But there are a lot of colleges where philosophy ISN'T part of the curriculum at all. I've gone through a 4 year program and the closest we've come is a statement of what the Church-Turing hypothesis is (in a non-required and not popular course) and a 2 day ethics discussion in the software engineering course.
Ah, but it's the theoretical basis that Turing discovered/developed where one of the most fundamental philosophical questions in CS comes from: the relationship between computers and the human mind. And the key here is not that modern computers are Von Neumann machines, but that they are (with appropriate adjustments for the infinite space of a true Turing machine) as powerful as Turing machines. Then, by the Church-Turing hypothesis, they are as powerful (but no more so) than the mind.
And it's the Church-Turing hypothesis -- which Von Neumann doesn't enter into at all -- that is at the center of this discussion.
Inaccessible dial-up numbers: I had about 4 numbers locally, and most problems were because I screwed with my modem baud trying to squeeze out top speed.
OTOH, to be fair to the article, in the month or two following when they first went to unlimited time it was near impossible to get anything but a busy signal, especially in the evening, and at least where I lived. We actually took to dialing the AOL number with our phone and, when we finally didn't get a busy signal, quickly hitting the sign-on. Usually the program would get to the point where it tries to establish a carrier before the server timed out, and all you'd have to do was hang up. (Hey, it worked!) We did this because we could make repeated calls with the phone faster than the computer and AOL client would, so the dozen or so tries it usually took to get an answer only took a minute instead of five.
The first time I used WIndows NT, I tried out several obvious attacks on the privilege model, and succeeded more often than I failed. I was even able to boost Power User to Local System, which actually has more privileges than Administrator.
Windows NT is at least 3 versions behind Vista, probably 4. I know MS's reputation as well as anyone, but it really does look to me like they are making attempts to fix up the user model with Vista.
If it turns out that it's as easily broken as you say, I'll concede defeat; but, I think that considering it a foregone conclusion that it's broken is unfair and very possibly wrong.
Confirmation and approval dialogs are almost worthless from a security standpoint. They operate at the application level, and the component that generates them has to have the privileges they're allegedly protecting
Not the ones I'm talking about. See this comment, this blog (and keep in mind that the number of things that trigger warnings was reduced in Beta 2, though not by enough, and there's still discussion going on in MS about to what degree to require confirmation), and probably plenty of other sources.
At any rate, you still can't infer ANYTHING about the user model just by the fact that IE runs in a sandbox. MS may not deserve much credit when it comes to security, but doing so is grossly unfair to even them.
Upon further investigation, it appears that Beta 2 is based on 5381, but not 5381 itself; 5381 is a pre-beta 2 release.
So my original point stands that the screenshot is of an old version. However, there is a new problem that destroys the overall point that I was trying to make. The problem is that Beta 2 itself has only been out for two days.
So what we can conclude from this is: 1) He hasn't been running beta 2 for three weeks flawlessly 2) He has probably been running build 5381 for three weeks 3) 5381 crashed 4) Thus what he says he's been running for three weeks flawlessly hasn't been so flawless
Moderators are free to mod down my post; I deserve it.
(There IS one more possibility though, which is that Windows caught and logged the error internally, but fixed itself before any effect was visible to the user.)
Not the product in question? The product in question is windows vista. The screenshot shows a system crash. Reading the article and looking at a picture is not rocket science.
But a different version!
Right from the page:
Note: This screen is from build 5381, although the application looks identical in Beta 2.
He claims that beta 2 has been running flawlessly, not 5381.
This means that (a) they apparently haven't fixed the "normal users have access to the whole system (ie, run as Administrator)" problem, and (b) they've given up on keeping IE from being a slutty little spyware freak, and assume that no matter what they do it's gonna get infected.
Mod the parent troll please. This is in lieu of a (-1, Flat out wrong) moderation.
If you had bothered to read almost anything about Vista from the last year, you'd know that they are much bigger on the non-admin roles. If you had done some more reading (say, some of the comments posted earlier on this story), you'd see that even if you are running as administrator you still don't have full root priviledges, and have to confirm certain changes.
There's such a thing as layered security. This means that you have multiple defenses. You might know it as the maxim "don't put all your eggs in one basket" as applied to security. In case the user does choose to run as admin, the IE improvements still could help. And even if not, anything running as that user still has access to anything the user does, so it still more than makes sense to protect against spyware.
The journalism sources that MS is involved with (there's also Slate) are held on quite a long leash by MS. By all reasonable measure, they are as independent as anyone else.
I've heard interviews with reporters for Slate that were talking about how they were quite critical of MS during the antitrust trial and never saw any bad things come of it.
Did you miss the part about how MS employees are currently running it in Redmond as a matter of course as part of their "eat their own dogfood" thing, or did you just not RTFA?
Or does doing development on it not count as real world use?
My computer is 4 years old almost (3 years, 10 months). It wasn't top of the line when I got it, though it was pretty good. It's gotten a RAM upgrade, but as far as internals go that's it.
The Vista hardware evaluation wizard thingy they had posted to/. a little bit ago had only one complaint -- the amount of hard drive space I have. And if I changed around my partitions a bit so that C: wasn't only 12 GB, it wouldn't complain about that.
The hardware requirements to run Vista, even Aero, I think are vastly overplayed.
There's one very important thing that you're missing: just because the current employees have admin priviledges doesn't mean that they aren't running with LUA, it just means they have the OPTION of running as admin.
MS employees apparently really do believe in the dogfood thing (from what I hear from an employee) so I find it reasonable to think that at least many of them usually run as LUA.
The news from the other day would remove the option and force them to run as LUA, which very well may make things worse from this point of view because then there won't also be a lot of people running as admin.
I've heard that the Embedded XP has a special write delaying mechanism that bunches together disk writes to minimize wear? Anyone know if that's true or not?
Yes, it is true, which doesn't mean you can do it under normal XP. It's called the Enhanced Write Filter.
(At least, it does SOMETHING to minimize the writes, I just don't remember what.)
There are pretty good "wear leveling" techniques that spread out the writes. So if it notices that one part of the drive is getting a lot of writes, it will move that logical block around the disk so that no physical block is overbalanced.
No! As mentioned in several of the replies to that comment, that's not a solid state drive. Google the part number and go to the second page and you'll find the stats, which clearly states it's a 5400 RPM hard drive.
According to this month-old article about Samsung announcing (probably not coincidentally) a 32GB flash hard drive gives a price of it over $900.
Huh? What does having a blog have to do with this?
The same would be true if he sent into the local paper what he wrote on the blog, or printed it out and stapled it to telephone poles around town.
(Okay, the telephone poles might be worse because depending on the ordinances that could be seen as vandalism... taped it up to willing store windows then.)
He's not being deprived of his right to free speech, he's learning an important lesson about being responsible for his public statements. He has a right to say what he wants; they have a right to kick him out.
No, they don't.
The First Amendment, as extended through the Fourteenth and interpreted by the Supreme Court, bars government institutions from punishing or rewarding anyone on the basis of almost all speech. Note that the school in question is a public school, and thus is a government institution and bound by that law.
This is legal. Schools are allowed to have dress codes. Schools are allowed to decide what constitutes "non-disruptive" activity to the learning environment.
But schools CAN'T dictate what dress the students wear at home, and can't dictate what constitutes "non-disruptive" activity when they are sitting at their dinner tables with their families....his statement (especially with a veiled threat in the name of the Columbine assholes) exudes attitude.
My reading is that the Columbine post was posted AFTER the school threatened expulsion, though the article is very unclear.
In my opinion (only) I think it's disruptive.
How so?
In what way does a post on a website that probably can't be visited on school property disrupt classroom activity?
"a loser-pays court system is the only reasonable way"
No!
I firmly believe that a guranteed loser-pays system is worse than what we have now. What we have now encourages frivilous, unfounded, and stupid lawsuits, but having a loser-pays system makes it nearly impossible to file well-founded but risky lawsuits against big companies. You think that the story in Erin Brokovitch could have happened with a loser-pays system? No way in hell. You wouldn't find someone willing to take that risk.
There are proper crimes that need investigating. If you ask people whether they think taxpayers money should be spent tying up the legal system and criminalising people who are just copying music, most people don't agree.
Then MOST PEOPLE need to call into their government and have the laws repealed.
Because while the laws are on the books, it is the police's DUTY to investigate. Or would you have the police and prosecutors decide which laws are worth enforcing?
Look, I'm not arguing that copying music is a horrible offense morally. But right now, it's a non-trivial crime in Germany (with potentially 3 years in jail, which puts it on par with a more severly graded misdemeanor in the US).
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Your one of two I've ever heard say that, as compared to over a hundred more people who've had to reinstall Windows because of Symantec's software
Three, now.
But there are a lot of colleges where philosophy ISN'T part of the curriculum at all. I've gone through a 4 year program and the closest we've come is a statement of what the Church-Turing hypothesis is (in a non-required and not popular course) and a 2 day ethics discussion in the software engineering course.
Ah, but it's the theoretical basis that Turing discovered/developed where one of the most fundamental philosophical questions in CS comes from: the relationship between computers and the human mind. And the key here is not that modern computers are Von Neumann machines, but that they are (with appropriate adjustments for the infinite space of a true Turing machine) as powerful as Turing machines. Then, by the Church-Turing hypothesis, they are as powerful (but no more so) than the mind.
And it's the Church-Turing hypothesis -- which Von Neumann doesn't enter into at all -- that is at the center of this discussion.
Inaccessible dial-up numbers: I had about 4 numbers locally, and most problems were because I screwed with my modem baud trying to squeeze out top speed.
OTOH, to be fair to the article, in the month or two following when they first went to unlimited time it was near impossible to get anything but a busy signal, especially in the evening, and at least where I lived. We actually took to dialing the AOL number with our phone and, when we finally didn't get a busy signal, quickly hitting the sign-on. Usually the program would get to the point where it tries to establish a carrier before the server timed out, and all you'd have to do was hang up. (Hey, it worked!) We did this because we could make repeated calls with the phone faster than the computer and AOL client would, so the dozen or so tries it usually took to get an answer only took a minute instead of five.
The first time I used WIndows NT, I tried out several obvious attacks on the privilege model, and succeeded more often than I failed. I was even able to boost Power User to Local System, which actually has more privileges than Administrator.
Windows NT is at least 3 versions behind Vista, probably 4. I know MS's reputation as well as anyone, but it really does look to me like they are making attempts to fix up the user model with Vista.
If it turns out that it's as easily broken as you say, I'll concede defeat; but, I think that considering it a foregone conclusion that it's broken is unfair and very possibly wrong.
Confirmation and approval dialogs are almost worthless from a security standpoint. They operate at the application level, and the component that generates them has to have the privileges they're allegedly protecting
Not the ones I'm talking about. See this comment, this blog (and keep in mind that the number of things that trigger warnings was reduced in Beta 2, though not by enough, and there's still discussion going on in MS about to what degree to require confirmation), and probably plenty of other sources.
At any rate, you still can't infer ANYTHING about the user model just by the fact that IE runs in a sandbox. MS may not deserve much credit when it comes to security, but doing so is grossly unfair to even them.
Hmm, so I see. I sort of retract what I said.
Upon further investigation, it appears that Beta 2 is based on 5381, but not 5381 itself; 5381 is a pre-beta 2 release.
So my original point stands that the screenshot is of an old version. However, there is a new problem that destroys the overall point that I was trying to make. The problem is that Beta 2 itself has only been out for two days.
So what we can conclude from this is:
1) He hasn't been running beta 2 for three weeks flawlessly
2) He has probably been running build 5381 for three weeks
3) 5381 crashed
4) Thus what he says he's been running for three weeks flawlessly hasn't been so flawless
Moderators are free to mod down my post; I deserve it.
(There IS one more possibility though, which is that Windows caught and logged the error internally, but fixed itself before any effect was visible to the user.)
But a different version!
Right from the page:
He claims that beta 2 has been running flawlessly, not 5381.
This means that (a) they apparently haven't fixed the "normal users have access to the whole system (ie, run as Administrator)" problem, and (b) they've given up on keeping IE from being a slutty little spyware freak, and assume that no matter what they do it's gonna get infected.
Mod the parent troll please. This is in lieu of a (-1, Flat out wrong) moderation.
If you had bothered to read almost anything about Vista from the last year, you'd know that they are much bigger on the non-admin roles. If you had done some more reading (say, some of the comments posted earlier on this story), you'd see that even if you are running as administrator you still don't have full root priviledges, and have to confirm certain changes.
There's such a thing as layered security. This means that you have multiple defenses. You might know it as the maxim "don't put all your eggs in one basket" as applied to security. In case the user does choose to run as admin, the IE improvements still could help. And even if not, anything running as that user still has access to anything the user does, so it still more than makes sense to protect against spyware.
The journalism sources that MS is involved with (there's also Slate) are held on quite a long leash by MS. By all reasonable measure, they are as independent as anyone else.
I've heard interviews with reporters for Slate that were talking about how they were quite critical of MS during the antitrust trial and never saw any bad things come of it.
It also indicates that's not the product in question. Or have our reading comprehension skills gone down?
I suppose it's possible that he's lying, but unless you can present some evidence to the contrary, I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt.
Did you miss the part about how MS employees are currently running it in Redmond as a matter of course as part of their "eat their own dogfood" thing, or did you just not RTFA?
Or does doing development on it not count as real world use?
My computer is 4 years old almost (3 years, 10 months). It wasn't top of the line when I got it, though it was pretty good. It's gotten a RAM upgrade, but as far as internals go that's it.
/. a little bit ago had only one complaint -- the amount of hard drive space I have. And if I changed around my partitions a bit so that C: wasn't only 12 GB, it wouldn't complain about that.
The Vista hardware evaluation wizard thingy they had posted to
The hardware requirements to run Vista, even Aero, I think are vastly overplayed.
There's one very important thing that you're missing: just because the current employees have admin priviledges doesn't mean that they aren't running with LUA, it just means they have the OPTION of running as admin.
MS employees apparently really do believe in the dogfood thing (from what I hear from an employee) so I find it reasonable to think that at least many of them usually run as LUA.
The news from the other day would remove the option and force them to run as LUA, which very well may make things worse from this point of view because then there won't also be a lot of people running as admin.
I've heard that the Embedded XP has a special write delaying mechanism that bunches together disk writes to minimize wear? Anyone know if that's true or not?
Yes, it is true, which doesn't mean you can do it under normal XP. It's called the Enhanced Write Filter.
(At least, it does SOMETHING to minimize the writes, I just don't remember what.)
There are pretty good "wear leveling" techniques that spread out the writes. So if it notices that one part of the drive is getting a lot of writes, it will move that logical block around the disk so that no physical block is overbalanced.
No! As mentioned in several of the replies to that comment, that's not a solid state drive. Google the part number and go to the second page and you'll find the stats, which clearly states it's a 5400 RPM hard drive.
According to this month-old article about Samsung announcing (probably not coincidentally) a 32GB flash hard drive gives a price of it over $900.
Huh? What does having a blog have to do with this?
The same would be true if he sent into the local paper what he wrote on the blog, or printed it out and stapled it to telephone poles around town.
(Okay, the telephone poles might be worse because depending on the ordinances that could be seen as vandalism... taped it up to willing store windows then.)
He's not being deprived of his right to free speech, he's learning an important lesson about being responsible for his public statements. He has a right to say what he wants; they have a right to kick him out.
No, they don't.
The First Amendment, as extended through the Fourteenth and interpreted by the Supreme Court, bars government institutions from punishing or rewarding anyone on the basis of almost all speech. Note that the school in question is a public school, and thus is a government institution and bound by that law.
This is legal. Schools are allowed to have dress codes. Schools are allowed to decide what constitutes "non-disruptive" activity to the learning environment.
...his statement (especially with a veiled threat in the name of the Columbine assholes) exudes attitude.
But schools CAN'T dictate what dress the students wear at home, and can't dictate what constitutes "non-disruptive" activity when they are sitting at their dinner tables with their families.
My reading is that the Columbine post was posted AFTER the school threatened expulsion, though the article is very unclear.
In my opinion (only) I think it's disruptive.
How so?
In what way does a post on a website that probably can't be visited on school property disrupt classroom activity?
"a loser-pays court system is the only reasonable way"
No!
I firmly believe that a guranteed loser-pays system is worse than what we have now. What we have now encourages frivilous, unfounded, and stupid lawsuits, but having a loser-pays system makes it nearly impossible to file well-founded but risky lawsuits against big companies. You think that the story in Erin Brokovitch could have happened with a loser-pays system? No way in hell. You wouldn't find someone willing to take that risk.
"If there's nothing wrong with me, maybe there's something wrong with the universe!"
To be fair, someone posted the exact same quote as a top-level comment a couple screens down. Though I did post this before I saw that...
Pretty soon we'll be down to:
"Computer, what is the nature of the universe?"
"The universe is a spheroid region, 705 meters in diameter."
There are proper crimes that need investigating. If you ask people whether they think taxpayers money should be spent tying up the legal system and criminalising people who are just copying music, most people don't agree.
Then MOST PEOPLE need to call into their government and have the laws repealed.
Because while the laws are on the books, it is the police's DUTY to investigate. Or would you have the police and prosecutors decide which laws are worth enforcing?
Look, I'm not arguing that copying music is a horrible offense morally. But right now, it's a non-trivial crime in Germany (with potentially 3 years in jail, which puts it on par with a more severly graded misdemeanor in the US).
You must be able to understand binary machine language...
Which, I must point out for the sake of those who don't know, you have to read off of an oscilloscope. None of that sissy hex dump stuff.
Yes, how DARE those police investigate credible leads of crimes being committed and undertake searches justified by probable cause!