Imagine the price of platinum being no greater than the price of steel.
Platinum? Who cares? The most interesting properties of platinum are as a catalyst, and being wear and tarnish resistant. It's useful in catalytic converters and jewelry. How would cheap platinum help anyone?
The future of materials lies in making ever more sophisticated and better materials, not in making raw materials orders of magnitude cheaper. I like to imagine a future where diamond is as cheap as glass. Or where I can insulate my house with aerogel. Or cables are made of carbon-nanotubes, or spider silk.
I don't find this all that threatening, I try really hard to be truthful with the people that I trust and care about.
Bar Search, Strip Club Search, and Gamblers Search give no guarantee of accuracy of results, and cannot be held liable for inaccurate or misleading results.
Oh, and did I mention we're now offering bulk rates for employers?
The use of public information and technology to catch deadbeats and lawbreakers is not a bad thing.
How about other "bad" people? My new Bar Watcher service will tell you if your loved one is at one of 30 local area bars. For only $10 a search we'll give you time, location, and duration. For an annual subscription of only $100 we'll send you a text message every time we see your loved ones car (or one of his friends cars) at the local bars. Sign up now! *
We also have our gamblers search! Same service, for all the local Casinos!
*(service not available for elected officials, law enforcement officers, or judges by state law)
Why does somebody driving down the (public) road taking a picture of your (public) license plate on your car parked in (public) plain view and comparing it to a list need oversight?
That alone I don't think requires oversight.
What DOES require oversight is the same system, but writing it to a database including current location. Then selling said database to whomever. Your health insurance provider starts scanning it to see how many times you've been seen at Mickey-Ds in the last year. Once a week? Sorry sir, you'll have to pay a higher premium for that.
Or how about the new business called Cyber Stalkers! For only $50 a search we'll tell you the daily traffic patterns of anyone you desire. For only $1000, you can get on the "privacy list" so people with $50 can't see where you've been. (If you'd like to see the where people with the privacy option have been call us for pricing details).
Too outlandish? Never happen because too many would object? Why not a more acceptable service where only "bad" people get reported on. Enter "Strip club search!" For only $20 a search we'll tell you if you're loved one has been at all the local strip clubs (name, dates, locations, and duration). It's OK because it only targets those dirty strip club guys.
There's countless ways an automated system like this can destroy peoples privacy in ways that don't exist right now.
DRM is basically about infect software with a trojan, and cracking is about removing it.
I've run across this on commercial software. A couple years ago I wanted to recover old papers I had written 20 years ago stored on old C64 disks. I bought a hardware device to connect my old 1541 drive to a modern PC, and was able to extract the raw data quite easily. Some of my old papers were saved in some old Word processor format who's name I forget and legally bought 20 years ago, and still had the disks for. So I extracted the disks the word processor was on to the proper format, and tried to run it in the emulator. Nope! Copy protection stopped me dead in my tracks. Hmm..think. Someone surely cracked this software, and it's likely on the web somewhere. 10 minutes of Googling later I found the software, downloaded it, ran it in the emulator, and was reading my old papers from 20 years ago just fine. Thanks Piracy!
(Oh, and to anyone that that old C64 software was really great... they've got an extraordinarily poor memory. It sucked. Export format? What's that?)
Actually, I don't think they were misleading the regulators... It appears that they didn't have pipes that could carry the tritium. If only we could figure out why they were there in the first place.
Maybe, maybe not. I found this statement interesting:
"The Entergy responses were limited to only pipes that touch soil, (not those encased in concrete) that carry liquid (not gaseous matter) and that are part of whole systems as defined by law," Entergy's statement said.
To me that's kind of a lawyering statement where they're trying to get out of any legal repercussions by trying to be very precise about what they say they meant. I don't know the actual quote of what Entergy said to regulators, or the context in which they said it so it's hard to make any definitive analysis here. At this point I wouldn't give the company the benefit of the doubt though.
Ok but seriously what we are talking about here is really not that hard. It should be standard procedure to escape user input before it hits the dbms.
Why do that when there's prepared statements? Any decent language and DB driver should support it. It's a hell of a lot simpler and safer than figuring out all the various different things you might have to escape.
To some extent it looks like they weren't litigious pricks as much as having gotten very bad legal advice and then not backed out when they should have.
So the lawyer thought they could win and was wrong. That somehow excuses them from being pricks by suing in the first place? You make it sound like the lawyer somehow forced Magic Jack to sue.
So this may be more in the category of "too stubborn" more than anything else.
I'd say stubborn pricks describes it quite well. Who sues someone for a factually accurate article that describes something the company publicly posted on their site, but hoped nobody would notice? I hadn't heard about the lawsuit or the spying behaviour of magic jack before. (Though I had heard of magic jack). You better believe I'll tell people that they reserve the right to spy on people based on who they call, then decide to sue people who tell anybody.
What exactly does "more random" mean in the summary?
Hard to say, since it wasn't defined in the article. One possibility is a measurement of entropy. Source A produces 100 bits, with 80 bits of entropy. Source B produces 100 bits, with 90 bits of entropy. Source B is considered "more random" than Source A. In this context you can think of entropy as how much the bits lack any pattern. Passwords are a good example. Typical passwords only have a few bits of entropy per character, rather than the full 7 or 8 bits it might take to store each character. So for a password you'd expect to only search through a few bits of space to correctly guess the password, since typically people pick passwords that form a pattern, so you can eliminate huge possibilities while guessing.
I think you're right that that once a source is "purely random", it can't be any more random. I'd also agree that this development isn't likely to make anything more secure. Security is always based on the weakest attack point. That's very very rarely the quality of randomness of an RNG. If you care about that sort of thing, cheap HW RNGs have been available for a decade at least. I've got one in my cheap VIA PC. It was fun to play around with, but I don't think for a minute it made anything much more secure on my server.
It's obvious to anyone willing to think about it for more than 30 seconds that a new user interaction requires a new design. The author of this article starts out first trying to blame "flash" for this, then briefly retracts the statement saying that apps could be designed for touchscreens. Then he goes through a series of ways to try to map mouse UI design onto touchscreen UI design (which he admits doesn't work). He's close, but rejecting option one because "it just isn't going to happen" is hasty.
This isn't a "Flash" problem. Flash is a programming language and can adapt to any UI if programmer and tool developer choose to. This is a fundamental UI design problem. Usability and UI Guru Jakob Nielsen posted an article about this very topic a couple weeks ago. One of the more interesting points he made was when GUI's first came out, app designers just slapped a GUI on top of the old mainframe app. A fundamental mistake that we know didn't work.
The problem is very real, and it's a good thing to point out. The ONLY solution to this problem (at least if you want to make the apps usable on touchscreens) is to either redesign the UI to work with both mice and touchscreens (likely a bad option), or have to separate versions of the UI for mice and touchscreens. Depending on how the app was written, this can mean either an entire re-write if the app didn't separate out the UI from the rest of the app, or simply coding up a new UI layer that interacts with the existing layers in the app.
The one distinction I'd like to make though is this isn't a technological problem at all and can't be solved through technology. It's a business and re-training problem where re-coding the UI and learning the new UI design skills has to be worth it, business wise. In the long run, touchscreen are going to be an important part of new UI design. It's actually the first real competitor since the mouse became common 20 years ago. 20 years is a long time (especially in computing), so it shouldn't be surprising we need to re-think a lot of the UI interaction that's been designed for mice for the last 20 years.
So in other words, nobody learned anything and we're just as screwed as we were 2 years ago. Great. Time to start putting my money in Euros, or are is everyone else just as stupid and shortsighted as the American bankers?
This is getting way off topic, but why not just ban the practice of bundling all these mortgages together into something that almost nobody fully understands? The ratings agency was supposed to take care of that problem, but I'm skeptical that trying to fix them is a good long term solution.
The other proposal that did appeal to me is making anyone wanting to sell these things keep a portion of them (I call it "eating your own dogfood"). Combine that with banning rating something that's essentially un-ratable because of the complexity sounds decent enough to me. What really became apparent to me is the financial industry may have smart people in it, but they're all prone to this self-reinforcing echo-chamber effect. That's why I'm skeptical that trying to fix the ratings people is the right approach, since they'll just come up with another self-reinforcing belief structure that'll go poof.
So they confirm where the attacks came from, where does it go from there?
The usual with anything dealing with international politics. A lot of posturing, threats, and promises, but very little in the way of action. I somehow doubt they'll find a way to directly pin this on the Chinese government, regardless of if they did it or not.
Who's "they"? Google? Google has already tried to do that. Same with the U.S. media. John Markoff was on NPR yesterday talking about how it couldn't have just been students because "they used unknown IE exploits, which points to professionals". That just made me laugh. Gee John Markoff, did you forget your own reporting from the last 20 years where it was the American kids using "unknown exploits" (Mitnick, Robert Morris) to break into American businesses?
Who it was that ACTUALLY did these attacks I doubt we'll ever know. China will try to sweep it all under the rug, Google will try to use this as a way to look like they're trying to face up to China, and the media will use it as another opportunity to sell some eyeballs. I sure as hell wouldn't just assume it couldn't have been a single, or a small group of individuals though. These guysthis guy (just to pick a couple well known examples) proved that wrong more than 20 years ago. It could also be a collusion of individuals and foreign governments, like for instance this guy
After the various Chinese food scandals, I refuse to buy any food from that comes from China. It's obvious to me the cause of the THREE separate melamine food scandals (milk, wheat gluten and pet food) and the poisoned toothpaste scandal were a corrupt system that's setup to reward bad behavior. Essentially milk producers got more money if they had high protein levels in the milk. Adding melamine gave a high false reading for protein. Someone obviously started marketing this melamine to farmers or someone else in the distribution channel to raise protein levels. They might not even have known what the hell the stuff was. If the price of milk is so low you can't survive without watering it down and putting this poison in it to "enhance" it, how many people won't do that? So the problem is systemic, and not just "a few bad apples", which is how I heard China was trying to spin it as. Not a system I want to gamble my health on.
The whole thing reminds me of the U.S. banking system that caused the housing collapse. That's a similar system that rewarded bad behavior where banks bundle up bad mortgages (throwing away information in the process), and then get a ratings agency to give the resulting security a triple-A rating (low risk). The securities then got sold around the world. The ratings agencies are "independent", but are highly motivated to give good ratings since banks will shop around for good rating agencies. Of course, we STILL haven't really fixed the system in any way, and the will to do so is quickly disappearing.
but it is disturbing now that it's an issue used by politicians of a certain flavor to push their agenda.
Yeah. It's all politics.
If we just had a group of people that studied this kind of thing, scientifically speaking. These people could look at the data, gather thousands of years of climate data, hey.. maybe find records of CO2 in something like artic ice! Then they could reach a consensus. Yup.. if only we had scientists studying this thing have it all decided.
Instead, we have the situation you describe. All politics, no data, no scientists, no decades worth of study, nothing!
Is any drive manufacturer immune to problems? Nope.
After years of reading about drive history and reliability, I have to agree. Find one person who swears by brand A and hates brand B, and you'll find someone who's the opposite.
The only conclusion I can reach is that manufacturers suffer goofs on individual drive lines and the "goof rate" among major manufacturers is largely the same. If you care about reliability, look at the individual models and try to find out if it's a "goof line". You might still get screwed, since some goofs don't show up till years later.
The other day, I couldn't get the damned oil pan drain plug out of my Chrysler car. Why? It's a Chrysler car, build in the Americas (well, Mexico, close enough), but the damned drain plug is a *metric* size. (Size 13... 13mm? I guess?)
Where have you been? "American" cars have had metric parts for the last 20 years or so. I couldn't say which is more common, but both cars I've had in the last 15 years have been largely metric. One was a Chrysler product, the other a Chevy. (In retrospect, I'm guessing they standardized this so the vast number of oil changes places don't have to constantly change their tools.)
They standardized it so they can sell the same car in Europe, or at least change parts throughout their different models.
This is something I see a lot, especially from Europeans: the assumption that Americans are actually fanatical supporters of the Imperial system. The truth is, we don't like it
It depends. For cooking, I much prefer the system of cups, teaspoons, and tablespoons. The system was largely designed around proportions, and cooking is all about proportions so the system works. Having to use milli-liters for everything wouldn't work (and in fact I believe many recipes in European countries still use something like tablespoons, teaspoons, and cups).
For temperature, Is centigrade really any better than Fahrenheit? For distance, how often do I really need to convert miles into feet? Nobody ever does, and we use 10ths of a mile when we need a smaller unit. When I buy bulk items, it's always displayed as a decimal anyway, not in Pounds/oz. So what's the real advantage?
The only time I REALLY think the imperial system is stupid is when measuring inches. I detest having to figure out if the marker is 1/2, 3/8, 5/16, etc. Converting between them is stupid, and I really which I just had millimeters. Decimalization doesn't really work either, since the materials are all set sizes that are based on a power of two fraction. It can't really go away either, since the studs in my house are always going to be 16 inches on center and the thickness of the drywall is going to remain 1/2 inch.
I can't over-emphasize the importance of titles in communication, especially with complex technical subject where there's a lot of evidence presented to support a conclusion. Your title colors the rest of the article and creates expectations about what you're trying to say. When people read articles (especially on the web) they scan through them trying to find the important parts. That's been demonstrated through eye-tracking studies multiple times.
Your title was very broad, but the evidence to support it was very narrow (as you admit yourself). Since your article only referenced Gentoo, and installing a drive after installation using fdisk, why not: "fdisk not ready for 4096 byte sector drives?" If you wanted to cover all of "linux" (whatever that is), why not research other distributions and see how they handle the job, installing the OS flat out on several distro's and see how they perform. If you didn't want to do the research, you could have written in an inquisitive style, i.e. "Is linux ready for 4096 byte sector drives?" and then presented your evidence and talked about how fdisk didn't do this, but parted worked a bit better, and how the drives reported 512 sectors but weren't, etc, but you've only tried Gentoo, and maybe others should try other distributions with other tools.
I think the experimental aspects you did were great, and I'm glad to know that some of the tools out there don't fully work with this particular 4096 byte sector drive. I just don't think you've done enough research to say much more than the problem affecs Gentoo, on these specific WD drives.
Nice to see you criticizing people for "poor" research when you hardly done any yourself.
Why is it some people just don't seem to understand the concept of arguing for not knowing something? I DID do research, I read the article quite carefully and determined the guy didn't take into account multiple different things, and that his claim was far too broad. If you can't understand that that involves research and analysis, I can't help you. Gentoo has no versions. Nor cutesy names like Ubuntu. It is a source-based distro and everything is compiled on installation so doesn't need this careful versioning nonsense.
For a distribution that you claim doesn't have any versions, they sure do have a lot of announcements claiming new versions: (from distrowatch)
2009-10-05: Distribution Release: Gentoo Linux 10.0
2009-09-27: Development Release: Gentoo Linux 10.0 Test
2008-07-06: Distribution Release: Gentoo Linux 2008.0
2008-04-29: Development Release: Gentoo Linux 2008.0 Beta 2
2008-04-01: Development Release: Gentoo Linux 2008.0 Beta 1
2007-05-07: Distribution Release: Gentoo Linux 2007.0
It is not just one version of fdisk on some backwater 15 year old distribution
Funny, I don't recall making any claims this was one version of fdisk. If I recall I only said the article referenced one version.
Look at his tweets. He's pissed that they waited until he was in the seat, to tell him "sorry, you need the second seat after all"
Hmmm... so he knew enough ahead of time that he really should be buying two seats because of his weight and did so. Then boarded the plane without a second seat available on it. When he got on the flight he obviously knew he didn't have his second seat available. Considering the recent photo at: http://i.imgur.com/UfBNC.jpg
I'd say SW was justified in kicking him off the flight. He's quite large, and it seems like anyone seated next to him would have a pretty miserable flight. I'm sure it's embarrassing to have to be kicked off a flight after you're already boarded (especially for being to big), but such is life.
Reaching out to all his fans as if he was being victimized seems childish. Unfortunately many of the people supporting the airlines decision all seem to have their own form of childishness in demonizing the overweight.
But this is not a distro-specific issue, so you are wrong, too.
I never made any claims about this being a distro-specific issue, or not being a distro-specific issue. The only point I'm trying to get across is the article is extraordinarily narrow in what it's actually tested.
A&E had a reality show called Airline that featured Southwest from 2004-2005 that had several episodes where people were forced to buy a second seat if someone judged them "too fat". So this is a policy that Southwest has had for a long time, and isn't just some crazy pilot or booking agent just came up with but is rather something that comes from the top down.
It always seemed a bit embarrassing for everyone involved to me. I don't recall much detail from 5 years ago, but I do remember thinking some of the people judged "too fat" looked large, but not so large to affect the passenger next to them. It wasn't a very flattering series for Southwest, as a lot of the stories concentrated on bad aspects of flying. (Some of which were airline employees acting like control freaks)
The article represents one data point, for one particular way to install a drive, on one (un-named) version of Gentoo, on one particular model of a WD drive that had a bugzilla entry entered by the author all of 2 days ago. So this is supposed to be an indictment of all of Linux?
The author even mentions that Ubuntu has an option on parted that accomplishes the task properly. I'd be much more interested in an article that talks about how the default installer handles this task rather than concentrating on one particular expert tool that does so. It's still good to know that fdisk on his un-named Gentoo distribution does the wrong thing.. but this hardly means we should fire up the klaxon and declare "Linux not fully prepared for 4096 sector hard drives!". It's certainly interesting, but I'll withhold judgment until we actually know more about the implications of this across the entire spectrum of Linux distributions and the various 4096 sector HDs.
but to make it a point to say that Windows XP is incompatible with no mention of Vista and 7 being perfectly compatible should be an embarrassment of journalistic integrity. . . Their take away may be that Microsoft operating systems are broken in some way (which they are in a lot of ways), but not this one!
It only takes about 3 brain cells to realize that Windows XP != All Microsoft Operating Systems. Even the average person has more than 3 brain cells.
For those people with less than 3 brain cells, Slashdot still has you covered since the article clearly says:
According to WD, their new 4096-byte sector drives are problematic for Windows XP users but not Linux or most other OSes.
(emphasis mine) It only takes 2 brain cells to understand that "most other OSes" likely includes Vista and Windows 7.
For those unlucky few with only 1 brain cell, you're correct. Slashdot has certainly failed the 1 brain celled individual.
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine the price of platinum being no greater than the price of steel.
Platinum? Who cares? The most interesting properties of platinum are as a catalyst, and being wear and tarnish resistant. It's useful in catalytic converters and jewelry. How would cheap platinum help anyone?
The future of materials lies in making ever more sophisticated and better materials, not in making raw materials orders of magnitude cheaper. I like to imagine a future where diamond is as cheap as glass. Or where I can insulate my house with aerogel. Or cables are made of carbon-nanotubes, or spider silk.
I don't find this all that threatening, I try really hard to be truthful with the people that I trust and care about.
Bar Search, Strip Club Search, and Gamblers Search give no guarantee of accuracy of results, and cannot be held liable for inaccurate or misleading results.
Oh, and did I mention we're now offering bulk rates for employers?
The use of public information and technology to catch deadbeats and lawbreakers is not a bad thing.
How about other "bad" people? My new Bar Watcher service will tell you if your loved one is at one of 30 local area bars. For only $10 a search we'll give you time, location, and duration. For an annual subscription of only $100 we'll send you a text message every time we see your loved ones car (or one of his friends cars) at the local bars. Sign up now! *
We also have our gamblers search! Same service, for all the local Casinos!
*(service not available for elected officials, law enforcement officers, or judges by state law)
Why does somebody driving down the (public) road taking a picture of your (public) license plate on your car parked in (public) plain view and comparing it to a list need oversight?
That alone I don't think requires oversight.
What DOES require oversight is the same system, but writing it to a database including current location. Then selling said database to whomever. Your health insurance provider starts scanning it to see how many times you've been seen at Mickey-Ds in the last year. Once a week? Sorry sir, you'll have to pay a higher premium for that.
Or how about the new business called Cyber Stalkers! For only $50 a search we'll tell you the daily traffic patterns of anyone you desire. For only $1000, you can get on the "privacy list" so people with $50 can't see where you've been. (If you'd like to see the where people with the privacy option have been call us for pricing details).
Too outlandish? Never happen because too many would object? Why not a more acceptable service where only "bad" people get reported on. Enter "Strip club search!" For only $20 a search we'll tell you if you're loved one has been at all the local strip clubs (name, dates, locations, and duration). It's OK because it only targets those dirty strip club guys.
There's countless ways an automated system like this can destroy peoples privacy in ways that don't exist right now.
DRM is basically about infect software with a trojan, and cracking is about removing it.
I've run across this on commercial software. A couple years ago I wanted to recover old papers I had written 20 years ago stored on old C64 disks. I bought a hardware device to connect my old 1541 drive to a modern PC, and was able to extract the raw data quite easily. Some of my old papers were saved in some old Word processor format who's name I forget and legally bought 20 years ago, and still had the disks for. So I extracted the disks the word processor was on to the proper format, and tried to run it in the emulator. Nope! Copy protection stopped me dead in my tracks. Hmm..think. Someone surely cracked this software, and it's likely on the web somewhere. 10 minutes of Googling later I found the software, downloaded it, ran it in the emulator, and was reading my old papers from 20 years ago just fine. Thanks Piracy!
(Oh, and to anyone that that old C64 software was really great... they've got an extraordinarily poor memory. It sucked. Export format? What's that?)
Actually, I don't think they were misleading the regulators... It appears that they didn't have pipes that could carry the tritium. If only we could figure out why they were there in the first place.
Maybe, maybe not. I found this statement interesting:
To me that's kind of a lawyering statement where they're trying to get out of any legal repercussions by trying to be very precise about what they say they meant. I don't know the actual quote of what Entergy said to regulators, or the context in which they said it so it's hard to make any definitive analysis here. At this point I wouldn't give the company the benefit of the doubt though.
Ok but seriously what we are talking about here is really not that hard. It should be standard procedure to escape user input before it hits the dbms.
Why do that when there's prepared statements? Any decent language and DB driver should support it. It's a hell of a lot simpler and safer than figuring out all the various different things you might have to escape.
To some extent it looks like they weren't litigious pricks as much as having gotten very bad legal advice and then not backed out when they should have.
So the lawyer thought they could win and was wrong. That somehow excuses them from being pricks by suing in the first place? You make it sound like the lawyer somehow forced Magic Jack to sue.
So this may be more in the category of "too stubborn" more than anything else.
I'd say stubborn pricks describes it quite well. Who sues someone for a factually accurate article that describes something the company publicly posted on their site, but hoped nobody would notice? I hadn't heard about the lawsuit or the spying behaviour of magic jack before. (Though I had heard of magic jack). You better believe I'll tell people that they reserve the right to spy on people based on who they call, then decide to sue people who tell anybody.
What exactly does "more random" mean in the summary?
Hard to say, since it wasn't defined in the article. One possibility is a measurement of entropy. Source A produces 100 bits, with 80 bits of entropy. Source B produces 100 bits, with 90 bits of entropy. Source B is considered "more random" than Source A. In this context you can think of entropy as how much the bits lack any pattern. Passwords are a good example. Typical passwords only have a few bits of entropy per character, rather than the full 7 or 8 bits it might take to store each character. So for a password you'd expect to only search through a few bits of space to correctly guess the password, since typically people pick passwords that form a pattern, so you can eliminate huge possibilities while guessing.
I think you're right that that once a source is "purely random", it can't be any more random. I'd also agree that this development isn't likely to make anything more secure. Security is always based on the weakest attack point. That's very very rarely the quality of randomness of an RNG. If you care about that sort of thing, cheap HW RNGs have been available for a decade at least. I've got one in my cheap VIA PC. It was fun to play around with, but I don't think for a minute it made anything much more secure on my server.
It's obvious to anyone willing to think about it for more than 30 seconds that a new user interaction requires a new design. The author of this article starts out first trying to blame "flash" for this, then briefly retracts the statement saying that apps could be designed for touchscreens. Then he goes through a series of ways to try to map mouse UI design onto touchscreen UI design (which he admits doesn't work). He's close, but rejecting option one because "it just isn't going to happen" is hasty.
This isn't a "Flash" problem. Flash is a programming language and can adapt to any UI if programmer and tool developer choose to. This is a fundamental UI design problem. Usability and UI Guru Jakob Nielsen posted an article about this very topic a couple weeks ago. One of the more interesting points he made was when GUI's first came out, app designers just slapped a GUI on top of the old mainframe app. A fundamental mistake that we know didn't work.
The problem is very real, and it's a good thing to point out. The ONLY solution to this problem (at least if you want to make the apps usable on touchscreens) is to either redesign the UI to work with both mice and touchscreens (likely a bad option), or have to separate versions of the UI for mice and touchscreens. Depending on how the app was written, this can mean either an entire re-write if the app didn't separate out the UI from the rest of the app, or simply coding up a new UI layer that interacts with the existing layers in the app.
The one distinction I'd like to make though is this isn't a technological problem at all and can't be solved through technology. It's a business and re-training problem where re-coding the UI and learning the new UI design skills has to be worth it, business wise. In the long run, touchscreen are going to be an important part of new UI design. It's actually the first real competitor since the mouse became common 20 years ago. 20 years is a long time (especially in computing), so it shouldn't be surprising we need to re-think a lot of the UI interaction that's been designed for mice for the last 20 years.
So in other words, nobody learned anything and we're just as screwed as we were 2 years ago. Great. Time to start putting my money in Euros, or are is everyone else just as stupid and shortsighted as the American bankers?
This is getting way off topic, but why not just ban the practice of bundling all these mortgages together into something that almost nobody fully understands? The ratings agency was supposed to take care of that problem, but I'm skeptical that trying to fix them is a good long term solution.
The other proposal that did appeal to me is making anyone wanting to sell these things keep a portion of them (I call it "eating your own dogfood"). Combine that with banning rating something that's essentially un-ratable because of the complexity sounds decent enough to me. What really became apparent to me is the financial industry may have smart people in it, but they're all prone to this self-reinforcing echo-chamber effect. That's why I'm skeptical that trying to fix the ratings people is the right approach, since they'll just come up with another self-reinforcing belief structure that'll go poof.
So they confirm where the attacks came from, where does it go from there?
The usual with anything dealing with international politics. A lot of posturing, threats, and promises, but very little in the way of action.
I somehow doubt they'll find a way to directly pin this on the Chinese government, regardless of if they did it or not.
Who's "they"? Google? Google has already tried to do that. Same with the U.S. media. John Markoff was on NPR yesterday talking about how it couldn't have just been students because "they used unknown IE exploits, which points to professionals". That just made me laugh. Gee John Markoff, did you forget your own reporting from the last 20 years where it was the American kids using "unknown exploits" (Mitnick, Robert Morris) to break into American businesses?
Who it was that ACTUALLY did these attacks I doubt we'll ever know. China will try to sweep it all under the rug, Google will try to use this as a way to look like they're trying to face up to China, and the media will use it as another opportunity to sell some eyeballs. I sure as hell wouldn't just assume it couldn't have been a single, or a small group of individuals though. These guys this guy (just to pick a couple well known examples) proved that wrong more than 20 years ago. It could also be a collusion of individuals and foreign governments, like for instance this guy
After the various Chinese food scandals, I refuse to buy any food from that comes from China. It's obvious to me the cause of the THREE separate melamine food scandals (milk, wheat gluten and pet food) and the poisoned toothpaste scandal were a corrupt system that's setup to reward bad behavior. Essentially milk producers got more money if they had high protein levels in the milk. Adding melamine gave a high false reading for protein. Someone obviously started marketing this melamine to farmers or someone else in the distribution channel to raise protein levels. They might not even have known what the hell the stuff was. If the price of milk is so low you can't survive without watering it down and putting this poison in it to "enhance" it, how many people won't do that? So the problem is systemic, and not just "a few bad apples", which is how I heard China was trying to spin it as. Not a system I want to gamble my health on.
The whole thing reminds me of the U.S. banking system that caused the housing collapse. That's a similar system that rewarded bad behavior where banks bundle up bad mortgages (throwing away information in the process), and then get a ratings agency to give the resulting security a triple-A rating (low risk). The securities then got sold around the world. The ratings agencies are "independent", but are highly motivated to give good ratings since banks will shop around for good rating agencies. Of course, we STILL haven't really fixed the system in any way, and the will to do so is quickly disappearing.
but it is disturbing now that it's an issue used by politicians of a certain flavor to push their agenda.
Yeah. It's all politics.
If we just had a group of people that studied this kind of thing, scientifically speaking. These people could look at the data, gather thousands of years of climate data, hey.. maybe find records of CO2 in something like artic ice! Then they could reach a consensus. Yup.. if only we had scientists studying this thing have it all decided.
Instead, we have the situation you describe. All politics, no data, no scientists, no decades worth of study, nothing!
Is any drive manufacturer immune to problems? Nope.
After years of reading about drive history and reliability, I have to agree. Find one person who swears by brand A and hates brand B, and you'll find someone who's the opposite.
The only conclusion I can reach is that manufacturers suffer goofs on individual drive lines and the "goof rate" among major manufacturers is largely the same. If you care about reliability, look at the individual models and try to find out if it's a "goof line". You might still get screwed, since some goofs don't show up till years later.
The other day, I couldn't get the damned oil pan drain plug out of my Chrysler car. Why? It's a Chrysler car, build in the Americas (well, Mexico, close enough), but the damned drain plug is a *metric* size. (Size 13... 13mm? I guess?)
Where have you been? "American" cars have had metric parts for the last 20 years or so. I couldn't say which is more common, but both cars I've had in the last 15 years have been largely metric. One was a Chrysler product, the other a Chevy.
(In retrospect, I'm guessing they standardized this so the vast number of oil changes places don't have to constantly change their tools.)
They standardized it so they can sell the same car in Europe, or at least change parts throughout their different models.
This is something I see a lot, especially from Europeans: the assumption that Americans are actually fanatical supporters of the Imperial system. The truth is, we don't like it
It depends. For cooking, I much prefer the system of cups, teaspoons, and tablespoons. The system was largely designed around proportions, and cooking is all about proportions so the system works. Having to use milli-liters for everything wouldn't work (and in fact I believe many recipes in European countries still use something like tablespoons, teaspoons, and cups).
For temperature, Is centigrade really any better than Fahrenheit? For distance, how often do I really need to convert miles into feet? Nobody ever does, and we use 10ths of a mile when we need a smaller unit. When I buy bulk items, it's always displayed as a decimal anyway, not in Pounds/oz. So what's the real advantage?
The only time I REALLY think the imperial system is stupid is when measuring inches. I detest having to figure out if the marker is 1/2, 3/8, 5/16, etc. Converting between them is stupid, and I really which I just had millimeters. Decimalization doesn't really work either, since the materials are all set sizes that are based on a power of two fraction. It can't really go away either, since the studs in my house are always going to be 16 inches on center and the thickness of the drywall is going to remain 1/2 inch.
I can't over-emphasize the importance of titles in communication, especially with complex technical subject where there's a lot of evidence presented to support a conclusion. Your title colors the rest of the article and creates expectations about what you're trying to say. When people read articles (especially on the web) they scan through them trying to find the important parts. That's been demonstrated through eye-tracking studies multiple times.
Your title was very broad, but the evidence to support it was very narrow (as you admit yourself). Since your article only referenced Gentoo, and installing a drive after installation using fdisk, why not: "fdisk not ready for 4096 byte sector drives?" If you wanted to cover all of "linux" (whatever that is), why not research other distributions and see how they handle the job, installing the OS flat out on several distro's and see how they perform. If you didn't want to do the research, you could have written in an inquisitive style, i.e. "Is linux ready for 4096 byte sector drives?" and then presented your evidence and talked about how fdisk didn't do this, but parted worked a bit better, and how the drives reported 512 sectors but weren't, etc, but you've only tried Gentoo, and maybe others should try other distributions with other tools.
I think the experimental aspects you did were great, and I'm glad to know that some of the tools out there don't fully work with this particular 4096 byte sector drive. I just don't think you've done enough research to say much more than the problem affecs Gentoo, on these specific WD drives.
Nice to see you criticizing people for "poor" research when you hardly done any yourself.
Why is it some people just don't seem to understand the concept of arguing for not knowing something? I DID do research, I read the article quite carefully and determined the guy didn't take into account multiple different things, and that his claim was far too broad. If you can't understand that that involves research and analysis, I can't help you.
Gentoo has no versions. Nor cutesy names like Ubuntu. It is a source-based distro and everything is compiled on installation so doesn't need this careful versioning nonsense.
For a distribution that you claim doesn't have any versions, they sure do have a lot of announcements claiming new versions: (from distrowatch)
It is not just one version of fdisk on some backwater 15 year old distribution
Funny, I don't recall making any claims this was one version of fdisk. If I recall I only said the article referenced one version.
Look at his tweets. He's pissed that they waited until he was in the seat, to tell him "sorry, you need the second seat after all"
Hmmm... so he knew enough ahead of time that he really should be buying two seats because of his weight and did so. Then boarded the plane without a second seat available on it. When he got on the flight he obviously knew he didn't have his second seat available. Considering the recent photo at:
http://i.imgur.com/UfBNC.jpg
I'd say SW was justified in kicking him off the flight. He's quite large, and it seems like anyone seated next to him would have a pretty miserable flight. I'm sure it's embarrassing to have to be kicked off a flight after you're already boarded (especially for being to big), but such is life.
Reaching out to all his fans as if he was being victimized seems childish. Unfortunately many of the people supporting the airlines decision all seem to have their own form of childishness in demonizing the overweight.
But this is not a distro-specific issue, so you are wrong, too.
I never made any claims about this being a distro-specific issue, or not being a distro-specific issue. The only point I'm trying to get across is the article is extraordinarily narrow in what it's actually tested.
A&E had a reality show called Airline that featured Southwest from 2004-2005 that had several episodes where people were forced to buy a second seat if someone judged them "too fat". So this is a policy that Southwest has had for a long time, and isn't just some crazy pilot or booking agent just came up with but is rather something that comes from the top down.
It always seemed a bit embarrassing for everyone involved to me. I don't recall much detail from 5 years ago, but I do remember thinking some of the people judged "too fat" looked large, but not so large to affect the passenger next to them. It wasn't a very flattering series for Southwest, as a lot of the stories concentrated on bad aspects of flying. (Some of which were airline employees acting like control freaks)
The article represents one data point, for one particular way to install a drive, on one (un-named) version of Gentoo, on one particular model of a WD drive that had a bugzilla entry entered by the author all of 2 days ago. So this is supposed to be an indictment of all of Linux?
The author even mentions that Ubuntu has an option on parted that accomplishes the task properly. I'd be much more interested in an article that talks about how the default installer handles this task rather than concentrating on one particular expert tool that does so. It's still good to know that fdisk on his un-named Gentoo distribution does the wrong thing.. but this hardly means we should fire up the klaxon and declare "Linux not fully prepared for 4096 sector hard drives!". It's certainly interesting, but I'll withhold judgment until we actually know more about the implications of this across the entire spectrum of Linux distributions and the various 4096 sector HDs.
but to make it a point to say that Windows XP is incompatible with no mention of Vista and 7 being perfectly compatible should be an embarrassment of journalistic integrity.
.
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Their take away may be that Microsoft operating systems are broken in some way (which they are in a lot of ways), but not this one!
It only takes about 3 brain cells to realize that Windows XP != All Microsoft Operating Systems. Even the average person has more than 3 brain cells.
For those people with less than 3 brain cells, Slashdot still has you covered since the article clearly says:
(emphasis mine)
It only takes 2 brain cells to understand that "most other OSes" likely includes Vista and Windows 7.
For those unlucky few with only 1 brain cell, you're correct. Slashdot has certainly failed the 1 brain celled individual.