Additionally, in the not too distant future,
off-the-shelf quantum computers will be able to make short work of 1024+.
I don't believe this. When you put a quantum computer on a shelf, you never know what part of the shelf it is liable to move to, or even a different shelf entirely.
It continues to astonish me how insane M@cros#fts behavior is. Between their attacks on open source use, and their aggressive harassment of schools, it seems as if they are trying to force as many organizations as possible to use Linux. I think that it is not an exaggeration to say that they are the biggest evangelist for Linux today. I don't blame any company for wanting to sell their software, but their tactics are so over the top that it appears that they want the outcome of people switching to open source because they can't stand the abuse. If/. readers had predicted behavior like this two years ago, people would just have laughed at them. Between highlighting the security problems in their software by starting the debate on relative quality and security, and imposing audits on numerous school districts throughout the country, it is difficult to see how they could possibly think that this behavior is going to help them.
I would criticize the point in that article where they said that a well-chosen 8 digit password would still take 13 years to crack on average on a Pentium 4. An 8 digit password chosen from the 95 printable ASCII characters is about equivalent to a 52 bit key. It is well known that the 56bit DES key can be broken within a few minutes on machines that are not prohibitively expensive to build. Assuming that people are only going to try to crack passwords on a Pentium 4 is somewhat naive and misleading. Many people have access to fast machines at work or at school, especially if only a few minutes of access are needed.
Also, I have a pet peeve about forcing people to change their passwords. I worked at a place that required you to change your password every 2 weeks. I finally started writing it down on stickies even though I know that is wrong, because there is no way that I could keep up with that. Forcing a password change every 6 months might be reasonable. Forcing frequent password changes is just idiotic.
This is not meant as flamebait, but javadoc works pretty well for Java. I don't know what software is out there to do something similar, but this style of documentation has been talked about at least since Donald Knuths web and weave in the 1980's.
In case you are not familiar with it, javadoc produces a collection of html files automatically from structured comments within Java. It is a pretty good first pass for documenting code. I am sure that there must be some open source programs that will do the same thing for C++.
It locked up my Netscape browser the first time that I tried, but it worked the second time. Anyway, they think that my name is I.P. Freely, so what's the big deal?
Re:I Cancelled My Earthlink Account
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 1
I Cancelled My Earthlink Account...in all of about five minutes.
I called the Earthlink number, and the recorded message said that the wait would be at least 20 minutes. I don't know how you cancelled in five minutes. It only took me three minutes to cancel my credit card though. That got me faster service.
Yes, go to college. Take some English classes, and meet women. There will probably be opportunities for you to get work-study sysadmin jobs at the University, and get some hands on experience while you are taking classes. Learn about hardware and software in addition to the minimum narrow set of skills that a sysadmin needs. You will also have the time to learn different things, and decide what you really want to do.
I was a psychology major as an undergraduate, and have been a software developer for the last 13 years. I still learned a lot of good stuff in college, even if it isn't relevant to my current occupation.
I don't think that the articles were meant to be a simplistic all-or-nothing debate about freedom of information. The simple fact is that as long as most of the people in the world are poor and ignorant, the Internet is not going to be a positive force in their lives. Pointing out the dark side of the Internet would not lead any reasonable person to try to outlaw it.
There is an information divide in the world, and it is in the interests of all of us to try to find a way to cross it. This is not a matter of liberal do-gooding, it is a matter of survival.
The N'Sync of Science Fiction are the big studio movies being churned out; big on special effects but very small on thought. Like any serious fictional medium, the best work is not going to make the bestseller list. The endless Star Trek and Star Wars related books will remain at the top of the Science Fiction bestseller list. People that are interested in the good stuff will continue to look at the Nebula/Hugo lists, as well as other sources that are not worth the time of the media giants. This is a reflection of our society. If a few percent of people read serious science fiction, that is still a lot of people. A great many science fiction authors are able to make a living. Getting onto some generic list isn't really going to have much effect on this.
The reason for this is that you can't just become a doctor, or a lawyer, or a teacher. But anyone can read some computer books, buy a computer, and become a programmer.
I don't know that professional programmers, those with either a university degree or those who have a significant amount of work experience, have any less ethics than any other profession. If you widen the definition of programmer to include script kiddies, self-taught high school students, etc, then it is not very surprising if there is not a strong sense of professional responsibility.
A professional society analogous to the AMA for software engineers with a professional code of conduct would not necessarily be a good thing. For one thing, it would keep all of those self-educated people who become professional programmers through hard work out. There is a reason why a visit to the doctor costs so much.
It seems to me that corporations would benefit equally from all the advantages that governments would get. Also, without getting into a flame war, running Solaris, or another proprietary version of UNIX is a LOT better than running M@crosoft products because they interoperate well with Linux, BSD, etc.
I was at a telecomm company in Denver currently heading for bankruptcy, and one day (Friday evening at 6:30), my group was told that we weren't working hard enough and would have to start working from 7 to 7 until further notice. I just sent an email back refusing, and offering to resign if they had a problem with it. They did not ask me to resign, but my group got laid off four days later. They may be encouraging people to quit so that they have less severance packages to hand out. The bottom line, at least in Colorado, is that they can change salary, working hours, etc within very broad limits, and there isn't anything that you can do about it legally. The only people with contracts protecting them are executives in upper management.
One scary thought; builders of bridges, buildings, or whatever could incorporate these, and then have any easy way of commiting terrorist acts in the future. One more happy thought to keep in mind.
Hey, http://www.wehavethewayout.com is up now.
It was also up sometime last week. That's pretty impressive, considering that the host machine had its operating system removed.
Technically, Windows is not an operating system.
It is a virus.
I liked the soft sculpture they used to have of an old man sitting in a chair reading. I think that the problem was that you sometimes had real old people sitting in chairs reading that were mistaken for soft sculptures. In any case, they are very nice bookstores. Check them out if you ever come to Denver.
Connect the car and the world with TCP/IP? If these engineers can't imagine that anyone would want to hack their own system, what about other peoples systems? Does the car have a static ip address? How long do you think it will be before cars are moving without anyone stepping on the gas?
This would be similar to using a one-way hash function such as SHA-1, and just passing a seed,
which could be as small as a few hundred characters of text (or 20 bytes of truly random data). This method would be reasonably secure, as long as huge amounts of information aren't sent without reseeding occasionally. But it is definitely NOT a one-tine pad.
I have heard stories of gangs in various Asian countries stealing diamond rings by cutting off peoples fingers. I am not sure that this is going to stop an abductor from removing the watch if they really want to.
I have had numerous problems with Konqueror,
at least the version that came with RH 7.1.
I am going to download Mozilla. I hope that
is better than just excellent like Konqueror.
Slashdot Mirror
Can personal cubicles be far behind?
(That's a cardboard box over your head for non-Dilbert fans)
It continues to astonish me how insane M@cros#fts behavior is. Between their attacks on open source use, and their aggressive harassment of schools, it seems as if they are trying to force as many organizations as possible to use Linux. I think that it is not an exaggeration to say that they are the biggest evangelist for Linux today. I don't blame any company for wanting to sell their software, but their tactics are so over the top that it appears that they want the outcome of people switching to open source because they can't stand the abuse. If /. readers had predicted behavior like this two years ago, people would just have laughed at them. Between highlighting the security problems in their software by starting the debate on relative quality and security, and imposing audits on numerous school districts throughout the country, it is difficult to see how they could possibly think that this behavior is going to help them.
I believe that M@crosoft has implemented its own CMM model, but it is not compatible with the SEI one.
Also, I have a pet peeve about forcing people to change their passwords. I worked at a place that required you to change your password every 2 weeks. I finally started writing it down on stickies even though I know that is wrong, because there is no way that I could keep up with that. Forcing a password change every 6 months might be reasonable. Forcing frequent password changes is just idiotic.
In case you are not familiar with it, javadoc produces a collection of html files automatically from structured comments within Java. It is a pretty good first pass for documenting code. I am sure that there must be some open source programs that will do the same thing for C++.
It locked up my Netscape browser the first time that I tried, but it worked the second time. Anyway, they think that my name is I.P. Freely, so what's the big deal?
I called the Earthlink number, and the recorded message said that the wait would be at least 20 minutes. I don't know how you cancelled in five minutes. It only took me three minutes to cancel my credit card though. That got me faster service.
I was a psychology major as an undergraduate, and have been a software developer for the last 13 years. I still learned a lot of good stuff in college, even if it isn't relevant to my current occupation.
There is an information divide in the world, and it is in the interests of all of us to try to find a way to cross it. This is not a matter of liberal do-gooding, it is a matter of survival.
The N'Sync of Science Fiction are the big studio movies being churned out; big on special effects but very small on thought. Like any serious fictional medium, the best work is not going to make the bestseller list. The endless Star Trek and Star Wars related books will remain at the top of the Science Fiction bestseller list. People that are interested in the good stuff will continue to look at the Nebula/Hugo lists, as well as other sources that are not worth the time of the media giants. This is a reflection of our society. If a few percent of people read serious science fiction, that is still a lot of people. A great many science fiction authors are able to make a living. Getting onto some generic list isn't really going to have much effect on this.
Of course, Ender's Game was first published 20 years after Dune.
I don't know that professional programmers, those with either a university degree or those who have a significant amount of work experience, have any less ethics than any other profession. If you widen the definition of programmer to include script kiddies, self-taught high school students, etc, then it is not very surprising if there is not a strong sense of professional responsibility.
A professional society analogous to the AMA for software engineers with a professional code of conduct would not necessarily be a good thing. For one thing, it would keep all of those self-educated people who become professional programmers through hard work out. There is a reason why a visit to the doctor costs so much.
It seems to me that corporations would benefit equally from all the advantages that governments would get. Also, without getting into a flame war, running Solaris, or another proprietary version of UNIX is a LOT better than running M@crosoft products because they interoperate well with Linux, BSD, etc.
I was at a telecomm company in Denver currently heading for bankruptcy, and one day (Friday evening at 6:30), my group was told that we weren't working hard enough and would have to start working from 7 to 7 until further notice. I just sent an email back refusing, and offering to resign if they had a problem with it. They did not ask me to resign, but my group got laid off four days later. They may be encouraging people to quit so that they have less severance packages to hand out. The bottom line, at least in Colorado, is that they can change salary, working hours, etc within very broad limits, and there isn't anything that you can do about it legally. The only people with contracts protecting them are executives in upper management.
One scary thought; builders of bridges, buildings, or whatever could incorporate these, and then have any easy way of commiting terrorist acts in the future. One more happy thought to keep in mind.
I am pretty sure. This means that anyone that installs Linux on a Windows machine (unless they make it a dual boot) is breaking the law.
Hey, http://www.wehavethewayout.com is up now. It was also up sometime last week. That's pretty impressive, considering that the host machine had its operating system removed.
Technically, Windows is not an operating system. It is a virus.
I liked the soft sculpture they used to have of an old man sitting in a chair reading. I think that the problem was that you sometimes had real old people sitting in chairs reading that were mistaken for soft sculptures. In any case, they are very nice bookstores. Check them out if you ever come to Denver.
Connect the car and the world with TCP/IP?
If these engineers can't imagine that anyone would want to hack their own system, what about other peoples systems? Does the car have a static ip address? How long do you think it will be before cars are moving without anyone stepping on the gas?
Some poor loser who just can't earn enough karma points will be next.
This would be similar to using a one-way hash function such as SHA-1, and just passing a seed, which could be as small as a few hundred characters of text (or 20 bytes of truly random data). This method would be reasonably secure, as long as huge amounts of information aren't sent without reseeding occasionally. But it is definitely NOT a one-tine pad.
I have heard stories of gangs in various Asian countries stealing diamond rings by cutting off peoples fingers. I am not sure that this is going to stop an abductor from removing the watch if they really want to.
All that is missing is the feature where the kid gets a zap whenever he moves out of his allowed area.
I have had numerous problems with Konqueror, at least the version that came with RH 7.1. I am going to download Mozilla. I hope that is better than just excellent like Konqueror.