If you're impatient and want to know what the fuss about high dynamic range is all about, try this demo. It's quite pretty looking, far superior to the overused bloom effect in my opinion.
Of course, that means your system isn't really patched. If this is a key server and the patch fixes a security hole, I'd like to know about it so that I can get the issue fixed as soon as possible.
I updated several of my devices without a reboot. Those sort of patches seem rare, and likely for good reason.
The catch is that if you need to patch a critical system file, it's orders of magnitude more simple to just replace it upon reboot (since nothing's running). Otherwise you need to close down any applications and services that are using that file. Some system files are used by the GUI interface itself, at which point you're crossing your fingers and hoping it pops back to reality during the patch process.
It's probably technically possible to do certain patches without rebooting, but you'd have to have a savvy enough user to shut down and bring back dependent services. Linux admins are used to that sort of thing. For home users, it's far easier to simply reboot.
Just to translate for the masses, that comes to roughly.0032 LOCs (assuming 1 Library of Congress = 10 TB). Sometimes terms like "Giga Bytes" can get confusing.
But this may be one of the reasons it's getting a lot of attention. Drug companies are rarely excited about a cure, but pay close attention to long-term treatments. One suggested use for this is reducing the viral load of hepatitis C. While some have suggested that the immune system may be able to knock it out if the viral load is reduced by a factor of ten, the likely outcome is that people take this RNAi treatment for life in order to avoid liver damage.
There's always ClamAV, though it doesn't have real-time virus scanning and it's not as easy to use (a Windows install requires Cygwin). Still, it's an open source option.
Yep. It was clearly "my fault" in this particular case. It was one of those applications secured by NT groups. Unfortunately we had some issues where security got screwed up by an overzealous administrator and this one didn't get fixed. I ended up changing the security model after the fact, switching to my typical database authorization method.
A few months ago, we asked for a demo of the product. My main involvement was to help compare with our existing search strategy. Just to cut to the chase, we generally had a very positive experience with it. Searches would bring up what we wanted more often than not. Our existing search system, which was based around IIS and custom SQL code, was pretty good, though it couldn't beat Google for pulling up relevant pages. We did have a few quirky things happen, though.
We had a couple times when the appliance locked up and had to be rebooted. That was probably the most distressing as it had to be on 24x7 to support our organization and I wasn't looking forward to the help desk calls.
More amusing, though, was the way it crawled content. Google works like any other crawler - it goes around and clicks hyperlinks. Unfortunately it's not too bright, not paying attention to the text of the hyperlink, like if it said "delete" or something like that.
Unfortunately I had a poorly secured application that Google was able to sneak into via another link I wasn't aware of. It held the custom links for each of our departments to display a personalized set of links on the home page. Unfortunately it went through the admin tool and clicked every delete link it could find. I was paged the next morning and was fairly unhappy. My fault, though.
The irony is that the budget money evaporated and we aren't getting it after all.
Actually, I probably have touched millions of dollars worth of hardware and software in my time. The catch is that nearly every application requires a learning curve. SMS, Exchange, IIS, ActiveDirectory, and so on each have massive complexity behind them and I can appreciate the simplicity of things like the Active Directory browser. Over time, I've had to get nitty-gritty and write to the ADSI interface and use tools that expose the raw LDAP data.
Such things aren't for the faint of heart, and it takes time to become an expert in such things. Me, I'm primarily a generalist and an integrator. When people want distribution lists created based on HR records, Active Directory entries, Exchange status, and so on, I'm the one to do it. Having the nice GUI tools to do so is very handy at the beginning.
I can only hope that our company's systems team would keep an armed vigil around our own data center.
We've had some minor water leaks and an accidental activation of the fire suppression system, but nothing compares to what you folks are going through. Kudos to you all.
I'm admittedly a Windows person for the most part, as that's the environment I live in at work. The good news about the GUI-based environment is that it's typically fairly easy to pick up a new Windows tool and figure it out. For the semi-casual administrator/developer, that can be immensely useful.
The problem is that after a certain point, it becomes difficult to figure out complex issues. When bugs pop up, it's hard to know whether it's the software's fault or your own, with no good way to peek under the hood. When trying to extend beyond an application's capabilities, you start running into hard-coded issues that make it difficult or impossible.
We're currently migrating to ASP.Net and having internal struggles about whether or not to use Visual Studio, for example. I personally dislike being hampered by the interface, though it makes certain things much easier. The catch is that you need this bulky environment in order to work with what you create, you can't easily edit things outside of the environment, and often the application creates code for you that isn't quite what you want.
So, I'm not sure there's a clear TCO value for these sort of things. Each OS and application probably needs to be evaluated for what you're trying to do. My guess is that there will be a mix of the two systems for a long time into the future. Competition is good.
We initially went with the self-certificate approach, which seemed to work just fine, as long as the package created the certificate when it was run. Remember that self signed certificates are device specific and can't be distributed to other computers.
Unfortunately Office 2003 had further security limitations and this approach didn't work properly. At one point, we brought up our own Certificate Server in the organization, but something didn't work properly and spending $400 was pretty cheap compared to the people's time involved.
We certainly joked about it. Most of my time after writing the code was as an occasional advisor. I ended up talking with the SMS person a bunch, helping him make a package that would work with everything. It certainly wasn't four man weeks. It probably was along the lines if six hours spread across many weeks, as is most of the stuff I do.
Personally I mock the people who can't juggle more than one or two projects. I typically have a dozen or two, continually ebbing and flowing, often not really ever being truly completed.
Our organization recently bought an email encryption product called Tumbleweed that was quite expensive. One of the features is that any e-mail with "[Secure]" at the beginning of the subject would automatically be encrypted. The catch is that in order to make a button in Outlook that added this text, it would cost an extra $8,000 for a custom add-in.
Naturally the request came to me (even though I develop web applications). I whipped up a ten line Outlook macro that did it, spending about twenty minutes on it. Easy, right? The catch is that Outlook security is incredibly tight and unless you open massive security holes, the macro wouldn't run unless it was digitally signed by a trusted provider.
I plunked down $400 for a Verisign certificate and spent the next couple weeks working with our SMS guy to create packages for the various Outlook versions, and the desktop guys to deal with people who had custom Outlook macros.
Basically it was a huge hassle, done only because we had to. Still, it worked, and ended up saving some money. Crazy, though.
Sunday night, I was browsing the web in IE via my Windows 2003 Server that hosts my web site (and is conveniently located next to my main computer). I had turned on JavaScript, ActiveX, and a few other things to make the browsing experience less annoying (I hated having to put every site I visited into the list of Trusted Domains). Since there's no free AV software for Windows 2003, I was running with a firewall, fully patched, but with no anti-virus running.
Well, fate finally caught up to me. I was browsing a Google cache of a discussion group. Within seconds, the IE toolbar had been taken over, icons were installing on the desktop, and my computer rebooted, only to never come up again.
The aftermath was really messy. I got about four hours of sleep that night, trying to clean and fix things. By the next day, I'd mounted the drives on another computer and cleaned it, but it still wouldn't boot. I then had massive problems with Windows Activation, getting stuck in Microsoft call center Hell. Eventually I managed to install the Windows 2003 Server setup from an inactivated Windows XP Pro installation and it worked.
Needless to say, I've added additional security, as well as switching to Firefox. Going through that level of pain and suffering is the biggest motivator to moving away from Microsoft that I've experienced in a long time. My guess is that since the Windows 2003 Server browser is so locked down, they don't bother fixing holes.
Well, we haven't had very good luck shooting down missiles when the platform is stationary. Why they think it'll be easier when firing at a moving target from a moving platform, I have no idea.
That's not to say that I don't think it makes sense. Air combat these days is all about moving your missiles close, firing them away, and high-tailing it out of there. It'll be interesting to see what happens if missiles suddenly become useless and people have to close to visual range and dogfight away.
It's pretty easy to block the transfer of memories from short term to long term. That's one of the reasons why people who have been in serious trauma often forget what happened right before.
Removing long-term memories is more of a challenge. There have been some studies that suggest that recalled memories can be blocked, though it's not as permanent as people thought.
Movies like the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind may be fun to watch, but that sort of surgical removal of memories doesn't seem to be possible. What seems to typically happen is that the connections to recall certain memories are weakened over time due to disuse. My understanding is that those synaptic connections are eventually "reused" in the formation of new memories, though the specifics are very complicated.
I was just thinking this morning as I punched in the old door combination for the hundredth time that it would be nice if that memory vanished a bit more quickly.
Your brain already does a pretty good job at figuring out what memories should be stored strongly and which ones should be left to fade away. It's almost certainly possible to override that mechanism, but you'll probably end up with incredibly vivid memories of things that aren't very relevant.
Imagine if I popped these pills before studying for organic chemistry in college. Now I'd be having flashbacks of acid/base interactions and other useless trivia while I try to go about my daily job.
It's rather sad that my most informative electronics class was back in Jr. High. I'm fairly comfortable swapping out computer parts and have built a dozen computers on my own. Yet some of the more basic electronic concepts are still a little fuzzy in my brain.
I suppose ignorance is bliss . . . until things catch on fire.
I once managed to connect my first CD-ROM drive backwards to the power suppy so that it was getting far more voltage than it should have (stupid Y connector). That was one of the times I managed to cause smoke to come out of the computer.
Another time I was putting in a variable resistor to quiet down a fan. Unfortunately it wasn't rated at the voltage I was passing through it, so that was smoking computer #2.
This final one happened to someone else (really). They were a domain administrator, thinking at they were looking at all the users with access to their computer, though they were really looking at the domain users. Since there were so many, they decided to delete them all out. Sure enough, no one in our organization could log onto the domain again. Eventualy people figured things out and restored from backup. The person felt pretty guilty, especially as they were a manager of the network team.
I noticed that you used the term "obvious" several times. It's not to me.
There's a species of lizard that reproduces parthenogenically. Conception doesn't occur. Does that mean that it isn't a new member of a species? That it's not alive?
It's entirely possible that at some point in the future, something that sure looks like a human being will be created using methods other than conception. Somatic cell nuclear transfer is a likely candidate. If this happens, does that mean that it's not alive? Can it be treated as a slave?
As people's understanding and capabilities advance, things like this will become increasingly possible. What parts of a person are considered "self"? Can a doctor ethically remove parts of someone's brain? If I culture a mass of cells from my bone marrow and turn it into brain cells, does it have legal rights? If I inject the cells into my own brain and they integrate, should I be considered cojoined twins?
Science is weird and it's up to medical ethics to deal with these sorts of issues.
You joke, but throughout the years, people's definition of who is human has changed wildly over the years. It used to be that in order to be counted as human, you had to be of the same ethnic background, religion, gender, and/or economic background. Of course, there's nothing in science that nicely categorizes people and non-people.
On a personal note, I would greatly prefer stem cell research to be more open than it currently is. I think it should be matter of course that growing new organs is a high priority. I had a coworker in the same boat as you. She's doing surprisingly well - got married, sailed around the world, and is coping with the progression of her eventual kidney failure. Best of luck to you.
I think the biggest issue here is exactly how people define life. Right now the focus seems to be around "if there's conception, there's life", though there's all sorts of issues that make things complicated. Stem cells from umbilical cords seem fine to most folks because it's something typically seen as tossed away. Extracting bulk stem cells from people's brains is probably a no-no, though stem cells from fat tissue is fine.
The bottom line is that there's no obvious definition over what constitutes a living person and what isn't. As someone with a master's degree in biology, I've decided there never is going to be one ("life" will be one of those words like "justice" or "freedom" that mean many things to many people).
What people will find, of course, is that there's a way to reprogram adult cells so that it looks and acts just like embryonic stem cells. Of course, that means that you could turn it into something that looks an awful like a human being. If any cell in your body has the potential for turning into a full-grown human, does that mean liposuction is murder? If I create a stem cell from scratch, can I grow them to term and sell them as non-human slaves?
I'm not necessarily advocating either side in the debate, only that it's one of those ethical decisions rather than something science dictates as fact. I suspect it'll be argued over for many decades to come.
Slashdot Mirror
My work blocked access to this site (likely due to the site being categorized as "file sharing").
Fortunately Slashdot can work as a file sharing network in a pinch.
If you're impatient and want to know what the fuss about high dynamic range is all about, try this demo. It's quite pretty looking, far superior to the overused bloom effect in my opinion.
Of course, that means your system isn't really patched. If this is a key server and the patch fixes a security hole, I'd like to know about it so that I can get the issue fixed as soon as possible.
I updated several of my devices without a reboot. Those sort of patches seem rare, and likely for good reason.
The catch is that if you need to patch a critical system file, it's orders of magnitude more simple to just replace it upon reboot (since nothing's running). Otherwise you need to close down any applications and services that are using that file. Some system files are used by the GUI interface itself, at which point you're crossing your fingers and hoping it pops back to reality during the patch process.
It's probably technically possible to do certain patches without rebooting, but you'd have to have a savvy enough user to shut down and bring back dependent services. Linux admins are used to that sort of thing. For home users, it's far easier to simply reboot.
Just to translate for the masses, that comes to roughly .0032 LOCs (assuming 1 Library of Congress = 10 TB). Sometimes terms like "Giga Bytes" can get confusing.
But this may be one of the reasons it's getting a lot of attention. Drug companies are rarely excited about a cure, but pay close attention to long-term treatments. One suggested use for this is reducing the viral load of hepatitis C. While some have suggested that the immune system may be able to knock it out if the viral load is reduced by a factor of ten, the likely outcome is that people take this RNAi treatment for life in order to avoid liver damage.
There's always ClamAV, though it doesn't have real-time virus scanning and it's not as easy to use (a Windows install requires Cygwin). Still, it's an open source option.
Yep. It was clearly "my fault" in this particular case. It was one of those applications secured by NT groups. Unfortunately we had some issues where security got screwed up by an overzealous administrator and this one didn't get fixed. I ended up changing the security model after the fact, switching to my typical database authorization method.
A few months ago, we asked for a demo of the product. My main involvement was to help compare with our existing search strategy. Just to cut to the chase, we generally had a very positive experience with it. Searches would bring up what we wanted more often than not. Our existing search system, which was based around IIS and custom SQL code, was pretty good, though it couldn't beat Google for pulling up relevant pages. We did have a few quirky things happen, though.
We had a couple times when the appliance locked up and had to be rebooted. That was probably the most distressing as it had to be on 24x7 to support our organization and I wasn't looking forward to the help desk calls.
More amusing, though, was the way it crawled content. Google works like any other crawler - it goes around and clicks hyperlinks. Unfortunately it's not too bright, not paying attention to the text of the hyperlink, like if it said "delete" or something like that.
Unfortunately I had a poorly secured application that Google was able to sneak into via another link I wasn't aware of. It held the custom links for each of our departments to display a personalized set of links on the home page. Unfortunately it went through the admin tool and clicked every delete link it could find. I was paged the next morning and was fairly unhappy. My fault, though.
The irony is that the budget money evaporated and we aren't getting it after all.
Actually, I probably have touched millions of dollars worth of hardware and software in my time. The catch is that nearly every application requires a learning curve. SMS, Exchange, IIS, ActiveDirectory, and so on each have massive complexity behind them and I can appreciate the simplicity of things like the Active Directory browser. Over time, I've had to get nitty-gritty and write to the ADSI interface and use tools that expose the raw LDAP data.
Such things aren't for the faint of heart, and it takes time to become an expert in such things. Me, I'm primarily a generalist and an integrator. When people want distribution lists created based on HR records, Active Directory entries, Exchange status, and so on, I'm the one to do it. Having the nice GUI tools to do so is very handy at the beginning.
Hats off to you gentlemen.
I can only hope that our company's systems team would keep an armed vigil around our own data center.
We've had some minor water leaks and an accidental activation of the fire suppression system, but nothing compares to what you folks are going through. Kudos to you all.
I'm admittedly a Windows person for the most part, as that's the environment I live in at work. The good news about the GUI-based environment is that it's typically fairly easy to pick up a new Windows tool and figure it out. For the semi-casual administrator/developer, that can be immensely useful.
The problem is that after a certain point, it becomes difficult to figure out complex issues. When bugs pop up, it's hard to know whether it's the software's fault or your own, with no good way to peek under the hood. When trying to extend beyond an application's capabilities, you start running into hard-coded issues that make it difficult or impossible.
We're currently migrating to ASP.Net and having internal struggles about whether or not to use Visual Studio, for example. I personally dislike being hampered by the interface, though it makes certain things much easier. The catch is that you need this bulky environment in order to work with what you create, you can't easily edit things outside of the environment, and often the application creates code for you that isn't quite what you want.
So, I'm not sure there's a clear TCO value for these sort of things. Each OS and application probably needs to be evaluated for what you're trying to do. My guess is that there will be a mix of the two systems for a long time into the future. Competition is good.
We initially went with the self-certificate approach, which seemed to work just fine, as long as the package created the certificate when it was run. Remember that self signed certificates are device specific and can't be distributed to other computers.
Unfortunately Office 2003 had further security limitations and this approach didn't work properly. At one point, we brought up our own Certificate Server in the organization, but something didn't work properly and spending $400 was pretty cheap compared to the people's time involved.
We certainly joked about it. Most of my time after writing the code was as an occasional advisor. I ended up talking with the SMS person a bunch, helping him make a package that would work with everything. It certainly wasn't four man weeks. It probably was along the lines if six hours spread across many weeks, as is most of the stuff I do.
Personally I mock the people who can't juggle more than one or two projects. I typically have a dozen or two, continually ebbing and flowing, often not really ever being truly completed.
Our organization recently bought an email encryption product called Tumbleweed that was quite expensive. One of the features is that any e-mail with "[Secure]" at the beginning of the subject would automatically be encrypted. The catch is that in order to make a button in Outlook that added this text, it would cost an extra $8,000 for a custom add-in.
Naturally the request came to me (even though I develop web applications). I whipped up a ten line Outlook macro that did it, spending about twenty minutes on it. Easy, right? The catch is that Outlook security is incredibly tight and unless you open massive security holes, the macro wouldn't run unless it was digitally signed by a trusted provider.
I plunked down $400 for a Verisign certificate and spent the next couple weeks working with our SMS guy to create packages for the various Outlook versions, and the desktop guys to deal with people who had custom Outlook macros.
Basically it was a huge hassle, done only because we had to. Still, it worked, and ended up saving some money. Crazy, though.
Sunday night, I was browsing the web in IE via my Windows 2003 Server that hosts my web site (and is conveniently located next to my main computer). I had turned on JavaScript, ActiveX, and a few other things to make the browsing experience less annoying (I hated having to put every site I visited into the list of Trusted Domains). Since there's no free AV software for Windows 2003, I was running with a firewall, fully patched, but with no anti-virus running.
Well, fate finally caught up to me. I was browsing a Google cache of a discussion group. Within seconds, the IE toolbar had been taken over, icons were installing on the desktop, and my computer rebooted, only to never come up again.
The aftermath was really messy. I got about four hours of sleep that night, trying to clean and fix things. By the next day, I'd mounted the drives on another computer and cleaned it, but it still wouldn't boot. I then had massive problems with Windows Activation, getting stuck in Microsoft call center Hell. Eventually I managed to install the Windows 2003 Server setup from an inactivated Windows XP Pro installation and it worked.
Needless to say, I've added additional security, as well as switching to Firefox. Going through that level of pain and suffering is the biggest motivator to moving away from Microsoft that I've experienced in a long time. My guess is that since the Windows 2003 Server browser is so locked down, they don't bother fixing holes.
Fortunately, they've already begun pre-production on it. I'm guessing that Bethesda will start seriously working on it after Oblivion.
And yes, this is the reason my nick is PIPBoy3000.
Well, we haven't had very good luck shooting down missiles when the platform is stationary. Why they think it'll be easier when firing at a moving target from a moving platform, I have no idea.
That's not to say that I don't think it makes sense. Air combat these days is all about moving your missiles close, firing them away, and high-tailing it out of there. It'll be interesting to see what happens if missiles suddenly become useless and people have to close to visual range and dogfight away.
It's pretty easy to block the transfer of memories from short term to long term. That's one of the reasons why people who have been in serious trauma often forget what happened right before.
Removing long-term memories is more of a challenge. There have been some studies that suggest that recalled memories can be blocked, though it's not as permanent as people thought.
Movies like the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind may be fun to watch, but that sort of surgical removal of memories doesn't seem to be possible. What seems to typically happen is that the connections to recall certain memories are weakened over time due to disuse. My understanding is that those synaptic connections are eventually "reused" in the formation of new memories, though the specifics are very complicated.
I was just thinking this morning as I punched in the old door combination for the hundredth time that it would be nice if that memory vanished a bit more quickly.
Your brain already does a pretty good job at figuring out what memories should be stored strongly and which ones should be left to fade away. It's almost certainly possible to override that mechanism, but you'll probably end up with incredibly vivid memories of things that aren't very relevant.
Imagine if I popped these pills before studying for organic chemistry in college. Now I'd be having flashbacks of acid/base interactions and other useless trivia while I try to go about my daily job.
It's rather sad that my most informative electronics class was back in Jr. High. I'm fairly comfortable swapping out computer parts and have built a dozen computers on my own. Yet some of the more basic electronic concepts are still a little fuzzy in my brain.
I suppose ignorance is bliss . . . until things catch on fire.
I once managed to connect my first CD-ROM drive backwards to the power suppy so that it was getting far more voltage than it should have (stupid Y connector). That was one of the times I managed to cause smoke to come out of the computer.
Another time I was putting in a variable resistor to quiet down a fan. Unfortunately it wasn't rated at the voltage I was passing through it, so that was smoking computer #2.
This final one happened to someone else (really). They were a domain administrator, thinking at they were looking at all the users with access to their computer, though they were really looking at the domain users. Since there were so many, they decided to delete them all out. Sure enough, no one in our organization could log onto the domain again. Eventualy people figured things out and restored from backup. The person felt pretty guilty, especially as they were a manager of the network team.
I noticed that you used the term "obvious" several times. It's not to me.
There's a species of lizard that reproduces parthenogenically. Conception doesn't occur. Does that mean that it isn't a new member of a species? That it's not alive?
It's entirely possible that at some point in the future, something that sure looks like a human being will be created using methods other than conception. Somatic cell nuclear transfer is a likely candidate. If this happens, does that mean that it's not alive? Can it be treated as a slave?
As people's understanding and capabilities advance, things like this will become increasingly possible. What parts of a person are considered "self"? Can a doctor ethically remove parts of someone's brain? If I culture a mass of cells from my bone marrow and turn it into brain cells, does it have legal rights? If I inject the cells into my own brain and they integrate, should I be considered cojoined twins?
Science is weird and it's up to medical ethics to deal with these sorts of issues.
You joke, but throughout the years, people's definition of who is human has changed wildly over the years. It used to be that in order to be counted as human, you had to be of the same ethnic background, religion, gender, and/or economic background. Of course, there's nothing in science that nicely categorizes people and non-people.
On a personal note, I would greatly prefer stem cell research to be more open than it currently is. I think it should be matter of course that growing new organs is a high priority. I had a coworker in the same boat as you. She's doing surprisingly well - got married, sailed around the world, and is coping with the progression of her eventual kidney failure. Best of luck to you.
I think the biggest issue here is exactly how people define life. Right now the focus seems to be around "if there's conception, there's life", though there's all sorts of issues that make things complicated. Stem cells from umbilical cords seem fine to most folks because it's something typically seen as tossed away. Extracting bulk stem cells from people's brains is probably a no-no, though stem cells from fat tissue is fine.
The bottom line is that there's no obvious definition over what constitutes a living person and what isn't. As someone with a master's degree in biology, I've decided there never is going to be one ("life" will be one of those words like "justice" or "freedom" that mean many things to many people).
What people will find, of course, is that there's a way to reprogram adult cells so that it looks and acts just like embryonic stem cells. Of course, that means that you could turn it into something that looks an awful like a human being. If any cell in your body has the potential for turning into a full-grown human, does that mean liposuction is murder? If I create a stem cell from scratch, can I grow them to term and sell them as non-human slaves?
I'm not necessarily advocating either side in the debate, only that it's one of those ethical decisions rather than something science dictates as fact. I suspect it'll be argued over for many decades to come.