> it's about a fucking school that wants to store private medical details
Schools need at least the student's immmunization records, doctor contact information, history of allergies, and a record of treatments received at the school.
It's not "the doctor having access". It's the access by unknown and untraceable third party staff members. Medical information contains a great deal of privileged information, including the identity of family members, family history, billing addresses with credit card information and social security number. It also includes data that workplaces are not allowed to ask about, such as age, chronic illnesses, and pregnancy. Such information is also politically very sensitive: discovering that a political opponent has been treated for a venereal disease or depression finding that a female candidate is pregnant, or discovering that a right wing candidates children have had abortions, can be political gold.
> It's only "done" when you can get on Amazon or got to Wal-mart and buy one.
The systems are dangerous to human eyes and they're fire hazards. Until those issues are resolved, and they're very difficult to resolve, I don't see them ever being available for household purchase.
I'm afraid that "Content Management System" as a description for a GUI for managing websites is part of the problem with most of them. Content management systems allow sharing of digital content, typically code and databases. This is a very separate set of requirements from a website management toolkit. The needs to support consistent coding standards, to give a variety of developers and graphic designers and non-programmers the flexibility _in a GUI_ to publish and arrange their content as desired are very separate needs from consistency, backup, security, and reliability of the underlying content management itself.
The trade-offs are good reasons for people who do actual software development or systems management to stay away from the work. The client's needs have to be balanced against the software capabilities, and no matter what balance is chosen, it is often considered wrong by more than half of the clients, even when they are on the same team.
> If the NSA has the capabilities why would they have wasted them on such a dumb fucking case that was a loser?
Especially if it would have revealed resources that they rely on for more important monitoring. The infamous historic example of this is the "Coventry Blitz" in World War II. According to some witnesses, the Allies had warning of attacks on Coventry from successfully decrypting the "Enigma" military encryption. According to the commander of Allied intelligence, they refused to improve defenses against those attacks lest they reveal the decryption and imperil other, more critical military operations.
Treating DNS as a key to free speech around the world, and protecting from the commercial abuse and deceit of DNS wildcards or the riduculous number of toplevel domains, would gain even more respect.
There is a great deal of "carefully selected hardware" in the world, especially in secure civilian and military installations, equipment which could present a broad and lucrative attack surface to such tools. And a good security vulnerability report is also much like a good scientific experiment: enough detail is included to allow clear repetition of the attack, without accidental disparities in the testing conditions obscuring the results.
For _X_ based access, namely for Linux based servers and remote shared or graphical sessions from other platforms, I've found the NoMachine software from www.nomachine.com to work very well. There are older free software versions of it, such as "freenx", and very good demo versions of it. Commercial use and support requires rather expensive commercial licenses, but the quality of the software has been very good. It's well supported, the free clients work very well with the commercial servers, and they've earned my confidence in their commercial support.
It's also effective to use the free versions as a demo, and buy the commercial license when satisfied with the demo. I do _not_ encourage commercial use of hte demo, that's a license violation and discourages good developers trying to sell their work.
Those systems may also be hacked by a "script kiddie" working for the poachers. Automated updates involve trade-offs of security versus stability and network resources that require real thought, especially with the constant critical security updates for Windows based systems.
> Even if there are bugs, you can just stop the simulation, fix the bugs and start it over.
As a developer and administrator for decades, dealing with increasingly complex systems, I must say "no". Many complex systems have bugs that are "emergent". They emerge from subtle interactions among smaller components, and can be devastatingly destructive to your existing system to repair. Examples include exceeding the size of expected storage through conditions that were never in the original specification, but which were assumed by other developers.
Yes. It means "we'd like you to give us money to develop this idea we came up with while goofing off, and that's been tried and failed the last 10 times anyone did it". If you work for these people, cash the checks quickly, and make sure you don't burn yourself out working for options that are unlikely to vest. And _do not_ let them run up large outstanding purchases for equipment, food, or travel on your personal credit card.
This looks like an end run around patent law, to create "synthetic" genes that are patentable even if they're functionally identical to existing "natural" gene sequences.
Botswana is doing well _for the wealthy_. They import 90% of their food, and the poor are starving to death. The middle class, whose income comes from unrenewable mineral wealthy, are spending roughly half their income on food. The poor are starving because they simply cannot afford the imported food.
At higher altitudes you can suffocate due to lack of oxygen while falling. And your terminal velocity at 10,000 meters is much higher, due to the thin air, though it seems fairly irrelevant: it's the terminal velocity at landing time that's far more critical.
I'm afraid that "practice makes perfict" is the method you're describing. And the better metaphor is "perfect practice makes perfect". Poor practice ingrains horrible habits, and some good literature and especially good mentorship can be invaluable to learning _good_ coding, instead of simply publishing bad tools in public source repositories.
I'll personally recommend Kernighan and Richie's "The C Programming Language" as a critical tutorial in understanding how, and why, "types" of data matter and what "arrays" and data structures really are. "UNIX Power Tools" is a close second, due to the breadth of excellent hacks and workarounds that are invaluable to a skilled administrator. And I'm finding it difficult to select between "Don Quixote" by Cervantes, or "The Prince" by Machiavelli. Don Quixote portrays the wisdom and sorrows of pursuing dreams. The Prince includes a great deal of distasteful but illuminating advice about how to deal with bureaucrats and management, and why they make their choices.
Some African economies have been doing well. Sub-Saharan Africa is devastated by AIDS. Swaziland, Botswana, and Lesotho are the worst hit with over 20% infection among working age adults South Africa is a close follower in those numbers: that's not a surprise, it borders on or actually contains those countries. That information is roughly 5 years old: I'm afraid that if it's gotten noticeably better, it's because many of the AIDS victims have since died.
The chart at http://www.avert.org/professio..., based on 2015 data, is also compelling. Sub-Saharan Africa is suffering very badly from AIDS. The attrition of the work force, and the cost of treatment to try and preserve the workforce, is devastating.
> There is no "world hunger," there is only local hunger, which is due to local governments who enforce low levels of economic freedom.
Failure to keep the peace is not the same as "enforcing low levels of economic freedom". But it remains an ongoing fact of life for millions of people around the world. It need not even be caused by incompetence or malice. Take a good look at how AIDS has destroyed economies in Africa over the last few decades.
CentOS doesn't generally "keep up with changes". They follow changes from RHEL, with a few exceptions like their Xen virtualization project.
RHEL is kept very standard, with consistent major libraries, kernels, and software versions. They do occasionally publish add-on toolkits, such as additional and upgraded versions of python or gcc in parallel with the main default version. And they are doing some interesting things with the "software collecion" libraries, to provide updated MySQL and python toolkits compatible with older operating systems. But it can be very tricky to publish two major releases of the same softwae in parallel, and RHEL has been careful to keep them separate.
RHEL 7.2 is the latest long-term supported production platform from Red Hat. Fedora is the bleeding edge work, and a sign of what will be in future RHEL releases. The bleeding edge versions of perl, python, and of virtualization toolkits and security toolkits can be very destabilizing to production systems, which is why RHEL and CentOS have been so popular for production work.
> . . . they are very difficult to get rid of. Give 'em a scorched Earth . . . they'll figure some way to survive in it.
Partly by changing the schorched Earth itself. Many species have gone extinct in the last few hundred years due to human intervention, despite hardy natures and adaptability to changing environments. Humanity has tended to revise its own environment, especially since we gained access to bulldozers, cement, and mechanical power.
> If Paramount/CBS were smart they make a deal with these guys, throw some money at it and syndicate it.
Many companies do that buying out smaller competitors. The result is often quite poor. The managerial, technical, and cultural approaches of the smaller company are lost, many of the best staff take the buyout money and move on to other projects, and you get uncertain quality about new projects. It's especially bad when the corporate offices have policies that work well for larger companies, and their staff have learned to work with, and the smaller company has not.
I've seen many such smaller companies bought out by larger companies in my career. A modest percentage go on to complete their main projects, or help start new ones, but it's not a _large_ percentage.
Slashdot Mirror
> it's about a fucking school that wants to store private medical details
Schools need at least the student's immmunization records, doctor contact information, history of allergies, and a record of treatments received at the school.
It's not "the doctor having access". It's the access by unknown and untraceable third party staff members. Medical information contains a great deal of privileged information, including the identity of family members, family history, billing addresses with credit card information and social security number. It also includes data that workplaces are not allowed to ask about, such as age, chronic illnesses, and pregnancy. Such information is also politically very sensitive: discovering that a political opponent has been treated for a venereal disease or depression finding that a female candidate is pregnant, or discovering that a right wing candidates children have had abortions, can be political gold.
> It's only "done" when you can get on Amazon or got to Wal-mart and buy one.
The systems are dangerous to human eyes and they're fire hazards. Until those issues are resolved, and they're very difficult to resolve, I don't see them ever being available for household purchase.
I'm afraid that "Content Management System" as a description for a GUI for managing websites is part of the problem with most of them. Content management systems allow sharing of digital content, typically code and databases. This is a very separate set of requirements from a website management toolkit. The needs to support consistent coding standards, to give a variety of developers and graphic designers and non-programmers the flexibility _in a GUI_ to publish and arrange their content as desired are very separate needs from consistency, backup, security, and reliability of the underlying content management itself.
The trade-offs are good reasons for people who do actual software development or systems management to stay away from the work. The client's needs have to be balanced against the software capabilities, and no matter what balance is chosen, it is often considered wrong by more than half of the clients, even when they are on the same team.
> If the NSA has the capabilities why would they have wasted them on such a dumb fucking case that was a loser?
Especially if it would have revealed resources that they rely on for more important monitoring. The infamous historic example of this is the "Coventry Blitz" in World War II. According to some witnesses, the Allies had warning of attacks on Coventry from successfully decrypting the "Enigma" military encryption. According to the commander of Allied intelligence, they refused to improve defenses against those attacks lest they reveal the decryption and imperil other, more critical military operations.
Treating DNS as a key to free speech around the world, and protecting from the commercial abuse and deceit of DNS wildcards or the riduculous number of toplevel domains, would gain even more respect.
There is a great deal of "carefully selected hardware" in the world, especially in secure civilian and military installations, equipment which could present a broad and lucrative attack surface to such tools. And a good security vulnerability report is also much like a good scientific experiment: enough detail is included to allow clear repetition of the attack, without accidental disparities in the testing conditions obscuring the results.
For _X_ based access, namely for Linux based servers and remote shared or graphical sessions from other platforms, I've found the NoMachine software from www.nomachine.com to work very well. There are older free software versions of it, such as "freenx", and very good demo versions of it. Commercial use and support requires rather expensive commercial licenses, but the quality of the software has been very good. It's well supported, the free clients work very well with the commercial servers, and they've earned my confidence in their commercial support.
It's also effective to use the free versions as a demo, and buy the commercial license when satisfied with the demo. I do _not_ encourage commercial use of hte demo, that's a license violation and discourages good developers trying to sell their work.
Those systems may also be hacked by a "script kiddie" working for the poachers. Automated updates involve trade-offs of security versus stability and network resources that require real thought, especially with the constant critical security updates for Windows based systems.
> Even if there are bugs, you can just stop the simulation, fix the bugs and start it over.
As a developer and administrator for decades, dealing with increasingly complex systems, I must say "no". Many complex systems have bugs that are "emergent". They emerge from subtle interactions among smaller components, and can be devastatingly destructive to your existing system to repair. Examples include exceeding the size of expected storage through conditions that were never in the original specification, but which were assumed by other developers.
> t's clear that what they're saying has meaning.
Yes. It means "we'd like you to give us money to develop this idea we came up with while goofing off, and that's been tried and failed the last 10 times anyone did it". If you work for these people, cash the checks quickly, and make sure you don't burn yourself out working for options that are unlikely to vest. And _do not_ let them run up large outstanding purchases for equipment, food, or travel on your personal credit card.
This looks like an end run around patent law, to create "synthetic" genes that are patentable even if they're functionally identical to existing "natural" gene sequences.
Botswana is doing well _for the wealthy_. They import 90% of their food, and the poor are starving to death. The middle class, whose income comes from unrenewable mineral wealthy, are spending roughly half their income on food. The poor are starving because they simply cannot afford the imported food.
Tilting at windmills, or at the right windmills, can inspire people to do more than they realized was possible. This includes yourself.
At higher altitudes you can suffocate due to lack of oxygen while falling. And your terminal velocity at 10,000 meters is much higher, due to the thin air, though it seems fairly irrelevant: it's the terminal velocity at landing time that's far more critical.
High altitude falls involve fascinating physics: The record seems to be listed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....
> You have to have the fundamentals of AT LEAST algebra first.
> Without the math that underpins ALL computers, you can't program. Not even a spreadsheet.
Some understanding of binary logic is critical, but please show a single use of polynomials in all of the Perl or Python libraries.
She fell over 10,000 _meters, much more impressive than you may have realized.
http://www.guinnessworldrecord...
> Coders code. It's what we do.
I'm afraid that "practice makes perfict" is the method you're describing. And the better metaphor is "perfect practice makes perfect". Poor practice ingrains horrible habits, and some good literature and especially good mentorship can be invaluable to learning _good_ coding, instead of simply publishing bad tools in public source repositories.
I'll personally recommend Kernighan and Richie's "The C Programming Language" as a critical tutorial in understanding how, and why, "types" of data matter and what "arrays" and data structures really are. "UNIX Power Tools" is a close second, due to the breadth of excellent hacks and workarounds that are invaluable to a skilled administrator. And I'm finding it difficult to select between "Don Quixote" by Cervantes, or "The Prince" by Machiavelli. Don Quixote portrays the wisdom and sorrows of pursuing dreams. The Prince includes a great deal of distasteful but illuminating advice about how to deal with bureaucrats and management, and why they make their choices.
Some African economies have been doing well. Sub-Saharan Africa is devastated by AIDS. Swaziland, Botswana, and Lesotho are the worst hit with over 20% infection among working age adults South Africa is a close follower in those numbers: that's not a surprise, it borders on or actually contains those countries. That information is roughly 5 years old: I'm afraid that if it's gotten noticeably better, it's because many of the AIDS victims have since died.
The chart at http://www.avert.org/professio..., based on 2015 data, is also compelling. Sub-Saharan Africa is suffering very badly from AIDS. The attrition of the work force, and the cost of treatment to try and preserve the workforce, is devastating.
> There is no "world hunger," there is only local hunger, which is due to local governments who enforce low levels of economic freedom.
Failure to keep the peace is not the same as "enforcing low levels of economic freedom". But it remains an ongoing fact of life for millions of people around the world. It need not even be caused by incompetence or malice. Take a good look at how AIDS has destroyed economies in Africa over the last few decades.
> It is hurting crooked managers.
Who often have golden parachutes already set up.
> Has CentOS 6 kept up with recent changes?
CentOS doesn't generally "keep up with changes". They follow changes from RHEL, with a few exceptions like their Xen virtualization project.
RHEL is kept very standard, with consistent major libraries, kernels, and software versions. They do occasionally publish add-on toolkits, such as additional and upgraded versions of python or gcc in parallel with the main default version. And they are doing some interesting things with the "software collecion" libraries, to provide updated MySQL and python toolkits compatible with older operating systems. But it can be very tricky to publish two major releases of the same softwae in parallel, and RHEL has been careful to keep them separate.
RHEL 7.2 is the latest long-term supported production platform from Red Hat. Fedora is the bleeding edge work, and a sign of what will be in future RHEL releases. The bleeding edge versions of perl, python, and of virtualization toolkits and security toolkits can be very destabilizing to production systems, which is why RHEL and CentOS have been so popular for production work.
> . . . they are very difficult to get rid of. Give 'em a scorched Earth . . . they'll figure some way to survive in it.
Partly by changing the schorched Earth itself. Many species have gone extinct in the last few hundred years due to human intervention, despite hardy natures and adaptability to changing environments. Humanity has tended to revise its own environment, especially since we gained access to bulldozers, cement, and mechanical power.
> If Paramount/CBS were smart they make a deal with these guys, throw some money at it and syndicate it.
Many companies do that buying out smaller competitors. The result is often quite poor. The managerial, technical, and cultural approaches of the smaller company are lost, many of the best staff take the buyout money and move on to other projects, and you get uncertain quality about new projects. It's especially bad when the corporate offices have policies that work well for larger companies, and their staff have learned to work with, and the smaller company has not.
I've seen many such smaller companies bought out by larger companies in my career. A modest percentage go on to complete their main projects, or help start new ones, but it's not a _large_ percentage.