Have you ever had a large oak tree in your yard? There's just no way of mulching all the leaves to the point it won't choke the lawn.
I have 4 relatively large trees and one small one and get leaves from neighbors yards as well all in my very small yard. I get a lot of leaves. The first year in the house I bagged them I got something like 20-30 bags of leaves. I quickly realized it made sense to just buy a power lawnmower and mulch it all (I normally use a reel mower). You have to go over the leaves multiple times with the lawnmower, and repeat the process over a few weeks as more leaves fall. Still, this is far easier than raking.
It works very well, and the leaves are all decomposed by spring. You can mulch an enormous amount of leaves with just a regular lawnmower. Just make sure they're relatively dry and they mostly disappear into finely ground mulch after a pass or two beneath the mower. Leaf and branch collection is also free in my city, though I never use it. The branches are wonderful to collect and burn in a firepit in the fall.
Sounds like you want more of a tutorial in the style of K\&R, rather than a reference book like this.
For the most part, yes. The hard part about learning anything new is the general concepts, not the excruciating detail. I find too often that authors (and instructors) are far too convinced they have to cover every aspect of something, as if the learning stops when you finish the book.
I've never really understood the practice of bagging up your lawn clippings, or raking up your leaves and throwing them in bags as if it was all waste products to be disposed of. Mulching everything with a mulching lawnmower is less effort, better for your yard, and better for the city since it saves money in collection costs.
Leaves in particular once ground up are wonderful soil amendments for a garden. They're not particularly high in nutrients, but when the leaves break down, they turn into hummus, which both retains moisture, and improves drainage.
I hate books that are this long on a single subject. Most of the time I find books over 400 pages to be mostly filler material which I wind up having to wade through to get to the real content.
Technical books are ordinarily very dry and tedious, and reading them is often a chore. So as to avoid prying my eyes off each page with a spatula, I find it especially important for authors of technical books to put up an effort to be brief rather than cover every single conceivable aspect of something.
I read through the entire article, and saw zero data to support his assertion. I'm sure he has the data, but the article didn't reference a single piece of it. Without any data to support the theory all we have is a fluff opinion piece. Shame on Data Center Knowledge for writing an article about a scientific investigation, and not presenting a single piece of scientific evidence.
I've always wondered why our software is so crap. Is it the constant hunt for features, vs. usability, security, stability. Is it laziness. Maybe lack of motivation. Could be all of them.... (btw. I'm working for a major software house. Biggest kid on the block)
So you work for Microsoft. I can tell you why your software sucks. I can tell you in one word. Monopoly. One former Microsoft guy explained it to me like this: Microsoft makes most of its money off of corporate package deals. You pay Microsoft one big fee, and get access to all the software it produces. The fee itself is far lower than buying even the big packages that everyone already needs. So Microsoft can sit back and make really shitty software that mostly sucks, but "works" since there's essentially no financial incentive for the customer to go and try some other package.
So no, it has nothing to do with developers, and everything to do with the choices Steve Balmer and crew have made. They've managed to create a culture of mediocrity where there's little incentive to create good software.
You're kind of right, it does have something to do with laziness and lack of motivation. But that lack of motivation comes from the top, not trickles up from the bottom.
You denounce the "Cost centre" concept then speak of a feedback loop between consumer and provider based on cost. Like most management philosophies I am sure a number of businesses magnify its principles until nothing exists but the bean-counting. However, the basic concept is sound.
Two completely different concepts. I'm railing against the idea espoused by the OP, who thinks that "I generate the profits for this business". Bullshit. No department operates in a vacuum. The guy who "generates the profits for the business" is only one part of the machine that does so. Without the rest of it, he'd just be a yahoo that couldn't do anything.
The point being, cost center and profit center are merely tools. They're a certain perspective that answers some narrow range of questions, but they aren't reality itself. Too many people get caught up in their own little box and don't understand there's anything outside it.
Absolutely. This is in fact one of the big problems of people relating to the "IT Department". It's assumed by many everyone in IT is some large collection of the same people, even though the disciplines are very different from one another. Understanding what people do is part of being a professional, and all to often IT is treated as a job title.
Are you suggesting that computers are more complex than airplanes?
I don't know exactly what you mean by "computers" (the term is so generic as to be meaningless), but I'd very easily say that the computing eco-system of an average business is orders of magnitude more complex than an airplane. I expect the IT department to be able to fix it out without reinstalling Windows. If they can't, then I think I'm justified in criticizing them.
Spoken by someone who's obviously never done a lot of support of Windows, computing, or how Microsoft operates in general. I'm not sure if you're trolling here or not, but assuming you're serious, then it shows you're profoundly ignorant of the complexity involved.
Also, I'm sure given enough time, money, and resources someone COULD fix your PC without reinstalling windows, a large part of the time it's idiotic to do so because a reinstall saves everyone time and money. Your question is like saying to a mechanic "Why can't you guys fix my seized engine without replacing the thing? I heard of my buddy who bored out new cylinders, re-constituted the seals, and fixed all the valves by hand!"
the short history that computers exist we've made them too simple so that the average person thinks it's not complicated to keep those things running correctly
I think I agree with you, but it takes more explanation than simply making computers too simple. One of the challenges of computing is taking a pre-existing population that has little or no experience with computers and information technology and getting them to the point of being able to manipulate complex systems. We've tried to make very complicated processes simple, while not expecting the user to learn much in the process other than "click on this magic icon to do task-Y'. This may be the only way forward, with such a large existing population that never grew up with any sort of computing technology.
I'm really quite convinced that if users had more sophisticated approaches to computers, and were willing to learn the simplest of scripting techniques, or more sophisticated views of data than simply an Excel spreadsheet, many of them could blow multiply their productivity by 10, maybe 100 times. It's as if we're giving people calculators to add up numbers, but never teaching them the basics of what addition, or multiplication are. The problem, however is that the next generation will grow up with all the nifty "click x and get what you want" approach to computing, and get into the same trap as their parents did. If we spent as much time teaching about information technology as we did on Algebra, think about how much more productive the next generation could be.
My job generated the revenue that pays for IT jobs.
This is exactly the wrong way to think of how a company operates. There's no one job that generates revenue, and others than consume it. The bullshit "cost center" approach to managing a business is like drawing some arbitrary circles around your business to attempt to get a handle on one aspect of it, and then forgetting why you picked those circles in the first place, and applying them to an entirely different problem. But IT thinks they have the authority to tell me how to do my job (i.e. what equipment to use, how I use my computer, what programs I can run, what websites I can visit, etc...).
Perhaps that's because everything you just mentioned has a cost associated with it to support, which is on the IT department budget? This idea that you have that you're the king, and everyone bows down to you is nonsensical. A business exists to make money. To do that you need to run efficiently, which can't be done unless there's some sort of feedback loop between the people who consume the resources, and those that bear the cost of it. That doesn't mean that it has to be this hard set of rules to accomplish that, but it does mean giving up some control over how you accomplish tasks. Resources aren't infinite.
In short, in all but the most specialized applications it's better to just get a regular chip.
If by "specialised" you mean new, I'd agree with you. I'm sure people said the exact same thing when the CPU first was created, but nobody would consider a CPU specialised any more. What's specialised now could easily become the largest number of chips produced very quickly.
If this technology pans out as described, these little chips aren't going to replace silicon chips, they'll be used for applications where a silicon chip is either impractical because of expense, or too fragile. Silicon chips have been around far too long and developed far too much for anything to directly replace them.
Who the hell does intrusion detection by (simply) analyzing network traffic and port scanning? Here's a line from a log file in a certain machine I have access to:
Maybe the same idiots who put a SCADA system accessible over the internet?
The truth is we have no idea where the alleged "russian IP address" came from. You making up an SSH log is pure bullshit. Was it an intrusion detection system, or was it a firewall log? Nobody is saying. The OP seemed to think this was very simple, with an IP address somehow being a definitive answer to whether the system was broken into, and the breaking being definitive evidence of the pump being caused by the alleged breakin.
My advice would be to stop making things up, and rely on actual facts. There's almost none of those now, so you can say just about anything and get away with it. The facts are the the FBI has said the claims the machine was hacked is utter bullshit.
My money is on the idiots who who thought it was a good idea to put a SCADA system for a public water supply on the internet aren't exactly the people you want conducting a security investigation. I don't exactly trust the FBI, but they're not really known to back away from high profile cases and claim there wasn't any crime. If you want evidence of the FBI being over-zealous in trying to find crimes where non occurred, just ask Steve Kurtz
Exactly. Paper doesn't scale, and obviously is difficult to machine scan. But the point is all you need to do is send log files to an indelible medium. Paper is just the simplest one to understand. The electronic equivalent would be something like a WORM drive, or optical non-RW drive. I'm sure there's other examples that exist.
Either there is or there isn’t a Russian IP address in there. It’s hard to miss that.
An ip address is some unnamed log file that someone says is Russian tells you exactly nothing about whether a system was compromised. Was that just somebody running a scan near the same time the pump broke, or did you just get 0wned? A simple log file of network traffic won't tell you that. Anyone who's ever looked at network log files knows there's scans of your IP addresses going on constantly. In any forensic investigation it's rarely or never really a series of black and white. It's always open to interpretation.
It sounds like you don't exactly know where your problems are, so how can you solve them?
My advice would be to do some serious analysis of what's going on in your network. Hook up an ethernet sniffer to your internet connection and see what's going wrong. You suspect it's a lot of retransmissions do to the DSL, well find out if that's true. Consider buying a cheap spectrum analyzer (wi-spy can be had for under $100). Track when you get problems, and where. Throwing money and equipment at the problem is more likely to waste money and equipment than solve the problem. Since you're retired, it sounds like you're more short on money and equipment than you are on time to analyse and diagnose the problem.
Once you actually know what the problem is, then you can go out to the wireless community and ask for a solution. K You're seeing a lot of very, very different solutions here because people are guessing what the underlying problem is, largely based on what's worked for them. Obviously you can't follow all of them, but which one should you try? Knowledge is power, and ignorance is folly.
Ok, now explain why this problem seems to actually be more common among high-IQ types than it is in the general population.
I don't know if it is or not, but assume for the moment it is. Some speculation:
Smart people tend to know more words, and thus have a higher investment in their own definition of them. Smart people get really good at arguing about things, and are thus harder to convince of anything outside their belief system. (Getting really good at fooling oneself). Smart people are just more willing to argue about the subject, while dumber people will just nod and go back to doing whatever they were doing. (Thus it's just easier to identify a smart person who has this belief).
why does everyone have such a hard time with this?
Because there's a significant population of Slashdot that thinks words are things with single, hard definitions that never change and must conform to what they learned in science class.
For those of us that can see the box as a box, it's not that hard. For people stuck inside the box, they'll insist everyone else get inside their little box.
This article should never have been posted. There's no facts to respond to. Linking to a wikipedia article that talks about the possibility of Quantum computing is not a topic for discussion. Where does the estimate of 20 years come from? What will Quantum computing be able to do in this imagined 20 years? How much will it cost?
Unless the submitter can give real answers to the above question, based on facts and not idle speculation, there's nothing to talk about.
Even in the name- they are "virtual" because they are just mathematical abstractions. nothing more.
Except the effects of virtual particles are observable. Hawking radiation, and small black holes boiling away both should exist if virtual particles are real. The casimir effect, (The pushing together of parallel plates in a vacuum) is due to virtual particles. The casmir effect has actually been measured. I don't think Hawking radiation has been yet.
I do agree with you that a theory should be falsifiable, and not merely just a mathematical abstraction. But virtual particles aren't that.
I've worked in software for around 10 years, and am a proud patent infringer on at least one patent. I didn't know about my infringement at the time, and by the time I did the software wasn't in use anymore, so it didn't matter. I say proud, because the "invention" is very, very widely used, and is quite obvious. So I'm quite proud to have infringed on this patent, thus proving how useless the patent system has become. No, I won't say what I infringed on, (patent trolls are quite real).
I've no doubt that if I spent my days reading through patents, I'm sure I'd find I've infringed on dozens, if not hundreds of patents I've infringed on. The one I infringed on I found out from merely a fluke. Given the silly, and broadly defined things that are allowed to be patented, I'm sure most developers have violated many patents over the years.
Your project became a necessity because Polaroid went bankrupt, and the world had only once source of the very specialized Polaroid film. Other common consumables have become a commodity, with multiple companies in the world being able to replicate the consumable. I can still buy toner for an HP Laserjet printer from 1987 for instance, even if HP doesn't produce it. Do you have any contingency plans in place so the world can avoid a similar fate if Impossible Project meets a similar fate as Polaroid?
1. Redhat provides more timely security updates. One ownag3 due to a patch being late in Centos, and your CIO will wish he had spent the extra bucks. This isn't terribly likely, but it should still be a concern. 2. Redhat provides indemnification. This can be a Big Deal if you get sued by someone. A large enough company with deep pockets is a target to be sued. (Patent lawsuits anyone?) 3. Redhat provides 24/7 support. Sure, your admins may be Super Great, and you never need the support, but what happens when the admin is on vacation, fishing in the middle of Alaska with no cell coverage? What happens when the Super Great admin finds better pay somewhere else?
With that said, I think Centos is a great option for a lot of people. I use it myself for my home machines, and have used it for small businesses. None of the above are terribly important for either of these cases, so Centos is a much better option. But at a certain point, largely dependant on company size, the above reasons are going to overshadow the additional cost.
I've always hated the term Software Engineer. I've never identified with engineers, or engineering. To me software development is a form of applied mathematics, not engineering.
Programmer is usually associated with a low-skill person who cranks out code. A developer is someone who has to understand the problem inside and out, not merely just complete the task as prescribed.
I'd say the exact opposite is true. It's FAR more useful to NOT name the CAs. Why? It points out that the CA system is entirely broken. If the CAs had been named, the compulsion would be to simply point at the 4 "bad guys", hope they go out of business, and everything is back to "business as usual". Then wait for the next group of CAs to get own3d. Rinse, repeat. In short, it doesn't matter which 4 were hacked, because the problem isn't bad apples, the problem is the trust system itself.
The entire world can't rely on a security system where the weakest link makes everyone in the world vulnerable to MITM attacks. If the CA system depends on any one entity being perfectly secure, or perfectly trustable, then the game is over. That will never be the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you ever had a large oak tree in your yard? There's just no way of mulching all the leaves to the point it won't choke the lawn.
I have 4 relatively large trees and one small one and get leaves from neighbors yards as well all in my very small yard. I get a lot of leaves. The first year in the house I bagged them I got something like 20-30 bags of leaves. I quickly realized it made sense to just buy a power lawnmower and mulch it all (I normally use a reel mower). You have to go over the leaves multiple times with the lawnmower, and repeat the process over a few weeks as more leaves fall. Still, this is far easier than raking.
It works very well, and the leaves are all decomposed by spring. You can mulch an enormous amount of leaves with just a regular lawnmower. Just make sure they're relatively dry and they mostly disappear into finely ground mulch after a pass or two beneath the mower. Leaf and branch collection is also free in my city, though I never use it. The branches are wonderful to collect and burn in a firepit in the fall.
Sounds like you want more of a tutorial in the style of K\&R, rather than a reference book like this.
For the most part, yes. The hard part about learning anything new is the general concepts, not the excruciating detail. I find too often that authors (and instructors) are far too convinced they have to cover every aspect of something, as if the learning stops when you finish the book.
I've never really understood the practice of bagging up your lawn clippings, or raking up your leaves and throwing them in bags as if it was all waste products to be disposed of. Mulching everything with a mulching lawnmower is less effort, better for your yard, and better for the city since it saves money in collection costs.
Leaves in particular once ground up are wonderful soil amendments for a garden. They're not particularly high in nutrients, but when the leaves break down, they turn into hummus, which both retains moisture, and improves drainage.
I hate books that are this long on a single subject. Most of the time I find books over 400 pages to be mostly filler material which I wind up having to wade through to get to the real content.
Technical books are ordinarily very dry and tedious, and reading them is often a chore. So as to avoid prying my eyes off each page with a spatula, I find it especially important for authors of technical books to put up an effort to be brief rather than cover every single conceivable aspect of something.
I read through the entire article, and saw zero data to support his assertion. I'm sure he has the data, but the article didn't reference a single piece of it. Without any data to support the theory all we have is a fluff opinion piece. Shame on Data Center Knowledge for writing an article about a scientific investigation, and not presenting a single piece of scientific evidence.
I've always wondered why our software is so crap. Is it the constant hunt for features, vs. usability, security, stability. Is it laziness. Maybe lack of motivation. Could be all of them.
(btw. I'm working for a major software house. Biggest kid on the block)
So you work for Microsoft. I can tell you why your software sucks. I can tell you in one word. Monopoly. One former Microsoft guy explained it to me like this: Microsoft makes most of its money off of corporate package deals. You pay Microsoft one big fee, and get access to all the software it produces. The fee itself is far lower than buying even the big packages that everyone already needs. So Microsoft can sit back and make really shitty software that mostly sucks, but "works" since there's essentially no financial incentive for the customer to go and try some other package.
So no, it has nothing to do with developers, and everything to do with the choices Steve Balmer and crew have made. They've managed to create a culture of mediocrity where there's little incentive to create good software.
You're kind of right, it does have something to do with laziness and lack of motivation. But that lack of motivation comes from the top, not trickles up from the bottom.
You denounce the "Cost centre" concept then speak of a feedback loop between consumer and provider based on cost. Like most management philosophies I am sure a number of businesses magnify its principles until nothing exists but the bean-counting. However, the basic concept is sound.
Two completely different concepts. I'm railing against the idea espoused by the OP, who thinks that "I generate the profits for this business". Bullshit. No department operates in a vacuum. The guy who "generates the profits for the business" is only one part of the machine that does so. Without the rest of it, he'd just be a yahoo that couldn't do anything.
The point being, cost center and profit center are merely tools. They're a certain perspective that answers some narrow range of questions, but they aren't reality itself. Too many people get caught up in their own little box and don't understand there's anything outside it.
What's IT? help desk? Sysadmins? Developers? etc.
Absolutely. This is in fact one of the big problems of people relating to the "IT Department". It's assumed by many everyone in IT is some large collection of the same people, even though the disciplines are very different from one another. Understanding what people do is part of being a professional, and all to often IT is treated as a job title.
Are you suggesting that computers are more complex than airplanes?
I don't know exactly what you mean by "computers" (the term is so generic as to be meaningless), but I'd very easily say that the computing eco-system of an average business is orders of magnitude more complex than an airplane.
I expect the IT department to be able to fix it out without reinstalling Windows. If they can't, then I think I'm justified in criticizing them.
Spoken by someone who's obviously never done a lot of support of Windows, computing, or how Microsoft operates in general. I'm not sure if you're trolling here or not, but assuming you're serious, then it shows you're profoundly ignorant of the complexity involved.
Also, I'm sure given enough time, money, and resources someone COULD fix your PC without reinstalling windows, a large part of the time it's idiotic to do so because a reinstall saves everyone time and money. Your question is like saying to a mechanic "Why can't you guys fix my seized engine without replacing the thing? I heard of my buddy who bored out new cylinders, re-constituted the seals, and fixed all the valves by hand!"
the short history that computers exist we've made them too simple so that the average person thinks it's not complicated to keep those things running correctly
I think I agree with you, but it takes more explanation than simply making computers too simple. One of the challenges of computing is taking a pre-existing population that has little or no experience with computers and information technology and getting them to the point of being able to manipulate complex systems. We've tried to make very complicated processes simple, while not expecting the user to learn much in the process other than "click on this magic icon to do task-Y'. This may be the only way forward, with such a large existing population that never grew up with any sort of computing technology.
I'm really quite convinced that if users had more sophisticated approaches to computers, and were willing to learn the simplest of scripting techniques, or more sophisticated views of data than simply an Excel spreadsheet, many of them could blow multiply their productivity by 10, maybe 100 times. It's as if we're giving people calculators to add up numbers, but never teaching them the basics of what addition, or multiplication are. The problem, however is that the next generation will grow up with all the nifty "click x and get what you want" approach to computing, and get into the same trap as their parents did. If we spent as much time teaching about information technology as we did on Algebra, think about how much more productive the next generation could be.
My job generated the revenue that pays for IT jobs.
This is exactly the wrong way to think of how a company operates. There's no one job that generates revenue, and others than consume it. The bullshit "cost center" approach to managing a business is like drawing some arbitrary circles around your business to attempt to get a handle on one aspect of it, and then forgetting why you picked those circles in the first place, and applying them to an entirely different problem.
But IT thinks they have the authority to tell me how to do my job (i.e. what equipment to use, how I use my computer, what programs I can run, what websites I can visit, etc...).
Perhaps that's because everything you just mentioned has a cost associated with it to support, which is on the IT department budget? This idea that you have that you're the king, and everyone bows down to you is nonsensical. A business exists to make money. To do that you need to run efficiently, which can't be done unless there's some sort of feedback loop between the people who consume the resources, and those that bear the cost of it. That doesn't mean that it has to be this hard set of rules to accomplish that, but it does mean giving up some control over how you accomplish tasks. Resources aren't infinite.
In short, in all but the most specialized applications it's better to just get a regular chip.
If by "specialised" you mean new, I'd agree with you. I'm sure people said the exact same thing when the CPU first was created, but nobody would consider a CPU specialised any more. What's specialised now could easily become the largest number of chips produced very quickly.
If this technology pans out as described, these little chips aren't going to replace silicon chips, they'll be used for applications where a silicon chip is either impractical because of expense, or too fragile. Silicon chips have been around far too long and developed far too much for anything to directly replace them.
Who the hell does intrusion detection by (simply) analyzing network traffic and port scanning? Here's a line from a log file in a certain machine I have access to:
Maybe the same idiots who put a SCADA system accessible over the internet?
The truth is we have no idea where the alleged "russian IP address" came from. You making up an SSH log is pure bullshit. Was it an intrusion detection system, or was it a firewall log? Nobody is saying. The OP seemed to think this was very simple, with an IP address somehow being a definitive answer to whether the system was broken into, and the breaking being definitive evidence of the pump being caused by the alleged breakin.
My advice would be to stop making things up, and rely on actual facts. There's almost none of those now, so you can say just about anything and get away with it. The facts are the the FBI has said the claims the machine was hacked is utter bullshit.
My money is on the idiots who who thought it was a good idea to put a SCADA system for a public water supply on the internet aren't exactly the people you want conducting a security investigation. I don't exactly trust the FBI, but they're not really known to back away from high profile cases and claim there wasn't any crime. If you want evidence of the FBI being over-zealous in trying to find crimes where non occurred, just ask Steve Kurtz
Exactly. Paper doesn't scale, and obviously is difficult to machine scan. But the point is all you need to do is send log files to an indelible medium. Paper is just the simplest one to understand. The electronic equivalent would be something like a WORM drive, or optical non-RW drive. I'm sure there's other examples that exist.
Either there is or there isn’t a Russian IP address in there. It’s hard to miss that.
An ip address is some unnamed log file that someone says is Russian tells you exactly nothing about whether a system was compromised. Was that just somebody running a scan near the same time the pump broke, or did you just get 0wned? A simple log file of network traffic won't tell you that. Anyone who's ever looked at network log files knows there's scans of your IP addresses going on constantly. In any forensic investigation it's rarely or never really a series of black and white. It's always open to interpretation.
It sounds like you don't exactly know where your problems are, so how can you solve them?
My advice would be to do some serious analysis of what's going on in your network. Hook up an ethernet sniffer to your internet connection and see what's going wrong. You suspect it's a lot of retransmissions do to the DSL, well find out if that's true. Consider buying a cheap spectrum analyzer (wi-spy can be had for under $100). Track when you get problems, and where. Throwing money and equipment at the problem is more likely to waste money and equipment than solve the problem. Since you're retired, it sounds like you're more short on money and equipment than you are on time to analyse and diagnose the problem.
Once you actually know what the problem is, then you can go out to the wireless community and ask for a solution. K You're seeing a lot of very, very different solutions here because people are guessing what the underlying problem is, largely based on what's worked for them. Obviously you can't follow all of them, but which one should you try? Knowledge is power, and ignorance is folly.
Ok, now explain why this problem seems to actually be more common among high-IQ types than it is in the general population.
I don't know if it is or not, but assume for the moment it is. Some speculation:
Smart people tend to know more words, and thus have a higher investment in their own definition of them.
Smart people get really good at arguing about things, and are thus harder to convince of anything outside their belief system. (Getting really good at fooling oneself).
Smart people are just more willing to argue about the subject, while dumber people will just nod and go back to doing whatever they were doing. (Thus it's just easier to identify a smart person who has this belief).
why does everyone have such a hard time with this?
Because there's a significant population of Slashdot that thinks words are things with single, hard definitions that never change and must conform to what they learned in science class.
For those of us that can see the box as a box, it's not that hard. For people stuck inside the box, they'll insist everyone else get inside their little box.
This article should never have been posted. There's no facts to respond to. Linking to a wikipedia article that talks about the possibility of Quantum computing is not a topic for discussion. Where does the estimate of 20 years come from? What will Quantum computing be able to do in this imagined 20 years? How much will it cost?
Unless the submitter can give real answers to the above question, based on facts and not idle speculation, there's nothing to talk about.
Even in the name- they are "virtual" because they are just mathematical abstractions. nothing more.
Except the effects of virtual particles are observable. Hawking radiation, and small black holes boiling away both should exist if virtual particles are real. The casimir effect, (The pushing together of parallel plates in a vacuum) is due to virtual particles. The casmir effect has actually been measured. I don't think Hawking radiation has been yet.
I do agree with you that a theory should be falsifiable, and not merely just a mathematical abstraction. But virtual particles aren't that.
I've worked in software for around 10 years, and am a proud patent infringer on at least one patent. I didn't know about my infringement at the time, and by the time I did the software wasn't in use anymore, so it didn't matter. I say proud, because the "invention" is very, very widely used, and is quite obvious. So I'm quite proud to have infringed on this patent, thus proving how useless the patent system has become. No, I won't say what I infringed on, (patent trolls are quite real).
I've no doubt that if I spent my days reading through patents, I'm sure I'd find I've infringed on dozens, if not hundreds of patents I've infringed on. The one I infringed on I found out from merely a fluke. Given the silly, and broadly defined things that are allowed to be patented, I'm sure most developers have violated many patents over the years.
Your project became a necessity because Polaroid went bankrupt, and the world had only once source of the very specialized Polaroid film. Other common consumables have become a commodity, with multiple companies in the world being able to replicate the consumable. I can still buy toner for an HP Laserjet printer from 1987 for instance, even if HP doesn't produce it. Do you have any contingency plans in place so the world can avoid a similar fate if Impossible Project meets a similar fate as Polaroid?
1. Redhat provides more timely security updates. One ownag3 due to a patch being late in Centos, and your CIO will wish he had spent the extra bucks. This isn't terribly likely, but it should still be a concern.
2. Redhat provides indemnification. This can be a Big Deal if you get sued by someone. A large enough company with deep pockets is a target to be sued. (Patent lawsuits anyone?)
3. Redhat provides 24/7 support. Sure, your admins may be Super Great, and you never need the support, but what happens when the admin is on vacation, fishing in the middle of Alaska with no cell coverage? What happens when the Super Great admin finds better pay somewhere else?
With that said, I think Centos is a great option for a lot of people. I use it myself for my home machines, and have used it for small businesses. None of the above are terribly important for either of these cases, so Centos is a much better option. But at a certain point, largely dependant on company size, the above reasons are going to overshadow the additional cost.
I've always hated the term Software Engineer. I've never identified with engineers, or engineering. To me software development is a form of applied mathematics, not engineering.
Programmer is usually associated with a low-skill person who cranks out code. A developer is someone who has to understand the problem inside and out, not merely just complete the task as prescribed.
This post is useless without naming them
I'd say the exact opposite is true. It's FAR more useful to NOT name the CAs. Why? It points out that the CA system is entirely broken. If the CAs had been named, the compulsion would be to simply point at the 4 "bad guys", hope they go out of business, and everything is back to "business as usual". Then wait for the next group of CAs to get own3d. Rinse, repeat. In short, it doesn't matter which 4 were hacked, because the problem isn't bad apples, the problem is the trust system itself.
The entire world can't rely on a security system where the weakest link makes everyone in the world vulnerable to MITM attacks. If the CA system depends on any one entity being perfectly secure, or perfectly trustable, then the game is over. That will never be the case.