I must say that personally, I'm not convinced of the slashdot-favorite counter-example at all. For all we know, what it shows is a DOS attack on a poorly implemented regular expression our brain is solving... or to put it more scientifically, maybe the time it takes for us to decipher the letters has a best case scenario (the word is a complete match) and a worst case scenario (the letters are simply reversed).
Hmmm... somehow, as cool as the idea sounds for a Star Trek episode, or some sort of sci-fi novel, I wouldn't want my humanity stolen from me that way. What next? Bathe us in a luke warm gelly like liquid to avoid any external stimuli?
Hmmm, the painter Georges Seurat was a pointilist. I'm not going to post a link to his picture because we would melt down any server I link, but a quick google for his name will find you pictures.
My point is: if you look closely at those paintings, the dots aren't superimposed. They are side by side. And they are quite big: the size of small brushes... So it *does* work.
Re:Super ultra elite developers
on
The Bionic Office
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Let me tell you something, I can type page after page of relatively bug free C++ code as fast as I can type it.
I learned as soon as I got into a working environment that it's basically pointless. After a project reaches a size, or deadline where a single person isn't good enough to implement it alone, things start changing, and most of the bottlenecks come from incompatible internal structures that end up being re-written. We had a programmer like that in our team (after I was no longer that kind of programmer), and he was looked upon by everyone else as the black sheep. He would spurt out 500 lines of code at the end of a week, and the rest of the team (5 people) would spend a week after that stiching it all together.
Unless these people you talk about were the borg, and could neurally interface with each other, I'm pretty sure what you say is impossible.
I'll tell you one programmer I met that to this impresses me to no end: before he was our DB developper he had worked for Sybase. I would ask him to write stored procs for our DB. He would send me.txt files of the stored procs that he'd written in notepad. Would never run the stored procs to see if they worked. They just did. Probably around 200 non trivial stored procs he wrote (with complexe cursor work etc), and the *only* time I got an error was a mistyped keyword. And as far as spec goes, he was always dead on what I had asked him.
But as the grandparent post indicated, I was his interface to the world of humans, aside from me, he was incapable of talking to anyone.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not thinking all of a sudden that you're a racist, and really didn't expect an apology.
My personal belief is that with the current state of affairs, their techniques/technology is running far behind their targets. For example, just think about the American/Mexican border, and the points made in the film "Traffic". I'm not basing my facts on a film mind you, but the points are screaming: if only 10% of cars get screened, and you have a million cars going through every day, it's almost statisticaly guaranteed that you will manage to smuggle in some drugs/wmd/slaves whetever you want...
It's not that hard for airports though: I personally believe everyone should be checked. But in more non intrusive ways... Dogs that sniff, proper security checks using X-Ray, and metal detectors. And further more, make it policy to not randomly search people like in your case: if a terrorist has made a plexiglass katana that's invisible to the x-ray, well good for him, he will get through - and that's what I meant by the unavoidability of some of this stuff. It's simply illogical to screen say 30% of regular travelers randomly (amounting up to hundreds of thousands of people) expecting to find the one plastic katana blade that may or may not exist.
It all comes down to 'letting go'... You're travelling at 800mph in a metal tube at 20k feet. You're inherintly in danger. Nothing is going to change that, no matter how much you officially deny it.
Dude, I can see your nostrils flaring, but you have to take a deep breath and look at what you are demanding.
First of all, my personal belief is that airline security tightening is utterly useless. They've already done it once, I doubt it's going to replay itself. Or rather, if any terrorist were to do the same attack replayed, they would sure have to be stupid.
So what is the security tightnening for really? There are two answers, again IMHO. 1) Political: so that Bush can say they've done something - where in fact terrorism by its very nature is not avoidable by force. If it were, terrorist activity in many parts of the world right now wouldn't have gone on for so long. 2) Because of a true lack of security, or rather a true laxness in the system. People *shouldn't* be able to board planes with butcher knives in their luggage. And that is not a terrorism issue, it's just a security issue, especially now that the precedent has been set. I know of at least one event in Europe where a guy actually hijacked a plane and was demanding that he be allowed to marry some woman... or some stupid story like that. Security before was just absent, this is an attempt to change that.
Now where does that leave us: I live in Toronto and very often cross the border (by bus especially). Every time we hit the border, any arab person - and remember Arab refers to a large group of people spanning from Algeria to Iran - gets systematically battered on. Every thing they say is second guessed. Even if the person is a woman in her late 40s with 3 kids and a suitcase half her size. If the problem is immigration, let immigration deal with it... But as far as security is concerned, these arabs quite obviously pose absolutely no threat. Implementing 'racial profiling' is just deliberately making their lives harder... exerting 'revenge' on these people because you had a bad time at the airport is not the way to go.
I would also like to draw to your attention that religion name calling, and making any assumptions based on the fact that a person is islamic, or jewish or budhist or whatever it may be is *very* backward. It would be the equivalent of me asserting that all chrisitian americans are basically the witch burners.
I leave you with this thought: the current state of affairs in the world is mostly due to knee-jerk reactions by whole nations. You may have had a knee-jerk reaction when you originally said your statement, and the knee-jerk replies that you received might be incoherent enough to dismiss, but don't think that you've 'won an argument' because of this. Your opinion is yours and yours alone of course, but I would humbly request that you reconsider it.
Thank you andy, for pointing out the obvious fallacies in my reasoning. I think I will go home now and start working on logic 101 again...
Now onto the real business: where's the peer review in Intel's patented die processes? And how come you trust your computer, and probably some very important files to this un-peer reviewed technology?
I mean, how hard is this to understand? Honestly....
Let me tell you how hard it is to understand who you are: "Your argument is flawed of course". You sound exactly like what I would call a zealot. In fact, there's an article on slashdot right now that has the exact description of what you sound like:
So of course that day I got hundreds of emails about it. Every Linux apologist in the world wanted to make sure I was fully informed of their opinion. The replies were roughly in the following groups:
...
"You're clearly an idiot, Linux is too sophisticated for you, you clearly are incapable of understanding anything, you should go back to kindergarten and/or use a Mac." (Oddly, all of these messages used the word `clearly' repeatedly.)
...
Now. I tell you: how hard is this to understand? Do you not realize you sound stupid? You actually *sound* stupid.
You know, I appreciate the article, but to me it sounds very tainted. Not in the facts, but in the interpretation... "The current administration sees through Arafat's charade"
Would he have us belive the cold war was entirely run by the Soviet Union? That while the soviet's were busy working on this, the CIA was tending the flowers on capitol hill?
It's all a game. They're all puppets, and this 'exposition of facts' doesn't change in the least bit the current situation of the people. The people Israeli or Palestinian facing death on a daily basis...
If anything, the US should be backing down, and toning down their side of the affair since the USSR is no more. But at this point, it's too engrained in the people.
Tough luck Pacepa... you were a peon just like anyone else. If you're in jail, you're either someone's bitch or their dady. It appears to me what you are doing right now is a continuation of what your work was back in the soviet block: selling ideals... or sharades as you call them. Except, in capitalist America, with a craving for vengefullness, you're going to get rich doing it.
Sure, if I close my source to anyone and live on an island off of the Fiji coast, maybe...
But I'm pretty sure the top paid engineers at microsoft aren't the script kiddies you see running around on this site. In fact, I'd be surprised if this guy himself hasn't consulted at one point or another for microsoft.
This is a very essential point most people never consider: Microsoft has the money to hire just about *anyone* on the planet who would be willing. And, yeah, maybe none of the linux zealot script kiddies would work (although I'm sure many would succumb to money when flashed a $1000 in their faces), most leading industry experts would. Why do you think Microsoft is getting involved so closely with Universities? Do you think it's just to get programmers using their products? Or do you think they actually intend on getting scientific reasearch collaboration?
In fact, if I recall correctly, some educational institutions have access with NDAs to Microsoft windows source code.
Wrong: if I come to your house, and throw a rock at your neighbor's window from your balcony, and then run away... who do you think your neighbor is going to come looking for?
Heck, why do you think Afghanistan was invaded? Do you think the 9/11 attacks were government funded??? Please don't answer that.
On a side note, end users *are* responsible... It's just that nobody has bother going after them yet... maybe because it's just stupid. (Maybe the RIAA should learn of that too).
first off, I forgot to fully qualify the fever-like physiological aide in that this article goes under "Developer" which is probably not read by most/. readers...
What's even more sick is that when looked at carefully, everything on this site shows pure propaganda in the works. The core people who would read the 'developers' thread are in effect the people who have something at stake, their cherrished little holy grail. But what you don't realize is that as with any propaganda machine, you are dimming the wits of your own youth. The 'anti-bodies' out there, the less than 18 teenagers who are on this site mass posting trying to fulfill some sort of ego trip, they aren't doing anyone any good, neither the OSS nor themselves. You are dimming your own wit by limiting reasonable conversation.
How sad that it is somewhat visible that most of this machine is being tended to mostly by the american crowds too... makes you think about how accustomed they have grown to it.
I denounce you Taco, who might think the moderation system is good as is... nay, you probably have stopped veiling your intents to yourself, you probably realize what the power of this tool is and are embracing it by now.
Is that this article gets posted at the wee hours of the morning, and there isn't even that little cocroach with the barbecue marks on it.
It just proves that this site and most of its audience are dellusional/in denial on a mass scale.
In fact, you behave like some sort of pluricellular organism... your immune system has been arrowsed right now, as the prick of an uncomfortable foreign body has entered your system. All white blood cells are out there trying to 'eat up' any argument, and the rest of the immunitary response is antibody-coagulation-like self defensive irrational posts (which *should* be modded troll/flamebait but instead get the 5+ insightful).
All this made more effective by the fever-like physiological aide provided by posting when readership drops, and probably not duping this one important article.
Yay. I got karma to burn and enemies to make. I've stopped caring.
You might be right, but you have the advantage of hindsight - after all, all us DNA/RNA based living beings are here to look at this thing. The guy is saying that he found objects that fit the criteria we have for living cells. Now apart from the statement that he thought this had to be a prerequesite for our form of live to appear, I think he's got something interesting.
I mean this is exactly the idea that Alien's was exploiting: silicate based life form instead of carbon (for those who don't know silicon and carbon have the exact same valence structure, but silicon is much more britle)...
reading this article gave me an initial knee-jerk reaction of checking it out...
Read the next paragraph a-la Monty Python skit:
But all the clues pointed that in fact, there was no hole on my computer. The announcement on Microsoft site said the flaw had been disclosed on the 10th. The "support" bullet said: a patch will be made available within 24 hours... and my windows update didn't warn me of anything.
So I took out my handy "psinfo -h" and found the following atrocity:
OS Hot Fix Installed ... KB824146 9/10/2003 ...
A full 8 days ago.
For those who couldn't figure out the skit, it's the Ralph Melish skit where absolutely nothing happens.
Well, to be precise: the kid is fusing atoms, and hence has a fusion device. Which doesn't mean it's a fusion generator... He's probably - nay - he's definitely spending more energy than he is generating.
"The whole general display industry is just littered with dead bodies everywhere, and success stories, too," he said.
<Mr. T> IS THIS GUY SAYING SOMETHING?
<Dubya> I think he is, Mr. T, I think he is. You know what you gotta do.
Re:We really need a different language
on
Secure Programming
·
· Score: 1
Hey don't get me wrong, I find LISP and the derivatives to be superior languages by far. In fact, I'm pretty convinced LISP *is* the most powerful language...
But life unfortunately is never that simple. C++ matured as a market product faster because it was easier to implement on simpler systems (8 bit, 16 bit)...
PS. There is one thing not doable using macros and generic functions, and that is only because it's simply two different beasts: templates are a compile-time construct, while class inheritance etc are runtime. I don't think there's a distinction in LISP of compile/runtime. But believe me, this provides at least a couple of nifty tricks... But again, LISP is more powerful, all hail the lisp =)
Re:We really need a different language
on
Secure Programming
·
· Score: 1
I have used LISP, and am aware of a bit of what you talk about, but I also must say once you've tasted the strength of templates you learn to appreciate C++ more for what it is. And I don't mean templates to define just a function that takes a float or an int... Tempaltes are much more powerful than people take them to be...
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm... somehow, as cool as the idea sounds for a Star Trek episode, or some sort of sci-fi novel, I wouldn't want my humanity stolen from me that way. What next? Bathe us in a luke warm gelly like liquid to avoid any external stimuli?
My point is: if you look closely at those paintings, the dots aren't superimposed. They are side by side. And they are quite big: the size of small brushes... So it *does* work.
I learned as soon as I got into a working environment that it's basically pointless. After a project reaches a size, or deadline where a single person isn't good enough to implement it alone, things start changing, and most of the bottlenecks come from incompatible internal structures that end up being re-written. We had a programmer like that in our team (after I was no longer that kind of programmer), and he was looked upon by everyone else as the black sheep. He would spurt out 500 lines of code at the end of a week, and the rest of the team (5 people) would spend a week after that stiching it all together.
Unless these people you talk about were the borg, and could neurally interface with each other, I'm pretty sure what you say is impossible.
I'll tell you one programmer I met that to this impresses me to no end: before he was our DB developper he had worked for Sybase. I would ask him to write stored procs for our DB. He would send me .txt files of the stored procs that he'd written in notepad. Would never run the stored procs to see if they worked. They just did. Probably around 200 non trivial stored procs he wrote (with complexe cursor work etc), and the *only* time I got an error was a mistyped keyword. And as far as spec goes, he was always dead on what I had asked him.
But as the grandparent post indicated, I was his interface to the world of humans, aside from me, he was incapable of talking to anyone.
My personal belief is that with the current state of affairs, their techniques/technology is running far behind their targets. For example, just think about the American/Mexican border, and the points made in the film "Traffic". I'm not basing my facts on a film mind you, but the points are screaming: if only 10% of cars get screened, and you have a million cars going through every day, it's almost statisticaly guaranteed that you will manage to smuggle in some drugs/wmd/slaves whetever you want...
It's not that hard for airports though: I personally believe everyone should be checked. But in more non intrusive ways... Dogs that sniff, proper security checks using X-Ray, and metal detectors. And further more, make it policy to not randomly search people like in your case: if a terrorist has made a plexiglass katana that's invisible to the x-ray, well good for him, he will get through - and that's what I meant by the unavoidability of some of this stuff. It's simply illogical to screen say 30% of regular travelers randomly (amounting up to hundreds of thousands of people) expecting to find the one plastic katana blade that may or may not exist.
It all comes down to 'letting go'... You're travelling at 800mph in a metal tube at 20k feet. You're inherintly in danger. Nothing is going to change that, no matter how much you officially deny it.
First of all, my personal belief is that airline security tightening is utterly useless. They've already done it once, I doubt it's going to replay itself. Or rather, if any terrorist were to do the same attack replayed, they would sure have to be stupid.
So what is the security tightnening for really? There are two answers, again IMHO. 1) Political: so that Bush can say they've done something - where in fact terrorism by its very nature is not avoidable by force. If it were, terrorist activity in many parts of the world right now wouldn't have gone on for so long. 2) Because of a true lack of security, or rather a true laxness in the system. People *shouldn't* be able to board planes with butcher knives in their luggage. And that is not a terrorism issue, it's just a security issue, especially now that the precedent has been set. I know of at least one event in Europe where a guy actually hijacked a plane and was demanding that he be allowed to marry some woman... or some stupid story like that. Security before was just absent, this is an attempt to change that.
Now where does that leave us: I live in Toronto and very often cross the border (by bus especially). Every time we hit the border, any arab person - and remember Arab refers to a large group of people spanning from Algeria to Iran - gets systematically battered on. Every thing they say is second guessed. Even if the person is a woman in her late 40s with 3 kids and a suitcase half her size. If the problem is immigration, let immigration deal with it... But as far as security is concerned, these arabs quite obviously pose absolutely no threat. Implementing 'racial profiling' is just deliberately making their lives harder... exerting 'revenge' on these people because you had a bad time at the airport is not the way to go.
I would also like to draw to your attention that religion name calling, and making any assumptions based on the fact that a person is islamic, or jewish or budhist or whatever it may be is *very* backward. It would be the equivalent of me asserting that all chrisitian americans are basically the witch burners.
I leave you with this thought: the current state of affairs in the world is mostly due to knee-jerk reactions by whole nations. You may have had a knee-jerk reaction when you originally said your statement, and the knee-jerk replies that you received might be incoherent enough to dismiss, but don't think that you've 'won an argument' because of this. Your opinion is yours and yours alone of course, but I would humbly request that you reconsider it.
Zero bugs. Ever.
No one has yet found a bug in Prevayler in a Production release. Who will be the first?
link.
I didn't know people still made such bold assertions past the dot-com era.
If you've ever heard about the STRIDE threat model, the E stands for Escalation of priviledge.
fyi, STRIDE stands for:
Spoofing
Tampering
Repudiation
Info Disclosure
Denial of Service
Elevation of Privilege
Mind you, I'm not bad mouthing OpenSSH.
Now onto the real business: where's the peer review in Intel's patented die processes? And how come you trust your computer, and probably some very important files to this un-peer reviewed technology?
I mean, how hard is this to understand? Honestly....
Let me tell you how hard it is to understand who you are: "Your argument is flawed of course". You sound exactly like what I would call a zealot. In fact, there's an article on slashdot right now that has the exact description of what you sound like:
So of course that day I got hundreds of emails about it. Every Linux apologist in the world wanted to make sure I was fully informed of their opinion. The replies were roughly in the following groups:
...
"You're clearly an idiot, Linux is too sophisticated for you, you clearly are incapable of understanding anything, you should go back to kindergarten and/or use a Mac." (Oddly, all of these messages used the word `clearly' repeatedly.)
...
Now. I tell you: how hard is this to understand? Do you not realize you sound stupid? You actually *sound* stupid.
Derisive laughter as I walk away...
Would he have us belive the cold war was entirely run by the Soviet Union? That while the soviet's were busy working on this, the CIA was tending the flowers on capitol hill?
It's all a game. They're all puppets, and this 'exposition of facts' doesn't change in the least bit the current situation of the people. The people Israeli or Palestinian facing death on a daily basis...
If anything, the US should be backing down, and toning down their side of the affair since the USSR is no more. But at this point, it's too engrained in the people.
Tough luck Pacepa... you were a peon just like anyone else. If you're in jail, you're either someone's bitch or their dady. It appears to me what you are doing right now is a continuation of what your work was back in the soviet block: selling ideals... or sharades as you call them. Except, in capitalist America, with a craving for vengefullness, you're going to get rich doing it.
But I'm pretty sure the top paid engineers at microsoft aren't the script kiddies you see running around on this site. In fact, I'd be surprised if this guy himself hasn't consulted at one point or another for microsoft.
This is a very essential point most people never consider: Microsoft has the money to hire just about *anyone* on the planet who would be willing. And, yeah, maybe none of the linux zealot script kiddies would work (although I'm sure many would succumb to money when flashed a $1000 in their faces), most leading industry experts would. Why do you think Microsoft is getting involved so closely with Universities? Do you think it's just to get programmers using their products? Or do you think they actually intend on getting scientific reasearch collaboration?
In fact, if I recall correctly, some educational institutions have access with NDAs to Microsoft windows source code.
Heck, why do you think Afghanistan was invaded? Do you think the 9/11 attacks were government funded??? Please don't answer that.
On a side note, end users *are* responsible... It's just that nobody has bother going after them yet... maybe because it's just stupid. (Maybe the RIAA should learn of that too).
What's even more sick is that when looked at carefully, everything on this site shows pure propaganda in the works. The core people who would read the 'developers' thread are in effect the people who have something at stake, their cherrished little holy grail. But what you don't realize is that as with any propaganda machine, you are dimming the wits of your own youth. The 'anti-bodies' out there, the less than 18 teenagers who are on this site mass posting trying to fulfill some sort of ego trip, they aren't doing anyone any good, neither the OSS nor themselves. You are dimming your own wit by limiting reasonable conversation.
How sad that it is somewhat visible that most of this machine is being tended to mostly by the american crowds too... makes you think about how accustomed they have grown to it.
I denounce you Taco, who might think the moderation system is good as is... nay, you probably have stopped veiling your intents to yourself, you probably realize what the power of this tool is and are embracing it by now.
Propagand away... news has other sources.
It just proves that this site and most of its audience are dellusional/in denial on a mass scale.
In fact, you behave like some sort of pluricellular organism... your immune system has been arrowsed right now, as the prick of an uncomfortable foreign body has entered your system. All white blood cells are out there trying to 'eat up' any argument, and the rest of the immunitary response is antibody-coagulation-like self defensive irrational posts (which *should* be modded troll/flamebait but instead get the 5+ insightful).
All this made more effective by the fever-like physiological aide provided by posting when readership drops, and probably not duping this one important article.
Yay. I got karma to burn and enemies to make. I've stopped caring.
I mean this is exactly the idea that Alien's was exploiting: silicate based life form instead of carbon (for those who don't know silicon and carbon have the exact same valence structure, but silicon is much more britle)...
Would like to see what comes out of it.
I remember there was a virus that loaded itself into kernel and just simply xor'ed a really small pad on top of any hdd writes/reads...
Removing the virus effectively stopped you from being able to use your computer.
reading this article gave me an initial knee-jerk reaction of checking it out...
Read the next paragraph a-la Monty Python skit:
But all the clues pointed that in fact, there was no hole on my computer. The announcement on Microsoft site said the flaw had been disclosed on the 10th. The "support" bullet said: a patch will be made available within 24 hours... and my windows update didn't warn me of anything.
So I took out my handy "psinfo -h" and found the following atrocity:
A full 8 days ago.
For those who couldn't figure out the skit, it's the Ralph Melish skit where absolutely nothing happens.
On a side note though, I'm not too sure about jail time for spam. Heavy fines, yes, jail time... makes me stop and think about it.
Well, ok. You made my coffee break...
<Mr. T> IS THIS GUY SAYING SOMETHING?
<Dubya> I think he is, Mr. T, I think he is. You know what you gotta do.
But life unfortunately is never that simple. C++ matured as a market product faster because it was easier to implement on simpler systems (8 bit, 16 bit)...
PS. There is one thing not doable using macros and generic functions, and that is only because it's simply two different beasts: templates are a compile-time construct, while class inheritance etc are runtime. I don't think there's a distinction in LISP of compile/runtime. But believe me, this provides at least a couple of nifty tricks... But again, LISP is more powerful, all hail the lisp =)
I have used LISP, and am aware of a bit of what you talk about, but I also must say once you've tasted the strength of templates you learn to appreciate C++ more for what it is. And I don't mean templates to define just a function that takes a float or an int... Tempaltes are much more powerful than people take them to be...
The beauty of ratios
long night indeed.