I applaud the editors who quit, thier integrity will assist them wherever they go.
However, they should have never needed to quit. Editorial review is something that is normally done BEFORE an article is published. If Sys-con and its sister rags hadn't established channels allowing O'Gara to publish without editorial review, Sys-con wouldn't be in this situation.
Given that their jobs and their role in the company was made optional, I imagine that they were not having a good time whenever articles bypassed thier review.
Milgram's test stands as a low point in the application of Psychology, but a high point in the sensationalisim of its findings.
There is not control, so there is no provability. The population was self selecting. There were problems in reproducibility, lending only labs that were able to reproduce to be published. And today, the experiment is now considered unethical preventing the acceptance of any further research on the findings.
It's about as close to an experiment in scientific terms as O'Gara's recent piece was an "article" in publishing terms.
Most things do not grow evenly through their whole life. Firefox grew explosivly in part due to the Wall Street Journal ad and a lot analysts pushing the security benefits. Now that there's been an equal amount of noise about the near-trivial exploit, people are getting cold feet.
I mean, some of the people who were considering switching are now asking about the exploit. One that did switch is asking how hard it is to switch back.
I say that it's a theoritical exploit that nobody has actually used to compromise a computer. If they're still listening, I add a joke contrasting IE's real world exploits. The news has hurt adoption rates of Firefox, but that's just because it's bad news, not because it's real.
People want to hear "Firefox is a pancea for all your ills", not "Every piece of software can have problems". Expect Firefox growth to pick up again after people don't remember this recent bug, and expect a few people to remember this bug years from today.
---- Evil will always win because good is dumb. -- Spaceballs.
It's a sad truth, but I believe in the intelligence of terrorists.
I asume that they are at least intelligent enough to not waste incredible amounts of time, enery, and manpower to hack / break into Cisco so they can perform a very high level analysis of the source code for security holes, so they can hack into backbone routers and misconfigure / shutdown them.
Instead of say, the dumb way of running into the telephone pole brining down the power lines outside or blowing up a critical resource.
Most people aren't terrorized by routing problems, credit card theft, or failure to get to thier favorite website (Google included). It's an inconveince, a crime, and possibly very distressing, but it's not like they are having trouble sleeping with the looming threat that these things can happen.
Today, if you're dressed badly and jaywalking, it's probably going to be seen as terroristic activity.
There's no mystery to why Dell invested, that is, unless you're not going to even try to find out why. It's been documented in a few odd places, and even published in a couple of books.
Dell, Intel, and many, many others (OEMs, IBM, etc.) invested in RedHat specifically because they didn't want to see the company die since they needed an alternative (however likely / unlikely it would seem) to Microsoft.
RedHat had a profitable business before the investments, and had a good plan that indicated they would lose some money during the growth phase, but then return to profitability. RedHat apparently had the right kind of management, because during the bubble burst, RedHat's assets hadn't been squandered on silly stuff that had no chance of generating revenue.
And with RedHat stock in Dell's portfolio, there's no possibility of Microsoft stating that Dell can't use RedHat (like the ploy they played out with IBM's OS2 developers) because that threat would fall to pieces just as quickly as arguing that Dell can't use Dell's marketing division.
Even if Dell never sold a RedHat system, the threat of being able to switch carries sufficent weight to prevent truly severe abuses by Microsoft concering Windows products.
Imagine the control panel dialog that allows you to configure the color of your screen of death. Sounds just like the kind of option that would eventually be worked into Windows, no? I mean, it would just be another tab on the Display adjustment utility.
That's probably because the default behavior of the desktop shell, explorer, now restarts instead of dumping core.
Which means that although I don't get BSODs very often either, I do get two to three "blank-outs" on a bad day. It's arguably better for the end users, but usually fuels the disgust from programmers who appreciate the cheesyness of this solution when they see it.
Well, now that I see that it's not a BSOD replacement, I appreciate some variety of *SOD colors.
How long until the Green Screen of Death, the Orange Screen of Death, and the fearsome Black Screen of Death?
Seriously, if it turns out to be a good debugging tool, then I'm happy; however, far, far too many products ship from MS with the debugging tools tightly integrated into the product. Ctrl-Alt-Delete, BSOD, regedit, etc. And now some of that behavior is required for correct product operation (see the history of Ctrl-Alt-Delete).
The company has a lot more to lose than you do by withholding pay. Even the mention that you will (don't say might) fight the loss of this paycheck is enough to make any manager stop. Even your frustrating manager knows that the business will not back a person that goes out of their way to create legal issues. Instead, the corporation will (wisely) protect itself by indicating that the former manager acted outside of his authority and was fired / reprimanded / demoted / etc.
The best reply to a threat of "Holding your paycheck", is this phrase. Remember it well:
(Laugh in a good natured way and then say) "That's fine, I would love to own this company in settlement."
It's a rediculous statement, but one that indicates that you do know your rights and won't fold. But even more importantly, it lets him know that his threat failed to deliver the one item that it was really intended to delever: It failed to inspire fear.
Been there before, and I know it sucks. But don't say anything even remotely bad about your boss. Even if everyone agrees with you and praises your insight, you're still out of there in a week or so. Let him dig his own grave. Any boss that bad mouths thier employees won't be looked on kindly by his peers. He won't get fired for it, but you can gurantee that he will be passed over for promotion until people forget his behavior.
Yes, and eventually it will degrade their website to not much more than a fan-boy forum, or a crowd of "ditto-heads".
Such places rarely get educated traffic, or even much of the traffic of their clients, as people who really want to evaluate the product or fix their installations will be Googling for "Product X problems" which will never hit thier site.
Are you insinuating that humans are not animals? Or that animals are sub-human? Does that infer that humans are not mammals? Or that not all mammals are animals?
Such statements make me believe that some humans are perhaps better classified as a plant or mineral.
Ruby, Saphire, or maybe Quartz was the slowest material that was listed in my physics text (if I remember correctly). I guess I had to do one too many index of refaction problems in school.
I remember reading about Cerenkov Radiation back in school. Facinating stuff, but again, only possible when NOT in a vacuum. Google to the rescue, look at this readable description of Cerenkov Radiation if you are so inclined.
Thank you. I'm grasping the impossibility of an eavesdropping attack, but how does this solution deal with other common communication problems, like:
Denial of service. False positive intrusions. Reliability without retransmission.
Is the idea to use wavelengths that are not readily absorbable by common atoms? If so, how would they theoretically be generated? Does the answer lie in the manufacture of "perfect" materials (assuming that such a material could exist)? How would impurities not eventually tunnel into the fiber?
Seriously, I completely understand that this is "breaking" research, and not an "off-the-shelf" solution. It may be achievable, or not. But it would be very interesting to hear if these issues are currently considered critical or irrelevant.
Yes, the electron pressure wave moves at almost C (mabye exactly C?), but that's not what what we are talking about here.
In this case, yes, we are talking about light. So, it would follow that photons move at the speed of light. It would be kind of impossible for them to not move at the speed of light (yes, humor for the physics / philosophy minded).
As an aside, with the advent of AC electricity, it's the oscillation of electrons that gets probagated through the line, and half of that oscillation is the electrons moving in the reverse direction, so any electron drift would be expected to me miniscule. You could probably expect more electron drift in DC electricity.
Electron mass may be small, but it is significant. For example, brining up the power grid from a blackout really demonstrates how much resistance a few hundred miles of electrons in a wire can generate. That's why it is brought up (and down) in sections, reducing the amount of energy requried to overcome the inertia of electrons at rest by distributing it across many small steps.
So you're saying that if I fire off a photon at 5 Km/h, then the photon flies off at 5 Km/h?
When an electron settles down from an excited position, a photon is emitted at C (which may vary depending on the medium, but is constant for that medium). It doesn't matter what speed the atom was at, because the speed light travels at is a CONSTANT (within the limits of our ability to meaure).
The duality principle is that light can be percieved as either a wave or a particle, but there's never been a discrepancy about it's ability to move or the rate.
What? You didn't receive my password? BUT I JUST SENT IT!!!
Not unhackable by a long shot, but you'd discover every hack. That is, until someone can perform a man-in-the-middle attack, assuming such a feat would be possible.
Wouldn't the transmission speed have to be C?
I mean, C isn't constant across all mediums, but even in quartz and ruby it's significanly faster than 120km/h.
Up and down mean nothing in a computer, that is, they mean just as much as the stack growing left to right, or right to left. Or even upper-right corner to lower-left corner, diagonally.
0x00000000 isn't the math number 0, nor is 0xFFFFFFFF unless you assign that meaning to it. A perfect example is in floating point numbers, which mean something totally different that the same sized integer, which is totally different that the same sized memory address.
As others have already said. It's not the direction, it's the ability to do something that you shouldn't be able to do.
My favorite "reach out" was close enough to reach into my old workplace a few years back.
Basically they invited a staunch Palm OS advocate (who incidentally was a *BSD/UNIX advocate) to ask about the state of PDAs/handhelds and what could be done to improve it.
He was really excited, as it would allow him to give direct input into the designers of what would be the next Windows CE. When he came back he was sporting a new PDA, and indicated that overall he had a great time. That is, until he talked about the time when they met with the group that wanted their input.
Basically, everything that was asked for was corrected, and the outside "experts" were persuaded, conjoled, and flat out told what they wanted was a windows-like interface that acted like Palm OS, but in a more windows-98 like way.
Funny thing is, it worked to some degree. Many of the staunch Palm fans were very busy the next three or so months trying to get the most out of their newly accquired Windows products. Some "converted" whole-heartedly, but a bit-by-bit they eventually drifted back to the Palm-side.
It could be much harder to make this work in FOSS circles, as MS really doesn't have anything to offer them, yet. But it may be just as disruptive.
If what you say is true, the problem lies in the organization that put up the signs.
I mean, we have signs over here that indicate different speeds for day / night driving and different speeds for day / night driving for trucks. I think if they really wanted it to be 75 / 45 they could have come up with a 75 / 45 (snow) speed limit sign.
Or perhaps they just fed the citizens a bunch of bull so they would have a guranteed speed limit revenue service handy.
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I applaud the editors who quit, thier integrity will assist them wherever they go.
However, they should have never needed to quit. Editorial review is something that is normally done BEFORE an article is published. If Sys-con and its sister rags hadn't established channels allowing O'Gara to publish without editorial review, Sys-con wouldn't be in this situation.
Given that their jobs and their role in the company was made optional, I imagine that they were not having a good time whenever articles bypassed thier review.
Please don't call that an experimenet.
Milgram's test stands as a low point in the application of Psychology, but a high point in the sensationalisim of its findings.
There is not control, so there is no provability. The population was self selecting. There were problems in reproducibility, lending only labs that were able to reproduce to be published. And today, the experiment is now considered unethical preventing the acceptance of any further research on the findings.
It's about as close to an experiment in scientific terms as O'Gara's recent piece was an "article" in publishing terms.
Firefox is just coming off of a growth spurt.
Most things do not grow evenly through their whole life. Firefox grew explosivly in part due to the Wall Street Journal ad and a lot analysts pushing the security benefits. Now that there's been an equal amount of noise about the near-trivial exploit, people are getting cold feet.
I mean, some of the people who were considering switching are now asking about the exploit. One that did switch is asking how hard it is to switch back.
I say that it's a theoritical exploit that nobody has actually used to compromise a computer. If they're still listening, I add a joke contrasting IE's real world exploits. The news has hurt adoption rates of Firefox, but that's just because it's bad news, not because it's real.
People want to hear "Firefox is a pancea for all your ills", not "Every piece of software can have problems". Expect Firefox growth to pick up again after people don't remember this recent bug, and expect a few people to remember this bug years from today.
----
Evil will always win because good is dumb. -- Spaceballs.
It's a sad truth, but I believe in the intelligence of terrorists.
I asume that they are at least intelligent enough to not waste incredible amounts of time, enery, and manpower to hack / break into Cisco so they can perform a very high level analysis of the source code for security holes, so they can hack into backbone routers and misconfigure / shutdown them.
Instead of say, the dumb way of running into the telephone pole brining down the power lines outside or blowing up a critical resource.
Most people aren't terrorized by routing problems, credit card theft, or failure to get to thier favorite website (Google included). It's an inconveince, a crime, and possibly very distressing, but it's not like they are having trouble sleeping with the looming threat that these things can happen.
Today, if you're dressed badly and jaywalking, it's probably going to be seen as terroristic activity.
There's no mystery to why Dell invested, that is, unless you're not going to even try to find out why. It's been documented in a few odd places, and even published in a couple of books.
Dell, Intel, and many, many others (OEMs, IBM, etc.) invested in RedHat specifically because they didn't want to see the company die since they needed an alternative (however likely / unlikely it would seem) to Microsoft.
RedHat had a profitable business before the investments, and had a good plan that indicated they would lose some money during the growth phase, but then return to profitability. RedHat apparently had the right kind of management, because during the bubble burst, RedHat's assets hadn't been squandered on silly stuff that had no chance of generating revenue.
And with RedHat stock in Dell's portfolio, there's no possibility of Microsoft stating that Dell can't use RedHat (like the ploy they played out with IBM's OS2 developers) because that threat would fall to pieces just as quickly as arguing that Dell can't use Dell's marketing division.
Even if Dell never sold a RedHat system, the threat of being able to switch carries sufficent weight to prevent truly severe abuses by Microsoft concering Windows products.
There's something eerie about this.
Imagine the control panel dialog that allows you to configure the color of your screen of death. Sounds just like the kind of option that would eventually be worked into Windows, no? I mean, it would just be another tab on the Display adjustment utility.
After which, Blarney, the animated Dinosaur will come popping up on your screen, trying to assist you in useful, cheerful ways.
Blarney:
Ohhh...
Your computer crashed...
But don't be sad....
Be HAPPY!
BSOD, BSOD,
it's like getting a typing break for free!
With a song and a dance, it will all go away.
But it'll be back another day.
User: They must relax gun laws for justifiable computer shootings.
That's probably because the default behavior of the desktop shell, explorer, now restarts instead of dumping core.
Which means that although I don't get BSODs very often either, I do get two to three "blank-outs" on a bad day. It's arguably better for the end users, but usually fuels the disgust from programmers who appreciate the cheesyness of this solution when they see it.
Well, now that I see that it's not a BSOD replacement, I appreciate some variety of *SOD colors.
How long until the Green Screen of Death, the Orange Screen of Death, and the fearsome Black Screen of Death?
Seriously, if it turns out to be a good debugging tool, then I'm happy; however, far, far too many products ship from MS with the debugging tools tightly integrated into the product. Ctrl-Alt-Delete, BSOD, regedit, etc. And now some of that behavior is required for correct product operation (see the history of Ctrl-Alt-Delete).
I guess they've FINALLY fixed the last issue that casues a blue screen of death with Longhorn. :)
The company has a lot more to lose than you do by withholding pay. Even the mention that you will (don't say might) fight the loss of this paycheck is enough to make any manager stop. Even your frustrating manager knows that the business will not back a person that goes out of their way to create legal issues. Instead, the corporation will (wisely) protect itself by indicating that the former manager acted outside of his authority and was fired / reprimanded / demoted / etc.
The best reply to a threat of "Holding your paycheck", is this phrase. Remember it well:
(Laugh in a good natured way and then say) "That's fine, I would love to own this company in settlement."
It's a rediculous statement, but one that indicates that you do know your rights and won't fold. But even more importantly, it lets him know that his threat failed to deliver the one item that it was really intended to delever: It failed to inspire fear.
Been there before, and I know it sucks. But don't say anything even remotely bad about your boss. Even if everyone agrees with you and praises your insight, you're still out of there in a week or so. Let him dig his own grave. Any boss that bad mouths thier employees won't be looked on kindly by his peers. He won't get fired for it, but you can gurantee that he will be passed over for promotion until people forget his behavior.
Yes, and eventually it will degrade their website to not much more than a fan-boy forum, or a crowd of "ditto-heads".
Such places rarely get educated traffic, or even much of the traffic of their clients, as people who really want to evaluate the product or fix their installations will be Googling for "Product X problems" which will never hit thier site.
Blur the lines between man and animal?
Are you insinuating that humans are not animals? Or that animals are sub-human? Does that infer that humans are not mammals? Or that not all mammals are animals?
Such statements make me believe that some humans are perhaps better classified as a plant or mineral.
And what about the space garbage?
I mean, it would really, really suck to have a toothbrush hit your umbilical cord to the earth at 200,000 Km/s.
Ruby, Saphire, or maybe Quartz was the slowest material that was listed in my physics text (if I remember correctly). I guess I had to do one too many index of refaction problems in school.
I remember reading about Cerenkov Radiation back in school. Facinating stuff, but again, only possible when NOT in a vacuum. Google to the rescue, look at this readable description of Cerenkov Radiation if you are so inclined.
Thank you. I'm grasping the impossibility of an eavesdropping attack, but how does this solution deal with other common communication problems, like:
Denial of service.
False positive intrusions.
Reliability without retransmission.
Is the idea to use wavelengths that are not readily absorbable by common atoms? If so, how would they theoretically be generated? Does the answer lie in the manufacture of "perfect" materials (assuming that such a material could exist)? How would impurities not eventually tunnel into the fiber?
Seriously, I completely understand that this is "breaking" research, and not an "off-the-shelf" solution. It may be achievable, or not. But it would be very interesting to hear if these issues are currently considered critical or irrelevant.
Yes, the electron pressure wave moves at almost C (mabye exactly C?), but that's not what what we are talking about here.
In this case, yes, we are talking about light. So, it would follow that photons move at the speed of light. It would be kind of impossible for them to not move at the speed of light (yes, humor for the physics / philosophy minded).
As an aside, with the advent of AC electricity, it's the oscillation of electrons that gets probagated through the line, and half of that oscillation is the electrons moving in the reverse direction, so any electron drift would be expected to me miniscule. You could probably expect more electron drift in DC electricity.
Electron mass may be small, but it is significant. For example, brining up the power grid from a blackout really demonstrates how much resistance a few hundred miles of electrons in a wire can generate. That's why it is brought up (and down) in sections, reducing the amount of energy requried to overcome the inertia of electrons at rest by distributing it across many small steps.
So you're saying that if I fire off a photon at 5 Km/h, then the photon flies off at 5 Km/h?
When an electron settles down from an excited position, a photon is emitted at C (which may vary depending on the medium, but is constant for that medium). It doesn't matter what speed the atom was at, because the speed light travels at is a CONSTANT (within the limits of our ability to meaure).
The duality principle is that light can be percieved as either a wave or a particle, but there's never been a discrepancy about it's ability to move or the rate.
Finally we could answer that age old question:
If you're driving faster that the speed of light, and you turn you headlights on, what happens?
What? You didn't receive my password? BUT I JUST SENT IT!!!
Not unhackable by a long shot, but you'd discover every hack. That is, until someone can perform a man-in-the-middle attack, assuming such a feat would be possible.
Wouldn't the transmission speed have to be C? I mean, C isn't constant across all mediums, but even in quartz and ruby it's significanly faster than 120km/h.
Up and down mean nothing in a computer, that is, they mean just as much as the stack growing left to right, or right to left. Or even upper-right corner to lower-left corner, diagonally.
0x00000000 isn't the math number 0, nor is 0xFFFFFFFF unless you assign that meaning to it. A perfect example is in floating point numbers, which mean something totally different that the same sized integer, which is totally different that the same sized memory address.
As others have already said. It's not the direction, it's the ability to do something that you shouldn't be able to do.
My favorite "reach out" was close enough to reach into my old workplace a few years back.
Basically they invited a staunch Palm OS advocate (who incidentally was a *BSD/UNIX advocate) to ask about the state of PDAs/handhelds and what could be done to improve it.
He was really excited, as it would allow him to give direct input into the designers of what would be the next Windows CE. When he came back he was sporting a new PDA, and indicated that overall he had a great time. That is, until he talked about the time when they met with the group that wanted their input.
Basically, everything that was asked for was corrected, and the outside "experts" were persuaded, conjoled, and flat out told what they wanted was a windows-like interface that acted like Palm OS, but in a more windows-98 like way.
Funny thing is, it worked to some degree. Many of the staunch Palm fans were very busy the next three or so months trying to get the most out of their newly accquired Windows products. Some "converted" whole-heartedly, but a bit-by-bit they eventually drifted back to the Palm-side.
It could be much harder to make this work in FOSS circles, as MS really doesn't have anything to offer them, yet. But it may be just as disruptive.
If what you say is true, the problem lies in the organization that put up the signs.
I mean, we have signs over here that indicate different speeds for day / night driving and different speeds for day / night driving for trucks. I think if they really wanted it to be 75 / 45 they could have come up with a 75 / 45 (snow) speed limit sign.
Or perhaps they just fed the citizens a bunch of bull so they would have a guranteed speed limit revenue service handy.