We are vulnerable because of the lopsided distribution of operating systems. If we had better balance, not 95% Windows, it would be harder for any virus to spread.
Or, everyone could run the same OS, but with different mail daemons, web browsers, editors, etc. A kmail exploit (if it could exist) will never effect mailx (hell mailx is just a new version of mail, the original mail program, the first email client ever, and I seriously doubt it has ever had a vulnerability, but I digress). What I am trying to say is that homoginous systems can be avoided, if, for example, your web browser isn't an integrated part of your OS.
actually, there used to be vi macro viruses running around (you could run arbitrary vi, and that means by extension shell code whenever a particular file was opened). Most vi versions have dropped default autorun code support, or dropped the possibility of autorun code altogether. IIRC there is a similar case with emacs (I think it will still autorun code if you are the owner of the file).
This is like creating an "Desktop Publishing Distribution"
This is slightly different, because Unix was desined from the ground up to do text processing, and Linux, like the other Unix derivatives (except maybe SGI) is way behind when it comes to audio applications (in terms of features, usability, performance, etc.). I see this project as something really cool, as a composer of experimental computer music.
If you are still in Knoxville, then it is a "pot luck." And, by Gawd, any carbonated drink is a Coke irregardless of flavor or manufacturer.
Don't mean to be a nerd, but a potlatch was an orgy of a social festival from what is now the Pacific Northwest USA / Southwest CA in which the chieftan who gave away the most stuff to his opponents and killed the most of his own slaves was officially the most important chief for the next year. Sounds like quite the party to me, they probably ate better during the potlatch than otherwise.
Music production is a labor-intensive industry, and the cost of employing songwriters, vocalists, musicians, and recording engineers has not gone down. Neither has the cost of a secretary or a paid intern. Do you really think that is what your entertanment consumption pays for? Your entertainment buck pays for lawyers, agents, accountants and PR, more than anything else. Wanting to be a musician or songwriter as a career is about as safe a plan as is planning a career in professional sports. You might as well become a bum who plays the horses with the success rate of that career plan.
Most of these "rich middle-class kids" (an oxymoron) are actualy rather well in debt. Whether with college loans or just keeping up with day to day living, most of us have little money to spend. "Rich middle class kids" is not an oxymoron. There are two kinds of rich, the middle class who run a business and employ others in order to sustain their wealth, and the aristocracy, who inherit an absolute social privelidge. The term middle class does not mean of median income (for a long time the middle classes of the world have been richer than the aristocracy of the world, as far as I know). "Middle class" is an anachronistic term, meaning of median social respectability between the landed gentry and the class of servants and wage-slaves. One can be the richest person in the world and be middle class, and you can have exactly the worlds median income and wealth and not be middle class.
I feel quite different, thank you for asking. It is surely more common to feel differently, but I can feel different just as I can feel beautiful or clumsy. I might somehow even contrive a way to feel clumsily. It is sad that understanding of our language is bad enough that a mistake and an unusual idea cannot be distinguished from each other.
what you all overlook is that there is meta in team. and meat too. and tame. and 'met a'. and a. and ma. and eat. and mat. and mta (mail transfer agent). duh. now I feel dumb.
Dude, you are confusing "open source" with "free software". You can have an open source product that requires a license for certain uses. There are lots of cases where you have software that's free for eval only, or maybe personal use only, educational use, etc. Just because you provide source doesn't prohibit you from making money on it, restricting distribution, etc.
One of the problems we have today is the definition of "open source." Some people feel that it needs to have a GPL like license, others think BSD is OK, others think that it just means that source is available to anyone that wants to look at it. This variety of definitions causes much confusion.
The Open Source movement is an outgrowth of the Free software movement (headed up by RMS and embracing both the BSD and GPL licenses). Open Source was an attempt to be more apolitical and business friendly than Free software. There was a conference organized on the west coast where the whole Open Source project started, where RMS was conspicuously not invited. What RMS created based on principle, they milk for all the money and publicity it is worth.
I guess that M$ will just prosecute anyone caught reverse engineering their binaries under the DMCA.
You said:
Oh yeah, I can REALLY see someone who's performing ONE illegal act (ie: hacking a critical system) being worried about a piece of legislation like the DMCA..... NOT !!!
As insane and draconian as the DMCA is, it is highly unlikely to serve as a deterrent to someone who is performing other illegal activities.
Reverse engineering was never illegal until the DMCA came around, as far as I know. What Microsoft is calling matters of national security are design holes in their APIs, so that if they made their APIs completely public, Alchin claims, it would be trivial for any terrorist (or anyone else who wanted to) to crash or exploit any arbitrary computer running Windows. Notice that I call this a design hole: if fixing the problem is not treated as a possibility, it is not a bug in the implimentation, but rather in the specification. Reverse engineering their APIs (until the DMCA a legal act in most all cases) would give you the same ability to crash or exploit a Windows system, after more work. (Allchin mentioned message passing, maybe it's the printf() exploit).
ps. I have spelled Alchinn's name wrong at least 2/3 of the times I have mentioned him.
This is not what science is about, that theories stay around because we like the sound of them and they make us feel good. That's religion.
If you mean to equate scientific thought and religion, I would have to disagree wholeheartedly, but if you are saying that to hope a theory stands up to time is not scientific thought, you are right. I must point out that a person should be allowed to express nonscientific thoughts, though.
Instead try something like cWordVar or sWord_Var//Complex Multi word. Does...
my point was that underscores_between_words_is_easier_to readThanCamelCapsIs, regardless of length of names. And extra capitalization is annoying. (also, I hope sWord_Var is not in a game where it could be misread to apply to a weapon).
Isn't the rule of thumb" "don't just explain what a given block of code does, instead explain why you put that block of code in there"?
As far as I am concerned, apart from exceptional circumstances, the code should make clear what it does (well designed data structures help alot with this). Explaining what well written code does in anything but assembler should be redundant to anyone but a novice reader of code. Why is another matter, why it is being done should be explained in your comments as clearly and concisely as possible.
I was most impressed by the advice Rob Pike gives on commenting code. If I remember correctly, his main points are: write code so that it is uncluttered and acts as it's own comment, never paraphrase the code itself, but rather explain metastructures and relations (otherwise you are more likely to have outdated comments that were redundant in the first place; a line is more likely to change than the overal logic). Keep both comments and code concise and clear. And call it complex_multi_word_variable, not ComplexMultiWordVariable, for readability's sake.
I presume you meant to include some file that got eaten as if it were an html tag. How about this:
#include <stdgalaxy.h> #include <gnu_extensions.h> /* this code uses non-standard GNU (Gnu is Not a Universe) extensions to POSIX (Portable Omnipotence Standards Interface)
you knew the universe was GPL'ed, right? */
int main(int argc, char **argv){ return gnu_universe_happen_right_now();} /* I do not count comments as lines */
It appears to be a c like variant of a sugared lisp (type declarations being unneccisary, so int would be a variable with the value 42, and the last evaluated value of a lisp function is usually it's implicit return value. Or maybe it is just really dumb pseudo code.
In the interview/article, the interviewer states that Wolfram created some language called SMP. Was this an actual program, or is the interviewer/reviewer trying to talking about Symmetric Multi Processing? Wolram comes off sounding like a complete jackass sometimes in this article.
Of course, it makes me wander why NORAD fears those Far-Right and Left Canadians... I mean, you got to watch out for those enraged Maple Leaf fans. They came to my city once, and the crime rate doubled for the weekend...
Haven't you followed the news? The Canadians are seriously considering legalizing marijuana, officially making them a terrorist nation! (I shit you not, check out canada.com if you don't believe me).
I would think the short question to ask would be - "What doesn't DARPA fund?" They really should be FARPA - Fund Any Research Project Agency. I'm not complaining - just observing
At the University of Illinois, there was a project called the Biological Computing Laboratory, founded by Cyberneticist Heinz Von Foerster, which did research in second - order cybernetics. (a field devoted to those studies of information, communication, and control in which the observer of the system is an active part of that system, for example analyzing a conversation one is engaged in, or the political system one lives within, in terms of systems theory and information theory). I learned alot from older friends/mentors who were participants in this laboratory, which was shut down, in part, because of the passage of a law (I forget it's year or name), specifying that all defense money go to militarily usable research. The participants of the BCL unanimously refused to change their path of studies to be more directly applicable to military use, and the project lost all funding.
Apropos the article, it seems inevitable that technologies become smaller and smaller in their implementation, to some limit which we surely have not reached. One could have a mechanical Babbage difference engine style computer in a chip. One could have an analog chemical computer in a chip, even. Commonly used higher-order calculations could be replaced by parametricized measurements of an internal mechanical simulation. I don't know if any of these are of any practical use, but they intregue me.
... And the only reason I'm posting anonymously is b/c the moderation system is seriously mucked and classes criticizing comments as evil.
I have to agree that disagreement and meta-discussion are too often seen as troll and off topic. My karma would sure be a bit higher if I was intimidated by being modded down based on criteria like those. Sometimes, though, a "whacked-out" post, as you put it, is a welcome chuckle on my way to the informative or insightful posts that hopefuly follow. I am with you in spirit, and suggest that maybe if you try taking karma a little less seriously than your own criteria of what is a good post (even if you must then read at -1, as I did to find your arguably poorly modded comment), you may find slashdot more enjoyable.
Though I understand that nitpicks are annoying, I find that rampant imprecision in language makes it hard for me to state clearly something unexpected without it being heard as what is already taken for granted.
With this disclaimer, the title of this story should be a statement rather than a question, unless the editor is unsure wheter the submitter was asking a question.
In general, the higher the level at which you can keep your work, the faster you will churn it out and the fewer errors. This can involve everything from reuse of proven snippets to well written libraries to very high level languages. A note about very high level languages (lisp, ML, Haskell, and pals) is that you don't even know how usefull their features are until you learn the language and find them missing somewhere else. It was a revelation to me about programming when I first wanted a first order function in C (and couldn't have it without a kludge). The only problem is that, as we all know, features and efficiency are having your cake and eating it.
The same way I'll use ed for a quick jot or one line change, vi for a fiew quick changes or a letter, and fire up emacs (in vi emulation mode) if I'm gonna be restructuring and debugging my code for more than an hour straight, I think it makes sense to do a small program that needs to run as fast as possible in c, but a larger or more featureful program in something like lisp or python, where you sweat less of the small stuff.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, everyone could run the same OS, but with different mail daemons, web browsers, editors, etc. A kmail exploit (if it could exist) will never effect mailx (hell mailx is just a new version of mail, the original mail program, the first email client ever, and I seriously doubt it has ever had a vulnerability, but I digress). What I am trying to say is that homoginous systems can be avoided, if, for example, your web browser isn't an integrated part of your OS.
actually, there used to be vi macro viruses running around (you could run arbitrary vi, and that means by extension shell code whenever a particular file was opened). Most vi versions have dropped default autorun code support, or dropped the possibility of autorun code altogether. IIRC there is a similar case with emacs (I think it will still autorun code if you are the owner of the file).
This is slightly different, because Unix was desined from the ground up to do text processing, and Linux, like the other Unix derivatives (except maybe SGI) is way behind when it comes to audio applications (in terms of features, usability, performance, etc.). I see this project as something really cool, as a composer of experimental computer music.
If you are still in Knoxville, then it is a "pot luck." And, by Gawd, any carbonated drink is a Coke irregardless of flavor or manufacturer.
Don't mean to be a nerd, but a potlatch was an orgy of a social festival from what is now the Pacific Northwest USA / Southwest CA in which the chieftan who gave away the most stuff to his opponents and killed the most of his own slaves was officially the most important chief for the next year. Sounds like quite the party to me, they probably ate better during the potlatch than otherwise.
Music production is a labor-intensive industry, and the cost of employing songwriters, vocalists, musicians, and recording engineers has not gone down.
Neither has the cost of a secretary or a paid intern. Do you really think that is what your entertanment consumption pays for? Your entertainment buck pays for lawyers, agents, accountants and PR, more than anything else. Wanting to be a musician or songwriter as a career is about as safe a plan as is planning a career in professional sports. You might as well become a bum who plays the horses with the success rate of that career plan.
He does not make crappy films! Repo Man was fucking awesome. Who could forget:
"you do not want to look in the trunk"
cop opens trunk
bzap
cop dust in jack boots
????
Most of these "rich middle-class kids" (an oxymoron) are actualy rather well in debt. Whether with college loans or just keeping up with day to day living, most of us have little money to spend.
"Rich middle class kids" is not an oxymoron. There are two kinds of rich, the middle class who run a business and employ others in order to sustain their wealth, and the aristocracy, who inherit an absolute social privelidge. The term middle class does not mean of median income (for a long time the middle classes of the world have been richer than the aristocracy of the world, as far as I know). "Middle class" is an anachronistic term, meaning of median social respectability between the landed gentry and the class of servants and wage-slaves. One can be the richest person in the world and be middle class, and you can have exactly the worlds median income and wealth and not be middle class.
I feel quite different, thank you for asking. It is surely more common to feel differently, but I can feel different just as I can feel beautiful or clumsy. I might somehow even contrive a way to feel clumsily. It is sad that understanding of our language is bad enough that a mistake and an unusual idea cannot be distinguished from each other.
what you all overlook is that there is meta in team. and meat too. and tame. and 'met a'. and a. and ma. and eat. and mat. and mta (mail transfer agent). duh. now I feel dumb.
One of the problems we have today is the definition of "open source." Some people feel that it needs to have a GPL like license, others think BSD is OK, others think that it just means that source is available to anyone that wants to look at it. This variety of definitions causes much confusion.
The Open Source movement is an outgrowth of the Free software movement (headed up by RMS and embracing both the BSD and GPL licenses). Open Source was an attempt to be more apolitical and business friendly than Free software. There was a conference organized on the west coast where the whole Open Source project started, where RMS was conspicuously not invited. What RMS created based on principle, they milk for all the money and publicity it is worth.
I guess that M$ will just prosecute anyone caught reverse engineering their binaries under the DMCA.
You said:
Oh yeah, I can REALLY see someone who's performing ONE illegal act (ie: hacking a critical system) being worried about a piece of legislation like the DMCA..... NOT !!!
As insane and draconian as the DMCA is, it is highly unlikely to serve as a deterrent to someone who is performing other illegal activities.
Reverse engineering was never illegal until the DMCA came around, as far as I know. What Microsoft is calling matters of national security are design holes in their APIs, so that if they made their APIs completely public, Alchin claims, it would be trivial for any terrorist (or anyone else who wanted to) to crash or exploit any arbitrary computer running Windows. Notice that I call this a design hole: if fixing the problem is not treated as a possibility, it is not a bug in the implimentation, but rather in the specification. Reverse engineering their APIs (until the DMCA a legal act in most all cases) would give you the same ability to crash or exploit a Windows system, after more work. (Allchin mentioned message passing, maybe it's the printf() exploit).
ps. I have spelled Alchinn's name wrong at least 2/3 of the times I have mentioned him.
If you mean to equate scientific thought and religion, I would have to disagree wholeheartedly, but if you are saying that to hope a theory stands up to time is not scientific thought, you are right. I must point out that a person should be allowed to express nonscientific thoughts, though.
cWordVar or sWord_Var
my point was that underscores_between_words_is_easier_to readThanCamelCapsIs, regardless of length of names. And extra capitalization is annoying. (also, I hope sWord_Var is not in a game where it could be misread to apply to a weapon).
As far as I am concerned, apart from exceptional circumstances, the code should make clear what it does (well designed data structures help alot with this). Explaining what well written code does in anything but assembler should be redundant to anyone but a novice reader of code. Why is another matter, why it is being done should be explained in your comments as clearly and concisely as possible.
I was most impressed by the advice Rob Pike gives on commenting code. If I remember correctly, his main points are: write code so that it is uncluttered and acts as it's own comment, never paraphrase the code itself, but rather explain metastructures and relations (otherwise you are more likely to have outdated comments that were redundant in the first place; a line is more likely to change than the overal logic). Keep both comments and code concise and clear. And call it complex_multi_word_variable, not ComplexMultiWordVariable, for readability's sake.
> #include
> int main() {
> start_universe();
> return; }
> Yup, that's 4.
I presume you meant to include some file that got eaten as if it were an html tag. How about this:
#include <stdgalaxy.h>
#include <gnu_extensions.h>
/* this code uses non-standard GNU (Gnu is Not a Universe) extensions to POSIX (Portable Omnipotence Standards Interface)
you knew the universe was GPL'ed, right? */
int main(int argc, char **argv){
return gnu_universe_happen_right_now();}
/* I do not count comments as lines */
It appears to be a c like variant of a sugared lisp (type declarations being unneccisary, so int would be a variable with the value 42, and the last evaluated value of a lisp function is usually it's implicit return value. Or maybe it is just really dumb pseudo code.
In the interview/article, the interviewer states that Wolfram created some language called SMP. Was this an actual program, or is the interviewer/reviewer trying to talking about Symmetric Multi Processing? Wolram comes off sounding like a complete jackass sometimes in this article.
My comment was meant to be funny...
Haven't you followed the news? The Canadians are seriously considering legalizing marijuana, officially making them a terrorist nation! (I shit you not, check out canada.com if you don't believe me).
I'm not complaining - just observing
At the University of Illinois, there was a project called the Biological Computing Laboratory, founded by Cyberneticist Heinz Von Foerster, which did research in second - order cybernetics. (a field devoted to those studies of information, communication, and control in which the observer of the system is an active part of that system, for example analyzing a conversation one is engaged in, or the political system one lives within, in terms of systems theory and information theory). I learned alot from older friends/mentors who were participants in this laboratory, which was shut down, in part, because of the passage of a law (I forget it's year or name), specifying that all defense money go to militarily usable research. The participants of the BCL unanimously refused to change their path of studies to be more directly applicable to military use, and the project lost all funding.
Apropos the article, it seems inevitable that technologies become smaller and smaller in their implementation, to some limit which we surely have not reached. One could have a mechanical Babbage difference engine style computer in a chip. One could have an analog chemical computer in a chip, even. Commonly used higher-order calculations could be replaced by parametricized measurements of an internal mechanical simulation. I don't know if any of these are of any practical use, but they intregue me.
I have to agree that disagreement and meta-discussion are too often seen as troll and off topic. My karma would sure be a bit higher if I was intimidated by being modded down based on criteria like those. Sometimes, though, a "whacked-out" post, as you put it, is a welcome chuckle on my way to the informative or insightful posts that hopefuly follow. I am with you in spirit, and suggest that maybe if you try taking karma a little less seriously than your own criteria of what is a good post (even if you must then read at -1, as I did to find your arguably poorly modded comment), you may find slashdot more enjoyable.
cheers
Though I understand that nitpicks are annoying, I find that rampant imprecision in language makes it hard for me to state clearly something unexpected without it being heard as what is already taken for granted.
With this disclaimer, the title of this story should be a statement rather than a question, unless the editor is unsure wheter the submitter was asking a question.
oopsy
switch "first order" with "higher order" in my previous comment for it to make sense.
In general, the higher the level at which you can keep your work, the faster you will churn it out and the fewer errors. This can involve everything from reuse of proven snippets to well written libraries to very high level languages. A note about very high level languages (lisp, ML, Haskell, and pals) is that you don't even know how usefull their features are until you learn the language and find them missing somewhere else. It was a revelation to me about programming when I first wanted a first order function in C (and couldn't have it without a kludge). The only problem is that, as we all know, features and efficiency are having your cake and eating it.
The same way I'll use ed for a quick jot or one line change, vi for a fiew quick changes or a letter, and fire up emacs (in vi emulation mode) if I'm gonna be restructuring and debugging my code for more than an hour straight, I think it makes sense to do a small program that needs to run as fast as possible in c, but a larger or more featureful program in something like lisp or python, where you sweat less of the small stuff.