And the author of that one *also* does not name the offending company.
Raising the issue in a vacuum is fruitless, because there's no general panacea for corporate security stupidity. Other users won't know until they receive their passwords in the mail that they've opened an account with a company that should be marked "Fail".
So mark them. Here's a good place to start, and the above blogger should have done it also. Otherwise you're just blowing off steam.
This doesn't seem like a tough call. I have four volumes of Knuth on my shelf (just found 4A existed, so its cover is still pretty fresh), and I refer to them frequently. Even the oldest ones (though I did buy a fresh copy of Vol 1 after it was updated). It's my first stop when I need to start researching an algorithm, and often I don't need to go further.
OK, now Thomas Haigh. Googled him. Checked his credentials. PhD dissertation in the sociology of computer science. Umm, OK. Think I'll go analyze this algorithm some more... after I check my Knuth to see whether he's already done it for me.
That sounds charming, but there was no clue during the setup of the new Xbox One that the problem was due to their network failure. The error messages presented to us as we were trying to figure out the setup were that our cables, local network and ISP DNS server were not working. There was no suggestion offered by the box that a server outage was a possibility. Yes, we did go on to other things, but it took us two hours to decide it was likely the problem was not in fact ours.
Less merry for adults, too. We got an Xbox One for the grandkids, and I tried to help my son get it sorted for a couple of hours. The situation was magnified by inappropriate error messages from Microsoft pointing fingers at our cables, our network, our ISP's network, and, in short, everything except their own darned servers! A single approximately correct error diagnosis from them (like "Our servers may be knackered. Check back later.") would have redirected our efforts more appropriately.
When I finally stopped checking Microsoft's website and got around to looking at news sites, I told them about the DOS. One of my grandsons said "Think of the children!"
I enjoyed Honor Harrington for a while... at least until it devolved into tree-cat fan-fiction. But the parts that appealed to me least were the parts you're referring to. When even the names of her monarchy's opponents were cribbed directly from the French revolutionary leaders I cringed. Other writers also crib a piece of history and file off the serial numbers to disguise their laziness, but Weber doesn't even bother with the file.
I agree that Iain M. Banks's Culture novels show that Stross's goal is at least possible. He did a brilliant job of imagining a distant future that gave me severe culture shock, but was also entertaining and engaging. Books set thousands of years in the future where we have the same viewpoints and aspirations do indeed make it difficult for me to suspend disbelief.
William Gibson's recent "Peripheral" provides two more near-term futures, both of which I would expect Stross to approve - the first perhaps two or three decades ahead that's a (perhaps appropriately) cynical view of the direction our civilizations are going, and the second perhaps a century on from that. With the closer one I could see where it was all coming from, and with the second the protagonist was able to relate better than I was... but then she was a couple of decades closer to it. It seemed to me a real tour de force. Recommended.
Looking back, though, I like to see how various authors did predicting their future in which we currently live. Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer" is still one of my favorites, but didn't work as a crystal ball. One of the Lazarus Long books placed his sidekick and tame math genius Andrew Libby on the spaceship's bridge using his slide rule to work his calculations. Gibson's 1984 "Neuromancer" hasn't held up very well either in this regard.
But Vernor Vinge's groundbreaking 1981 "True Names" still seems spot on to me, except perhaps underestimating the bandwidth that was going to be available. Anonymous hackers mostly stayed ahead of the governments, and Vinge foresaw some of our current network-based threats only a few years after the ARPAnet started spreading out from the universities. Like the protagonist Mr. Slippery, I feel impaired when I'm on a cruise ship with limited bandwidth and can't get instant answers to fleeting questions -- it seems that I'm not as effective a problem solver when I'm unplugged from the Net. Vinge even predicted the role of Homeland Security, though he had the Welfare Department cast in that role: when confronted by the authorities, Roger Pollack said "I do know my rights. You FBI types must identify yourselves, give me a phone call, and--". The response was "Perhaps that would be true, if we were the FBI or if you were not the scum you are. But this is a Welfare Department bust, Pollack, and you are suspected--putting it kindly--of interference with the instrumentalities of National and individual survival." And it keeps getting better. Pardon me, time to go read it yet again.
President Obama has indeed forsworn the moon, and he's the one who tells NASA how to pick targets. In http://www.nasa.gov/news/media... he says "Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before. Buzz has been there. There’s a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do. So I believe it’s more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach -- and operate at -- a series of increasingly demanding targets, while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward. And that’s what this strategy does."
He's the first successful Presidential candidate I've voted for, and I've been voting for one or another of their opponents since 1968, but I was very disappointed with this President's unfocused long-term strategy of finding different balls of matter to plant flags on... once.
Orbiting a few satellites around the Moon is laudable, but they can't be realistically compared to a project like Apollo or a major follow-on like a permanent or semi-permanent Moon base.
CERN said the evidence is five sigma or so for a particle more or less where the Higgs was expected (or perhaps about halfway between where two competing theories expected it), but some now doubt whether the particle CERN found is actually the Higgs. See this recent reassessment: http://sdu.dk/en/Om_SDU/Fakult...
"it does not have any status as anything else." -- not quite true. Perhaps not any *legitimate* status, or *deserved* status, but the IRS granted it tax-exempt status as a religion after a relentless harassment campaign.
You don't. I didn't claim it was, although I admit the title could be less specific. ("...perfectly satisfied with Linux performance on...") I'm looking at the larger issue of mainstream Linux gaming.
Although I don't have the careful performance charts of the link in the OP, I've been perfectly satisfied for years with Linux performance on the large-budget games I've played recently: Lord of the Rings Online, EVE-Online and Minecraft. My frame rate has been very smooth on the desktop and fat laptop, and quite playable on my 2GB RAM Acer C720 Chromebook running Crouton... around 20-40 fps on the latter for LotRO and EVE. For LotRO it seems to crash less than running it natively on Windows. Although I don't play it myself, I installed WoW on the Chromebook as a proof of concept for an interested Croutoner, and again it was quite playable... at least through the "kill 10 rats" style intro.
So from my viewpoint there's more to main-line game life on Linux than these reported ports or Steam.
My Amazon Acer C720 purchase was legit in the sense you're talking about. I saw a cheap box that could stream my Amazon Prime video to my TV's HDMI port and serve as a backup mail and browser system when it wasn't doing that; but the expectation was that it would sit on that pile of boxes next to the TV and live there. I bought it as a ChromeOS machine and it worked great for that.
Only after I got it did I discover I could put Crouton on it and have a full-fledged Linux system just like I'm using on my main machines, and that it really did get 10 hours on the battery. Now it's the one that goes with me on trips instead of my monster ASUS laptop whose power brick weighs as much as the Chromebook, and I can still do my C development and testing on it with no problem.
I exchange the Keepass password file by superencrypting it with a (presumably) strong encryption algorithm before stuffing it up into the cloud. That should make it easier to break into my house physically than ripping my keys.
For anyone with a suitable background..., Wikipedia's math articles are generally the best, most accurate and most comprehensive free source of basic mathematics information available. If you don't have that background, no article of any kind is going to be explain to what a "scheme" is, for example. To think so is as naive as believing that you can understand all the nuances of Baudelaire's poetry without learning French; you may think you learn something from a translation into your language, but you actually don't.
Goethe's comment is relevant here:
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and it immediately becomes something entirely different.
Jon Huntsman has plenty of good qualities. For example, his willingness to become ambassador to China when asked by President Obama, because both he and the President recognized that he was the best man available for the job. Working with the other side when it's the right thing to do makes good sense, but of course does not allow you to win the Republican nomination when the whole party has fallen off the conservative side of the scale.
A number of potentially strong candidates chose not to run, saving their energy for when they have a better chance. There are other very competent candidates who weren't interested, but might be persuaded to come out and try it in 2016, like Condi Rice.
Until they move back toward traditional Republican values and away from the nutballs currently controlling the party, I doubt that they'll get anybody elected. Step one: disavow their Grover Norquist "never vote yes on a tax" pledge and embrace realistic solutions to real problems.
You indicate your reading decline started from feeling you had to finish a book once you'd started it, even if you hated it. This is easily addressed: you need to recognize that life is too short to read bad books. There are many more books out there that you will enjoy than you have time to read. In fact, there are more good ones published every year than you can handle in a lifetime. The day of the Renaissance Man has passed - no-one nowadays can know everything important.
Samuel Johnson said "A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good." (Boswell, Life of Johnson, 14 July 1763)
There's no guarantee that getting an electronic tool will make reading more interesting or fun for you. The main advantage of an ebook reader like Kindle is that you can read it outside in the sunlight, if that fits better with your lifestyle. A tablet provide its own light, so you can read in the dark and not bother roommates. I personally prefer the tablet (Nexus 7 for me), since I can do a great deal of other stuff on it when I'm not reading. I spend probably half my tablet time reading, and the other half web-surfing or writing. I plan to watch movies and read books on it the next time I fly. It's handy because I can copy and paste from what I'm reading into what I'm writing.
My wife has a Kindle and a Nexus 7 -- she no longer uses the Kindle. It'll be gifted to a niece, probably.
I wonder whether Toulouse has laws against using your smartphone while driving -- this could be a nice income source for the municipality as well, staking out the parking spots with hidden cameras!
I saw this played at the University of Wisconsin in 1970 - Paul Purdom was on one side, but I forget the other player - maybe Ralph London? It was called Go-spiel (by analogy with Kriegspiel), and required a referee to tell the players whether their proposed move was legal, using his master board between the two players with screens to keep them from seeing the other boards.
The one game I saw played didn't have nearly the depth and interest of Kriegspiel, which I played and refereed often in the years before that at the RAND Corporation. Perhaps 9x9 Go-spiel would have worked out better.
I like shocking nonsense: it's easier to remember something dirty that you make up yourself, for some reason. "My Uncle John had carnal relations with blueberry pies 3 times a week." => "MUJhcrwbp3taw.". I'm suspicious of pulling letters out of a known document, no matter how obscure.
For passwords on unimportant sites it's not worth the effort to use strong passwords.
The initial dump from Gawker showed 188,281 cracked passwords out of 1,247,893 in the password database, or 15%. They were salted. A report from totse says "261459 password hashes cracked, 486643 left". I don't know how that user selected the particular hashes he was working on -- looks like ~70% of the ones that weren't cracked in the initial dump. John the Ripper dictionary attacker and brute-forcer is being used on the password file, but the CUDA cracker doesn't have this DES-based algorithm in it.
There are lots of news stories about the completion of the neutrino observatory. I could have linked any of them, but I preferred to go to the source of the information rather than filtering it through a reporter -- especially when the source has perfectly accessible text that doesn't need a scientist to explain for us. If you want to see many news articles about it, Google News will find them quickly.
That was my first try at a submission -- next time I'll put more in the summary.
Slashdot Mirror
And the author of that one *also* does not name the offending company.
Raising the issue in a vacuum is fruitless, because there's no general panacea for corporate security stupidity. Other users won't know until they receive their passwords in the mail that they've opened an account with a company that should be marked "Fail".
So mark them. Here's a good place to start, and the above blogger should have done it also. Otherwise you're just blowing off steam.
This doesn't seem like a tough call. I have four volumes of Knuth on my shelf (just found 4A existed, so its cover is still pretty fresh), and I refer to them frequently. Even the oldest ones (though I did buy a fresh copy of Vol 1 after it was updated). It's my first stop when I need to start researching an algorithm, and often I don't need to go further.
OK, now Thomas Haigh. Googled him. Checked his credentials. PhD dissertation in the sociology of computer science. Umm, OK. Think I'll go analyze this algorithm some more... after I check my Knuth to see whether he's already done it for me.
That sounds charming, but there was no clue during the setup of the new Xbox One that the problem was due to their network failure. The error messages presented to us as we were trying to figure out the setup were that our cables, local network and ISP DNS server were not working. There was no suggestion offered by the box that a server outage was a possibility. Yes, we did go on to other things, but it took us two hours to decide it was likely the problem was not in fact ours.
Your smug superiority is misplaced.
Less merry for adults, too. We got an Xbox One for the grandkids, and I tried to help my son get it sorted for a couple of hours. The situation was magnified by inappropriate error messages from Microsoft pointing fingers at our cables, our network, our ISP's network, and, in short, everything except their own darned servers! A single approximately correct error diagnosis from them (like "Our servers may be knackered. Check back later.") would have redirected our efforts more appropriately.
When I finally stopped checking Microsoft's website and got around to looking at news sites, I told them about the DOS. One of my grandsons said "Think of the children!"
I just did a quick cat / tr / grep / wc on Lord of the Rings, and got:
Fellowship of the Rings: 1361 hyphenated words out of 178,672
The Two Towers: 1047 of 154,403
Return of the King: 829 of 135,285
This guy gets kicked to the curb for 100 hyphens out of 90,000 words? Pooh. It's a matter of style.
I enjoyed Honor Harrington for a while... at least until it devolved into tree-cat fan-fiction. But the parts that appealed to me least were the parts you're referring to. When even the names of her monarchy's opponents were cribbed directly from the French revolutionary leaders I cringed. Other writers also crib a piece of history and file off the serial numbers to disguise their laziness, but Weber doesn't even bother with the file.
I agree that Iain M. Banks's Culture novels show that Stross's goal is at least possible. He did a brilliant job of imagining a distant future that gave me severe culture shock, but was also entertaining and engaging. Books set thousands of years in the future where we have the same viewpoints and aspirations do indeed make it difficult for me to suspend disbelief.
William Gibson's recent "Peripheral" provides two more near-term futures, both of which I would expect Stross to approve - the first perhaps two or three decades ahead that's a (perhaps appropriately) cynical view of the direction our civilizations are going, and the second perhaps a century on from that. With the closer one I could see where it was all coming from, and with the second the protagonist was able to relate better than I was... but then she was a couple of decades closer to it. It seemed to me a real tour de force. Recommended.
Looking back, though, I like to see how various authors did predicting their future in which we currently live. Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer" is still one of my favorites, but didn't work as a crystal ball. One of the Lazarus Long books placed his sidekick and tame math genius Andrew Libby on the spaceship's bridge using his slide rule to work his calculations. Gibson's 1984 "Neuromancer" hasn't held up very well either in this regard.
But Vernor Vinge's groundbreaking 1981 "True Names" still seems spot on to me, except perhaps underestimating the bandwidth that was going to be available. Anonymous hackers mostly stayed ahead of the governments, and Vinge foresaw some of our current network-based threats only a few years after the ARPAnet started spreading out from the universities. Like the protagonist Mr. Slippery, I feel impaired when I'm on a cruise ship with limited bandwidth and can't get instant answers to fleeting questions -- it seems that I'm not as effective a problem solver when I'm unplugged from the Net. Vinge even predicted the role of Homeland Security, though he had the Welfare Department cast in that role: when confronted by the authorities, Roger Pollack said "I do know my rights. You FBI types must identify yourselves, give me a phone call, and--". The response was "Perhaps that would be true, if we were the FBI or if you were not the scum you are. But this is a Welfare Department bust, Pollack, and you are suspected--putting it kindly--of interference with the instrumentalities of National and individual survival." And it keeps getting better. Pardon me, time to go read it yet again.
President Obama has indeed forsworn the moon, and he's the one who tells NASA how to pick targets. In http://www.nasa.gov/news/media... he says "Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before. Buzz has been there. There’s a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do. So I believe it’s more important to ramp up our capabilities to reach -- and operate at -- a series of increasingly demanding targets, while advancing our technological capabilities with each step forward. And that’s what this strategy does."
He's the first successful Presidential candidate I've voted for, and I've been voting for one or another of their opponents since 1968, but I was very disappointed with this President's unfocused long-term strategy of finding different balls of matter to plant flags on... once.
Orbiting a few satellites around the Moon is laudable, but they can't be realistically compared to a project like Apollo or a major follow-on like a permanent or semi-permanent Moon base.
CERN said the evidence is five sigma or so for a particle more or less where the Higgs was expected (or perhaps about halfway between where two competing theories expected it), but some now doubt whether the particle CERN found is actually the Higgs. See this recent reassessment: http://sdu.dk/en/Om_SDU/Fakult...
"it does not have any status as anything else." -- not quite true. Perhaps not any *legitimate* status, or *deserved* status, but the IRS granted it tax-exempt status as a religion after a relentless harassment campaign.
You don't. I didn't claim it was, although I admit the title could be less specific. ("...perfectly satisfied with Linux performance on...") I'm looking at the larger issue of mainstream Linux gaming.
Although I don't have the careful performance charts of the link in the OP, I've been perfectly satisfied for years with Linux performance on the large-budget games I've played recently: Lord of the Rings Online, EVE-Online and Minecraft. My frame rate has been very smooth on the desktop and fat laptop, and quite playable on my 2GB RAM Acer C720 Chromebook running Crouton... around 20-40 fps on the latter for LotRO and EVE. For LotRO it seems to crash less than running it natively on Windows. Although I don't play it myself, I installed WoW on the Chromebook as a proof of concept for an interested Croutoner, and again it was quite playable... at least through the "kill 10 rats" style intro.
So from my viewpoint there's more to main-line game life on Linux than these reported ports or Steam.
My Amazon Acer C720 purchase was legit in the sense you're talking about. I saw a cheap box that could stream my Amazon Prime video to my TV's HDMI port and serve as a backup mail and browser system when it wasn't doing that; but the expectation was that it would sit on that pile of boxes next to the TV and live there. I bought it as a ChromeOS machine and it worked great for that.
Only after I got it did I discover I could put Crouton on it and have a full-fledged Linux system just like I'm using on my main machines, and that it really did get 10 hours on the battery. Now it's the one that goes with me on trips instead of my monster ASUS laptop whose power brick weighs as much as the Chromebook, and I can still do my C development and testing on it with no problem.
I exchange the Keepass password file by superencrypting it with a (presumably) strong encryption algorithm before stuffing it up into the cloud. That should make it easier to break into my house physically than ripping my keys.
For anyone with a suitable background ..., Wikipedia's math articles are generally the best, most accurate and most comprehensive free source of basic mathematics information available. If you don't have that background, no article of any kind is going to be explain to what a "scheme" is, for example. To think so is as naive as believing that you can understand all the nuances of Baudelaire's poetry without learning French; you may think you learn something from a translation into your language, but you actually don't.
Goethe's comment is relevant here:
Mathematicians are like Frenchmen: whatever you say to them they translate into their own language, and it immediately becomes something entirely different.
Jon Huntsman has plenty of good qualities. For example, his willingness to become ambassador to China when asked by President Obama, because both he and the President recognized that he was the best man available for the job. Working with the other side when it's the right thing to do makes good sense, but of course does not allow you to win the Republican nomination when the whole party has fallen off the conservative side of the scale.
A number of potentially strong candidates chose not to run, saving their energy for when they have a better chance. There are other very competent candidates who weren't interested, but might be persuaded to come out and try it in 2016, like Condi Rice.
Until they move back toward traditional Republican values and away from the nutballs currently controlling the party, I doubt that they'll get anybody elected. Step one: disavow their Grover Norquist "never vote yes on a tax" pledge and embrace realistic solutions to real problems.
You indicate your reading decline started from feeling you had to finish a book once you'd started it, even if you hated it. This is easily addressed: you need to recognize that life is too short to read bad books. There are many more books out there that you will enjoy than you have time to read. In fact, there are more good ones published every year than you can handle in a lifetime. The day of the Renaissance Man has passed - no-one nowadays can know everything important.
Samuel Johnson said "A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good." (Boswell, Life of Johnson, 14 July 1763)
There's no guarantee that getting an electronic tool will make reading more interesting or fun for you. The main advantage of an ebook reader like Kindle is that you can read it outside in the sunlight, if that fits better with your lifestyle. A tablet provide its own light, so you can read in the dark and not bother roommates. I personally prefer the tablet (Nexus 7 for me), since I can do a great deal of other stuff on it when I'm not reading. I spend probably half my tablet time reading, and the other half web-surfing or writing. I plan to watch movies and read books on it the next time I fly. It's handy because I can copy and paste from what I'm reading into what I'm writing.
My wife has a Kindle and a Nexus 7 -- she no longer uses the Kindle. It'll be gifted to a niece, probably.
I wonder whether Toulouse has laws against using your smartphone while driving -- this could be a nice income source for the municipality as well, staking out the parking spots with hidden cameras!
I saw this played at the University of Wisconsin in 1970 - Paul Purdom was on one side, but I forget the other player - maybe Ralph London? It was called Go-spiel (by analogy with Kriegspiel), and required a referee to tell the players whether their proposed move was legal, using his master board between the two players with screens to keep them from seeing the other boards.
The one game I saw played didn't have nearly the depth and interest of Kriegspiel, which I played and refereed often in the years before that at the RAND Corporation. Perhaps 9x9 Go-spiel would have worked out better.
I confess I watched the one with Paris Hilton washing a car in her bikini several times. I forget what kind of hamburger it was advertising, though.
I like shocking nonsense: it's easier to remember something dirty that you make up yourself, for some reason. "My Uncle John had carnal relations with blueberry pies 3 times a week." => "MUJhcrwbp3taw.". I'm suspicious of pulling letters out of a known document, no matter how obscure.
For passwords on unimportant sites it's not worth the effort to use strong passwords.
The initial dump from Gawker showed 188,281 cracked passwords out of 1,247,893 in the password database, or 15%. They were salted. A report from totse says "261459 password hashes cracked, 486643 left". I don't know how that user selected the particular hashes he was working on -- looks like ~70% of the ones that weren't cracked in the initial dump. John the Ripper dictionary attacker and brute-forcer is being used on the password file, but the CUDA cracker doesn't have this DES-based algorithm in it.
There are lots of news stories about the completion of the neutrino observatory. I could have linked any of them, but I preferred to go to the source of the information rather than filtering it through a reporter -- especially when the source has perfectly accessible text that doesn't need a scientist to explain for us. If you want to see many news articles about it, Google News will find them quickly.
That was my first try at a submission -- next time I'll put more in the summary.
> Fear and surprise.
And ruthless efficiency.