Re:Litany of the Long Sun
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
I liked what I have read in the past by Gene Wolfe...guess it's time to dig up some more stuff!
I'll take a look at that, thanks!
ttyl
Farrell
Re:Halfway through the book, and ...
on
Anathem
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I found the first quarter of the book a little slow...but after that, I couldn't read it fast enough to keep up. I obsessed about the book and ended up getting the audio book as well so I could listen to it in the car to and from work!
It is an epic book, and it is a memetic masterpiece, since many people are big fans of this book have slowly been infiltrating it's words into the english language...
Ok, let's put it this way. *I* was a special needs kid, and didn't get the help I needed in school. It is only with the fact that computers and editing/spelling correction software has become easy to get that it has enabled me to become fully literate. Even today, the cruelest you can ask me to do is fill out a form by hand. Do you have any idea, mr or mrs. doom what it is like to write a paper that gets an "A" for quality, and because of the spelling mistakes, ends up with an "F"? Even if I used a dictionary?!?!?!
The way you judge a civilization is by how they treat their needy, and disadvantaged...and the US is has slipped very far down the scale so that even places like Cuba have a better educated populace than the US does. Hopefully, with Obama as Prez, and a Democratic majority in both Houses, some progressive changes can be made.
And anything to throw out the "No Child Left Behind" system!
It creates a situation where special needs kids are being pushed out of the publish school systems because the act has no accommodation for them, and thus they drag down the scores for schools and schoolboards. So they don't loose their funding, schools only provide the minimal of what the law requires of them, and the kids suffer unless their parents can afford to put them into private schools. It's cruel!
Unfortunately, that is true. Which is why Bruce is saying that Quantum Crypto is kind of useless. It's neat, but really geeky, but doesn't make it any more secure.
The problem is, no matter how good your security is, be it traditional or quantum, people are *always* the weakest link. It is always much easier to compromise a person than a machine. Talk to any of the great computer crackers and they will tell you that they got into more systems using "social engineering" than through their computer skills.
Well, they may have all crashed, but we have had the better part of a century of aircraft engineering since then. Add to that, Helium is no longer a strategic gas, and thus rationed.
I also switched to Teksavvy, great transfer rates and they are great people! But Ma Bell, that cheap mother, now throttles Teksavvy, and if I need to snarf the latest Blue-White Linux (love my Slackware!), between 8 pm and 2 am, I get downloads of about 30 kps, I might as well be using dialup! Hope the CRTC really wrings them out!
With the new law, it is going to be illegal to bypass any "digital" locks that a content creator/publisher puts on their work.
One of these systems that is used by some Record companies prevents you from coping a CD on a Microsoft Windows machine. The way that it works is that it automatically loads up a program when you put the CD into the computer that prevents the transfering of CD's music to either your computer or Ipod. This is known as Digitial Rights Managment or Copy Protection.
But what if you a Mac, or a Linux machine?
As the software that is automatically loaded from the CD to prevent you copying only works under Microsoft Window, it would thus be illegal to put that CD into your Mac, as it would be a "circumvention of the copy protection" on the CD.
There is not Goddess But Eris, and Murphy is Her Consort!
HAIL ERIS! ALL HAIL DISCORDIA!
The Law of Fives:
The Law of Fives is one of the oldest Erisian Mysterees. It was first revealed to Good Lord Omar and is one of the great contributions to come from The Hidden Temple of The Happy Jesus.
POEE subscribes to the Law of Fives of Omar's sect. And POEE also recognizes the holy 23 (2+3=5) that is incorporated by Episkopos Dr. Mordecai Malignatus, KNS, into his Discordian sect, The Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria.
The Law of Fives states simply that: ALL THINGS HAPPEN IN FIVES, OR ARE DIVISIBLE BY OR ARE MULTIPLES OF FIVE, OR ARE SOMEHOW DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY APPROPRIATE TO 5.
If your email is david.jones@company.com, that's a personal address. Or to put it another way...you rent your apartment, Apt 523 at 2300 Wilson Way. Illuminated Reality owns the building, not you. By your reasoning, Illuminated should be able to read my mail. I don't think that is how the privacy laws work in Canada, although it probably does work that way in the US.
The fact that the "Land of the Free" has less privacy than their northern neighbor is remarked upon many times.
Some countries, like Canada, treat email like paper mail, and you need a court order to read an employee's email. If you can't trust someone, don't employ them!
I built a custom distro, MfxLinux, based upon Slackware, so I have rooted around the innards of it, so think I can give you a much better answer...
Yes, a lot of a distro is the packages and release engineering...but a huge portion is making sure that everything works together, that all the libraries a program needs are installed, that if those libraries need other libraries or utilities that they are installed as well. It's also making sure that everything is working OK with the versions of libraries, compilers and utilities that are installed. Add to that testing everything with the kernel version. This is the real heart and main work of a distro builder.
This is the real core of an operating system, and it is something that Patrick Volkerding and company do very , very well.
I've been saying for years: More computer security is notbetter computer security!
Most security can sometimes even lead to less security! A system that is too hard to access because of it's security will eventually be bypassed by the normal users, leaving you with a bigger security hole is one example of this. Customers who put three different firewall programs on their computer, plus the one on their router is another example.
The other thing missing is a Time Base Corrector, or TBC...it compensates for the slippage there always is in a mechanical transfer of data from a magnetic media, and helical scan heads introduces erros. a TBC essentially is a huge buffer that waits for the whole frame to be collected from the source, and then passed along to the recording source.
Anyone know of a cheap TBC, or software that will do the same job?
As the questions to the Good General noted, there is always a balancing act between ease of access/use and security. I can see why the he sort of dodged the question, as tell us what they are doing about it would be giving away some operational security!
One good thing about having so many players in the market monitoring security is that when something does happen, we will have corroborating evidence from multiple agencies. And that will make figuring out the source a whole lot easier.
I've been doing email admin for a couple of decades now...I started off running a Fidonet system, and have managed email servers for Fortune 500 companies. I don't use Exchange. After Opus and Maximus, all of the mail servers I have worked on were Unix. And under Unix, even with the beast that is Sendmail, it is *easy* to make a complete duplicate of all email going through a server. And as the emails are stored as text files, you are really only limited by the size of your file system's maximum file size. Archive those files monthly, and you won't see any performance degradation. Use a file system that uses compression, and run RAID 01, and you could probably go for a year, depending on the system speed, and mail volume.
Such an archive email server could easily run in front of the exchange server, and be transparent to it.
Is the US government so clueless? Or did they do what they did on purpose?
But what about all those poor souls who are using cavemen to beat rocks together to make 0's and 1's for today's legacy systems?!?!?! THINK OF THE CAVEMEN!
ttyl
Farrell...this is not a commercial for Geico...although I would love to see the Geico Cavemen eat the Geico Gecko!
Slashdot Mirror
I liked what I have read in the past by Gene Wolfe...guess it's time to dig up some more stuff!
I'll take a look at that, thanks!
ttyl
Farrell
I found the first quarter of the book a little slow...but after that, I couldn't read it fast enough to keep up. I obsessed about the book and ended up getting the audio book as well so I could listen to it in the car to and from work!
It is an epic book, and it is a memetic masterpiece, since many people are big fans of this book have slowly been infiltrating it's words into the english language...
Don't overlook the Anathem WIKI at http://anathem.wikia.com/wiki/Anathem_Wiki
And if you like the music, you can get it via Neal's site: http://www.nealstephenson.com/anathem/music.htm
ttyl
Farrell
Ok, let's put it this way. *I* was a special needs kid, and didn't get the help I needed in school. It is only with the fact that computers and editing/spelling correction software has become easy to get that it has enabled me to become fully literate. Even today, the cruelest you can ask me to do is fill out a form by hand. Do you have any idea, mr or mrs. doom what it is like to write a paper that gets an "A" for quality, and because of the spelling mistakes, ends up with an "F"? Even if I used a dictionary?!?!?!
The way you judge a civilization is by how they treat their needy, and disadvantaged...and the US is has slipped very far down the scale so that even places like Cuba have a better educated populace than the US does. Hopefully, with Obama as Prez, and a Democratic majority in both Houses, some progressive changes can be made.
ttyl
Farrell
And anything to throw out the "No Child Left Behind" system!
It creates a situation where special needs kids are being pushed out of the publish school systems because the act has no accommodation for them, and thus they drag down the scores for schools and schoolboards. So they don't loose their funding, schools only provide the minimal of what the law requires of them, and the kids suffer unless their parents can afford to put them into private schools. It's cruel!
ttyl
Farrell
Unfortunately, that is true. Which is why Bruce is saying that Quantum Crypto is kind of useless. It's neat, but really geeky, but doesn't make it any more secure.
ttyl
Farrell
The problem is, no matter how good your security is, be it traditional or quantum, people are *always* the weakest link. It is always much easier to compromise a person than a machine. Talk to any of the great computer crackers and they will tell you that they got into more systems using "social engineering" than through their computer skills.
ttyl
Farrell
Sounds like another manifestation of ACTA...see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
ttyl
Farrell
Well, they may have all crashed, but we have had the better part of a century of aircraft engineering since then. Add to that, Helium is no longer a strategic gas, and thus rationed.
I also switched to Teksavvy, great transfer rates and they are great people! But Ma Bell, that cheap mother, now throttles Teksavvy, and if I need to snarf the latest Blue-White Linux (love my Slackware!), between 8 pm and 2 am, I get downloads of about 30 kps, I might as well be using dialup! Hope the CRTC really wrings them out!
ttyl
Farrell
Would become criminals under the new law...
With the new law, it is going to be illegal to bypass any "digital" locks
that a content creator/publisher puts on their work.
One of these systems that is used by some Record companies prevents you from
coping a CD on a Microsoft Windows machine. The way that it works is that it
automatically loads up a program when you put the CD into the computer that
prevents the transfering of CD's music to either your computer or Ipod. This
is known as Digitial Rights Managment or Copy Protection.
But what if you a Mac, or a Linux machine?
As the software that is automatically loaded from the CD to prevent you
copying only works under Microsoft Window, it would thus be illegal to put
that CD into your Mac, as it would be a "circumvention of the copy
protection" on the CD.
This law is stooopid!
ttyl
Farrell
There is not Goddess But Eris, and Murphy is Her Consort!
HAIL ERIS! ALL HAIL DISCORDIA!
The Law of Fives:
The Law of Fives is one of the oldest Erisian Mysterees. It was first revealed to Good Lord Omar and is one of the great contributions to come from The Hidden Temple of The Happy Jesus.
POEE subscribes to the Law of Fives of Omar's sect. And POEE also recognizes the holy 23 (2+3=5) that is incorporated by Episkopos Dr. Mordecai Malignatus, KNS, into his Discordian sect, The Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria.
The Law of Fives states simply that:
ALL THINGS HAPPEN IN FIVES, OR ARE DIVISIBLE BY OR ARE MULTIPLES OF FIVE, OR ARE SOMEHOW DIRECTLY OR INDIRECTLY APPROPRIATE TO 5.
The Law of Fives is never wrong.
fnord
Ahh...ASUS makes some of Dell's desktop Motherboards.
Another company whose name escapes me makes laptops/notebooks for both HP *and* Dell.
There are only a half dozen manufacturers of laptops/notebooks in the world today.
ttyl
Farrell
As Enron found out, just because they can do it doesn't mean it right or legal.
ttyl
Farrell
If your email is david.jones@company.com, that's a personal address. Or to put it another way...you rent your apartment, Apt 523 at 2300 Wilson Way. Illuminated Reality owns the building, not you. By your reasoning, Illuminated should be able to read my mail. I don't think that is how the privacy laws work in Canada, although it probably does work that way in the US.
The fact that the "Land of the Free" has less privacy than their northern neighbor is remarked upon many times.
ttyl
Farrell
Why do you ASSume that all employees are liars? And all companies' AUP prohibits personal emails?
Besides, all Postal systems I know of are government subsidized monopolies, US, Canada, etc.
ttyl
Farrell
Some countries, like Canada, treat email like paper mail, and you need a court order to read an employee's email. If you can't trust someone, don't employ them!
ttyl
Farrell
I built a custom distro, MfxLinux, based upon Slackware, so I have rooted around the innards of it, so think I can give you a much better answer...
Yes, a lot of a distro is the packages and release engineering...but a huge portion is making sure that everything works together, that all the libraries a program needs are installed, that if those libraries need other libraries or utilities that they are installed as well. It's also making sure that everything is working OK with the versions of libraries, compilers and utilities that are installed. Add to that testing everything with the kernel version. This is the real heart and main work of a distro builder.
This is the real core of an operating system, and it is something that Patrick Volkerding and company do very , very well.
ttyl
Farrell, architect of MfxLinux
I've been saying for years: More computer security is not better computer security!
Most security can sometimes even lead to less security! A system that is too hard to access because of it's security will eventually be bypassed by the normal users, leaving you with a bigger security hole is one example of this. Customers who put three different firewall programs on their computer, plus the one on their router is another example.
ttyl
Farrell
The other thing missing is a Time Base Corrector, or TBC...it compensates for the slippage there always is in a mechanical transfer of data from a magnetic media, and helical scan heads introduces erros. a TBC essentially is a huge buffer that waits for the whole frame to be collected from the source, and then passed along to the recording source.
Anyone know of a cheap TBC, or software that will do the same job?
ttyl
Farrell
You have been eating and watching* too much Canadian Bacon!
ttyl
Farrell
* http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109370/
Security is not a destination, it is a process.
As the questions to the Good General noted, there is always a balancing act between ease of access/use and security. I can see why the he sort of dodged the question, as tell us what they are doing about it would be giving away some operational security!
One good thing about having so many players in the market monitoring security is that when something does happen, we will have corroborating evidence from multiple agencies. And that will make figuring out the source a whole lot easier.
ttyl
Farrell
I've been doing email admin for a couple of decades now...I started off running a Fidonet system, and have managed email servers for Fortune 500 companies. I don't use Exchange. After Opus and Maximus, all of the mail servers I have worked on were Unix. And under Unix, even with the beast that is Sendmail, it is *easy* to make a complete duplicate of all email going through a server. And as the emails are stored as text files, you are really only limited by the size of your file system's maximum file size. Archive those files monthly, and you won't see any performance degradation. Use a file system that uses compression, and run RAID 01, and you could probably go for a year, depending on the system speed, and mail volume.
Such an archive email server could easily run in front of the exchange server, and be transparent to it.
Is the US government so clueless? Or did they do what they did on purpose?
ttyl
Farrell
And she doesn't look a day over 5 billion....
ttyl
Farrell
But what about all those poor souls who are using cavemen to beat rocks together to make 0's and 1's for today's legacy systems?!?!?! THINK OF THE CAVEMEN!
...this is not a commercial for Geico...although I would love to see the Geico Cavemen eat the Geico Gecko!
ttyl
Farrell
Can we say "Embrace, extend and extinguish", by proxy? I knew you could!
ttyl
Farrell