While I appreciate faster boot speeds, this seems less of an issue with Linux than with Windows, and has been achieved as you pointed out with shells like dash and through other techniques like actually paring-back hard on both the kernel and the daemons on the system to what's truly necessary versus being a general-purpose system. It may be harder to pare-back on package-based systems like those using RPM and dpkg, but that's mostly due to sometimes excessive declared dependencies that may or may not be truly necessary for specific functions.
Boot speed in the VM world may be more of a issue since cloud users might want to create or destroy instances dynamically, but if a cloud platform is singular in purpose then that's even more reason to pare-back on the daemons and kernel modules. There's simply no reason to have general-purpose tools if they're never going to be used and arguably constitute security risk.
Insurance companies also created the IIHS, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. In twenty years they've compelled the automakers to go from cars that have a high likelihood of killing their occupants in moderate-speed collisions and cars that are extremely expensive to repair in 5mph collisions to cars that will do a much better job of protecting their occupants in even fairly high-speed collisions and are generally reasonable to fix if involved in 5mph collisions. It took a combination of embarrassing automakers by showing how badly their cars handled realistic collisions to the public and using the collected data to change insurance rates, but ultimately it has worked.
Unfortunately it'll probably take court precedent to demonstrate that insurance payout is the correct remedy in order to compel the situation to change. That means initial court cases will have to be fought the hard way to show that the entity's insurance really is liable.
That's basically where I'm at with it. I was familiar with Slackware's init, I was familiar with Debian's init. Can't remember off of the top of my head but I believe one used SysV, the other used BSD. Either way, not that complicated, easily fixed by hand if necessary.
If a replacement for the various fragmented inits was limited in its scope then I would be fine with such a replacement. Trouble is, this seems to have taken the kitchen-sink approach, throwing everything in whether it's needed or not, and worse, it seems to have broken the tenet that everything is editable with a text editor and some patience.
Back in the late nineties I convinced my best friend to drop NetBSD and join us on Linux. At the time Linux seemed to be where all of the development was being done to make new hardware work where it didn't do so well in BSD. Now I'm wondering if it's time to reconsider the BSDs.
Affordable compared to what? What's the cost difference between building a massive solar plant that stores energy in the form of some kind of superheated substrate to emit that heat back to generate power, plus the maintenance of that facility, compared to the cost to build and fuel a power plant that burns fossil fuel?
No one is expecting fossil fuel plants to just be switched off, what most expect is to build new plants of new types to replace old plants as they're increasingly nonviable.
I don't know how all you zombies do it, but I configured my home equipment to only allow outbound NAT/PAT to a specific list of ports, and I've blacklisted IP ranges that there's no business connecting to, in addition to all of the normal unsolicited incoming blocking.
Most end users only need perhaps a half-dozen destination network ports to work these days. 53, 80, 443, possibly 20/21 for FTP and possibly a few others for business VPN and VOIP. If you're still using your local ISP for e-mail then 25 or 465 for SMTP, 110 or 995 for POP3, 143 or 993 for IMAP. The vast majority of users probably don't even need any of those.
If your default policy is to deny, and you carve-out exceptions to allow, then even if something gets into your home network it's going to be much less likely to communicate out to a command and control node for a botnet. It may not be a perfect solution, but a lot of consumer-grade hardware can do it. The trouble is having someone knowledgeable enough to set it up in the first place, or to create the correct out-of-the-box policies to ensure that it's a 95% solution when the customer buys it.
Hit 'em via their business liability insurance. When their insurance rates skyrocket then maybe they'll start paying attention to things like information security.
Yes, this will mean that products will cost more. Nothing is free though, either you have to pay for it, take on risk by not having it, or you have to do it yourself. Right now far too many operate with that middle choice.
I don't know about you, but to me, 174 Petawatts of untapped energy seems like it should be able to power the planet. Sure, one has to determine how one stores-up energy to use when the planet's rotation obscures the sun, but given that fossil-fuel-based power required all sorts of intermediate steps to get where we are today anyway, this does not seem like an impossible task.
There are more ways of storing potential energy than chemical batteries.
My dad was a COBOL programmer for more than 30 years, learned on an IBM System 36 in the late sixties and early seventies. He maintained that COBOL was very human-readable, especially compared to languages like C where something like
If one considers the growth of business-computing, business has always been about what the nontechnical person can understand, as the nontechnical person is usually the business manager. That's in-part why nowadays everything is either GUI-only or at least has some kind of GUI presence whether it needs it or not, and why the web browser has found its way into tons of niches that it has no business being in. Back in the sixties though, GUI was not really possible, but languages with very easy to understand and follow terminology, used through a command-line interface or menu-system, would be possible.
COBOL might well be the first piece of computing designed specifically to appeal to nontechnical managers.
If I surmise those projects correctly, there was a fairly important degree of central control and some kind of authority to make decisions, and the mesh networks were of limited scope. A mesh network of the size that the article presumes would be massively more complicated and would have to be able to react dynamically to outages.
The current Internet has a combination of a limited number of players for backbone and a fairly slow routing protocol that is fairly limited who gets to participate. A routing protocol that could handle something like this hypothetical mesh network would need to function a lot more like an interior routing protocol, but those only work because a single organization controls an autonomous system. To my knowledge there is no organization-to-organization routing protocol that can react with near instant speed to the changes in the network that will inevitably occur as nodes connect and disconnect from the mesh.
Routing was the first problem that came to my mind too. An unreliable network requires a fast routing protocol, but fast routing protocols are very traffic-intensive for large networks. A large wireless mesh network would spend an inordinate amount of it's bandwidth just keeping converged.
That's before dealing with security/trust issues. It's already proving a problem on slow routing protocols as the recent Russian incident shows where relatively few people have to be trusted, it would be much worse with every small player possibly being able to make adverse changes.
Are you proposing that various entities pay small amounts for their little connections to larger entities with larger connections, which in-turn pay to connect to even larger entities to interconnect them all?
Isn't that what we have now? Last time I looked at traceroute results, I connected via inexpensive residential link to inexpensive residential ISP, who connected to regional ISP, who connected to backbone provider, who connected to another regional ISP, who connected to a business ISP, who connected to hosting/colocation/cloud service.
I don't see it there. Of course I'm running an anti-javascript plugin so as Slashdot's bloat of crosslinked Javascript grows I don't see the pieces that get shuffled-off to other sites.
Competitor A pushes competitor B out of the market to corner the market and drive up profits, right? In other words, it's about greed, right?
I'm reminded of a line from The Simpsons from Mr. Burns. It went something to the effect of, "I love my money, but I'd give it all up... for just a little bit more."
I don't disagree with you. Unfortunately poor education begets poor decisions which begets poor education, the circle of derp if you will.
Come in as an outsider to attempt to help and you're disrespected for being that outsider, even if you have reasonable intentions. Be an insider that managed to get that education despite the difficulties and you're branded as an elitist, even if your goal is to attempt to bring everyone up to your level.
The best argument against local control (ie, Federalism) is seeing what people do with it. The best argument against having only a central-controlled government is currently residing at 1600 W. Pennsylvania Avenue, when he deigns to stoop so low as to stay there.
It's very simple. Not all reproductive faults are genetic in origin. Some are due to injury, some are due to medications that the person's own mother took prior-to or during pregnancy. Some are due to environmental factors.
Additionally not all genetic faults are passed-on either. There are already ways to test in-utero for faults. Among them is a test called Progenity that allows one to screen for Trisomy and a whole slew of other conditions, where the only sampling needed is a blood-draw from the mother. If various genetic faults can be filtered-for chemically (ie, find a way to prevent sperm or egg with the genetic fault from fertilizing and becoming an embryo) then that would allow for reproduction without those faults from being passed down, where the offspring is still the child of the people that seek to be parents.
Unfortunately it's expensive to help the population of a whole region when one the biggest economic drivers of that region collapses.
It does not take a lot of education to mine coal, nearly all education is hands-on on-the-job and is physical. A region whose primary employment is like this can let its education system slide while still keeping a degree of productivity, but if that industry leaves then what remains is generations of people without the education to readily persue other forms of work. One has to educate all generations in some fashion or another; school-age children need stronger curriculum. Adults need practical job skills, and need to learn or at least accept the value of the education their children would benefit from, and to be willing to pay for it.
Except where the surrogate does not want to give-up the child they've carried. Or when the surrogate has a poor diet that affects the child. Or where the surrogate has injury, or illness, etc.
Laws governing surrogacy are not consistent from state to state either, so it's certainly possible that a surrogate might move from a state where the law favors the genetic contributors, to where the surrogate is favored, so even strongly worded contracts might not help.
Looks like we found the source for the next celebrity nude picture scandal. Only this time, instead of the pictures being intentionally taken by the celebrity or their lover, the photos are taken by someone that hacked the weak security surrounding the control system for the device and took the pictures themselves.
Security cameras are already ironically highly insecure, and those theoretically are from companies that should specialize in security, where the data should remain only on tightly controlled networks. This thing doesn't stand a chance.
Slashdot Mirror
While I appreciate faster boot speeds, this seems less of an issue with Linux than with Windows, and has been achieved as you pointed out with shells like dash and through other techniques like actually paring-back hard on both the kernel and the daemons on the system to what's truly necessary versus being a general-purpose system. It may be harder to pare-back on package-based systems like those using RPM and dpkg, but that's mostly due to sometimes excessive declared dependencies that may or may not be truly necessary for specific functions.
Boot speed in the VM world may be more of a issue since cloud users might want to create or destroy instances dynamically, but if a cloud platform is singular in purpose then that's even more reason to pare-back on the daemons and kernel modules. There's simply no reason to have general-purpose tools if they're never going to be used and arguably constitute security risk.
That statement was pulled from an old joke fake press release:
CREATORS ADMIT Unix, C HOAX
Insurance companies also created the IIHS, Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. In twenty years they've compelled the automakers to go from cars that have a high likelihood of killing their occupants in moderate-speed collisions and cars that are extremely expensive to repair in 5mph collisions to cars that will do a much better job of protecting their occupants in even fairly high-speed collisions and are generally reasonable to fix if involved in 5mph collisions. It took a combination of embarrassing automakers by showing how badly their cars handled realistic collisions to the public and using the collected data to change insurance rates, but ultimately it has worked.
Unfortunately it'll probably take court precedent to demonstrate that insurance payout is the correct remedy in order to compel the situation to change. That means initial court cases will have to be fought the hard way to show that the entity's insurance really is liable.
That's basically where I'm at with it. I was familiar with Slackware's init, I was familiar with Debian's init. Can't remember off of the top of my head but I believe one used SysV, the other used BSD. Either way, not that complicated, easily fixed by hand if necessary.
If a replacement for the various fragmented inits was limited in its scope then I would be fine with such a replacement. Trouble is, this seems to have taken the kitchen-sink approach, throwing everything in whether it's needed or not, and worse, it seems to have broken the tenet that everything is editable with a text editor and some patience.
Back in the late nineties I convinced my best friend to drop NetBSD and join us on Linux. At the time Linux seemed to be where all of the development was being done to make new hardware work where it didn't do so well in BSD. Now I'm wondering if it's time to reconsider the BSDs.
You're saying that we shouldn't be disappointed that something that worked fine was replaced with something that is broken?
Why don't you go back to Windows? Seems that OS is more in-tune with your attitude.
They did. It's called the Devuan fork. I've been using it on some multimedia PCs at home and so far so good.
From that vendor's point of view, that is security. Financial security.
Affordable compared to what? What's the cost difference between building a massive solar plant that stores energy in the form of some kind of superheated substrate to emit that heat back to generate power, plus the maintenance of that facility, compared to the cost to build and fuel a power plant that burns fossil fuel?
No one is expecting fossil fuel plants to just be switched off, what most expect is to build new plants of new types to replace old plants as they're increasingly nonviable.
I don't know how all you zombies do it, but I configured my home equipment to only allow outbound NAT/PAT to a specific list of ports, and I've blacklisted IP ranges that there's no business connecting to, in addition to all of the normal unsolicited incoming blocking.
Most end users only need perhaps a half-dozen destination network ports to work these days. 53, 80, 443, possibly 20/21 for FTP and possibly a few others for business VPN and VOIP. If you're still using your local ISP for e-mail then 25 or 465 for SMTP, 110 or 995 for POP3, 143 or 993 for IMAP. The vast majority of users probably don't even need any of those.
If your default policy is to deny, and you carve-out exceptions to allow, then even if something gets into your home network it's going to be much less likely to communicate out to a command and control node for a botnet. It may not be a perfect solution, but a lot of consumer-grade hardware can do it. The trouble is having someone knowledgeable enough to set it up in the first place, or to create the correct out-of-the-box policies to ensure that it's a 95% solution when the customer buys it.
Hit 'em via their business liability insurance. When their insurance rates skyrocket then maybe they'll start paying attention to things like information security.
Yes, this will mean that products will cost more. Nothing is free though, either you have to pay for it, take on risk by not having it, or you have to do it yourself. Right now far too many operate with that middle choice.
I don't know about you, but to me, 174 Petawatts of untapped energy seems like it should be able to power the planet. Sure, one has to determine how one stores-up energy to use when the planet's rotation obscures the sun, but given that fossil-fuel-based power required all sorts of intermediate steps to get where we are today anyway, this does not seem like an impossible task.
There are more ways of storing potential energy than chemical batteries.
My dad was a COBOL programmer for more than 30 years, learned on an IBM System 36 in the late sixties and early seventies. He maintained that COBOL was very human-readable, especially compared to languages like C where something like
for(;P("\n"),R--;P("|"))for(e=C;e--;P("_"+(*u++/8)%2))P("| "+(*u/4)%2);
will clean-compile.
If one considers the growth of business-computing, business has always been about what the nontechnical person can understand, as the nontechnical person is usually the business manager. That's in-part why nowadays everything is either GUI-only or at least has some kind of GUI presence whether it needs it or not, and why the web browser has found its way into tons of niches that it has no business being in. Back in the sixties though, GUI was not really possible, but languages with very easy to understand and follow terminology, used through a command-line interface or menu-system, would be possible.
COBOL might well be the first piece of computing designed specifically to appeal to nontechnical managers.
If I surmise those projects correctly, there was a fairly important degree of central control and some kind of authority to make decisions, and the mesh networks were of limited scope. A mesh network of the size that the article presumes would be massively more complicated and would have to be able to react dynamically to outages.
The current Internet has a combination of a limited number of players for backbone and a fairly slow routing protocol that is fairly limited who gets to participate. A routing protocol that could handle something like this hypothetical mesh network would need to function a lot more like an interior routing protocol, but those only work because a single organization controls an autonomous system. To my knowledge there is no organization-to-organization routing protocol that can react with near instant speed to the changes in the network that will inevitably occur as nodes connect and disconnect from the mesh.
Routing was the first problem that came to my mind too. An unreliable network requires a fast routing protocol, but fast routing protocols are very traffic-intensive for large networks. A large wireless mesh network would spend an inordinate amount of it's bandwidth just keeping converged.
That's before dealing with security/trust issues. It's already proving a problem on slow routing protocols as the recent Russian incident shows where relatively few people have to be trusted, it would be much worse with every small player possibly being able to make adverse changes.
Just so we understand each other...
Are you proposing that various entities pay small amounts for their little connections to larger entities with larger connections, which in-turn pay to connect to even larger entities to interconnect them all?
Isn't that what we have now? Last time I looked at traceroute results, I connected via inexpensive residential link to inexpensive residential ISP, who connected to regional ISP, who connected to backbone provider, who connected to another regional ISP, who connected to a business ISP, who connected to hosting/colocation/cloud service.
I don't see it there. Of course I'm running an anti-javascript plugin so as Slashdot's bloat of crosslinked Javascript grows I don't see the pieces that get shuffled-off to other sites.
You'll note that Slashdot dropped the, "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters," moniker a long time ago.
Competitor A pushes competitor B out of the market to corner the market and drive up profits, right? In other words, it's about greed, right?
I'm reminded of a line from The Simpsons from Mr. Burns. It went something to the effect of, "I love my money, but I'd give it all up... for just a little bit more."
I don't disagree with you. Unfortunately poor education begets poor decisions which begets poor education, the circle of derp if you will.
Come in as an outsider to attempt to help and you're disrespected for being that outsider, even if you have reasonable intentions. Be an insider that managed to get that education despite the difficulties and you're branded as an elitist, even if your goal is to attempt to bring everyone up to your level.
The best argument against local control (ie, Federalism) is seeing what people do with it. The best argument against having only a central-controlled government is currently residing at 1600 W. Pennsylvania Avenue, when he deigns to stoop so low as to stay there.
It's very simple. Not all reproductive faults are genetic in origin. Some are due to injury, some are due to medications that the person's own mother took prior-to or during pregnancy. Some are due to environmental factors.
Additionally not all genetic faults are passed-on either. There are already ways to test in-utero for faults. Among them is a test called Progenity that allows one to screen for Trisomy and a whole slew of other conditions, where the only sampling needed is a blood-draw from the mother. If various genetic faults can be filtered-for chemically (ie, find a way to prevent sperm or egg with the genetic fault from fertilizing and becoming an embryo) then that would allow for reproduction without those faults from being passed down, where the offspring is still the child of the people that seek to be parents.
Unfortunately it's expensive to help the population of a whole region when one the biggest economic drivers of that region collapses.
It does not take a lot of education to mine coal, nearly all education is hands-on on-the-job and is physical. A region whose primary employment is like this can let its education system slide while still keeping a degree of productivity, but if that industry leaves then what remains is generations of people without the education to readily persue other forms of work. One has to educate all generations in some fashion or another; school-age children need stronger curriculum. Adults need practical job skills, and need to learn or at least accept the value of the education their children would benefit from, and to be willing to pay for it.
Remember, the only difference between incubation and sous vide is final temperature...
Except where the surrogate does not want to give-up the child they've carried. Or when the surrogate has a poor diet that affects the child. Or where the surrogate has injury, or illness, etc.
Laws governing surrogacy are not consistent from state to state either, so it's certainly possible that a surrogate might move from a state where the law favors the genetic contributors, to where the surrogate is favored, so even strongly worded contracts might not help.
Looks like we found the source for the next celebrity nude picture scandal. Only this time, instead of the pictures being intentionally taken by the celebrity or their lover, the photos are taken by someone that hacked the weak security surrounding the control system for the device and took the pictures themselves.
Security cameras are already ironically highly insecure, and those theoretically are from companies that should specialize in security, where the data should remain only on tightly controlled networks. This thing doesn't stand a chance.