Well, part of the reason why I run Linux is that since peer review is possible, there is a greater chance that someone will catch an error and provide a repair method. Proprietary systems don't have this extra level, so a problem in the Microsoft world requires Microsoft people to acknowledge and repair the error. I don't rule out them doing this, but I don't expect it to happen with the speed that it seems to happen in the OSS world when an error in programming is discovered.
One of these days I'll email some of the people responsible for fixing bugs in the Linux Kernel and other major daemons that run on Linux systems to find out how long the bug fix process generally takes. I'm sure that they have to go through and figure out what exactly the code does, what it's supposed to do, what *else* it does, and if there's any quick way to deal with the issue. I am genuinely interested in the process, as I'd like to compare it to how long it takes proprietary vendors (of any OS, not just Windows) to get a security fix ready.
As much as I think his presentation method is tacky, I can agree with some of what he says.
C and C++ allow for buffer overflows. They allow for improper or intentional coding to cause software to try to violate memory space of other functions or programs. They allow for memory allocation without necessarily providing any cleanup later. In the hands of bad, sloppy, lazy, or malicious programmers these traits have always proven to be a problem time and again on many different platforms. This doesn't mean that these languages are the wrong tool; I'd argue that part of Linux's success is because the kernel and most of the GNU-implemented services are written in these languages, which are flexible. Too much flexibility for the wrong purpose leads to problems though, just as too much rigidity leads to problems when things need to be flexible.
Assuming you meant Challenger instead of Columbia in that last sentence, I wonder how many things are questioned by Engineers and brought to the attention of Management. If there are lots and lots of things brought to Management that don't ultimately have any bad effect, then Management would be accustomed to writing things off unless they are really, really badly noticeable. If there are too many then they simply can't investigate every single one.
Two things have to happen, and unfortunately the bulk of this falls on the Engineering side. These both assume the above stated condition. Unfortunately the bulk of the burden falls on the Engineering side. Engineers need to better learn how to present what they find in meaningful terms, and Engineers need to learn how to weed out the real problems from the bulk of "what ifs" that they encounter. Yes, this would put more responsiblility on the Engineers if there is a missed problem, but Engineering's presentation of information on both the Challenger and the Columbia didn't get action partially due to how the problems were presented. Managers need to learn how to interpret too, though.
Maybe it is time for Earth to near-space transport (Earth to Moon and everywhere in between) to go to private companies and for NASA to redirect focus to places out of a week's travel through space. The technology to get out of orbit is widely understood, and a little bit of real competition could lead to more efficient, less expensive ways of moving people around. NASA could then spend its money on what it has been fairly successful with; physically probing other parts of the solar system, and exploring extra-solar phenomena with telescopes and observation.
"But wouldn't the foam be going somewhat near the same speed as the shuttle although it would be decelerating due to gravity or is 700 mph an estimate at the delta of the speed of the shuttle between the foam coming off the tank and hitting the wing during the shuttles acceleration curve?"
Congratulations, you won't be a NASA engineer in the post-Columbia era.
More seriously, someone with the ultimate job duty of "decision maker" came to that same conclusion. Yes, the foam wasn't probably moving slower than 70% of the shuttle's speed, if even that slow, but the piece of foam was large enough and the front of the wing was weak enough that it still did damage. Anything striking the shuttle before it has re-entered successfully could result in the kind of disaster that befelled the Columbia, so the shuttle occupants aren't really close to safe until they're cruising like a plane back to the airstrip.
"...but they appear to be exclusive of each other"
"nope. same principal -- just in vitro, rather than in vivo......and crossing the species boundaries, which is what's getting people a bit riled."
Well, chimeras, where people have two sets of DNA structures are naturally occurring, as the process involved fertilization of cells that were originally sexual cells. Since there are no animals that can breed with humans genetically, there can not be any natually-occurring mixed-species chimeras unless somehow an animal stem cell or something somehow got mixed in with a human embryo and survived, and even then the being would have two independent sets of cells, not some hybrid cell that has multiple DNA parts.
That could be a real big problem, and might lead to a spontaneous miscarriage, especially if blood types are incompatible.
There are a few known examples of XY/XX Chimeras if memory serves, though I don't really remember how physical characteristics developed.
Scarier yet, there are conjoined twins that share what looks to be a single torso and legs, looking like one body with two heads. Apparently the girls have seperate ribcages and upper organs, but their backbones merge into a single pelvis, and their digestive systems combine somewhere in there. They each control one arm and one leg on each one's side of their body. Since the girls have always been this way they've gotten good at coordinating to allow them to function to the point of playing slowpitch softball with family. I don't doubt that life will always be difficult for them to keep individual, considering their extreme fusing, but they are mentally seperate.
I remember reading about another medical circumstance that also used the term Chimera. Apparently it's possible for two fraternal embryos in a pregnant woman to combine and become one organism, with two sets of genetics. Some beings composed this way stand out due to differing genetics manifesting different skin on the body; some don't stand out because certain organs or systems have a different genetic makeup than other systems, all internally. It's interesting, as these people have two DNA structures. When I first read Chimera in the context of the headline I wondered what this new thing had to do with the old use, but they appear to be exclusive of each other.
"Tell that to someone that has lost a loved one 'cause of a drunk driver... Why airport authorities should worry stopping drunk pilots? Why two nurses had to stop a drunk doctor on his way to the OP room? Also, thank you very much to drunk drivers, we ALL need to pay expensive uninsured motorists premiums."
What we need is for the punishment to fit the crime. Regardless of WHY the motorist was intentionally self-impaired the motorist is at fault for intentional negligence in the cause of the death. Yes, this time it was drugs. How about all of the people who drive when they're excessively tired? How about all of the people who don't maintain their cars to the point that mechanical malfunctions cause control problems? How about all of the people who don't signal lane changes, cut people off, run red lights, etc?
Alcohol and drugs are just two causes for the same result, all of which are preventable, and all of which very well could be prosecuted based on results. No one intends to hit someone and kill them in a car, but the results primarily, and to a small extent the level of negligence, should determine the punitive actions taken.
The problem is that people will increasingly tailor laws to restrict behaviour that has no bearing on them whatsoever because it offends their beliefs somehow. Basically antisodomy, antifornication, antidrinking, antidrug, and antipornography laws all fit the bill for many of these people. It doesn't matter that they don't engage in any of these activities, they don't want anyone else to engage in them either, even when these activities don't have any victims by definition. By converse, I don't do what these people do (congregate and evangelize about their invisible best friend who sees all, knows all, and needs money) but I don't work toward prohibiting them from doing so, and I don't tell them that they have to be like me. I simply want them to let me do what I want to do so long as I don't victimize anyone in doing it. That's the very important difference.
"I don't see the necessary links between these steps. This seems to be a bit of a 'slippery slope' argument that may not stand up to further examination. I don't mean to rule it out, but can you elaborate on your argument? I don't see it, but that doesn't mean it isn't there."
I see it. If people continue to block advertising in whatever form it comes in, the ultimate solution to the provider is to charge for the information being published. Ads usually pay for things. The grandparent's argument requires two things to actively happen and one thing to not happen; people have to continue to block out advertising in increasing numbers on the web, and people have to continue to filter their email for useful email, throwing away the rest. What needs to not happen is for new methods of advertising to come about negating the filtering methods on the two current interfaces. Once these conditions are met, the content provider effectively has no income as those who would purchase ads won't purchase them if the ads are not seen. Content provider is left charging for content directly.
Off topic I know, but a friend of mine reminded me of this recently...
It's pronounced "nome". Not "guh-nome". Likewise, GNU is pronounced "new" or "Gee Inn Ewe", not "guh-new". We don't pronounce GIMP as "guh-imp", Gnumeric as "guh-numeric", or grip as "guh-rip".
Yes, there are some things that are not phoenetic, like gxine, which would be sensically pronounced as "gee-zine", or gcalc which could be pronounced as "gee-calc", though it would be better served to just say "Gnome Calculator" instead.
Pronouncing "guh-nome" in front of people that you're trying to convince to try Linux makes you look dorky, and it hurts your argument in trying to convince them.
It was launched as the first line of the autoexec.bat file, before any of the Windows stuff actually loaded. If the buffer isn't cleared (which I think was changed by Windows 98 SE if not for 98 original) then it would work. Microsoft would let you delete the stuff you were actively running from MS-DOS. This is a throwback to that.
Back in the Windows 95 days when I was fifteen, Best Buy's computer sales department pissed me off so badly at a particular store that I added the format statement to the autoexec.bat files on their demo computers as I browsed around. They installed security software in that particular store after that.
At some point Microsoft modified format.exe (or was it format.com?) to make it clear the buffer before prompting for yes/no.
Okay, how about using one of those long distance water balloon launchers? One could fairly easily pack a bunch of nasty stuff together with an impact-tripped igniter and send stuff over a couple of blocks to the target. Or, if that's not good, an amateur rocket with no ejection charge, instead letting it drop and impact on the target, or a large ballista or trebuchet or something...
Basically if someone wants to do something nasty they will. This used to be the playground of smart but angsty kids, who thought it was cool to blow stuff up, but now the prospect of being brought up on terrorism charges has gone so far as to stifle hobbyist model rocketry. It's a shame.
Yes, yes I know. Living in the city makes it really bloody hard to not know at least a few things about it, like that the dude who influenced naming of Phoenix, Kyrene, and Tempe was a rich British weirdo who actually tried to put his classical education to use by mis-naming or oddly naming lots of things here...
It's MIT. Of course they spent a mint on their server. What they should do is spend a mint on the Systems Administrator; maybe people would be more inclined to be around him if the halitosis is cured...
"Nah! Phoenix is in Arizona. Sure, Sedona is famous for its red rocks, but it's not Mars!"
There's something ironic about naming a probe sent to one of the coldest visitable places in the solar system after one of the hottest inhabited places...
"My bank uses plain HTML forms and javascript, so does Bellsouth, the power company, the cable company, and other various sites I conduct business on."
Don't be so sure that they don't have ActiveX stuff for those browsers that support it. It's easy to detect a browser and send the user to the appropriate page for the right rendering engine and plugin support. Just because you don't have ActiveX doesn't mean that it'll be broken.
If you want to see how many pages use ActiveX, even if for stupid things like color cycling or logo animation, run Microsoft's browser and disable ActiveX. It'll prompt every page that it loads that would use ActiveX if it were enabled.
I'm 24 years old. I saw information on these experiments when I was ten or so. I remember some blurb about them in freshman Chemistry class, but no details ring through.
Have you ever seen modern Chemistry and/or Biology and/or Biochem textbooks? I haven't cracked a book like that since I got out of high school. I don't know what's in them now. I do know, however, that they do revise them fairly frequently, so if the school or district updates its books then they'll have whatever's modern. These might simply be an interesting sidenote to the process.
Any students who go on to high level sciences will get modern schooling on what's actually going on. If you're not going there then you don't have much to be concerned about anyway.
I see that you missed all of the qualifiers in my original post. You probably also missed the scientific definition of Theory and the mathematical relationship between distance, velocity, and time.
"Microsoft's got a different problem: how do you make the UI consistent when there's a million and a half different video cards on the market? They need to make sure that whatever they do *doesn't* run horrendously on old hardware."
Hah! Fat chance that they actually do that, based on the severe performance issues that XP has on the i815 chipset with an 866MHz P-III...
"at least the probe isn't being compared to a Ford Probe..."
"Of course not - can you imagine the cost of a recall when it's that far away??"
Well, if they'd compared it to another Ford product, the Pinto, then it'd burn up on impact with the planet and they wouldn't even have anything left to recall...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, part of the reason why I run Linux is that since peer review is possible, there is a greater chance that someone will catch an error and provide a repair method. Proprietary systems don't have this extra level, so a problem in the Microsoft world requires Microsoft people to acknowledge and repair the error. I don't rule out them doing this, but I don't expect it to happen with the speed that it seems to happen in the OSS world when an error in programming is discovered.
One of these days I'll email some of the people responsible for fixing bugs in the Linux Kernel and other major daemons that run on Linux systems to find out how long the bug fix process generally takes. I'm sure that they have to go through and figure out what exactly the code does, what it's supposed to do, what *else* it does, and if there's any quick way to deal with the issue. I am genuinely interested in the process, as I'd like to compare it to how long it takes proprietary vendors (of any OS, not just Windows) to get a security fix ready.
As much as I think his presentation method is tacky, I can agree with some of what he says.
C and C++ allow for buffer overflows. They allow for improper or intentional coding to cause software to try to violate memory space of other functions or programs. They allow for memory allocation without necessarily providing any cleanup later. In the hands of bad, sloppy, lazy, or malicious programmers these traits have always proven to be a problem time and again on many different platforms. This doesn't mean that these languages are the wrong tool; I'd argue that part of Linux's success is because the kernel and most of the GNU-implemented services are written in these languages, which are flexible. Too much flexibility for the wrong purpose leads to problems though, just as too much rigidity leads to problems when things need to be flexible.
Assuming you meant Challenger instead of Columbia in that last sentence, I wonder how many things are questioned by Engineers and brought to the attention of Management. If there are lots and lots of things brought to Management that don't ultimately have any bad effect, then Management would be accustomed to writing things off unless they are really, really badly noticeable. If there are too many then they simply can't investigate every single one.
Two things have to happen, and unfortunately the bulk of this falls on the Engineering side. These both assume the above stated condition. Unfortunately the bulk of the burden falls on the Engineering side. Engineers need to better learn how to present what they find in meaningful terms, and Engineers need to learn how to weed out the real problems from the bulk of "what ifs" that they encounter. Yes, this would put more responsiblility on the Engineers if there is a missed problem, but Engineering's presentation of information on both the Challenger and the Columbia didn't get action partially due to how the problems were presented. Managers need to learn how to interpret too, though.
Maybe it is time for Earth to near-space transport (Earth to Moon and everywhere in between) to go to private companies and for NASA to redirect focus to places out of a week's travel through space. The technology to get out of orbit is widely understood, and a little bit of real competition could lead to more efficient, less expensive ways of moving people around. NASA could then spend its money on what it has been fairly successful with; physically probing other parts of the solar system, and exploring extra-solar phenomena with telescopes and observation.
"But wouldn't the foam be going somewhat near the same speed as the shuttle although it would be decelerating due to gravity or is 700 mph an estimate at the delta of the speed of the shuttle between the foam coming off the tank and hitting the wing during the shuttles acceleration curve?"
Congratulations, you won't be a NASA engineer in the post-Columbia era.
More seriously, someone with the ultimate job duty of "decision maker" came to that same conclusion. Yes, the foam wasn't probably moving slower than 70% of the shuttle's speed, if even that slow, but the piece of foam was large enough and the front of the wing was weak enough that it still did damage. Anything striking the shuttle before it has re-entered successfully could result in the kind of disaster that befelled the Columbia, so the shuttle occupants aren't really close to safe until they're cruising like a plane back to the airstrip.
Well, chimeras, where people have two sets of DNA structures are naturally occurring, as the process involved fertilization of cells that were originally sexual cells. Since there are no animals that can breed with humans genetically, there can not be any natually-occurring mixed-species chimeras unless somehow an animal stem cell or something somehow got mixed in with a human embryo and survived, and even then the being would have two independent sets of cells, not some hybrid cell that has multiple DNA parts.
That could be a real big problem, and might lead to a spontaneous miscarriage, especially if blood types are incompatible.
There are a few known examples of XY/XX Chimeras if memory serves, though I don't really remember how physical characteristics developed.
Scarier yet, there are conjoined twins that share what looks to be a single torso and legs, looking like one body with two heads. Apparently the girls have seperate ribcages and upper organs, but their backbones merge into a single pelvis, and their digestive systems combine somewhere in there. They each control one arm and one leg on each one's side of their body. Since the girls have always been this way they've gotten good at coordinating to allow them to function to the point of playing slowpitch softball with family. I don't doubt that life will always be difficult for them to keep individual, considering their extreme fusing, but they are mentally seperate.
Aw, how are we going to get the kangaroo dudes from Tank Girl if we don't do this!?
I remember reading about another medical circumstance that also used the term Chimera. Apparently it's possible for two fraternal embryos in a pregnant woman to combine and become one organism, with two sets of genetics. Some beings composed this way stand out due to differing genetics manifesting different skin on the body; some don't stand out because certain organs or systems have a different genetic makeup than other systems, all internally. It's interesting, as these people have two DNA structures. When I first read Chimera in the context of the headline I wondered what this new thing had to do with the old use, but they appear to be exclusive of each other.
More here and here.
"Tell that to someone that has lost a loved one 'cause of a drunk driver... Why airport authorities should worry stopping drunk pilots? Why two nurses had to stop a drunk doctor on his way to the OP room? Also, thank you very much to drunk drivers, we ALL need to pay expensive uninsured motorists premiums."
What we need is for the punishment to fit the crime. Regardless of WHY the motorist was intentionally self-impaired the motorist is at fault for intentional negligence in the cause of the death. Yes, this time it was drugs. How about all of the people who drive when they're excessively tired? How about all of the people who don't maintain their cars to the point that mechanical malfunctions cause control problems? How about all of the people who don't signal lane changes, cut people off, run red lights, etc?
Alcohol and drugs are just two causes for the same result, all of which are preventable, and all of which very well could be prosecuted based on results. No one intends to hit someone and kill them in a car, but the results primarily, and to a small extent the level of negligence, should determine the punitive actions taken.
The problem is that people will increasingly tailor laws to restrict behaviour that has no bearing on them whatsoever because it offends their beliefs somehow. Basically antisodomy, antifornication, antidrinking, antidrug, and antipornography laws all fit the bill for many of these people. It doesn't matter that they don't engage in any of these activities, they don't want anyone else to engage in them either, even when these activities don't have any victims by definition. By converse, I don't do what these people do (congregate and evangelize about their invisible best friend who sees all, knows all, and needs money) but I don't work toward prohibiting them from doing so, and I don't tell them that they have to be like me. I simply want them to let me do what I want to do so long as I don't victimize anyone in doing it. That's the very important difference.
"I don't see the necessary links between these steps. This seems to be a bit of a 'slippery slope' argument that may not stand up to further examination. I don't mean to rule it out, but can you elaborate on your argument? I don't see it, but that doesn't mean it isn't there."
I see it. If people continue to block advertising in whatever form it comes in, the ultimate solution to the provider is to charge for the information being published. Ads usually pay for things. The grandparent's argument requires two things to actively happen and one thing to not happen; people have to continue to block out advertising in increasing numbers on the web, and people have to continue to filter their email for useful email, throwing away the rest. What needs to not happen is for new methods of advertising to come about negating the filtering methods on the two current interfaces. Once these conditions are met, the content provider effectively has no income as those who would purchase ads won't purchase them if the ads are not seen. Content provider is left charging for content directly.
Off topic I know, but a friend of mine reminded me of this recently...
It's pronounced "nome". Not "guh-nome". Likewise, GNU is pronounced "new" or "Gee Inn Ewe", not "guh-new". We don't pronounce GIMP as "guh-imp", Gnumeric as "guh-numeric", or grip as "guh-rip".
Yes, there are some things that are not phoenetic, like gxine, which would be sensically pronounced as "gee-zine", or gcalc which could be pronounced as "gee-calc", though it would be better served to just say "Gnome Calculator" instead.
Pronouncing "guh-nome" in front of people that you're trying to convince to try Linux makes you look dorky, and it hurts your argument in trying to convince them.
</rant>
It was launched as the first line of the autoexec.bat file, before any of the Windows stuff actually loaded. If the buffer isn't cleared (which I think was changed by Windows 98 SE if not for 98 original) then it would work. Microsoft would let you delete the stuff you were actively running from MS-DOS. This is a throwback to that.
There was an episode of Star Trek: Voyager where the ship got sick. That would be a definite bad side...
Back in the Windows 95 days when I was fifteen, Best Buy's computer sales department pissed me off so badly at a particular store that I added the format statement to the autoexec.bat files on their demo computers as I browsed around. They installed security software in that particular store after that.
At some point Microsoft modified format.exe (or was it format.com?) to make it clear the buffer before prompting for yes/no.
Okay, how about using one of those long distance water balloon launchers? One could fairly easily pack a bunch of nasty stuff together with an impact-tripped igniter and send stuff over a couple of blocks to the target. Or, if that's not good, an amateur rocket with no ejection charge, instead letting it drop and impact on the target, or a large ballista or trebuchet or something...
Basically if someone wants to do something nasty they will. This used to be the playground of smart but angsty kids, who thought it was cool to blow stuff up, but now the prospect of being brought up on terrorism charges has gone so far as to stifle hobbyist model rocketry. It's a shame.
Yes, yes I know. Living in the city makes it really bloody hard to not know at least a few things about it, like that the dude who influenced naming of Phoenix, Kyrene, and Tempe was a rich British weirdo who actually tried to put his classical education to use by mis-naming or oddly naming lots of things here...
It's MIT. Of course they spent a mint on their server. What they should do is spend a mint on the Systems Administrator; maybe people would be more inclined to be around him if the halitosis is cured...
"Nah! Phoenix is in Arizona. Sure, Sedona is famous for its red rocks, but it's not Mars!"
There's something ironic about naming a probe sent to one of the coldest visitable places in the solar system after one of the hottest inhabited places...
"My bank uses plain HTML forms and javascript, so does Bellsouth, the power company, the cable company, and other various sites I conduct business on."
Don't be so sure that they don't have ActiveX stuff for those browsers that support it. It's easy to detect a browser and send the user to the appropriate page for the right rendering engine and plugin support. Just because you don't have ActiveX doesn't mean that it'll be broken.
If you want to see how many pages use ActiveX, even if for stupid things like color cycling or logo animation, run Microsoft's browser and disable ActiveX. It'll prompt every page that it loads that would use ActiveX if it were enabled.
I'm 24 years old. I saw information on these experiments when I was ten or so. I remember some blurb about them in freshman Chemistry class, but no details ring through.
Have you ever seen modern Chemistry and/or Biology and/or Biochem textbooks? I haven't cracked a book like that since I got out of high school. I don't know what's in them now. I do know, however, that they do revise them fairly frequently, so if the school or district updates its books then they'll have whatever's modern. These might simply be an interesting sidenote to the process.
Any students who go on to high level sciences will get modern schooling on what's actually going on. If you're not going there then you don't have much to be concerned about anyway.
I see that you missed all of the qualifiers in my original post. You probably also missed the scientific definition of Theory and the mathematical relationship between distance, velocity, and time.
"Microsoft's got a different problem: how do you make the UI consistent when there's a million and a half different video cards on the market? They need to make sure that whatever they do *doesn't* run horrendously on old hardware."
Hah! Fat chance that they actually do that, based on the severe performance issues that XP has on the i815 chipset with an 866MHz P-III...
Well, if they'd compared it to another Ford product, the Pinto, then it'd burn up on impact with the planet and they wouldn't even have anything left to recall...