I do not get your point. Telnet is still around in situations where it would make more sense for it not to be around. Just the other day there was an article here about EOL licence hassles with medical record software that users were connecting to using Microsoft's version of telnet. There are plenty of old systems in use. In five years there will still be a lot of current systems in use so it's a given that SSH will still around even if something much better is available.
Normally when Dropbox is mentioned and the topic is security it's referring to one of their many spectacular fuckups. Able to download the files of others by knowing the filename and hash - that was Dropbox when people used this bug as an alternative to bittorrent for a while. Able to login to other people's accounts without a password - Dropbox was wide open one day with that massive fuckup. Using the interface to revoke other people's access to your files, getting told that it had worked, then those other people found they could still get the files - Dropbox again.
And that's just the stuff that has had dedicated articles about it on Slashdot. If you don't want your worst enemy, a potential thief, or your mother to see something then don't put it on Dropbox.
You can't have years of useless leaders with sustaining some sort of damage. If you want to compare it to corporations then Enron style damage, but there is less of a reality check here since corporations usually have to pay some attention to balance sheets so epic fuckups can cost the useless near the top of a corporation their jobs.
If you look up the Snowden stuff (which would never have happened if the NSA has their shit together instead of employing dodgy subcontractors) you can see for yourself that the place is full of toy soldiers instead of the competency your wishful thinking suggests. There has been a lot of other stuff in the press too.
Those losers actually think polygraphs work like Wonder Woman's lariat of truth FFS! With such a major mistake do you really think all the stuff that has come out about systemic incompetence was made up?
If you still don't believe me then remember what happened to NASA after years of it's management being full of people rewarded for their political connections instead of promoted due to ability.
That's a start, think of image processing. A lot of it is applying the same operation to a very large number of images with no need to do it in a special order or in a serial manner at all. Even something as trivial as editing a home movie is going to be an utter pain if the software is single threaded instead of doing the task more quickly in parallel.
most things you want to do with a computer are inherently serial
Even very simple stuff with sound and images is inherently parallel. More complex modelling of physical objects is inherently parallel. You don't get it? Imagine resizing the every frame of a movie at 25fps over two hours. That's the same operation done many times and very trivial to do in parallel. It's just a matter of splitting the task to whatever resources you have. With sound (and thus things like seismic data as well) if you want to apply the same filter to thousands or millions of samples it's very trivial to do in parallel.
Those are big problems, but very specialized
Home movies and digital photography fit into the mix so not very specialized at all.
Most programmers don't seem to be able to deal with buffer overflows, race conditions or 64 bit. This is for the other ones who can deal with more than one thread, the ones that have caught up with the 1990s and are not stuck in the MSDOS mindset.
Adobe and Cisco both went the jackboot route as well, with Cisco going as far as dragging a guy out of a court hearing for extra contempt for society. Both were over far more trivial things than this example.
You forgot to add "at taxpayers expense" to the absurd and ridiculously costly paramilitary exercise. They are not using their own resources for their corporate godhood which makes it even worse. Given police budgets something had to be given up on elsewhere to fund this farce.
A casino owner leans left? I suppose some people will say such weird shit in a place where Charlie Chaplin, one of the richest capitalists of his time, was called a communist.
Very much so - see also DVD Jon and also the earlier events covered in Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown" (free online since before this slashdot started) for other examples of insane paramilitary responses to suspected online crimes and how it's not getting any better. It's as if the agencies involved think they are in a comic book going after supervillians and are incapable of learning from experience.
Another poster seeing it as a person! Most of the people who were there in 2010 would have moved on. I had the misfortune of working for a government owned body a couple of times. Every year there was a major "re-org", change of direction, and new slogans. If a middle manager was in the same post for two years they would consider their career over and resign to work elsewhere.
You have it mixed up. It's about being allowed to use the software. It's not about support. The vendor is refusing to licence the software and pulling the rug out from under the client telling them to stop using it. How about discussing that instead of wandering off into the wilds?
The same morons for THIRTY YEARS? Unlike you I'm not going to call yourself or raymorris morons but you clearly have not put any thought into this before posting.
I'm in a small place unlike that S.A. government department but I'd still get annoyed if someone blamed me for some of the ignorant and stupid choices that were made in my workplace before I started working there and cleaned them up. If I was in a very large place like a S.A. government department I wouldn't like to be called a moron for failing to get enough of a budget to do a major migration lasting years away from a platform that may have made sense long ago but does not now. A moron is something else.
Been there done that - plenty of vendors issue a permanent licence to their clients in the final year of support so that the "security" software will let the software start up. It typically comes with a contract that says you can continue to use the software with no support and no legal recourse if the software has or causes any sort of problem. My workplace has a few bits of legacy software occasionally used that fit that category. Sometimes it's easier to make a minor tweak to some data from the 1990s in the same program used at the time instead of the time consuming and sometimes lossy process of converting the data into a different format. Another is just due to the users wanting monospaced fonts in the plotter output (or a PDF of the same via a virtual plotter) which was not available on any version beyond 2000. There are plenty of reasons to use something that works especially if currently available software produces different results.
Switching can sure be a pain for types of software, if it's the center of your enterprise. It sure is silly to lease that kind of software for a few years rather than but (or build) it.
Of course, the article says they choose to lease because from the very beginning they planned to replace it. So the plan all along was that they would replace it, but now they decided they'd rather not. That kinda sucks, but when you can't make up your mind, can't make a decision, you sometimes end up an inconvenient position.
The above strange attitude is common so I will not call you an idiot just someone who has falling for a common trap. Corporations and other orgs are not people FFS! It's not that they have a mind to change. As management and staff change directions also change.
Do you really think the same people are still there as were in the place thirty years ago? I'd say not, it doesn't look like you've thought about it an any depth and have just fallen into the trap of thinking of an org as a person with a will of it's own. That sort of thinking can only lead to confusion, disappointment and possibly getting utterly fucked over by unexpected change.
And what happens when some unsigned index counter wraps around and the database gets corrupted? At some point even the best written software needs bug fixes.
Then you restore from backup. Do you really think they have used this software for decades without some problem forcing that already?
One important factor not mentioned in the article is that IBM seriously fucked over the Australian state of Queensland over a failed software migration for the health department there and the cost blowout was enough for it to be the major factor for a lot of people in politics to lose their jobs. People in politics care about their own jobs more than anything else. Until a few years have passed expect Australian politicians to refuse to allow changes with software whether it makes any sense to do so or not.
On another note government departments or government owned corporations (worst of both worlds) are used to forcing software companies to do their bidding. When the government owned the Australian telephone company, Testra, they wanted to put more than 32728 MS Windows workstations on a single MS Windows Domain (yes I know that is a pretty fucking insane policy long before it hit that hard ceiling, and also kids that's another good example of where using a signed integer is insane in the first place). That was one of the reasons Microsoft moved to Active Directory and allowed such things. They are used to bossing major vendors around even if it means getting something that makes little or no sense.
Yet that is exactly what you were suggesting it is. It's all there way above. You are backtracking now, but it would be better to just admit it instead of pretending you did not, endless whining, getting other people offline involved, accusing me of being a rapist and telling me you wished I was dead. I suppose that honest wish is a step forward from the passive-agressive "friend" shit you picked up from somewhere like a bad disease.
Oh, I get it, because I'm male
A different victim card - how pathetic. That's the sort of men's rights shit I'm complaining about. I'm old enough to have been involved with IT when there were a lot of women in the field. It's little self-entitled shits like you that drove them out.
So when you turn 45 what then? You are no longer potentially part of the "well regulated militia". If it was all about the second amendment as Oliver North and the other NRA directors say then the government could take those guns away once you hit the age limit.
The reason they don't is because you have the right to do anything unless laws are enacted to stop you having that right. There is no law to stop you. The second amendment distraction from a sporting club turned political has nothing to do with it.
The 2nd directly mentions The People and not the states
Not "states" - the state. In this context "state" means nation or national government, as it does in many political documents worldwide especially the US constitution. I put it in all capitals to try to make that more obvious but kept the word "state" since that's in the document. See also
Since their counterproductive "there is no such thing as nuclear waste" and stuff about a magical 1950s liquid metal reactor being beyond the current state of the art is baseless and offensive then why treat them so gently? It may inspire the others who can think for themselves to stop listening to the idiots, go looking for answers, perhaps become the sort of people driving progress instead of sitting around doing nothing but blaming hippies and pretending it was all a solved problem 60 years ago. The people doing the mindless cheering are a lost cause but hopefully a minority of those interested in this sort of technology.
As for the other poster:
I think that you might mean the Hanford website
That's the one. It presents the information in a far better was than books I have read on those topics, especially the MOX fuel production and waste management which effectively answers the "there is no such thing as nuclear waste" people.
The right to hand your guns back when you turn 45 and are no longer considered a potential member of the militia? The STATE has second amendment rights, the right to draft your ass into uniform and get you to fight. You have your gun rights because they have not been taken away. It has nothing to do with the second amendment no matter what the ranting of people in nothing but a sports club, the NRA, consists of. That's why you get to keep your guns even when you no longer fit the "militia" definition.
So, well, what is the punishment for high treason?
You get to run for office with photos of you wrapped in a flag and then when that fails you get a gig as one of the directors of the National Rifle Association. That's if high treason is giving classified anti-tank weapons and a pile of other ordinance to Hezbolla less than a year after they blew up over a hundred US Marines. These days high treason probably means beating a Russian at chess instead. Giving weapons to terrorists (North) or giving away state secrets for sex (Petraeus) just doesn't seem to make the grade when political connections are strong.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not get your point. Telnet is still around in situations where it would make more sense for it not to be around. Just the other day there was an article here about EOL licence hassles with medical record software that users were connecting to using Microsoft's version of telnet.
There are plenty of old systems in use. In five years there will still be a lot of current systems in use so it's a given that SSH will still around even if something much better is available.
SSH was first released in 1995.
Normally when Dropbox is mentioned and the topic is security it's referring to one of their many spectacular fuckups.
Able to download the files of others by knowing the filename and hash - that was Dropbox when people used this bug as an alternative to bittorrent for a while.
Able to login to other people's accounts without a password - Dropbox was wide open one day with that massive fuckup.
Using the interface to revoke other people's access to your files, getting told that it had worked, then those other people found they could still get the files - Dropbox again.
And that's just the stuff that has had dedicated articles about it on Slashdot.
If you don't want your worst enemy, a potential thief, or your mother to see something then don't put it on Dropbox.
You can't have years of useless leaders with sustaining some sort of damage. If you want to compare it to corporations then Enron style damage, but there is less of a reality check here since corporations usually have to pay some attention to balance sheets so epic fuckups can cost the useless near the top of a corporation their jobs.
If you look up the Snowden stuff (which would never have happened if the NSA has their shit together instead of employing dodgy subcontractors) you can see for yourself that the place is full of toy soldiers instead of the competency your wishful thinking suggests. There has been a lot of other stuff in the press too.
Those losers actually think polygraphs work like Wonder Woman's lariat of truth FFS! With such a major mistake do you really think all the stuff that has come out about systemic incompetence was made up?
If you still don't believe me then remember what happened to NASA after years of it's management being full of people rewarded for their political connections instead of promoted due to ability.
That's a start, think of image processing. A lot of it is applying the same operation to a very large number of images with no need to do it in a special order or in a serial manner at all.
Even something as trivial as editing a home movie is going to be an utter pain if the software is single threaded instead of doing the task more quickly in parallel.
Even very simple stuff with sound and images is inherently parallel. More complex modelling of physical objects is inherently parallel.
You don't get it? Imagine resizing the every frame of a movie at 25fps over two hours. That's the same operation done many times and very trivial to do in parallel. It's just a matter of splitting the task to whatever resources you have. With sound (and thus things like seismic data as well) if you want to apply the same filter to thousands or millions of samples it's very trivial to do in parallel.
Home movies and digital photography fit into the mix so not very specialized at all.
Most programmers don't seem to be able to deal with buffer overflows, race conditions or 64 bit. This is for the other ones who can deal with more than one thread, the ones that have caught up with the 1990s and are not stuck in the MSDOS mindset.
Adobe and Cisco both went the jackboot route as well, with Cisco going as far as dragging a guy out of a court hearing for extra contempt for society. Both were over far more trivial things than this example.
You forgot to add "at taxpayers expense" to the absurd and ridiculously costly paramilitary exercise. They are not using their own resources for their corporate godhood which makes it even worse.
Given police budgets something had to be given up on elsewhere to fund this farce.
A casino owner leans left?
I suppose some people will say such weird shit in a place where Charlie Chaplin, one of the richest capitalists of his time, was called a communist.
Very much so - see also DVD Jon and also the earlier events covered in Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown" (free online since before this slashdot started) for other examples of insane paramilitary responses to suspected online crimes and how it's not getting any better. It's as if the agencies involved think they are in a comic book going after supervillians and are incapable of learning from experience.
Read up on the Star Trek set thing. That story alone confirms it several times.
High ranking jobs at the NSA are a sinecure used as a reward for people that have never worked for a similar group before.
The "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" thing applies far more at the NSA than it did at FEMA.
Outlook not so good.
Clicking on the subject is enough to open the email and "helpfully" run the script via Internet Explorer.
Absolute fucking insanely bad software design is why we are living knee deep in a malware swamp beyond the dreams of bad science fiction.
Another poster seeing it as a person! Most of the people who were there in 2010 would have moved on.
I had the misfortune of working for a government owned body a couple of times. Every year there was a major "re-org", change of direction, and new slogans. If a middle manager was in the same post for two years they would consider their career over and resign to work elsewhere.
You have it mixed up.
It's about being allowed to use the software. It's not about support.
The vendor is refusing to licence the software and pulling the rug out from under the client telling them to stop using it.
How about discussing that instead of wandering off into the wilds?
The same morons for THIRTY YEARS?
Unlike you I'm not going to call yourself or raymorris morons but you clearly have not put any thought into this before posting.
I'm in a small place unlike that S.A. government department but I'd still get annoyed if someone blamed me for some of the ignorant and stupid choices that were made in my workplace before I started working there and cleaned them up. If I was in a very large place like a S.A. government department I wouldn't like to be called a moron for failing to get enough of a budget to do a major migration lasting years away from a platform that may have made sense long ago but does not now. A moron is something else.
There is a LOT of it about.
Been there done that - plenty of vendors issue a permanent licence to their clients in the final year of support so that the "security" software will let the software start up. It typically comes with a contract that says you can continue to use the software with no support and no legal recourse if the software has or causes any sort of problem. My workplace has a few bits of legacy software occasionally used that fit that category.
Sometimes it's easier to make a minor tweak to some data from the 1990s in the same program used at the time instead of the time consuming and sometimes lossy process of converting the data into a different format. Another is just due to the users wanting monospaced fonts in the plotter output (or a PDF of the same via a virtual plotter) which was not available on any version beyond 2000. There are plenty of reasons to use something that works especially if currently available software produces different results.
Switching can sure be a pain for types of software, if it's the center of your enterprise. It sure is silly to lease that kind of software for a few years rather than but (or build) it.
Of course, the article says they choose to lease because from the very beginning they planned to replace it. So the plan all along was that they would replace it, but now they decided they'd rather not. That kinda sucks, but when you can't make up your mind, can't make a decision, you sometimes end up an inconvenient position.
The above strange attitude is common so I will not call you an idiot just someone who has falling for a common trap.
Corporations and other orgs are not people FFS!
It's not that they have a mind to change.
As management and staff change directions also change.
Do you really think the same people are still there as were in the place thirty years ago? I'd say not, it doesn't look like you've thought about it an any depth and have just fallen into the trap of thinking of an org as a person with a will of it's own. That sort of thinking can only lead to confusion, disappointment and possibly getting utterly fucked over by unexpected change.
And what happens when some unsigned index counter wraps around and the database gets corrupted? At some point even the best written software needs bug fixes.
Then you restore from backup.
Do you really think they have used this software for decades without some problem forcing that already?
One important factor not mentioned in the article is that IBM seriously fucked over the Australian state of Queensland over a failed software migration for the health department there and the cost blowout was enough for it to be the major factor for a lot of people in politics to lose their jobs. People in politics care about their own jobs more than anything else. Until a few years have passed expect Australian politicians to refuse to allow changes with software whether it makes any sense to do so or not.
On another note government departments or government owned corporations (worst of both worlds) are used to forcing software companies to do their bidding. When the government owned the Australian telephone company, Testra, they wanted to put more than 32728 MS Windows workstations on a single MS Windows Domain (yes I know that is a pretty fucking insane policy long before it hit that hard ceiling, and also kids that's another good example of where using a signed integer is insane in the first place). That was one of the reasons Microsoft moved to Active Directory and allowed such things. They are used to bossing major vendors around even if it means getting something that makes little or no sense.
Yet that is exactly what you were suggesting it is. It's all there way above. You are backtracking now, but it would be better to just admit it instead of pretending you did not, endless whining, getting other people offline involved, accusing me of being a rapist and telling me you wished I was dead. I suppose that honest wish is a step forward from the passive-agressive "friend" shit you picked up from somewhere like a bad disease.
A different victim card - how pathetic. That's the sort of men's rights shit I'm complaining about. I'm old enough to have been involved with IT when there were a lot of women in the field. It's little self-entitled shits like you that drove them out.
The reason they don't is because you have the right to do anything unless laws are enacted to stop you having that right. There is no law to stop you. The second amendment distraction from a sporting club turned political has nothing to do with it.
Not "states" - the state. In this context "state" means nation or national government, as it does in many political documents worldwide especially the US constitution. I put it in all capitals to try to make that more obvious but kept the word "state" since that's in the document. See also
The people doing the mindless cheering are a lost cause but hopefully a minority of those interested in this sort of technology.
As for the other poster:
That's the one. It presents the information in a far better was than books I have read on those topics, especially the MOX fuel production and waste management which effectively answers the "there is no such thing as nuclear waste" people.
The right to hand your guns back when you turn 45 and are no longer considered a potential member of the militia?
The STATE has second amendment rights, the right to draft your ass into uniform and get you to fight. You have your gun rights because they have not been taken away. It has nothing to do with the second amendment no matter what the ranting of people in nothing but a sports club, the NRA, consists of. That's why you get to keep your guns even when you no longer fit the "militia" definition.
You get to run for office with photos of you wrapped in a flag and then when that fails you get a gig as one of the directors of the National Rifle Association.
That's if high treason is giving classified anti-tank weapons and a pile of other ordinance to Hezbolla less than a year after they blew up over a hundred US Marines.
These days high treason probably means beating a Russian at chess instead.
Giving weapons to terrorists (North) or giving away state secrets for sex (Petraeus) just doesn't seem to make the grade when political connections are strong.