"Reliable" means "always works", it doesn't mean "always obeys the spec". (Unless you use a circular definition)
A timeout is a legal result by the TCP specification, but it's not reliable, because your data didn't make it through.
By the IP specification, your data might not make it either- and that's a legal result because the spec allows it to drop packets for any reason at all. That doesn't mean IP is reliable, just that it obeys its own definition.
Of course, no real protocol can ever meet this restrictive definition of reliable. Some maniac can always cut through your wires or incinerate your CPUs. Calling TCP a "reliable protocol" is just a shorthand for "as much more reliable than the underlying protocols as we could manage"
The timeout you mention does make TCP more reliable than IP, because it alerts you to the data loss, where the application can possibly take steps to retransmit it sometime in the future. But its not as if TCP could ever achieve the perfect reliablity that the simplest, most abstract description of it would imply. Which is why, as the author says, those who rely on the abstractions can get bitten later.
Operation Sealion was doomed from the start, the British Isles where never seriously threatened with invasion
"And I'd have got away with it too, Churchill, if not for your pesky radar!" The German plan was a fine one, and could've worked except for technological innovations that the Nazis couldn't have known about. Even so, the RAF was seriously attrited. Maybe if the German resources weren't split on the Eastern front they could've overwhelmed the defenders. Or if they had an amazing espionage victory they could've neutralized radar.
In either of those cases (or if the invention had never been made at all), then German forces could've pushed onto the British Isles. It would've been a a bloodbath for both sides, but then the coastline of Axis Europe would be safe, with no convenient launching-point for American troops to launch an amphibious assault.
WW2 was the first war to be definitively won by scientists and inventors.
the Italian reputation for cowardice is largely unfounded, faint, thrust, retreat
Fainting still sounds cowardly. Or like they didn't maintain a proper diet. Feinting would be a superior combat tactic.
I was abbreviating North Korea, which is a stereotypical "US enemy". And of course the difference in bandwidth across the DMZ is night and day. (The difference in electricification is too)
Fine if they're inserting the floppy disks. Just as long as the guard at the door doesn't let him take it away. (Course, according to the badge you mentioned, he shouldn't have been let in at all... badly run place)
If they did things right (some do), all "Classified" work would be done in SCIFs (Secure Computer Information Facility?), which is not only surrounded by a faraday-ish cage, but is also a roach-motel for electronic media: "Discs check in, but they don't check out".
(Except for every 3 months, when the security guys come around to march the accumulated tainted materials to the incinerator)
I'm being intentionally alarmist here, and assuming the worst. Military planners should do the same, and prepare for the baddest scenario they can imagine. (And of course I don't mean that the zero-tier console-jockeys should be responsible for this. They should kick it up the chain until we finger the general who placed profits & patronage over security)
If he's looking for competitive info, then Raytheon and Lockheed Martin's corp networks are much softer and juicier. (Of course, for all we know, he's been in them too)
If he's an enemy, then there's non-classified data that can still be damaging. Especially military personnel records (which are often in the lesser category "sensitive"). Asymmetrical warfare procedure: Check out the make of aircraft bombing you, look up where the pilots get trained, see who's rotated through there, cross reference against health-care records for neo-natal care, and dispatch someone to visit the pilot's wife/kids.
(There are other ways to get the data, but lets not make it easier than necessary)
Yeah, and that shows he wasn't a professional, but someone out for fun. A professional cracker would've gotten his data, got out, and collected his paycheck.
Same with the snipers- the police can hardly claim to have beaten them. (the number of bodies they left behind made it a phyrric victory at best). A professional assasin would've killed his target, got out, and collected his paycheck.
So far we can barely defend ourselves from recreation "hackers" and gunmen. If some real terrorist group starts funding some, it will be much much worse.
Throw some military sysadmins to a court-martial for dereliction of duty!
Ok, don't be that harsh on them. Scare em a little, then let the go with a warning. But national western militaries cannot continue to run their networks like this. It's dangerously irresponsible.
For a national military to assume they can use police arrests (force of arms) to secure their networks is folly. Armed force only works against attacks that are perpetrated from inside your range of military dominance. For the US that's a big area, but there's still many places where they can neither call in a SWAT team, nor direct an unmanned plane to assasinate the target.
If this fellow had been a professional (earning money from these hacks), then he'd be living in a secret compound provided by his employers in Iraq/Korea/China. True, the internet bandwidth isn't that great there, but a good hacker doesn't need it. He can just compromise some broadband PCs in the US or UK (possibly with the help of an agent on scene- a retailer who sells trojaned machines for instance) and use that to leapfrog to the real targets.
(If this guy was any good, we'll find out that this British suspect was just a patsy)
One big argument against more stringent computer-crime laws in the US is that they permit businesses and the military to postpone installing real network security. Why bother defending yourself, if the FBI just busts the punks for you?
This sets us up for disaster in 20 years, when the economy really needs the internet to survive day-to-day, and China has caught up to our 2005-era connectivity levels. If President Bush the 3rd angers China and they set 200 top computer professionals at making mischief, the damage could be real.
Spirited Away has precious little to do with any genuine Japanese religion. If you get a 20 second summary of Shinotism and can understand the concept of a public bathhouse/spa, you're more than prepared. How much does a person need to comprehend European "culture, religion, and social customs" to follow Cinderella or Snow White? Not at all. In the case of Alice in Wonderland or the Wizard of Oz (which are more in the Spirited Away genre), any preconceptions will just confuse you more.
The villian in B&B, I'm thinking, was the wicked witch who laid the curse in the beginning. She's not seen except as a shadow in the very beginning. But still, the problems are caused by one evil person, whose scheme is defeated. (We don't know if she had any other plots to fall back on. The Spirited Away witch had a job to return to)
I have in fact created cell-based animation at somewhere above flipbook quality...
Note that this comment was in response to an article which was stupid and funny, trying to construct grand sociological insights from an art style. If one must draw a conclusion from Anime's visually-ambiguous ethnicity, then lazy artists is as good as any. (Publishers angling for overseas sales is a good one too, but not applicable to early anime development).
Nonetheless, if you look at the faces of Anime characters and compare them to faces from "Western" comic books or cartoons, or even from manga, you'll see a whole lot of near uniformity. Within the works of a studio/artist there's sameness, and there's sameness within anime as a whole as well. When a work is transitioned from manga to anime, some distinctness is always removed. (And not just to simplify, but other changes too)
I'm not talking about the effort of animation, but the creativity invested in character design. That's a process done once per show, and is no more tedious than a detailed imaginary sketch- the finger-cramping labor of animating by hand isn't involved. (Although its true that designers simplify partly to reduce the chances of a low-paid animator screwing up. In anime this is a constant threat- compare Evangelion episodes 4&5. The "laziness" isn't as much an individual failing as a business decision to reduce the man hours of Korean pencil-jockeys they're paying for. They don't want to retrain those people, so they tend towards the same old character shapes)
I remember when Escaflowne(TV) was released. Anime fans were caught off guard by the astounding character design- everyone had detectable noses! Even girls!
Even the best fall into this. Miyazaki's Chihiro, Kiki, San, and Nausicaa are indistinguishable from each other without the differences in age and costume.
When an Anime character designer needs to create a new leading female, the only real tool he can call on is a unique hairstyle. At best, it must be something that no Anime girl has worn before, leading to a competitive plumbing of ever-greater depths of weirdness. Search for images from recent series like "Piano" or "Generator Gawl" to see how bad it can get.
Not exactly in a Disney-like way. In every major Disney animation I can recall*, the hero's problems are the work of a villian (usually a magician or, prototypically, a witch) who is defeated at the end.
Sometimes its merely her plan that's foiled, but usually the villian's existence is terminated as well. Death, dissolution, imprisonment, or at least public humiliation- the Wicked Witch is not allowed to return to her tower with pride & power intact. The villian doesn't get to become happy with everyone else.
Unlike 2 other Miyazaki movies that Disney has imported (Kiki's Delivery Service and Mononoke Hime), Spirited Away had a well defined antagonist in the person of "Ubaba". In fact, she was even a witch! But her comeupance was not nearly the simplistic Good-Conquerors-Evil that a Mouse storyboarder might create. Her pride was hurt a little, maybe she learned a lesson about caring, but her livelihood and position of control were not harmed.
* I haven't watched enough Disney movies to tell if this is really the pattern, but its the impression I get from a small sample (Cinderella & Alladin, Beauty&Beast). Its notable that the Pixar movies, although influenced by Disney writers, haven't fallen much into the "hero vs villan" mold either. They're more "man against nature".
It is (almost exactly) displacing the same volume[1] of water it would be if it were to melt.
Oh really? How exact do you mean? I'm not thinking about the difference between fresh and salt water, or warm and cold water, but between water and ice. Ice is less dense than water- they say that for any floating ice object, 10% of its mass will be above the water it's floating in.
This means that if the ice melts, it no longer sticks 100s of meters into the air at the north pole- instead it distributes to all of our beaches. Global sea level will undeniably increase (at least a little).
Conversely, if the oceans freeze, shorelines drop. (You've ever read about "land bridges" that allowed human and animal migration during ice ages? They weren't just walking across ice, the ocean had pulled back. Of course part of that was due to glaciers that got pushed onto land)
Melting of ice on land would surely cause much more sea-level increase, as 100% of the ice is converted to new ocean water. But I'm not sure the 10% contribution from melting floating ice caps is too small to hurt anyone. Some Pacific islands are already drafting evacuation plans.
The extent to which they specify a machine is simply a gratutious "on a microprocessor" comment. If that's all it takes for the patent to become valid, then you can effectively patent pure software.
Unless you want to make it impossible to patent a mechanism with certain properties that make it able to do X using method Y, there's no way to avoid software patents.
The mechanism (the hardware, the machine, the microprocessor) is the same across all software patents. That the point of software, the hardware doesn't have to change. Those properties have always been there.
If only Alan Turing had patented "Method and apparatus to load an arbitrary computable algorithm into computer memory for evaluation", then it would've covered every single software patent, and have expired by now too.
In the abstract, software patents sound OK. "He had a brilliant intuitive leap with practical applications. Why should he be any less protected just because he works in bytes and not metal or plastic?" But read through the USPTO database for a while, and a vanishingly small portion of software patents look like any kind of invention.
Those that are inventive were often patented from just an idea, without a "model" or reference implementation having been presented to the examiners. "Ideas are $0.10 for a pack of 12." "The devil is in the details" "10% inspiration, 90% perspiration".
What some software patenters are able to do is seize upon an important idea, which is difficult to implement. Very likely that many people before them have had the same idea, but not done anything with it because implementation is so tricky, or because the level of supporting technology is not yet adequate. But even if he can't figure out the details of making it work, our lazy inventor can gamble that someone else will. File a patent on the topic and wait until a hardworking entrepreneur has pushed through the sticky parts and is ready to bring his product to market. Then pounce on him with the relevation that all his expenditures were merely "stealing" your idea, and demand a cut of his profits or his business will be destroyed before its begun.
That scenario can occur with non-software patents too, but it seems less frequent there. Maybe because the examiners aren't as easy to fool- they can tell when your "invention" is a rigged demo or a vague idea presented in blustering, grandiose terms.
Not really. With T1 you pay for all of the bandwidth you could potentially use in a month. Whether you actually transmit something into each of the frames you buy isn't normally computed into the price.
There's room in the marketplace for power-user level service priced between T1 and existing cablemodem/DSL offerings. It should have a much lower total throughput than T1 (unless you decide to authorize a big penalty for exceeding the quota), but the peak rate should be faster. ("I want that 210 megabyte game demo, and I want it now. Then I'll log off for 6 days to play it.")
No, what you bought was low-priced commodity Internet access.
Read through the IETF RFCs for a few months, and you can extract the definition of Internet Access. It means that if a computer has Internet Access, it can open any 16 bit port and send TCP or UDP to any other host which also has Internet Access. (If some packets get delayed or randomly dropped, it still counts. But block them entirely, and they can't reach The Internet anymore)
Ask Metcalf, Cerf, or Berners-Lee and they'll tell you the same.
To advertise "Internet Access" and then only provide a subset of it is misleading, and if regulators were more tech-savvy they'd fine many ISPs for false advertising. If carriers think they can pick and choose what ports and protocols to allow, then they should rename the service to "HTTP Client / Email / IM access" and at least be forthright about it.
Also, some implementations of "Ada95" feature corruptly unworkable thread support. The IBM AIX one, for instance. Its different from other Adas, or just plain wrong. Maybe they shouldn't have been allowed to call it Ada95 at all, but there ya go.
(I've had the pain of watching Ada programs fork into 5 different processes and talk over strictly timed RPC to work around these shortcomings).
Regarding the "Language vs Library" theories- if thread support was NOT part of Ada, but was provided by external libraries, there'd be less barrier to entry for some thread-expert wanting to fix these problems without re-implementing the entire enormous Ada language himself.
(It would also help him if the compiler was Open Source. I suppose you like to use GNAT, I'm not sure if it works well on PowerPC hardware and non-linux-like OSes.)
Funny, they've decided to block their users from contributory copyright violation, while still letting them download all the MP3s they want.
But one legal defense ISPs use against charges of copyright infringment themselves (and a bevy of other crimes) is "We just move the data from one side to another- we never know what's inside it". That's why USENET still has its binaries groups moving at full tilt- ISPs don't want to get into a position of accepting/rejecting individual blobs of content.
For one thing, the workload would be enormous. For another, they'd begin serving in an editoral role, and have some responsiblity for the content they do let through. And some attorneys general will be happy to attack them with "you didn't reject it, so you must've accepted it, so you're a party to the crime!". (I can particularly imagine someone in a music-industry consitutency doing this)
Of course, per-file (checksum/watermark?), per-newsgroup, or per-filename blocking is a far cry from the simplistic protocol level denial this ISP is doing. They're still a common carrier for a while (denying data not by its contents, but by its format and packaging).
Although this change won't immediately hurt the availability of files on P2P filesharing (P2Pfs) much, it could be the start of a trend where all ISPs might block outgoing sharing. Leading to a chase where the P2Pfs software takes refuge inside one unblocked port and unfiltered protocol after another...
A race like that could (in 10 years or so) chase P2P programs entirely onto other allowed procotols, maybe even something like email messages. As the disguising of the P2Pfs packets becomes ever-more sophisticated, the only way to detect them will be to read more and more closely into every user's transmission. At some point, you become a real censor.
has built-in language support and features for threads, it is becomming almost second nature to think in terms of threads. What a wonderful language!
This is partly a matter of taste, but I dislike languages that are excessively large. That is, when given the choice between implementing a feature in the language itself or in the standard libraries (which are built in, or at least interfaced via, the same language) you should try to use the language you already have.
Academics prefers this because it follows principles like Occam's Razor and MDL (minimum description length, an artificial intelligence related term for program quality).
This simplifies your language definition, but transfers some complexity to your library documentation- which is optional reading for learning the language. And it makes the language more extensible in the future. The classic example that C++ advocates pick on is Java's String class. Two Java Strings support the "+" operator to concatenate them as a special language feature. But 3rd party library developers cannot support "+" with their own Objects, like complex numbers or string-like series of non-character data.
The same argument can be applied (with much more complexity and opportunity for disagreement or plain old error) to the question of including threading support native in the language, rather than as an external library. Language-supporters may say "The language natively provides the CPU's logical, arithmetic, and memory management operations. Threads are just as fundamental, and should go there too". The Library guys respond "No useful program lacks logic,arith,and memory. But we've gotten by fine for decades without threads. They're OPTIONAL. And not all OSes support threads- you want to make them incompatible with your language then?"
It goes back and forth, but winds up with a pro-Library argument backed up by programming language theory- language support for threads offers no more expressive power than library support, so they should be kept in the standard libraries. So C/C++ adopted this approach (or rather, C++ kept the C approach as it had been justified).
It sounds great to theorists, who think that even C++'s 4 styles of parentheses are redundant and excessive compared to what's used in Lisp. But outside of conceptual language design, there's a large practical problem which has retarded the performance of C++ programs to this day: backwards compatibility. Specifically, compatibility of new source code with old linkers. (This problem applied somewhat to the acceptance of other compiled languages besides C++)
To get any acceptance, new versions of C++ needed to be compatibile with user's existing C libraries. And to reduce the workload of C++ compiler developers, they made C++ compilers fit into the C workflow (compile, compile... & link) as directly as possible.
But that undermines one big assumption of the "provide important features IN the language, not AS the language" crowd- the assumption that the compiler is very, very good. Their quality metric ignored the ease of the compiler making good binary code from your source- as long as the language has the ability to express their intent compactly and unambiguously they're happy- but that intent may not be clear if the computer isn't looking at the whole program.
A compiler can make global optimizations if it considers the whole program at once, avoiding the function-call overhead of using external functions for core features. But the C developement processs- only giving the compiler small sections of code at once, and then depending on a separate program to link them together- means that the compiler simply can't make the best choices, burdened with incomplete information. (Today, we sometimes have smarter linkers which support more function inlining and const propagation, but they're a poorer solution than using compilers all the way through).
So, this lack of super-good compilers is why pulling more features into a language definition has been helpful, even though plenty of CS graduate theses say it shouldn't be so.
I don't think C/C++ is a good language either- except to implement other languages in! (Where "other languages" may include all the graphics, networking, compression, and other low-level code that Ada95 programs access via C bindings). And to make the academics most happy, that language should be Lisp or ML, which can then be used to write any other compiler/interpreter you might wish.
There are other valid reasons why C++ is still heavily used, but they're mostly shortsighted and based in legacy compatibility ("We've always written desktop applications that way!")
In terms of software archeology, there is an important intermediate ancestor.
Quake's original networking was meant for LANs only- the fact that it was even barely playable over the internet suprised the authors.
idsoftware soon released QuakeWorld free to Quake owners. It used the same interface and most of the graphics resources as Quake, so its arguably not a different program. But it came as a separate executable, with many Quake features removed (like monsters). And most importantly, the networking code was entirely re-written.
It is that code that QuakeII and successors derived from.
Many coders are disinclined to use threads, because they don't necessarily improve code speed.
Whether or not multithreading will accelerate any particular program has to be determined case-by-case. And for most software, the deciding factor should be whether threads will simplify development and correctness (theoretically they can, but lots of developers don't understand threads and use them wrong).
My company has some realtime networked game for which threading was an impediment. Both the rate/duration of screen refreshs and network transmissions were low enough so they didn't usually interfere with each other in the same thread. But using thread-safe versions of standard library functions was degrading every other part of the program with constant locking/unlocking.
So nonthreaded was faster. (Maybe cleverer people could've made special thread-unsafe alternative functions to use in contexts where we know inter-thread race conditions won't occur. But munging around with 2 standard libraries in one program is riskier than we'd like to deal with)
Basically, while Linus was incommunicado sailing across the ocean, someone got jumpy and suggested 3.0 should be the next step.
It might be more likely that it proceeds through 2.10 and higher before going to 3, though. Just to confuse the people who think version numbers are floating-point.
Dictionaries are notoriously out of date when it comes to usage related to computers.
The fact that dictionaries are out of date actually supports the usage of "printed" as applying to websites. (One of the less prominent definitions can be construed as applying to anything resembling block letters).
However, in modern popular use, the word "print" has a very exact definition when used in the context of computer operation: it means "output to paper" (look under any File dropdown menu to see what I mean).
"The printed word" refers to any published, written communication,
(The first of 3 times you ignored an obvious joke.)
You seem to have an affection for pedantic adherence to language rules, so I'll let you check your dictionary to see that printed means "created by pressing or stamping onto a surface".
It's not just niggling about definitions- in the context of journalism and editorial integrity, printed words are a different domain than electronically transmitted ones. Once printed, something can never be rescinded or repaired- but websight contents are eternally mutable. (Copyrightviolators notwithstanding). Printed words have an essential limitation on space, justifying the practice of "editing for brevity". That's much less defensible in the online arena, where the full text letter can be only a hyperlink away.
For example, I corrected each item shown above in boldface.
The fact that both "one-way" and "one-time" are dictionary words doesn't remove the unhypenated forms from valid English. This is akin to Dan Quayle's infamous potato/potatoe spelling-bee incident.
and a bit less on appearing cultured.
If I had meant "cultured" seriously, it wouldn't have been in scare quotes. It was a joke. (Finding the 3rd one is up to you. Don't waste your time on it, though)
because the editors regularly edit readers' letters for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and length
The fact that/. never censors is an advertised feature of the site, and is intended to distinguish it from traditional publications. Also, (advertising aside), I could enjoy my city's major newspapers for years without ever seeing a word not written by a paid employee- but 96% of Slashdot articles and 99.9992% of its total textual content are reader-contributions.
The rules are different here, because the demands are different.
Printed media have professional editors to ensure quality. On Slashdot, that job goes to the Moderators. The so-called editors are just there to keep the content flowing along smoothly; judging its quality it someone else's job.
There's a fundamental difference in the time-frame available to a printed periodical and an online one. Slashdot already has a reputation for lagging in articles, they can't afford to delay it further by more editing.
And that time constraint problem goes triple for comments on the stories- the comments aren't a static page, or a relaxed medium like a newspaper where a at least 72 hours can elapse between the publication of a story and the responses it evokes. Instead, it is a weird, quasi-real time conversation that will be broadcast to many more than those involved, and archived for posterity. Its unfortunate, but if even a very insightful comment fails to make it into the first 200, it's likely to be sqandered and fall comparatively unread. In this informal environment, first-hand knowledge, creativity, wit, and speed are more important than those qualities with 4th grade teachers specialize in.
Thus the rise of the "Grammar/Spelling Nazi" epithets. I don't dispute that people should be free to point out obvious minor errors- I just wish the bulk of readers didn't have to be burdened with language trivia, educational as it may be. The comment-submission for should have an option to "self-moderate" your post as "Spelling/Grammer Nitpick", "Off Topic", "Spoiler", and "Bad Pun". (No effect on your karma, but others can choose to filter them out of view)
I strongly hope that you don't send Slashdot stories to your printer! Please at least pretend to care about the environment.
If an editor corrects the work of professional writers, why should that benefit be denied a reader who submits something for print?
Because professional writers have an interactive relationship with their editors. There's a level of back and forth and of questioning. The writer almost always has a chance to veto changes before publication (and if not, then at least they'll continue working together, so he can guard against it happening next time).
But slashdot's submitters and "editors" don't have a collaborative relationship. Its a one way, one time process. If any "editing" to be done to the post (aside from inserting parenthetical comments and deciding where to break it off), then the submitter's words have been misrepresented.
In the case of this story title, the grammar-incorrectness may be intentional. It denotes to us:
That the targeted site is non-English, and we should expect similar minor translation errors ahead.
"How looks" is an archaic, poetic idiom. To "cultured" readers, it evokes romantic odes to the beauty of a comely woman.
This is an offbeat, funny story. The lack of professional editing attention tells us not to take the content too seriously. (In fact, the same goes for the entirety of Slashdot)
Regardless of the accuracy of those interpretations, they're between the writer and readers. Editors shouldn't interfere. (Unless they're paying the writers, then they've bought the right to have more control)
Slashdot Mirror
"Reliable" means "always works", it doesn't mean "always obeys the spec". (Unless you use a circular definition)
A timeout is a legal result by the TCP specification, but it's not reliable, because your data didn't make it through.
By the IP specification, your data might not make it either- and that's a legal result because the spec allows it to drop packets for any reason at all. That doesn't mean IP is reliable, just that it obeys its own definition.
Of course, no real protocol can ever meet this restrictive definition of reliable. Some maniac can always cut through your wires or incinerate your CPUs. Calling TCP a "reliable protocol" is just a shorthand for "as much more reliable than the underlying protocols as we could manage"
The timeout you mention does make TCP more reliable than IP, because it alerts you to the data loss, where the application can possibly take steps to retransmit it sometime in the future.
But its not as if TCP could ever achieve the perfect reliablity that the simplest, most abstract description of it would imply. Which is why, as the author says, those who rely on the abstractions can get bitten later.
Operation Sealion was doomed from the start, the British Isles where never seriously threatened with invasion
"And I'd have got away with it too, Churchill, if not for your pesky radar!" The German plan was a fine one, and could've worked except for technological innovations that the Nazis couldn't have known about. Even so, the RAF was seriously attrited. Maybe if the German resources weren't split on the Eastern front they could've overwhelmed the defenders. Or if they had an amazing espionage victory they could've neutralized radar.
In either of those cases (or if the invention had never been made at all), then German forces could've pushed onto the British Isles. It would've been a a bloodbath for both sides, but then the coastline of Axis Europe would be safe, with no convenient launching-point for American troops to launch an amphibious assault.
WW2 was the first war to be definitively won by scientists and inventors.
the Italian reputation for cowardice is largely unfounded, faint, thrust, retreat
Fainting still sounds cowardly. Or like they didn't maintain a proper diet. Feinting would be a superior combat tactic.
I was abbreviating North Korea, which is a stereotypical "US enemy". And of course the difference in bandwidth across the DMZ is night and day. (The difference in electricification is too)
Fine if they're inserting the floppy disks. Just as long as the guard at the door doesn't let him take it away. (Course, according to the badge you mentioned, he shouldn't have been let in at all... badly run place)
If they did things right (some do), all "Classified" work would be done in SCIFs (Secure Computer Information Facility?), which is not only surrounded by a faraday-ish cage, but is also a roach-motel for electronic media: "Discs check in, but they don't check out".
(Except for every 3 months, when the security guys come around to march the accumulated tainted materials to the incinerator)
I'm being intentionally alarmist here, and assuming the worst. Military planners should do the same, and prepare for the baddest scenario they can imagine. (And of course I don't mean that the zero-tier console-jockeys should be responsible for this. They should kick it up the chain until we finger the general who placed profits & patronage over security)
If he's looking for competitive info, then Raytheon and Lockheed Martin's corp networks are much softer and juicier. (Of course, for all we know, he's been in them too)
If he's an enemy, then there's non-classified data that can still be damaging. Especially military personnel records (which are often in the lesser category "sensitive"). Asymmetrical warfare procedure: Check out the make of aircraft bombing you, look up where the pilots get trained, see who's rotated through there, cross reference against health-care records for neo-natal care, and dispatch someone to visit the pilot's wife/kids.
(There are other ways to get the data, but lets not make it easier than necessary)
Yeah, and that shows he wasn't a professional, but someone out for fun. A professional cracker would've gotten his data, got out, and collected his paycheck.
Same with the snipers- the police can hardly claim to have beaten them. (the number of bodies they left behind made it a phyrric victory at best). A professional assasin would've killed his target, got out, and collected his paycheck.
So far we can barely defend ourselves from recreation "hackers" and gunmen. If some real terrorist group starts funding some, it will be much much worse.
Throw some military sysadmins to a court-martial for dereliction of duty!
Ok, don't be that harsh on them. Scare em a little, then let the go with a warning. But national western militaries cannot continue to run their networks like this. It's dangerously irresponsible.
For a national military to assume they can use police arrests (force of arms) to secure their networks is folly. Armed force only works against attacks that are perpetrated from inside your range of military dominance. For the US that's a big area, but there's still many places where they can neither call in a SWAT team, nor direct an unmanned plane to assasinate the target.
If this fellow had been a professional (earning money from these hacks), then he'd be living in a secret compound provided by his employers in Iraq/Korea/China. True, the internet bandwidth isn't that great there, but a good hacker doesn't need it. He can just compromise some broadband PCs in the US or UK (possibly with the help of an agent on scene- a retailer who sells trojaned machines for instance) and use that to leapfrog to the real targets.
(If this guy was any good, we'll find out that this British suspect was just a patsy)
One big argument against more stringent computer-crime laws in the US is that they permit businesses and the military to postpone installing real network security. Why bother defending yourself, if the FBI just busts the punks for you?
This sets us up for disaster in 20 years, when the economy really needs the internet to survive day-to-day, and China has caught up to our 2005-era connectivity levels. If President Bush the 3rd angers China and they set 200 top computer professionals at making mischief, the damage could be real.
("Vaccinate now! Free Heckenkamp")
Spirited Away has precious little to do with any genuine Japanese religion. If you get a 20 second summary of Shinotism and can understand the concept of a public bathhouse/spa, you're more than prepared. How much does a person need to comprehend European "culture, religion, and social customs" to follow Cinderella or Snow White? Not at all. In the case of Alice in Wonderland or the Wizard of Oz (which are more in the Spirited Away genre), any preconceptions will just confuse you more.
If you didn't like it, you must be feeling lonely by now. Here's the only reviewer who agrees with you, as opposed to the hundred who loved it.
The villian in B&B, I'm thinking, was the wicked witch who laid the curse in the beginning. She's not seen except as a shadow in the very beginning. But still, the problems are caused by one evil person, whose scheme is defeated. (We don't know if she had any other plots to fall back on. The Spirited Away witch had a job to return to)
I have in fact created cell-based animation at somewhere above flipbook quality...
Note that this comment was in response to an article which was stupid and funny, trying to construct grand sociological insights from an art style. If one must draw a conclusion from Anime's visually-ambiguous ethnicity, then lazy artists is as good as any. (Publishers angling for overseas sales is a good one too, but not applicable to early anime development).
Nonetheless, if you look at the faces of Anime characters and compare them to faces from "Western" comic books or cartoons, or even from manga, you'll see a whole lot of near uniformity. Within the works of a studio/artist there's sameness, and there's sameness within anime as a whole as well. When a work is transitioned from manga to anime, some distinctness is always removed. (And not just to simplify, but other changes too)
I'm not talking about the effort of animation, but the creativity invested in character design. That's a process done once per show, and is no more tedious than a detailed imaginary sketch- the finger-cramping labor of animating by hand isn't involved.
(Although its true that designers simplify partly to reduce the chances of a low-paid animator screwing up. In anime this is a constant threat- compare Evangelion episodes 4&5. The "laziness" isn't as much an individual failing as a business decision to reduce the man hours of Korean pencil-jockeys they're paying for. They don't want to retrain those people, so they tend towards the same old character shapes)
I remember when Escaflowne(TV) was released. Anime fans were caught off guard by the astounding character design- everyone had detectable noses! Even girls!
Even the best fall into this. Miyazaki's Chihiro, Kiki, San, and Nausicaa are indistinguishable from each other without the differences in age and costume.
When an Anime character designer needs to create a new leading female, the only real tool he can call on is a unique hairstyle. At best, it must be something that no Anime girl has worn before, leading to a competitive plumbing of ever-greater depths of weirdness. Search for images from recent series like "Piano" or "Generator Gawl" to see how bad it can get.
Reading the submission text, I think not what westerners expect applies not to animation, but to significance of animation to the Japanese.
And few people would guess that it's all an expression of submerged racial self-loathing...
(I sure attributed blandness of anime characters more to lazy artists than anything else...)
Not exactly in a Disney-like way. In every major Disney animation I can recall*, the hero's problems are the work of a villian (usually a magician or, prototypically, a witch) who is defeated at the end.
Sometimes its merely her plan that's foiled, but usually the villian's existence is terminated as well. Death, dissolution, imprisonment, or at least public humiliation- the Wicked Witch is not allowed to return to her tower with pride & power intact. The villian doesn't get to become happy with everyone else.
Unlike 2 other Miyazaki movies that Disney has imported (Kiki's Delivery Service and Mononoke Hime), Spirited Away had a well defined antagonist in the person of "Ubaba". In fact, she was even a witch! But her comeupance was not nearly the simplistic Good-Conquerors-Evil that a Mouse storyboarder might create. Her pride was hurt a little, maybe she learned a lesson about caring, but her livelihood and position of control were not harmed.
* I haven't watched enough Disney movies to tell if this is really the pattern, but its the impression I get from a small sample (Cinderella & Alladin, Beauty&Beast). Its notable that the Pixar movies, although influenced by Disney writers, haven't fallen much into the "hero vs villan" mold either. They're more "man against nature".
It is (almost exactly) displacing the same volume[1] of water it would be if it were to melt.
Oh really? How exact do you mean? I'm not thinking about the difference between fresh and salt water, or warm and cold water, but between water and ice. Ice is less dense than water- they say that for any floating ice object, 10% of its mass will be above the water it's floating in.
This means that if the ice melts, it no longer sticks 100s of meters into the air at the north pole- instead it distributes to all of our beaches. Global sea level will undeniably increase (at least a little).
Conversely, if the oceans freeze, shorelines drop. (You've ever read about "land bridges" that allowed human and animal migration during ice ages? They weren't just walking across ice, the ocean had pulled back. Of course part of that was due to glaciers that got pushed onto land)
Melting of ice on land would surely cause much more sea-level increase, as 100% of the ice is converted to new ocean water. But I'm not sure the 10% contribution from melting floating ice caps is too small to hurt anyone. Some Pacific islands are already drafting evacuation plans.
No one would be allowed a patent on just the software part, absent the machine to run it.
People say that. They say "You can only patent software as part of a Method & Apparatus filing".
But its effectively no longer true, if it ever was. Look at blatant stuff like this.
The extent to which they specify a machine is simply a gratutious "on a microprocessor" comment. If that's all it takes for the patent to become valid, then you can effectively patent pure software.
Unless you want to make it impossible to patent a mechanism with certain properties that make it able to do X using method Y, there's no way to avoid software patents.
The mechanism (the hardware, the machine, the microprocessor) is the same across all software patents. That the point of software, the hardware doesn't have to change. Those properties have always been there.
If only Alan Turing had patented "Method and apparatus to load an arbitrary computable algorithm into computer memory for evaluation", then it would've covered every single software patent, and have expired by now too.
In the abstract, software patents sound OK. "He had a brilliant intuitive leap with practical applications. Why should he be any less protected just because he works in bytes and not metal or plastic?" But read through the USPTO database for a while, and a vanishingly small portion of software patents look like any kind of invention.
Those that are inventive were often patented from just an idea, without a "model" or reference implementation having been presented to the examiners. "Ideas are $0.10 for a pack of 12." "The devil is in the details" "10% inspiration, 90% perspiration".
What some software patenters are able to do is seize upon an important idea, which is difficult to implement. Very likely that many people before them have had the same idea, but not done anything with it because implementation is so tricky, or because the level of supporting technology is not yet adequate. But even if he can't figure out the details of making it work, our lazy inventor can gamble that someone else will. File a patent on the topic and wait until a hardworking entrepreneur has pushed through the sticky parts and is ready to bring his product to market. Then pounce on him with the relevation that all his expenditures were merely "stealing" your idea, and demand a cut of his profits or his business will be destroyed before its begun.
That scenario can occur with non-software patents too, but it seems less frequent there. Maybe because the examiners aren't as easy to fool- they can tell when your "invention" is a rigged demo or a vague idea presented in blustering, grandiose terms.
Not really. With T1 you pay for all of the bandwidth you could potentially use in a month. Whether you actually transmit something into each of the frames you buy isn't normally computed into the price.
There's room in the marketplace for power-user level service priced between T1 and existing cablemodem/DSL offerings. It should have a much lower total throughput than T1 (unless you decide to authorize a big penalty for exceeding the quota), but the peak rate should be faster. ("I want that 210 megabyte game demo, and I want it now. Then I'll log off for 6 days to play it.")
No, what you bought was low-priced commodity Internet access.
Read through the IETF RFCs for a few months, and you can extract the definition of Internet Access. It means that if a computer has Internet Access, it can open any 16 bit port and send TCP or UDP to any other host which also has Internet Access. (If some packets get delayed or randomly dropped, it still counts. But block them entirely, and they can't reach The Internet anymore)
Ask Metcalf, Cerf, or Berners-Lee and they'll tell you the same.
To advertise "Internet Access" and then only provide a subset of it is misleading, and if regulators were more tech-savvy they'd fine many ISPs for false advertising. If carriers think they can pick and choose what ports and protocols to allow, then they should rename the service to "HTTP Client / Email / IM access" and at least be forthright about it.
Also, some implementations of "Ada95" feature corruptly unworkable thread support. The IBM AIX one, for instance. Its different from other Adas, or just plain wrong. Maybe they shouldn't have been allowed to call it Ada95 at all, but there ya go.
(I've had the pain of watching Ada programs fork into 5 different processes and talk over strictly timed RPC to work around these shortcomings).
Regarding the "Language vs Library" theories- if thread support was NOT part of Ada, but was provided by external libraries, there'd be less barrier to entry for some thread-expert wanting to fix these problems without re-implementing the entire enormous Ada language himself.
(It would also help him if the compiler was Open Source. I suppose you like to use GNAT, I'm not sure if it works well on PowerPC hardware and non-linux-like OSes.)
Funny, they've decided to block their users from contributory copyright violation, while still letting them download all the MP3s they want.
But one legal defense ISPs use against charges of copyright infringment themselves (and a bevy of other crimes) is "We just move the data from one side to another- we never know what's inside it". That's why USENET still has its binaries groups moving at full tilt- ISPs don't want to get into a position of accepting/rejecting individual blobs of content.
For one thing, the workload would be enormous. For another, they'd begin serving in an editoral role, and have some responsiblity for the content they do let through. And some attorneys general will be happy to attack them with "you didn't reject it, so you must've accepted it, so you're a party to the crime!". (I can particularly imagine someone in a music-industry consitutency doing this)
Of course, per-file (checksum/watermark?), per-newsgroup, or per-filename blocking is a far cry from the simplistic protocol level denial this ISP is doing. They're still a common carrier for a while (denying data not by its contents, but by its format and packaging).
Although this change won't immediately hurt the availability of files on P2P filesharing (P2Pfs) much, it could be the start of a trend where all ISPs might block outgoing sharing. Leading to a chase where the P2Pfs software takes refuge inside one unblocked port and unfiltered protocol after another...
A race like that could (in 10 years or so) chase P2P programs entirely onto other allowed procotols, maybe even something like email messages. As the disguising of the P2Pfs packets becomes ever-more sophisticated, the only way to detect them will be to read more and more closely into every user's transmission. At some point, you become a real censor.
has built-in language support and features for threads, it is becomming almost second nature to think in terms of threads. What a wonderful language!
This is partly a matter of taste, but I dislike languages that are excessively large. That is, when given the choice between implementing a feature in the language itself or in the standard libraries (which are built in, or at least interfaced via, the same language) you should try to use the language you already have.
Academics prefers this because it follows principles like Occam's Razor and MDL (minimum description length, an artificial intelligence related term for program quality).
This simplifies your language definition, but transfers some complexity to your library documentation- which is optional reading for learning the language. And it makes the language more extensible in the future. The classic example that C++ advocates pick on is Java's String class. Two Java Strings support the "+" operator to concatenate them as a special language feature. But 3rd party library developers cannot support "+" with their own Objects, like complex numbers or string-like series of non-character data.
The same argument can be applied (with much more complexity and opportunity for disagreement or plain old error) to the question of including threading support native in the language, rather than as an external library. Language-supporters may say "The language natively provides the CPU's logical, arithmetic, and memory management operations. Threads are just as fundamental, and should go there too". The Library guys respond "No useful program lacks logic,arith,and memory. But we've gotten by fine for decades without threads. They're OPTIONAL. And not all OSes support threads- you want to make them incompatible with your language then?"
It goes back and forth, but winds up with a pro-Library argument backed up by programming language theory- language support for threads offers no more expressive power than library support, so they should be kept in the standard libraries. So C/C++ adopted this approach (or rather, C++ kept the C approach as it had been justified).
It sounds great to theorists, who think that even C++'s 4 styles of parentheses are redundant and excessive compared to what's used in Lisp. But outside of conceptual language design, there's a large practical problem which has retarded the performance of C++ programs to this day: backwards compatibility. Specifically, compatibility of new source code with old linkers. (This problem applied somewhat to the acceptance of other compiled languages besides C++)
To get any acceptance, new versions of C++ needed to be compatibile with user's existing C libraries. And to reduce the workload of C++ compiler developers, they made C++ compilers fit into the C workflow (compile, compile... & link) as directly as possible.
But that undermines one big assumption of the "provide important features IN the language, not AS the language" crowd- the assumption that the compiler is very, very good. Their quality metric ignored the ease of the compiler making good binary code from your source- as long as the language has the ability to express their intent compactly and unambiguously they're happy- but that intent may not be clear if the computer isn't looking at the whole program.
A compiler can make global optimizations if it considers the whole program at once, avoiding the function-call overhead of using external functions for core features. But the C developement processs- only giving the compiler small sections of code at once, and then depending on a separate program to link them together- means that the compiler simply can't make the best choices, burdened with incomplete information. (Today, we sometimes have smarter linkers which support more function inlining and const propagation, but they're a poorer solution than using compilers all the way through).
So, this lack of super-good compilers is why pulling more features into a language definition has been helpful, even though plenty of CS graduate theses say it shouldn't be so.
I don't think C/C++ is a good language either- except to implement other languages in! (Where "other languages" may include all the graphics, networking, compression, and other low-level code that Ada95 programs access via C bindings). And to make the academics most happy, that language should be Lisp or ML, which can then be used to write any other compiler/interpreter you might wish.
There are other valid reasons why C++ is still heavily used, but they're mostly shortsighted and based in legacy compatibility ("We've always written desktop applications that way!")
In terms of software archeology, there is an important intermediate ancestor.
Quake's original networking was meant for LANs only- the fact that it was even barely playable over the internet suprised the authors.
idsoftware soon released QuakeWorld free to Quake owners. It used the same interface and most of the graphics resources as Quake, so its arguably not a different program. But it came as a separate executable, with many Quake features removed (like monsters). And most importantly, the networking code was entirely re-written.
It is that code that QuakeII and successors derived from.
Many coders are disinclined to use threads, because they don't necessarily improve code speed.
Whether or not multithreading will accelerate any particular program has to be determined case-by-case. And for most software, the deciding factor should be whether threads will simplify development and correctness (theoretically they can, but lots of developers don't understand threads and use them wrong).
My company has some realtime networked game for which threading was an impediment. Both the rate/duration of screen refreshs and network transmissions were low enough so they didn't usually interfere with each other in the same thread. But using thread-safe versions of standard library functions was degrading every other part of the program with constant locking/unlocking.
So nonthreaded was faster. (Maybe cleverer people could've made special thread-unsafe alternative functions to use in contexts where we know inter-thread race conditions won't occur. But munging around with 2 standard libraries in one program is riskier than we'd like to deal with)
Sigh, I'll do your web searching for you.
Basically, while Linus was incommunicado sailing across the ocean, someone got jumpy and suggested 3.0 should be the next step.
It might be more likely that it proceeds through 2.10 and higher before going to 3, though. Just to confuse the people who think version numbers are floating-point.
But I'm willing to have the last word
Sorry, I can't resist one more tiny comment.
Dictionaries are notoriously out of date when it comes to usage related to computers.
The fact that dictionaries are out of date actually supports the usage of "printed" as applying to websites. (One of the less prominent definitions can be construed as applying to anything resembling block letters).
However, in modern popular use, the word "print" has a very exact definition when used in the context of computer operation: it means "output to paper" (look under any File dropdown menu to see what I mean).
(The first of 3 times you ignored an obvious joke.)
You seem to have an affection for pedantic adherence to language rules, so I'll let you check your dictionary to see that printed means "created by pressing or stamping onto a surface".
It's not just niggling about definitions- in the context of journalism and editorial integrity, printed words are a different domain than electronically transmitted ones. Once printed, something can never be rescinded or repaired- but websight contents are eternally mutable. (Copyright violators notwithstanding). Printed words have an essential limitation on space, justifying the practice of "editing for brevity". That's much less defensible in the online arena, where the full text letter can be only a hyperlink away.
For example, I corrected each item shown above in boldface.
The fact that both "one-way" and "one-time" are dictionary words doesn't remove the unhypenated forms from valid English. This is akin to Dan Quayle's infamous potato/potatoe spelling-bee incident.
and a bit less on appearing cultured. If I had meant "cultured" seriously, it wouldn't have been in scare quotes. It was a joke. (Finding the 3rd one is up to you. Don't waste your time on it, though)
because the editors regularly edit readers' letters for grammar, spelling, punctuation, and length
The fact that /. never censors is an advertised feature of the site, and is intended to distinguish it from traditional publications. Also, (advertising aside), I could enjoy my city's major newspapers for years without ever seeing a word not written by a paid employee- but 96% of Slashdot articles and 99.9992% of its total textual content are reader-contributions.
The rules are different here, because the demands are different.
Printed media have professional editors to ensure quality. On Slashdot, that job goes to the Moderators. The so-called editors are just there to keep the content flowing along smoothly; judging its quality it someone else's job.
There's a fundamental difference in the time-frame available to a printed periodical and an online one. Slashdot already has a reputation for lagging in articles, they can't afford to delay it further by more editing.
And that time constraint problem goes triple for comments on the stories- the comments aren't a static page, or a relaxed medium like a newspaper where a at least 72 hours can elapse between the publication of a story and the responses it evokes. Instead, it is a weird, quasi-real time conversation that will be broadcast to many more than those involved, and archived for posterity. Its unfortunate, but if even a very insightful comment fails to make it into the first 200, it's likely to be sqandered and fall comparatively unread. In this informal environment, first-hand knowledge, creativity, wit, and speed are more important than those qualities with 4th grade teachers specialize in.
Thus the rise of the "Grammar/Spelling Nazi" epithets. I don't dispute that people should be free to point out obvious minor errors- I just wish the bulk of readers didn't have to be burdened with language trivia, educational as it may be. The comment-submission for should have an option to "self-moderate" your post as "Spelling/Grammer Nitpick", "Off Topic", "Spoiler", and "Bad Pun". (No effect on your karma, but others can choose to filter them out of view)
I strongly hope that you don't send Slashdot stories to your printer! Please at least pretend to care about the environment.
If an editor corrects the work of professional writers, why should that benefit be denied a reader who submits something for print?
Because professional writers have an interactive relationship with their editors. There's a level of back and forth and of questioning. The writer almost always has a chance to veto changes before publication (and if not, then at least they'll continue working together, so he can guard against it happening next time).
But slashdot's submitters and "editors" don't have a collaborative relationship. Its a one way, one time process. If any "editing" to be done to the post (aside from inserting parenthetical comments and deciding where to break it off), then the submitter's words have been misrepresented.
In the case of this story title, the grammar-incorrectness may be intentional. It denotes to us:
Regardless of the accuracy of those interpretations, they're between the writer and readers. Editors shouldn't interfere. (Unless they're paying the writers, then they've bought the right to have more control)