Well there's the problem. Being a balloon, yes you might cheaply get from A to B by gliding along for little expenditure of energy (I guess you could heat up the helium by solar energy, too valuable to outgas) but there is the little problem of wind. Now Any breeze at all is going to spoil all your plans so you need engines... which are heavy things which mean a large vehicle to lift them and the engines can only work so well trying to propel an object with huge air resistance. Which means its hard to get moving against the wind but the wind can push you wherever it likes becuase your mass is so low. Arrgg. Balloons are a cool invention, but highly impractical I think... never could understand the recurring fuss about them.
From the Sydney Morning Herald we have this. SMH is about as mainstream as you get... true it is in the technology section but it heads the section as a Special Report.
Though if you look at the doctored photo in one of the links you can see that Kerry is in sunlight that is coming from the left and behind the camera. Whereas for Fonda the light is coming from the right and behind her, also the light for Fonda is more diffuse. This is one of the classic 'first look' tests you have to do to check photos, people often get things like the lighting, shadows etc wrong. Though with digital it doesn't take that much effort to fix that either.
Its actually ridiculously easy to land on Venus. You don't even need a parachute. The Venera craft didn't use parachutes they just had a dish shaped structure at the top like an umbrella and in the enormously dense atmosphere that was enough to slow the craft to landing speed. However, once there surviving is very difficult, the major problem is the heat. We can build craft to go down 11 km in our oceans, and survive sulphuric acid environments no problem... but you can't keep an object permanently cold (or cold for extended periods) in such a hot environment.
I'm sure Venus has an interesting history and is worth exploring one day. But probably not for a while. Though the pics are very intriguing.
I'm not surprised that Linux had a 'poor' showing. Increased popularity, relative inexperience in locking it down... in other words poor training or lack of it. The article admits this. Still, a kick in the pants is still a kick in the pants I guess... supports the idea of implementing easier methods of protecting systems (though really, I don't think its that hard at the moment).
Windows on the other hand is another matter. Really by discounting viruses and worms then they are discounting the insertion of back doors into systems. Come on! How direct an attack do you want. I mean Windows is such a sitting duck that direct attacks are part of the normal windows experience.
I'd sure like to figure out a way to make the word liberal lose its negative connotation
Easy. Just start calling yourselves "Defenders of the Constitution" instead. Somewhow, "bleeding heart defenders of the constitution" just doesn't sound the same.
BTW. Am not American so perhaps take that with a grain of salt.
I read the article and the guy made some reasonable points which did give me some concerns. However, on thinking it over there is a major difference between open and closed projects.
If a backdoor is inserted in an open source project, then the chances are that someone somewhere will eventually find it. And once it is found the CVS logs will indicate who made the change, or if no CVS logs (savages!) then there will be a very small set of people in the frame. Once the culprit is known they are history, the open source people will regard them as scum (would you want them on your project?) and if the word spreads to their employer they're in line for the sack.
No one would tolerate someone who subverts a project like that, and their reputation would spread I think. Apart from legal issues.
On the other hand, a closed source project even if the backdoor is found (unlikely) the company could say anything about it (after all you dont have access to the version control software) so it might even be a 'feature' supported by an unwritten company policy.
The BBC replied to my complaint stating that essentially since it was an opinion piece it was not factually incorrect. This is splitting hairs, and wont win the BBC friends when it needs them most. The story was shallow and uninformed. It makes little sense that a Linux user would go to the trouble to write a sophisticated Windows application and risk detection just to do something to SCO that they can easily sidestep and probably give them brownie points in the eyes of the press.
The virus did 3 things (apart from spreading itself): it installed a back door (a very serious breach of security), it installed a key logger (even worse), and it setup a DDOS of SCO (serious but easily sidestepped if given some warning). The DDOS was the least important part of it. Also the virus was cleverly social engineered to fool even moderately savvy users into clicking the attachment. It reeks of something more than a pissed of linux coder hitting back at SCO.
Now MyDoom.C is distributing the source code through the back doors to confuse the trail of those trying to find the author. Also version C doesn't have an expiry date. This was well planned, the DDOS is just camouflage for the real payload.
I find it kind of sad that due to propaganda etc this has been forgotten. A lot of amazing things happened in the "space race" apart from the Apollo missions. And on both sides. The Russians we now know weren't that far behind America in getting a man to the moon when it was cancelled (better to pretend you wouldn't lower yourself to a crass race than to come second I guess). But the lunakhod was very public and was front page news in many countries. And it just kept on going for ages. There was even talk about getting one that would take off and return samples to Earth... I *think* that happend but I'm not sure, that was considered an embarassing possibility to the Americans. Still so much potential lost. It should be a lesson I guess to the future generations of engineers about publish or perish.
we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our server pool
When you start off thinking that Linux is shareware then you've just demonstrated that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Anything else that follows in your post can only be viewed as slapstick!
having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming
Oh man you're a scream. This has gotta be a troll. A very funny one at that.
kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem
Ok gotcha, this is for those who still don't realise its a joke post. Tell em something obviously false.
Yes a hilarious post, though unfortunately some people might think you actually mean what you said. If you did.... well um... hate to say it but you're an idiot, just hope your clients don't find out.
You know that don't you? Just the way you put it makes it like you know Javascript and not enough of anything else to know the bleeding obvious that Java and Javascript have nothing else in common but a similar name. Apart from that I agree, though I'd probably go more for Python... so easy to learn. Though the easiest language I ever learnt was Basic for the Sinclair Spectrum... took me a couple of hours one afternoon (had never seen basic before). GW-Basic was nasty and primitive in comparison. For the record my favourite languages are (in order): C++, Java, C, Python, and others.
As for Javascript, what Javascript I have done I've found much easier using the Venkman debugger in Mozilla... why on Earth would you do it any other way?
Hey its not your fault we have f*ckin stupid politicians.
Trouble is life in Australia can very easily be very good indeed... it makes people very complacent. Until it all turns to shit of course which also inevitably happens as well. Bit of a roller coaster living here.
You may remember way back when a Bill of Rights was suggested and even drafted for Australia. Good ol' arse-licker hisself, John Howard, opposed it and defeated it. Its good for America but not good for us. F*ckin hypocrit.
Incidentally, I saw the SMH opinion poll showing about 66% of the respondents either saying its more beneficial to the US or it is disappointing. A lot of people aren't happy, and we haven't even seen the fine print yet.
Look at it this way. Ask yourself why human beings whose major pre-occupation for 95% of its evolution was being a hunter-gatherer should somehow have the brain hardware to indpendently discover mathematics in Europe, the Americas (Maya), India and China and be able to therefore design spacecraft etc. It doesn't make sense unless evolution supplies these skills as part of the normal repertoire of a successful hunter-gatherer. Evolution is convergent, if skills are useful to us in this environment there is a very good chance they will be selected on the other side of the galaxy as well. I don't even think that mathematical reasoning is unique to humans you would suspect that the roots of it are probably older.
When I was deeply into mathematics I happened to read an interesting SF book by Ursula K. Leguin. I don't remember the title, if you've read her work you may recognise it though: it was set in the Ekumen universe, sometime after the Age of the Enemy but before the story of "Left Hand of Darkness" and about guy from the colony of delta or gamma Draconis who ends up in the wilds of ruined Earth... he was a mathematician and the story revolves around a race of people called the Shing who supposedly came to Earth and destroyed the interplanetary civilisation because they could lie in mindspeach (telepathy). Anyway, at the end of the story the character steals a Shing starship and examines the mathematics it uses and realises that the Shing are real and not a convenient invention because the mathematics is alien. Which got me thinking, would an alien civilisation produce an alien mathematics ? And how 'alien' could it be?
I think that althought the foundations of mathematics may be quite different, for example one might rework the foundations like Russel and Whitehead but that brings up the issue of what happens when Goedel Incompleteness raises its head... they might not care because theirs is one only representation eh, maybe. Or they could construct a loose set of intuitionist proofs a la the Greeks and mid 19th century Europe. Or some other combination. The results would look different at close inspection however just because the basics are the same doesn't mean there would not be a close resemblance at a coarser level. Calculus would still exist: there were several attempts at a solution to the area under a curve over time that came so close that it makes you realise that the problem would have a similar solution though it would look different. As I recall the Greeks and Chinese did some very interesting work.
If you pick up an old work on mathematics... say one dating back to around 1800 it doesn't look like the mathematics we do now... yet it is very closely related. An alien society with an alien history and psychology will do things differently. But mathematics is very useful for the real world, that is just a plain fact (do I really need to explain this in the 21st century), any other civilisation will discover this as well and the mathematics will evolve to be useful for that purpose. Alien SETI programs will most likely use mathematics to design their dishes and signal processing... but we would not recognise it as such at first.
When such a large change occurs then there are going to be consequences... which probably wont be good for human beings. What kind of consequences ? OK here is an article describing fears based on a possible slowing / shutdown of the Gulf Stream and perhaps even of the whole conveyor, and here is the article that probably inspired it, and finally here is the Pentagon take on the real world dire consequences.
By the way, I think this change is so large that there is no way it can be stopped. It is just plain too late.
If they teach assembly to beginners then they should at least teach them a more simple / intuitive assembly first before they launch into x86 stuff. x86 is a terrible assembly in many ways. I remember learning assembly first via simulators that had simple instruction sets and I thought that was great since it meant I learnt quickly and that real assembly wasn't such a daunting next step.
Nope. No production engine was ever built for Project Orion. I was actually referring to NERVA.
Yeah I remember seeing pics and film clips back then about it. You know, 2001 A Space Odyssey did NOT look fanciful at all when you had the Nerva rockets as probable new technology. But I'm afraid, as Arthur C. Clarke would say the bureaucrats had both a failure of nerve and a failure of imagination. Pfft.
Ahh well looks like there is a bit of competition at last. Note I said 'bit' it doesn't seem anywhere as serious as the space race... pity.
My worst fear that has refused to go away is a paragraph from a science fiction story I read years and years ago where the narrator describes the gradual loss of space technology until satellites etc are considered joke material by DJs to laugh at the previous generations. I read it in the early 70s and it has been spot on so far. Shudder. So any competition is good.
Ahh memories. I especially liked the self modifying code using the & operator. Yeah, I know evil, shouldn't do it.
I wouldn't call the UI the database though. Certainly there was a default input method that was like that. But when you made custom made screens with SAY etc it wasn't like this... then you resorted to using db3+ like a real programming language... with access to C routines and all. It was a cool language, but it was really for relatively small applications. But you could knock up a small app for someone in your lunchtime, literraly... I know because I did it several times. On the other hand the largest db3 app I wrote was 13,000 lines which is a lot in xbase.
Shouldn't really compared it to SQL though, SQL is meant to scale whereas xbase stuff wasn't.
I was very disappointed in the books because I thought the radio series was sooo amazing. It just didn't seem to capture the atmosphere even though the words were the same... like the wry voice of the book which said a lot by the way it was said. I read the books but it just wasn't the same, and the tv series was another couple of notches further down the scale.
Yep sure h5n1 is a great great worry. Enough to make you think all computer viruses are small stuff indeed. Especially, if h5n1 combines with human influenza, as some in the WHO are expecting (or so it is reported).
OK. Since your post was offtopic we might as well go way further off topic. Check out this excellent article on the Black Death and what it might have really been (hint: not spread by rats). Hmmm, yeah a global pandemic would certainly cost more.
The last page of the Wired article (page 8) details about a guy that managed the outsourcing arrangements for a company. He outsourced, overseas, the manufacturing, HR, IT, call centers, and back-office operations. Question I'd ask is what is left ? Why not just take that extra small step and move HQ out of the country ? I'm not an American, wages are cheaper here in Australia than the US but still jobs are being outsourced from here to India as well.
I see no incentive here for an IT industry in the future. I see lots of ads for Business Analysts but few developers... I suspect those analysts are doing the requirements / analysis for outsourced work.
Slashdot Mirror
Well there's the problem. Being a balloon, yes you might cheaply get from A to B by gliding along for little expenditure of energy (I guess you could heat up the helium by solar energy, too valuable to outgas) but there is the little problem of wind. Now Any breeze at all is going to spoil all your plans so you need engines ... which are heavy things which mean a large vehicle to lift them and the engines can only work so well trying to propel an object with huge air resistance. Which means its hard to get moving against the wind but the wind can push you wherever it likes becuase your mass is so low. Arrgg. Balloons are a cool invention, but highly impractical I think ... never could understand the recurring fuss about them.
My 2 cents.
From the Sydney Morning Herald we have this. SMH is about as mainstream as you get ... true it is in the technology section but it heads the section as a Special Report.
New name: XP Matrix Edition.
Though if you look at the doctored photo in one of the links you can see that Kerry is in sunlight that is coming from the left and behind the camera. Whereas for Fonda the light is coming from the right and behind her, also the light for Fonda is more diffuse. This is one of the classic 'first look' tests you have to do to check photos, people often get things like the lighting, shadows etc wrong. Though with digital it doesn't take that much effort to fix that either.
Its actually ridiculously easy to land on Venus. You don't even need a parachute. The Venera craft didn't use parachutes they just had a dish shaped structure at the top like an umbrella and in the enormously dense atmosphere that was enough to slow the craft to landing speed. However, once there surviving is very difficult, the major problem is the heat. We can build craft to go down 11 km in our oceans, and survive sulphuric acid environments no problem ... but you can't keep an object permanently cold (or cold for extended periods) in such a hot environment.
I'm sure Venus has an interesting history and is worth exploring one day. But probably not for a while. Though the pics are very intriguing.
I'm not surprised that Linux had a 'poor' showing. Increased popularity, relative inexperience in locking it down ... in other words poor training or lack of it. The article admits this. Still, a kick in the pants is still a kick in the pants I guess ... supports the idea of implementing easier methods of protecting systems (though really, I don't think its that hard at the moment).
Windows on the other hand is another matter. Really by discounting viruses and worms then they are discounting the insertion of back doors into systems. Come on! How direct an attack do you want. I mean Windows is such a sitting duck that direct attacks are part of the normal windows experience.
I'd sure like to figure out a way to make the word liberal lose its negative connotation
Easy. Just start calling yourselves "Defenders of the Constitution" instead. Somewhow, "bleeding heart defenders of the constitution" just doesn't sound the same.
BTW. Am not American so perhaps take that with a grain of salt.
I read the article and the guy made some reasonable points which did give me some concerns. However, on thinking it over there is a major difference between open and closed projects.
If a backdoor is inserted in an open source project, then the chances are that someone somewhere will eventually find it. And once it is found the CVS logs will indicate who made the change, or if no CVS logs (savages!) then there will be a very small set of people in the frame. Once the culprit is known they are history, the open source people will regard them as scum (would you want them on your project?) and if the word spreads to their employer they're in line for the sack.
No one would tolerate someone who subverts a project like that, and their reputation would spread I think. Apart from legal issues.
On the other hand, a closed source project even if the backdoor is found (unlikely) the company could say anything about it (after all you dont have access to the version control software) so it might even be a 'feature' supported by an unwritten company policy.
The BBC replied to my complaint stating that essentially since it was an opinion piece it was not factually incorrect. This is splitting hairs, and wont win the BBC friends when it needs them most. The story was shallow and uninformed. It makes little sense that a Linux user would go to the trouble to write a sophisticated Windows application and risk detection just to do something to SCO that they can easily sidestep and probably give them brownie points in the eyes of the press.
The virus did 3 things (apart from spreading itself): it installed a back door (a very serious breach of security), it installed a key logger (even worse), and it setup a DDOS of SCO (serious but easily sidestepped if given some warning). The DDOS was the least important part of it. Also the virus was cleverly social engineered to fool even moderately savvy users into clicking the attachment. It reeks of something more than a pissed of linux coder hitting back at SCO.
Now MyDoom.C is distributing the source code through the back doors to confuse the trail of those trying to find the author. Also version C doesn't have an expiry date. This was well planned, the DDOS is just camouflage for the real payload.
I find it kind of sad that due to propaganda etc this has been forgotten. A lot of amazing things happened in the "space race" apart from the Apollo missions. And on both sides. The Russians we now know weren't that far behind America in getting a man to the moon when it was cancelled (better to pretend you wouldn't lower yourself to a crass race than to come second I guess). But the lunakhod was very public and was front page news in many countries. And it just kept on going for ages. There was even talk about getting one that would take off and return samples to Earth ... I *think* that happend but I'm not sure, that was considered an embarassing possibility to the Americans. Still so much potential lost. It should be a lesson I guess to the future generations of engineers about publish or perish.
we wanted to integrate the shareware version of Linux into our server pool
When you start off thinking that Linux is shareware then you've just demonstrated that you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. Anything else that follows in your post can only be viewed as slapstick!
having programmed in VB for the last 8 years doing kernel level programming
Oh man you're a scream. This has gotta be a troll. A very funny one at that.
kernel itself lacks any support for any type of journaled filesystem
Ok gotcha, this is for those who still don't realise its a joke post. Tell em something obviously false.
Yes a hilarious post, though unfortunately some people might think you actually mean what you said. If you did .... well um ... hate to say it but you're an idiot, just hope your clients don't find out.
You know that don't you? Just the way you put it makes it like you know Javascript and not enough of anything else to know the bleeding obvious that Java and Javascript have nothing else in common but a similar name. Apart from that I agree, though I'd probably go more for Python ... so easy to learn. Though the easiest language I ever learnt was Basic for the Sinclair Spectrum ... took me a couple of hours one afternoon (had never seen basic before). GW-Basic was nasty and primitive in comparison. For the record my favourite languages are (in order): C++, Java, C, Python, and others.
As for Javascript, what Javascript I have done I've found much easier using the Venkman debugger in Mozilla ... why on Earth would you do it any other way?
Hey its not your fault we have f*ckin stupid politicians.
Trouble is life in Australia can very easily be very good indeed ... it makes people very complacent. Until it all turns to shit of course which also inevitably happens as well. Bit of a roller coaster living here.
You may remember way back when a Bill of Rights was suggested and even drafted for Australia. Good ol' arse-licker hisself, John Howard, opposed it and defeated it. Its good for America but not good for us. F*ckin hypocrit.
Incidentally, I saw the SMH opinion poll showing about 66% of the respondents either saying its more beneficial to the US or it is disappointing. A lot of people aren't happy, and we haven't even seen the fine print yet.
Don't worry, that'll be his name at Club Fed.
Look at it this way. Ask yourself why human beings whose major pre-occupation for 95% of its evolution was being a hunter-gatherer should somehow have the brain hardware to indpendently discover mathematics in Europe, the Americas (Maya), India and China and be able to therefore design spacecraft etc. It doesn't make sense unless evolution supplies these skills as part of the normal repertoire of a successful hunter-gatherer. Evolution is convergent, if skills are useful to us in this environment there is a very good chance they will be selected on the other side of the galaxy as well. I don't even think that mathematical reasoning is unique to humans you would suspect that the roots of it are probably older.
When I was deeply into mathematics I happened to read an interesting SF book by Ursula K. Leguin. I don't remember the title, if you've read her work you may recognise it though: it was set in the Ekumen universe, sometime after the Age of the Enemy but before the story of "Left Hand of Darkness" and about guy from the colony of delta or gamma Draconis who ends up in the wilds of ruined Earth ... he was a mathematician and the story revolves around a race of people called the Shing who supposedly came to Earth and destroyed the interplanetary civilisation because they could lie in mindspeach (telepathy). Anyway, at the end of the story the character steals a Shing starship and examines the mathematics it uses and realises that the Shing are real and not a convenient invention because the mathematics is alien. Which got me thinking, would an alien civilisation produce an alien mathematics ? And how 'alien' could it be?
I think that althought the foundations of mathematics may be quite different, for example one might rework the foundations like Russel and Whitehead but that brings up the issue of what happens when Goedel Incompleteness raises its head ... they might not care because theirs is one only representation eh, maybe. Or they could construct a loose set of intuitionist proofs a la the Greeks and mid 19th century Europe. Or some other combination. The results would look different at close inspection however just because the basics are the same doesn't mean there would not be a close resemblance at a coarser level. Calculus would still exist: there were several attempts at a solution to the area under a curve over time that came so close that it makes you realise that the problem would have a similar solution though it would look different. As I recall the Greeks and Chinese did some very interesting work.
If you pick up an old work on mathematics ... say one dating back to around 1800 it doesn't look like the mathematics we do now ... yet it is very closely related. An alien society with an alien history and psychology will do things differently. But mathematics is very useful for the real world, that is just a plain fact (do I really need to explain this in the 21st century), any other civilisation will discover this as well and the mathematics will evolve to be useful for that purpose. Alien SETI programs will most likely use mathematics to design their dishes and signal processing ... but we would not recognise it as such at first.
Hmmm. This isn't +5 Funny, this should be +5 Insightful when describing the relationship between some jobs and vacations.
When such a large change occurs then there are going to be consequences ... which probably wont be good for human beings. What kind of consequences ? OK here is an article describing fears based on a possible slowing / shutdown of the Gulf Stream and perhaps even of the whole conveyor, and here is the article that probably inspired it, and finally here is the Pentagon take on the real world dire consequences.
By the way, I think this change is so large that there is no way it can be stopped. It is just plain too late.
Enjoy.
If they teach assembly to beginners then they should at least teach them a more simple / intuitive assembly first before they launch into x86 stuff. x86 is a terrible assembly in many ways. I remember learning assembly first via simulators that had simple instruction sets and I thought that was great since it meant I learnt quickly and that real assembly wasn't such a daunting next step.
Nope. No production engine was ever built for Project Orion. I was actually referring to NERVA.
Yeah I remember seeing pics and film clips back then about it. You know, 2001 A Space Odyssey did NOT look fanciful at all when you had the Nerva rockets as probable new technology. But I'm afraid, as Arthur C. Clarke would say the bureaucrats had both a failure of nerve and a failure of imagination. Pfft.
Ahh well looks like there is a bit of competition at last. Note I said 'bit' it doesn't seem anywhere as serious as the space race ... pity.
My worst fear that has refused to go away is a paragraph from a science fiction story I read years and years ago where the narrator describes the gradual loss of space technology until satellites etc are considered joke material by DJs to laugh at the previous generations. I read it in the early 70s and it has been spot on so far. Shudder. So any competition is good.
My two cents anyway.
Ahh memories. I especially liked the self modifying code using the & operator. Yeah, I know evil, shouldn't do it.
I wouldn't call the UI the database though. Certainly there was a default input method that was like that. But when you made custom made screens with SAY etc it wasn't like this ... then you resorted to using db3+ like a real programming language ... with access to C routines and all. It was a cool language, but it was really for relatively small applications. But you could knock up a small app for someone in your lunchtime, literraly ... I know because I did it several times. On the other hand the largest db3 app I wrote was 13,000 lines which is a lot in xbase.
Shouldn't really compared it to SQL though, SQL is meant to scale whereas xbase stuff wasn't.
I was very disappointed in the books because I thought the radio series was sooo amazing. It just didn't seem to capture the atmosphere even though the words were the same ... like the wry voice of the book which said a lot by the way it was said. I read the books but it just wasn't the same, and the tv series was another couple of notches further down the scale.
Yep sure h5n1 is a great great worry. Enough to make you think all computer viruses are small stuff indeed. Especially, if h5n1 combines with human influenza, as some in the WHO are expecting (or so it is reported).
OK. Since your post was offtopic we might as well go way further off topic. Check out this excellent article on the Black Death and what it might have really been (hint: not spread by rats). Hmmm, yeah a global pandemic would certainly cost more.
The last page of the Wired article (page 8) details about a guy that managed the outsourcing arrangements for a company. He outsourced, overseas, the manufacturing, HR, IT, call centers, and back-office operations. Question I'd ask is what is left ? Why not just take that extra small step and move HQ out of the country ? I'm not an American, wages are cheaper here in Australia than the US but still jobs are being outsourced from here to India as well.
I see no incentive here for an IT industry in the future. I see lots of ads for Business Analysts but few developers ... I suspect those analysts are doing the requirements / analysis for outsourced work.