Case One: We were looking for a bug tracking solution and we had short-listed the contenders to
a choice between Bugzilla, BugTracker and FogBugz. Although FogBugz was a superior product BugTracker won
because we could modify it to suit our needs. We didn't like Bugzilla because of it's clumsy interface and the fact
we'd need an extra machine to run it.
We saved money on the licenses and we got something we could modify and maintain ourselves. Free software at it's best.
Case Two: We were paying through the nose for anti-virus subscription and software. We all know that anti-virus software
takes a lot of real estate. Most have *HORRIBLE* splash screens that no-one is interested
in seeing and they tend to slow the machine considerably.
Our solution to the problem to the anti-virus problem was the Windows version of ClamAV. It has a nice outlook plugin
that protects from e-mail based virus and we set a schedule to scan the disk every night. There is no "resident shield"
in ClamAV but to be honest they rarely do any good anyway.
My former boss works at a much larger company (we're still good friends) and he's deployed the strategy across a company
with around thirty machines and saved a fortune.
So yes, companies can save money using Open source. The hard part is convincing them that a not-for-profit organisation can deliver quality products. I find ten minutes with Firefox usually does the trick.
How about if they ran it through an image filter like "sharpen" or "unsharp mask"?
I couldn't tell you exactly how they work but I know there are algorithms that can maintain the integrity of the data even when the image is resized, cropped, sharpened, blurred etc.
Broadly, they work by changing more visible aspected of the image that aren't easily destroyed by these operations. The technology is used extensively in digital watermarking, where the watermark must survive all kinds of abuse.
Unfortuantely, due to the level of extra protection that is required to defeat these attack the amount of information you can communicate drops dramatically. To uniquely identify an image you don't need much capacity but for anything that needs even slightly more capacity it is probably unsuitable.
Rather than worry about trying to detect stegnography, any image posting service could just arbitrarily set all of the least significant bits of jpgs to "1" as part of the image posting process. It might slightly degrade the image, but it would also erase any potential encoded messages.
Not really, the best stego packages use error correcting codes to help mitigate this kind of attack. Some stego packages don't work by using the LSB but by swapping adjacent pixels. The cleaning of the LSB would have no real impact on this type of stego.
So basically they're showing you how to use a photo storage service to store private data. I think this is immoral and is probably against the terms of service.
Flikr could probably detect the changes anyway. When you do stego on Jpegs you do it by altering the coefficients on the waveforms. The problem is these coefficients usually conform to a gaussian distribution and by packing so much data in to the jpeg you're going to screw up that distribution.
To hide truly undetectable data in there is going to be difficult and the channel capacity wont be all too great. It's a clever idea but I'm against it. If you want storage, buy a web-hosting package and FTP it up tot there.
If Psycopathy has a genetic component, then has it survived natural selection. Surely in ancient times psycopathy would not have got you far. You'd likely be expelled from a society or likely killed.
It's too common to be a mutation because genetic diseases often have percentage rates of 0.01% or below.
The article claims that the new law will also make computer systems more vulnerable to hackers,
according to some digital privacy and civil liberties groups.
Oh it's a whole metric-fuckton worse than that. The problem the FCC, FBI
(insert your favourite alphabet agency here) is that they make the assumption
that the criminals that will be using VOIP will COMPLY with FCC.
Voice/IP isn't like traditional the traditional telephone system at all.
I can't install my own private telephone network with encrypted lines but with V/IP this
is fairly easy to achieve. What's worse, what criminal is really going to open up their private
P2P telephone so the government can tap them?
So the measure has absolutely no effect on our ability to catch criminals. Instead we subject
the communication of ordinary law abiding citizens to the possibility of them having their perfectly
legitimate conversations compromised, be it by a l33t|st or corupt police officers alike.
The life of hardware manufacturer is tough. You need enough DRM to convince copyright owners
to develop/author for your platform yet it's DRM needs to be flawed enough so Joe Six-pack can easily
circumvent it.
The former insures there's enough content on your platform to make it an enticing to a consumer. The latter
makes your platform doubly as enticing because your customers don't have to spend an insane amount of money getting
a large body of content for your platform; they'll just copy it.
The problem is that Sony just can't make the DRM flawed enough to capture public interest because their media
division just wont stand for it. So once again, someone else will come along and give the public what they want:
media that's easily copied.
Is there precident for this? Absolutely, Why did the Sony Playstation crush the N64?
Because you can copy easily for the Playstation. Copying a cartridge is just too
much hastle to be worth it. Even better it was trivial to chip a playstation so
you could get loads of games for the price of a few CDs.
Rather than learning this lesson they ignored it. Before the IPod, Sony products were the market leaders
in portable music. Sony could have got an Ipod like device to market first but the Sony record label were
scared so it never happened: Apple did it instead.
Far from being a match made in heaven, the symbiosis of Sony media and Sony technology
is becoming increasingly schizophrenic and it is punishing them right where it hurts any company:
their bottom line.
How would the EU enforce breaking up a United States company?
It woudl have no power to enforce it directly but it could ban Microsoft from selling anything to the EU unless it divides. That's a pretty big club to hit them with.
Microsoft, you're fucking stupid. The EU are going to
murder you over this and rest assure the settlement with the EU
wont be as lenient as the last time. I think it would silly for prosecution
to demand anything less than the division of the company for a repeat offense.
And I think that this time they'll get it.
Microsoft, you must understand three things.
You are a monopoly. This monopoly means you have to tread very carefully not to fall foul of competition law.
Building an OS that removes your only crediable competition in that sector of the market is not a wise move.
The United states of America is not the same as the EU. Most of the EU is ruled by governments elected
by proportional representation. This means that the EU political center is much further to the left than the US.
Most believe in free enterprise but only if it is not unchecked; they're not going to be as receptive to your
excuses as the republican party.
European governments are starting to wise up that transfering as much as 0.3% of GDP to the United States
in Windows licenses is not a smart move. To put the size of this figure in to perspective, the United Kingdom
spends 0.3% of GDP on it's transport infrastructure. As a result, Governments are looking at OSS seriously and are
likely to want to protect the future of it.
I am confident of one thing: the future of Microsoft will not be dictated by how well it fares in the US market but how well
it fares in the EU market. It simply wont make sales in India, China or the South American countries. Linux is quickly becoming
intrenched in these countries because these companies can't really afford to prop up the American economy. In many ways,
the fact that they're so poor means they have to be smarter with their cash.Something that's better for us all.
Not all information is created equal. The information that
"wants to be free" is information that adds meaningfully to the sum
of human knowledge. Whether that's an algorithm to quickly sort large amounts of information,
a law of physics, or a new economic model.. these types of information want to be free.
Information that "doesn't want to be free" is the kind that doesn't give anything meaningful to
humanity at large or the kind that bring me to some harm if released. If the information in question doesn't
pass this test then it's okay to keep it secret. What porn I bought yesterday is not really of interest to
anybody except me and therefore, under my model, this information is best kept secret. Other secret information, like passwords,
credit-card numbers and social security number are outright danger to me if they are released to the public.
We have to be careful what line we tread. In the US, companies like choicepoint are collecting huge amounts of data and yet
even though the data is about us, it does not belong to us. This causes huge problems for us because Choicepoint doesn't
really care if this data gets out. What skin is it off Choicepoints back? Will it lose sales? These data collection companies
need to CARE about keeping our data SAFE. The only way to do that is make them liable for incredible sums of money if that
data ends up in the wrong hands.
Privacy is under attack and we need to defend it. A 150 years ago, I could walk out in to a field and have a private conversation and
be sure it was private. These days, there could be lazer microphones and bugs. A 150 years ago, I could disappear on a horse
for a couple of months and nobody would know where I am. These days they can find you with your mobile phone and CCTV. A 150 years ago
you could build a house and not care about somebody using spy-satelites to check for building code violations.
Privacy and Liberty are not at odds, they are one in the same. Being free is about people not knowing everything about you.
People often retort by saying "I have nothing to hide, so I don't care if they collect the data". Yes, I'm sure the Jews
had nothing to hide from the government in 1920s. Only ten years later, their census data was being used to round them up
and murder them. Privacy is important not for the reasons we can readily think of but for all the reasons we can't think of.
Well, I do believe in life was intelligently designed, just not by God. What many theists don't understand
is that inherit-randomness in a system often improves the quality of the decision making process. For example,
There are algorithms that run faster if they make random decisions. Free market economics is very good at allocating resources where they are needed precisely because the of the random
noise in the market. The speed at which DNA is "unziped" is determined by the imposed randomness present due to the Heisenburg
uncertainty principle. It is optimised to use this randomness to reduce errors.
Intelligent design is not a scientific theory because in principle it can't be falsified.
Say a creationist said: "ah ha, evolution can not explain how this particular thing
evolved therefore it must be designed". Then the scientists found an explanation of said thing evolved, the
creationist would just retreat to the next scientific mystery.
Intelligent design is no different from the ancients saying Thor created lightening, or Mars was the god of war. For some reason, the ID crowd have a real problem with saying: "you know what, I don't actually know the answer!" - they need to be taught that there is nothing wrong in not having the answer to everything.
Does this mean U.K. employers need to worry about a mass exodus from the I.T. field, or is this just normal griping?
Griping, as they say: "The grass is always greener on the other side."
The reality is that often it isn't, people (not just IT workers) fail to see just how good their job is and resign themselves to being
miserable about it. I program C# about 50% of the time, do internal user support 10% of the time, reply to emails 10% time (this annoys me),
deal with external customer support another 10% of the time. The remaining 20% is probably spent on administration etc.
I love my job, I love the variety, the sallary is good for my age and my coworkers are motivated but easy enough
to get a long with. A think a key failing with IT people is believing you can storm in at 20 and somehow be a senior developer.
I have a simple message to people with this attitude: you're not a genius, get over yourself; this trade takes a long time to learn.
Just because you hacked together a perl script to do something useful on your private linux box
doesn't make you a seasoned professional. Building professional code takes as much experience as it does intelligence.
Serve your apprenticeship get the experience and become a better coder. Don't be arrogant towards your superiors
because believe it or not most of the time they deserve to be there. Remember, your time will come
and for the moment there is a lot of wisdom in just be content with what you have: A brilliant job
where you can be creative and intelligent.
What is the fixation with sex? Why would a child seeing two consenting adults having sex "corrupt" them. Sex is a natural thing that happens between two people who like each other a lot. It's nothing to be shy about and really, rather than demonising it, we should be celebrating it. It's one of the activities that transcends all cultures on this planet and that is universally enjoyed.
The Christian faith (who's political wing is the Republican party) for some reason believe that sex is bad and that pornography is somehow immoral. I don't know how they reached that conclusion, after all, one need only look as far as Job's daughters antics in the book of Genesis to see that the Bible is no authority on sexual morality.
I just think that Children are not as vulnerable as these people make out. As young as twelve or thirteen I was viewing pornography because I was curious and felt a drive to seek out such material. Far from damaging my psyche, it made me a lot less nervous about my sexuality. I look back and see that period of my life as an important part of my sexual development.
I'm sick of the "What about the children?" being used as a front to foist laws upon on us. This law isn't designed to protect our children, it's a law that takes the first bold step in pushing the Republican party's religious mantra on those who do not want and care about it.
Without wanting to be flame-bait, the Republican part engages in what I call "henry ford" freedom: You can have any freedom you want, as long as it's Republican. The essence of freedom is about allowing people to do something you don't personally agree with. You may not agree with abortion or gay marriage but believing in freedom is about having the maturity to realize that the people who are gay or have abortions are consenting adults and are fully aware of the consequences of their actions.
Minor interface issues like where to place buttons by default (which can probably be customized anyway) is the least of your problems when developing a browser. The big issues are things that you can't see without examining the code, like how the rendering engine decides which layout algorithm to use depending on the CSS display and float properties. Etc. etc. etc.
I do write software, professionally, and it's that type of thinking that leads to some of the horrible interfaces we see in OSS. It may be PHYSICALLY easy to move a button on a screen but arranging the buttons so that a novice can deduce their function is very difficult.
This point is very often missed on developers. OSS zealots are the worst for this; "if they can't figure it out, they're too stupid to use it". Congratulations, you've lost 90% of the market.
So your saying that IE7 is rubbish because it doesn't look nice? It's still in beta FFS! I know a lot of people on Slashdot hate Microsoft but this is getting ridiculous.
Anybody can write a program, writing a program that is easy for a non-literate person to use is a real challenge.
We live in a world where people judge everything by the way it looks. People buy Ipods because they look and feel better than the competition even though there are high capacity, longer battery life alternatives.
Even if we discount the visual side of IE, it's still rubish. It's so far away from standard compliance that it might aswell be considered it's own platform. It delivered full PNG support half a decade too late. ActiveX needs no introduction. It's crap, and this version is no better.
And guess what, Firefox is going to keep growing! Why? Because IE7 is a rubbish. Before you mod this flamebait,
let me explain why. Here is a screenshot of IE7 beta. Examine it closely.
Here are my issue with it:
Where the fuck is the refresh button? After ten minutes you work
out it's the little button next to the right of the URL entry bit.
Why is the menu Below the tabs. I find this
inconsistent and confusing. Worst of all, there's no way to put it in it's proper position.
Have Microsoft dropped it's entire design team, the tabs look simply awful. That little grey bit to the right
of the tabs allows you to create a new tab by clicking on it. That's fairly cool, but holy shit it just looks wrong.
The home icon on the left hand side of the screen is in that default position, unexpanded, where did my Favourites go or
everything else go?
If this is it, what took so freaking long?
Seriously, this looks like it was designed by an amateur software development team. This is meant to be the Firefox killer?
Firefox is showing that a monopoly doesn't guarentee you a browser monopoly. Is IE7 going to stop the rot? I doubt it very much.
Firefox looks and feels better. Hats off to the Firefox team.
Other people have tackled the obvious problems with these measures. All of these problems are a result of the fact they're attempting to secure against pishing by using the SAME medium as the pishers.
The way to secure against pishing is to use media the pishers don't have access to. The best way to do this is with a physical token. The best example is something like RSA's SecureID. There is no way for the pisher to know what that value is so it makes pishing harder. They may be able to get the value once, but that won't help them next time.
Once these schemes become more widespread, we'll see Pishers performing a man in the middle attack; that is, they'll make their site in to a proxy that connects to the real bank and passes your details to the actual bank. They'll then insert their own commands to steal your money.
Pishing isn't all that easy to stop and the attacks are only going to get more ingenious.
No single technology will bring spam under control. It's going to take a blend of technologies, namely:
Spam filtering.
Preventing forged headers.
Making e-mail sending computationally expensive.
The first campaign, spam filtering, has worked with resonable success. Spammers now have to send a lot more e-mail in order to reach their customer base. Of course, e-mail is cheap to send so this hasn't changed the economics of the situation dramatically and army of slave machines that they've hacked make getting a lot of CPU power fairly straight-forward.
The second campaign on which we are embarking is designed to reduce this army. How effective this will be only time will tell. The principle is concern is about throw-away domains be a problem.
If I set up a domain and tell the SPF address to allow any machine on the internet to send mail then i've totally destroyed the value of SPF. However, it's value in controlling pishing should not be underestimated.
The final campaign in my list it the nuclear option: Using CPU time to create digital stamps. The idea behind this is to take the hash of your e-mail (complete with subject, addresses etc.) then brute force a collision of the last 20 bits of the hash. For the normal user, this wont cause a noticeable slow down, for a spammer it will probably destroy their business model.
The drone armies will be cut down to size. Rather than sending a couple of hundred messages per second they may be able to manage one or two. The CPU load on a drone would be so high as to make the PC unusable and the users of these hacked machines would have to start taking notice: they will have to get their machines fixed. If spammers wanted to send messages directly they would now need supercomputers.
There are disadvantages to the above approach. Mobile devices would take a long time to mint a stamp. This can be combated by setting special rules for the SMTP servers that forward messages from mobile devices.
The same problems also exist for third-world countries where they might be running significantly slower machines. However, even if it took 15 seconds to send an e-mail, I think that's an acceptable price to pay for the service.
Overall, I think the real answer lies in the combination of these three schemes. I believe there is a "critial point" in the fight against spam. Once you start to tip the spammers from profit to loss we will start to see huge reductions in spam. The only way to achieve this is to put the cost on the spamer. Electronic stamps are the way to do this.
On the broad issue on whether we should be using other languages, I think that saying "the programmer should carefully" is a bit misguided. Humans make mistakes and this is something that computers can do very well. Besides, if coding in such languages is slow, we can use a profiler to find the hot-spots and optimise the slow section using a lower level language.
For that reason, I don't really buy the "but it's too slow argument" - I think it's a good trade-off to use a language that doesn't allow buffer-overflows.
Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot? Foobared?
Absolutely. Two cases in point:
Case One: We were looking for a bug tracking solution and we had short-listed the contenders to a choice between Bugzilla, BugTracker and FogBugz. Although FogBugz was a superior product BugTracker won because we could modify it to suit our needs. We didn't like Bugzilla because of it's clumsy interface and the fact we'd need an extra machine to run it.
We saved money on the licenses and we got something we could modify and maintain ourselves. Free software at it's best.
Case Two: We were paying through the nose for anti-virus subscription and software. We all know that anti-virus software takes a lot of real estate. Most have *HORRIBLE* splash screens that no-one is interested in seeing and they tend to slow the machine considerably.
Our solution to the problem to the anti-virus problem was the Windows version of ClamAV. It has a nice outlook plugin that protects from e-mail based virus and we set a schedule to scan the disk every night. There is no "resident shield" in ClamAV but to be honest they rarely do any good anyway.
My former boss works at a much larger company (we're still good friends) and he's deployed the strategy across a company with around thirty machines and saved a fortune.
So yes, companies can save money using Open source. The hard part is convincing them that a not-for-profit organisation can deliver quality products. I find ten minutes with Firefox usually does the trick.
Simon
How about if they ran it through an image filter like "sharpen" or "unsharp mask"?
I couldn't tell you exactly how they work but I know there are algorithms that can maintain the integrity of the data even when the image is resized, cropped, sharpened, blurred etc.
Broadly, they work by changing more visible aspected of the image that aren't easily destroyed by these operations. The technology is used extensively in digital watermarking, where the watermark must survive all kinds of abuse.
Unfortuantely, due to the level of extra protection that is required to defeat these attack the amount of information you can communicate drops dramatically. To uniquely identify an image you don't need much capacity but for anything that needs even slightly more capacity it is probably unsuitable.
Simon
Rather than worry about trying to detect stegnography, any image posting service could just arbitrarily set all of the least significant bits of jpgs to "1" as part of the image posting process. It might slightly degrade the image, but it would also erase any potential encoded messages.
Not really, the best stego packages use error correcting codes to help mitigate this kind of attack. Some stego packages don't work by using the LSB but by swapping adjacent pixels. The cleaning of the LSB would have no real impact on this type of stego.
Simon
So basically they're showing you how to use a photo storage service to store private data. I think this is immoral and is probably against the terms of service.
Flikr could probably detect the changes anyway. When you do stego on Jpegs you do it by altering the coefficients on the waveforms. The problem is these coefficients usually conform to a gaussian distribution and by packing so much data in to the jpeg you're going to screw up that distribution.
To hide truly undetectable data in there is going to be difficult and the channel capacity wont be all too great. It's a clever idea but I'm against it. If you want storage, buy a web-hosting package and FTP it up tot there.
Simon
If Psycopathy has a genetic component, then has it survived natural selection. Surely in ancient times psycopathy would not have got you far. You'd likely be expelled from a society or likely killed.
It's too common to be a mutation because genetic diseases often have percentage rates of 0.01% or below.
It makes me wonder!
Simon.
Whirlpool. It's based on the mathematics that gives AES it's proofs of security against certain classes of attack.
It's slower than SHA-1 but guess what? Security costs CPU cycles. A lot of people tend to forget this most important lesson.
Simon.
Urgh, link here
Simon.
Project Orion would have made all these dreams come true. It still can, though we'd probably have to build one of these suckers in space.
Frankly, for travel in the solar system any other form of propulsion is misguided at best and outright stupid at worst!
Simon.
The article claims that the new law will also make computer systems more vulnerable to hackers, according to some digital privacy and civil liberties groups.
Oh it's a whole metric-fuckton worse than that. The problem the FCC, FBI (insert your favourite alphabet agency here) is that they make the assumption that the criminals that will be using VOIP will COMPLY with FCC.
Voice/IP isn't like traditional the traditional telephone system at all. I can't install my own private telephone network with encrypted lines but with V/IP this is fairly easy to achieve. What's worse, what criminal is really going to open up their private P2P telephone so the government can tap them?
So the measure has absolutely no effect on our ability to catch criminals. Instead we subject the communication of ordinary law abiding citizens to the possibility of them having their perfectly legitimate conversations compromised, be it by a l33t|st or corupt police officers alike.
Simon.
The life of hardware manufacturer is tough. You need enough DRM to convince copyright owners to develop/author for your platform yet it's DRM needs to be flawed enough so Joe Six-pack can easily circumvent it.
The former insures there's enough content on your platform to make it an enticing to a consumer. The latter makes your platform doubly as enticing because your customers don't have to spend an insane amount of money getting a large body of content for your platform; they'll just copy it.
The problem is that Sony just can't make the DRM flawed enough to capture public interest because their media division just wont stand for it. So once again, someone else will come along and give the public what they want: media that's easily copied.
Is there precident for this? Absolutely, Why did the Sony Playstation crush the N64? Because you can copy easily for the Playstation. Copying a cartridge is just too much hastle to be worth it. Even better it was trivial to chip a playstation so you could get loads of games for the price of a few CDs.
Rather than learning this lesson they ignored it. Before the IPod, Sony products were the market leaders in portable music. Sony could have got an Ipod like device to market first but the Sony record label were scared so it never happened: Apple did it instead. Far from being a match made in heaven, the symbiosis of Sony media and Sony technology is becoming increasingly schizophrenic and it is punishing them right where it hurts any company: their bottom line.
Simon.
If enforced, these patents could shut down almost every dynamic site on the Internet, including the USPTO
Ahh the wonders of living in Europe. Let's just hope it lasts.
Simon
How would the EU enforce breaking up a United States company?
It woudl have no power to enforce it directly but it could ban Microsoft from selling anything to the EU unless it divides. That's a pretty big club to hit them with.
Simon.
Microsoft, you're fucking stupid. The EU are going to murder you over this and rest assure the settlement with the EU wont be as lenient as the last time. I think it would silly for prosecution to demand anything less than the division of the company for a repeat offense. And I think that this time they'll get it.
Microsoft, you must understand three things.
I am confident of one thing: the future of Microsoft will not be dictated by how well it fares in the US market but how well it fares in the EU market. It simply wont make sales in India, China or the South American countries. Linux is quickly becoming intrenched in these countries because these companies can't really afford to prop up the American economy. In many ways, the fact that they're so poor means they have to be smarter with their cash.Something that's better for us all.
Simon
Not all information is created equal. The information that "wants to be free" is information that adds meaningfully to the sum of human knowledge. Whether that's an algorithm to quickly sort large amounts of information, a law of physics, or a new economic model.. these types of information want to be free.
Information that "doesn't want to be free" is the kind that doesn't give anything meaningful to humanity at large or the kind that bring me to some harm if released. If the information in question doesn't pass this test then it's okay to keep it secret. What porn I bought yesterday is not really of interest to anybody except me and therefore, under my model, this information is best kept secret. Other secret information, like passwords, credit-card numbers and social security number are outright danger to me if they are released to the public.
We have to be careful what line we tread. In the US, companies like choicepoint are collecting huge amounts of data and yet even though the data is about us, it does not belong to us. This causes huge problems for us because Choicepoint doesn't really care if this data gets out. What skin is it off Choicepoints back? Will it lose sales? These data collection companies need to CARE about keeping our data SAFE. The only way to do that is make them liable for incredible sums of money if that data ends up in the wrong hands.
Privacy is under attack and we need to defend it. A 150 years ago, I could walk out in to a field and have a private conversation and be sure it was private. These days, there could be lazer microphones and bugs. A 150 years ago, I could disappear on a horse for a couple of months and nobody would know where I am. These days they can find you with your mobile phone and CCTV. A 150 years ago you could build a house and not care about somebody using spy-satelites to check for building code violations.
Privacy and Liberty are not at odds, they are one in the same. Being free is about people not knowing everything about you. People often retort by saying "I have nothing to hide, so I don't care if they collect the data". Yes, I'm sure the Jews had nothing to hide from the government in 1920s. Only ten years later, their census data was being used to round them up and murder them. Privacy is important not for the reasons we can readily think of but for all the reasons we can't think of.
Simon.
Well, I do believe in life was intelligently designed, just not by God. What many theists don't understand is that inherit-randomness in a system often improves the quality of the decision making process. For example, There are algorithms that run faster if they make random decisions. Free market economics is very good at allocating resources where they are needed precisely because the of the random noise in the market. The speed at which DNA is "unziped" is determined by the imposed randomness present due to the Heisenburg uncertainty principle. It is optimised to use this randomness to reduce errors.
Intelligent design is not a scientific theory because in principle it can't be falsified. Say a creationist said: "ah ha, evolution can not explain how this particular thing evolved therefore it must be designed". Then the scientists found an explanation of said thing evolved, the creationist would just retreat to the next scientific mystery.
Intelligent design is no different from the ancients saying Thor created lightening, or Mars was the god of war. For some reason, the ID crowd have a real problem with saying: "you know what, I don't actually know the answer!" - they need to be taught that there is nothing wrong in not having the answer to everything.
Simon.
Does this mean U.K. employers need to worry about a mass exodus from the I.T. field, or is this just normal griping?
Griping, as they say: "The grass is always greener on the other side."
The reality is that often it isn't, people (not just IT workers) fail to see just how good their job is and resign themselves to being miserable about it. I program C# about 50% of the time, do internal user support 10% of the time, reply to emails 10% time (this annoys me), deal with external customer support another 10% of the time. The remaining 20% is probably spent on administration etc.
I love my job, I love the variety, the sallary is good for my age and my coworkers are motivated but easy enough to get a long with. A think a key failing with IT people is believing you can storm in at 20 and somehow be a senior developer. I have a simple message to people with this attitude: you're not a genius, get over yourself; this trade takes a long time to learn. Just because you hacked together a perl script to do something useful on your private linux box doesn't make you a seasoned professional. Building professional code takes as much experience as it does intelligence.
Serve your apprenticeship get the experience and become a better coder. Don't be arrogant towards your superiors because believe it or not most of the time they deserve to be there. Remember, your time will come and for the moment there is a lot of wisdom in just be content with what you have: A brilliant job where you can be creative and intelligent.
Simon.
What is the fixation with sex? Why would a child seeing two consenting adults having sex "corrupt" them. Sex is a natural thing that happens between two people who like each other a lot. It's nothing
to be shy about and really, rather than demonising it, we should be celebrating it. It's one of the activities that transcends all cultures on this planet and that is universally enjoyed.
The Christian faith (who's political wing is the Republican party) for some reason believe that sex is bad and that pornography is somehow immoral. I don't know how they reached that conclusion, after all, one need only look as far as Job's daughters antics in the book of Genesis to see that the Bible is no authority on sexual morality.
I just think that Children are not as vulnerable as these people make out. As young as twelve or thirteen I was viewing pornography because I was curious and felt a drive to seek out such material. Far from damaging my psyche, it made me a lot less nervous about my sexuality. I look back and see that period of my life as an important part of my sexual development.
I'm sick of the "What about the children?" being used as a front to foist laws upon on us. This law isn't designed to protect our children, it's a law that takes the first bold step in pushing the Republican party's religious mantra on those who do not want and care about it.
Without wanting to be flame-bait, the Republican part engages in what I call "henry ford" freedom:
You can have any freedom you want, as long as it's Republican. The essence of freedom is about allowing people to do something you don't personally agree with. You may not agree with abortion or gay marriage but believing in freedom is about having the maturity to realize that the people who are gay or have abortions are consenting adults and are fully aware of the consequences of their actions.
Simon.
http://www.ckwop.me.uk/ is my site, it's a screenshot from my screen.
Simon.
Minor interface issues like where to place buttons by default (which can probably be customized anyway) is the least of your problems when developing a browser. The big issues are things that you can't see without examining the code, like how the rendering engine decides which layout algorithm to use depending on the CSS display and float properties. Etc. etc. etc.
I do write software, professionally, and it's that type of thinking that leads to some of the horrible interfaces we see in OSS. It may be PHYSICALLY easy to move a button on a screen but arranging the buttons so that a novice can deduce their function is very difficult.
This point is very often missed on developers. OSS zealots are the worst for this; "if they can't figure it out, they're too stupid to use it". Congratulations, you've lost 90% of the market.
Simon.
So your saying that IE7 is rubbish because it doesn't look nice? It's still in beta FFS! I know a lot of people on Slashdot hate Microsoft but this is getting ridiculous.
Anybody can write a program, writing a program that is easy for a non-literate person to use is a real challenge.
We live in a world where people judge everything by the way it looks. People buy Ipods because they look and feel better than the competition even though there are high capacity, longer battery life alternatives.
Even if we discount the visual side of IE, it's still rubish. It's so far away from standard compliance that it might aswell be considered it's own platform. It delivered full PNG support half a decade too late. ActiveX needs no introduction. It's crap, and this version is no better.
Simon.
And guess what, Firefox is going to keep growing! Why? Because IE7 is a rubbish. Before you mod this flamebait, let me explain why. Here is a screenshot of IE7 beta. Examine it closely. Here are my issue with it:
Seriously, this looks like it was designed by an amateur software development team. This is meant to be the Firefox killer? Firefox is showing that a monopoly doesn't guarentee you a browser monopoly. Is IE7 going to stop the rot? I doubt it very much. Firefox looks and feels better. Hats off to the Firefox team.
Simon.
Other people have tackled the obvious problems with these measures. All of these problems are a result of the fact they're attempting to secure against pishing by using the SAME medium as the pishers.
The way to secure against pishing is to use media the pishers don't have access to. The best way to do this is with a physical token. The best example is something like RSA's SecureID. There is no way for the pisher to know what that value is so it makes pishing harder. They may be able to get the value once, but that won't help them next time.
Once these schemes become more widespread, we'll see Pishers performing a man in the middle attack; that is, they'll make their site in to a proxy that connects to the real bank and passes your details to the actual bank. They'll then insert their own commands to steal your money.
Pishing isn't all that easy to stop and the attacks are only going to get more ingenious.
Simon.
No single technology will bring spam under control. It's going to take a blend of technologies, namely:
The first campaign, spam filtering, has worked with resonable success. Spammers now have to send a lot more e-mail in order to reach their customer base. Of course, e-mail is cheap to send so this hasn't changed the economics of the situation dramatically and army of slave machines that they've hacked make getting a lot of CPU power fairly straight-forward.
The second campaign on which we are embarking is designed to reduce this army. How effective this will be only time will tell. The principle is concern is about throw-away domains be a problem.
If I set up a domain and tell the SPF address to allow any machine on the internet to send mail then i've totally destroyed the value of SPF. However, it's value in controlling pishing should not be underestimated.
The final campaign in my list it the nuclear option: Using CPU time to create digital stamps. The idea behind this is to take the hash of your e-mail (complete with subject, addresses etc.) then brute force a collision of the last 20 bits of the hash. For the normal user, this wont cause a noticeable slow down, for a spammer it will probably destroy their business model.
The drone armies will be cut down to size. Rather than sending a couple of hundred messages per second they may be able to manage one or two. The CPU load on a drone would be so high as to make the PC unusable and the users of these hacked machines would have to start taking notice: they will have to get their machines fixed. If spammers wanted to send messages directly they would now need supercomputers.
There are disadvantages to the above approach. Mobile devices would take a long time to mint a stamp. This can be combated by setting special rules for the SMTP servers that forward messages from mobile devices.
The same problems also exist for third-world countries where they might be running significantly slower machines. However, even if it took 15 seconds to send an e-mail, I think that's an acceptable price to pay for the service.
Overall, I think the real answer lies in the combination of these three schemes. I believe there is a "critial point" in the fight against spam. Once you start to tip the spammers from profit to loss we will start to see huge reductions in spam. The only way to achieve this is to put the cost on the spamer. Electronic stamps are the way to do this.
Simon
See here
On the broad issue on whether we should be using other languages, I think that saying "the programmer should carefully" is a bit misguided. Humans make mistakes and this is something that computers can do very well. Besides, if coding in such languages is slow, we can use a profiler to find the hot-spots and optimise the slow section using a lower level language.
For that reason, I don't really buy the "but it's too slow argument" - I think it's a good trade-off to use a language that doesn't allow buffer-overflows.
Simon.