they train users to default accept dialog boxes that come up, because they're just in the way and don't actually mean anything
It's context really. if I've just installed Norton firewall, I'd expect it to ask me about each and every network application that I run, and I'd expect to tell it "always allow network" for all of them.
If I've just installed a new version of firefox, I'd expect to have to do the "always allow" once.
If the dialog comes up out of the blue, it's unpexpected and worthy of attention. Maybe I just haven't run that app since putting in the firewall, maybe it's something more serious.
#2) Enumerating Badness You can't enumerate all legit software, it can't be done.
No. But you can do what my firewall does when deciding if a program can use the network, and ask the first time that an unknown program it, ie ask the user "Unknown program xyzee.exe is attempting to run. Do you want to Allow this time/Block this time/Allow always/Block always".
The only time that this is a pain is if you are a software developer (like me) and have a new.exe to run every 10 minutes.
No rights were ever given to us by the grace of God No rights were ever given by some United Nations clause No rights were ever given by some nice guy at the top Our rights they were bought by all the blood And all the tears of all our Grandmothers, grandfathers before
- New Model Army
Everyone lives, thrives, and reproduces regardless of their genetic adaptations (or quality).
Not true at all in the third world, and not completely true in the first world either. Eventually we'll breed for teenagers who look before crossing the road.
Will any noticeable branching happen?
The last century or three has seen the reversal of branching. Population groups that were seperate are now mixing, those that haven't been exterminated or marginalised by people of European descent.
A webbrowser really just needs to be usable and low on memory
Web browsers are one of the pinacles of modern complex software. Think about it. A web browser is a document viewer, a network-aware program, an application platform with built-in scripting language runtime(s), a parser and renderer for dozens of varieties of HTML, XML, CSS and SVG, a secure e-commerce tool, a pluggin host, a media center and a personal communications tool.
Now you want it to be small too? Efficient use of memory with no leaks: a good goal; actual low use of memory: not likely.
I'd have thought that zero gravity refers to any place where there is little or no net gravitational force. Low earth orbit, high earth orbit, medium Mars orbit, surface of a small comet in solar orbit... take your pick.
Correct, but the point remains: the comet was described as having the consitency of a snowdift.
On the surface of earth, the bottom of a snowdrift compacts under the weight of snow on top of it. On a comet (i.e. a small body in a large orbital path around the sun) the same effect does not apply, and the snowdrift could be as loose as the top inch all the way through.
I would suggest that it's a perfectly accurate idea of what private companies are supposed to do. They are supposed to make money.
Incorrect. They are supposed to do what the people who own them, run them and comprise them want them to do. If profit uber alles is all your society can think of to do with them, then that is a problem with your society. Broken levees are just a symptom.
If you write "I am trying to implement MPI I/O for our CFD" I would expect you to explain or otherwise link those terms. Explication is required for a general audience, even an intelligent one.
According to the register's quotes, the memory is "read by a laser beam. This memory does not have any moving mechanical parts." So if there are no moving parts, the laser beam won't be able to move, right? So how then can it read more than one bit, total? This is an amazing breakthrough accomplished in secret. Take that, mainstream scientific research!
If you want things to be atomic then turn on transactions or simply design your program better.
Uh, that porblem has already been solved. By relational database management systems. It's a far from trivial problem, so why reinvent the wheel badly? No Amount of "better design" will keep the data consistent in the event of an unexpected power failure, not without boatloads of code for journals and transactions and the like. A good DBMS will, because it has already done that code.
I handle all kinds of db stuff with millions of records and all kinds of interesting interactions and funny enough I never get corrupt data.
"It hasn't happend to me, therefor it is impossible"? But it is possible, and in some systems that's just not acceptable.
You probably code in some lame language like Visual Basic too.
If evolution is "only a theory", then so is Intelligent Design, and the two theories make distinct predictions: ID predicts the absence of "stupid design", while evolution predicts equal amounts of clever and stupid designs, as long as they increase the reproductive success of the organisms they appear in.
Of course, stupid designs in nature far outnumber the miraculously intelligent ones, starting with the human appendix and tailbone, ranging across non-functional foot bones in whales, to joke animals like the dodo and the platypus, to molecular features like "junk DNA" and vitamin-C processing genes that are broken *in the very same way* in humans, apes and monkeys.
Evolution by nature is very good at finding unexpected answers - if it works, no matter why, no matter if a designer would have never thought of doing it that way, it will be selected for. But it has virtually no long-term planning. The ostrich for instance is as birds go a good antelope. But a designer with foresight wanting to go to antelope, probably wouldn't start from bird.
Intelligent design is the opposite; it would have foresight, would use certain characteristic design patterns (unless you believe in Omniscient Design). This is however not what we see.
Most C# applications use unmanaged code, they are potentially vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks and the like.
Can you justify that claim? How about a source for that unsupported almost-statistic? I've seen a fair amount of C#, and little to no unsafe code used.
C# has been criticised repeatdely in the security community for this feature. Java always runs in safe or managed mode and is therefore more secure than C#.
The fact of the matter is that any language needs to be able to interface with libraries in other languages, and the rest of the world in general. The other fact is that those interfaces are predominantly in c-language style, i.e. use pointers left right and center. Java communicates with such libraries via the Java Native Interface (JNI). C# does it in unsafe code blocks. Both are ways of accomplishing this necessary task. Both are as big "security holes". Which is easier to use?
Given that most C# applications use unmanaged code, they are potentially vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks and the like.
So if there's one line of unmanaged code in a C# app, then the rest of it is also suddenly vulnerable to buffer overruns? It doesn't work like that. You might as well argue that any Java program that makes a JNI call can be buffer-overrunned at will.
Since a security policy cannot be enforced on unmanaged code
Correct, the code with pointers in it cannot be verified. However the verifier can detect an unsafe code block, and refuse to run programs containing such block if there is insufficient rights. Unsafe code should not be and is not given the same security privileges as safe code, thus it is not the gaping hole that you claim.
Wouldn't it be safer to switch from blacklists to whitelists?
It wouldn't be better. I have a new build of my app every hour or so. I have to click to let the firewall let it through for each new build as it is, and after a week or so the firewall's rules are cluttered with dozens of obsolete builds.
Aircraft speed is increasingly becoming less relevant to total travel time.
Have you ever travelled in Europe? Air time of about 40 minutes between London (UK) and Cologne (Germany). The total travel time is much longer - it takes about 40 minutes again for the last leg of the journey (express train from Liverpool Street station -> Stansted airport)
"nature" was in scare-quotes because there is no good way to define it. Either you make it a meaningless word by declaring that everything is natural, or you attempt to draw a sharp line between the blurry catagories of the built and designed by numans world and the just-is-that-way evolved world (never mind that the former is part of/built upon of the latter).
The point of the post was that debates over if this plan is natural ot not are useless. Pragmatic debates over if this plan is worthwhile are what is needed. We're in charge of this planet whether we like it or not - what happen on Earth's biosphere is mostly up to the naked apes.
If these animals died out 13,000 years ago, doesn't the secular world view this as a mistake on the part of natural selection? Are we really going to second-guess that?
Yes. We overide "nature" constantly, when it suits our interests.
men aren't natural... The world has to exist as if men were never here, because men are evil and vile.
Natural or not - who knows and who cares. This is a pragmatic idea aimed at preventing extinctions and making richer ecosystems. The last paragraph the article makes that clear.
Microsoft have already tried to push their own vector markup language called VML (surprise). I think it was proposed as a standard at one point, but it tanked. So I expect that even MS would be enthusiastic about SVG - it's already gotten enough momentum that it would be quite hard and rather pointless trying to go against it.
You're kidding, right? MS is prepared to do technically hard thing in order to keep thier market. They are also capable of swimming against the tide, or rather, making thier own damn tide or "momentum" by building it into the the next release of windows.
"Avalon is based on the XML-based markup language XAML, representing user interface for Windows applications."
um, no. option 1 (or something close to it) is what happens to 90%+ of the stuff on Sourceforge. But this at least is better than the fate of 99% of comercial closed code, which eventually reaches the end of its use, is forgotten by the long-departed coders, and just dries up and blows away.
Slashdot Mirror
they train users to default accept dialog boxes that come up, because they're just in the way and don't actually mean anything
It's context really. if I've just installed Norton firewall, I'd expect it to ask me about each and every network application that I run, and I'd expect to tell it "always allow network" for all of them.
If I've just installed a new version of firefox, I'd expect to have to do the "always allow" once.
If the dialog comes up out of the blue, it's unpexpected and worthy of attention. Maybe I just haven't run that app since putting in the firewall, maybe it's something more serious.
#2) Enumerating Badness You can't enumerate all legit software, it can't be done.
.exe to run every 10 minutes.
No. But you can do what my firewall does when deciding if a program can use the network, and ask the first time that an unknown program it, ie ask the user "Unknown program xyzee.exe is attempting to run. Do you want to Allow this time/Block this time/Allow always/Block always".
The only time that this is a pain is if you are a software developer (like me) and have a new
Yeah, our AC is a horse's end.
Everyone lives, thrives, and reproduces regardless of their genetic adaptations (or quality).
Not true at all in the third world, and not completely true in the first world either. Eventually we'll breed for teenagers who look before crossing the road.
Will any noticeable branching happen?
The last century or three has seen the reversal of branching. Population groups that were seperate are now mixing, those that haven't been exterminated or marginalised by people of European descent.
A webbrowser really just needs to be usable and low on memory
Web browsers are one of the pinacles of modern complex software. Think about it. A web browser is a document viewer, a network-aware program, an application platform with built-in scripting language runtime(s), a parser and renderer for dozens of varieties of HTML, XML, CSS and SVG, a secure e-commerce tool, a pluggin host, a media center and a personal communications tool.
Now you want it to be small too? Efficient use of memory with no leaks: a good goal; actual low use of memory: not likely.
Zero-gravity refers a region of low Earth orbit
... take your pick.
I'd have thought that zero gravity refers to any place where there is little or no net gravitational force. Low earth orbit, high earth orbit, medium Mars orbit, surface of a small comet in solar orbit
Why would it? The earth's gravity squeezes the rock. A comet is so small that it is very much a "microgravity" environment.
Correct, but the point remains: the comet was described as having the consitency of a snowdift.
On the surface of earth, the bottom of a snowdrift compacts under the weight of snow on top of it. On a comet (i.e. a small body in a large orbital path around the sun) the same effect does not apply, and the snowdrift could be as loose as the top inch all the way through.
The lower layers of an object will not compact in a zero-gravity environment.
I would suggest that it's a perfectly accurate idea of what private companies are supposed to do. They are supposed to make money.
Incorrect. They are supposed to do what the people who own them, run them and comprise them want them to do. If profit uber alles is all your society can think of to do with them, then that is a problem with your society. Broken levees are just a symptom.
If you write "I am trying to implement MPI I/O for our CFD" I would expect you to explain or otherwise link those terms. Explication is required for a general audience, even an intelligent one.
Dude. I take my notional hat off to you. Brilliant.
Or a "soutpiel" in Afrikaans. (As a Capetonain living in London, I resemble that remark)
El reg has a page on this malarkey
According to the register's quotes, the memory is "read by a laser beam. This memory does not have any moving mechanical parts." So if there are no moving parts, the laser beam won't be able to move, right? So how then can it read more than one bit, total? This is an amazing breakthrough accomplished in secret. Take that, mainstream scientific research!
If you want things to be atomic then turn on transactions or simply design your program better.
Uh, that porblem has already been solved. By relational database management systems. It's a far from trivial problem, so why reinvent the wheel badly? No Amount of "better design" will keep the data consistent in the event of an unexpected power failure, not without boatloads of code for journals and transactions and the like. A good DBMS will, because it has already done that code.
I handle all kinds of db stuff with millions of records and all kinds of interesting interactions and funny enough I never get corrupt data.
"It hasn't happend to me, therefor it is impossible"? But it is possible, and in some systems that's just not acceptable.
You probably code in some lame language like Visual Basic too.
An ad-hominem attack. Grow up.
Evolution by nature is very good at finding unexpected answers - if it works, no matter why, no matter if a designer would have never thought of doing it that way, it will be selected for. But it has virtually no long-term planning. The ostrich for instance is as birds go a good antelope. But a designer with foresight wanting to go to antelope, probably wouldn't start from bird.
Intelligent design is the opposite; it would have foresight, would use certain characteristic design patterns (unless you believe in Omniscient Design). This is however not what we see.
Most C# applications use unmanaged code, they are potentially vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks and the like.
Can you justify that claim? How about a source for that unsupported almost-statistic? I've seen a fair amount of C#, and little to no unsafe code used.
C# has been criticised repeatdely in the security community for this feature. Java always runs in safe or managed mode and is therefore more secure than C#.
The fact of the matter is that any language needs to be able to interface with libraries in other languages, and the rest of the world in general. The other fact is that those interfaces are predominantly in c-language style, i.e. use pointers left right and center. Java communicates with such libraries via the Java Native Interface (JNI). C# does it in unsafe code blocks. Both are ways of accomplishing this necessary task. Both are as big "security holes". Which is easier to use?
Given that most C# applications use unmanaged code, they are potentially vulnerable to buffer overflow attacks and the like.
So if there's one line of unmanaged code in a C# app, then the rest of it is also suddenly vulnerable to buffer overruns? It doesn't work like that. You might as well argue that any Java program that makes a JNI call can be buffer-overrunned at will.
Since a security policy cannot be enforced on unmanaged code
Correct, the code with pointers in it cannot be verified. However the verifier can detect an unsafe code block, and refuse to run programs containing such block if there is insufficient rights. Unsafe code should not be and is not given the same security privileges as safe code, thus it is not the gaping hole that you claim.
Now stop trolling.
Wouldn't it be safer to switch from blacklists to whitelists?
It wouldn't be better. I have a new build of my app every hour or so. I have to click to let the firewall let it through for each new build as it is, and after a week or so the firewall's rules are cluttered with dozens of obsolete builds.
Aircraft speed is increasingly becoming less relevant to total travel time.
Have you ever travelled in Europe? Air time of about 40 minutes between London (UK) and Cologne (Germany). The total travel time is much longer - it takes about 40 minutes again for the last leg of the journey (express train from Liverpool Street station -> Stansted airport)
"nature" was in scare-quotes because there is no good way to define it. Either you make it a meaningless word by declaring that everything is natural, or you attempt to draw a sharp line between the blurry catagories of the built and designed by numans world and the just-is-that-way evolved world (never mind that the former is part of/built upon of the latter).
The point of the post was that debates over if this plan is natural ot not are useless. Pragmatic debates over if this plan is worthwhile are what is needed. We're in charge of this planet whether we like it or not - what happen on Earth's biosphere is mostly up to the naked apes.
If these animals died out 13,000 years ago, doesn't the secular world view this as a mistake on the part of natural selection? Are we really going to second-guess that?
... The world has to exist as if men were never here, because men are evil and vile.
... men ... men ... human race
Yes. We overide "nature" constantly, when it suits our interests.
men aren't natural
Natural or not - who knows and who cares. This is a pragmatic idea aimed at preventing extinctions and making richer ecosystems. The last paragraph the article makes that clear.
men
What about women?
You're kidding, right? MS is prepared to do technically hard thing in order to keep thier market. They are also capable of swimming against the tide, or rather, making thier own damn tide or "momentum" by building it into the the next release of windows.
Option 3 is least uncommon by far.
um, no. option 1 (or something close to it) is what happens to 90%+ of the stuff on Sourceforge. But this at least is better than the fate of 99% of comercial closed code, which eventually reaches the end of its use, is forgotten by the long-departed coders, and just dries up and blows away.
My digital didn't work well on the ski slopes anyway - I ran out of charge in double-quuick time. It seems that the batteries just don't like it cold.