A blind link is a link to a server that's not known good, or a link to an URL shortener like j.mp
Microsoft advises against clicking blind links, and that's good guidance. It's talking to a wall since Twitter almost requires those links, and it's the hot tech right now. Of course I have my own URL shortener service so I don't have to use other people's.
I'm not worried about you piercing my anonymous veil, since once you've been online as long as I have, "whois username" will almost always pierce that veil. Bing me and drop by the house one day - I live near you and wouldn't mind a visit around 7PM on a weekday. I would actually like to meet you in real life as I think I would like you in person. I prefer to keep my symbolset handle separate from my work and daily life to ensure my family and employer aren't tainted by my opinions, but I do believe what I believe and I am a person and you can find me if you want to, just as I can find you. I'm sure if you wanted to, you'd know who I was by now. It's just that that particular thread lends itself to "funny" links that hose your machine. I do that myself now and then. I don't mind the occasional funny hosing, but I've got work to do and my random hosable machines are all busy today.
When I have time and sufficient separation from client data, I'll click it and read what you had to say - and then burn the VM to be sure I didn't pick up any stray software along the way. In a more congenial context I tend to be less careful, but the Internet is what it is. I don't even know that you are who you claim to be. Though the timing of your comments against world events is persuasive evidence, persuasion is not proof.
I am a little worried about you setting the evangelists after me. I sell several $M/yr of your products at work and only point out your weaknesses in my free time, but giving me more free time and less selling time is part of the self-destructive behaviour I expect from your gang.
I do believe more and more states are outlawing "Distracted Driving," which is a catchall that covers texting, talking without handsfree, receiving oral sex on the freeway, slashdotting, Farking, flogging the dolphin and watching TV or movies on your portable. Kids these days, once they get off our lawn, seem to be offered less fun than we had.
Naturally proper Libertarians are going to have a problem with that. I'm a Libertarian, but not a proper one, so I don't have a problem with these laws as long as I don't get caught violating them. If I do get caught of course I'll be upset about the constitutional implications of limiting my civil liberties. Actually I'm probably more of an ambivalent anarchist. I don't really believe in the anarchist philosophy, but at least it trends more toward liberty than the situation I'm in. Should we trend more toward a purer form like Somalian Anarchy, I'm sure I would become more conservative. I'm not a big fan of group antisocial atavism.
Oh, hell I've trapped myself. I'm symbolset, and I'd like to call myself a "rationalist" as defined by a system of evaluating the situation and making reasonable judgements based on the available evidence in a calm manner with the presumption that "do nothing" is usually the best course - but unfortunately the "rationalism" token is taken some 2400 years now by Socrates. Frankly he did OK, but Kant messed the whole thing up and that's what people attach to that symbol so I need a new one.
Pending a better symbol I'll call my personal philosophy Frzygy. Fellow Frzygists, unite (unless you don't want to)!
Since over the last decade I've managed to convince my employers that my/. addiction was a large part of my value add, I'm going to have to agree with you./. rocks. I was a lurker for a few years before I got a registered account.
I make my living by being able to solve problems, fix problems, architect solutions and educate staff engineers and customers about classic and emerging information technologies. Though I have a firm education foundation, over the years the tips for further study I've found through/. have become an ever larger fraction of the value I provide. It's not my only source, but it's a catchall for stuff I would otherwise miss in my more focused studies. Quite a few times breaking news on/. has saved my bacon, and several times it's helped me steer customers away from toxic products. Checking/. every morning and evening gives me the opportunity to allstaff breaking events that impact operations and give an opportunity to provide customer guidance on a regular basis and frankly that's a large part of why I continue to be employed in IT at the level I enjoy.
I used to buy stuff for personal use from random vendors on pricewatch.com and recommend that even though fulfillment was spotty, but years ago Newegg advertised here and I went there and now I'm a big Newegg fan. They'll continue to be my preferred online vendor until they let me down, which hasn't happened yet and seems less likely every year. I've probably spent $50K with them, and referred 20X as much. Today I recommend about $40M a year of IT spend ($400K today, but today was a good day) and of that my company's customers buy much more than half.
So yeah, Slashdot rocks.
I still wish they'd fix browser detection and give me a thin home page so I could get my/. on on my blackberry, but that's a small thing compared to what I get for what I pay.
I subscribe, and the subscription cost is ridiculously small. The minimum subscription can last almost forever. They should jack that up a bit. The plums (like being able to pull up your first comment for you) are worth far more..
Given the article, don't you think your protocols link is a little rich? Especially given the similar exFAT licensing article from yesterday?
You're open or you're not. There's none of this licensing the protocol nonsense in "interopability".
BTW: I'm not stalking you. It seems we're interested in the same stuff. I haven't hit your blog link yet - I've been busy selling your products and blind links from that thread merit the due caution of access from offsite hosting through a proxy or seven, which takes more time to set up than I've had.
The Borg Bill icon rocks, and I miss it since I turned the icons off because they were giving my Blackberry fits. I should turn them back on now that Slashdot has upgraded its interface to the point where I can no longer/. on my BB.
Or maybe this is an appeal for/. to detect my BB browser and give me a thinner home page so I can once more get my/. on while driving in heavy traffic. Hm.
Protocols are not code. Protocols are methods of interaction between pieces of code, even if the code is methods of interaction embedded in hardware. That these methods could possibly be considered as something that should be protected by some sort of intellectual property agreement is a testament to how far we've fallen from the root assumption of Unix: that all things should be able to connect to all other things whenever physically possible.
This is the mindset that brought us DRM, all of Sony's stupid proprietary media formats, and an iPhone that won't tether.
I'm sick of it. I have enough stuff that doesn't connect to my other stuff. I'm not buying any more stuff that doesn't connect to the stuff that I already have. I'm not using any systems that require proprietary licensing to connect the stuff I have to the new stuff I buy. I'm done with all that stupidness.
You have to give him (or her) points for creating a new account that memes another troll username and getting the initial comment with a topical troll message that references the username. That's troll diligence there.
I've had more than 60K recipes online for over a decade and nobody ever bothered me about it. Sadly, I can't provide a link as the site's down now two weeks while we shift hosting providers. It's a hobby and it's free so I'm not apologetic about that. I'm a fairly busy guy and I'm not going to let that get in the way of my slashdotting. We get about 250k hits a month, down from a peak of over a million.
You can't put out your protocol under anything less than an "all implementations are free" license and then pretend you're supporting interopability. It's one way or the other: it's your protocol and people have to pay you to use it, or people don't need your permission to interoperate with you. You can't have both.
You can review your comments. Just go back to your first comment. Was that about the right time?
So now, what would any home user need 128MB of RAM on their graphics card for, at this point? Are the games really going to become so complex in the next couple of years that they would require that much RAM on board? I can understand why, in a professional/commercial environment, one might need a really high-powered video card... for special effects in movies, or just general professional graphics/video work. But how much RAM do you *really* need in your video card?
I was observing for Mother Earth News. It turns out that the trees reached a consensus - climate scientists kept boring holes in them and cutting them down to see their rings, so the trees agreed to randomize their ring thickness to get the scientists to stop. Sadly, it didn't work so the trees will probably revert to their old behaviour at their next meeting in 21,046 (Trees have an exceedingly sparse conference schedule, as they are all busy and slow moving).
And NIST certified calibrated dataloggers that could record the temperature within.00013C twice each minute all during the day - generating a swamp of data. You could take all of that data and capture a close approximation (within.001C) of the actual mean temperature for each location during a day.
Or you could skip that because it's hard. You could throw out everything except the high and low, average those, and call that the average temperature for that point during the day, and pretend that it's accurate within the limits of your instrument.
Which of those methods do you suppose these "scientists" used?
Trolls thrive on attention. Don't feed them and they go away. Validate them with responses and they will swarm you as if they were ducks and you were unwrapping loaves of bread.
This is pretty basic online stuff. You have been sheltered, haven't you?
You're an AC, but your use of "we" is interesting in the grammar analysis realm. You are clearly posting from a subjective point of view and your post is worthy of note.
I think your opinion is interesting, though I don't share it.
Thanks for joining the discussion friend. Now go back and review what he and I have shared on the subject to get some context on what I said. You may have to subscribe to slashdot to get the good bits.
Windows still has autorun even in W7. They've limited it, but it's still there.
I don't know what to say. You're obviously so subscribed to the myth of global warming that you can't admit that it's wrong to adjust NIST calibrated measurements. I have nothing more to add except that this is not science.
If you believe in proxy data then you believe that we should adjust today's NIST calibrated instruments by +.5c to match them, which is what the models are doing. I have a problem with that.
In 1960 tree ring proxies stopped matching observations, contemporary with the invention of datalogging. It's not reasonable to adjust NIST calibrated measurements to agree with tree rings on this basis. Trees did not have a meeting and agree to change their modus operandi.
And that's without considering that the tree ring data includes strip bark trees like Bristlecone Pines, which have an accuracy of 4-6 sigmas based on angle of attack on the borer. You're better off rolling dice, even before the "scientists" sampled 10x the trees they reported, and only reported the trees that matched the expected curve.
Ice gas proxies have similar problems. Their reports are interesing but anecdotal - they should not be presented in the same graph as measured data.
Regardless, the raw data says that the climate is cooling, and the scientists and their "corrections" claim that the climate is warming. If their corrections carry such weight over raw observations, should we not be entitled to some explanations? Why should we not believe this wacky guy?
Using a strong software market position to prevent hardware innovation in products like Larrabee and Snapdragon is prevention of progress for profit. I hope that is not a business you're engaged in. That behavior would be evil, among other ways to describe it, and the truth will out eventually.
I think that you know that I disagree. Linux does not have any form of autorun. Most distributions lack open ports. That's a lot of attack surface missing right there relative to Windows on a per system basis. After all, if your computer isn't listening over the network, it can't be compromised over the network by a remote initiator; if it isn't running a file on the root of a mounted share, CD or pendrive then it can't be automatically compromised by software placed in those locations (or mailed or dropped in the parking lot or in the Men's room at the clubs where your high-value targets hang out) without further user interaction. Then there are the thousands of object formats like images, spreadsheets and wordart that Microsoft seems to think should be embedded in every application. That's how you wind up with a buffer overflow in font rendering that gets system privileges. Even without these things the embedding of Turing Complete scripting languages in every application with hidden execution renders the Windows platform's security horrendous.
Both can be rendered more secure of course. Here, for example, are some NSA recommendations for Windows. With good system administration by a skilled staff it's possible to build an image and policies for either that can carry most users through a year without being compromised despite heavy online research and heavy communications on the part of the end user. I think we can both agree that this is not what's actually happening in the field.
I argue that if Linux became as popular as windows that it would face security problems at a similar scale.
This argument is beaten to death. Linux runs the Internet. There is no higher value target than the server that stores the files and databases for thousands of users or processes their credit cards and here market share is more evenly matched. And yet... where is the Linux equivalent of the SQL_slammer worm that compromised 90% of all the vulnerable servers in the world in under an hour? Nowhere. The "When Linux is popular it will have problems too" story is just getting silly. There are more than enough Linux users both for commercial software vendors and malware vendors and they're both avoiding it like the plague. Kudos to your marketing team for making the former happen. I have to think the latter made that decision on their own, but perhaps the marketing does help, so thanks for that.
Did you know that the Windows Malware ecosystem is in dollars actually far larger than the Windows market? I thought it odd too, but if you count time and money lost, development and marketing and sales on both sides (attack and defense), hardware and services, it's not even close. Maybe you're on the wrong side of the business.
I'm going to summarize with a truism you should engrave on your desk: "Anything a program can do, another program can do."
If the signal was present we would see it in the raw data. It's not in the raw data. It's not normalization to put into the model the information you're looking for and then call out "Eureka!" I found it! There's another word for that.
Yeah, like NASA. Those guys put up data from thermometers that clearly shows the hockey stick.
Oh, wait. No, it doesn't. That's odd. Maybe you can find the hockey stick in this data. I can't. What I find in the data is that scientists like to live in cities that get warmer as they get larger.
We're going into TMI territory. I've worked in Intel labs. The people there are first rate. There's no way to describe how much more fun it is to deal with folks who can think.
The executive suite there could use a broom. That's all I can say about that.
We'll have our progress with or without Intel. If Intel gets behind enabling individuals to do more without worrying about how much that "cannibalizes" their historical markets, they will have learned what I tried to teach them. I did try.
Slashdot Mirror
A blind link is a link to a server that's not known good, or a link to an URL shortener like j.mp
Microsoft advises against clicking blind links, and that's good guidance. It's talking to a wall since Twitter almost requires those links, and it's the hot tech right now. Of course I have my own URL shortener service so I don't have to use other people's.
I'm not worried about you piercing my anonymous veil, since once you've been online as long as I have, "whois username" will almost always pierce that veil. Bing me and drop by the house one day - I live near you and wouldn't mind a visit around 7PM on a weekday. I would actually like to meet you in real life as I think I would like you in person. I prefer to keep my symbolset handle separate from my work and daily life to ensure my family and employer aren't tainted by my opinions, but I do believe what I believe and I am a person and you can find me if you want to, just as I can find you. I'm sure if you wanted to, you'd know who I was by now. It's just that that particular thread lends itself to "funny" links that hose your machine. I do that myself now and then. I don't mind the occasional funny hosing, but I've got work to do and my random hosable machines are all busy today.
When I have time and sufficient separation from client data, I'll click it and read what you had to say - and then burn the VM to be sure I didn't pick up any stray software along the way. In a more congenial context I tend to be less careful, but the Internet is what it is. I don't even know that you are who you claim to be. Though the timing of your comments against world events is persuasive evidence, persuasion is not proof.
I am a little worried about you setting the evangelists after me. I sell several $M/yr of your products at work and only point out your weaknesses in my free time, but giving me more free time and less selling time is part of the self-destructive behaviour I expect from your gang.
I do believe more and more states are outlawing "Distracted Driving," which is a catchall that covers texting, talking without handsfree, receiving oral sex on the freeway, slashdotting, Farking, flogging the dolphin and watching TV or movies on your portable. Kids these days, once they get off our lawn, seem to be offered less fun than we had.
Naturally proper Libertarians are going to have a problem with that. I'm a Libertarian, but not a proper one, so I don't have a problem with these laws as long as I don't get caught violating them. If I do get caught of course I'll be upset about the constitutional implications of limiting my civil liberties. Actually I'm probably more of an ambivalent anarchist. I don't really believe in the anarchist philosophy, but at least it trends more toward liberty than the situation I'm in. Should we trend more toward a purer form like Somalian Anarchy, I'm sure I would become more conservative. I'm not a big fan of group antisocial atavism.
Oh, hell I've trapped myself. I'm symbolset, and I'd like to call myself a "rationalist" as defined by a system of evaluating the situation and making reasonable judgements based on the available evidence in a calm manner with the presumption that "do nothing" is usually the best course - but unfortunately the "rationalism" token is taken some 2400 years now by Socrates. Frankly he did OK, but Kant messed the whole thing up and that's what people attach to that symbol so I need a new one.
Pending a better symbol I'll call my personal philosophy Frzygy. Fellow Frzygists, unite (unless you don't want to)!
Since over the last decade I've managed to convince my employers that my /. addiction was a large part of my value add, I'm going to have to agree with you. /. rocks. I was a lurker for a few years before I got a registered account.
I make my living by being able to solve problems, fix problems, architect solutions and educate staff engineers and customers about classic and emerging information technologies. Though I have a firm education foundation, over the years the tips for further study I've found through /. have become an ever larger fraction of the value I provide. It's not my only source, but it's a catchall for stuff I would otherwise miss in my more focused studies. Quite a few times breaking news on /. has saved my bacon, and several times it's helped me steer customers away from toxic products. Checking /. every morning and evening gives me the opportunity to allstaff breaking events that impact operations and give an opportunity to provide customer guidance on a regular basis and frankly that's a large part of why I continue to be employed in IT at the level I enjoy.
I used to buy stuff for personal use from random vendors on pricewatch.com and recommend that even though fulfillment was spotty, but years ago Newegg advertised here and I went there and now I'm a big Newegg fan. They'll continue to be my preferred online vendor until they let me down, which hasn't happened yet and seems less likely every year. I've probably spent $50K with them, and referred 20X as much. Today I recommend about $40M a year of IT spend ($400K today, but today was a good day) and of that my company's customers buy much more than half.
So yeah, Slashdot rocks.
I still wish they'd fix browser detection and give me a thin home page so I could get my /. on on my blackberry, but that's a small thing compared to what I get for what I pay.
I subscribe, and the subscription cost is ridiculously small. The minimum subscription can last almost forever. They should jack that up a bit. The plums (like being able to pull up your first comment for you) are worth far more..
Given the article, don't you think your protocols link is a little rich? Especially given the similar exFAT licensing article from yesterday ?
You're open or you're not. There's none of this licensing the protocol nonsense in "interopability".
BTW: I'm not stalking you. It seems we're interested in the same stuff. I haven't hit your blog link yet - I've been busy selling your products and blind links from that thread merit the due caution of access from offsite hosting through a proxy or seven, which takes more time to set up than I've had.
The Borg Bill icon rocks, and I miss it since I turned the icons off because they were giving my Blackberry fits. I should turn them back on now that Slashdot has upgraded its interface to the point where I can no longer /. on my BB.
Or maybe this is an appeal for /. to detect my BB browser and give me a thinner home page so I can once more get my /. on while driving in heavy traffic. Hm.
Protocols are not code. Protocols are methods of interaction between pieces of code, even if the code is methods of interaction embedded in hardware. That these methods could possibly be considered as something that should be protected by some sort of intellectual property agreement is a testament to how far we've fallen from the root assumption of Unix: that all things should be able to connect to all other things whenever physically possible.
This is the mindset that brought us DRM, all of Sony's stupid proprietary media formats, and an iPhone that won't tether.
I'm sick of it. I have enough stuff that doesn't connect to my other stuff. I'm not buying any more stuff that doesn't connect to the stuff that I already have. I'm not using any systems that require proprietary licensing to connect the stuff I have to the new stuff I buy. I'm done with all that stupidness.
You have to give him (or her) points for creating a new account that memes another troll username and getting the initial comment with a topical troll message that references the username. That's troll diligence there.
I've had more than 60K recipes online for over a decade and nobody ever bothered me about it. Sadly, I can't provide a link as the site's down now two weeks while we shift hosting providers. It's a hobby and it's free so I'm not apologetic about that. I'm a fairly busy guy and I'm not going to let that get in the way of my slashdotting. We get about 250k hits a month, down from a peak of over a million.
You can't put out your protocol under anything less than an "all implementations are free" license and then pretend you're supporting interopability. It's one way or the other: it's your protocol and people have to pay you to use it, or people don't need your permission to interoperate with you. You can't have both.
So now, what would any home user need 128MB of RAM on their graphics card for, at this point? Are the games really going to become so complex in the next couple of years that they would require that much RAM on board? I can understand why, in a professional/commercial environment, one might need a really high-powered video card... for special effects in movies, or just general professional graphics/video work. But how much RAM do you *really* need in your video card?
Ah, nostalgia, what would we do without you?
I was observing for Mother Earth News. It turns out that the trees reached a consensus - climate scientists kept boring holes in them and cutting them down to see their rings, so the trees agreed to randomize their ring thickness to get the scientists to stop. Sadly, it didn't work so the trees will probably revert to their old behaviour at their next meeting in 21,046 (Trees have an exceedingly sparse conference schedule, as they are all busy and slow moving).
And NIST certified calibrated dataloggers that could record the temperature within .00013C twice each minute all during the day - generating a swamp of data. You could take all of that data and capture a close approximation (within .001C) of the actual mean temperature for each location during a day.
Or you could skip that because it's hard. You could throw out everything except the high and low, average those, and call that the average temperature for that point during the day, and pretend that it's accurate within the limits of your instrument.
Which of those methods do you suppose these "scientists" used?
I'm having a disconnect between what I said and your rebuttal. Could you spell it out for me?
Trolls thrive on attention. Don't feed them and they go away. Validate them with responses and they will swarm you as if they were ducks and you were unwrapping loaves of bread.
This is pretty basic online stuff. You have been sheltered, haven't you?
You're an AC, but your use of "we" is interesting in the grammar analysis realm. You are clearly posting from a subjective point of view and your post is worthy of note.
I think your opinion is interesting, though I don't share it.
Thanks for joining the discussion friend. Now go back and review what he and I have shared on the subject to get some context on what I said. You may have to subscribe to slashdot to get the good bits.
Windows still has autorun even in W7. They've limited it, but it's still there.
I don't know what to say. You're obviously so subscribed to the myth of global warming that you can't admit that it's wrong to adjust NIST calibrated measurements. I have nothing more to add except that this is not science.
If you believe in proxy data then you believe that we should adjust today's NIST calibrated instruments by +.5c to match them, which is what the models are doing. I have a problem with that.
In 1960 tree ring proxies stopped matching observations, contemporary with the invention of datalogging. It's not reasonable to adjust NIST calibrated measurements to agree with tree rings on this basis. Trees did not have a meeting and agree to change their modus operandi.
And that's without considering that the tree ring data includes strip bark trees like Bristlecone Pines, which have an accuracy of 4-6 sigmas based on angle of attack on the borer. You're better off rolling dice, even before the "scientists" sampled 10x the trees they reported, and only reported the trees that matched the expected curve.
Ice gas proxies have similar problems. Their reports are interesing but anecdotal - they should not be presented in the same graph as measured data.
Regardless, the raw data says that the climate is cooling, and the scientists and their "corrections" claim that the climate is warming. If their corrections carry such weight over raw observations, should we not be entitled to some explanations? Why should we not believe this wacky guy?
Apologies. You're a reasoned voice in the storm, offering useful guidance. I shouldn't bother you.
I did find an interesting link and this is a good place to bookmark it.
Yes, ordinary people should examine the evidence for themselves and come to their own conclusions. I agree.
I made you a link to An interesting graph.
Do you understand why we have questions now?
Using a strong software market position to prevent hardware innovation in products like Larrabee and Snapdragon is prevention of progress for profit. I hope that is not a business you're engaged in. That behavior would be evil, among other ways to describe it, and the truth will out eventually.
I think that you know that I disagree. Linux does not have any form of autorun. Most distributions lack open ports. That's a lot of attack surface missing right there relative to Windows on a per system basis. After all, if your computer isn't listening over the network, it can't be compromised over the network by a remote initiator; if it isn't running a file on the root of a mounted share, CD or pendrive then it can't be automatically compromised by software placed in those locations (or mailed or dropped in the parking lot or in the Men's room at the clubs where your high-value targets hang out) without further user interaction. Then there are the thousands of object formats like images, spreadsheets and wordart that Microsoft seems to think should be embedded in every application. That's how you wind up with a buffer overflow in font rendering that gets system privileges. Even without these things the embedding of Turing Complete scripting languages in every application with hidden execution renders the Windows platform's security horrendous.
Both can be rendered more secure of course. Here, for example, are some NSA recommendations for Windows. With good system administration by a skilled staff it's possible to build an image and policies for either that can carry most users through a year without being compromised despite heavy online research and heavy communications on the part of the end user. I think we can both agree that this is not what's actually happening in the field.
I argue that if Linux became as popular as windows that it would face security problems at a similar scale.
This argument is beaten to death. Linux runs the Internet. There is no higher value target than the server that stores the files and databases for thousands of users or processes their credit cards and here market share is more evenly matched. And yet... where is the Linux equivalent of the SQL_slammer worm that compromised 90% of all the vulnerable servers in the world in under an hour? Nowhere. The "When Linux is popular it will have problems too" story is just getting silly. There are more than enough Linux users both for commercial software vendors and malware vendors and they're both avoiding it like the plague. Kudos to your marketing team for making the former happen. I have to think the latter made that decision on their own, but perhaps the marketing does help, so thanks for that.
Did you know that the Windows Malware ecosystem is in dollars actually far larger than the Windows market? I thought it odd too, but if you count time and money lost, development and marketing and sales on both sides (attack and defense), hardware and services, it's not even close. Maybe you're on the wrong side of the business.
I'm going to summarize with a truism you should engrave on your desk: "Anything a program can do, another program can do."
If the signal was present we would see it in the raw data. It's not in the raw data. It's not normalization to put into the model the information you're looking for and then call out "Eureka!" I found it! There's another word for that.
When your credibility is shot, it's best to stop talking.
Yeah, like NASA. Those guys put up data from thermometers that clearly shows the hockey stick.
Oh, wait. No, it doesn't. That's odd. Maybe you can find the hockey stick in this data. I can't. What I find in the data is that scientists like to live in cities that get warmer as they get larger.
We're going into TMI territory. I've worked in Intel labs. The people there are first rate. There's no way to describe how much more fun it is to deal with folks who can think.
The executive suite there could use a broom. That's all I can say about that.
We'll have our progress with or without Intel. If Intel gets behind enabling individuals to do more without worrying about how much that "cannibalizes" their historical markets, they will have learned what I tried to teach them. I did try.