After Automated doors and Cell-phones Star Trek seems to continue to predict technological developments, this technology was seen in Star Trek TOS episode: Spock's Brain: http://homepage.mac.com/m5comp/trekbits/trekpics/b rain/ Where we see Spock being controlled by remote controll using a device placed on his head.
There are better reasons to get rid of legacy code then lack of programmers. Any semi decent programmer can learn a new(or old computer language) with out too much diffuclty. A few months ago a bunch of programmer friends of mine were sent to a COBOL course(for some it was a refresher course) because the company had legacy code to be maintained. COBOL is still a needed skill as are many other aging technolgies but even if there is no fear in skilled personnal vanishing, A company with a bit of foresight will still strive to be rid of legacy code. The fact is most computer systems become obsolete with in 5 years of making. Patching and repatching ancient code produces complex ugly unmaintanable code with no clear theme behind it, this is obviously bad. And this is the main reason we should get rid of legacy code.
These are remote controll robots, Which have been around and carrying lethal weapons for many years specificly the standard bomb dispusal robots used by both police and military are equiped with a rifle, so that they could attempt to set off bombs remotly by shooting at them.
Gmail makes money by showing you adds, this kind of automated interface is strictly prohibeted. Just like any automated interface to Gmail, If you use Gmail you must not use any automated tool to read your mail and display it too you out of Gmail. There is nothing to prevent you from using Gmail as file storage but when you want to access your files you should pay for your privlage by watching adds.
When I work by myself or with one or two developers who I know well and get along with(and talk a lot with) We can get by with practicly no specifications even with a coding which lasts several months. You can split up the work by writing header files first and that usually does the trick.Obviously this cuts down on development time.
However I had on several ocasions needed to join in on a project which has been going on for sevral years, and I found it much much easier to start working quickly on the projects with more specs. I am currently on a project run by a man who is quite anal about specs and standards and documentation, and organized testing. The result is that I spend more time dealing with standards then programing but It greatly increases the quality of the code, it makes the throwing out a week of work for incompatebilty impossible, And perhaps most importantly it makes getting aquainted with a diffrent part of the project very easy.
As for EP, I have seen it work well and I have seen it fail miserably. I have not yet gathered enogh expirience with EP to identify what makes it work.
Me.
P.s I am not a US resident, nor did I study in the US.
even with a comfortable GUI, some one with zero computer knowledge will require training. I was just thinking about something similar for my father who has just retired and decided it is about time to learn how to use these damn machines. assuming step by step coaching is not an option (I am not home enough) some written documentation would be usefull, where does one find texts aimed for computer newbies?
All military navigators know how to do it the old fashioned way. A good part of my officer training was spent on navigating without GPS, a compass and a map you saw the other day is all a trained officer needs to get where he is going. my expirience is not with the US army(IDF) but I have reason to believe the US army/navy does things quite the same way.
In my expirience with advocating GNU/linux there is enough Linux hype going around to convince some-one to take a look, and the KDE/Gnome desktops are in themselves easy on the eyes. The problem is to convinvce someone to work at learning the new system. GNU/Linux is diffrent then windows! I hope it will always remain so, but when talking about user friendlyness the problem isn't with switching windows or what your icons look like, it is more about setting up programs. In the GNU/Linux world people still open a text console on a every day basis, Somw of us find it the more convinient way of managing the system. I have several times tried using some automatic configuration tool(usually by Mandrake) and quickly found myself opening emacs in a split window with a man page and a config file.
In many cases the problem is with the GNU/Linux gurus not being able to help with GUI tools. On several ocasions my brother came to me with linux questions how do I do this or that and I knew my way of doing it(Typing in a console window) but I knew very little of which GUI tool will do the job and how.
THG seems to be very very carefull about everything. I have migrated my share of Windows boxes to Linux but never done as carefull and systematic job of preparing for the install. Yet I have been sorry I missed any one of the steps suggested so I say: good job! anybody with mission critical data will probably want to use this guide, a home user converting his old desktop just to see how he likes it can probably find a much simpler guide.
Me.
Re:Still not a justification for ISS
on
Testing Relativity
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Humans are needed when things go wrong sure when everything goes as planned we don't need any human intevention, but since men first looked up to the sky the fact remains big projects always have something go wrong. The robots are not able to improvise. Have you looked at the mars score card which was published on slashdot a while back? unmanned missions tend to fail.
To the best of my knowledge each and every manned mission to space had something go wrong, and a human being on board help fix it. You can't tell your robot to perform an unplanned spacewalk because something went wrong. and you just might want to do just that.
In addition to this, some of the tests we are intrested in doing involve testing how humans can live in space how we react to a micro-gravity enviorment these obviously require sending men and women into space.
Yes there are risks involved but there are many dangerous proffesions out there, cleanning windows on high-rise buildings is a dangerous job, but we still do it, and it gives back to humanity much less then space exploration.
The limmit used to br 56kbs for our modems then came isdn and got us up to 128kbps then came adsl and got us up to several MegaBits per second. all on the same old phone lines.
This latest isn't the same phone lines but it is still copper wiring and find this very impressive.
however I think it is likely to be a while before we need this kind of bandwidth. even though a while back I had a need to send an uncompressed video stream and 100Mbps was not enough.
I pay 99NIS for a 500kbps DSL line, to the government owned monopoly running the phone lines. and 55 NIS for my ISP. a tottal of 154NIS a month which is aproxematly 34$ us.(without looking up exchange rates)
I think some people get better deals(mainly people get 750kbps lines for something similar) But the cheapest around here is probably cables when you do a combo deal of cable tv+broadband. (you don't deal with the monopoly on phone+dsl lines)
ususally for something to be considered news their needs to be something new about it. "SCO maid no empty threats last week" that would be news worth reading about. I am not sure how much extra publicity linux is getting any more, and it seems to me that getting SCO out of the news and into court would be the best strategy.
The generall tecnhique described above is with volnerable scripts which display text which came from URL encoded data, This is one of many methods to display the attackers HTML in an unsuspecting users browser. It is very common for the 404 message on a website to contain the URL which was entered, In the past this was done mostly by copying it as is. This would allow an attack.
In order to hide the attack hex encoding is used in the URL so the victim would not notice the script in the URL.
Still the attacker needs to minimize the length of the URL this causes him to use HTML options such as iframe in order to insert a lot of HTML taken from a diffrent site.
The main point of intrest is that the page appears to be comming from the (probably trusted) server, this can convince the user to do stuff he may not do on the attackers web site, say for example enter credit card info.
Also one could collect cookies this way, the cookies are likely to contain passwords or equivelent informations for sites with user login.
In some forums a user can put scripts in his signature or profile, this allows similar results, but with out sending funny URLs.
DO NOT TRUST USER INPUT, it may harm not only you but also the user, they must be protected.
So we managed to dodge one bullet, forgive me if I am not jumping up and down. Not only could M$ still try to gain controll over google, We all saw problems with google earlier when they fanagle search results for no good reason.
We all love google we use it every day, but it must be replaced. Replacing google has two problems the software and the hardware. The software is by far the easier one, the general techniques that google uses are well known, and the good guys don't have a shortage of good programers.
The Hardware requires money, a lot of it if you want to compete with google. IMO the solution would be to design a system capeable of working efficiently on a google like setup with dedicated linux clusters around the globe, but also capeable of taking advantage of every half stable server someone can donate somewhere on the globe.
Initially search times would be slow, but money can be raised, to add the servers necessary, A free google alternative must and therfor will be produced.
It is simpler than that, by placing very small devices near the gate of a military base one can easily keep track of everything moving in and out.
It is possible to make more soficiticated devices with encryption of some sort, a chap method or syncronized clocks. It is probably possible to make these devices moderatly secure, or even very secure. I don't see this being done.
One would think the military whould find this type of security important. Yet the militarty keeps showing just how stupid large orgenizations can get with out falling apart.
There is no need for you to work next to your computer box, the cables/RF connecting your screen keyboard and mouse to your computer can run a great distance. I have a computer set up in my bedroom with the box in a diffrent room. with a Screen a keyboard a mouse and a USB CDRW drive conviniently available. No nutty modifications, just USB extention cords.
anyone which wants to do just a little bit of research could create a similier list, that list would be of very little use for crackers. But pointing out flaws in widely used products is an important service to society. I give thumbs up to full disclouser. and a big thumbs down to PivX for going the wrong way.
A desktop computer + a laptop. This is more cost effective than multiple monitors because I already have a laptop, and there always is a desktop computer around. I find it very usefull, when writing some code, even on a 19'' monitor it is not convinient to watch the code I am typing, the design document, some other bit of code, a man page, and an email client all open and visible. It is very common to need access to this many diffrent items, and switching windows/virtual desktops, is less convinient than moving your eyes slightly to the right.
Lately I see this argument coming up a whole lot, saying one common application+os makes a weak enviorment.
This has been known for a while, is definetly a valid point. But is linux really so much less monocolture than windows? and will it be able to keep the diversity it has when the public smartens up and makes the switch?
What percentage of the linux systems in the world run an openssh server, and were volnerable lately? and what would have happened to a worm written to exploite this.
Most systems in linux you have several good alternatives commonly used, but not all. And when creating a system for the masses one of the most important things is to be standard. You can't expect everybody to learn how to do everything twice! If linux will ever reach the masses it will have to be a version very similar in behaviou and UI for practicly everyone.
When I destroyed a fat16 hard drive lately,
A friend of mine and myself didn't like
the tools we found, so we wrote our own.
http://www.mit.edu/~raindel/
This tool:
puts together 2 fat tables to make one.
searches for fat chains.
locates directories and builds whatever directory
structure is available.
sooner or later I will get around to make a
general purpose free software tool out
of this, but I have other stuff to do first.
Me.
P.s
Backup is simply not enough.
Slashdot Mirror
After Automated doors and Cell-phonesb rain/
Star Trek seems to continue to predict
technological developments,
this technology was seen in Star Trek
TOS episode: Spock's Brain:
http://homepage.mac.com/m5comp/trekbits/trekpics/
Where we see Spock being controlled by remote controll
using a device placed on his head.
Me.
There are better reasons to get rid of legacy code then lack of programmers.
Any semi decent programmer can learn a new(or old computer language) with out too much diffuclty.
A few months ago a bunch of programmer friends of mine were sent to a COBOL course(for some it was a refresher course) because the company had legacy code to be maintained. COBOL is still a needed skill as are many other aging technolgies but even if there is no fear in skilled personnal vanishing, A company with a bit of foresight will still strive to be rid of legacy code.
The fact is most computer systems become obsolete with in 5 years of making. Patching and repatching ancient code produces complex ugly unmaintanable code with no clear theme behind it, this is obviously bad. And this is the main reason we should get rid of legacy code.
Me
These are remote controll robots,
Which have been around and carrying
lethal weapons for many years
specificly the standard bomb dispusal robots
used by both police and military
are equiped with a rifle,
so that they could attempt to set off
bombs remotly by shooting at them.
Me.
Gmail makes money by showing you adds,
this kind of automated interface is strictly prohibeted. Just like any automated interface to Gmail, If you use Gmail you must not use any automated tool to read your mail and display it too you out of Gmail.
There is nothing to prevent you from using Gmail as file storage but when you want to access your files you should pay for your privlage by watching adds.
Me
It seems to me as if this kind of limitation will take an hour or so of work to get around.
And you will have modified versions of SP2 floating around the web in not time.
technolgical limitations are not going to stop software "piracy" and it is about time micro$oft and friends realise this.
Me
When I work by myself or with one or two developers
who I know well and get along with(and talk a lot with) We can get by with practicly no specifications even with a coding which lasts several months.
You can split up the work by writing header files first and that usually does the trick.Obviously this
cuts down on development time.
However I had on several ocasions needed to join in on a project which has been going on for sevral years, and I found it much much easier to start working quickly on the projects with more specs.
I am currently on a project run by a man who is quite anal about specs and standards and documentation, and organized testing. The result is that I spend more time dealing with standards then programing but It greatly increases the quality of the code, it makes the throwing out a week of work for incompatebilty impossible, And perhaps most importantly it makes getting aquainted with a diffrent part of the project very easy.
As for EP, I have seen it work well and I have seen it fail miserably. I have not yet gathered enogh expirience with EP to identify what makes it work.
Me.
P.s I am not a US resident, nor did I study in the US.
even with a comfortable GUI, some one with
zero computer knowledge will require training.
I was just thinking about something similar for
my father who has just retired and decided it is
about time to learn how to use these damn machines.
assuming step by step coaching is not an option
(I am not home enough) some written documentation
would be usefull, where does one find texts aimed
for computer newbies?
Me.
All military navigators know how to do it the old fashioned way.
A good part of my officer training was spent on navigating without GPS, a compass and a map you saw the other day is all a trained officer needs to get where he is going.
my expirience is not with the US army(IDF) but I have reason to believe the US army/navy does things quite the same way.
Me.
In my expirience with advocating GNU/linux there is enough Linux hype going around to convince some-one to take a look, and the KDE/Gnome desktops are in themselves easy on the eyes. The problem is to convinvce someone to work at learning the new system.
GNU/Linux is diffrent then windows! I hope it will always remain so, but when talking about user friendlyness the problem isn't with switching windows or what your icons look like, it is more about setting up programs.
In the GNU/Linux world people still open a text console on a every day basis, Somw of us find it the more convinient way of managing the system.
I have several times tried using some automatic configuration tool(usually by Mandrake) and quickly found myself opening emacs in a split window with a man page and a config file.
In many cases the problem is with the GNU/Linux gurus not being able to help with GUI tools. On several ocasions my brother came to me with linux questions how do I do this or that and I knew my way of doing it(Typing in a console window) but I knew very little of which GUI tool will do the job and how.
These are the major issues in GNU/Linux UI
Me
THG seems to be very very carefull about everything. I have migrated my share of Windows boxes to Linux but never done as carefull and systematic job of preparing for the install. Yet I have been sorry I missed any one of the steps suggested so I say: good job!
anybody with mission critical data will probably want to use this guide, a home user converting his old desktop just to see how he likes it can probably find a much simpler guide.
Me.
Humans are needed when things go wrong
sure when everything goes as planned we don't
need any human intevention, but since men first looked up to the sky the fact remains big projects always have something go wrong.
The robots are not able to improvise. Have you looked at the mars score card which was published on slashdot a while back? unmanned missions tend to fail.
To the best of my knowledge each and every manned mission to space had something go wrong, and a human being on board help fix it. You can't tell your robot to perform an unplanned spacewalk because something went wrong. and you just might want to do just that.
In addition to this, some of the tests we are intrested in doing involve testing how humans can live in space how we react to a micro-gravity enviorment these obviously require sending men and women into space.
Yes there are risks involved but there are many dangerous proffesions out there, cleanning windows on high-rise buildings is a dangerous job, but we still do it, and it gives back to humanity much less then space exploration.
Me.
The limmit used to br 56kbs for our modems
then came isdn and got us up to 128kbps
then came adsl and got us up to several MegaBits per second. all on the same old phone lines.
This latest isn't the same phone lines
but it is still copper wiring and find this very impressive.
however I think it is likely to be a while before
we need this kind of bandwidth.
even though a while back I had a need to send an
uncompressed video stream and 100Mbps was not enough.
Me.
I pay 99NIS for a 500kbps DSL line, to the
government owned monopoly running the phone
lines. and 55 NIS for my ISP. a tottal of 154NIS
a month which is aproxematly 34$ us.(without
looking up exchange rates)
I think some people get better deals(mainly people
get 750kbps lines for something similar)
But the cheapest around here is probably cables
when you do a combo deal of cable tv+broadband.
(you don't deal with the monopoly on phone+dsl lines)
Me
ususally for something to be considered news their needs to be something new about it.
"SCO maid no empty threats last week" that would be news worth reading about.
I am not sure how much extra publicity linux is getting any more, and it seems to me that getting SCO out of the news and into court would be the best strategy.
Meir.
The generall tecnhique described above is with
volnerable scripts which display text which came
from URL encoded data, This is one of many methods
to display the attackers HTML in an unsuspecting
users browser.
It is very common for the 404 message on a website to contain the URL which was entered, In the past this was done mostly by copying it as is. This would allow an attack.
In order to hide the attack hex encoding is used in the URL so the victim would not notice the script in the URL.
Still the attacker needs to minimize the length of the URL this causes him to use HTML options
such as iframe in order to insert a lot of HTML
taken from a diffrent site.
The main point of intrest is that the page appears to be comming from the (probably trusted) server, this can convince the user to do stuff he may not do on the attackers web site, say for example enter credit card info.
Also one could collect cookies this way, the cookies are likely to contain passwords or equivelent informations for sites with user login.
In some forums a user can put scripts in his signature or profile, this allows similar results,
but with out sending funny URLs.
DO NOT TRUST USER INPUT, it may harm not only you
but also the user, they must be protected.
Me.
SO I figure they must be doing something
funny on the way. I would not recommend using
such a system, I will stick to 2Kbit RSA thank you.
Me
So we managed to dodge one bullet, forgive me if I am not jumping up and down. Not only could M$ still try to gain controll over google, We all saw problems with google earlier when they fanagle search results for no good reason.
We all love google we use it every day, but it must be replaced. Replacing google has two problems the software and the hardware. The software is by far the easier one, the general techniques that google uses are well known, and the good guys don't have a shortage of good programers.
The Hardware requires money, a lot of it if you want to compete with google. IMO the solution would be to design a system capeable of working efficiently on a google like setup with dedicated linux clusters around the globe, but also capeable of taking advantage of every half stable server someone can donate somewhere on the globe.
Initially search times would be slow, but money can be raised, to add the servers necessary, A free google alternative must and therfor will be produced.
Me.
and even then it would be tricky, and me
be circumvented.
Whatermarking is based on taking advantage of some redundancy in the data marked. If ypu are aware
of the redundancy you can elliminate it.
signing code is much more tricky than signing sound
or images, and they havn't figured out yet how
to make any of these tamper proof.
probably simply adding more optimizations would erase most watermarkings.
Me.
It is simpler than that, by placing very small
devices near the gate of a military base one can
easily keep track of everything moving in and out.
It is possible to make more soficiticated devices
with encryption of some sort, a chap method or
syncronized clocks. It is probably possible to
make these devices moderatly secure, or even
very secure. I don't see this being done.
One would think the military whould find this type
of security important. Yet the militarty keeps showing just how stupid large orgenizations can get with out falling apart.
Me.
There is no need for you to work next to
your computer box, the cables/RF connecting your
screen keyboard and mouse to your computer
can run a great distance. I have a computer set up
in my bedroom with the box in a diffrent room.
with a Screen a keyboard a mouse and a USB CDRW
drive conviniently available.
No nutty modifications, just USB extention cords.
Me.
anyone which wants to do just a little bit of research could create a similier list, that list would be of very little use for crackers. But pointing out flaws in widely used products is an important service to society.
I give thumbs up to full disclouser.
and a big thumbs down to PivX for going the wrong way.
Me.
no reason to reboot just because I repartioned
the Hard drive. it should be as simple as:
unmount repartition, reload table. mount.
I do not enjoy reboots.
Me.
A desktop computer + a laptop.
This is more cost effective than multiple monitors because I already have a laptop, and there always is a desktop computer around.
I find it very usefull, when writing some code,
even on a 19'' monitor it is not convinient to watch the code I am typing, the design document, some other bit of code, a man page, and an email client all open and visible.
It is very common to need access to this many diffrent items, and switching windows/virtual desktops, is less convinient than moving your eyes slightly to the right.
I am not surprised.
Me.
Lately I see this argument coming up a whole lot, saying one common application+os makes a weak enviorment.
This has been known for a while, is definetly a valid point. But is linux really so much less monocolture than windows? and will it be able to keep the diversity it has when the public smartens up and makes the switch?
What percentage of the linux systems in the world run an openssh server, and were volnerable lately? and what would have happened to a worm written to exploite this.
Most systems in linux you have several good alternatives commonly used, but not all. And when creating a system for the masses one of the most important things is to be standard.
You can't expect everybody to learn how to do everything twice!
If linux will ever reach the masses it will have to be a version very similar in behaviou and UI for practicly everyone.
This leads to the dreaded monocolture enviorment.
Me.
When I destroyed a fat16 hard drive lately, A friend of mine and myself didn't like the tools we found, so we wrote our own. http://www.mit.edu/~raindel/ This tool: puts together 2 fat tables to make one. searches for fat chains. locates directories and builds whatever directory structure is available. sooner or later I will get around to make a general purpose free software tool out of this, but I have other stuff to do first. Me. P.s Backup is simply not enough.