Clearly, you do not understand the.Net framework correctly. The Common Language Runtime was designed in such a way that all the expected features from any assembly language are either directly supported or an equivalent combination of CLR instructions exists which implements them. Thus, since scheme, C++, and Java all run on current systems they can be run under CLR too. The idea of using a common assembly language with virtual machine is a proven concept and has been shown to work well on cross platform applications (Java anyone) and Microsoft even wrote a compiler which compiles java byte codes into CLR byte codes. Likewise with Scheme and other LISP languages...if they can run on Intel, Sun, or other chips in assembly then they can run under CLR because CLR is a full assembly language with Virtual Machine.
Back to the C++ argument...how often do you use multiple inheritance and can you name one circumstance where multiple inheritance is either:
1) Absolutely necessary OR
2) Is worth the time to debug because your multiple inheritances is causing some weird run-time error which has already wasted several hours of your time which could have been used to write the same code without using multiple inheritance.
And don't pull out the template argument. Templates were vastly overrated in terms of value and the common object hierarchy provided by Java and.Net combined with the dynamic link library (DLL) concept renders the whole template issue a moot point. How many times (and be honest) did you find yourself tweaking your templates each time you re-used them when they were supposed to be "write-once". C++ was never a write once use anywhere type of language whether you used templates or not. I suggest that you take a second look at.Net and CLR, there is more there than you might think.
I have been using C# for the past 6 months on a mid-sized distributed business application with multi-threaded socket handling, web services, ADO.NET, and XML and I have to give Microsoft some credit where it is due. When one compares the features that are built into C# such as callback delegates, custom event handlers, excellent threading support, and the extensive class library provided with the.Net framework it is difficult to understand why anyone would want to write a new piece of business software with C++/MFC, or platform SDK and C. That being said, both C and C++ have advantages in niche application development such as drivers, operating system kernels, and the like but they are far to expensive to use and maintain except where absolutely necessary or in the largest scale projects. The Java question is an entirely separate issue since C# and.Net were designed, more or less, to directly compete with the features offered by the Java platform. They often speak about a concept at Microsoft which they call developer mindshare and how it can be extended and maintained. Now, I know that Java is frequently taught in Universities and C# is not...but think about it. If you are a new Computer Science grad in a tough job market then your odds of obtaining employment are significantly enhanced by choosing the C#,.Net, Windows route, rather than the Java, Sun, Linux route. Regardless of what you may think about Microsoft, the world uses their software and there are many more Windows programming jobs out there than Sun, Linux, and UNIX jobs. For my part I usually choose the route of least resistance when I write software and in my situation C# has been a good choice. I really hope that something comes of the whole Dot GNU project so that C# and.Net applications which compile to the Common Language Runtime can run on Linux too. In summary the features which I find most useful in C# are:
1. Excellent XML support including Xml Document Model, Xml Serialization, Xml Schema Validation, and of course Xml Web Services (this is VERY useful).
2. The combination of the Windows Forms with the power of a full featured c-style language. If you ever worked with C++/MFC or C with Platform SDK then you know that this was a long time in coming and a welcome relief.
3. Callback delegates - you never realize how useful these are until you start using them in your applications.
4. Advanced threading library including thread pooling, support for various synchronization methods, and easy to use asynchronous framework.
"What is the ultimate price a company can pay for using its marks incorrectly, and allowing others to also use the marks incorrectly?
The mark may be determined to be the generic name of the goods or services. If a mark "goes generic", anyone can use it. Despite years of marketing efforts and expense, you will not be able to prevent someone else from using the term. Sound farfetched? Escalator used to be the brand name for a particular company's moving stairway. Shredded wheat, yo-yo, thermos, aspirin and cellophane are all generic terms that once were company trademarks. Sony, owner of the trademark "Walkman", recently had a court in the United Kingdom determine that "walkman" was a generic term."
I am not a lawyer, but one could certainly make the case that Hormel has not been diligent in protecting their "SPAM" trademark. Many people now associate the term with unsolicited e-mail and thus, the term has become generic even though it is largely used to refer to unwholesome e-mail now instead of unwholesome meat products. This case is interesting because usually when a term becomes generic it has been used to refer to generic things which are similar to or a close substitute for the things that were originally trademarked, as in the aforementioned excerpt: aspirin, escalator, thermos, etc.
I apologize for not responding to all of the excellent responses in a more timely fashion, but I am currently switching companies and moving my residence so I have been somewhat distracted. I was pleased with some of the suggestions of the responders and intrigued by some of the solutions that have been cobbled together by able administrators using existing tools. The question I would like to propose to the honeypot and the jackpot users is this:
What do you plan to do with the e-mails or IP addresses that you log in your trap?
The spammers probably do not care if you catch them red-handed if there is no threat of serious punishment (fine or imprisonment); they will simply switch ISPs and resume their spamming activities. Let me be clear, I believe that honey pots are valuable for understanding the tactics used by spammers and for raising the barrier of entry (limiting the number of small time operators).
In response to the post concerning filtering effectiveness and spam deterrence:
I question the notion that spammers would be stopped simply by extremely low return rates. In fact, I have heard that a response rate of approximately 1/10 of 1% is considered a resounding success by these spammers. It is also widely known that large volume spammers employ software tools written by secretive foreign companies that only accept payment in bank wire transfers (BTW: any software developer that would work for these companies really has joined the dark side). Thus, it is difficult for me to see why a low success and response rate per message would be a deterrent. The spammers will simply up the number of messages to compensate for the lower response rates and thus aggravate the aforementioned bandwidth problem.
In response to your question Simon I would recommend the new book, "The Art of Deception", by Kevin D. Mitnick, which addresses various security scenarios and events, both real and fictional, which include the human element of security. In addition to the scenarios presented, which include transcripts of phone conversations and descriptions of actual attacks, Kevin presents several chapters on good user policies for personnel ranging from the system administrator to the secretary working at the front desk for minimizing the potential of a social engineering attack. These are not highly technical security policies, but rather simple suggestions and procedures that reinforce good security habits and make a successful social engineering attack much harder to accomplish. In fact, a main point of the book is that high tech security measures are rarely the problem when a security breach occurs...it is far easier to attack the weakest part of the system (the people using it) than to try and break in through the network via a terminal session. I was shocked especially by the phone conversations between the social engineers and the unsuspecting employees, even a person with little technical knowledge could potentially be a serious threat to your network. I had never considered that possibility before. In conclusion I found, "The Art of Deception", to be a rare and refreshing look at one of the most overlooked elements of security.
The problem with this argument is that even if we all ran Bayesian Filters and blocked 99.9% of all spam messages from hitting our inboxes there would still be billions of messages going back an forth between mail servers before they are caught by the filters. This is a major drag on Internet bandwidth even if all of us never actually saw another spam in our inboxes ever again. These people who abuse their network privileges and degrade the network for the rest of us should be caught and punished for their behavior. Another thing that would really help is for slashdot people to advocate proper mail server configuration, including disallowing open relays, and education of all of the part-time mail sysadmins out there who perpetuate the problem with their own ineptness. There are groups already trying to do these things and it is helping, but it will take much more work on the part of mail admins and users to shut the spammers down for good.
All of that doesn't mean squat if you can't defend your country. When will liberal idealists learn that the world is full of people who would just assume kill you and piss on your grave than give you the time of day. The United States must maintain its military superiority lest we lose the freedoms that some of us take for granted. Peace through superior firepower, overwhelming force is the only language that brutal dictators, leftist guerillas, and terrorists understand. Every nation needs a national defense, that is simply the reality of the world that we live in. I wish they would fix the potholes too but not at the expense of our military.
The United States Navy sponsored a test project with a ~$500,000 budget in late 1998 to see if an independent team could build a reliable cruise missile weapon using off the shelf technology. I suppose that since the project failed they quietly cancelled it or declared it a success (since the independent team failed to develop a useful weapon) and ended it. Things may be different now but $5,000 probably won't be enough to build an effective military grade cruise missile, especially when one considers the advanced counter-measures employed by the United States and other Navies. I doubt that a $5,000 homemade cruise missile would defeat the Aegis system employed by the United States Navy. I was able to find only this small snippet of information on the web regarding the whole affair:
"14 Apr 98 The Kraken cruise missile built by the BMDO Countermeasures Hands-On Project crashed on take off from Point Mugu, California. The Kraken was built to test the ability of a rest-of-world country to develop this type of weapon."
If you have a secure communication that you wish to remain secure then it is always best to manager your own public and private keys and encrypt the data yourself. That way, short of putting a keystroke logger physically inside your keyboard, which the FBI has been known to do that to overcome PGP and other types of encryption, one can be reasonably assured that any private communications will remain private. I do not believe that you can be forced to turn over the pass phrase to your PGP keys either since this would be tantamount to incriminating yourself and citizens of the United States are protected against this by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. They may be able to break my pass phrase key string by brute force, but that would take a while. The fact that all of this is even necessary is a sad commentary on the continuing erosion of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. The indiscriminate monitoring of Internet, voice, and other communications routinely used by ordinary citizens is reminiscent of the activities and duties of the secret police forces in the repressive former Soviet block nations such as East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. One should not be subjected to surveillance unless one has given the authorities probable cause to expect that one is engaged in criminal activities. The use of encryption is not by itself probable cause to suspect that someone is engaged in criminal activity. We don't hassle people for using security envelopes at the post office so why should we harass people who use freely available encryption technologies? I want the terrorists and the bad guys caught and punished just as much as the next law abiding citizen, but I don't want my freedoms to be squelched in the process.
The following is a segment of an excellent series which ran on PBS last year (and will run again this may) called "The Commanding Heights" which discussed and explained the battle between soviet style central planning in the 20th century and the free market economy and also the promise and perils of the new globalization. There are interviews with economists, politicians, businessmen and others who discuss firsthand their experiences with the various economic principles of macro and micro economics. Despite the emphasis on economics the series is interesting and it is designed to get average people thinking about the market forces which exist in this world and control the fate of nations and people. The following is a segment which discusses TARIFS and their effects upon an economy. As many other people have already said, TARIFS are almost certainly the wrong way to protect the American software and IT industry. Here is the link; the entire series is available via the internet as well for those who are interested.
ALVINN uses neural networks to learn visual servoing. It
watches a person drive for five minutes, and can
then take over driving. ALVINN has been trained to drive on
dirt paths, single-lane country roads, city streets,
and multi-lane highways. Click
here
for images of the vehicles and videos of ALVINN in action.
The sucessor to ALVINN, called
RALPH,
was the core of a system that drove a vehicle
autonomously all but 52 of the 2,849 miles
from Pittsburgh to San Diego, averaging 63 miles per hour,
day and night, rain or shine.
Kevin Mitnick's Book, "The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security", is an excellent source of information concerning social engineers, social engineering attack strategies, and methods to secure against social engineering attacks. The book includes transcripts of believable, but hypothetical, phone conversations between attackers and those persons that have information that the attacker wants. There are also stories and anecdotes from Mitnick's personal experience with social engineering attacks, including the details of how he pulled some of them off. It was shocking for me to learn how easily a determined attacker might circumvent advanced security measures such as time shifting tokens, smart cards, security cameras, and the like using social engineering methods. This is definitely worthy ready for anybody concerned about security.
Let me begin by stating that I read the ENTIRE article and that in my opinion this is the broadest and most satisfying explanation that I have ever heard concerning the state of the entertainment industry, the economics of digital distribution, freedom of choice, the rights of the consumer, and the role of intellectual property in our society. If you care the least bit about intellectual property, copyright, and the economics of the information society then this article is a must read.
The game industry has been taken over by the corporations and the media conglomerates so completely now that any small time developer is basically locked out of the big revenue streams. I did not say that it is impossible for an independent game to be successful from the standpoint of popularity (example: Counter-Strike). What I mean is that it is very difficult for an independent game developer to compete for the big money. There are quite a few barriers to entry for potential independent developers in the games industry:
1. The major game companies: Blizzard, EA, Interplay, Nintendo, ID, and others have an extremely high percentage of the market share in their target age groups and game genres. That is to say, the battle for hearts and minds has already been won and it would take an independent game or series of games that are nothing short of revolutionary to have a chance of recapturing even some of that market share (which leads into my second point).
2. It has become VERY expensive to produce a game which has any chance of competing against the established franchises. So not only are you fighting an uphill technical battle against opponents with more money and more experienced developers, but you are also competing in a marketing battle against the established brand and players loyalty to it which is why franchises like Madden Football, Warcraft, Half-Life, and Baldur's Gate are so valuable to their respective companies.
3. Even if you have a great independent team behind you, and you have a game idea which could potentially revolutionize the industry you will find very few publishers who are willing to take the risk of investing perhaps $1 million dollars (and probably more) in your unproven game company so that you can actually bring your game to market. In short if you want to do something revolutionary but unproven you had better bring your own suitcase full of money along for the ride.
4. Finally, if you want to earn the big bucks then you will have to deal with Wal-Mart because they are the largest game retailer in the US. Now, if you are some no-name game development company then Wal-Mart will probably want an agreement which guarantees that you will pay them back for any unsold stock and that you will give them a big chunk of the profits from each sale. If your publisher (see above) takes care of the Wal-Mart payola (shelf space fee, aisle end caps fee, advertisement fee etc) for you then you can bet that they will pass that cost onto your small independent game company. As if that wasn't enough, the big guys (Blizzard, EA, and the others named above) who can really bring in the sales, over 300,000+ copies sold with each release, probably get much better terms than you which means more profit for them and even less for you.
If all of this does not discourage you then by all means try and compete with the big guys, but just remember that your chances of winning the state lottery are probably about the same as the odds that your small startup game company will become the next Blizzard or EA. In conclusion the game industry today is a lot like the other entertainment businesses (publishing, movies, music, etc.). There are a few big name developers and companies which make bank and the rest just eke out a living and are happy if their first game isn't also their last.
SIDENOTE:
As a side note I do not work in the game industry, but I have friends who do and this information is thus secondhand. However, I think that the essential facts are obvious and that most people realize that the days of producing a hit in your garage and making it big (ala MYST) were over a long time ago.
The way I see it there are three primary considerations here.
1. The first is whether or not your PC, running the OS of you choice (Linux, MacOS, Windows, Lindows, etc), will be able to read the disc in existing CD-ROM drives. I believe that the likely answer to that question is yes, because the music industry and Micro$oft have seen the results of violating the Redbook Standard and rendering CDs unreadable. This approach leads to widespread incompatibilities, confusion, and frustration on the part of consumers about which CDs will or will not work in which devices. Thus people refuse to buy them.
2. The second question is whether or not it is possible using multiple layers on the CD to render the CD-ROM drive capable of reading only the WMA digitally encoded tracks and not the standard audio tracks. I am not an expert in CD-ROM drive hardware and drivers so perhaps one of you other slashdot people know the answer to that for sure. Let us assume for the moment that CD-ROM drives can only read the WMA encoded data tracks and move on to point number three.
3. WMA is a proprietary file format which is readable only by Windows Media Player (as far as I understand it). Thus this constitutes a "security by obscurity" type system scheme because presumably Micro$oft will keep the file format secret and somebody will have to write a program which parses the file and extracts the audio. History has shown these types of "encryption" schemes to be vulnerable. It is only a matter of time before some information about the WMA format leaks or somebody cracks the format encoding (case in point the CSS scheme employed on DVDs).
In closing, the only other alternative for additional protection beyond proprietary files is to use a real cryptographic scheme. However, it is difficult in practice to operate a public key encryption scheme under these circumstances.
Basically, the more people who have access to a decryption key, even though it may be buried or hidden in the Windows Media Software, the less secure the system becomes. This was a problem faced by DVD manufacturers in the early DeCSS days (As I understand it, the original program used a key which was leaked from a manufacturer, Xing technologies I think, to decode the mpeg streams). The problem became even worse when some enterprising hackers discovered that it was possible crack CSS and decode the DVD without a key. I will bet that even the hardware player manufacturers don't bother with the keys anymore because it is cheaper to put a DeCSS based decoder chip in the box instead. Thanks for reading.
Afterthought:
The only truley secure solution would be a single all in one device (speakers and everything) with end to end encryption. I dont believe anybody would accept that draconian of a solution and even if it were somehow forced onto people they could still record the sound coming out of the speakers. The music industry will only be happy when it becomes possible to pipe the music directly into your brain so that nobody else can hear it and you cannot copy it. Oh wait! what if I remember the song and it sticks in my head? did I violate the DMCA? lol friggen hillarious.
I would like my robots to be programmed with cheesy comic book style battle statements like "full re-route" or "utilize maximum force" or "sensors detect hostility" like microwave in the computer game "Freedom Force"
Mit Computer Spielen, es sollte derselbe in Deutschland sein, als es in den USA ist. Die eltern müssen sich entschieden was ihren kinder sollten und sollten nicht spielen. Zensur ist nicht die korrekte Lösung zu den Problemen einer Gesellschaft oder einer Einzelperson. Das ist meine Meinung über die Angelegenheit.
A general emphasis of performance over safety pervades the C++ STL and thus programmers must be sure in their knowledge of templates, functors (overloaded function () operators), and the precedence of the various operators. For example if one wants to call the erase() function in a collection class it is important to remember that the iterator should be post incremented when it is passed to the erase function since the designers of STL gave erase() no return value. This is just one example of the types of trade-offs that the STL makes in order to provide optimal speed. If the erase function returned the next valid iterator then this type of kludgy workaround could have been avoided. It all depends upon how erase is used in your program but most of the time one wants to move the iterator to the next valid position after the erase() function deletes the element pointed to by the iterator. The following code example illustrates this behavior (deletes all elements from the map):
The surest way to repel 99% of the women out there is to speak with them about programming. At least give yourself a chance before you admit to working in a cubicle at Initech.
It seems logical that we should look for fossil fuel replacements here on Earth rather than looking in space. At least for the time being there is still plenty of water on the earth, which stores a vast reserve of hydrogen. The technology to separate the hydrogen from the water is well known and when this is combined with the alternative sources mentioned in the article (solar, wind, and geothermal) there should be enough energy to satisfy our needs. It is still important to develop propulsion systems for our next generation of spacecraft. However, our more immediate energy requirements can be satisfied by the resources available here on Earth. The Earth's estimated current supply of fossil fuels will most probably supply our energy needs for the next 300 years or so give or take a decade or two. After that, we can switch to hydrogen and the aforementioned alternative sources as a replacement. The ultimate technology would of course be fusion power and for that we will also need hydrogen or perhaps some of that helium3.
Keep in mind that right now, building the GNOME 2.0 Desktop from CVS is NOT for the faint-hearted! However, if your idea of support is prompt integration of your patches, please consider testing, using and contributing to it.
Why take the chance? Is anti-aliased text and multilanguage support really worth it?
It may be time to consider a position at a different company. These kind of hostile relationships between the developers, IT departments, and others are usually indications of serious internal communication problems and if a company cannot communicate amongst itself imagine what kind of job it must be doing with its customers.
I have had good results with variable bit rate encoders that use higher bit rates for the peaks and lower bitrates for the flattened parts of the signal where the extra bits would be wasted. If space is an issue this can save you some KBs that when amortized over a large collection can add up to hundreds of MBs. SoundForge has a variable bit rate MP3 encoder and there are others. I am not aware of an open source product that provides the same level of quality with regard to variable bit rate encoding but I have not spent much time looking. If you simply dont care and have tons of space then higher bit rates are preferable. 256 and higher all sounds the same to me.
The save game file containing your character data, items, experience, etc... is stored on the game server away from your hacking attempts for a very good reason. Even the game designers saw that one comming.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly, you do not understand the .Net framework correctly. The Common Language Runtime was designed in such a way that all the expected features from any assembly language are either directly supported or an equivalent combination of CLR instructions exists which implements them. Thus, since scheme, C++, and Java all run on current systems they can be run under CLR too. The idea of using a common assembly language with virtual machine is a proven concept and has been shown to work well on cross platform applications (Java anyone) and Microsoft even wrote a compiler which compiles java byte codes into CLR byte codes. Likewise with Scheme and other LISP languages...if they can run on Intel, Sun, or other chips in assembly then they can run under CLR because CLR is a full assembly language with Virtual Machine.
.Net combined with the dynamic link library (DLL) concept renders the whole template issue a moot point. How many times (and be honest) did you find yourself tweaking your templates each time you re-used them when they were supposed to be "write-once". C++ was never a write once use anywhere type of language whether you used templates or not. I suggest that you take a second look at .Net and CLR, there is more there than you might think.
Back to the C++ argument...how often do you use multiple inheritance and can you name one circumstance where multiple inheritance is either:
1) Absolutely necessary OR
2) Is worth the time to debug because your multiple inheritances is causing some weird run-time error which has already wasted several hours of your time which could have been used to write the same code without using multiple inheritance.
And don't pull out the template argument. Templates were vastly overrated in terms of value and the common object hierarchy provided by Java and
I have been using C# for the past 6 months on a mid-sized distributed business application with multi-threaded socket handling, web services, ADO.NET, and XML and I have to give Microsoft some credit where it is due. When one compares the features that are built into C# such as callback delegates, custom event handlers, excellent threading support, and the extensive class library provided with the .Net framework it is difficult to understand why anyone would want to write a new piece of business software with C++/MFC, or platform SDK and C. That being said, both C and C++ have advantages in niche application development such as drivers, operating system kernels, and the like but they are far to expensive to use and maintain except where absolutely necessary or in the largest scale projects. The Java question is an entirely separate issue since C# and .Net were designed, more or less, to directly compete with the features offered by the Java platform. They often speak about a concept at Microsoft which they call developer mindshare and how it can be extended and maintained. Now, I know that Java is frequently taught in Universities and C# is not...but think about it. If you are a new Computer Science grad in a tough job market then your odds of obtaining employment are significantly enhanced by choosing the C#, .Net, Windows route, rather than the Java, Sun, Linux route. Regardless of what you may think about Microsoft, the world uses their software and there are many more Windows programming jobs out there than Sun, Linux, and UNIX jobs. For my part I usually choose the route of least resistance when I write software and in my situation C# has been a good choice. I really hope that something comes of the whole Dot GNU project so that C# and .Net applications which compile to the Common Language Runtime can run on Linux too. In summary the features which I find most useful in C# are:
1. Excellent XML support including Xml Document Model, Xml Serialization, Xml Schema Validation, and of course Xml Web Services (this is VERY useful).
2. The combination of the Windows Forms with the power of a full featured c-style language. If you ever worked with C++/MFC or C with Platform SDK then you know that this was a long time in coming and a welcome relief.
3. Callback delegates - you never realize how useful these are until you start using them in your applications.
4. Advanced threading library including thread pooling, support for various synchronization methods, and easy to use asynchronous framework.
This excerpt was taken from the page of a law firm which handles trademark issues:
Trademarks and Service Marks: Use 'Em or Lose 'Em
"What is the ultimate price a company can pay for using its marks incorrectly, and allowing others to also use the marks incorrectly?
The mark may be determined to be the generic name of the goods or services. If a mark "goes generic", anyone can use it. Despite years of marketing efforts and expense, you will not be able to prevent someone else from using the term. Sound farfetched? Escalator used to be the brand name for a particular company's moving stairway. Shredded wheat, yo-yo, thermos, aspirin and cellophane are all generic terms that once were company trademarks. Sony, owner of the trademark "Walkman", recently had a court in the United Kingdom determine that "walkman" was a generic term."
I am not a lawyer, but one could certainly make the case that Hormel has not been diligent in protecting their "SPAM" trademark. Many people now associate the term with unsolicited e-mail and thus, the term has become generic even though it is largely used to refer to unwholesome e-mail now instead of unwholesome meat products. This case is interesting because usually when a term becomes generic it has been used to refer to generic things which are similar to or a close substitute for the things that were originally trademarked, as in the aforementioned excerpt: aspirin, escalator, thermos, etc.
I apologize for not responding to all of the excellent responses in a more timely fashion, but I am currently switching companies and moving my residence so I have been somewhat distracted. I was pleased with some of the suggestions of the responders and intrigued by some of the solutions that have been cobbled together by able administrators using existing tools. The question I would like to propose to the honeypot and the jackpot users is this:
What do you plan to do with the e-mails or IP addresses that you log in your trap?
The spammers probably do not care if you catch them red-handed if there is no threat of serious punishment (fine or imprisonment); they will simply switch ISPs and resume their spamming activities. Let me be clear, I believe that honey pots are valuable for understanding the tactics used by spammers and for raising the barrier of entry (limiting the number of small time operators).
In response to the post concerning filtering effectiveness and spam deterrence:
I question the notion that spammers would be stopped simply by extremely low return rates. In fact, I have heard that a response rate of approximately 1/10 of 1% is considered a resounding success by these spammers. It is also widely known that large volume spammers employ software tools written by secretive foreign companies that only accept payment in bank wire transfers (BTW: any software developer that would work for these companies really has joined the dark side). Thus, it is difficult for me to see why a low success and response rate per message would be a deterrent. The spammers will simply up the number of messages to compensate for the lower response rates and thus aggravate the aforementioned bandwidth problem.
Thank you all for taking the time to respond.
In response to your question Simon I would recommend the new book, "The Art of Deception", by Kevin D. Mitnick, which addresses various security scenarios and events, both real and fictional, which include the human element of security. In addition to the scenarios presented, which include transcripts of phone conversations and descriptions of actual attacks, Kevin presents several chapters on good user policies for personnel ranging from the system administrator to the secretary working at the front desk for minimizing the potential of a social engineering attack. These are not highly technical security policies, but rather simple suggestions and procedures that reinforce good security habits and make a successful social engineering attack much harder to accomplish. In fact, a main point of the book is that high tech security measures are rarely the problem when a security breach occurs...it is far easier to attack the weakest part of the system (the people using it) than to try and break in through the network via a terminal session. I was shocked especially by the phone conversations between the social engineers and the unsuspecting employees, even a person with little technical knowledge could potentially be a serious threat to your network. I had never considered that possibility before. In conclusion I found, "The Art of Deception", to be a rare and refreshing look at one of the most overlooked elements of security.
The problem with this argument is that even if we all ran Bayesian Filters and blocked 99.9% of all spam messages from hitting our inboxes there would still be billions of messages going back an forth between mail servers before they are caught by the filters. This is a major drag on Internet bandwidth even if all of us never actually saw another spam in our inboxes ever again. These people who abuse their network privileges and degrade the network for the rest of us should be caught and punished for their behavior. Another thing that would really help is for slashdot people to advocate proper mail server configuration, including disallowing open relays, and education of all of the part-time mail sysadmins out there who perpetuate the problem with their own ineptness. There are groups already trying to do these things and it is helping, but it will take much more work on the part of mail admins and users to shut the spammers down for good.
All of that doesn't mean squat if you can't defend your country. When will liberal idealists learn that the world is full of people who would just assume kill you and piss on your grave than give you the time of day. The United States must maintain its military superiority lest we lose the freedoms that some of us take for granted. Peace through superior firepower, overwhelming force is the only language that brutal dictators, leftist guerillas, and terrorists understand. Every nation needs a national defense, that is simply the reality of the world that we live in. I wish they would fix the potholes too but not at the expense of our military.
The United States Navy sponsored a test project with a ~$500,000 budget in late 1998 to see if an independent team could build a reliable cruise missile weapon using off the shelf technology. I suppose that since the project failed they quietly cancelled it or declared it a success (since the independent team failed to develop a useful weapon) and ended it. Things may be different now but $5,000 probably won't be enough to build an effective military grade cruise missile, especially when one considers the advanced counter-measures employed by the United States and other Navies. I doubt that a $5,000 homemade cruise missile would defeat the Aegis system employed by the United States Navy. I was able to find only this small snippet of information on the web regarding the whole affair:
missile defense
"14 Apr 98 The Kraken cruise missile built by the BMDO Countermeasures Hands-On Project crashed on take off from Point Mugu, California. The Kraken was built to test the ability of a rest-of-world country to develop this type of weapon."
If you have a secure communication that you wish to remain secure then it is always best to manager your own public and private keys and encrypt the data yourself. That way, short of putting a keystroke logger physically inside your keyboard, which the FBI has been known to do that to overcome PGP and other types of encryption, one can be reasonably assured that any private communications will remain private. I do not believe that you can be forced to turn over the pass phrase to your PGP keys either since this would be tantamount to incriminating yourself and citizens of the United States are protected against this by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution. They may be able to break my pass phrase key string by brute force, but that would take a while. The fact that all of this is even necessary is a sad commentary on the continuing erosion of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. The indiscriminate monitoring of Internet, voice, and other communications routinely used by ordinary citizens is reminiscent of the activities and duties of the secret police forces in the repressive former Soviet block nations such as East Germany, Bulgaria, and Czechoslovakia. One should not be subjected to surveillance unless one has given the authorities probable cause to expect that one is engaged in criminal activities. The use of encryption is not by itself probable cause to suspect that someone is engaged in criminal activity. We don't hassle people for using security envelopes at the post office so why should we harass people who use freely available encryption technologies? I want the terrorists and the bad guys caught and punished just as much as the next law abiding citizen, but I don't want my freedoms to be squelched in the process.
What happens if you walk into the bar-b-que place and fail to give the obligatory..."Yeeeehaaw" on your way through the door ;p
The following is a segment of an excellent series which ran on PBS last year (and will run again this may) called "The Commanding Heights" which discussed and explained the battle between soviet style central planning in the 20th century and the free market economy and also the promise and perils of the new globalization. There are interviews with economists, politicians, businessmen and others who discuss firsthand their experiences with the various economic principles of macro and micro economics. Despite the emphasis on economics the series is interesting and it is designed to get average people thinking about the market forces which exist in this world and control the fate of nations and people. The following is a segment which discusses TARIFS and their effects upon an economy. As many other people have already said, TARIFS are almost certainly the wrong way to protect the American software and IT industry. Here is the link; the entire series is available via the internet as well for those who are interested.
Latin American Dependencia
ALVINN - Autonomous Vehicle Navigation using Neural Nets (CMU)
ALVINN uses neural networks to learn visual servoing. It watches a person drive for five minutes, and can then take over driving. ALVINN has been trained to drive on dirt paths, single-lane country roads, city streets, and multi-lane highways. Click here for images of the vehicles and videos of ALVINN in action. The sucessor to ALVINN, called RALPH, was the core of a system that drove a vehicle autonomously all but 52 of the 2,849 miles from Pittsburgh to San Diego, averaging 63 miles per hour, day and night, rain or shine.
Kevin Mitnick's Book, "The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security", is an excellent source of information concerning social engineers, social engineering attack strategies, and methods to secure against social engineering attacks. The book includes transcripts of believable, but hypothetical, phone conversations between attackers and those persons that have information that the attacker wants. There are also stories and anecdotes from Mitnick's personal experience with social engineering attacks, including the details of how he pulled some of them off. It was shocking for me to learn how easily a determined attacker might circumvent advanced security measures such as time shifting tokens, smart cards, security cameras, and the like using social engineering methods. This is definitely worthy ready for anybody concerned about security.
Let me begin by stating that I read the ENTIRE article and that in my opinion this is the broadest and most satisfying explanation that I have ever heard concerning the state of the entertainment industry, the economics of digital distribution, freedom of choice, the rights of the consumer, and the role of intellectual property in our society. If you care the least bit about intellectual property, copyright, and the economics of the information society then this article is a must read.
The game industry has been taken over by the corporations and the media conglomerates so completely now that any small time developer is basically locked out of the big revenue streams. I did not say that it is impossible for an independent game to be successful from the standpoint of popularity (example: Counter-Strike). What I mean is that it is very difficult for an independent game developer to compete for the big money. There are quite a few barriers to entry for potential independent developers in the games industry:
1. The major game companies: Blizzard, EA, Interplay, Nintendo, ID, and others have an extremely high percentage of the market share in their target age groups and game genres. That is to say, the battle for hearts and minds has already been won and it would take an independent game or series of games that are nothing short of revolutionary to have a chance of recapturing even some of that market share (which leads into my second point).
2. It has become VERY expensive to produce a game which has any chance of competing against the established franchises. So not only are you fighting an uphill technical battle against opponents with more money and more experienced developers, but you are also competing in a marketing battle against the established brand and players loyalty to it which is why franchises like Madden Football, Warcraft, Half-Life, and Baldur's Gate are so valuable to their respective companies.
3. Even if you have a great independent team behind you, and you have a game idea which could potentially revolutionize the industry you will find very few publishers who are willing to take the risk of investing perhaps $1 million dollars (and probably more) in your unproven game company so that you can actually bring your game to market. In short if you want to do something revolutionary but unproven you had better bring your own suitcase full of money along for the ride.
4. Finally, if you want to earn the big bucks then you will have to deal with Wal-Mart because they are the largest game retailer in the US. Now, if you are some no-name game development company then Wal-Mart will probably want an agreement which guarantees that you will pay them back for any unsold stock and that you will give them a big chunk of the profits from each sale. If your publisher (see above) takes care of the Wal-Mart payola (shelf space fee, aisle end caps fee, advertisement fee etc) for you then you can bet that they will pass that cost onto your small independent game company. As if that wasn't enough, the big guys (Blizzard, EA, and the others named above) who can really bring in the sales, over 300,000+ copies sold with each release, probably get much better terms than you which means more profit for them and even less for you.
If all of this does not discourage you then by all means try and compete with the big guys, but just remember that your chances of winning the state lottery are probably about the same as the odds that your small startup game company will become the next Blizzard or EA. In conclusion the game industry today is a lot like the other entertainment businesses (publishing, movies, music, etc.). There are a few big name developers and companies which make bank and the rest just eke out a living and are happy if their first game isn't also their last.
SIDENOTE:
As a side note I do not work in the game industry, but I have friends who do and this information is thus secondhand. However, I think that the essential facts are obvious and that most people realize that the days of producing a hit in your garage and making it big (ala MYST) were over a long time ago.
The way I see it there are three primary considerations here.
1. The first is whether or not your PC, running the OS of you choice (Linux, MacOS, Windows, Lindows, etc), will be able to read the disc in existing CD-ROM drives. I believe that the likely answer to that question is yes, because the music industry and Micro$oft have seen the results of violating the Redbook Standard and rendering CDs unreadable. This approach leads to widespread incompatibilities, confusion, and frustration on the part of consumers about which CDs will or will not work in which devices. Thus people refuse to buy them.
2. The second question is whether or not it is possible using multiple layers on the CD to render the CD-ROM drive capable of reading only the WMA digitally encoded tracks and not the standard audio tracks. I am not an expert in CD-ROM drive hardware and drivers so perhaps one of you other slashdot people know the answer to that for sure. Let us assume for the moment that CD-ROM drives can only read the WMA encoded data tracks and move on to point number three.
3. WMA is a proprietary file format which is readable only by Windows Media Player (as far as I understand it). Thus this constitutes a "security by obscurity" type system scheme because presumably Micro$oft will keep the file format secret and somebody will have to write a program which parses the file and extracts the audio. History has shown these types of "encryption" schemes to be vulnerable. It is only a matter of time before some information about the WMA format leaks or somebody cracks the format encoding (case in point the CSS scheme employed on DVDs).
In closing, the only other alternative for additional protection beyond proprietary files is to use a real cryptographic scheme. However, it is difficult in practice to operate a public key encryption scheme under these circumstances. Basically, the more people who have access to a decryption key, even though it may be buried or hidden in the Windows Media Software, the less secure the system becomes. This was a problem faced by DVD manufacturers in the early DeCSS days (As I understand it, the original program used a key which was leaked from a manufacturer, Xing technologies I think, to decode the mpeg streams). The problem became even worse when some enterprising hackers discovered that it was possible crack CSS and decode the DVD without a key. I will bet that even the hardware player manufacturers don't bother with the keys anymore because it is cheaper to put a DeCSS based decoder chip in the box instead. Thanks for reading.
Afterthought:
The only truley secure solution would be a single all in one device (speakers and everything) with end to end encryption. I dont believe anybody would accept that draconian of a solution and even if it were somehow forced onto people they could still record the sound coming out of the speakers. The music industry will only be happy when it becomes possible to pipe the music directly into your brain so that nobody else can hear it and you cannot copy it. Oh wait! what if I remember the song and it sticks in my head? did I violate the DMCA? lol friggen hillarious.
I would like my robots to be programmed with cheesy comic book style battle statements like "full re-route" or "utilize maximum force" or "sensors detect hostility" like microwave in the computer game "Freedom Force"
Mit Computer Spielen, es sollte derselbe in Deutschland sein, als es in den USA ist. Die eltern müssen sich entschieden was ihren kinder sollten und sollten nicht spielen. Zensur ist nicht die korrekte Lösung zu den Problemen einer Gesellschaft oder einer Einzelperson. Das ist meine Meinung über die Angelegenheit.
A general emphasis of performance over safety pervades the C++ STL and thus programmers must be sure in their knowledge of templates, functors (overloaded function () operators), and the precedence of the various operators. For example if one wants to call the erase() function in a collection class it is important to remember that the iterator should be post incremented when it is passed to the erase function since the designers of STL gave erase() no return value. This is just one example of the types of trade-offs that the STL makes in order to provide optimal speed. If the erase function returned the next valid iterator then this type of kludgy workaround could have been avoided. It all depends upon how erase is used in your program but most of the time one wants to move the iterator to the next valid position after the erase() function deletes the element pointed to by the iterator. The following code example illustrates this behavior (deletes all elements from the map):
typedef map map;
typedef map::iterator map_itr;
map m_example;
.
.
.
for(map_itr itr = m_example.begin(); itr != m_example.end(); )
{
m_example.erase(itr++);
}
The surest way to repel 99% of the women out there is to speak with them about programming. At least give yourself a chance before you admit to working in a cubicle at Initech.
It seems logical that we should look for fossil fuel replacements here on Earth rather than looking in space. At least for the time being there is still plenty of water on the earth, which stores a vast reserve of hydrogen. The technology to separate the hydrogen from the water is well known and when this is combined with the alternative sources mentioned in the article (solar, wind, and geothermal) there should be enough energy to satisfy our needs. It is still important to develop propulsion systems for our next generation of spacecraft. However, our more immediate energy requirements can be satisfied by the resources available here on Earth. The Earth's estimated current supply of fossil fuels will most probably supply our energy needs for the next 300 years or so give or take a decade or two. After that, we can switch to hydrogen and the aforementioned alternative sources as a replacement. The ultimate technology would of course be fusion power and for that we will also need hydrogen or perhaps some of that helium3.
Keep in mind that right now, building the GNOME 2.0 Desktop from CVS is NOT for the faint-hearted! However, if your idea of support is prompt integration of your patches, please consider testing, using and contributing to it.
Why take the chance? Is anti-aliased text and multilanguage support really worth it?
It may be time to consider a position at a different company. These kind of hostile relationships between the developers, IT departments, and others are usually indications of serious internal communication problems and if a company cannot communicate amongst itself imagine what kind of job it must be doing with its customers.
I have had good results with variable bit rate encoders that use higher bit rates for the peaks and lower bitrates for the flattened parts of the signal where the extra bits would be wasted. If space is an issue this can save you some KBs that when amortized over a large collection can add up to hundreds of MBs. SoundForge has a variable bit rate MP3 encoder and there are others. I am not aware of an open source product that provides the same level of quality with regard to variable bit rate encoding but I have not spent much time looking. If you simply dont care and have tons of space then higher bit rates are preferable. 256 and higher all sounds the same to me.
The save game file containing your character data, items, experience, etc... is stored on the game server away from your hacking attempts for a very good reason. Even the game designers saw that one comming.