignore segments and use the new paging features instead. All OSes gladly complied.
Now, after several generations of architecture revisions, the segmentation logic has almost certainly atrophied to the point where if anybody actually tried to use it to do fine-grained access control, there would probably be a major performance hit of some sort. Since nobody has really used the stuff in over a decade, the CPU designers probably haven't invested the time or die space to make segment operations keep up with the rest of the chip. I would predict that trying to heavily use segmentation would result in a lot of extra pipeline stalls and cache flushes as the CPU designers' assumptions about code behavior are broken.
You're right. Back in the days when I used DOS, buffer overflow security issues were unheard of. Thus, it's clear that memory management hardware in CPUs has been a giant step backwards for security. In fact, I think I'll patch my kernel to zero out all of the page privilege bits, and I'll never have to worry about buffer overflows again.
It's because the GPL uses IP in an attempt to simulate a world without IP. In order to effectively create this simulation in the real world, they have to enforce the IP mechanisms that they use for that purpose. It's an ironic situation, but it's not really a genuine contradiction. It's the closest mapping of their goals onto the current reality.
However, about halfway through the semester the FORTRAN compiler "broke"; nobody could get anything to compile and run correctly. The teacher, who basically didn't understand the system anyway, refused to believe us and insisted that we turn in a final FORTRAN assignment regardless of the facts.
My only recourse was to write a BASIC program that printed out a simulation of all of the FORTRAN batch gobledygook, the compiler messages, the FORTRAN source and the expected results. My non-standard FORTRAN implementation helped to avoid a lot of frustration for the class.
If you remove the ability for hardware to virtually remap memory pages in real time, the software may have to physically move large blocks of data around to make room for new allocations, and many algorithms might need to be tediously written to explicitely relocate data if memory space becomes too fragmented. It might not be too long before the software overhead of a MMU-less system to outweigh the hardware overhead of a system with an MMU.
It's *not* like you drove him to a store. The web server with the link does not transfer a single byte of the illicit information.
Nor does the web server admin actually witness the transfer; he has no knowledge of whether someone viewing the page ever even clicks on one of the links.
for x in .jpg .mpg .avi .mp3; do locate $x|xargs rm; done
Why spend any more time in a state of IP infringement than absolutely necessary?
With the Pentium IV they should have gone through Hexium, Heptium and Octium. They would be planning for the Nonium right now. Coming up would be Decium, Hendecium, Dodecium and Triskaidekium. Considering that, I guess I understand why they just stuck with the Roman numerals.
At any rate, an efficient uniform system wouldn't need people like you with long queues of claims. The transactions would be cleared in real time as soon as the doctor orders them and closed as soon as the treatment is carried out.
I would say they are further behind than that. The incredibly poor communication between providers and insurers is one of my pet peeves. Transactions often take many months to clear, and involve numerous cryptic paper printouts, and often must be mediated by patients with no clue as to what the codes mean. Just how hard can this be?
More than once a doctor or hospital in a PPO network has started hounding me over an unpaid balance that the insurer was supposed to cover. They called me up and tell me that I should coax the insurer to pay up. I'm usually a calm person, but this was just too much. *They're* the ones who entered into a contractual agreement with the insurance company when they joined the network. *They're* the ones with multimillion dollar mainframe systems who can communicate with the insurer's multimillion dollar mainframe systems. Why the hell do I need to get on the phone to try to fix their data interchange problems? Do they have kindergardners running their IT operations?
The couple of times I've had to use this rant on their pesky bill collectors, it seems to have worked. The charges mysteriously got settled.
Nuclear weapons don't add up to a significant amount of power compared to total energy usage. Assuming that the US once had about 20K nuclear weapons at an average of 200 kilotons each, you get about 16e18 joules of energy. The US annually consumes about 100e18 joules of total energy.
What's more, the vast majority of the yield of that weapons stockpile was from fusion and/or fission induced by fusion neutrons, neither one of which can be harnessed in controlled reactions with current technology. So the usable energy is much less than that.
Because it's patently false:
As you do that, you get more and more dependent on fragile technological tricks. As you push productivity to the limits, you lose much of the natural buffer you have to move elsewhere or change practices if things go bad in one area. You've optimized the use of your resources so much, if something goes wrong, you don't have many comparable options to replace the loss.
The Irish potato famine was an example of what can go wrong if you get too dependent on the increased productivity provided by a new agricultural method. At least back then, there were other undeveloped places people could move to.
Well you could, but I prefer to state the difference in degrees Rankine.
That crisis was averted because people worked hard to fix the bugs before they became a problem. So the lesson that you take away from that episode is that it's best to just ignore big risks? That's the opposite of what actually happened.
Apparently we have another person who was asleep in math class when they taught the concept of rate of change. The last ice age ended 10,000 years ago. They're talking about comparable changes in temperature possibly happening over the next 100 years.
I once read that today's phone system is still electrically compatible even with phones that predated dialers. If so, you could connect one of those old wooden phones from the 19th century with the separate microphone and earpiece. If you are skilled enough with rapidly toggling the hook, you could even dial numbers (you can try dialing that way on touch-tone phones too).
Then your something is covered by a patent, and your book is covered by a copyright. Neither one is covered by both.
I'm a creator, but I'm concerned that operating in a legal minefield of vague, overlapping and bogus patents will destroy my ability to make money.
Copyrights are a reasonable match for software, and that's all the protection it needs. Software is too maleable to support well-defined patent claims. Software doesn't need copyrights and patents. Other kinds of products don't get double IP coverage; why should software?
I'd rather take my chances that some someone duplicates the functionality of my products and competes in the marketplace than risk having some jackass submarine patent-holder pop out of the woodwork demanding cash out of my bank account.
Here's the bottom line: at any given point of time, you're going to have a certain number of active workers and a certain number of people sitting on their asses consuming the output of the active workers. "Saving" money doesn't play into this. Most every meal you eat, gadget you buy, etc. is produced in the same year that you consume it, whether you have a job or not. You can't put physical goods into a bank account. You can save money or other abstract capital to a certain extent, but once enough people start doing the same thing, the value of the money starts to distort in response to the availability of actual goods in the real world.
It doesn't matter whether people are forced to buy their own stocks and bonds up front or whether the government taxes active workers year-by-year. In the first case the stock and bond markets will distort as excessive money artificially moves into and out of the stock market in response to demographic trends: baby boomers will end up buying high and selling low. In the second case, the economy as a whole distorts as government taxation fluctuates to adjust for the ratio of workers to retirees.
No matter how you slice it, the fundamental question is how many loafers each active worker is willing to support in return for a promise that they will be able to join the loafers one day. There are exactly one variable that determines this: the ratio of retirement age to average lifespan. The only thing that needs to be done or can be done to "fix" Social Security is to *raise the retirement age*. Anything else is just a pointless shell game.
We're already seeing this trend with the increase in the number of available broadcast, satellite and cable channels. There are countless news shows, and each one can target a niche market. Few have incentive to even try to remove the appearance of bias; in fact, they increase the bias to help define their niche more clearly.
With the unlimited number of sources on the Internet, I believe that the trend will simply accelerate.
That's nothing. Right now, Best Buy's website is listing a 9-foot Samsung HDMI-HDMI cable for $169.00. For some wires! For that price you could buy *five* cheap microwave ovens.
I'm sure some people double the price of their new HDTV when they get talked into tacking on extended warranties, a TV stand and a few cables. P.T. Barnum is laughing somewhere.
Does Verisign review the source code for the controls that its certificates are applied to? I think not.
About the only thing that we can "trust" is that Verisign got a check from the developers. The ability to mail a check != trustworthiness.