I used Ubuntu (from 2006-2012). I used debian before and i use debian now. I could not agree more with you. What made me move away was that they stopped focusing on "Ubuntu for Computers".
When Ubuntu started, they made "Debian" + "whatever it takes to get it running without pain". That was great.
Then they continued to make small improvements which greatly improved usability (which was definitly great). I think the best releases where around 2010. Consistent, reliable, and yet compatible with most other FOS.
Then they started to push their own shit (Ubuntu one could, Unity etc.) and most of it before it was ready. They stopped focusing on fixing annoying bugs (like, problems with hibernation).
I waited for two upgrades, then i switched back to debian. Now the things which work do work consitently and all functions which are mandatory work.
My guess: when the technology which increases the data density by a factor of 100 is ready, then also the writing mechanism will be significantly faster.
A market works best if all sides have the same access to knowledge. Prior to the Internet there was no big market for "i have a room which is dont use" because exchanging information was too expensive.
However, it was not at all unusual on the countryside to just put up a sign if you had a room to rent. I remember bicycle trips where we just stopped at some farm and asked and got a room there.
But the books which shaped my view on computing were -The dragon book -Algorithms (Sedgewick) -An Introduction to Database Systems, (C. J. Date) -Finite fields and their applications (Lidl, Niederreiter) -Design Patterns -The art of computing (Partially)
The best system i found are plain text files for the really important things, in a year/month/day directory structure. Store it locally on a usb stick and use an arbitray sync tool or version mangement to sync between your devices.
I dont the f**k care. If 4 developers who are probably not assigned on full time to this task taake only a week to give it a good start, then for sure a company could have taken the effort in the many years in which this library is in use.
Funny. I never suggested that i would use Java for this purpose, i just pointed out that i assume that the same level of coding tools exists for C (as you stated yourself).
Regarding the VM JIT vs. statically compiled Code + and big amount of interpreters: Yes, for high-security code i definitly prefer stattically compiled code. OTOH i point out that *most* of the JVM vulnerabilities were actually not in the low layer compilation but in the somehow weird assumption that security can be managed inside the same adress space by high-level language features (which implicitely assumes that libraries of arbitrry complexity with JNI code inside are all written perfect).
I cant talk for C, but in Java the tools which warn you about potentially dangerous constructs are great (e.g. Sonar). You can easily identify many *suspicous* contructs and change them to something more safe. 250 commits per week with 4 devs on a moderatly sized project do not see much to me, much at the "quality" and not the "quantity" side.
What annoys me is that - with all due respect - the companies which embed openssl in their products could have done a review of the code for quality. To me it seems that it's a fundamental library.
Yes, and if you buy consulting work based on a flat amount of money for a project assigning the right people to the right task is something the consulting company does for you. Because if they do this then will earn more money.
If i find a bug which is critical to my employer while being plaid by my employer, the first and only thing which is do is assess the impact to my emplyer, and identify the most important measures for the employers business.
IMHO they acted correctly: protect your own systems, and then the systems with the biggest impact.
My good advice to every customer is: dont buy consultant work as time and material. Buying as time and material puts the wrong incentives to everybody:
-Your own people will feel that they still can just use them as normal workers and keep all decisions (and thus responsibility) to themself
-The consultants dont care, since just doing what your own people tell them without thinking is what gets their monthly timesheets signed. If something goes wrong they can even sell more hours, not less
-The consulting company does not care (and rigthly so since that was not what you asked for) and will send you inexperiences junior consultants wherever possible.
-Coding quality has to be reviewd by your own people (or just accepted as it is)
-Your own people are usually vastly inferior at project management in comparison to the average senior consultant - in a non T&M contract the usual situation is that you get the things done in time or you will loose money.
Chernobyl would not have been prevented by putting the reactor in water. It was the only accident which had a "nuclear power excursion" as the reason. TMI and Fukushima were a failure of the classical cooling.
In Chernobyl the operators ignored the normal precautions. They operated the fuel in a state where xenon (see http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g...) was present. Due to this the system was far away from the assumed stable oprtion point assumed in the controls.
The power which you would have needed to dissipate at the event to cool the reactor would have been ong the order of 200GW. Normal heat transfer coefficients are on the order of 10s of KW/m^2/K if i assume that you allow 200K difference on the surface, you end up at an active cooling surface of 100000m^2, which just is not there, not even if you drop the reactor into water.
GNOME, as the lead organization, has been responsible for managing the finances for the entire effort. However, as the program grew, the processes did not keep up. The changes were not tracked effectively from the point when other organizations joined the OPW. This impacted not only our ability to manage the OPW administration, but also to keep up with the core financial tasks of the Foundation -- tasks which already needed the full attention of the Foundation's employees and the board.
So other organizations accepted liabilities which were automatically transferred to GNOME Foundation? or they plainly lost track? Or they did not caclulate before what limit for accepting students there is?
Or WHAT?
Did they - by spending money on a side track -fuck up an organization which should - given the situation about people not bein happy with they main project - focus on stakeholder management? I mean it's not like that job is not important for the FOSS community. And wo me it seems that the exeution of the job leaves some things to be desired.
The national security interest would be to patch the hole, not to leave it open. This hole was to easy to exploit, and supposedly enabled identity theft on a massive scale, even to vastly infereior intelligence services.
The comparison with the centrifuges in Iran is misleading. for that combination of attacks it is very hard even to find suitable experts to generate the code.
I dont use my mobile while driving. But i know enough idiots do.
So lets build a safer car. The technology is there. The typical accidents which happen due to reduced attention (like changing lanes unintentionally, not reacting to bearking light of the car in front or a pedestrian entering the road) can be addressed well by existing off-the-shelf technology. Right now these things (radar, automatic breaking) are sold in premium cars. The reason for this is not because these are so expensive to built, but because its is the best strategy for carmakers to first milk the high-end segment (with nearly arbitrary earnings/revenue) and then turn to the rest of the market.
However, if you make things mandatory for all new cars, then the price for the new car goes up by a few hundred bucks, but the insurance will go down.
As and extreme measure the car could reduce the maximum speed automaticlly once it detects that the driver is using a mobile phone or, in general, not looking at the road. Tracking eye movements is well proven technology.
Science runs out of things to discover all the time. The last big point when everybody thought that now "everything is understood" was in the middle of the 19th century. Mathematics was developed enough to descibe that classical non-relativistic point-mechanics world well enough. Everything seemed fine.
Then came relativity and quantum mechanics, and in the wave understanding all these phenomena there was an time when the theories could be used verified (with the "low hanging fruit" first). Fact is, building technology from a theory is the last step in using the theory. This step happens now for QM with the coherent of single quantum controls. Only when you have such technology, you can actually test the limits. I should remind here that, at the time of implementation the Michelson-Morely experiment was absolutely state of the art, using all understanding in the design and the newest technology.
Now we are at a similar point. We need extremly complicate technology (Quantum Computer, Gravitational wave detectors) to bring the experiments to the limits. Absolutely nobody nowadays can tell if QC will work (i am a former QC researcher). If the interpolation between the "macroscopic/collective" Quantumphenomena and the few quantum entangled systems indeed will exist is something which we expect, but it is an *unproven Hypothesis*, a test of a theory in limit which was never tested before.
Maybe everything works out according to theory, but possibly not. The same is true for Gravitation.
it makes it even believable that the NSA "accidentally" records all infromation which it "accidentally" acquired. You know, in times when even google "accidentally" turns on the microphone and a security library has "accidentally" simple checks deactivated, you know they just "accicentally" forgot the "SELECT" statement.
Slashdot Mirror
Noscript, only per session cookies, and surfing trough a proxy.
I used Ubuntu (from 2006-2012). I used debian before and i use debian now. I could not agree more with you. What made me move away was that they stopped focusing on "Ubuntu for Computers".
When Ubuntu started, they made "Debian" + "whatever it takes to get it running without pain". That was great.
Then they continued to make small improvements which greatly improved usability (which was definitly great). I think the best releases where around 2010. Consistent, reliable, and yet compatible with most other FOS.
Then they started to push their own shit (Ubuntu one could, Unity etc.) and most of it before it was ready. They stopped focusing on fixing annoying bugs (like, problems with hibernation).
I waited for two upgrades, then i switched back to debian. Now the things which work do work consitently and all functions which are mandatory work.
My guess: when the technology which increases the data density by a factor of 100 is ready, then also the writing mechanism will be significantly faster.
I could imagine that a flat-fee per month could serve them and theirs customers well.
A market works best if all sides have the same access to knowledge. Prior to the Internet there was no big market for "i have a room which is dont use" because exchanging information was too expensive.
However, it was not at all unusual on the countryside to just put up a sign if you had a room to rent. I remember bicycle trips where we just stopped at some farm and asked and got a room there.
What is new is that you can plan this.
But the books which shaped my view on computing were
-The dragon book
-Algorithms (Sedgewick)
-An Introduction to Database Systems, (C. J. Date)
-Finite fields and their applications (Lidl, Niederreiter)
-Design Patterns
-The art of computing (Partially)
The best system i found are plain text files for the really important things, in a year/month/day directory structure. Store it locally on a usb stick and use an arbitray sync tool or version mangement to sync between your devices.
Searching these is easy.
Better nuke the reservoir form orbit, the only way to be sure.
I am lucky I grew up in the 80s I guess.
I dont the f**k care. If 4 developers who are probably not assigned on full time to this task taake only a week to give it a good start, then for sure a company could have taken the effort in the many years in which this library is in use.
I can assure you that predicting market scenarios is mor complicated that you make it sound.
For sure they can get the DoF right in 3D movies, why not?
Funny. I never suggested that i would use Java for this purpose, i just pointed out that i assume that the same level of coding tools exists for C (as you stated yourself).
Regarding the VM JIT vs. statically compiled Code + and big amount of interpreters: Yes, for high-security code i definitly prefer stattically compiled code. OTOH i point out that *most* of the JVM vulnerabilities were actually not in the low layer compilation but in the somehow weird assumption that security can be managed inside the same adress space by high-level language features (which implicitely assumes that libraries of arbitrry complexity with JNI code inside are all written perfect).
I cant talk for C, but in Java the tools which warn you about potentially dangerous constructs are great (e.g. Sonar). You can easily identify many *suspicous* contructs and change them to something more safe. 250 commits per week with 4 devs on a moderatly sized project do not see much to me, much at the "quality" and not the "quantity" side.
What annoys me is that - with all due respect - the companies which embed openssl in their products could have done a review of the code for quality. To me it seems that it's a fundamental library.
Yes, and if you buy consulting work based on a flat amount of money for a project assigning the right people to the right task is something the consulting company does for you. Because if they do this then will earn more money.
If i find a bug which is critical to my employer while being plaid by my employer, the first and only thing which is do is assess the impact to my emplyer, and identify the most important measures for the employers business.
IMHO they acted correctly: protect your own systems, and then the systems with the biggest impact.
I am working as a consultant.
My good advice to every customer is: dont buy consultant work as time and material. Buying as time and material puts the wrong incentives to everybody:
-Your own people will feel that they still can just use them as normal workers and keep all decisions (and thus responsibility) to themself
-The consultants dont care, since just doing what your own people tell them without thinking is what gets their monthly timesheets signed. If something goes wrong they can even sell more hours, not less
-The consulting company does not care (and rigthly so since that was not what you asked for) and will send you inexperiences junior consultants wherever possible.
-Coding quality has to be reviewd by your own people (or just accepted as it is)
-Your own people are usually vastly inferior at project management in comparison to the average senior consultant - in a non T&M contract the usual situation is that you get the things done in time or you will loose money.
Wow they just managed to create uncanny deep holes to fall into.
Chernobyl would not have been prevented by putting the reactor in water. It was the only accident which had a "nuclear power excursion" as the reason. TMI and Fukushima were a failure of the classical cooling.
In Chernobyl the operators ignored the normal precautions. They operated the fuel in a state where xenon (see http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.g...) was present. Due to this the system was far away from the assumed stable oprtion point assumed in the controls.
The power which you would have needed to dissipate at the event to cool the reactor would have been ong the order of 200GW. Normal heat transfer coefficients are on the order of 10s of KW/m^2/K if i assume that you allow 200K difference on the surface, you end up at an active cooling surface of 100000m^2, which just is not there, not even if you drop the reactor into water.
Lat me get this right (from their wiki page):
GNOME, as the lead organization, has been responsible for managing the finances for the entire effort. However, as the program grew, the processes did not keep up. The changes were not tracked effectively from the point when other organizations joined the OPW. This impacted not only our ability to manage the OPW administration, but also to keep up with the core financial tasks of the Foundation -- tasks which already needed the full attention of the Foundation's employees and the board.
So other organizations accepted liabilities which were automatically transferred to GNOME Foundation? or they plainly lost track? Or they did not caclulate before what limit for accepting students there is?
Or WHAT?
Did they - by spending money on a side track -fuck up an organization which should - given the situation about people not bein happy with they main project - focus on stakeholder management? I mean it's not like that job is not important for the FOSS community. And wo me it seems that the exeution of the job leaves some things to be desired.
The national security interest would be to patch the hole, not to leave it open. This hole was to easy to exploit, and supposedly enabled identity theft on a massive scale, even to vastly infereior intelligence services.
The comparison with the centrifuges in Iran is misleading. for that combination of attacks it is very hard even to find suitable experts to generate the code.
I dont use my mobile while driving. But i know enough idiots do.
So lets build a safer car. The technology is there. The typical accidents which happen due to reduced attention (like changing lanes unintentionally, not reacting to bearking light of the car in front or a pedestrian entering the road) can be addressed well by existing off-the-shelf technology. Right now these things (radar, automatic breaking) are sold in premium cars. The reason for this is not because these are so expensive to built, but because its is the best strategy for carmakers to first milk the high-end segment (with nearly arbitrary earnings/revenue) and then turn to the rest of the market.
However, if you make things mandatory for all new cars, then the price for the new car goes up by a few hundred bucks, but the insurance will go down.
As and extreme measure the car could reduce the maximum speed automaticlly once it detects that the driver is using a mobile phone or, in general, not looking at the road. Tracking eye movements is well proven technology.
How else should I programmatically access ms office from decent languages?
Science runs out of things to discover all the time. The last big point when everybody thought that now "everything is understood" was in the middle of the 19th century. Mathematics was developed enough to descibe that classical non-relativistic point-mechanics world well enough. Everything seemed fine.
Then came relativity and quantum mechanics, and in the wave understanding all these phenomena there was an time when the theories could be used verified (with the "low hanging fruit" first). Fact is, building technology from a theory is the last step in using the theory. This step happens now for QM with the coherent of single quantum controls. Only when you have such technology, you can actually test the limits. I should remind here that, at the time of implementation the Michelson-Morely experiment was absolutely state of the art, using all understanding in the design and the newest technology.
Now we are at a similar point. We need extremly complicate technology (Quantum Computer, Gravitational wave detectors) to bring the experiments to the limits. Absolutely nobody nowadays can tell if QC will work (i am a former QC researcher). If the interpolation between the "macroscopic/collective" Quantumphenomena and the few quantum entangled systems indeed will exist is something which we expect, but it is an *unproven Hypothesis*, a test of a theory in limit which was never tested before.
Maybe everything works out according to theory, but possibly not. The same is true for Gravitation.
it makes it even believable that the NSA "accidentally" records all infromation which it "accidentally" acquired. You know, in times when even google "accidentally" turns on the microphone and a security library has "accidentally" simple checks deactivated, you know they just "accicentally" forgot the "SELECT" statement.