Some of us don't think those problems will ever be solved while we remain in our current form. We're an argumentative, short-sighted bunch of screeching apes (apologies to creationists). We seem to live in a universe that's hostile to life and intelligence, (particularly surrounding the white house event horizon).
IMHO, the sooner we can practically disperse a bit and reduce our risk the better. Having said that, I agree that if we want manned missions to Mars, it should not be at the expense of real, existing space science.
A) You don't have to compile anything. But you can if you want to. And you can forget about all those dependency DLL-hell issues too that you get in Windows, if you use a modern distro with good package management. Then you just fire up the GUI, put a "tick" in the box for the software you want, and it gets it for you and installs it. It's easier than having to trawl through someone's web site for the right installer, manually download it, manually run the setup. And then find the installer won't remove the software properly when you want to get rid of it or find it needs some obscure runtime DLL you never heard of and don't know where to get.
B) I do take exception to the "force me to drop to the command line" bit. Why would you need to drop to the command line to edit a text file, assuming you needed to do such a thing? I do drop down to the command line quite frequently though - it's good for batch operations and scripting things together, but I use a graphical text editor if I need to edit text - I'm not a masochist! Having said that, I haven't had to edit a text file on linux for system administration reasons for nearly a year. It's not a constant occurrence, not anymore. Hardware - all auto detected on installation. All devices I've plugged in have just worked (no need to trawl manufacturer sites for the latest driver). GUIs for all common system administration tasks. As far as windows goes, anytime I have to directly edit the registry, you as a developer... oh, never mind;)
C) Help is better these days, but I agree is still patchy in places. And arrogant people do still exist on some of the forums (hopefully getting fewer all the time). But then, Windows help files were never that good either, and I don't recall getting any help from Microsoft unless I paid for it. Can't really think of a system where the help and service has been uniformly excellent.
The truth is, linux is not the system you are describing anymore. Maybe 5 years ago - it's come on a long way. Why not download a bootable Ubuntu Live CD and give it a go, just so you know what's it's like these days.
AFAIK, no they are not equivalent statements. There is no absolute frame of reference, but this does not mean that acceleration is symmetric like this. For example, if the entire universe accelerated away from you as you floated in your spaceship, would you experience a g-force pushing you to the floor of the ship? Acceleration of one entity is not equivalent to the acceleration of everything else - this is something that changes your frame of reference and is fairly important in understanding why the twins paradox isn't a paradox. But maybe a real physicist can explain this better than I can...
The GPL has nothing to do with "hobby" developers or whether anyone makes money out of the code. Commercial organisations are free to make money out of GPL code. Commercial organisations are free to contribute to GPL code. They are free to create GPLd code from scratch. A lot of GPLd software out there is written by paid developers in commercial organizations right now.
What commercial organisations (or anyone else, for that matter) cannot do under the GPL is to modify the code and distribute the resulting software, but to not pass on those code modifications to everyone else.
This makes the "our secret code is our secret sauce" software business model impossible for GPLd code, but the GPL does not prevent you from selling GPLd software. But since your users could get the same software for free, you might find you have very few customers! Which is why most commercial organizations dealing with GPLd software sell support and other value-add on top, not the code itself, although they can do that if they wish.
That sounds almost plausible, but I still don't believe it. I've spent a year or two studying cryptanalysis. Fourier transforms on encrypted data have never featured in any modern cryptanalytic approaches I've heard of.
The whole point of encryption is to minimise those statistical artifacts. By encrypting a ciphertext again, you are only applying more entropy to data that already appears quite random. If you don't already have any idea of the underlying plaintext, comparing one ciphertext with a re-encrypted version of the same ciphertext should not reveal anything at all about the original encryption scheme.
I'm afraid I need some links to real papers about using fourier transforms in cryptanalysis to accept this. I've googled for them myself, but I can't find any.
I agree that the phrase doesn't define insanity. I do remember from my first degree, which touched on some psychology, a quote from Lawrence Kubie:
"The measure of health is flexibility, the freedom to learn from experience...to be influenced by reasonable arguments...and especially the freedom to cease when sated. The essence of illness is the freezing of behavior into unalterable and insatiable patterns."
Statistically speaking, the encrypted data isn't random it's pseudo random.
Well, yes! Is there such a thing as truly random?
By re-encrypting it with a known schema, you may be able to identify the original schema by observing the patterns of data shifting between the old & new files.
Please provide some links for this; it sounds deeply wrong to me. How would re-encrypting the already encrypted plaintext allow you to observe data shifting, when the point of encryption is to obscure the relationship between the plaintext and the ciphertext?
Only because we have inherited OS security designs that run all processes with the full rights of the logged in user. From simpler, more trusting days.
There are many things OS security could do to massively reduce susceptibility to viruses, if we could start fresh, anyway.
Brilliant! So if I get some encrypted data that was only encrypted ONCE, all I have to do to make it easier to cryptanalyse is to encrypt it again myself! That will make the encrypted data more vulnerable, right?
Have you been off line for the past decade? Chinese attacks on US networks aren't some nebulous possibility; they've been going on for years. Quite a few articles about it have shown up right here on Slashdot.
The article is about investing in cyberwar attack and defense in general, not about launching specific attacks. Yes, Chinese hackers have been targeting US systems and UK systems (and other western nations) for some time. And I imagine that there are US and UK hackers targeting Chinese systems. This is not a declaration of war; this is just business as usual.
As for the US's military spending, that annoys me because it gets blown kicking over some dictator in the Middle East or chasing "terrorists" who kill less people than cars, instead of preparing for and dealing with real threats.
Actually, the printer virus is a hoax. But it may have played some part in the overall information war strategy, in terms of psychological warfare / propaganda. Information warfare is as old as war itself - just read the Art of War. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/03/10/one_printe r_one_virus_one/
Hmmmm - if any other country invests in its military capability, it's equivalent to an attack on the US? That's got to be the most fearful stance I've heard in a long time, and especially perplexing coming from someone in the world's biggest military spender, by some very large margin.
Do you not think it better to trade with countries and develop strong relations with them? You have another strategy?
I've discussed these same issues in another Slashdot thread with another user with that old 'geeks only' misconception. He pointed to the sourceforge website for Gaim as an example of how difficumt it is to locate and install Linux apps. I pointed him at This Screen Shot [glaci.com] to show how easy it is in Ubuntu.
I've encountered the "it's harder to install software in Linux; where's the setup.exe?" before from Windows users. It's almost hilarious to hear these complaints, as it's so much easier in linux than windows, but to be fair, everyone just thinks that installing software is a manual process. So they try to install software "the windows way" in linux, (locate vendor web site, find downloads, download a file, install, reboot, uninstall, download the correct file, install, reboot, uninstall, login as adminstrator, reinstall, etc. etc.) and then bitch that there's no setup program, etc. If we could only get it through people's heads that linux generally has a kind of "iTunes for software" - you don't have to do it all yourself - just tick the things you want and away you go.
Wow, you've drunk the Microsoft Kool-Aid. It's true, Microsoft has argued that Windows didn't need a decent command line because the GUI was supposed to make it irrelevant. The command line was seen as a vestige of the awful DOS days. Command-line bad... GUI good was the mantra.
Now they've rediscovered the fact that GUIs are generally good at making common tasks easy, and are certainly easier for casual users to pick up, but pretty bad when you have very specific requirements, or you need to chain several things together. Like for systems administrators. Which is why Microsoft are finally releasing PowerShell.
So, now that Microsoft also thinks a powerful command line is a good thing, I guess there's no reason not to switch to linux?
FYI, I know perfectly well how science operates. I was not making any personal judgement on whether global warming is real, caused by human activity, or by the flying spaghetti monster.
I was attacking the position (hopefully with a little humour) that global warming is all FUD. That position seems untenable; that a large majority of the world's scientists would all conspire to promote falsehood. They may be entirely wrong, but the majority are in broad agreement.
Given that the consequences of not acting on this information may be disastrous, the precautionary principle suggests that we listen to them. Taken to its logical extreme, you would be advocating never acting on any scientific advice, as it *might* be wrong.
Damn that global conspiracy of nearly 100% of the world's climate scientists! Even the politicians are finally getting in on it, after decades of dedicated FUD spreading by those evil scientists. They must be laughing, laughing I say, all the way to the... err...
A cynic might suggest that the people writing open source software are the ones who are making their daytime living working for a proprietary-solutions vendor and spend their nights tearing down the very house they live in. And that if open source replaced proprietary solutions, these people would not be able to make a daytime living that supports their night time hobby.
If the world really moved over to an open source model rather than a proprietary model (presumably because open-source software was more compelling), then the world would still need software, and so would still pay for it. And there would still be a lot of in-house projects (which account for a lot of development jobs).
So I don't think there's any danger of programmers coding themselves out of business - just a danger to a particular software business model.
Exactly, that's obvious. But what everyone seems to have missed is that apparently it is American laws that do not apply inside American borders. As long as it's for your own good, to protect you from bad people and all.
Linux isn't my favorite OS, and it's admittedly a young man's attempt at ripping off Hurd, not Windows NT. Yes, the GUI of Linux is ripped off of Windows, but that was ripped off of Mac anyway (which in turn was an improvement on Xerox).
Linux had nothing to do with Hurd. The inspiration for the linux kernel was to make an x86 version of Minix, not to copy the Hurd kernel, which has a radically different architecture. It was combined with the other GNU userland tools, which Hurd also uses. Also not really true to say that the GUI is ripped off windows either - X and Motif were around long before windows, and lots of different GUIs have been built that work on top of X. KDE is possibly the most similar to windows (but can be made to look radically different), Gnome less so, and the many others even less. They all use windows, icons, menus and pointers... but that's from Xerox.
You beat me to it. Yes, listen. Two ears, one mouth, and all that.
I had a conversation recently with another techy at work about how to communicate difficult issues to management. His method is to write a really long email, covering all of the technical pros and cons for all the options, so the manager can make the best decision. My approach is to write a very short summary of the main business issues, with one or two recommended solutions, and an offer to explain things further if need be. My colleague is pretty successful at work, so I can't say my approach is always better, but it works for me.
I agree that Bill Gates can hardly be called a moron, and he may indeed be proved right about Tablet PCs... time will tell. But I do disagree that Microsoft's operating system "led to the rise of the personal computer". I was using personal computers before Microsoft even existed.
Whether it was Microsoft or some other company, I'm 100% sure that personal computers would have arisen - IBM invented the PC, and were looking for an operating system to put on it. Microsoft were in the right place at the right time, and Bill Gates had what it took to take full advantage of that. If not Microsoft, then another company.
I strongly disagree that Linux would not have arisen if it weren't for Microsoft. How do you make that link?
If it makes you feel any better, I *am* a geek, I've installed linux many times, and I had to go back and forward at least 5 times before I was comfortable with what was about to happen in the ubuntu disk partitioning part of the install, including doing quite a bit of googling. There is a definite lack of information on what is about to happen to what.
Most people don't install windows either (and installing windows on a machine that already has another operating system is a real pain). To get people to switch, linux is going to have to be a whole lot better than windows, not just as good. IMHO, it's a lot better in some areas already - but the partitioning part of the install experience is definitely something that needs some radical improvement.
No, it just means they didn't give a damn about security until it started to look like it might hurt their bottom line. At which point they discovered that adding good security to an architectural mess is quite hard.
A good enough reason to switch to linux anyway, IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
You said what I said in a much longer way, but in a much better way!
Some of us don't think those problems will ever be solved while we remain in our current form. We're an argumentative, short-sighted bunch of screeching apes (apologies to creationists). We seem to live in a universe that's hostile to life and intelligence, (particularly surrounding the white house event horizon).
IMHO, the sooner we can practically disperse a bit and reduce our risk the better. Having said that, I agree that if we want manned missions to Mars, it should not be at the expense of real, existing space science.
You can safely assume that they are already reading them; no need to incriminate yourself to prove that.
Good news! It's ready!
;)
A) You don't have to compile anything. But you can if you want to. And you can forget about all those dependency DLL-hell issues too that you get in Windows, if you use a modern distro with good package management. Then you just fire up the GUI, put a "tick" in the box for the software you want, and it gets it for you and installs it. It's easier than having to trawl through someone's web site for the right installer, manually download it, manually run the setup. And then find the installer won't remove the software properly when you want to get rid of it or find it needs some obscure runtime DLL you never heard of and don't know where to get.
B) I do take exception to the "force me to drop to the command line" bit. Why would you need to drop to the command line to edit a text file, assuming you needed to do such a thing? I do drop down to the command line quite frequently though - it's good for batch operations and scripting things together, but I use a graphical text editor if I need to edit text - I'm not a masochist! Having said that, I haven't had to edit a text file on linux for system administration reasons for nearly a year. It's not a constant occurrence, not anymore. Hardware - all auto detected on installation. All devices I've plugged in have just worked (no need to trawl manufacturer sites for the latest driver). GUIs for all common system administration tasks. As far as windows goes, anytime I have to directly edit the registry, you as a developer... oh, never mind
C) Help is better these days, but I agree is still patchy in places. And arrogant people do still exist on some of the forums (hopefully getting fewer all the time). But then, Windows help files were never that good either, and I don't recall getting any help from Microsoft unless I paid for it. Can't really think of a system where the help and service has been uniformly excellent.
The truth is, linux is not the system you are describing anymore. Maybe 5 years ago - it's come on a long way. Why not download a bootable Ubuntu Live CD and give it a go, just so you know what's it's like these days.
AFAIK, no they are not equivalent statements. There is no absolute frame of reference, but this does not mean that acceleration is symmetric like this. For example, if the entire universe accelerated away from you as you floated in your spaceship, would you experience a g-force pushing you to the floor of the ship? Acceleration of one entity is not equivalent to the acceleration of everything else - this is something that changes your frame of reference and is fairly important in understanding why the twins paradox isn't a paradox. But maybe a real physicist can explain this better than I can...
The GPL has nothing to do with "hobby" developers or whether anyone makes money out of the code. Commercial organisations are free to make money out of GPL code. Commercial organisations are free to contribute to GPL code. They are free to create GPLd code from scratch. A lot of GPLd software out there is written by paid developers in commercial organizations right now.
What commercial organisations (or anyone else, for that matter) cannot do under the GPL is to modify the code and distribute the resulting software, but to not pass on those code modifications to everyone else.
This makes the "our secret code is our secret sauce" software business model impossible for GPLd code, but the GPL does not prevent you from selling GPLd software. But since your users could get the same software for free, you might find you have very few customers! Which is why most commercial organizations dealing with GPLd software sell support and other value-add on top, not the code itself, although they can do that if they wish.
That sounds almost plausible, but I still don't believe it. I've spent a year or two studying cryptanalysis. Fourier transforms on encrypted data have never featured in any modern cryptanalytic approaches I've heard of.
The whole point of encryption is to minimise those statistical artifacts. By encrypting a ciphertext again, you are only applying more entropy to data that already appears quite random. If you don't already have any idea of the underlying plaintext, comparing one ciphertext with a re-encrypted version of the same ciphertext should not reveal anything at all about the original encryption scheme.
I'm afraid I need some links to real papers about using fourier transforms in cryptanalysis to accept this. I've googled for them myself, but I can't find any.
I agree that the phrase doesn't define insanity. I do remember from my first degree, which touched on some psychology, a quote from Lawrence Kubie:
"The measure of health is flexibility, the freedom to learn from experience...to be influenced by reasonable arguments...and especially the freedom to cease when sated. The essence of illness is the freezing of behavior into unalterable and insatiable patterns."
Statistically speaking, the encrypted data isn't random it's pseudo random.
Well, yes! Is there such a thing as truly random?
By re-encrypting it with a known schema, you may be able to identify the original schema by observing the patterns of data shifting between the old & new files.
Please provide some links for this; it sounds deeply wrong to me. How would re-encrypting the already encrypted plaintext allow you to observe data shifting, when the point of encryption is to obscure the relationship between the plaintext and the ciphertext?
Only because we have inherited OS security designs that run all processes with the full rights of the logged in user. From simpler, more trusting days.
There are many things OS security could do to massively reduce susceptibility to viruses, if we could start fresh, anyway.
Brilliant! So if I get some encrypted data that was only encrypted ONCE, all I have to do to make it easier to cryptanalyse is to encrypt it again myself! That will make the encrypted data more vulnerable, right?
Have you been off line for the past decade? Chinese attacks on US networks aren't some nebulous possibility; they've been going on for years. Quite a few articles about it have shown up right here on Slashdot.
The article is about investing in cyberwar attack and defense in general, not about launching specific attacks. Yes, Chinese hackers have been targeting US systems and UK systems (and other western nations) for some time. And I imagine that there are US and UK hackers targeting Chinese systems. This is not a declaration of war; this is just business as usual.
As for the US's military spending, that annoys me because it gets blown kicking over some dictator in the Middle East or chasing "terrorists" who kill less people than cars, instead of preparing for and dealing with real threats.
I don't disagree with any of that!Actually, the printer virus is a hoax. But it may have played some part in the overall information war strategy, in terms of psychological warfare / propaganda. Information warfare is as old as war itself - just read the Art of War. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/03/10/one_printe r_one_virus_one/
Hmmmm - if any other country invests in its military capability, it's equivalent to an attack on the US? That's got to be the most fearful stance I've heard in a long time, and especially perplexing coming from someone in the world's biggest military spender, by some very large margin.
Do you not think it better to trade with countries and develop strong relations with them? You have another strategy?
I've discussed these same issues in another Slashdot thread with another user with that old 'geeks only' misconception. He pointed to the sourceforge website for Gaim as an example of how difficumt it is to locate and install Linux apps. I pointed him at This Screen Shot [glaci.com] to show how easy it is in Ubuntu.
I've encountered the "it's harder to install software in Linux; where's the setup.exe?" before from Windows users. It's almost hilarious to hear these complaints, as it's so much easier in linux than windows, but to be fair, everyone just thinks that installing software is a manual process. So they try to install software "the windows way" in linux, (locate vendor web site, find downloads, download a file, install, reboot, uninstall, download the correct file, install, reboot, uninstall, login as adminstrator, reinstall, etc. etc.) and then bitch that there's no setup program, etc. If we could only get it through people's heads that linux generally has a kind of "iTunes for software" - you don't have to do it all yourself - just tick the things you want and away you go.
Wow, you've drunk the Microsoft Kool-Aid. It's true, Microsoft has argued that Windows didn't need a decent command line because the GUI was supposed to make it irrelevant. The command line was seen as a vestige of the awful DOS days. Command-line bad... GUI good was the mantra.
Now they've rediscovered the fact that GUIs are generally good at making common tasks easy, and are certainly easier for casual users to pick up, but pretty bad when you have very specific requirements, or you need to chain several things together. Like for systems administrators. Which is why Microsoft are finally releasing PowerShell.
So, now that Microsoft also thinks a powerful command line is a good thing, I guess there's no reason not to switch to linux?
FYI, I know perfectly well how science operates. I was not making any personal judgement on whether global warming is real, caused by human activity, or by the flying spaghetti monster.
I was attacking the position (hopefully with a little humour) that global warming is all FUD. That position seems untenable; that a large majority of the world's scientists would all conspire to promote falsehood. They may be entirely wrong, but the majority are in broad agreement.
Given that the consequences of not acting on this information may be disastrous, the precautionary principle suggests that we listen to them. Taken to its logical extreme, you would be advocating never acting on any scientific advice, as it *might* be wrong.
Damn that global conspiracy of nearly 100% of the world's climate scientists! Even the politicians are finally getting in on it, after decades of dedicated FUD spreading by those evil scientists. They must be laughing, laughing I say, all the way to the... err...
A cynic might suggest that the people writing open source software are the ones who are making their daytime living working for a proprietary-solutions vendor and spend their nights tearing down the very house they live in. And that if open source replaced proprietary solutions, these people would not be able to make a daytime living that supports their night time hobby.
If the world really moved over to an open source model rather than a proprietary model (presumably because open-source software was more compelling), then the world would still need software, and so would still pay for it. And there would still be a lot of in-house projects (which account for a lot of development jobs).
So I don't think there's any danger of programmers coding themselves out of business - just a danger to a particular software business model.
Exactly, that's obvious. But what everyone seems to have missed is that apparently it is American laws that do not apply inside American borders. As long as it's for your own good, to protect you from bad people and all.
Linux isn't my favorite OS, and it's admittedly a young man's attempt at ripping off Hurd, not Windows NT. Yes, the GUI of Linux is ripped off of Windows, but that was ripped off of Mac anyway (which in turn was an improvement on Xerox).
Linux had nothing to do with Hurd. The inspiration for the linux kernel was to make an x86 version of Minix, not to copy the Hurd kernel, which has a radically different architecture. It was combined with the other GNU userland tools, which Hurd also uses. Also not really true to say that the GUI is ripped off windows either - X and Motif were around long before windows, and lots of different GUIs have been built that work on top of X. KDE is possibly the most similar to windows (but can be made to look radically different), Gnome less so, and the many others even less. They all use windows, icons, menus and pointers... but that's from Xerox.
You beat me to it. Yes, listen. Two ears, one mouth, and all that.
I had a conversation recently with another techy at work about how to communicate difficult issues to management. His method is to write a really long email, covering all of the technical pros and cons for all the options, so the manager can make the best decision. My approach is to write a very short summary of the main business issues, with one or two recommended solutions, and an offer to explain things further if need be. My colleague is pretty successful at work, so I can't say my approach is always better, but it works for me.
I agree that Bill Gates can hardly be called a moron, and he may indeed be proved right about Tablet PCs... time will tell. But I do disagree that Microsoft's operating system "led to the rise of the personal computer". I was using personal computers before Microsoft even existed.
Whether it was Microsoft or some other company, I'm 100% sure that personal computers would have arisen - IBM invented the PC, and were looking for an operating system to put on it. Microsoft were in the right place at the right time, and Bill Gates had what it took to take full advantage of that. If not Microsoft, then another company.
I strongly disagree that Linux would not have arisen if it weren't for Microsoft. How do you make that link?
If it makes you feel any better, I *am* a geek, I've installed linux many times, and I had to go back and forward at least 5 times before I was comfortable with what was about to happen in the ubuntu disk partitioning part of the install, including doing quite a bit of googling. There is a definite lack of information on what is about to happen to what.
Most people don't install windows either (and installing windows on a machine that already has another operating system is a real pain). To get people to switch, linux is going to have to be a whole lot better than windows, not just as good. IMHO, it's a lot better in some areas already - but the partitioning part of the install experience is definitely something that needs some radical improvement.
No, it just means they didn't give a damn about security until it started to look like it might hurt their bottom line. At which point they discovered that adding good security to an architectural mess is quite hard.
A good enough reason to switch to linux anyway, IMHO.