I don't think it's the case that COBOL is popular in old systems as much as nobody dares to update the COBOL in old critical financial systems.
Oh, it gets updated. We sell a lot of COBOL development tools. There's quite a bit of new COBOL development, too, because many large organizations have significant numbers of COBOL developers.
In many cases they're still working with old-fashioned COBOL, but some have moved to COBOL-85 (which at least has decent scope terminators and some other useful features), and others have even adopted OO COBOL.
Modern managed OO COBOL is actually pretty nice in some respects, with all the features of its environment (JVM or CLR). Properties, type inference, anonymous inline delegates, event combining, and so forth.
Yes, when I drive 900 miles in a day, mostly through the rural Southwest US, as I do several times a year, those rapid chargers sure do come in handy.
Of course, being an old-fashioned sort of fellow, I call them "gas stations".
It'll be a long while yet before the EV infrastructure meets my requirements. Currently the only feasible way to support my use case would be battery-swapping - I'm not stopping for 40 minutes or longer to charge an EV[1] - and that in, at best, very small cities in low-density parts of the country.
Here, let me throw in a bit of prolepsis. The EV proponents will claim my use case is rare. Sure. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, though; and that means mspohr's claim that range "is a non-issue" is narrow-minded bullshit. Everyone isn't you, mspohr.
[1] The Tesla Model X (which I wouldn't drive if I got for free, because I don't like anything about the Tesla designs, but let's ignore that for now) takes 40 minutes to go to 80% charge on a rapid charger. The X is pretty much the only EV that would work for me, since I need towing capability. The longest-range X has a nominal range of 351 miles; 80% of that is 281. So even in ideal conditions and departing with fully-charged batteries I'd be forced to charge three times on a trip of a bit more than 900 miles. That's two hours wasted.
since it mostly was as repetitive as traditional radio
Agreed. In fact, I find it worse than traditional radio, though for the latter I mostly listen to college stations that are typically much more varied than commercial ones (because they let students work with a number of formats, rather than sticking to one), or similarly varied independent stations that haven't been homogenized by the likes of Clear Channel.
I have friends who like Sirius for long trips, but I only found a couple of stations I was interested in, and they loop after two or three hours. When I'm doing a 10- or 13-hour drive, that's useless.
With coins going for so much money, a DDoS would be relatively cheap, in return for the gains involved.
According to Apostolaki et al., the BitCoin network routinely suffers routing attacks already. And by "routinely" they mean at least 100000 times a month.
It would appear that partitioning the BitCoin network is already a widely-used tactic, and that's just BGP attacks - we're not even talking DDoS yet. I haven't looked closely at Lightning (I'm not very interested in BitCoin, personally), but I wouldn't be surprised if (as GP suggested) it will make things worse.
Personally, I'm impressed that the summary author managed to state the rate ( 2mm / year), then say it "can add up fast". When something happens at a given rate, that's how fast it "adds up".
The "can add up fast" comment is entirely redundant. Either you think 2mm/yr is fast, or you don't. If the quoted rate is correct, and that's how fast it will - never mind "can" - add up. Simply a stupid thing to write.
(Also, tangentially, is there any rule that a runaway train has to be going fast? It just has to be runaway, no? If you can't stop it, it qualifies. So... this is more or less analogous to a runaway train, I believe. Just a slow one. A walkaway train, perhaps.)
I've been writing software for several decades, and I've yet to see the appeal of any IDE. (And I've used a lot of them.) Why use a limited set of functions when you can have a good shell (of your choice), a huge and easily extensible collection of general-purpose tools, and the editor, debugger, and build toolchain you prefer?
When I'm doing woodworking or fixing something mechanical, I can put whatever tools I want on my workbench. I'm not limited to a set of tools that came with it; that would be idiotic. I don't see any good reason why software development should be different.
That said, I think Venomous Studio is particularly terrible (and seems to get steadily worse with each iteration). It's full of misfeatures, like its insistence on performing a build when you start a program for debug. (I have to use it for debugging CLR code; Microsoft doesn't offer a decent standalone managed-code debugger.) Or the way it likes to inject patently-incorrect elements like and into project files for no reason. Or the way it will re-enable extensions you've disabled when it updates.
It would be great if this feature will project incoming text messages
I'll allow it, if it uses the Star Wars Crawl effect.
I've seen plenty of people reading the newspaper, and once or twice someone reading a novel,[1] while driving. This would be really convenient for them.
Another good use: project 3D illusions to fool oncoming drivers. Fun for the whole family!
[1] My favorite: On Colorado 159, between San Luis and the New Mexico border. At night a very dark road, one lane in each direction, no median, breakdown lanes, or guard rails. 65mph speed limit, rarely enforced. With 17 miles of open horse range - and, yeah, I've seen horses on that road. I was driving it late one night when I came up behind an old Honda Civic with the interior lights on, doing about 40mph. As I passed it, I saw the driver had a book propped on the steering wheel. Didn't even glance my way as I went by.
If you're thinking about personal time spent getting to where you want to go, a private vehicle is likely more efficient.
That's not my experience - because on public transportation, all that time was available to me for work, entertainment, or sleep. That's an efficiency that no non-zero-driving-time commute can beat. If you have a driver, or a carpool, or an autonomous vehicle, then a personal vehicle might be more efficient.
(And I'm not interested in autonomous personal vehicles, personally. But then I also no longer commute.)
I recently switched, on two of my three machines. Haven't switched on the third just because it will be retired soon, and so I've prevented FF from updating on it. I see Mozilla engineers are eager to support my decision to abandon Firefox.
I've used Firefox as long as it's existed. Before that I used Netscape, though I also used IE, Opera, and HotJava on various systems, for purposes of comparison, and I've on occasion tested things with Chrome and Safari. Before Netscape I used Mosaic; before that I used Lync and CERN www. (And of course to this day I occasionally use wget and the like, or just nc for simple GETs.)
Modern Firefox, in my opinion, is horrible. It started becoming horrible with Australis, but at least it was possible to undo that damage. With Quantum, it's not worth trying to use it. A quarter-century legacy thrown away.
They're not selling certificates. The CAs are selling the certificates, which are public documents once they're created.
The "hackers" are selling the private keys that correspond to the certificates.
This is a perfectly sensible, if unethical, business model. The incentive to keep the key private is to avoid diluting (usually to nothing) the value of certificate as a proof of provenance. Someone who obtains a code-signing certificate with the intent of selling the key doesn't have that incentive.
And the headline's emphasis is wrong. As summary and TFA mention, the key finding is that these resold keys are displacing stolen keys for signing malware. And "legitimate" is imprecise, since (according to the research) while the certificates were obtained directly from CAs, that was under false pretense, with stolen credentials. So if the researchers are correct, this is more a shift from stealing signing keys to stealing credentials used to obtain certificates for keys generated by the attacker. That's not new; it's just more common than was popularly thought.
OP is probably paying for several premium channel tiers including a sports package.
I don't know about Comcast - thank god they're not the provider here - but we have Wow, which is consistently rated at or near the top in US cable-company satisfaction surveys (faint praise, etc). And we pay around $250/month.
That's for a bundle that includes Internet, basic and extended cable, a DVR (which we could get rid of, but doesn't add that much), and some premium channels. No sports packages, as neither of us ever watch the stuff. No phone, which I wouldn't use anyway.
We talked to Wow about getting rid of the premium channels, and the savings was miniscule. The bundle prices nearly eliminate the difference with reduced packages.
We'll probably drop the premium channels soon anyway; we almost never watch them, and have or can get streaming access if we want it. But it won't cut the bill by much.
Now, we have gotten something for it - when Wow took over from the (bankrupt) former provider, they made a ton of infrastructure upgrades. Their service is much better than the old provider's, too. They've made some channel lineup changes I'm not fond of, but frankly as streaming grows that becomes less important, and I don't watch much television anyway. (If it were just me here, I wouldn't have anything but the Internet service.)
But the simple fact is that in many parts of the US cable service is very expensive. If you're lucky, you get a provider that's not run by complete assholes (i.e. not Comcast or its ilk), but that's about it.
The US postal service is a prime example, where even with extreme requirements (geographic coverage) and unreasonable burdens (pension funding requirements not required of any other organization, private or public) placed on their operations they still provide a very good service for a very reasonable price.
Agreed, but it should be noted that they don't have the freedom to set those reasonable prices. Really US postal rates should be significantly higher, unless and until Congress stops stealing from the USPS (via those "pension funding" payments).
The faults in the 911 to allow for anonymous false calls
According to what I read - and I've made no attempt to verify this - the 911 (emergency services call) system was not involved. Barriss called a conventional phone line, a hotline at city hall, and spoke to someone there who relayed his message to the police.
It appears he didn't have an easy way to spoof a 911 call at the proper location, so that aspect of the system appears to have worked in this case. The problem was that it's too easy to socially-engineer an alternative - but that's a difficult problem to solve. You can't have random employees attempt to vet emergency calls, and telling a caller in distress to hang up and dial 911 isn't ideal either.
The police should certainly exercise much more caution when the call comes from a suspect source like this - but then they should exercise a hell of a lot more caution in general.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's the case that COBOL is popular in old systems as much as nobody dares to update the COBOL in old critical financial systems.
Oh, it gets updated. We sell a lot of COBOL development tools. There's quite a bit of new COBOL development, too, because many large organizations have significant numbers of COBOL developers.
In many cases they're still working with old-fashioned COBOL, but some have moved to COBOL-85 (which at least has decent scope terminators and some other useful features), and others have even adopted OO COBOL.
Modern managed OO COBOL is actually pretty nice in some respects, with all the features of its environment (JVM or CLR). Properties, type inference, anonymous inline delegates, event combining, and so forth.
I guess it would be weird indeed if someone complained that this was a 2nd amendment issue after all.
It may yet be. Has anyone checked whether Amazon is hiding erotic guns from searches?
Yes, when I drive 900 miles in a day, mostly through the rural Southwest US, as I do several times a year, those rapid chargers sure do come in handy.
Of course, being an old-fashioned sort of fellow, I call them "gas stations".
It'll be a long while yet before the EV infrastructure meets my requirements. Currently the only feasible way to support my use case would be battery-swapping - I'm not stopping for 40 minutes or longer to charge an EV[1] - and that in, at best, very small cities in low-density parts of the country.
Here, let me throw in a bit of prolepsis. The EV proponents will claim my use case is rare. Sure. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, though; and that means mspohr's claim that range "is a non-issue" is narrow-minded bullshit. Everyone isn't you, mspohr.
[1] The Tesla Model X (which I wouldn't drive if I got for free, because I don't like anything about the Tesla designs, but let's ignore that for now) takes 40 minutes to go to 80% charge on a rapid charger. The X is pretty much the only EV that would work for me, since I need towing capability. The longest-range X has a nominal range of 351 miles; 80% of that is 281. So even in ideal conditions and departing with fully-charged batteries I'd be forced to charge three times on a trip of a bit more than 900 miles. That's two hours wasted.
They are firing carbon based life form workers and are installing silicon based robots.
They certainly seem to be at Bloomberg, based on this piece.
Good to see those proof-of-traction schemes are finally gaining ground.
After all the ghost videos he has watched, he hasn't turned into a ghost, yet
Twist ending: You are the ghost. That's why he's your friend.
since it mostly was as repetitive as traditional radio
Agreed. In fact, I find it worse than traditional radio, though for the latter I mostly listen to college stations that are typically much more varied than commercial ones (because they let students work with a number of formats, rather than sticking to one), or similarly varied independent stations that haven't been homogenized by the likes of Clear Channel.
I have friends who like Sirius for long trips, but I only found a couple of stations I was interested in, and they loop after two or three hours. When I'm doing a 10- or 13-hour drive, that's useless.
With coins going for so much money, a DDoS would be relatively cheap, in return for the gains involved.
According to Apostolaki et al., the BitCoin network routinely suffers routing attacks already. And by "routinely" they mean at least 100000 times a month.
It would appear that partitioning the BitCoin network is already a widely-used tactic, and that's just BGP attacks - we're not even talking DDoS yet. I haven't looked closely at Lightning (I'm not very interested in BitCoin, personally), but I wouldn't be surprised if (as GP suggested) it will make things worse.
This is the Internet. Every day is Comment on Things You Know Nothing About Day.
Or so I've heard.
We can't stop the earth from rotating - the moon will just start it up again. Stupid moon.
(This is mentioned in Munroe's What If? book, but doesn't seem to be one of the ones on the website.)
Though we could try blowing the moon up first, as in Seveneves. Or get rid of it, as in Space 1999.
A minor media personality has provided anecdotal evidence based on casual observation? Well, that is a compelling argument.
In other news, did you know hyenas switch sex every year? Aristotle said so, so I guess it must be true.
Personally, I'm impressed that the summary author managed to state the rate ( 2mm / year), then say it "can add up fast". When something happens at a given rate, that's how fast it "adds up".
The "can add up fast" comment is entirely redundant. Either you think 2mm/yr is fast, or you don't. If the quoted rate is correct, and that's how fast it will - never mind "can" - add up. Simply a stupid thing to write.
(Also, tangentially, is there any rule that a runaway train has to be going fast? It just has to be runaway, no? If you can't stop it, it qualifies. So ... this is more or less analogous to a runaway train, I believe. Just a slow one. A walkaway train, perhaps.)
I've been writing software for several decades, and I've yet to see the appeal of any IDE. (And I've used a lot of them.) Why use a limited set of functions when you can have a good shell (of your choice), a huge and easily extensible collection of general-purpose tools, and the editor, debugger, and build toolchain you prefer?
When I'm doing woodworking or fixing something mechanical, I can put whatever tools I want on my workbench. I'm not limited to a set of tools that came with it; that would be idiotic. I don't see any good reason why software development should be different.
That said, I think Venomous Studio is particularly terrible (and seems to get steadily worse with each iteration). It's full of misfeatures, like its insistence on performing a build when you start a program for debug. (I have to use it for debugging CLR code; Microsoft doesn't offer a decent standalone managed-code debugger.) Or the way it likes to inject patently-incorrect elements like and into project files for no reason. Or the way it will re-enable extensions you've disabled when it updates.
It would be great if this feature will project incoming text messages
I'll allow it, if it uses the Star Wars Crawl effect.
I've seen plenty of people reading the newspaper, and once or twice someone reading a novel,[1] while driving. This would be really convenient for them.
Another good use: project 3D illusions to fool oncoming drivers. Fun for the whole family!
[1] My favorite: On Colorado 159, between San Luis and the New Mexico border. At night a very dark road, one lane in each direction, no median, breakdown lanes, or guard rails. 65mph speed limit, rarely enforced. With 17 miles of open horse range - and, yeah, I've seen horses on that road. I was driving it late one night when I came up behind an old Honda Civic with the interior lights on, doing about 40mph. As I passed it, I saw the driver had a book propped on the steering wheel. Didn't even glance my way as I went by.
If you're thinking about personal time spent getting to where you want to go, a private vehicle is likely more efficient.
That's not my experience - because on public transportation, all that time was available to me for work, entertainment, or sleep. That's an efficiency that no non-zero-driving-time commute can beat. If you have a driver, or a carpool, or an autonomous vehicle, then a personal vehicle might be more efficient.
(And I'm not interested in autonomous personal vehicles, personally. But then I also no longer commute.)
Forget that the UI was already shit and needed an overhaul
The UI was just fine. It did the job. No overhaul or redesign was needed.
Maybe it's time to switch to Palemoon browser
I recently switched, on two of my three machines. Haven't switched on the third just because it will be retired soon, and so I've prevented FF from updating on it. I see Mozilla engineers are eager to support my decision to abandon Firefox.
I've used Firefox as long as it's existed. Before that I used Netscape, though I also used IE, Opera, and HotJava on various systems, for purposes of comparison, and I've on occasion tested things with Chrome and Safari. Before Netscape I used Mosaic; before that I used Lync and CERN www. (And of course to this day I occasionally use wget and the like, or just nc for simple GETs.)
Modern Firefox, in my opinion, is horrible. It started becoming horrible with Australis, but at least it was possible to undo that damage. With Quantum, it's not worth trying to use it. A quarter-century legacy thrown away.
They're not selling certificates. The CAs are selling the certificates, which are public documents once they're created.
The "hackers" are selling the private keys that correspond to the certificates.
This is a perfectly sensible, if unethical, business model. The incentive to keep the key private is to avoid diluting (usually to nothing) the value of certificate as a proof of provenance. Someone who obtains a code-signing certificate with the intent of selling the key doesn't have that incentive.
And the headline's emphasis is wrong. As summary and TFA mention, the key finding is that these resold keys are displacing stolen keys for signing malware. And "legitimate" is imprecise, since (according to the research) while the certificates were obtained directly from CAs, that was under false pretense, with stolen credentials. So if the researchers are correct, this is more a shift from stealing signing keys to stealing credentials used to obtain certificates for keys generated by the attacker. That's not new; it's just more common than was popularly thought.
OP is probably paying for several premium channel tiers including a sports package.
I don't know about Comcast - thank god they're not the provider here - but we have Wow, which is consistently rated at or near the top in US cable-company satisfaction surveys (faint praise, etc). And we pay around $250/month.
That's for a bundle that includes Internet, basic and extended cable, a DVR (which we could get rid of, but doesn't add that much), and some premium channels. No sports packages, as neither of us ever watch the stuff. No phone, which I wouldn't use anyway.
We talked to Wow about getting rid of the premium channels, and the savings was miniscule. The bundle prices nearly eliminate the difference with reduced packages.
We'll probably drop the premium channels soon anyway; we almost never watch them, and have or can get streaming access if we want it. But it won't cut the bill by much.
Now, we have gotten something for it - when Wow took over from the (bankrupt) former provider, they made a ton of infrastructure upgrades. Their service is much better than the old provider's, too. They've made some channel lineup changes I'm not fond of, but frankly as streaming grows that becomes less important, and I don't watch much television anyway. (If it were just me here, I wouldn't have anything but the Internet service.)
But the simple fact is that in many parts of the US cable service is very expensive. If you're lucky, you get a provider that's not run by complete assholes (i.e. not Comcast or its ilk), but that's about it.
Yeah, you can't trust Proof of Stale. There are some decent Proof of Fresh schemes, though.
Personally I prefer Proof of Steak, but it has to be a decent cut. I'm not buyin' into any damn flank.
Just what is a "Yor calculator"?
I'm not sure, but apparently in the future hunters will use one.
The US postal service is a prime example, where even with extreme requirements (geographic coverage) and unreasonable burdens (pension funding requirements not required of any other organization, private or public) placed on their operations they still provide a very good service for a very reasonable price.
Agreed, but it should be noted that they don't have the freedom to set those reasonable prices. Really US postal rates should be significantly higher, unless and until Congress stops stealing from the USPS (via those "pension funding" payments).
These guys need to be working on beating Cancer!
No, we already know what the best possible time is for Cancer.
What a bizarre way to interpret what he wrote.
Well, when you start with a bizarre set of axioms...
The faults in the 911 to allow for anonymous false calls
According to what I read - and I've made no attempt to verify this - the 911 (emergency services call) system was not involved. Barriss called a conventional phone line, a hotline at city hall, and spoke to someone there who relayed his message to the police.
It appears he didn't have an easy way to spoof a 911 call at the proper location, so that aspect of the system appears to have worked in this case. The problem was that it's too easy to socially-engineer an alternative - but that's a difficult problem to solve. You can't have random employees attempt to vet emergency calls, and telling a caller in distress to hang up and dial 911 isn't ideal either.
The police should certainly exercise much more caution when the call comes from a suspect source like this - but then they should exercise a hell of a lot more caution in general.