I generally don't believe in the whole on-line thing: my typing self finds it easy to be deep and meaningful, but f2f the magic is what seems to matter. Otherwise, both sides just sit bored in a cafe and resolve not to try this again.
Really, if you ignore the gendered pronouns, I think the same basic advice applies to tech-oriented women, too. Having dated a marvelous tech-savvy slashdot reader --- who I still care a lot for --- I think I can safely say that women have as much trouble dating geeky guys as guys have dating them. Geek-geek relationships inevitably wind up in fights over the proper way to do XYZ in OS foo, or some such. [If both sides are fairly strong-willed --- as in my particular case --- you can just multiply the inevitable conflicts by an order of magnitude or so.]
Find someone who you respect but don't feel compelled to compete with. If you're not artistically inclined, try to catch yourself a Nitrozac. If you are, then maybe Cmdr Taco is more your speed (w/ apologies to his coffee-cup art projects). You *don't* necessarily want to find someone just like you. Find someone who can be as passionate explaining just what it is they do as you are, explaining what it is that *you* do. I can almost guarantee that someone "just like you" will also have the same troubles at the same times you do --- when what you really want is someone who's strong when you're weak, and vice-versa.
[Not to say you can't be friends --- good friends, even --- with folk "just like you"; just try not to expect them to be *different* than you when you're feeling low.]
You still haven't proved that 'friendship' or unfair collaboration caused any of this. Some bad decisions in the beginning (like MIT's class A allocation --- but they've been giving pieces of that away ever since they got it) and a general paucity of the 32-bit address space --- but at the beginning they really thought they had *plenty* and didn't need to pay close attention to allocation. Now we know better. Are the extremely poor allocations still happening? And can you prove that unfair practices were involved?
Most other word processors still haven't grokked onto the power of regular expressions and powerful scripting languages (and don't even *think* of comparing VB with emacs-lisp)...
But, more than anything else, both men have been *leaders*. Whether they personally wrote the code or not, Torvalds is responsible for *every single piece of Linux code out there*, and---it's a bit of a stretch---maybe even the continued existence of Unix. Stallman likewise is responsible for every piece of GNU code written, which, again, is quite a lot---and if you're feeling generous you can also attribute "the continued existence of Unix" to the GNU part of GNU/Linux.
No, they haven't advanced the technological frontier---in terms of pure, basic research---as much as (say) Tarjan and Dijkstra have. Knuth wasn't a basic researcher either---just a extremely precise librarian, who recorded and clarified the existing morass of knowledge---making his own tweaks and contributions along the way. This isn't to denigrate what he's done---just to point out that "contributions to the field" mean lots of things besides algorithm research. Saying Torvalds wasn't necessarily great but would be *remembered* as great seems to turn the whole thing into some sort of public relations problem...
[you can also thank Knuth indirectly for all the triple-dashes in the above two paragraphs. =) ]
...maybe the geeks picked on him for using windoze?
In any case, the article, while obviously inflammatory, is backed up by very little actual fact. The author didn't bother to actually *call up* any of those 'professional privacy advocates' and ask them himself why this wasn't an issue (in other words, didn't do any real journalism) -- he just whined and complained that the people *who with very little pay occupy themselves with protecting _his_ privacy* thought they knew better than he about the implications of IPv6. And WTF:
You would think that the 32-bit address field of IPv4, supporting more than 4 billion unique addresses, would be sufficient to last quite some time. Unfortunately, the cabal that controlled the disposition of these addresses had a habit of handing out large blocks to their friends, who parlayed these into start-ups with multibillion- dollar market caps. Hence, the "shortage."
That's quite a statement to make unsubstantiated. Very poor journalism. And:
The spooks and weirdos in Washington, ever eager to empower the surveillance state as they fight a rear-guard action against strong encryption, must be thrilled with such a gift. They appear so thrilled that the Institute for Information Sciences, heavily funded by the Defense Department, is writing a reference stack for IPv6 that it is quietly hoping to slip into Windows 2000.
Eh? Since when was "heavily funded by the Defense Department" an automatic stamp of badness? Does this guy realize that close to 90% of *all* the academic research in this (American) country is one way or another "funded by the Defense Department"? Heck, *I'm* funded by the defense department. The whole *Internet* was started by and remains to some extent funded by the Defense Department. This is just lazy scare-mongering by some guy who considers his opinions too obviously important to merit support with real facts.
If this guy is serious, he ought to research and back up his claims. Lacking any evidence to the contrary, I'd just as soon agree with the poster directly above, who claims that this NIC ID doesn't make it past the first router and so doesn't matter. That seems far more likely than the worldwide conspiracy that Bill Frezza would have us believe. If Bill can make a better argument, I'll go over to the standards and check for myself, but he has very little credibility in my book at this point.
It's as simple as that. He really has very little clue what he's talking about, and apparently (from his proto-fascist suggestions) has lived in America too long with memory too short to remember what evils governments can get into if you let them.
I find his suggestions deeply disturbing. Am I naive to hope that policy makers are better informed than he?
Uh, I've got another definition for writers. But it's kind of besides the point: the fact is *all* writers are different and some writers *are* geeks, neither of which was allowed by Katz's sloppy phrasing.
I view my job as a writer to be more or less equivalent to my job as a (geeky) systems designer: take familiar problems and odd-colored glasses, look at the old problem in a new way through the strange eyewear, write clear prose to tell others how different the old problem looks, and encourage them to try the experiment themselves.
That's how I see my writing on alternate Tuesdays, at least. Other times it's pure blue emotion, and yet another times it is an act of pure creation just as pristine and mysterious as the creation of the world (or a nifty program) ex nihlio. Writing is all of these things and none of them. Geeking is like writing in that it also can be all of these things, and none of them. Neither takes well to being boxed.
See what Need To Know said about this article... last week. The established opinion seems to be that The Sunday Times got TWINKLE mixed up with other stuff in their foggy heads and is now talking out of their ass.
...his explanation of the perl regex was completely wrong. He hasn't been doing enough sed programming.
\1 in a perl regexp means the same as $1 -- it's a backwards-compatibility hack for old-school sed hackers like me.
If anything, the filename portion of the hack might have been easier if he understood what \1 really does. Doesn't make much difference, though, except to gauge his amount of prior experience and therefore the 'difficulty' of the crack.
In my mind, this is clearly a CGI bug. The other holes aided and abetted, but nothing would have been possibly without the gaping CGI security flaws. Whoever wrote the script had clue-zero about security.
And anyone who claims that if would have been 'impossible' with a closed-source CGI has obviously not been computing long enough to remember the game-cracking leagues of the C64 and Apple II days. 100% closed source binaries; 100% crackable. Heck, there are even tools to allow you to decompile code quickly and efficiently, and in this case the cracker knew exactly what he was looking for. String-searching a binary for exploitable method calls is trivial.
And (at the risk of overly belaboring my point) -- it's pretty tough to 'closed-source' a script written in an interpreted language.
I think anyone who intends to *learn* anything from/. will see that this is a bad idea. You will end up seeing only comments from people *just like you* -- and what's the use of that?
Diversity is key. Opinions different from yours are valid. The one odd duck might be the only true voice.
Yeah, it seems clear that TCP/IP support is part of the OS (two choices) and probably which ports are open is strictly a function of software; ie which CD is in the drive on power-up.
Calling sega to get the password will probably do no good -- you should call the manufacturer of the game CD that you had in the drive.
This is eye mechanics. The eye has higher resolution in the fovea, which is the only place likely to be able to find a nick on a block. (Also, the coor receptors necessary to differentiate between red and green concentrate in the fovea).
Thus the eye will saccade (move rapidly) from one spot to the next to get the object under study projected onto the fovea. Of course the brain will process them serially; the fovea can only point at one at a time.
Reading is a more realistic problem, where several words can fit onto the fovea at once. The question of whether we process those words in parallel or serial is not resolved by this study.
Ah. The recent/. story on Microsoft's CryptoAPI and the NSA explains. Yes, Microsoft did have to get a license to export the *API*. The price they paid to get the license was installing an NSA back door. So, no, in general exporting APIs is *not* legal.
This is really simple. The US views cryptographic software as a munition, just like a gun or a bomb.
If someone has bomb plans on the web, and you fixed them or sent them changes showing how to make the bomb into a better bomb, then you are obviously exporting bomb technology and subject to prosecution. It doesn't matter if you're changing the placement of a single bolt or gutting the chemical explosives and drawing in uranium spheres; you're aiding a foreign national to construct a munition, which is prohibited.
You're allowed to talk about *bomb technology* at technical conferences (although the wording of the export regs would much prefer that said technology *already* be in the "public domain"), but you're not allowed to build any real bombs outside the US or with non-Americans. Them's the laws. Simple, right?
Also makes perfect sense---if you think that crypto is anything like a bomb or a gun.
The relevant section from the Defence Trade Regulations states:
Part 121 - The United States Munitions List.
Category XIII--Auxiliary Military Equipment (b)Speech scramblers, privacy devices, cryptographic devices and software (encoding and decoding), and components specifically designed to be modified therefore, ancillary equipment, and protective apparatus specifically designed or modified for such devices, components, and equipment.
So if your software is "specifically designed to be modified" into a "cryptographic device" for "encoding and decoding" than export is prohibited. And the definition of export includes:
Section 120.10 Export---permanent and temporary.
Export means: (4) Disclosing or transferring technical data to a foreign person, whether in the United States or abroad. (5) Performing a defense service on behalf of, or for the benefit of, a foreign person, whether in the United States or abroad.
Slashdot Mirror
I generally don't believe in the whole on-line
thing: my typing self finds it easy to be deep and meaningful, but f2f the magic is what seems to
matter. Otherwise, both sides just sit bored in
a cafe and resolve not to try this again.
You disagree? Bring it on, baby... try me. =)
No, I find TeX marvellous for script-writing.
The plain-text input means that I can *much* more easily track script revisions, using standard tools, than I could any other way.
And macros make the standard playwrighting conventions *so* much more managable. And it just *looks* so fine...
So, it's not just math geeks who like TeX.
[and colored contacts can be so much fun!... why give it all up for perfect vision? ;-) ]
Find someone who you respect but don't feel compelled to compete with. If you're not artistically inclined, try to catch yourself a Nitrozac. If you are, then maybe Cmdr Taco is more your speed (w/ apologies to his coffee-cup art projects). You *don't* necessarily want to find someone just like you. Find someone who can be as passionate explaining just what it is they do as you are, explaining what it is that *you* do. I can almost guarantee that someone "just like you" will also have the same troubles at the same times you do --- when what you really want is someone who's strong when you're weak, and vice-versa.
[Not to say you can't be friends --- good friends, even --- with folk "just like you"; just try not to expect them to be *different* than you when you're feeling low.]
Discussion and flaming welcome...
It wouldn't stand up in court.
This is an old wives tale.
An attractive one, but a
legend nonetheless.
You still haven't proved that 'friendship' or unfair collaboration caused any of this. Some bad decisions in the beginning (like MIT's class A allocation --- but they've been giving pieces of that away ever since they got it) and a general paucity of the 32-bit address space --- but at the beginning they really thought they had *plenty* and didn't need to pay close attention to allocation. Now we know better. Are the extremely poor allocations still happening? And can you prove that unfair practices were involved?
And how could you forget emacs? =)
Most other word processors still haven't grokked onto the power of regular expressions and powerful scripting languages (and don't even *think* of comparing VB with emacs-lisp)...
But, more than anything else, both men have been *leaders*. Whether they personally wrote the code or not, Torvalds is responsible for *every single piece of Linux code out there*, and---it's a bit of a stretch---maybe even the continued existence of Unix. Stallman likewise is responsible for every piece of GNU code written, which, again, is quite a lot---and if you're feeling generous you can also attribute "the continued existence of Unix" to the GNU part of GNU/Linux.
No, they haven't advanced the technological frontier---in terms of pure, basic research---as much as (say) Tarjan and Dijkstra have. Knuth wasn't a basic researcher either---just a extremely precise librarian, who recorded and clarified the existing morass of knowledge---making his own tweaks and contributions along the way. This isn't to denigrate what he's done---just to point out that "contributions to the field" mean lots of things besides algorithm research. Saying Torvalds wasn't necessarily great but would be *remembered* as great seems to turn the whole thing into some sort of public relations problem...
[you can also thank Knuth indirectly for all the triple-dashes in the above two paragraphs. =) ]
In any case, the article, while obviously inflammatory, is backed up by very little actual fact. The author didn't bother to actually *call up* any of those 'professional privacy advocates' and ask them himself why this wasn't an issue (in other words, didn't do any real journalism) -- he just whined and complained that the people *who with very little pay occupy themselves with protecting _his_ privacy* thought they knew better than he about the implications of IPv6. And WTF:
That's quite a statement to make unsubstantiated. Very poor journalism. And: Eh? Since when was "heavily funded by the Defense Department" an automatic stamp of badness? Does this guy realize that close to 90% of *all* the academic research in this (American) country is one way or another "funded by the Defense Department"? Heck, *I'm* funded by the defense department. The whole *Internet* was started by and remains to some extent funded by the Defense Department. This is just lazy scare-mongering by some guy who considers his opinions too obviously important to merit support with real facts.If this guy is serious, he ought to research and back up his claims. Lacking any evidence to the contrary, I'd just as soon agree with the poster directly above, who claims that this NIC ID doesn't make it past the first router and so doesn't matter. That seems far more likely than the worldwide conspiracy that Bill Frezza would have us believe. If Bill can make a better argument, I'll go over to the standards and check for myself, but he has very little credibility in my book at this point.
Yeah. Here's to classical music while coding: Dvorak in MP3; Dvorak in Real Audio.
I find his suggestions deeply disturbing. Am I naive to hope that policy makers are better informed than he?
I view my job as a writer to be more or less equivalent to my job as a (geeky) systems designer: take familiar problems and odd-colored glasses, look at the old problem in a new way through the strange eyewear, write clear prose to tell others how different the old problem looks, and encourage them to try the experiment themselves.
That's how I see my writing on alternate Tuesdays, at least. Other times it's pure blue emotion, and yet another times it is an act of pure creation just as pristine and mysterious as the creation of the world (or a nifty program) ex nihlio. Writing is all of these things and none of them. Geeking is like writing in that it also can be all of these things, and none of them. Neither takes well to being boxed.
[actually, had one of them too but lost it, er, her... =( ]
(Proof)
I also take issue with mutex duality.
--s
See what Need To Know said about this article... last week. The established opinion seems to be that The Sunday Times got TWINKLE mixed up with other stuff in their foggy heads and is now talking out of their ass.
...his explanation of the perl regex was completely wrong. He hasn't been doing enough sed programming.
\1 in a perl regexp means the same as $1 -- it's a backwards-compatibility hack for old-school sed hackers like me.
If anything, the filename portion of the hack might have been easier if he understood what \1 really does. Doesn't make much difference, though, except to gauge his amount of prior experience and therefore the 'difficulty' of the crack.
In my mind, this is clearly a CGI bug. The other holes aided and abetted, but nothing would have been possibly without the gaping CGI security flaws. Whoever wrote the script had clue-zero about security.
And anyone who claims that if would have been 'impossible' with a closed-source CGI has obviously not been computing long enough to remember the game-cracking leagues of the C64 and Apple II days. 100% closed source binaries; 100% crackable. Heck, there are even tools to allow you to decompile code quickly and efficiently, and in this case the cracker knew exactly what he was looking for. String-searching a binary for exploitable method calls is trivial.
And (at the risk of overly belaboring my point) -- it's pretty tough to 'closed-source' a script written in an interpreted language.
I think anyone who intends to *learn* anything from /. will see that this is a bad idea. You will end up seeing only comments from people *just like you* -- and what's the use of that?
Diversity is key. Opinions different from yours are valid. The one odd duck might be the only true voice.
Pretty small footprint, apart from the (shared) SSL libs.
Yeah, it seems clear that TCP/IP support is part
of the OS (two choices) and probably which ports
are open is strictly a function of software; ie which CD is in the drive on power-up.
Calling sega to get the password will probably do no good -- you should call the manufacturer of the
game CD that you had in the drive.
This is eye mechanics. The eye has higher resolution in the fovea, which is the only place likely to be able to find a nick on a block. (Also, the coor receptors necessary to differentiate between red and green concentrate in the fovea).
Thus the eye will saccade (move rapidly) from one spot to the next to get the object under study projected onto the fovea. Of course the brain will process them serially; the fovea can only point at one at a time.
Reading is a more realistic problem, where several words can fit onto the fovea at once. The question of whether we process those words in parallel or serial is not resolved by this study.
I assume you're planning on claiming the above perl is speech, not code?
Ah. The recent /. story on Microsoft's CryptoAPI and the NSA explains. Yes, Microsoft did have to get a license to export the *API*. The price they paid to get the license was installing an NSA back door. So, no, in general exporting APIs is *not* legal.
Bruce Schneier's "Applied Cryptography" book contains both the regs and the munitions list.
This is really simple. The US views cryptographic software as a munition, just like a gun or a bomb.
If someone has bomb plans on the web, and you fixed them or sent them changes showing how to make the bomb into a better bomb, then you are obviously exporting bomb technology and subject to prosecution. It doesn't matter if you're changing the placement of a single bolt or gutting the chemical explosives and drawing in uranium spheres; you're aiding a foreign national to construct a munition, which is prohibited.
You're allowed to talk about *bomb technology* at technical conferences (although the wording of the export regs would much prefer that said technology *already* be in the "public domain"), but you're not allowed to build any real bombs outside the US or with non-Americans. Them's the laws. Simple, right?
Also makes perfect sense---if you think that crypto is anything like a bomb or a gun.
So if your software is "specifically designed to be modified" into a "cryptographic device" for "encoding and decoding" than export is prohibited. And the definition of export includes: