I think COBOL was designed by an English major who got really frustrated with the rules of capitalization, said to hell with it, and turned away from the dark side, only to bring his evil ways to our proud profession.
COBOL is predominantly littered by English-sounding phrases (made up of COBOL 'words') such as:
ADD ME TO YOURMAMA GIVING SCARY-THOUGHT. PERFORM MY-FAVORITE-SUBROUTINE. etc...
SQL queries mostly read off as English:
CREATE DATABASE yourmama; CONNECT TO yourmama; INSERT INTO yourmama.[censored] values [censored]; DROP DATABASE yourmama;...
COBOL demonstrates exactly why spoken English sounding languages suck: English has little consistency in syntax and is way, way too verbose. IMHO, '{' from C is much easier to code that 'Begin' from Pascal, although I do love Pascal (my first language with pointers).
Could you imagine pointers in natural language:
PUT THE VALUE OF a ADDED TO c INTO THE LOCATION IN MEMORY REFERENCED BY d
The description of a statechart is remarkably similar to my understanding of Markov chains. Markov chains are representations of finite state systems used by mathematicians. There are several instances of folks attributing the 'invention' of statecharts to particular computer scientists in the discussions below. I think it would be more accurate to say that a cs person pioneered the implementation of [degenerate] Markov chains as a cs application.
Explanation of [degenerate]: Markov chains can be represented by both matricies and graphs. The primary difference I see between a graphed Markov chain and a statechart is that the Markov transitions are typically weighted. Knowing the event probabilities allows you to do some rather interesting stuff, like make predictions as to the number of trasitions before entering a terminal state, etc.
Re:Use MAC address filtering and Limited IP leases
on
How Stable is WEP?
·
· Score: 1
Yes I did. My ignorance is exposed.
There are many a feature in iproute2 that I seldom use.
I know what you're thinking - hop on the network without the MAC to start with, what's he thinking...
The transmissions to the AP are not encrypted, so one need not necessarily bind to the AP to recieve them. A promiscuous interface should do the trick.
Re:Use MAC address filtering and Limited IP leases
on
How Stable is WEP?
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Hate to burst the bubble, but MAC addresses are spoofable (and easily guessable)! On a GNU/Linux box with iproute2, you can do mac spoofing using ip maddr [add/del/etc].
Address filtering is really bad security, even at layer 2. Since you have no encryption at or above layer 2, anyone can just hop on your network and do an arp resolution to a broadcast address and bingo, they have a MAC that lets them in. Even if you couldn't do that, a MAC address is just a 48-bit number, and most of the MAC address space is verifiably unused (you can check the IEEE for a list of assigned prefixes - the first 24 bits are a manufacturer ID).
The purpose of 'jails' is to sustain the custody of individuals who are charged with crimes or are material witnesses to crimes. The purposes of 'prisons' are to prevent convicted criminals from harming society through isolation, to provide a mechanism by which they may be 'corrected', and to provide a strong deterrent to crime.
I know you didn't want to go there, but the irony here is that the subject of the incarceration need not be corrected, but the law he violated should be recognized as inconsitent with his right to property. His actions were allegedly in conflict with the law. The court is responsible for choosing which of the three outcomes is made manifest:
- His conflict with the law did in fact exist, and since he willfully commited the crime, he should be corrected. - His conflict with the law did not exist because the law is being misinterpreted or misapplied in the charge or the charge is not proven, therefore he is not to be corrected and (possibly) precedence is set. - The law is inconsistent with the Constitution, therefore the law is corrected.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution establish our right to property (pursuit of happiness) and our right to the retention of property except through due process. Property is not an object itself, but the rights we exercise with respect to a certain object.
I would content that the modification of property is a right which must be taken away by due process only.
Now that we have the ability to clone animals who are endangered whilst destroyoing the habitat they live in, we can let our consciences be at ease, because even though they have no place left to live, they exist.
Next month's manager special: the McBateng (with special sauce, of course).
I think the simplest solution is to set up an etc/ path under ~ on an up-al-the-time machine and then script a CVS checkout of that directory in one of your.whatever scripts. Then source everything in ~/etc/. Alias exit to do a CVS commit. You can make this stuff pretty painless with public key authentication (not interactive) and ssh.
If need be, you could CVS all of ~/, but do whatever you think is best for your needs.
Since I got married and started having kids, I have found that one of the best ways to not deal with spam at home (among other problems) is to leave work at work; and when I do (rarely) check my work email at home, I download just headers first.
Music duplication will never be preventable; the very usefullness of a piece of digitally encoded music depends on the media's ability to produce a pretty darn good analog of the original performance. Since a pretty darn good analog will therefore exist, the analog may always be reencoded with very little loss of quality.
Now, the Internet is the medium upon which the crime of music duplication takes place. Highways are the media upon which speeding takes place. Should we eliminate highways because they are media for crime? No, becuase they serve mostly legal and useful purposes, regardless of the fact that they by their very natuere lend the law of speeding to uneforceability. Think hard about this.
I love PHP. I use it every day to write custom web-enabled applications. It is a great Perl replacement (flame on) for those little apps you need to write when you grew up on a pseudo-OOP language like C++ or Borland Pascal 5.5 w/OOP. Some of us grew up on languages like that and PHP is just a very comfortable langauge to use.
The biggest problem I have with PHP is that it is always changing. Last week the fad was to use mysql_connect() style stuff to do your databasing, this week it is dbx_...(), next week, PEAR. No, wait, I'm a week behind already. The Perl folks figured out the mistakes they made with stuff like that a long time ago, and they mostly use DBI/DBD to do their database stuff. But the Apache folks didn't learn from their mistakes, and now we have n ways to do pretty much anything in PHP. Do I use the more abstracted string functions or do I use regexes?
The language is intentionally designed to make lots of people happy (shell/C/C++ style comments, ASP and HTML style script escapes, etc.). But there are no long-term best practices, and newer better ways to do this stuff come out each version. So how can a print book effectively keep up?
I find the online PHP docs quite good, and the public comments are great. I really don't understand so many people's need to buy a book when docs (and tutorials) are there for you on your screen. Kudos to the MySQL folks, for their online docs, too. It would be nice if you could find (maybe I didn't look hard enough) a snapshot of the MySQL manual from each revision.
Layer 1 security (physical access denial) is not good security. The best way to secure networks is to use secure protocols - wrap everything up in SSL.
As for the service interruption concern, it would seem prudent to use several redundant beams spaced at irregular vertical and horizontal intervals - wide enough so that a small flock of pigeons doesn't interrupt service.
we see the obsolescence another one of those cute little topic icons on/. RIP, Compaq.
You know, maybe it would be nice for nostalgia's sake to post an article under the Digital logo once in a while. Of course, a small piece of DEC lives on in the Digital Networking Products Group. It's a real shame that Compaq cut off the DEC.com and Digital.com domains this year. DEC = 3 letters, Compaq = 6. More to type.
Maybe this signals the need for a mechanism to merge topics of old in the slashcode.
Time to go see if that VAX I booted 9 years ago is still heating, er, running...
First off, if you have any sort of connection to any sort of public network, especially the Internet, YOU ARE A DESIRABLE TARGET.Your machine gets bandwidth, and bandwith begets DOS attacks.
Secondly, I log in to an NT workstation as an admin a lot too. But on NT, a lot of system stuff of hard to get to and accidentally delete. If I happen to be in the wrong path on a UNIX system and type 'rm -fr *' I could be in deep shit, but if I don't go around carelessly wielding a root UID, then I protect myself. It's a bit like keeping the safety on a rifle. It's just a good idea.
Check out aiSee. The software is free for academia. It does graphs in 2- and 3-d, and I think it might export VRML. Please give it a look. It runs on Macs, various UNIX and GNU/Linux, and, for the depraved, Windows.
If you assume the police did have the authority to examine data on the professor's drive, it follows logically that the police could not allow the professor to access her data after she had been informed of the action. Such allowance could lead to the professor deleting and overwriting the data.
The professor should have already had her data backed up. Period. There is no excuse for anybody not to have their data backed up. Only files modified since her last backup should be a problem. The best way to handle backups is not to - put your critical data on a SMB share or AppleTalk share on a server that backs it up for you. Thus, she should only have had a problem accessing the data she had modified that morning.
She should be using GPG, which would fix her problem regarding sensitive information.
I dont think NCREN would be willing to give access to folks off-campus. They have really strict rules as to what organizations get pipes, and the pipes they do give are really fat.
At Appalachian State, where there is an oligopoly of apartment management, a company called appstate.net has set up contracts with the apartment managers in town to put in 1.5 Mbit ADSL lines to the apartment buildings (1 per building). They then split it off with high-gain 802.11b WAPs. I think it works pretty well, and it is cheap, but they set a 30 GB limit per month. On the other hand, cablemodem access is only 19.95/mo from Charter cable. As long as UNC has a budget crisis, they are not going to fork out the dough for off-campus access.
There are better things we can do as sysadmins to help fix this problem.
Enforce good password practices. Force users to choose passwords not susceptible to dictionary attack. Most modern *NIX variants' passwd utils do this.
Use one authentication system for every computer on your network. This is a biggie. I have accounts on some seven machines at the university, each with their own peculiarities (VMS doesn't allow '.' in passwords, system A is on a manditory 2-week password change cycle, system B passwords are only changeable by web form, etc.) This is one reason why our users hate us so much. They have 80 different passwords to remember. Use Kerberos or NDS or something, and users will be much happier to abide by good password practices. Have your desktop passwords be the same as net passwords, too. NT supports this, and for heavens' sake , UNIX does too. If you don't do this, users will try to work around the system with password managers, etc., building insecurities into the system that you will never even know about.
Make it a terminal offense to share passwords.
I really don't get the difference between this image stuff and character passwords. All I see on the keys on my keyboard are pictures... they just happen to be of letters. What do they put on yours?
"The CD has almost 150 MB of free space. I believe that there are some utilities or applications missing, like a Font Installer (desktop users mostly browse the web, therefore having the standardised Web Fonts is a must...
The Microsoft terms of use for their free-as-in-beer fonts do not permit redistribution on CD-ROM. Furthermore, Microsoft does not create web standards. The W3C does, and they reccommend in the CSS1 reccomendation that designers include a generic family name to specify typefaces, such as sans-serif, serif or mono.
Maybe those students who switched to LaTeX were on to something: WYSIWYG word processing sucks. We do need WYSIWYG word processors for joe-q-idiot-on-the-street, but come on folks. Have you ever seen a document produced by TeX. Just look at your last math book. Bad things happen when you put layout and typography in the hands of a user.
Slashdot Mirror
I think COBOL was designed by an English major who got really frustrated with the rules of capitalization, said to hell with it, and turned away from the dark side, only to bring his evil ways to our proud profession.
...
COBOL is predominantly littered by English-sounding phrases (made up of COBOL 'words') such as:
ADD ME TO YOURMAMA GIVING SCARY-THOUGHT.
PERFORM MY-FAVORITE-SUBROUTINE.
etc...
SQL queries mostly read off as English:
CREATE DATABASE yourmama;
CONNECT TO yourmama;
INSERT INTO yourmama.[censored] values [censored];
DROP DATABASE yourmama;
COBOL demonstrates exactly why spoken English sounding languages suck: English has little consistency in syntax and is way, way too verbose. IMHO, '{' from C is much easier to code that 'Begin' from Pascal, although I do love Pascal (my first language with pointers).
Could you imagine pointers in natural language:
PUT THE VALUE OF a ADDED TO c INTO THE LOCATION IN MEMORY REFERENCED BY d
The description of a statechart is remarkably similar to my understanding of Markov chains. Markov chains are representations of finite state systems used by mathematicians. There are several instances of folks attributing the 'invention' of statecharts to particular computer scientists in the discussions below. I think it would be more accurate to say that a cs person pioneered the implementation of [degenerate] Markov chains as a cs application.
Explanation of [degenerate]:
Markov chains can be represented by both matricies and graphs. The primary difference I see between a graphed Markov chain and a statechart is that the Markov transitions are typically weighted. Knowing the event probabilities allows you to do some rather interesting stuff, like make predictions as to the number of trasitions before entering a terminal state, etc.
Yes I did. My ignorance is exposed.
There are many a feature in iproute2 that I seldom use.
I apologize.
I know what you're thinking - hop on the network without the MAC to start with, what's he thinking...
The transmissions to the AP are not encrypted, so one need not necessarily bind to the AP to recieve them. A promiscuous interface should do the trick.
Hate to burst the bubble, but MAC addresses are spoofable (and easily guessable)! On a GNU/Linux box with iproute2, you can do mac spoofing using ip maddr [add/del/etc].
Address filtering is really bad security, even at layer 2. Since you have no encryption at or above layer 2, anyone can just hop on your network and do an arp resolution to a broadcast address and bingo, they have a MAC that lets them in. Even if you couldn't do that, a MAC address is just a 48-bit number, and most of the MAC address space is verifiably unused (you can check the IEEE for a list of assigned prefixes - the first 24 bits are a manufacturer ID).
The purpose of 'jails' is to sustain the custody of individuals who are charged with crimes or are material witnesses to crimes. The purposes of 'prisons' are to prevent convicted criminals from harming society through isolation, to provide a mechanism by which they may be 'corrected', and to provide a strong deterrent to crime.
I know you didn't want to go there, but the irony here is that the subject of the incarceration need not be corrected, but the law he violated should be recognized as inconsitent with his right to property. His actions were allegedly in conflict with the law. The court is responsible for choosing which of the three outcomes is made manifest:
- His conflict with the law did in fact exist, and since he willfully commited the crime, he should be corrected.
- His conflict with the law did not exist because the law is being misinterpreted or misapplied in the charge or the charge is not proven, therefore he is not to be corrected and (possibly) precedence is set.
- The law is inconsistent with the Constitution, therefore the law is corrected.
The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution establish our right to property (pursuit of happiness) and our right to the retention of property except through due process. Property is not an object itself, but the rights we exercise with respect to a certain object.
I would content that the modification of property is a right which must be taken away by due process only.
Now that we have the ability to clone animals who are endangered whilst destroyoing the habitat they live in, we can let our consciences be at ease, because even though they have no place left to live, they exist.
Next month's manager special: the McBateng (with special sauce, of course).
I think the simplest solution is to set up an etc/ path under ~ on an up-al-the-time machine and then script a CVS checkout of that directory in one of your .whatever scripts. Then source everything in ~/etc/. Alias exit to do a CVS commit. You can make this stuff pretty painless with public key authentication (not interactive) and ssh.
If need be, you could CVS all of ~/, but do whatever you think is best for your needs.
Since I got married and started having kids, I have found that one of the best ways to not deal with spam at home (among other problems) is to leave work at work; and when I do (rarely) check my work email at home, I download just headers first.
The story at Scientific American can be reached from this link.
Internet springtime
the academics messaged
amongst their boxen
the diverse systems
without the scourge of commerce
by s m t p
cooperated
microsoft and sun and dec
unisys, hp
then came eye candy
if you build it they will come
e-commerce flourished
summertime came soon
venture capital dodo
the money dried up
quick buck was desired
send lots of mail to granny
she is rich and dumb
in greed's bosom born
marketing technique evil
electronic mail
spam spam spam spam spam
filtering is most futile
protocol not good
header forging easy
there must be a better way
new rfc please
even with new way
migration would be a bitch
forget about it
Music duplication will never be preventable; the very usefullness of a piece of digitally encoded music depends on the media's ability to produce a pretty darn good analog of the original performance. Since a pretty darn good analog will therefore exist, the analog may always be reencoded with very little loss of quality.
Now, the Internet is the medium upon which the crime of music duplication takes place. Highways are the media upon which speeding takes place. Should we eliminate highways because they are media for crime? No, becuase they serve mostly legal and useful purposes, regardless of the fact that they by their very natuere lend the law of speeding to uneforceability. Think hard about this.
I love PHP. I use it every day to write custom web-enabled applications. It is a great Perl replacement (flame on) for those little apps you need to write when you grew up on a pseudo-OOP language like C++ or Borland Pascal 5.5 w/OOP. Some of us grew up on languages like that and PHP is just a very comfortable langauge to use.
The biggest problem I have with PHP is that it is always changing. Last week the fad was to use mysql_connect() style stuff to do your databasing, this week it is dbx_...(), next week, PEAR. No, wait, I'm a week behind already. The Perl folks figured out the mistakes they made with stuff like that a long time ago, and they mostly use DBI/DBD to do their database stuff. But the Apache folks didn't learn from their mistakes, and now we have n ways to do pretty much anything in PHP. Do I use the more abstracted string functions or do I use regexes?
The language is intentionally designed to make lots of people happy (shell/C/C++ style comments, ASP and HTML style script escapes, etc.). But there are no long-term best practices, and newer better ways to do this stuff come out each version. So how can a print book effectively keep up?
I find the online PHP docs quite good, and the public comments are great. I really don't understand so many people's need to buy a book when docs (and tutorials) are there for you on your screen. Kudos to the MySQL folks, for their online docs, too. It would be nice if you could find (maybe I didn't look hard enough) a snapshot of the MySQL manual from each revision.
My $.02.
Layer 1 security (physical access denial) is not good security. The best way to secure networks is to use secure protocols - wrap everything up in SSL.
As for the service interruption concern, it would seem prudent to use several redundant beams spaced at irregular vertical and horizontal intervals - wide enough so that a small flock of pigeons doesn't interrupt service.
Another great example of the failures exibited by my school's BIND servers.
we see the obsolescence another one of those cute little topic icons on /. RIP, Compaq.
You know, maybe it would be nice for nostalgia's sake to post an article under the Digital logo once in a while. Of course, a small piece of DEC lives on in the Digital Networking Products Group. It's a real shame that Compaq cut off the DEC.com and Digital.com domains this year. DEC = 3 letters, Compaq = 6. More to type.
Maybe this signals the need for a mechanism to merge topics of old in the slashcode.
Time to go see if that VAX I booted 9 years ago is still heating, er, running...
First off, if you have any sort of connection to any sort of public network, especially the Internet, YOU ARE A DESIRABLE TARGET.Your machine gets bandwidth, and bandwith begets DOS attacks.
Secondly, I log in to an NT workstation as an admin a lot too. But on NT, a lot of system stuff of hard to get to and accidentally delete. If I happen to be in the wrong path on a UNIX system and type 'rm -fr *' I could be in deep shit, but if I don't go around carelessly wielding a root UID, then I protect myself. It's a bit like keeping the safety on a rifle. It's just a good idea.
Check out aiSee. The software is free for academia. It does graphs in 2- and 3-d, and I think it might export VRML. Please give it a look. It runs on Macs, various UNIX and GNU/Linux, and, for the depraved, Windows.
Let's use public key authentication and associate keys with SSN's... all we'd need to do is find a way to abstract the whole thing for the end users.
If you assume the police did have the authority to examine data on the professor's drive, it follows logically that the police could not allow the professor to access her data after she had been informed of the action. Such allowance could lead to the professor deleting and overwriting the data.
The professor should have already had her data backed up. Period. There is no excuse for anybody not to have their data backed up. Only files modified since her last backup should be a problem. The best way to handle backups is not to - put your critical data on a SMB share or AppleTalk share on a server that backs it up for you. Thus, she should only have had a problem accessing the data she had modified that morning.
She should be using GPG, which would fix her problem regarding sensitive information.
My 2 cents.
I dont think NCREN would be willing to give access to folks off-campus. They have really strict rules as to what organizations get pipes, and the pipes they do give are really fat.
At Appalachian State, where there is an oligopoly of apartment management, a company called appstate.net has set up contracts with the apartment managers in town to put in 1.5 Mbit ADSL lines to the apartment buildings (1 per building). They then split it off with high-gain 802.11b WAPs. I think it works pretty well, and it is cheap, but they set a 30 GB limit per month. On the other hand, cablemodem access is only 19.95/mo from Charter cable. As long as UNC has a budget crisis, they are not going to fork out the dough for off-campus access.
There are better things we can do as sysadmins to help fix this problem.
I really don't get the difference between this image stuff and character passwords. All I see on the keys on my keyboard are pictures... they just happen to be of letters. What do they put on yours?
Bad things also happen when you put spelling and grammar into the hands of a user. Sorry about the punctuation.
Maybe those students who switched to LaTeX were on to something: WYSIWYG word processing sucks. We do need WYSIWYG word processors for joe-q-idiot-on-the-street, but come on folks. Have you ever seen a document produced by TeX. Just look at your last math book. Bad things happen when you put layout and typography in the hands of a user.