> "Nobody was listening in on the ports to try and get usernames and password," says Defiant. "We could have, but we didn't." (On this point, Comcast and the hackers agree).
These guys are either total idiots for getting themselves in a lot of trouble with no gain for themselves or they are lying. Comcast, on the other hand, clearly has no way of knowing if customer information was compromise. They're relying on the word of two criminals who clearly don't like the company. Comcast's agreement in the statement above is irresponsible and negligent. The very least they can do is advise all customers to reset their passwords immediately. If it comes to light that personal information was stolen as a result of this attack, and Comcast customers (or others with whom Comcast customers communicate) can demonstrate financial loss*, I think Comcast should be held partially financially responsible due to their irresponsible response to this event.
* Yes, clearly that would likewise be near impossible to demonstrate, but if these guys/really/ want to screw Comcast, they should change their story later on to help victims of identity theft prove Comcast's culpability.
Yes, yes, we all know Al Gore use cold-war military funding to put all those tubes in series long before there was a cell phone network and that our wonderful modern day PCs evolved from room-size dinosaurs over many decades. But my point was that the Internet as a home consumer product appeared sometime in the mid to late 90s. The cell phone network (the used for more power-hungry and larger car phones) appeared earlier than that, I think in the 80s. But the government-funded advent of silicone and the IP benefited both the consumer internet and cell phone infrastructure presumably about equally. They diverged when the technologies were brought to the average consumer. While the Internet is an open and egalitarian infrastructure where anyone is free to invent new content and devices, content and devices on the cell phone networks are tightly controlled by the infrastructure owners and, despite the location independent advantage of cell, the content and the quality of reasonably priced device options available to consumers just isn't there.
And one more example. Why the heck doesn't my cell phone automatically keep track of how many minutes I've used without me having to manually reset it when the billing cycle restarts. I should be able to see a running total in both minutes and dollars on the device. But no, those @#$*&( are just dieing to have me use those high-rate extra minutes.
I agree with Obama that open access trumps bandwidth. What's more, the loads of free content that open access naturally creates provide huge incentive to upgrade the network. Let's take the cell phone network vs. the Internet. The internet has gone from 2800 baud dial-up service on $2K+ 286 PCs accessing BBSs to Mbps service on sub $1000 computers with processing, graphics, and multi-media capabilities that far exceed what was available in professional video-editing houses just a few decades back. BBSs (much to some of our dismay) gave way to streaming video and interactive GUI applications. And not only have the prices of the devices dropped by huge amounts even in inflation-adjusted dollars, but I don't pay much more for broadband than I once did for dial-up. And today I can sign up without a contract and switch my service provider if I'm unhappy with the service (because we have competing technologies/infrastructure, cable modem and DSL, we have true competition). As for additional infrastructure upgrades, I predict people will start to ditch cable for on-demand TV via the internet. Content provides will innovate with interactive TV and targeted ads. Advertisers will get more for their money because consumers will be more willing to watch ads that they're actually interested in. These efficiencies will motivate and pay for infrastructure upgrades.
The cell phone network on the other hand started as basically your land line sans the wires and hasn't really come very far. Features added include caller ID, call waiting, text messaging, an address book and calendar on your phone that your forced to edit using the horrible UI of the phone itself. You're locked in to a contract, sometimes a multi-year contract. And your devices is tied to the service provider, so you can't take it with you. Where's the simple to implement and obvious features like being able to edit/sync/backup your address book, calendar, etc on a real computer with a full keyboard. Sure, there are better devices like the iPhone and crackberry, but they cost an arm and a leg. And you're still locked into a service provider, so why would I pay so much more for a better device when I have no control over the most important feature, namely coverage area and bandwidth. The cell-phone network is actually bunch of closed-access monopolies and though coverage area has become somewhat better, bandwidth and devices still suck eggs.
Imagine if you could just sign up for wireless access and connect any device you want to the network and switch providers any time you want to get the best performance. I think there would be a huge innovation in devices. Once more useful devices were available, content would follow. (Honestly, how many of you web developers bother with versions of your sites for mobile devices.) Once the content and devices where there, consumers would demand (and be willing to pay for) a better network.
I'm not saying the we shouldn't take caution on the legal definition of NN (I like the Limited Discrimination and Tiering one), but I think it's pretty clear that ensuring open access is the market-centric approach to this issue and letting ISPs get away with trying to exercise monopoly power by exploiting control of the infrastructure would be a huge step backwards.
We'd love to, but we can't afford it. After buying* Iraq with a no-down-payment sub-prime ARM and promptly having the fair market value fall below the outstanding balance on our loan, our credit is shot. Wait, am I confusing domestic and international issues again?
* (Colin Powell to Bush BEFORE Iraq war: "The china-shop rule applies: You break it, you bought it.")
I don't know about the law in Singapore, but this seems so obviously silly that if I were a lawyer for one of the companies receiving the invoice, I'd ask the attorney general to prosecute for mail fraud (a federal offense which includes knowingly sending someone a bill for goods or services not rendered in hopes of receiving erroneous payment).
I'll start by saying that I'm an unashamed Gentoo fanboy, so mod as appropriate, but Mr. Østergaard seems to have forgotten to mention what he dislikes about Gentoo in either his blog entry or on exherbo.org. He says that Gentoo developers, users, Fanboys, and community are bad, but the most specific technical comment he made was a criticism that someone undertook "porting ebuilds to run on SunOS 2 ksh under Cygwin", which is apparently bad. He simply says of portage that it's "broken and unmaintainable", but he doesn't say why. He says Exherbo option handeling is "much improved" compared to Gentoo's USE flags, but again doesn't say what's wrong with USE flags. (I get around unintended consequences simply by enabling/disabling things on a package-by package basis, so if he's talking about that...).
I've been using gentoo quite happily for almost 3 years now on various servers as well as desktops for multiple users (no, I don't `emerge world` nightly), so I'm quite interested in what's wrong with portage (It's a godsend from my perspective) and the rest of gentoo. Seriously, I'd really like to know what's going to bite me in the arse here. But alas, Mr. Østergaard criticisms of Gentoo were far to vague and his design goals for Exherbo were equally vague and silly. Maybe he, or someone other than than the Trolls, other distro fanboys, and non-techy former Gentoo users who got burnt and should never have used it in the first place can please point me in the direction of some unbias and fair evaluations of Gentoo's strengths and weaknesses.
Section 2 does look like a translation of something, probably from the top (cypher or foreign language) into the bottom (hex). It's not just a key because of the repeats and because it's not in order. Since we see latin characters, the 2nd section was obviously written by someone from our culture. But why would (s)he use hash marks instead of 1/2 1/2/3 for the other sections unless (s)he was just copying something written by others exactly.
I also don't think the sections are the same message because even if you treat 1 and 3 as one long tertiary/binary number, you get something in the billions. Each line of section 2 is in the trillions by itself (and gives me an overflow if treated as 1 hex line.)
Section 1 is 2,299,824,724 in decimal and 0x89148A54 in hex.
Section 2:
Line 1: 264,703,011,126,627
Line 2: 119,270,485,038,054
Section 3 is 3,385,982,383 in decimal and 0xC9D1FDAF in hex.
Are you #()*& insane? Why would you want a rack mount anything, especially in your home? Rack stuff, especially 1U, is noisy (it has to have small fans that spin really fast) and it's an inconvenient form factor unless you really need to pack a lot of equipment into a space. The rack alone takes up 21"x42"xheight, so unless you actually need something on the order of 336 CPU cores (42U of two-way quad cores), rack mount is a horrible idea.
Ditch the rack and buy yourself a Shuttle barebones P238 (no, I don't work for them, but I do have shelves, not racks, full of them and they work great). Put 8G of memory, a few Raptor HDs, and a quad core in it and the whole thing will be less than $2500 from NewEgg for a sweet system. Then, put it any where you please because it's dead quiet and always ice cold (we do weather modeling on them, so we run the CPUs at 100% for days at a time).
$11 Million. To hack every computer in the world. Which has to includes all the overhead of government salaries and equipment. I'm shaking in my boots.
(Holds pinkey finger to corner of mouth) "One Million Dollars." (The one where he travels forward in time, not the one from the 60s.)
I just upgraded to rails 1.2.6 and ran `rails rails_test`. The file that cause most problems in previous versions was dispatch.rb, which looks like it has been greatly reduced, as is should be. There's still the changing API issue, but I yield on point 1, as this latest version seems much improved.
Now that's what I call 0wn3ing a server. Hackers are getting more aggressive every day. The only thing more impressive would be if the hacker got his lawyer to get the courts to agree that he had the legal ownership of the thing. I wonder how vulnerable the law is to hacking?
Funny, I don't ever remember seeing a EULA written on paper? I especially don't remember ever signing one. I've heard software developers/say/ that I couldn't possibly have installed their software without clicking some 'agree to the EULA' button, but to the best of my knowledge, I never did any such thing. Shouldn't they at least be required to have some reasonable record verifying that I agreed to such a thing before the courts will enforce it.
Pardon the off topic rant (please feel free to mod appropriately), but I have to agree that RoR DOES SUCK. (At least I didn't set up my own blog just to rant about it.) The RUBY language is the best thing since sliced bread, but Rails isn't. And I'm not talking about the installation and management issues like everyone else. I mean from a developer's perspective, RoR is horrible. Here's why:
1) Automated copy-n-paste is still copy-n-paste Maybe it's changed since the last time I used it, but creating a rails application COPIES a bunch of files from the distribution into the app directory it creates. How do you upgrade? Painfully, that's how. I have numerous small applications that break when I upgrade rails and it's dependencies because the copied files don't work with the newer version. My applications should be 100% code I write directly. Everything else should be kept separate and accessed via includes so emerge/apt/yum/gem dependencies can keep the rails code compatible with itself and I never have to "fix" code I didn't write.
2) RoR gives you the 1% that's used 10% of the time, not the 10% that's used 90% of the time. So you set up a RAILS app, create your database table, and run 'generate' to get your pseudo-MVC (seen #4 below). You've got everything you need to edit a single table via the web, but that's not even close to an application. It probably saved me about 1/2 of setting things up by hand. That's simply not good enough. It should be able to create an app that supports validation (both JS and server-side for obvious stuff like numeric and lengths), sorting, filtering, searching, relationships, and css skins. It could do this just from the information available in the database metadata, which would get you 90% done. And a huge number of simple apps could be completed simply by writing a custom CSS skin and adding some graphics.
3) No UI components, which are the hardest part of web development. Most of what rails does buy you is the back-end stuff. It's an easy way to get stared with ActiveRecord, which does the heavy SQL lifting. AR, the one shining gem of RoR, is a great object-relational model and I believe it is responsible for 99% of RoR's popularity. But SQL isn't that complicated in the first place. The real tough part of web development is getting rich, graphical, reusable UI components that work across web browsers. Prototype/Scriptaculous are a wonderful starting place, but I need code that I can feed an AR class (and possibly a list of columns and/or related tables+columns) that will generate cross-browser compatible HTML view of the table complete with searching, sorting, filtering, and paging. There could be functions/objects that render it as a table, a list, a tree, etc. You're probably thinking I should just use.NET and it's various components, but I don't want to work on Windows, I don't want to work with IIS, I don't want to write VB or C#, and.NET really does a bad job of layouts and makes a lot of other stuff more complicated. And it's ORM simply can't touch ActiveRecord. Rails does only a tiny amount of what it could and should.
4) It's NOT MVC The Model-View-Controller design pattern is about limiting the amount of communication necessary by having one instance of some code (the controller) that all access to data (the model) from other code (the views) goes through. Views subscribe to a model, get their data and then do their thing without worrying about other views. If some other view changes the model, the controller notifies all other subscribed views of the change. Rails MVC is something totally different that doesn't solve the same problem. Rails does provide data validation via AR, which is part of true MVC, but it still misses the point of MVC, which is a coherent and always up to date set of views into the model. In fact, an MVC is impossible to implement over the web because communication is one way: the browser must initiate all communication with the web server. (For those that don't "get" this,
From TFA Summary: "must make radical changes to the operating system"
Any software developer knows that 'radical changes' to working (however imperfectly) code is a bad idea. The only thing really wrong with Vista (other than the necessity of all those graphics in the first place, which boils down to a matter of opinion) is the video drivers, which can be blamed on Nvidia and ATI, not Microsoft. I get similar problems using the proprietary binary drivers on Linux from time to time as well though. It usually only crashes Xwindows rather than requiring a reboot, but you probably shouldn't be running a 3d graphics on a machine with uptime requirements in the first place.
Mr. Silver and Mr. MacDonald are either: a) Complete morons b) Covert Linux enthusiasts frustrated by Linux's slow advances in the desktop space c) Very knowledgeable about the direct relationship between sensationalism and ratings and lack thereof between intelligent analysis and ratings
From TFP: a server that implements tasks by breaking the tasks into smaller subtasks and utilizing idle resources in multiple clients to perform these subtasks;
I think I have a coffee cup that says something to that effect. Does that count as prior art?
A lot of the things they predicted are available, but no one wants them:
TFA: Dwellings for the most part are assembled from prefabricated modules... Despite the marketing efforts of modular home builders claiming that they're better quality, modular homes are still considered "low end" and buyers are afraid the home won't grow in value with the rest of the market.
TFA: prepackaged meals into the freezer and lets the automatic food utility do the rest. At preset times, each meal slides into the microwave oven and is cooked or thawed. The meal then is served on disposable plastic plates. These plates, as well as knives, forks and spoons of the same material, are so inexpensive they can be discarded after use. Microwave meals and disposable housewares all both available and cheap. But the quality is so bad that they're rarely used. TFA also didn't consider where all that trash would go.
TFA (correct): The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. TFA (wrong): These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance. TFA (corrected): These electronic brains suck America's productivity dry by keeping us busy playing video games, looking at pr0n, and watching low-quality video of idiots who deserve Darwin awards on Youtube.
TFA: TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center. Granted, the mouse hadn't been invented, but they couldn't imagine keyboards or touch-screens? Idiots.
TFA: Medical research has guaranteed that most babies born in the 21st century will live long and healthy lives....except in America, where we have the highest infant mortality rate in the 1st world (Sicko, Michael Moore).
TFA: No need to worry about failing memory or intelligence either....with the state of education, you'll still be smarted than the next generation for the foreseeable future.
Of course, that's CD-R, not CD-RW, so if you accidentally go and fill them with some crap from the record companies, then they're ruined and you'll need to buy new ones.
Amen. "because it's fun" is crap. I admit that it is "fun" or more accurately "interesting" to tinker from time to time, but that's not nearly enough motivation to go through the extra work of using Linux. And yes, it IS more complicated to install and maintain that Windows. I use it because:
1) It's free. Not just the OS, but a ridiculous amount of software that does just about anything. 2) Innovation starts here. Geeks use Linux. Geeks program on Linux. Lots of stuff is simply available on Linux first and supported on Linux better, especially in the scientific programming world. Sure, most those libraries will supposedly compile on Windows, but it's not the primary platform the devs are using and I can download, compile, and install it on windows with a single command. 3) CLI is simply a faster and better way to do a lot of things. CLI on windows is a second-class citizen (Konsole vs. Command Prompt). Granted, I haven't tried that new Microsoft shell and CLI language, but the beta was released a few years ago and you don't really hear much about it, so I'm guessing it's crap.
What is a supercomputer these days anyway? I'd say it has to be something that meets a special need, because applications that bottleneck on CPU speed alone these days are few and far between. Sure, you can probably find a lot of algorithms that use 100% of a few dozen processors, but try running it on a cluster of hundreds or thousands and the problem size for an individual node becomes so small that the process becomes I/O bound.
I vote that to be classified as a supercomputer, a system needs to have something like a really fast network, disks that are both large and fast, and/or 64GB+ of memory for each CPU core. Putting all that together and actually making it work would be both expensive and difficult. If you just need lots of cores with a few GB of memory each, connected by GigE, and with a few dozen TB of 7200RPM disks, that's pretty much dirt-cheap COTS hardware that anyone can put together.
> This has tremendous potential for the maintenance of fiber optic networks, pipelines, and plumbing in large buildings; and also as a spy device......not to mention Action/Thriller sequels staring Samuel L. Jackson and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
This summer: He traveled back in time to stop a post-apocolyptic future where terrorists rule the world with their robot-snake armies. But with their tremendous potential for the maintenance of fiber optic networks, pipelines, plumbing, and time-travel, two of them followed him: one good, the other evil...
Nothing wrong with that. In fact, that sounds like a pretty good use of government: providing independent ratings of things to help consumers make choices that suit them. It's just like the USDA rating meat and eggs. If you know the USDA is full of crap, you can always ignore the rating and buy what you like. You can also pay more for fatty, flavorless USDA "prime" if you like that sort of thing. As long as the Government isn't restricting, taxing, or fining ISP's who don't make the grade, I'm all for it.
> * Provide access to clean water > Nice idea, but first you have to have enough to go around. This problem (as would many others) be solved with FEWER people shitting the place up.
So, are you saying that "Provide access to clean water" and "Prevent nuclear terror" are mutually exclusive?
Slashdot Mirror
> "Nobody was listening in on the ports to try and get usernames and password," says Defiant. "We could have, but we didn't." (On this point, Comcast and the hackers agree).
/really/ want to screw Comcast, they should change their story later on to help victims of identity theft prove Comcast's culpability.
These guys are either total idiots for getting themselves in a lot of trouble with no gain for themselves or they are lying. Comcast, on the other hand, clearly has no way of knowing if customer information was compromise. They're relying on the word of two criminals who clearly don't like the company. Comcast's agreement in the statement above is irresponsible and negligent. The very least they can do is advise all customers to reset their passwords immediately. If it comes to light that personal information was stolen as a result of this attack, and Comcast customers (or others with whom Comcast customers communicate) can demonstrate financial loss*, I think Comcast should be held partially financially responsible due to their irresponsible response to this event.
* Yes, clearly that would likewise be near impossible to demonstrate, but if these guys
Yes, yes, we all know Al Gore use cold-war military funding to put all those tubes in series long before there was a cell phone network and that our wonderful modern day PCs evolved from room-size dinosaurs over many decades. But my point was that the Internet as a home consumer product appeared sometime in the mid to late 90s. The cell phone network (the used for more power-hungry and larger car phones) appeared earlier than that, I think in the 80s. But the government-funded advent of silicone and the IP benefited both the consumer internet and cell phone infrastructure presumably about equally. They diverged when the technologies were brought to the average consumer. While the Internet is an open and egalitarian infrastructure where anyone is free to invent new content and devices, content and devices on the cell phone networks are tightly controlled by the infrastructure owners and, despite the location independent advantage of cell, the content and the quality of reasonably priced device options available to consumers just isn't there.
And one more example. Why the heck doesn't my cell phone automatically keep track of how many minutes I've used without me having to manually reset it when the billing cycle restarts. I should be able to see a running total in both minutes and dollars on the device. But no, those @#$*&( are just dieing to have me use those high-rate extra minutes.
I agree with Obama that open access trumps bandwidth. What's more, the loads of free content that open access naturally creates provide huge incentive to upgrade the network. Let's take the cell phone network vs. the Internet. The internet has gone from 2800 baud dial-up service on $2K+ 286 PCs accessing BBSs to Mbps service on sub $1000 computers with processing, graphics, and multi-media capabilities that far exceed what was available in professional video-editing houses just a few decades back. BBSs (much to some of our dismay) gave way to streaming video and interactive GUI applications. And not only have the prices of the devices dropped by huge amounts even in inflation-adjusted dollars, but I don't pay much more for broadband than I once did for dial-up. And today I can sign up without a contract and switch my service provider if I'm unhappy with the service (because we have competing technologies/infrastructure, cable modem and DSL, we have true competition). As for additional infrastructure upgrades, I predict people will start to ditch cable for on-demand TV via the internet. Content provides will innovate with interactive TV and targeted ads. Advertisers will get more for their money because consumers will be more willing to watch ads that they're actually interested in. These efficiencies will motivate and pay for infrastructure upgrades.
The cell phone network on the other hand started as basically your land line sans the wires and hasn't really come very far. Features added include caller ID, call waiting, text messaging, an address book and calendar on your phone that your forced to edit using the horrible UI of the phone itself. You're locked in to a contract, sometimes a multi-year contract. And your devices is tied to the service provider, so you can't take it with you. Where's the simple to implement and obvious features like being able to edit/sync/backup your address book, calendar, etc on a real computer with a full keyboard. Sure, there are better devices like the iPhone and crackberry, but they cost an arm and a leg. And you're still locked into a service provider, so why would I pay so much more for a better device when I have no control over the most important feature, namely coverage area and bandwidth. The cell-phone network is actually bunch of closed-access monopolies and though coverage area has become somewhat better, bandwidth and devices still suck eggs.
Imagine if you could just sign up for wireless access and connect any device you want to the network and switch providers any time you want to get the best performance. I think there would be a huge innovation in devices. Once more useful devices were available, content would follow. (Honestly, how many of you web developers bother with versions of your sites for mobile devices.) Once the content and devices where there, consumers would demand (and be willing to pay for) a better network.
I'm not saying the we shouldn't take caution on the legal definition of NN (I like the Limited Discrimination and Tiering one), but I think it's pretty clear that ensuring open access is the market-centric approach to this issue and letting ISPs get away with trying to exercise monopoly power by exploiting control of the infrastructure would be a huge step backwards.
> uhm... can anyone invade us? pleeeeeasee!!!
We'd love to, but we can't afford it. After buying* Iraq with a no-down-payment sub-prime ARM and promptly having the fair market value fall below the outstanding balance on our loan, our credit is shot. Wait, am I confusing domestic and international issues again?
* (Colin Powell to Bush BEFORE Iraq war: "The china-shop rule applies: You break it, you bought it.")
I don't know about the law in Singapore, but this seems so obviously silly that if I were a lawyer for one of the companies receiving the invoice, I'd ask the attorney general to prosecute for mail fraud (a federal offense which includes knowingly sending someone a bill for goods or services not rendered in hopes of receiving erroneous payment).
I'll start by saying that I'm an unashamed Gentoo fanboy, so mod as appropriate, but Mr. Østergaard seems to have forgotten to mention what he dislikes about Gentoo in either his blog entry or on exherbo.org. He says that Gentoo developers, users, Fanboys, and community are bad, but the most specific technical comment he made was a criticism that someone undertook "porting ebuilds to run on SunOS 2 ksh under Cygwin", which is apparently bad. He simply says of portage that it's "broken and unmaintainable", but he doesn't say why. He says Exherbo option handeling is "much improved" compared to Gentoo's USE flags, but again doesn't say what's wrong with USE flags. (I get around unintended consequences simply by enabling/disabling things on a package-by package basis, so if he's talking about that...).
I've been using gentoo quite happily for almost 3 years now on various servers as well as desktops for multiple users (no, I don't `emerge world` nightly), so I'm quite interested in what's wrong with portage (It's a godsend from my perspective) and the rest of gentoo. Seriously, I'd really like to know what's going to bite me in the arse here. But alas, Mr. Østergaard criticisms of Gentoo were far to vague and his design goals for Exherbo were equally vague and silly. Maybe he, or someone other than than the Trolls, other distro fanboys, and non-techy former Gentoo users who got burnt and should never have used it in the first place can please point me in the direction of some unbias and fair evaluations of Gentoo's strengths and weaknesses.
Section 2 does look like a translation of something, probably from the top (cypher or foreign language) into the bottom (hex). It's not just a key because of the repeats and because it's not in order. Since we see latin characters, the 2nd section was obviously written by someone from our culture. But why would (s)he use hash marks instead of 1/2 1/2/3 for the other sections unless (s)he was just copying something written by others exactly.
I also don't think the sections are the same message because even if you treat 1 and 3 as one long tertiary/binary number, you get something in the billions. Each line of section 2 is in the trillions by itself (and gives me an overflow if treated as 1 hex line.)
Section 1 is 2,299,824,724 in decimal and 0x89148A54 in hex.
Section 2:
Line 1: 264,703,011,126,627
Line 2: 119,270,485,038,054
Section 3 is 3,385,982,383 in decimal and 0xC9D1FDAF in hex.
Are you #()*& insane? Why would you want a rack mount anything, especially in your home? Rack stuff, especially 1U, is noisy (it has to have small fans that spin really fast) and it's an inconvenient form factor unless you really need to pack a lot of equipment into a space. The rack alone takes up 21"x42"xheight, so unless you actually need something on the order of 336 CPU cores (42U of two-way quad cores), rack mount is a horrible idea. Ditch the rack and buy yourself a Shuttle barebones P238 (no, I don't work for them, but I do have shelves, not racks, full of them and they work great). Put 8G of memory, a few Raptor HDs, and a quad core in it and the whole thing will be less than $2500 from NewEgg for a sweet system. Then, put it any where you please because it's dead quiet and always ice cold (we do weather modeling on them, so we run the CPUs at 100% for days at a time).
$11 Million. To hack every computer in the world. Which has to includes all the overhead of government salaries and equipment. I'm shaking in my boots.
(Holds pinkey finger to corner of mouth) "One Million Dollars." (The one where he travels forward in time, not the one from the 60s.)
At least we don't yet seem to have any need to roll out the welcome mat for our San Franciscan overloads.
I just upgraded to rails 1.2.6 and ran `rails rails_test`. The file that cause most problems in previous versions was dispatch.rb, which looks like it has been greatly reduced, as is should be. There's still the changing API issue, but I yield on point 1, as this latest version seems much improved.
Now that's what I call 0wn3ing a server. Hackers are getting more aggressive every day. The only thing more impressive would be if the hacker got his lawyer to get the courts to agree that he had the legal ownership of the thing. I wonder how vulnerable the law is to hacking?
> paper they are written on
/say/ that I couldn't possibly have installed their software without clicking some 'agree to the EULA' button, but to the best of my knowledge, I never did any such thing. Shouldn't they at least be required to have some reasonable record verifying that I agreed to such a thing before the courts will enforce it.
Funny, I don't ever remember seeing a EULA written on paper? I especially don't remember ever signing one. I've heard software developers
Pardon the off topic rant (please feel free to mod appropriately), but I have to agree that RoR DOES SUCK. (At least I didn't set up my own blog just to rant about it.) The RUBY language is the best thing since sliced bread, but Rails isn't. And I'm not talking about the installation and management issues like everyone else. I mean from a developer's perspective, RoR is horrible. Here's why:
.NET and it's various components, but I don't want to work on Windows, I don't want to work with IIS, I don't want to write VB or C#, and .NET really does a bad job of layouts and makes a lot of other stuff more complicated. And it's ORM simply can't touch ActiveRecord. Rails does only a tiny amount of what it could and should.
1) Automated copy-n-paste is still copy-n-paste
Maybe it's changed since the last time I used it, but creating a rails application COPIES a bunch of files from the distribution into the app directory it creates. How do you upgrade? Painfully, that's how. I have numerous small applications that break when I upgrade rails and it's dependencies because the copied files don't work with the newer version. My applications should be 100% code I write directly. Everything else should be kept separate and accessed via includes so emerge/apt/yum/gem dependencies can keep the rails code compatible with itself and I never have to "fix" code I didn't write.
2) RoR gives you the 1% that's used 10% of the time, not the 10% that's used 90% of the time.
So you set up a RAILS app, create your database table, and run 'generate' to get your pseudo-MVC (seen #4 below). You've got everything you need to edit a single table via the web, but that's not even close to an application. It probably saved me about 1/2 of setting things up by hand. That's simply not good enough. It should be able to create an app that supports validation (both JS and server-side for obvious stuff like numeric and lengths), sorting, filtering, searching, relationships, and css skins. It could do this just from the information available in the database metadata, which would get you 90% done. And a huge number of simple apps could be completed simply by writing a custom CSS skin and adding some graphics.
3) No UI components, which are the hardest part of web development.
Most of what rails does buy you is the back-end stuff. It's an easy way to get stared with ActiveRecord, which does the heavy SQL lifting. AR, the one shining gem of RoR, is a great object-relational model and I believe it is responsible for 99% of RoR's popularity. But SQL isn't that complicated in the first place. The real tough part of web development is getting rich, graphical, reusable UI components that work across web browsers. Prototype/Scriptaculous are a wonderful starting place, but I need code that I can feed an AR class (and possibly a list of columns and/or related tables+columns) that will generate cross-browser compatible HTML view of the table complete with searching, sorting, filtering, and paging. There could be functions/objects that render it as a table, a list, a tree, etc. You're probably thinking I should just use
4) It's NOT MVC
The Model-View-Controller design pattern is about limiting the amount of communication necessary by having one instance of some code (the controller) that all access to data (the model) from other code (the views) goes through. Views subscribe to a model, get their data and then do their thing without worrying about other views. If some other view changes the model, the controller notifies all other subscribed views of the change. Rails MVC is something totally different that doesn't solve the same problem. Rails does provide data validation via AR, which is part of true MVC, but it still misses the point of MVC, which is a coherent and always up to date set of views into the model. In fact, an MVC is impossible to implement over the web because communication is one way: the browser must initiate all communication with the web server. (For those that don't "get" this,
So will they be hiring Hansel to search computers then?
For those interested in the real article, it's here:
/. links to doesn't actually link to it. Even this article is a summary of 6 articles from TheNewspaper.com (which it does link to).
http://www.motorists.org/blog/red-light-cameras/6-cities-that-were-caught-shortening-yellow-light-times-for-profit/
The blog post
From TFA Summary: "must make radical changes to the operating system"
Any software developer knows that 'radical changes' to working (however imperfectly) code is a bad idea. The only thing really wrong with Vista (other than the necessity of all those graphics in the first place, which boils down to a matter of opinion) is the video drivers, which can be blamed on Nvidia and ATI, not Microsoft. I get similar problems using the proprietary binary drivers on Linux from time to time as well though. It usually only crashes Xwindows rather than requiring a reboot, but you probably shouldn't be running a 3d graphics on a machine with uptime requirements in the first place.
Mr. Silver and Mr. MacDonald are either:
a) Complete morons
b) Covert Linux enthusiasts frustrated by Linux's slow advances in the desktop space
c) Very knowledgeable about the direct relationship between sensationalism and ratings and lack thereof between intelligent analysis and ratings
From TFP: a server that implements tasks by breaking the tasks into smaller subtasks and utilizing idle resources in multiple clients to perform these subtasks;
I think I have a coffee cup that says something to that effect. Does that count as prior art?
A lot of the things they predicted are available, but no one wants them:
...except in America, where we have the highest infant mortality rate in the 1st world (Sicko, Michael Moore).
...with the state of education, you'll still be smarted than the next generation for the foreseeable future.
TFA: Dwellings for the most part are assembled from prefabricated modules...
Despite the marketing efforts of modular home builders claiming that they're better quality, modular homes are still considered "low end" and buyers are afraid the home won't grow in value with the rest of the market.
TFA: prepackaged meals into the freezer and lets the automatic food utility do the rest. At preset times, each meal slides into the microwave oven and is cooked or thawed. The meal then is served on disposable plastic plates. These plates, as well as knives, forks and spoons of the same material, are so inexpensive they can be discarded after use.
Microwave meals and disposable housewares all both available and cheap. But the quality is so bad that they're rarely used. TFA also didn't consider where all that trash would go.
TFA (correct): The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer.
TFA (wrong): These electronic brains govern everything from meal preparation and waking up the household to assembling shopping lists and keeping track of the bank balance.
TFA (corrected): These electronic brains suck America's productivity dry by keeping us busy playing video games, looking at pr0n, and watching low-quality video of idiots who deserve Darwin awards on Youtube.
TFA: TV-telephone shopping is common. To shop, you simply press the numbered code of a giant shopping center.
Granted, the mouse hadn't been invented, but they couldn't imagine keyboards or touch-screens? Idiots.
TFA: Medical research has guaranteed that most babies born in the 21st century will live long and healthy lives.
TFA: No need to worry about failing memory or intelligence either.
Of course not. CD's only cost about 1/100th that:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817132027
Of course, that's CD-R, not CD-RW, so if you accidentally go and fill them with some crap from the record companies, then they're ruined and you'll need to buy new ones.
Amen. "because it's fun" is crap. I admit that it is "fun" or more accurately "interesting" to tinker from time to time, but that's not nearly enough motivation to go through the extra work of using Linux. And yes, it IS more complicated to install and maintain that Windows. I use it because:
1) It's free. Not just the OS, but a ridiculous amount of software that does just about anything.
2) Innovation starts here. Geeks use Linux. Geeks program on Linux. Lots of stuff is simply available on Linux first and supported on Linux better, especially in the scientific programming world. Sure, most those libraries will supposedly compile on Windows, but it's not the primary platform the devs are using and I can download, compile, and install it on windows with a single command.
3) CLI is simply a faster and better way to do a lot of things. CLI on windows is a second-class citizen (Konsole vs. Command Prompt). Granted, I haven't tried that new Microsoft shell and CLI language, but the beta was released a few years ago and you don't really hear much about it, so I'm guessing it's crap.
What is a supercomputer these days anyway? I'd say it has to be something that meets a special need, because applications that bottleneck on CPU speed alone these days are few and far between. Sure, you can probably find a lot of algorithms that use 100% of a few dozen processors, but try running it on a cluster of hundreds or thousands and the problem size for an individual node becomes so small that the process becomes I/O bound.
I vote that to be classified as a supercomputer, a system needs to have something like a really fast network, disks that are both large and fast, and/or 64GB+ of memory for each CPU core. Putting all that together and actually making it work would be both expensive and difficult. If you just need lots of cores with a few GB of memory each, connected by GigE, and with a few dozen TB of 7200RPM disks, that's pretty much dirt-cheap COTS hardware that anyone can put together.
> This has tremendous potential for the maintenance of fiber optic networks, pipelines, and plumbing in large buildings; and also as a spy device... ...not to mention Action/Thriller sequels staring Samuel L. Jackson and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
This summer: He traveled back in time to stop a post-apocolyptic future where terrorists rule the world with their robot-snake armies. But with their tremendous potential for the maintenance of fiber optic networks, pipelines, plumbing, and time-travel, two of them followed him: one good, the other evil...
Nothing wrong with that. In fact, that sounds like a pretty good use of government: providing independent ratings of things to help consumers make choices that suit them. It's just like the USDA rating meat and eggs. If you know the USDA is full of crap, you can always ignore the rating and buy what you like. You can also pay more for fatty, flavorless USDA "prime" if you like that sort of thing. As long as the Government isn't restricting, taxing, or fining ISP's who don't make the grade, I'm all for it.
> * Provide access to clean water
> Nice idea, but first you have to have enough to go around. This problem (as would many others) be solved with FEWER people shitting the place up.
So, are you saying that "Provide access to clean water" and "Prevent nuclear terror" are mutually exclusive?