I get it from the other end ; I'm a programmer and on occasion I've joined IRC channels where developers for particular projects hang out, asked questions about getting a build environment for their project set up, specifically so I can fix the bug that's rubbing me up the wrong way, and been told in very short language that "this is a developer channel, not a user channel".
It seems to be a cultural thing. This was not the first time I'd had such a response in this particular channel. In general I think a segregation of developers and users in this manner is harmful. It seems to cultivate a holier-than-thou attitude.
Other projects I've contributed to are much more welcoming. On one occasion, the lead developer of perhaps the most-used version control system was kind enough to make a patched build and upload it to my server so that I could test it. That is a project that values criticism and feedback.
Bug reports, feature requests, even blog articles about your user experience, are all valuable as hell and are to be welcomed. Some projects embrace them, and those projects deserve to succeed.
Once you see past the total lack of pretty graphics, it's the kind of game DK might have evolved into. Multi-level dungeons, with their own geology, geography, local wildlife, economy, and neighboring civilizations.
Because putting in a screen costs money, and occupies case space. Voice is free - the feature is entirely software.
From the blurb, the voice differs depending on which OS you use, so odds-on the voice synth is done on the computer and the output is stored on the device, so they didn't even need to optimize their voice synth to run on the Shuffle.
This was more of a stimulus to the French economy than buying Microsoft products. The best a Frenchman can hope for from that is a small cut for sales. This way, there is a reasonable prospect of projects that local talent can work on - bugfixes, improvements, customization ; much of which would be difficult or impossible with software from Redmond because the relevant source is unavailable.
Atomic energy policy is still about maintaining nuclear supremacy.
The latest review of fission reactors for procurement in the UK focussed only on Pressurized Water Reactor designs, even though other designs have the promise of being cheaper and safer.
It's not a coincidence that PWRs happen to produce lots of (ok, enough) lovely plutonium and tritium in ways convenient to extract (compared to breaking open the fuel pellets from a pebble-bed reactor).
Isn't it the other way round? Don't Americans by the thousand drive across the border to get their drugs from Canadian pharmacies?
The bureaucracy of the American system is much, much higher than that of the UK NHS (which is no model of streamlined elegance). Just looking at the messaging protocols for the IT systems will tell you that. We don't have to implement half the messages because they relate to billing.
On top of that, the US system is treated as a for-profit endeavour. I'm told that a 15% profit margin is considered to be at the low end.
In the UK we spend only 40% per head what the US does, yet we have universal coverage, flat-rate prescription costs, and no co-pay. Access to treament is based on what is cost effective within the NHS budget, not which loophole your policy manager can use to yank the rug out from under you.
I'd much rather be ill here in the UK, especially if I was poor, than in the USA.
I do not concur. We are inflicted with the Symantec product suite here ; in combination, they grind your machine to a miserable halt, and actually prevent certain actions because they are so slow, in particular, you cannot
* Drag folders out of archive browsers to extract them to disk
* Use shared drives across remote desktop connections (because the remote machine will BSOD instantly when you open explorer)
In addition, with SSD, a write cycle erases the whole block before filling it, so the actual number of blocks written is typically larger than data-size/block-size.
I bought Dawn of War II from the supermarket ; because it was a lot cheaper than getting it on Steam - even if it is natively a Steam game.
Why, in this day and age, are physical boxed copies retailing for less than the digital variant? In this particular case, there is literally no difference between the end results - both methods have the game, installed in my Steam folder, registered to my Steam account. Neither has any resale value. I even had to wait to download an update.
I would rather have downloaded it all, it would have used less materials, and perhaps given more money to the developer (in theory). But for less money, I got more value - I got a disk with a "preload" on it. So physical distribution isn't going away until the download costs less than a retail boxed copy, or until they stop offering boxed copies altogether, and the latter is probably the route that they will want to take - no competition, no discounting.
If you use an obscure compression method, then to automated filters there wouldn't be a difference.
That depends whether the filter is designed to try common decompression methods, or whether it's designed to detect entropy.
Encrypted data should be indistinguishable from random noise, whereas there is definitely order to plaintext compressed data.
Stenanography is another matter.
But really, the best way to combat ubiquitous state surveillance (assuming you can't just legislate it away) is to make it prohibitively expensive, which means ubiquitous personal encryption. Alas, the general public aren't going to take it up without both an easy, pre-packaged way of using it, and a massive FUD campaign. The former, perhaps the hackers can handle that. But the FUD campaign would have to come through media channels controlled by Big Business, who have a vested interest in supporting the government.
One can critically and rationally assess religious doctrine to determine whether it seems to make sense.
I believe (hah!) his point was that if you do critically and rationally assess religious doctrine, then you've probably just become an atheist, if you weren't one already.
Because it doesn't make sense. It's not even internally consistent, and it certainly isn't consistent with reality.
Before you come up with a pithy rejoinder, you must locate for me one confirmed case of human limb regeneration after amputation, whether ascribed to natural or supernatural causes.
Yet, not much people are capable of bearing responsibilities. If one can - then they'd likely to choose managerial career.
What if you want the responsiblity to make the changes, but you don't want to be a manager?
Case in point - my project at work has been steaming alone for a year. I've been programming tools for a group, working closely with them as the sole programmer. When they find problems, I fix them. When they want features, I put them in. Changes are deployed in short order. Progress is swift, risk is minimal (the parts of the tooling that write data are stable).
Management has become involved recently. I've been commended for the rapid production of the tooling, but progress has suddenly ground to a halt. I've actually been spinning my wheels for the last week, bored out of my skull, because the work has dried up - I've even got a requirements brief on my desk that I've been told not to do any work on.
Just by making design choices I've saved the organisation more than my wages in software licenses. The productivity of a bunch of other people is much higher. I'd love to have some recompense for this - I even joke in meetings that they should spot me a percentage of every expensive enterprise software support contract I take off their books ; we all know it's a joke, because there's no way this side of Armageddon I'll see a payment like that.
What I don't want to do is become a manager. I'd hate it. I'd be much less productive. I'd have less job satisfaction. Maybe the reason they get the big bucks is to drown out the misery of being management, because it sure isn't because they are the ones raising the bottom line. There must be companies that recognise what a good engineer is worth, but I've yet to see one that paid them more than management.
If you don't think this is already happening, you're mad.
Currently all the major city rail stations I've visited in the UK either have upgraded or are planning to upgrade to magstripe ticket gates (with RFID readers already in place for the next ticket version). Buying a season ticket requires a photocard, which requires ID including your address. It would be a fair assumption that the tickets have a unique serial number.
Most of the current generation of trains have onboard CCTV, and specifically placed facecams at the doors. The stations have camera saturation, will many units aimed at face height.
Presently, they don't catch people who buy day tickets with cash, but there are still many correlations you can apply to the data.
Big companies do not encourage innovation (although Google seems to try). Big companies have many mechanisms for mitigating risk.
Innovation is risk personified. The reason garage startups could penetrate the IT market was because they were small - they had one product. Win or lose. People like that are focussed on making their one product fantastic. They go the extra mile.
Software doesn't need big capital for development (you need a computer and an reasonable supply of Xena tapes and Hot Pockets). So, for an MS sized R&D budget, you could foster a very large number of garage startups, any of which could produce the New Hotness. Only that's not what happens - big heaps of money develop this crawling infestation of MBAs that try their darndest to prevent the money blowing away, which means not taking risks with it. Anything that is not understood is a risk. If they understood the New Hotness already, they'd be selling it. So paradoxically, the New Hotness is less likely to emerge from organisations with R&D budgets to rival Steve Ballmer's Ikea bills.
In addition, the liver is composed of cells that are almost certainly incompatible with the patient ; any stray cells that manage to get through all those formidable layers of physical protection are going to be mercilessly exterminated by even the weakest immune system.
This is the reason for keeping the liver separate from the patient behind a dialysing membrane in the first place - otherwise their immune system will kill it in very short order.
All TCHunt does is look for random data. If you append 100MB of/dev/urandom to a file and run TCHunt, it will "recognise" it as a TrueCrypt volume.
This is not a secret. This is how encryption works. Obfuscating your data inside a apparently plaintext structured format is called stenanography and is another subject entirely.
Discussions on using CVS and other version control are scattered throughout the forums without apparent quoshing by the admins. Yes, old versions of the source are not available - unless you already downloaded them, of course.
The MD5 hashes changing for the installer was just that - they rebuilt the installers with some of the new setup (like offering the option to disable the pagefile) from the version 6 installers, but the binaries inside remained identical. Doing this is rather poor practice because it raises this sort of question, but hey, you trusted the first file signed with their PGP key, why not the second? The TCHunt guys have an archive of old TrueCrypt versions, but they won't let you download them now for bandwidth reasons ; it might be illuminating to pick through the various MD5 versions and compare the actual binaries installed.
If someone is concerned about back doors, they can audit the code, and build it themselves. (don't respond to this with the Ken Thompson compiler back door proposition). Undoubtedly there are people that do this, although they are not equipped to sign their builds with the TC foundation PGP key.
As a popular encryption soft, I have no doubt it comes under scrutiny. I might trust it a mite more if it was signed by Bruce Schneier's key though:-)
He's also an ex-popstar, a TV documentarian, married to this gorgeous creature, contributes to the vast sum of human knowledge, and obviously enjoys his job so much it almost hurts.
Compared to the assorted collection of pigeon crap that passes for celebrity these days, this man is a god. This is the kind of role model children need, not some (to paraphrase a great man) twat who can kick a ball and looks good in his skivvies.
We've had Winamp banned by some clueless git in our upper echelons (apparently, it poses a risk of copyright inringement... I would personally be more worried about the burglary you'd need to commit to rip someone elses CDs with it).
I tried Amarok on my Ubuntu box and was quite pleased, it's easily got the best music organiser I've seen on a Linux music player, the library being the reason I used Winamp in the first place.
On Windows it's rather sluggish to start, the program itself eats over 100MB of memory, not to mention the various daemons that KDE requires to function which eat another 60MB between them with ease, and stick around even after you close the last KDE application. The file dialogs are rather slow to arrive, even after "warming them up".
VLC has a much more spartan media library, but it only consumes a slim 20MB.
I'm guessing that I'm going to be happy to see Qt4 applications on Windows, but possibly less enthusiastic about ones that drag all the KDE baggage in with them ; it just goes to show that Windows does not have a monopoly on enormous bloatware.
You're right about the insecurity of traditional signature technologies - regardless of whether they are implemented with silicon or ink, they are easy to attach to a document that wasn't the one signed.
Since the CC companies are so keen on making their cards into smart cards, they could do us all a favour and implement a cryptographic signing application on those cards that could be utilized by anyone with a need for a digital signature.
Digital signatures are virtually impossible to forge as long as you keep your keys secure, and they have the advantage of only identifying one particular byte stream as having been signed, so the document cannot be amended without breaking the signature.
Slots to accept the cards are ubiquitous. The technology is well understood. You could even have a completely separate "signing card" with a mugshot (and maybe other biometrics), signed by a variety of trusted parties (no need to store those biometrics in a central DB making them vulnerable to hackers).
Slashdot Mirror
I get it from the other end ; I'm a programmer and on occasion I've joined IRC channels where developers for particular projects hang out, asked questions about getting a build environment for their project set up, specifically so I can fix the bug that's rubbing me up the wrong way, and been told in very short language that "this is a developer channel, not a user channel".
It seems to be a cultural thing. This was not the first time I'd had such a response in this particular channel. In general I think a segregation of developers and users in this manner is harmful. It seems to cultivate a holier-than-thou attitude.
Other projects I've contributed to are much more welcoming. On one occasion, the lead developer of perhaps the most-used version control system was kind enough to make a patched build and upload it to my server so that I could test it. That is a project that values criticism and feedback.
Bug reports, feature requests, even blog articles about your user experience, are all valuable as hell and are to be welcomed. Some projects embrace them, and those projects deserve to succeed.
You might like Dwarf Fortress.
Once you see past the total lack of pretty graphics, it's the kind of game DK might have evolved into. Multi-level dungeons, with their own geology, geography, local wildlife, economy, and neighboring civilizations.
It makes me nervous enough to have miniature popups of certain windows....
Because putting in a screen costs money, and occupies case space. Voice is free - the feature is entirely software.
From the blurb, the voice differs depending on which OS you use, so odds-on the voice synth is done on the computer and the output is stored on the device, so they didn't even need to optimize their voice synth to run on the Shuffle.
This was more of a stimulus to the French economy than buying Microsoft products. The best a Frenchman can hope for from that is a small cut for sales. This way, there is a reasonable prospect of projects that local talent can work on - bugfixes, improvements, customization ; much of which would be difficult or impossible with software from Redmond because the relevant source is unavailable.
Atomic energy policy is still about maintaining nuclear supremacy.
The latest review of fission reactors for procurement in the UK focussed only on Pressurized Water Reactor designs, even though other designs have the promise of being cheaper and safer.
It's not a coincidence that PWRs happen to produce lots of (ok, enough) lovely plutonium and tritium in ways convenient to extract (compared to breaking open the fuel pellets from a pebble-bed reactor).
Isn't it the other way round? Don't Americans by the thousand drive across the border to get their drugs from Canadian pharmacies?
The bureaucracy of the American system is much, much higher than that of the UK NHS (which is no model of streamlined elegance). Just looking at the messaging protocols for the IT systems will tell you that. We don't have to implement half the messages because they relate to billing.
On top of that, the US system is treated as a for-profit endeavour. I'm told that a 15% profit margin is considered to be at the low end.
In the UK we spend only 40% per head what the US does, yet we have universal coverage, flat-rate prescription costs, and no co-pay. Access to treament is based on what is cost effective within the NHS budget, not which loophole your policy manager can use to yank the rug out from under you.
I'd much rather be ill here in the UK, especially if I was poor, than in the USA.
I do not concur. We are inflicted with the Symantec product suite here ; in combination, they grind your machine to a miserable halt, and actually prevent certain actions because they are so slow, in particular, you cannot
* Drag folders out of archive browsers to extract them to disk
* Use shared drives across remote desktop connections (because the remote machine will BSOD instantly when you open explorer)
It is not good.
In addition, with SSD, a write cycle erases the whole block before filling it, so the actual number of blocks written is typically larger than data-size/block-size.
Manna
As will the amount that goes out of Medicare into shareholders pockets.
I bought Dawn of War II from the supermarket ; because it was a lot cheaper than getting it on Steam - even if it is natively a Steam game.
Why, in this day and age, are physical boxed copies retailing for less than the digital variant? In this particular case, there is literally no difference between the end results - both methods have the game, installed in my Steam folder, registered to my Steam account. Neither has any resale value. I even had to wait to download an update.
I would rather have downloaded it all, it would have used less materials, and perhaps given more money to the developer (in theory). But for less money, I got more value - I got a disk with a "preload" on it. So physical distribution isn't going away until the download costs less than a retail boxed copy, or until they stop offering boxed copies altogether, and the latter is probably the route that they will want to take - no competition, no discounting.
If you use an obscure compression method, then to automated filters there wouldn't be a difference.
That depends whether the filter is designed to try common decompression methods, or whether it's designed to detect entropy.
Encrypted data should be indistinguishable from random noise, whereas there is definitely order to plaintext compressed data.
Stenanography is another matter.
But really, the best way to combat ubiquitous state surveillance (assuming you can't just legislate it away) is to make it prohibitively expensive, which means ubiquitous personal encryption. Alas, the general public aren't going to take it up without both an easy, pre-packaged way of using it, and a massive FUD campaign. The former, perhaps the hackers can handle that. But the FUD campaign would have to come through media channels controlled by Big Business, who have a vested interest in supporting the government.
One can critically and rationally assess religious doctrine to determine whether it seems to make sense.
I believe (hah!) his point was that if you do critically and rationally assess religious doctrine, then you've probably just become an atheist, if you weren't one already.
Because it doesn't make sense. It's not even internally consistent, and it certainly isn't consistent with reality.
Before you come up with a pithy rejoinder, you must locate for me one confirmed case of human limb regeneration after amputation, whether ascribed to natural or supernatural causes.
Vista is in the top 10 suggestions... draw what conclusions you will from that...
Yet, not much people are capable of bearing responsibilities. If one can - then they'd likely to choose managerial career.
What if you want the responsiblity to make the changes, but you don't want to be a manager?
Case in point - my project at work has been steaming alone for a year. I've been programming tools for a group, working closely with them as the sole programmer. When they find problems, I fix them. When they want features, I put them in. Changes are deployed in short order. Progress is swift, risk is minimal (the parts of the tooling that write data are stable).
Management has become involved recently. I've been commended for the rapid production of the tooling, but progress has suddenly ground to a halt. I've actually been spinning my wheels for the last week, bored out of my skull, because the work has dried up - I've even got a requirements brief on my desk that I've been told not to do any work on.
Just by making design choices I've saved the organisation more than my wages in software licenses. The productivity of a bunch of other people is much higher. I'd love to have some recompense for this - I even joke in meetings that they should spot me a percentage of every expensive enterprise software support contract I take off their books ; we all know it's a joke, because there's no way this side of Armageddon I'll see a payment like that.
What I don't want to do is become a manager. I'd hate it. I'd be much less productive. I'd have less job satisfaction. Maybe the reason they get the big bucks is to drown out the misery of being management, because it sure isn't because they are the ones raising the bottom line. There must be companies that recognise what a good engineer is worth, but I've yet to see one that paid them more than management.
If you don't think this is already happening, you're mad.
Currently all the major city rail stations I've visited in the UK either have upgraded or are planning to upgrade to magstripe ticket gates (with RFID readers already in place for the next ticket version). Buying a season ticket requires a photocard, which requires ID including your address. It would be a fair assumption that the tickets have a unique serial number.
Most of the current generation of trains have onboard CCTV, and specifically placed facecams at the doors. The stations have camera saturation, will many units aimed at face height.
Presently, they don't catch people who buy day tickets with cash, but there are still many correlations you can apply to the data.
Big companies do not encourage innovation (although Google seems to try). Big companies have many mechanisms for mitigating risk.
Innovation is risk personified. The reason garage startups could penetrate the IT market was because they were small - they had one product. Win or lose. People like that are focussed on making their one product fantastic. They go the extra mile.
Software doesn't need big capital for development (you need a computer and an reasonable supply of Xena tapes and Hot Pockets). So, for an MS sized R&D budget, you could foster a very large number of garage startups, any of which could produce the New Hotness. Only that's not what happens - big heaps of money develop this crawling infestation of MBAs that try their darndest to prevent the money blowing away, which means not taking risks with it. Anything that is not understood is a risk. If they understood the New Hotness already, they'd be selling it. So paradoxically, the New Hotness is less likely to emerge from organisations with R&D budgets to rival Steve Ballmer's Ikea bills.
In addition, the liver is composed of cells that are almost certainly incompatible with the patient ; any stray cells that manage to get through all those formidable layers of physical protection are going to be mercilessly exterminated by even the weakest immune system.
This is the reason for keeping the liver separate from the patient behind a dialysing membrane in the first place - otherwise their immune system will kill it in very short order.
All TCHunt does is look for random data. If you append 100MB of /dev/urandom to a file and run TCHunt, it will "recognise" it as a TrueCrypt volume.
This is not a secret. This is how encryption works. Obfuscating your data inside a apparently plaintext structured format is called stenanography and is another subject entirely.
The changelog is here
Discussions on using CVS and other version control are scattered throughout the forums without apparent quoshing by the admins. Yes, old versions of the source are not available - unless you already downloaded them, of course.
The MD5 hashes changing for the installer was just that - they rebuilt the installers with some of the new setup (like offering the option to disable the pagefile) from the version 6 installers, but the binaries inside remained identical. Doing this is rather poor practice because it raises this sort of question, but hey, you trusted the first file signed with their PGP key, why not the second? The TCHunt guys have an archive of old TrueCrypt versions, but they won't let you download them now for bandwidth reasons ; it might be illuminating to pick through the various MD5 versions and compare the actual binaries installed.
If someone is concerned about back doors, they can audit the code, and build it themselves. (don't respond to this with the Ken Thompson compiler back door proposition). Undoubtedly there are people that do this, although they are not equipped to sign their builds with the TC foundation PGP key.
As a popular encryption soft, I have no doubt it comes under scrutiny. I might trust it a mite more if it was signed by Bruce Schneier's key though :-)
He's also an ex-popstar, a TV documentarian, married to this gorgeous creature, contributes to the vast sum of human knowledge, and obviously enjoys his job so much it almost hurts.
Compared to the assorted collection of pigeon crap that passes for celebrity these days, this man is a god. This is the kind of role model children need, not some (to paraphrase a great man) twat who can kick a ball and looks good in his skivvies.
We've had Winamp banned by some clueless git in our upper echelons (apparently, it poses a risk of copyright inringement... I would personally be more worried about the burglary you'd need to commit to rip someone elses CDs with it).
I tried Amarok on my Ubuntu box and was quite pleased, it's easily got the best music organiser I've seen on a Linux music player, the library being the reason I used Winamp in the first place.
On Windows it's rather sluggish to start, the program itself eats over 100MB of memory, not to mention the various daemons that KDE requires to function which eat another 60MB between them with ease, and stick around even after you close the last KDE application. The file dialogs are rather slow to arrive, even after "warming them up".
VLC has a much more spartan media library, but it only consumes a slim 20MB.
I'm guessing that I'm going to be happy to see Qt4 applications on Windows, but possibly less enthusiastic about ones that drag all the KDE baggage in with them ; it just goes to show that Windows does not have a monopoly on enormous bloatware.
You're right about the insecurity of traditional signature technologies - regardless of whether they are implemented with silicon or ink, they are easy to attach to a document that wasn't the one signed.
Since the CC companies are so keen on making their cards into smart cards, they could do us all a favour and implement a cryptographic signing application on those cards that could be utilized by anyone with a need for a digital signature.
Digital signatures are virtually impossible to forge as long as you keep your keys secure, and they have the advantage of only identifying one particular byte stream as having been signed, so the document cannot be amended without breaking the signature.
Slots to accept the cards are ubiquitous. The technology is well understood. You could even have a completely separate "signing card" with a mugshot (and maybe other biometrics), signed by a variety of trusted parties (no need to store those biometrics in a central DB making them vulnerable to hackers).
For some reason I seem to think that
sudo su
Also works
Batteries at the consumer end with local microgeneration would have transmission losses closer to zero, for charge used locally.
Of course, large centralized projects are more attractive to the pocketbooks of Big Energy.