Don't post stuff like this, you might help out the terrorists do something to us.
I really cant help but just laugh when I see a post like this. It just goes to show, the mass fear campaign that the Bush government is running right now works, and works well. From www.dictionary.com:-
terrorist
adj : characteristic of someone who employs terrorism (especially as a political weapon);
The Bush government has policy based totally on terrorism as a political weapon. It's been used to justify a war, and is in the process of being used to strip americans of all the freedoms they so blatantly _think_ they enjoy. They are using terror as a political agenda, so, by it's own definition, that makes the bush administration terrorists. Based on your reaction to this/. article, it's working, they sure have put the fear into you.
I look at the article about the bowling ball cannon, and it looks cool, somebody having fun. As for giving folks ideas, well, I suspect if you look back in history just a bit, you will notice that simple cannons of this sort have been in existence and in use for most of the last 500 years. I'm sure there are many in the USA that would like to believe preventing articles like this from showing up on the internet is some kind of 'safety against terrorism'. It's not, there is a signifcant amount of 'prior art' throughout history to show, the concepts of a cannon are well known, well understood, and have been in use as weapons since ancient times.
The concept of using a piece of pipe and some powder as a cannon is not:-
a) unique
b) new
c) complicated
The internet is the last bastion of freedom for the free world. With freedom comes responsibility. That responsibility is not to make some misguided attempt to live with head stuck in the sand and 'sanitize' all the information in the world, the responsibility is to make all information freely available.
Knowledge is power. To control it or sanitize it, that's the work of corrupt regimes trying to keep a population in line. To have a population _asking_ for knowledge to be controlled and sanitized, that's just a sign of the overall intelligence level of the population itself. Some populations WANT to be dictated to, makes life a lot easier, you dont have to make decisions on your own behalf, and dont have to take responsibility for those decisions.
November of 2004 is when we will find out for sure what the american population really wants. If they want freedom, they will say so at the ballot box. If they want a dictatorial regime that is stripping america of all its freedoms thru the guise of 'Homeland Security', they will put a big X in the box beside dubya's name.
Time will tell, but, the more posts like the parent to this I see, the more of a sinking feeling i get. Terrorism has been an issue throughout most of the world for the last 50 years. It took the policies of GW to bring terrorism to North America as a way of life. We'll find out in 2004 if it's the way of life that americans really want.
It'll be a sad day when a fun post like the home made cannon cant show up on/. because it doesn't pass the 'sanitized' test. Current politics in the USA are rapidly heading in that direction. It has a lot of overtones similar to the McCarthy years.
Sorry, I don't buy this argument. Boeing has complete control over every aspect of the manufacture of a plane. Microsoft does not, for example, control what Netscape or NVidia does.
The last time I checked, rampant buffer overflows occur on Windows 2000 machines with IIS, and NOTHING else installed. Kinda hard to blame Netscape and NVida for all the IIS security problems on machines where they are not installed.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to go thru a product meant to be exposed to the public internet, and check for simple things like using unchecked buffers as local stack variables. That is part of the quality control of engineering. Releasing that to the masses, that's part of the hack and slash process of rushing a product out the door. Coming after the fact and spending millions talking about 'Secure Computing', well, that's just fraud. Whats even worse, is the media is so technically incompetent, they just feed on that kind of stuff, then turn around and spoon feed it to the masses.
If the product had gone thru a proper engineering quality control cycle, it would never have had a buffer overflow from it's first release, that's one of the first things a design reveiw would have red flagged as 'need fixing'.
Microsoft goes through these processes, like it or not. Windows wouldn't be able to work on millions of machines if they didn't.
Don't believe me? Ask anybody using Windows 2000.
No, Microsoft does NOT go thru these processes. If they did, there would never have been an unchecked buffer overflow exploit within the product. A very basic code review would have red flagged every one of them. If not the first time around, very definitely on the first review after they realized this is a problem. If you dont believe me, go ask all the folks that got huge bandwidth consumption bills the last few months, when thier co-located windows 2000 based machines got hit by Slammer/Blaster etc etc. The true cost of ownership on Windows server products really shows when the bills arrive for hundreds of gigabits of virus induced data transfers.
Windows 2000 has been subject to countless buffer overflow exploits over the years since its release. Window 2003 suffered it's first exploit within days of release. That kind of proves that a design review for 'known flaws in earlier products' was never done on the Windows 2003 product. If it was done, then, they made a conscious decision to release the product in it's broken form.
I guess the thing I dont get, is why everybody seems to consider this to be an excuse for sloppy quality control. There are many examples of products out there in the real world, which have complexities equivalent to or well beyond that of the Windows operating system. They are expected to 'just work'. Imagine a scenario where Boeing released the next generation airplane with the attitude 'we will patch software problems after we see them crashing, and show us where the problems are'.
Microsoft spends a LOT of money promoting the idea of 'Secure Computing'. That whole campaign is borderline on fraud. The script is very carefully written so it really says 'this is not something we do, only something we talk about', but, to joe non-technical, it comes across as 'Hey, this is real secure stuff', when its NOT.
Another thing that just never ceases to amaze me, the constant referral to Software Engineering by the Microsoft marketing droids. Engineering is the process of analysis and design, and producing a design that works, and works reliably. That's not what happens in Redmond. In Redmond, they hack together patches that 'sorta work' and then release it on the masses, to see what happens. There is no design, there is no quality control process, and there is certainly no engineering involved.
If the Microsoft marketing droids want to see software engineering, they have to drive up the road, to the Boeing plants. That's where systems get designed, tested, re-designed, re-tested, and continue thru the cycle till they 'just work'. Products that are engineered, and fault tested, an amazing concept it seems to the 'hi tech' industry, but, it can be done, and it does work.
So yes, you are right, software is written by error prone human beings. That's why there's such a thing as testing, design reviews, and all the other things that go along with 'Engineering'. It's just to bad this industry stole the term from the real engineers, and have bastardized it to mean edit, compile, debug, compile, release. True engineering has been totally lost from the concept. I'd be really curious to see how many/. coders have actually done code path analysis and execution fault path analysis/testing on a product prior to release. I'm almost willing to bet, if they are not working in aerospace of some form, they dont even know what that is....
If you have a baseball-sized meteorite of density 3.2 g/cc, using a value of 1.2 kg/m^3 for the density of air, you will find that the meteorite will slow from its approach velocity of roughly 11000 meters per second to its terminal velocity of 60 m/s in a mere 28 seconds, having traveled only 3 km.
The first problem with your math, you are assuming the meteor hits air at 1.2 kg/m^3. that's the density of air at sea level, not the density at the upper levels of the atmosphere. The real factor that matters is the angle of penetration. If the meteor is travelling at 11,000 m/s as you say, and hits the atmosphere vertically, it will encounter thin air initially. At an altitude of 6000 m, the density is already half that of sea level.
It's far to late in the evening to drag out serious mathematics, but, suffice it to say, if the meteor size of a baseball has a vertical penetration of the atmosphere at 11,000 m/s, it's likely gonna be still travelling well above the atmospheric terminal velocity at impact. The atmospheric drag will not have caused it to shed all that velocity in the minute or so it'll take to reach impact, assuming of course it's got enough mass and density to not have melted completely due to heat from friction.
If the angle of penetration is shallow, then yes, it'll spend a significant time in the upper atmosphere, and it'll likely be travelling at/near the terminal velocity induced by the sum of atmospheric drag, and 9.8 m/s^2 vertical acceleration applied by the mass of the earth. Essentially nothing more than a rock falling out of the sky.
The ceo's of the companies doing the outsourcing, you know, the folks actually pulling the strings and running the country. They said better, thats why they are moving everything....
The professor said that while the public perception was that management had f***ed up, the engineers had to bear some responsibility because they were unable to adequately communicate the necessary conclusions in a manner that decision makers could understand
I really think if you look at it, this is backwards. The manager is in the position to manage, because thats his JOB. Part of being a manager in this situation is to UNDERSTAND the engineers. If you cant understand them when they say 'its gonna blow up', then you are WRONG for that job. To manage a group, it's a pre-requisite, you gotta be able to communicate with them. In this specialized case, that means, you gotta be able to speak/understand the lingo of the engineers.
This is the fundamental reason why hiring business school management types to run a highly technical organization like Nasa is just plain flawed. The engineers do the real work, and it's highly specialized and difficult work. It's the managers job to understand the engineers, not vice versa. If the managers dont understand it, they need to be replaced by somebody who does. you dont 'dumb down' the work force cuz the boss is incompetent, you replace the boss with a competent one. in this case, my opinion, it's blatantly obvious. If you are gonna be a manager in the space shuttle program, you need a huge knowledge depth of shuttle engineering.
If you didn't design/build/fly it, you are not qualifed to be a manager in the shuttle program. Very simple.
This is the whole problem with most of corporate north america, and a large part of government. Without a proper knowledge base and understanding of the work the underlings are doing, you cannot properly manage the group. It matters not how many human factors courses you took in school, or how many courses you took on various management philosophies, if you are not an engineer, you are not qualified to be in a senior management position over a stable of engineers.
Read thru the report carefully that is the start of this thread, the NYT article. A career manager at NASA made an arbitrary decision to waive strength requirements on a launch component because it failed testing. She got lucky, that component held, but, others didn't. It's that kind of total 'manage by managers' philosophy that causes the kind of events nasa is getting pretty famous for. The shuttles 98% mission success rate is pretty good, but, not good enough to say that technical decisions can now come out of the hands of engineers, and into the hands of managers.
No 'management professional' is qualified to make such a decision. No engineer would make such a decision off the cuff at a pre-launch meeting.
Nasa has turned into what it is, precisely because it's a big beaurocracy of 'management professionals' all eating from the public trough. If americans want a properly run show, where shuttles dont blow up on launch, and dont burn up on re-entry, it's really actually pretty achievable, the knowledge/experience depth IS available.
Take the attitude 'if you didn't design it, build it, or fly it, then you are not qualified to manage it'. Sweep the house of all the management professionals, and put qualified individuals in the positions to make informed technical decisions. The results will shock just about everybody, because, those qualified individuals tend to be MOTIVATED individuals too. The shuttles will end up flying more missions for less dollars because the folks with the visions will be in the drivers seat for the organization as a whole, and they will be focussed on results, not on how to build little beaurocratic buffer zones to protect a 'management career' in a government organization.
A huge side effect of such a move, it leaves lots of career opportunity to advance to upper levels for the real workforce within the organization, so, many of the brightest ones will stay, instead of heading out into the private industry world where such opportunity does exist. It's a trickle up effect, but over time, you get the best and brightest in the top positions of the organization. End result, and organization with a vision, and the ability to accomplish the vision.
As it sits right now, to a shining young engineer, Nasa must look like a cool place to start out, lotsa neat toys, but, a total dead end for a long career. It's run by eggheads from business schools that dont know the difference between a strain guage and a rain guage. They think design limits are like speed limits, something you pay lip service to, then carry on anyways.
Properly managed, the space shuttle is capable of a 99.5% mission success rate, and an even better 'survival' rate. Business school grads are not capable of making that happen, engineers are....
If you dont think this is the case, I invite you to go read in detail the post mortems on the Challenger and Columbia incidents. There's more than enough information in those 2 reports to back the philosphy, if you didn't design it, build it, or fly it, you are not qualified to manage it.....
Guess this is all a matter of opinion. Frankly, I'd like to see all the music sharing and totally irrelavent to the real world RIAA crap modded right off the scale, but for some strange reason, it seems to be the most important subject there is for most/. junkies. The topic says 'News for Nerds, Stuff that matters'. The loss of a major communications satellite that hosts a LOT of signals seems like 'stuff that matters' for real nerds. Yet more whining about how everybody thinks it should be all ok to steal music, well, I guess I've always failed to see how that matters at all.
From a 'technology' standpoint, the loss of T4 is a big deal. More nattering about RIAA, well, does anybody even really care ?
planers may have improved, but the shrinkage in the dry kilne is a physical reality, depends only on the moisture content of the wood.
Modern mills measure the moisture content, and cut accordingly. Tarriffs and quota's have changed the conomics (and the firmware) of the cut. Chips delivered to the pulp mill are worth as much or more than lumber to the railhead today. Overcutting the rough cut just means more chips out of the planer, and that's not a bad thing these days.....
Certainly 2x4 lumber is not actually 2x4. I would think making everything absolutely accurate would simple confuse the average consumer.
In reality, the 2x4 IS 2 inches by 4 inches, when it's first cut into rough lumber. It's then kiln dried and planed to a smooth finish, resulting in a smaller final dimension.
The term 2x4 goes back to before the days of a planer mill to make nice smooth lumber, and it carries thru today, it's a reference to the raw size after first cut.
Over the years, Network Solutions was always the 'premier' issuer of names for the.com and.net tld's. The rationale for most of corporate north america (and much of the rest of the world too) has always been, they operate the root servers, the root servers are ALWAYS there, and they ALWAYS work right. Why go elsewhere? Verisign on the other hand, was another company building a business on TRUST, ya, the big thing was TRUST, and most of the internet TRUSTS Verisign with a huge amount of financial data/transactions. If not the transaction itself, it's the Verisign infrastructure being TRUSTED to validate things. When the two companies merged thru buyout, it was actually a very logical (altho way out of reality priced) transaction.
Enter events of the last few days:-
a) The root servers do not work correctly today
b) The root servers do give out wrong data
c) Verisign is the instigator of this wrong data
Basically what's happened, an infrastructure based on a trust relationship has just been rendered 'not trustworthy'. There is an obvious first step that must be taken, and we have to remove Network Solutions / Verisign from the list of 'approved suppliers'. By definition, this means any services currently under subscription there, will move to another location.
The next trick is not gonna be quite as easy, but, it must be done. We will have to move thru our entire infrastructure and remove the Verisign top level certificates from all web browsers. yup, this is gonna break a LOT of https: stuff out there for our users, but, that's life. Suppliers that want to deal with us on a secure basis will have to find another source of top level certificates, and, dont forget, THAWTE certs are no good either now, that's another subsidiary of the beast.
I guess this was inevitable. Corporate USA is a slave to the dollar, not to the principle of doing business in an honorable way. Having the top level trust relationship in electronic system based on a trust relationship with an american corporation is a flawed fundamental concept. It's time to change that.
Is Canada eager to grab techies from the US or must we follow the same immigration guidelines as everyone else?:-)
If you are arriving 'on your own' without a sponsor, back of the line, like everybody else. Oh, and by the way, folks from 'underprivileged' places can step ahead of you in that line.
If you are arriving thru a sponsorship, it's all up to the sponsor. I know of a few employers that will sponsor folks into the country, and have been involved in the process myself in the past. Like most of my peers, my attitude is pretty strait forward. I'd rather sponsor in somebody from a third world country that appreciates what our country has to offer, rather than somebody from the usa that's going to just be constantly trying to tell us how much better 'the american way' is.
BUT, my attitude and many others are likely to change soon. When the usa revives the draft so they can continue to provide cannon fodder to the situation in Iraq, well, then I will start looking at american candidates with exceptional skillsets, and children approaching draft age. One way to develop 'highly motivated' employees is to provide them something they cant get at home, and have a strong desire to obtain. Currently, the offer is lifestyle. Soon, the offer will be like it was in the 70's, freedom.
Funding, Vision, and Political Will are the real issues, and all of them drive the big one, economics.
Take a peek at history. The 60's had the political will, which made the funding available, and the population was behind the vision. Therein is the problem, it's HARD to keep a population focussed on something positive, much easier to focus them with scare tactics. Hence, the vision of the 60's and trips to the moon, were replaced by the cold war, and the scare of nuclear events. It's sooooo much easier to justify blind spending when it's going to the military industrial complex on the grounds of scare tactics.
The space program was a huge economic factor in the 60's, and the developments that came from it continue to be widely used today, in the most surprising of places. How many people know that the 'stay dry lining' of a disposable diaper was developed for astronauts trapped in space suits on the moon. But, visions dont buy votes, and promises of 'technology we dont even realize we want' to come, doesn't bode well for government spending allocations. On the other hand, flashing pictures of large explosions on the news, with an endless beat to death commentary on the 'terrorist we cannot see or find' will scare the population into approving any kind of spending.
The stakes are huge, there's hundreds of billions of dollars on the line annually. As long as you can keep the population scared, it will continue to flow into the military complex. If a true visionary would step up to the white house, with a message that can be sold to the masses, that money will divert to other goals, and, then the tables will turn. Military will live off the developments in other fields, rather than what happens today, other fields tend to live off military developments.
It's going to take a mindset change to cause this to happen, but, that's not likely. Everybody in Washington has bread buttered by military spending. The chances of NASA going back to the forefront of the mindset are basically on par with the proverbial 'snowball in hell'.
Cant help but wonder how much better a world we would be living in today, primary focus exploration and development. A military sitting at home ready to defend a country instead of being used to invade around the world, and the money not being spent on blowing other countries to hell, instead being focussed on outward exploration.
How would the NASA budget and shuttle fleet look today if 50 cents of every dollar spent on bombs for Vietnam and the Middle East, was instead spent on pushing the limits beyond 'low orbit'.....
How on earth am I to interpret > 60 Km? How many miles are that?
One of the great things about/. the headline says it all. 'News for Nerds'. Even some of the callous and trolling commentary tends to come from relatively intelligent, educated, and to some extent 'informed' folks. That is after all the stereotype of a nerd is it not ?
Another great thing about the typical/. nerd, there is one thing they ALL know. When you see a reference to something you dont understand, just cut and paste it into google, and bingo, an instant explanation.
To delve a little further into the stereotype, another reason most of the commentary seems to come from intelligent and educated folks is for a (obvious) reason. Nerds tend to be intelligent and educated. Part of the education process, is learning that there ARE other systems of measurement in use in this world, and pretty much everybody in the engineering world knows, the metric system is predominant in this world, and it's REAL reason for being so is because it is SLIDE RULE FRIENDLY. If you know how to shift decimals, and wiz the ruler back and forth a bit, metric makes a LOT more sense than any system that has no common basis with anything.
So I guess the real question becomes...
If one is not sure how to convert 60KM to a 'more understanding' measurement in thier head, and incapable of plugging it into google, to let google do the hard work for you, have you possibly mistaken/. for www.rednecks.us ?
k, i'm gonna go crawl back under my rock and slip into some asbestos clothing now.....
The first space program ran in the 40's, it was used to hurl missles from continental europe into england. Historically the failure rate on the V-2 program was approximately 20%.
After the war, those engineers ended up in the USA and started building bigger/better missles, with an undisclosed, but miserable, rate of failure. Eventually they sort of got it under control, and the Mercury and Gemini programs were launched with much fanfare, and a pretty decent success rate.
The apollo program followed, and there were 2 failures during the apollo program. The first burned on the pad resulting in the loss of the crew. The second failure was on apollo 13. Ingenuity, hard work, duct tape, and luck, prevented a loss of life during that mission. Overall, the combined failure rate for the 3 programs was in the range of 5 %.
During the same time period, the Russian program progressed with it's own set of problems. It's to late in the evening to go try dig up numbers, but it's a reasonable guesstimate that thier failure rate was on par or higher than the equivalent in the USA at the time, 5% or so.
The space shuttle program has been ongoing for 20 odd years, with it's own set of failures. Statistically speaking, the mission failure rate for the shuttle is on the order of 2%.
The data is pretty conclusive. Playing with rockets is dangerous stuff, they do blow up once in a while. The trend is pretty clear, the technology is improving, and the next generation of space launchers should be able to achieve a mission failure rate of sub 1% on current trends.
We live at the bottom of a very deep gravity well, and there is a price to pay in escaping that well. It's not a good day to hear/read about another failure, but, as long as folks keep looking up, they will keep trying, and, eventually, somebody will come up with a more reliable propulsion method that is capable of escaping our gravity well, without strapping folks on top of many tons of high explosives, and lighting the fuse.
Technology has a tendancy to mature very rapidly during times of war. The trend on launch vehicle reliability suggests that it'll be another 2 generations before it's an item we can take for granted, like an airplane today. Cant help but wonder if the political landscape will break that trend, like it did for the trend in aviation development between 1939 and 1945.
I'm chuckling, cuz this has got to be the most informative/. thread in a while, but the useage graph kinda made me laff a bit. I work with code in tiny embedded devices all day long, so, I read the article with GREAT interest, and particularily the paths taken to resolution (which appears to be an ongoing thing).
My hat is certainly off to you folks, it's so refreshing to see somebody facing a serious problem, and actually go about the course of identify and deal with it, with no mention of 'sue them' etc etc. Instead, the problem was identifed, tracked, and eventually the root cause discovered. At that point, they stayed on the high road, and went thru the company to address it, even though initial contacts were 'problematic'. My expectation from most americans after that root cause was discovered, would be for them to get a bidding war going between various law firms as to who could garner the largest settlement, and only then make contact with Netgear, via whichever law firm was bidding highest.
I sympathise with the problem, and I can sure see how something like that slipped thru various pre-release testing cycles (or possibly the lack thereof). The article has definitely made me step back and think about how 'accidental' things like this can slip thru, and possibly consider a new set of release testing parameters to catch such accidents. The/. boys (and girl) are having fun screaming for the head of the folks that caused the problem, but I think there's a valuable lesson in this, made much more valuable by the paths taken towards resolution. It's so refreshing to see non confrontational co-operation in a case like this. That's the kind of spirit that makes the open source world thrive, and it can apply to more than just 'lines of code'.
I think everybody is missing the point on this whole issue.
Fact:- Blaster is a worm, who's payload was intended to dos windowsupdate.com, rendering it unavailable to the folks using it.
Fact:- windowsupdate.com is 100% unavailable.
Conclusion:- Blaster is the most successful virus/trojan to date. It didn't just cause a few hours of unavailability, it wiped the domain from existence. Not just any domain, but a prominent microsoft domain (high profile, big budget website) totally obliterated off the internet.
Folks can say what they want, and argue about the politics of it all, bicker about who is responsible to update what, and whatever, but you cannot deny the facts.
Blaster is head and shoulders above the crowd as a denial of service worm, the first to achieve a 100% success even prior to actually triggering.
Say what you want folks, but this has got to go down in history as the most successful worm ever.
Slashdot Mirror
I really cant help but just laugh when I see a post like this. It just goes to show, the mass fear campaign that the Bush government is running right now works, and works well. From www.dictionary.com:-
terrorist adj : characteristic of someone who employs terrorism (especially as a political weapon);
The Bush government has policy based totally on terrorism as a political weapon. It's been used to justify a war, and is in the process of being used to strip americans of all the freedoms they so blatantly _think_ they enjoy. They are using terror as a political agenda, so, by it's own definition, that makes the bush administration terrorists. Based on your reaction to this /. article, it's working, they sure have put the fear into you.
I look at the article about the bowling ball cannon, and it looks cool, somebody having fun. As for giving folks ideas, well, I suspect if you look back in history just a bit, you will notice that simple cannons of this sort have been in existence and in use for most of the last 500 years. I'm sure there are many in the USA that would like to believe preventing articles like this from showing up on the internet is some kind of 'safety against terrorism'. It's not, there is a signifcant amount of 'prior art' throughout history to show, the concepts of a cannon are well known, well understood, and have been in use as weapons since ancient times.
The concept of using a piece of pipe and some powder as a cannon is not:-
a) unique
b) new
c) complicated
The internet is the last bastion of freedom for the free world. With freedom comes responsibility. That responsibility is not to make some misguided attempt to live with head stuck in the sand and 'sanitize' all the information in the world, the responsibility is to make all information freely available.
Knowledge is power. To control it or sanitize it, that's the work of corrupt regimes trying to keep a population in line. To have a population _asking_ for knowledge to be controlled and sanitized, that's just a sign of the overall intelligence level of the population itself. Some populations WANT to be dictated to, makes life a lot easier, you dont have to make decisions on your own behalf, and dont have to take responsibility for those decisions.
November of 2004 is when we will find out for sure what the american population really wants. If they want freedom, they will say so at the ballot box. If they want a dictatorial regime that is stripping america of all its freedoms thru the guise of 'Homeland Security', they will put a big X in the box beside dubya's name.
Time will tell, but, the more posts like the parent to this I see, the more of a sinking feeling i get. Terrorism has been an issue throughout most of the world for the last 50 years. It took the policies of GW to bring terrorism to North America as a way of life. We'll find out in 2004 if it's the way of life that americans really want.
It'll be a sad day when a fun post like the home made cannon cant show up on /. because it doesn't pass the 'sanitized' test. Current politics in the USA are rapidly heading in that direction. It has a lot of overtones similar to the McCarthy years.
The last time I checked, rampant buffer overflows occur on Windows 2000 machines with IIS, and NOTHING else installed. Kinda hard to blame Netscape and NVida for all the IIS security problems on machines where they are not installed.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to go thru a product meant to be exposed to the public internet, and check for simple things like using unchecked buffers as local stack variables. That is part of the quality control of engineering. Releasing that to the masses, that's part of the hack and slash process of rushing a product out the door. Coming after the fact and spending millions talking about 'Secure Computing', well, that's just fraud. Whats even worse, is the media is so technically incompetent, they just feed on that kind of stuff, then turn around and spoon feed it to the masses.
If the product had gone thru a proper engineering quality control cycle, it would never have had a buffer overflow from it's first release, that's one of the first things a design reveiw would have red flagged as 'need fixing'.
Microsoft goes through these processes, like it or not. Windows wouldn't be able to work on millions of machines if they didn't. Don't believe me? Ask anybody using Windows 2000.
No, Microsoft does NOT go thru these processes. If they did, there would never have been an unchecked buffer overflow exploit within the product. A very basic code review would have red flagged every one of them. If not the first time around, very definitely on the first review after they realized this is a problem. If you dont believe me, go ask all the folks that got huge bandwidth consumption bills the last few months, when thier co-located windows 2000 based machines got hit by Slammer/Blaster etc etc. The true cost of ownership on Windows server products really shows when the bills arrive for hundreds of gigabits of virus induced data transfers.
Windows 2000 has been subject to countless buffer overflow exploits over the years since its release. Window 2003 suffered it's first exploit within days of release. That kind of proves that a design review for 'known flaws in earlier products' was never done on the Windows 2003 product. If it was done, then, they made a conscious decision to release the product in it's broken form.
I guess the thing I dont get, is why everybody seems to consider this to be an excuse for sloppy quality control. There are many examples of products out there in the real world, which have complexities equivalent to or well beyond that of the Windows operating system. They are expected to 'just work'. Imagine a scenario where Boeing released the next generation airplane with the attitude 'we will patch software problems after we see them crashing, and show us where the problems are'.
Microsoft spends a LOT of money promoting the idea of 'Secure Computing'. That whole campaign is borderline on fraud. The script is very carefully written so it really says 'this is not something we do, only something we talk about', but, to joe non-technical, it comes across as 'Hey, this is real secure stuff', when its NOT.
Another thing that just never ceases to amaze me, the constant referral to Software Engineering by the Microsoft marketing droids. Engineering is the process of analysis and design, and producing a design that works, and works reliably. That's not what happens in Redmond. In Redmond, they hack together patches that 'sorta work' and then release it on the masses, to see what happens. There is no design, there is no quality control process, and there is certainly no engineering involved.
If the Microsoft marketing droids want to see software engineering, they have to drive up the road, to the Boeing plants. That's where systems get designed, tested, re-designed, re-tested, and continue thru the cycle till they 'just work'. Products that are engineered, and fault tested, an amazing concept it seems to the 'hi tech' industry, but, it can be done, and it does work.
So yes, you are right, software is written by error prone human beings. That's why there's such a thing as testing, design reviews, and all the other things that go along with 'Engineering'. It's just to bad this industry stole the term from the real engineers, and have bastardized it to mean edit, compile, debug, compile, release. True engineering has been totally lost from the concept. I'd be really curious to see how many /. coders have actually done code path analysis and execution fault path analysis/testing on a product prior to release. I'm almost willing to bet, if they are not working in aerospace of some form, they dont even know what that is....
The first problem with your math, you are assuming the meteor hits air at 1.2 kg/m^3. that's the density of air at sea level, not the density at the upper levels of the atmosphere. The real factor that matters is the angle of penetration. If the meteor is travelling at 11,000 m/s as you say, and hits the atmosphere vertically, it will encounter thin air initially. At an altitude of 6000 m, the density is already half that of sea level.
It's far to late in the evening to drag out serious mathematics, but, suffice it to say, if the meteor size of a baseball has a vertical penetration of the atmosphere at 11,000 m/s, it's likely gonna be still travelling well above the atmospheric terminal velocity at impact. The atmospheric drag will not have caused it to shed all that velocity in the minute or so it'll take to reach impact, assuming of course it's got enough mass and density to not have melted completely due to heat from friction.
If the angle of penetration is shallow, then yes, it'll spend a significant time in the upper atmosphere, and it'll likely be travelling at/near the terminal velocity induced by the sum of atmospheric drag, and 9.8 m/s^2 vertical acceleration applied by the mass of the earth. Essentially nothing more than a rock falling out of the sky.
The ceo's of the companies doing the outsourcing, you know, the folks actually pulling the strings and running the country. They said better, thats why they are moving everything....
I really think if you look at it, this is backwards. The manager is in the position to manage, because thats his JOB. Part of being a manager in this situation is to UNDERSTAND the engineers. If you cant understand them when they say 'its gonna blow up', then you are WRONG for that job. To manage a group, it's a pre-requisite, you gotta be able to communicate with them. In this specialized case, that means, you gotta be able to speak/understand the lingo of the engineers.
This is the fundamental reason why hiring business school management types to run a highly technical organization like Nasa is just plain flawed. The engineers do the real work, and it's highly specialized and difficult work. It's the managers job to understand the engineers, not vice versa. If the managers dont understand it, they need to be replaced by somebody who does. you dont 'dumb down' the work force cuz the boss is incompetent, you replace the boss with a competent one. in this case, my opinion, it's blatantly obvious. If you are gonna be a manager in the space shuttle program, you need a huge knowledge depth of shuttle engineering.
If you didn't design/build/fly it, you are not qualifed to be a manager in the shuttle program. Very simple.
This is the whole problem with most of corporate north america, and a large part of government. Without a proper knowledge base and understanding of the work the underlings are doing, you cannot properly manage the group. It matters not how many human factors courses you took in school, or how many courses you took on various management philosophies, if you are not an engineer, you are not qualified to be in a senior management position over a stable of engineers.
Read thru the report carefully that is the start of this thread, the NYT article. A career manager at NASA made an arbitrary decision to waive strength requirements on a launch component because it failed testing. She got lucky, that component held, but, others didn't. It's that kind of total 'manage by managers' philosophy that causes the kind of events nasa is getting pretty famous for. The shuttles 98% mission success rate is pretty good, but, not good enough to say that technical decisions can now come out of the hands of engineers, and into the hands of managers.
No 'management professional' is qualified to make such a decision. No engineer would make such a decision off the cuff at a pre-launch meeting.
Nasa has turned into what it is, precisely because it's a big beaurocracy of 'management professionals' all eating from the public trough. If americans want a properly run show, where shuttles dont blow up on launch, and dont burn up on re-entry, it's really actually pretty achievable, the knowledge/experience depth IS available.
Take the attitude 'if you didn't design it, build it, or fly it, then you are not qualified to manage it'. Sweep the house of all the management professionals, and put qualified individuals in the positions to make informed technical decisions. The results will shock just about everybody, because, those qualified individuals tend to be MOTIVATED individuals too. The shuttles will end up flying more missions for less dollars because the folks with the visions will be in the drivers seat for the organization as a whole, and they will be focussed on results, not on how to build little beaurocratic buffer zones to protect a 'management career' in a government organization.
A huge side effect of such a move, it leaves lots of career opportunity to advance to upper levels for the real workforce within the organization, so, many of the brightest ones will stay, instead of heading out into the private industry world where such opportunity does exist. It's a trickle up effect, but over time, you get the best and brightest in the top positions of the organization. End result, and organization with a vision, and the ability to accomplish the vision.
As it sits right now, to a shining young engineer, Nasa must look like a cool place to start out, lotsa neat toys, but, a total dead end for a long career. It's run by eggheads from business schools that dont know the difference between a strain guage and a rain guage. They think design limits are like speed limits, something you pay lip service to, then carry on anyways.
Properly managed, the space shuttle is capable of a 99.5% mission success rate, and an even better 'survival' rate. Business school grads are not capable of making that happen, engineers are.... If you dont think this is the case, I invite you to go read in detail the post mortems on the Challenger and Columbia incidents. There's more than enough information in those 2 reports to back the philosphy, if you didn't design it, build it, or fly it, you are not qualified to manage it.....
From a 'technology' standpoint, the loss of T4 is a big deal. More nattering about RIAA, well, does anybody even really care ?
Modern mills measure the moisture content, and cut accordingly. Tarriffs and quota's have changed the conomics (and the firmware) of the cut. Chips delivered to the pulp mill are worth as much or more than lumber to the railhead today. Overcutting the rough cut just means more chips out of the planer, and that's not a bad thing these days.....
The term 2x4 goes back to before the days of a planer mill to make nice smooth lumber, and it carries thru today, it's a reference to the raw size after first cut.
Enter events of the last few days:-
a) The root servers do not work correctly today
b) The root servers do give out wrong data
c) Verisign is the instigator of this wrong data
Basically what's happened, an infrastructure based on a trust relationship has just been rendered 'not trustworthy'. There is an obvious first step that must be taken, and we have to remove Network Solutions / Verisign from the list of 'approved suppliers'. By definition, this means any services currently under subscription there, will move to another location.
The next trick is not gonna be quite as easy, but, it must be done. We will have to move thru our entire infrastructure and remove the Verisign top level certificates from all web browsers. yup, this is gonna break a LOT of https: stuff out there for our users, but, that's life. Suppliers that want to deal with us on a secure basis will have to find another source of top level certificates, and, dont forget, THAWTE certs are no good either now, that's another subsidiary of the beast.
I guess this was inevitable. Corporate USA is a slave to the dollar, not to the principle of doing business in an honorable way. Having the top level trust relationship in electronic system based on a trust relationship with an american corporation is a flawed fundamental concept. It's time to change that.
If you are arriving thru a sponsorship, it's all up to the sponsor. I know of a few employers that will sponsor folks into the country, and have been involved in the process myself in the past. Like most of my peers, my attitude is pretty strait forward. I'd rather sponsor in somebody from a third world country that appreciates what our country has to offer, rather than somebody from the usa that's going to just be constantly trying to tell us how much better 'the american way' is.
BUT, my attitude and many others are likely to change soon. When the usa revives the draft so they can continue to provide cannon fodder to the situation in Iraq, well, then I will start looking at american candidates with exceptional skillsets, and children approaching draft age. One way to develop 'highly motivated' employees is to provide them something they cant get at home, and have a strong desire to obtain. Currently, the offer is lifestyle. Soon, the offer will be like it was in the 70's, freedom.
Take a peek at history. The 60's had the political will, which made the funding available, and the population was behind the vision. Therein is the problem, it's HARD to keep a population focussed on something positive, much easier to focus them with scare tactics. Hence, the vision of the 60's and trips to the moon, were replaced by the cold war, and the scare of nuclear events. It's sooooo much easier to justify blind spending when it's going to the military industrial complex on the grounds of scare tactics.
The space program was a huge economic factor in the 60's, and the developments that came from it continue to be widely used today, in the most surprising of places. How many people know that the 'stay dry lining' of a disposable diaper was developed for astronauts trapped in space suits on the moon. But, visions dont buy votes, and promises of 'technology we dont even realize we want' to come, doesn't bode well for government spending allocations. On the other hand, flashing pictures of large explosions on the news, with an endless beat to death commentary on the 'terrorist we cannot see or find' will scare the population into approving any kind of spending.
The stakes are huge, there's hundreds of billions of dollars on the line annually. As long as you can keep the population scared, it will continue to flow into the military complex. If a true visionary would step up to the white house, with a message that can be sold to the masses, that money will divert to other goals, and, then the tables will turn. Military will live off the developments in other fields, rather than what happens today, other fields tend to live off military developments.
It's going to take a mindset change to cause this to happen, but, that's not likely. Everybody in Washington has bread buttered by military spending. The chances of NASA going back to the forefront of the mindset are basically on par with the proverbial 'snowball in hell'.
Cant help but wonder how much better a world we would be living in today, primary focus exploration and development. A military sitting at home ready to defend a country instead of being used to invade around the world, and the money not being spent on blowing other countries to hell, instead being focussed on outward exploration.
How would the NASA budget and shuttle fleet look today if 50 cents of every dollar spent on bombs for Vietnam and the Middle East, was instead spent on pushing the limits beyond 'low orbit'.....
Another great thing about the typical /. nerd, there is one thing they ALL know. When you see a reference to something you dont understand, just cut and paste it into google, and bingo, an instant explanation.
To delve a little further into the stereotype, another reason most of the commentary seems to come from intelligent and educated folks is for a (obvious) reason. Nerds tend to be intelligent and educated. Part of the education process, is learning that there ARE other systems of measurement in use in this world, and pretty much everybody in the engineering world knows, the metric system is predominant in this world, and it's REAL reason for being so is because it is SLIDE RULE FRIENDLY. If you know how to shift decimals, and wiz the ruler back and forth a bit, metric makes a LOT more sense than any system that has no common basis with anything.
So I guess the real question becomes...
If one is not sure how to convert 60KM to a 'more understanding' measurement in thier head, and incapable of plugging it into google, to let google do the hard work for you, have you possibly mistaken /. for www.rednecks.us ?
k, i'm gonna go crawl back under my rock and slip into some asbestos clothing now.....
After the war, those engineers ended up in the USA and started building bigger/better missles, with an undisclosed, but miserable, rate of failure. Eventually they sort of got it under control, and the Mercury and Gemini programs were launched with much fanfare, and a pretty decent success rate.
The apollo program followed, and there were 2 failures during the apollo program. The first burned on the pad resulting in the loss of the crew. The second failure was on apollo 13. Ingenuity, hard work, duct tape, and luck, prevented a loss of life during that mission. Overall, the combined failure rate for the 3 programs was in the range of 5 %.
During the same time period, the Russian program progressed with it's own set of problems. It's to late in the evening to go try dig up numbers, but it's a reasonable guesstimate that thier failure rate was on par or higher than the equivalent in the USA at the time, 5% or so.
The space shuttle program has been ongoing for 20 odd years, with it's own set of failures. Statistically speaking, the mission failure rate for the shuttle is on the order of 2%.
The data is pretty conclusive. Playing with rockets is dangerous stuff, they do blow up once in a while. The trend is pretty clear, the technology is improving, and the next generation of space launchers should be able to achieve a mission failure rate of sub 1% on current trends.
We live at the bottom of a very deep gravity well, and there is a price to pay in escaping that well. It's not a good day to hear/read about another failure, but, as long as folks keep looking up, they will keep trying, and, eventually, somebody will come up with a more reliable propulsion method that is capable of escaping our gravity well, without strapping folks on top of many tons of high explosives, and lighting the fuse.
Technology has a tendancy to mature very rapidly during times of war. The trend on launch vehicle reliability suggests that it'll be another 2 generations before it's an item we can take for granted, like an airplane today. Cant help but wonder if the political landscape will break that trend, like it did for the trend in aviation development between 1939 and 1945.
My hat is certainly off to you folks, it's so refreshing to see somebody facing a serious problem, and actually go about the course of identify and deal with it, with no mention of 'sue them' etc etc. Instead, the problem was identifed, tracked, and eventually the root cause discovered. At that point, they stayed on the high road, and went thru the company to address it, even though initial contacts were 'problematic'. My expectation from most americans after that root cause was discovered, would be for them to get a bidding war going between various law firms as to who could garner the largest settlement, and only then make contact with Netgear, via whichever law firm was bidding highest.
I sympathise with the problem, and I can sure see how something like that slipped thru various pre-release testing cycles (or possibly the lack thereof). The article has definitely made me step back and think about how 'accidental' things like this can slip thru, and possibly consider a new set of release testing parameters to catch such accidents. The /. boys (and girl) are having fun screaming for the head of the folks that caused the problem, but I think there's a valuable lesson in this, made much more valuable by the paths taken towards resolution. It's so refreshing to see non confrontational co-operation in a case like this. That's the kind of spirit that makes the open source world thrive, and it can apply to more than just 'lines of code'.
I think everybody is missing the point on this whole issue. Fact :- Blaster is a worm, who's payload was intended to dos windowsupdate.com, rendering it unavailable to the folks using it.
Fact :- windowsupdate.com is 100% unavailable.
Conclusion :- Blaster is the most successful virus/trojan to date. It didn't just cause a few hours of unavailability, it wiped the domain from existence. Not just any domain, but a prominent microsoft domain (high profile, big budget website) totally obliterated off the internet.
Folks can say what they want, and argue about the politics of it all, bicker about who is responsible to update what, and whatever, but you cannot deny the facts.
Blaster is head and shoulders above the crowd as a denial of service worm, the first to achieve a 100% success even prior to actually triggering.
Say what you want folks, but this has got to go down in history as the most successful worm ever.