"besides what others posted here, you should also realize it would be possible to put a 100km asteroid (10x the size of the one in article) on a trajectory such that it would land on the earth with essentially zero kinetic energy."
Utter rubbish. Even if it wasn't moving earths gravity would still accelerate it to a dangerous velocity before it hit us.
Something that large hitting the earth would evaporate most of the oceans and turn a large proportion of the earths surface molten. If it didn't kill off life entirely it would certainly kill off almost all multicellular organisms and reset the evolutionary clock so an impact like that could not have happened in the last 600 million years at least.
Any life that was happy in 1200C water wouldn't last too long when exposed to 4C sea water so you'd have a hard time finding it even if you looked. You might find some dead organic material but that would be about it.
Can't say I noticed. You get a few rude types but if you can't deal with a bit of rudeness then you have bigger problems than where to go for online discussions. If it really bothers you there are plenty of moderated groups but in general usenet isn't for children , never has been and never will be and I personally wouldn't want some dumbed down , sanitised , disneyland version of usenet to keep delicate little wallflowers happy.
Anyone who still uses usenet regularly like me knows they're just as alive as ever so the slow closing down of usenet has nothing to do with declining usage, but in my slightly paranoid opinion I suspect it has everything to do with it not being self funding. Ads simply don't work on usenet (probably because of its text based nature) unlike with web sites and no revenue = no reason to keep the service going.
When it does eventually die I'll miss it since as yet I haven't seen an alternative that works nearly so well and has so many different topics under one roof so to speak.
Never mind the browser , you can tell (or used to be able to , this was a few years back) what OS someone is running - assuming they're not going through a proxy - by looking at the TCP sequence numbers the client sends. There was an article on/. about it and some post grads had written a whitepaper.
"What kind of idiot would store their details / important confidential data on their web server?"
No sonny , a bank stores customer details in their backend systems but if you can hack the web server you can intercept unencrypted account id's and so forth being sent to the backend systems.
You'd better run along now, teacher probably wants you back in class.
"I have a blog on my webserver, can't say I'd label it as an "important part of the internet" though."
If someone hacked into your bank account via a compromised web server you might have a different opinion.
"What age are you 12? Seriously, comparing compromising a few computers with genocide.."
I wasn't comparing it to genocide. My point which you didn't get is that it doesn't matter how long ago a crime was committed. If the perpetrator is still alive then he should still be brought to justice.
Expecting politicians to turn vague electioneering rhetoric into actual action.
McKinnons case will be quietly shuffled off to some under secretary to "look into" and once the media have lost interest he'll be on a plane to Dulles.
"X11 is also rubbish for remote access: having to be on the same LAN to get OK performance is not truly 'remote'."
I've had an xterm running over a dial up connection. YMMV.
"It also has no way to serve *multiples* of any window or desktop, which means that sharing windows with other people "
Apart from a few collaberation apps which could easily be written to open multiple windows displaying the same thing on different X servers - why on earn would you need to share a window or desktop anyway?
Well put it this way , I used to be able to run mpegs in a Window using X on Linux on a 486. Try getting Win XP/7 or OS/X to even run on a 486 , never mind do video.
"Let's be honest, XWindow's performance is just bloody awful. It's slow,"
Is it? I can run a full screen video no problems on my laptop, I can play 3D games and so forth. How exactly is it slow?
"it's a difficult platform for software development."
Really? I've written apps in Xlib and I never had any issues. And there are plenty of higher level libraries if you want to develop GUI apps. The way Xwin deals with visuals and colour is a bit archaic , but aside from that it works pretty well IMO. Even properly scalable fonts were sorted out years ago.
"The early 1980s architecture is not well suited to today's demands"
Rubbish. Its client server remote desktop architecture is perfectly suited to enterprise enviroments. Why not go find out why Citrix et al have been playing catch up on Windows for years to try and do the same thing.
No it isn't. If someone tells you "that is a dog" then you learn a simple fact without any patterns coming into it apart from being able to recognise what the particular breed of dog looks like in the future.
Theres no way just from looking at pictures of dogs that you could tell they're all the same species. There are some characterstics that some breads have in common with others (other than the obvious 4 legs etc) but they don't all overlap. With something like this its more than a simple case of pattern recognition - its aquired knowledge.
Even neural nets have to be programmed at some level to exhibit behaviour that the programmers think will allow them to learn the task at hand unless these guys used some sort of genetic algorithm. The article doesn't mention it. Does anyone know?
Also it doesn't explain whether the system just recognises similar pictures to what its seen before - eg this picture looks like object type 123 (which to a human would be a horses rump) or whether it can combine all views of an object and recognise them all as that object , eg this picture looks like a horse. If its the latter how does it do it - does it have to be shown the object from a large number of angles or can it just infer from a couple of angles what the object would be like from many others?
Slashdot Mirror
I 100% agree. Looks like some web "developers" modded you down though.
"disappointed by the sprawling architecture and lack of cohesion of this product."
Its written in PHP. What the hell do you expect? :o)
Anyway , if you don't like it why do you use it?
"besides what others posted here, you should also realize it would be possible to put a 100km asteroid (10x the size of the one in article) on a trajectory such that it would land on the earth with essentially zero kinetic energy."
Utter rubbish. Even if it wasn't moving earths gravity would still accelerate it to a dangerous velocity before it hit us.
Something that large hitting the earth would evaporate most of the oceans and turn a large proportion of the earths surface molten. If it didn't kill off life entirely it would certainly kill off almost all multicellular organisms and reset the evolutionary clock so an impact like that could not have happened in the last 600 million years at least.
Any life that was happy in 1200C water wouldn't last too long when exposed to 4C sea water so you'd have a hard time finding it even if you looked. You might find some dead organic material but that would be about it.
Amazing. So they only took 30 years to catch up instead of 40! Incredible!
XFree86 was even worse.
One day Linux will get a decent stable X server but I won't hold my breath. Thank god for alt-sysrq.
A proper scripting shell! So the MS command line finally makes it into the 1970s...
"Crazy people all over the place."
Can't say I noticed. You get a few rude types but if you can't deal with a bit of rudeness then you have bigger problems than where to go for online discussions. If it really bothers you there are plenty of moderated groups but in general usenet isn't for children , never has been and never will be and I personally wouldn't want some dumbed down , sanitised , disneyland version of usenet to keep delicate little wallflowers happy.
Anyone who still uses usenet regularly like me knows they're just as alive as ever so the slow closing down of usenet has nothing to do with declining usage, but in my slightly paranoid opinion I suspect it has everything to do with it not being self funding. Ads simply don't work on usenet (probably because of its text based nature) unlike with web sites and no revenue = no reason to keep the service going.
When it does eventually die I'll miss it since as yet I haven't seen an alternative that works nearly so well and has so many different topics under one roof so to speak.
Never mind the browser , you can tell (or used to be able to , this was a few years back) what OS someone is running - assuming they're not going through a proxy - by looking at the TCP sequence numbers the client sends. There was an article on /. about it and some post grads had written a whitepaper.
"Ah, you mean the violations of the PCI DSS you mean?"
LOL!
Yeah , keep reciting that to yourself. Maybe it'll make all the nasty men go away....
"What kind of idiot would store their details / important confidential data on their web server?"
No sonny , a bank stores customer details in their backend systems but if you can hack the web server you can intercept unencrypted account id's and so forth being sent to the backend systems.
You'd better run along now, teacher probably wants you back in class.
"I think hacking into a web server without destroying anything is a very petty crime"
I guess when you're old enough to buy a car or house you'll think that someone breaking into them is a "very petty crime" then.
"I have a blog on my webserver, can't say I'd label it as an "important part of the internet" though."
If someone hacked into your bank account via a compromised web server you might have a different opinion.
"What age are you 12? Seriously, comparing compromising a few computers with genocide.."
I wasn't comparing it to genocide. My point which you didn't get is that it doesn't matter how long ago a crime was committed. If the perpetrator is still alive then he should still be brought to justice.
... then how are they going to know how much you earn anyway? Surely you could just tell them anything and end up paying little or no tax?
"And he never hacked into any important or valuable computers, only webservers."
Oh right, so webservers arn't an important part of the internet then?
Whatever the rights and wrongs of Mckinnons case the statement you made is just moronic.
And as for it being long ago, so was WW2. Perhaps we should just let old nazi murderers have a nice peaceful retirement too?
Expecting politicians to turn vague electioneering rhetoric into actual action.
McKinnons case will be quietly shuffled off to some under secretary to "look into" and once the media have lost interest he'll be on a plane to Dulles.
"X11 is also rubbish for remote access: having to be on the same LAN to get OK performance is not truly 'remote'."
I've had an xterm running over a dial up connection. YMMV.
"It also has no way to serve *multiples* of any window or desktop, which means that sharing windows with other people "
Apart from a few collaberation apps which could easily be written to open multiple windows displaying the same thing on different X servers - why on earn would you need to share a window or desktop anyway?
Well put it this way , I used to be able to run mpegs in a Window using X on Linux on a 486. Try getting Win XP/7 or OS/X to even run on a 486 , never mind do video.
"Let's be honest, XWindow's performance is just bloody awful. It's slow,"
Is it? I can run a full screen video no problems on my laptop, I can play 3D games and so forth. How exactly is it slow?
"it's a difficult platform for software development."
Really? I've written apps in Xlib and I never had any issues. And there are plenty of higher level libraries if you want to
develop GUI apps. The way Xwin deals with visuals and colour is a bit archaic , but aside from that it works pretty well IMO.
Even properly scalable fonts were sorted out years ago.
"The early 1980s architecture is not well suited to today's demands"
Rubbish. Its client server remote desktop architecture is perfectly suited to enterprise enviroments. Why not go find out why
Citrix et al have been playing catch up on Windows for years to try and do the same thing.
No it isn't. If someone tells you "that is a dog" then you learn a simple fact without any patterns coming into it apart from being able to recognise what the particular breed of dog looks like in the future.
Theres no way just from looking at pictures of dogs that you could tell they're all the same species. There are some characterstics that some breads have in common with others (other than the obvious 4 legs etc) but they don't all overlap. With something like this its more than a simple case of pattern recognition - its aquired knowledge.
Even neural nets have to be programmed at some level to exhibit behaviour that the programmers think will allow them to learn the task at hand unless these guys used some sort of genetic algorithm. The article doesn't mention it. Does anyone know?
Also it doesn't explain whether the system just recognises similar pictures to what its seen before - eg this picture looks like object type 123 (which to a human would be a horses rump) or whether it can combine all views of an object and recognise them all as that object , eg this picture looks like a horse. If its the latter how does it do it - does it have to be shown the object from a large number of angles or can it just infer from a couple of angles what the object would be like from many others?
Just because its not enough for a major bank or for you to store your porn collection on doesn't mean it isn't enough for 99% of small businesses.