I'm not a rabid open source proponent - I'm actually rather pragmatic about it. I'll use what gets the job done for the right price, and what gives me the power to do what I need to do. I admire RMS's goal of freedom, but I acknowledge that part of a user's freedom is being able to selectively trade those freedoms for what they perceive as a worthwhile exchange. Sometimes closed source, commercial software allows me to do the job faster/easier/better.
Simple fact: My parents have managed to pick up spyware and an email worm or two using Outlook/IE. I installed Firefox and Eudora (running in lite/free-as-in-beer edition) on their machine, and in the last two years they haven't had a problem, and claim that both are "easier to use" than their previous counterparts. One is open source, the other closed source but still free-as-in-beer. Since then, they've been more productive and have had exactly no spyware/worm/virus problems.
Would I switch them to OO? Not likely, even I can't make it do some of the things I want, and the training to convert them from MSO to OO would outweigh the gain (none?).
In a business environment, though, I will often advocate using open source. I'm a firm proponent in not relying on vendors, but being able to open up the code when something goes wrong and fix it quickly. I've just seem too many cases where my own company was worried about having a vendor to blame rather than concentrating on making things work.
Couldn't have said it better - blacklists are almost worse than spammers. Sure, the spammers waste bandwidth and annoy us, but blacklists are basically admitting defeat and throwing out all the work that's built a universal email system. I can email anyone, anytime, for almost no cost. It's tremendous.
What we really need are a bunch of steel spikes, hammers, and the spammers confined to a small room...
Fix the problem. Don't make it worse with half-assed solutions like complete blacklist blocking (AOL, you listening? You're a huge part of the problem right now.) Me? I just use the blacklists to feed SpamAssassin, which tends to weigh things nicely and work the spam from the prime rib.:)
While you're certainly right that I want configurability on things I understand, there's also the other half that many hackers and code monkeys miss - most of us learn by dinking around with things. Get a good handle on the mindset something was built with, and then use that to better figure out the rest. If the initial ramp up on something as simple as a printing system takes many hours or even a day or two to even get basic functionality working, chances are I'm going to declare it "crap" and go back to finding another way around a problem.
Yes, the options should be there, but the path from source to basic functionality should be short, simple, and sweet. Once I can play with it, then figuring out the rest becomes easy.
That said, I have no problems configuring CUPS. It's always worked quite well for me in FC3. Just general thoughts on some F/OSS projects I've dealt with in the past.
To those who would say "fix it if you don't like it," I'm an embedded firmware programmer and electrical engineer. You don't want me touching application code, just like I don't want application monkeys touching firmware. The mentality of what needs to be done and how to do it are entirely different and somewhat incompatible.
Pretty simple why I'd use alkalines over rechargables in some cases, really - three words: self discharge rate. I have a clock - a small LCD job that syncs with WWV/WWVB. It needs batteries about every two years. NiMH loses about 1-2% of its charge daily just sitting there without external load. That means, assuming negligable load from the clock, I wind up changing the damn batteries every few months. That's a pain. So, throw a set of alkalines in there and be good for a couple years.
Same goes with emergency gear, like the flashlights in my cars - all powered by disposable alkaline, so there's a much better chance of them still having charge when I need it.
Well said - so there's at least two of us old time GOPers left that haven't been crushed. Smaller, less intrusive government and greater personal liberty. Now my old party's been overrun by zealots of the Christian right wing, terrorism "chicken littles", and huge corporate interests. Ain't a damn libertarian-leaning Republican left in sight.
I, too, went Democratic in affiliation this last year, because while I agree with the Libertarians on most social issues, I disagree heartily on their economic plans. I'm a relatively moderate conservative, personally against privatizing everything and believing that some regulation of the private sector is necessary to keep capitalism healthy. I still think the government needs to provide basic services that cannot be better provided in another way. Just FYI, though, my ballot was filled with votes for members of four different parties, however, including one for a socialist, because the two mainstream candidates were both blow-hard idiots.
For me it comes and goes, but yes, in the last couple weeks I've noticed a dramatic increase in false negatives. I feed them back into the bayesian filter for training, but it doesn't seem to help much. The worst part is that there's no real pattern to the stuff that gets through, other than the fact it tends to be very minimalist - a few words, often about a stock to invest in, etc.
That said, SA has been a saviour of unimaginable proportions. I get 400-600 pieces of spam a day, and normally it's very good about getting all but 1-2 of them each day with hardly any false positives. Lately it's been letting 10-20 slip through, though.
Yup, gotta love it when that happens, and I'm glad it's happened to people other than me. Got that one day while I was out driving around in my Honda del Sol (which, for reference, really was built in Japan). Of course I had to point out to the guy that my wife, who had her back to us most of the time, was also half Japanese... At that point he just had no idea what to say, and wandered off, as if he'd lost the war all over again.
It's been 50 years since we beat the hell out of them, they're now what we call an "ally", buddy. Get over it.
It almost certainly will still run, unless it's a completely idiotic design. The ECM and/or PCM (engine control module / powertrain control module, whatever these cars call it, the thing that runs the automatic transmission, the injectors, the spark, idle air control, etc.) is almost certainly not attached in any meaningful way to an embedded computer running a known OS. They're all attached to some sort of bus on modern OBD-II cars, but the ECM is usually capable of operating on its own. ECMs and PCMs are usually 8 or 16 bit micros with truly embedded software (read: no conventional OS, written specifically for the application at hand). Modern ones are flash-upgradable, but I highly doubt this would be enabled through any sort of radio interface, and even if it was, it wouldn't be any sort of thing where it could pick up a virus.
Sounds to me like the fancy mapping stuff and maybe some user interfacing is controlled by the affected computer, not the fundamental powertrain stuff. Any car designer that runs his powertrain off anything but a hardened, reliable, embedded micro is just an idiot, and I can't believe Toyota would do something that dumb.
Small chunks of not-to-critical code... yup, that pretty well describes 80% of my job. Usually it results from needing an analysis of some real world problem, and I need a magic widget that converts from Format A, cross references with Format B, and then builds statistical bins containing counts from Format C. It's usually a one-off scenario that I'm looking into some particular business problem, and I just need a quick chunk of code to do the conversions and some of the light statistical stuff.
They get created in a day or two, used once or twice, then I tar/gzip them up and store them away on a very secure, very well backed up corporate data repository with a note as to what they do, when they were created, and how to use them. Of course I keep my own copies, should this impenetrable bastion not live up to what its parent group promises, but...
Anything that evolves beyond the one-off uniwidget phase of a project immediately goes to CVS. Even for personal projects, I couldn't live without it for audit trails and, most of all, oops prevention. IMHO, anybody not using one should be regarded with suspicion. That said, if it weren't for working on F/OSS stuff in college, I would have never heard of version control systems either until I hit the real world.
Dammit, you've caught on to my clever scheme of exploiting other people's work in finding the links...
Unfortunately, I'm rather disappointed in tonight's posters. Not one link yet to a site titled "Boothbabes of CES 2005". Come on/.ers, don't let me down.
He totally missed the fundamental insecurity of IE. Crapware installs itself with IE, either by exploiting "features" or holes. Sure, some crapware requires the user to click Ok (fuck my browser now) or Cancel (fuck my browser now anyway), but for the majority of it that I've experienced, a couple visits to websites of questionable integrity pretty much does it...
Funny, I've never had Firefox do that.
Really, what the hell does it matter if the software is signed? Some spyware/adware is signed so it looks "safe" by this guy's standards, and some of it just installs without telling you. If your core browser isn't safe from exploitation, there's really no sense in going any further. If you train users to say no, spyware just exploits the holes and installs itself without asking, problem solved. 90% of users are just going to click "Ok" anyway, no matter what it tells them, and no matter how much you try to teach them.
He does have two interesting points, though, that perhaps we shouldn't trash with the rest. Maybe something beyond MD5 hashes should be provided for FF. My dad runs Windows, has no idea how to do an MD5 sum on a file, nor does he particularly need to know that. I hate even suggesting that Verisign is some bastion of legitimacy, because, well, just no. However, we're probably the biggest cooperating group of smart people (okay, some of you may be excused) the world has ever seen - surely there's a way to do it that is both easy for regular users and doesn't support V-evil.
Also, being able to turn on and off various plug-ins wouldn't hurt. Sure, I know about the extension manager, but I'm talking things like Flash and Acrobat (the two things that screw me over most often). It'd be nice if I could just turn them off temporarily. Acrobat the Plugin has to be one of the #1 things that crashes on my Win32 boxes.
Great, that's the obvious bugs they could find. The insidious ones are the logical errors, timing problems, or bizarre interactions of code. Those are the ones that you often spend years scratching your head over infrequent, seemingly random (yet oddly related) failures until one day you happen to be looking through code and find something screwy, or you happen to have the debugger on at the right time. Then there's the ones that hide for years, and suddenly pop up when something innocent changes in a completely different section.
I'm a legacy code maintainer among other things, and that's my personal hell.
And as a FedEx white collar employee (electrical engineer, scan systems), I have to say... somebody thinks I put in four months a year? Wow, they're vastly overestimating my productivity...
I'm hesitant to suggest that somebody got a clue somewhere, but yes, I've actually really enjoyed the last two seasons of Enterprise (except for the stupid alien Nazis, but what the heck, I'll throw in one for free). That's something I really can't say about any of the intermediate Treks. TNG was between good and awesome throughout its run (and I too never hated Wesley, come on, geeky kid who gets to hang out with the engineers of the Enterprise? It's an irresistable dream for those of us Trek fans nearly the same age as Wil.), but I never really got that into DS9 and Voyager.
First season Enterprise almost made me shut it off forever, too. Come on, how many "poke the alien, wonder why it killed you" episodes can we do? You know, the ones that follow these steps: find mysterious lifeform or situation and bother it until it gets incredibly pissed and tries to hurt us? You know, kind of like that Aussie guy with a similar show...
I'm glad to see that they've gone to longer, mini-arcs for episodes recently. The stories are well told and well thought-out, and there's enough time to do it without feeling hurried. Well done, well done.
It's not all about efficiency - mechanical valves, cams, and timing belts are extremely reliable mechanisms in ICEs that have been refined over decades. Electric valves and all the high power, complex electronics behind them just aren't proven. Even if they came out in production cars tomorrow, I wouldn't buy one for at least 5-10 years. Why? They're not proven reliable in the long run.
While I'd like fuel efficiency (hence the reason I have and usually drive a 95 del Sol - nearly 40 mpg with no exotic technologies at all, perfectly reliable for its first 180k miles), reliability is absolutely paramount. I travel into some of the more remote parts of the US and Canada that are still accessible by road, and a breakdown hundreds of miles from the nearest service facility or cell tower is not acceptable. I carry a rather extensive set of tools for dealing with most minor issues and some not so minor (anybody ever spent most of the night changing a halfshaft in a parking lot of your hotel?), but a major drivetrain failure in one of these places would be more than annoying. A dead valve would be just that, especially if it was the only one the exhaust side of a cylinder - a major failure. There just aren't that many ways that a mechanical valve can fail.
Not saying it can't be done, but if I was a car company engineer, I'd make sure those things had been in a fleet prototype test vehicles for 5 years and 250k miles before ever turning them loose on the mechnically-inept public.
As others have posted, though, a significant portion of the benefits can be gained by adjusting the timing on a mechanical cam - Honda's VTEC, a well proven technology, powering my del Sol since, well, 1995.;)
Don't worry, it's lost on a great number of us Americans, too. I'm an old-school right wing nutjob - concerned about excessive government intrusion on personal freedom, size of government powers and entities, wastes of tax money, and making sure of transparency and openness in government because I don't trust it one bit... you know, all that good stuff. I don't want my religion, your religion, or anybody else's religion driving the government, and I damn sure don't want it legislating things any of those religions think is "the will of God/Gaia/Satan/Allah/Budda/Zeus/Deity-of-Choice" The sitting Prez has done everything but be a good old-style Republican, aside from some tax cuts that I'll argue were largely misplaced and mistimed. (Unlike most people think, not all of us old-style Republicans would cut taxes to zero - most of us would rather see the debt paid off than lower taxes right now, as we think its a greater risk to the country's fiscal stability.) We've gotten government bloat on a grand scale (Dept Homeland Security, TSA, etc.), loss of personal freedom (pick any moral legislation that's been attempted, or the trampling of the law on freedoms we still enjoy, hoping we won't know the law) loss of controls over government intrusion into our lives (PATRIOT and secret warrants), and general dishonesty and disregard for evidence at hand when making important decisions (environment, Iraq, pick any two). As they said last night "God, Guns, and Gays" is what the new Republican party is all about, and aside from guns, I don't think any of that is the government's business.
To tell you the truth, I don't know where my side of the Republicans went. I think we've been 0wn3d by the militant, puritanical Christian right-wing. I'm incredibly liberal when it comes to keeping government out of purely personal issues, especially those that are only despised because of someone's religious beliefs. So I voted for all sorts of things yesterday in four different parties (including one Republican), including John Kerry for president. As a lifelong conservative, that hurts a bit.
Even if you do believe that (and, while I don't necessarily agree, it's a reasonable position), the fact is that somebody is still going to get that role, regardless of whether you vote or not. Even if you hate them all, it's more rational to vote for the one you believe least likely to use that power inappropriately. That's a step towards your stated goal, whereas not voting just amplifies the views of those who do bother to do so.
*waving* Over here... I'm one of those smaller government Republicans who was an advocate for more freedom and privacy. I think I'm the only one left, haven't seen another of my kind in almost five years.
Guess I'll just give up and become a Democrat - I'm volunteering for the Kerry campaign this cycle anyway.
Like many have pointed out, switches aren't a universal panacea to cure sniffing evils. They're much more effective when you look to them to segment and maximize network capacity, not provide security.
Besides, really, the average home user has no idea what's going on in their home network. While installing a new wireless card in my laptop the other night, I discovered (by accident) that my neighbor's completely unsecured wireless (no WEP, no MAC restrictions, and the SSID was linksys...) network actually has better signal strength in my living room than does my own.
A great many people I know don't even have software firewalls (which I've always considered mostly a joke), let alone hardware-based ones, between them and their cable modem. My own father proudly called me up to let me know he'd gotten a cable modem and hooked up his computer - so I demonstrated the problem by connecting to his machine and reading his email to him over the phone. Needless to say, the cable modem got turned off until he could run out and grab a consumer-grade NAT device the next day.
People are just not going to wake up and smell the coffee until it hits them. They seem to come with this mentality of "why would anybody attack me?" or that their computer should be secure because Dell/Gateway/etc. set it up for them three years ago and they wouldn't make it insecure...
I'm not saying I'm a typical American, because I'm almost certainly not. That said, I'm also a very early adopter of most technologies. As an example, my photography went 50% digital in 1997, and 100% in 1999. My first DVD burner was nearly $1000, and the disks were like $8/each. However, it'll be a very long time until I adopt HDTV. I just don't see a reason to upgrade. Sure, I watched some stuff on my parents' Sony HD plasma screen while I was home, but realistically there's no reason for me to junk three perfectly good (though one is a decade old) TVs when I find myself watching less and less TV by the year. Mainstream programming really just keeps getting dumber and less interesting, the HD crap is all encumbered by a "copyright" bit and other such, DVDs look pretty bad (due to artifacting) on HD, and if it wasn't for two hours of Stargate a week, plus a helping of stuff from Comedy Central and CSPAN/CSPAN2 when I'm bored, I'd barely watch any TV at all.
I don't think I'm alone. Many of my co-workers, also technology nuts, are also not even remotely interested in upgrading. Only one of the lot (about 20 of us) has an HD-capable TV. It's going to be a long, hard battle to compel enough of us to switch to HD. Oh wait, no it's not, they've got the FCC in their back pocket and will force us all over a bit after 2008! Stupid me, I forgot that they bought the government to push something that I don't want...
Haven't had one in any of my or my wife's machines for nearly four years. CD-Rs or CD-RWs worked fine for most cases, then USB dongles showed up. I do keep a floppy in the closet on the off chance I need to flash BIOS.
I'm completely, 110% with you on this one. USB-serial works on some stuff, but there are specific applications where it does not work well. Plus, from a pure hack point of view, serial is the most useful interface out there, IMHO. I can put together a device based on a micro, controlled over the serial port, very, very quickly. No user interface to design, no nothing. For application-specific, one-off hacks just to get the job done, it's an excellent control/telemetry connection. You can pretty much use echo, cat, shell pipes and redirects, and/dev/ttyS0 to do all of your control and logging. This one is one of the applications USB->serial usually works pretty well, but if you bastardize the flow control lines to do other stuff, then things start to fall apart rather quickly, in my experience.
USB, on the other hand, is a pain in the ass to build even simple devices for. Part of this is my lack of experience with it, I'm sure, but it's a far more complex communications link than serial. Of course if I had a USB-serial library to compile into my micro of choice, then maybe...
Likewise - I hate being categorized, but I tend to be of the view that smaller, less intrusive government is almost always better. For most of my life, that's made me a Republican in the two-significant-party system we're stuck with at the moment.
My side of the Republican Party has been lost. We've been overrun by the religious right faction and by other similar elements - like the "it's for the children" faction (often related to the first problem group mentioned). Those of us who think we should constantly be working to increase our liberties and rights, to cut off excesses in order to return to a small non-intrusive government, and to try to provide a wide open framework where we can all pursue our own interests, passions, and issues.
That's my part of the GOP, but other than a few contacts I still maintain that feel as stifled as I do, I haven't seen that part of my old GOP in years. Now it's all about prayer and commandments on rock monuments and anti-gay, anti-abortion, take away my freedoms for my safety, anti-anti-anti-everything they don't like. I'd join the Libertarians, but their economics don't make any sense at all, at least to me.
Where'd those of us go that cared about our freedom, both from foreign oppressors but also from our own government? Those who tried to enact the will of the majority while still protecting and enhancing the rights of the minority? Neo-Republicans want to take away my freedom to make me safe, and neo-Democrats want to tax the hell out of me. Oppression is oppression, whether you're taking away my rights directly or robbing me of the money I'd use to make use of those rights. Rights and liberties are no good unless we actually are able to exercise them. Perhaps I just came from a small, odd pocket of the Republican party, but even that small pocket seems to have dried up.
Bush is a bumbling idiot. It's his bag of goons that's dangerous (Ashcroft, Ridge, etc.) There's no way in hell I'd vote for him again (boy, was that a mistake). I don't have a good feel about Kerry, but I'm going to have to learn to stomach him brand of politics. I'd have much preferred Dean to have gotten the Dem's nod - now there's a candidate I could actively support, as opposed to hating less than Shrubby.
Why do I hate Flash? Because 99% of the ways it gets used on the web annoy me, waste my time, or could have been done better with just good ol' HTML. If you want to make a vector animation for the artistic purpose of doing so, that's fine, but don't make flash essential for navigating your site - that's what friggin' standard html is for.
Cutesy animations? Annoy me. Fancy popping/flashing/over-under/etc. menus? Yup, those annoy me too. Intro animations that don't do anything useful, well, aside from - you guessed it - annoy me. These are all examples of flash, misapplied, that waste my time and annoy me. I consider it only one tiny step above pop-up ads, which also (as you may have guessed) annoy me.
I should have clarified that the technology itself isn't bad, it's that it's been bastardized and misapplied. A website's functionality shouldn't depend on a proprietary extension whose primary purpose, in my opinion, is to allow artsy webmonkeys to screw up my search for information.
Like someone once summarized me - Makes progress through conflict, is primarily motivated by anger. Trust me, it's not the only thing I get pissed about, it's just the only thing right now that pertains to this discussion.
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I'm not a rabid open source proponent - I'm actually rather pragmatic about it. I'll use what gets the job done for the right price, and what gives me the power to do what I need to do. I admire RMS's goal of freedom, but I acknowledge that part of a user's freedom is being able to selectively trade those freedoms for what they perceive as a worthwhile exchange. Sometimes closed source, commercial software allows me to do the job faster/easier/better.
Simple fact: My parents have managed to pick up spyware and an email worm or two using Outlook/IE. I installed Firefox and Eudora (running in lite/free-as-in-beer edition) on their machine, and in the last two years they haven't had a problem, and claim that both are "easier to use" than their previous counterparts. One is open source, the other closed source but still free-as-in-beer. Since then, they've been more productive and have had exactly no spyware/worm/virus problems.
Would I switch them to OO? Not likely, even I can't make it do some of the things I want, and the training to convert them from MSO to OO would outweigh the gain (none?).
In a business environment, though, I will often advocate using open source. I'm a firm proponent in not relying on vendors, but being able to open up the code when something goes wrong and fix it quickly. I've just seem too many cases where my own company was worried about having a vendor to blame rather than concentrating on making things work.
Couldn't have said it better - blacklists are almost worse than spammers. Sure, the spammers waste bandwidth and annoy us, but blacklists are basically admitting defeat and throwing out all the work that's built a universal email system. I can email anyone, anytime, for almost no cost. It's tremendous.
:)
What we really need are a bunch of steel spikes, hammers, and the spammers confined to a small room...
Fix the problem. Don't make it worse with half-assed solutions like complete blacklist blocking (AOL, you listening? You're a huge part of the problem right now.) Me? I just use the blacklists to feed SpamAssassin, which tends to weigh things nicely and work the spam from the prime rib.
While you're certainly right that I want configurability on things I understand, there's also the other half that many hackers and code monkeys miss - most of us learn by dinking around with things. Get a good handle on the mindset something was built with, and then use that to better figure out the rest. If the initial ramp up on something as simple as a printing system takes many hours or even a day or two to even get basic functionality working, chances are I'm going to declare it "crap" and go back to finding another way around a problem.
Yes, the options should be there, but the path from source to basic functionality should be short, simple, and sweet. Once I can play with it, then figuring out the rest becomes easy.
That said, I have no problems configuring CUPS. It's always worked quite well for me in FC3. Just general thoughts on some F/OSS projects I've dealt with in the past.
To those who would say "fix it if you don't like it," I'm an embedded firmware programmer and electrical engineer. You don't want me touching application code, just like I don't want application monkeys touching firmware. The mentality of what needs to be done and how to do it are entirely different and somewhat incompatible.
Pretty simple why I'd use alkalines over rechargables in some cases, really - three words: self discharge rate. I have a clock - a small LCD job that syncs with WWV/WWVB. It needs batteries about every two years. NiMH loses about 1-2% of its charge daily just sitting there without external load. That means, assuming negligable load from the clock, I wind up changing the damn batteries every few months. That's a pain. So, throw a set of alkalines in there and be good for a couple years.
Same goes with emergency gear, like the flashlights in my cars - all powered by disposable alkaline, so there's a much better chance of them still having charge when I need it.
Let's cover it...
a) I'm not a morning person
b) My work hours are relatively fixed (roughly 9-5)
c) I'm a photographer, and I like working outside
That pretty much means I spend all winter awaiting the arrival of DST so I have light outside after work.
On the other hand, going to DST full time will actually cause me to burn more oil, since I'll spend more time in my car wandering about.
Well said - so there's at least two of us old time GOPers left that haven't been crushed. Smaller, less intrusive government and greater personal liberty. Now my old party's been overrun by zealots of the Christian right wing, terrorism "chicken littles", and huge corporate interests. Ain't a damn libertarian-leaning Republican left in sight.
I, too, went Democratic in affiliation this last year, because while I agree with the Libertarians on most social issues, I disagree heartily on their economic plans. I'm a relatively moderate conservative, personally against privatizing everything and believing that some regulation of the private sector is necessary to keep capitalism healthy. I still think the government needs to provide basic services that cannot be better provided in another way. Just FYI, though, my ballot was filled with votes for members of four different parties, however, including one for a socialist, because the two mainstream candidates were both blow-hard idiots.
For me it comes and goes, but yes, in the last couple weeks I've noticed a dramatic increase in false negatives. I feed them back into the bayesian filter for training, but it doesn't seem to help much. The worst part is that there's no real pattern to the stuff that gets through, other than the fact it tends to be very minimalist - a few words, often about a stock to invest in, etc.
That said, SA has been a saviour of unimaginable proportions. I get 400-600 pieces of spam a day, and normally it's very good about getting all but 1-2 of them each day with hardly any false positives. Lately it's been letting 10-20 slip through, though.
Yup, gotta love it when that happens, and I'm glad it's happened to people other than me. Got that one day while I was out driving around in my Honda del Sol (which, for reference, really was built in Japan). Of course I had to point out to the guy that my wife, who had her back to us most of the time, was also half Japanese... At that point he just had no idea what to say, and wandered off, as if he'd lost the war all over again.
It's been 50 years since we beat the hell out of them, they're now what we call an "ally", buddy. Get over it.
It almost certainly will still run, unless it's a completely idiotic design. The ECM and/or PCM (engine control module / powertrain control module, whatever these cars call it, the thing that runs the automatic transmission, the injectors, the spark, idle air control, etc.) is almost certainly not attached in any meaningful way to an embedded computer running a known OS. They're all attached to some sort of bus on modern OBD-II cars, but the ECM is usually capable of operating on its own. ECMs and PCMs are usually 8 or 16 bit micros with truly embedded software (read: no conventional OS, written specifically for the application at hand). Modern ones are flash-upgradable, but I highly doubt this would be enabled through any sort of radio interface, and even if it was, it wouldn't be any sort of thing where it could pick up a virus.
Sounds to me like the fancy mapping stuff and maybe some user interfacing is controlled by the affected computer, not the fundamental powertrain stuff. Any car designer that runs his powertrain off anything but a hardened, reliable, embedded micro is just an idiot, and I can't believe Toyota would do something that dumb.
Small chunks of not-to-critical code... yup, that pretty well describes 80% of my job. Usually it results from needing an analysis of some real world problem, and I need a magic widget that converts from Format A, cross references with Format B, and then builds statistical bins containing counts from Format C. It's usually a one-off scenario that I'm looking into some particular business problem, and I just need a quick chunk of code to do the conversions and some of the light statistical stuff.
They get created in a day or two, used once or twice, then I tar/gzip them up and store them away on a very secure, very well backed up corporate data repository with a note as to what they do, when they were created, and how to use them. Of course I keep my own copies, should this impenetrable bastion not live up to what its parent group promises, but...
Anything that evolves beyond the one-off uniwidget phase of a project immediately goes to CVS. Even for personal projects, I couldn't live without it for audit trails and, most of all, oops prevention. IMHO, anybody not using one should be regarded with suspicion. That said, if it weren't for working on F/OSS stuff in college, I would have never heard of version control systems either until I hit the real world.
Dammit, you've caught on to my clever scheme of exploiting other people's work in finding the links...
/.ers, don't let me down.
Unfortunately, I'm rather disappointed in tonight's posters. Not one link yet to a site titled "Boothbabes of CES 2005". Come on
He totally missed the fundamental insecurity of IE. Crapware installs itself with IE, either by exploiting "features" or holes. Sure, some crapware requires the user to click Ok (fuck my browser now) or Cancel (fuck my browser now anyway), but for the majority of it that I've experienced, a couple visits to websites of questionable integrity pretty much does it...
Funny, I've never had Firefox do that.
Really, what the hell does it matter if the software is signed? Some spyware/adware is signed so it looks "safe" by this guy's standards, and some of it just installs without telling you. If your core browser isn't safe from exploitation, there's really no sense in going any further. If you train users to say no, spyware just exploits the holes and installs itself without asking, problem solved. 90% of users are just going to click "Ok" anyway, no matter what it tells them, and no matter how much you try to teach them.
He does have two interesting points, though, that perhaps we shouldn't trash with the rest. Maybe something beyond MD5 hashes should be provided for FF. My dad runs Windows, has no idea how to do an MD5 sum on a file, nor does he particularly need to know that. I hate even suggesting that Verisign is some bastion of legitimacy, because, well, just no. However, we're probably the biggest cooperating group of smart people (okay, some of you may be excused) the world has ever seen - surely there's a way to do it that is both easy for regular users and doesn't support V-evil.
Also, being able to turn on and off various plug-ins wouldn't hurt. Sure, I know about the extension manager, but I'm talking things like Flash and Acrobat (the two things that screw me over most often). It'd be nice if I could just turn them off temporarily. Acrobat the Plugin has to be one of the #1 things that crashes on my Win32 boxes.
Great, that's the obvious bugs they could find. The insidious ones are the logical errors, timing problems, or bizarre interactions of code. Those are the ones that you often spend years scratching your head over infrequent, seemingly random (yet oddly related) failures until one day you happen to be looking through code and find something screwy, or you happen to have the debugger on at the right time. Then there's the ones that hide for years, and suddenly pop up when something innocent changes in a completely different section.
I'm a legacy code maintainer among other things, and that's my personal hell.
And as a FedEx white collar employee (electrical engineer, scan systems), I have to say... somebody thinks I put in four months a year? Wow, they're vastly overestimating my productivity...
I'm hesitant to suggest that somebody got a clue somewhere, but yes, I've actually really enjoyed the last two seasons of Enterprise (except for the stupid alien Nazis, but what the heck, I'll throw in one for free). That's something I really can't say about any of the intermediate Treks. TNG was between good and awesome throughout its run (and I too never hated Wesley, come on, geeky kid who gets to hang out with the engineers of the Enterprise? It's an irresistable dream for those of us Trek fans nearly the same age as Wil.), but I never really got that into DS9 and Voyager.
First season Enterprise almost made me shut it off forever, too. Come on, how many "poke the alien, wonder why it killed you" episodes can we do? You know, the ones that follow these steps: find mysterious lifeform or situation and bother it until it gets incredibly pissed and tries to hurt us? You know, kind of like that Aussie guy with a similar show...
I'm glad to see that they've gone to longer, mini-arcs for episodes recently. The stories are well told and well thought-out, and there's enough time to do it without feeling hurried. Well done, well done.
It's not all about efficiency - mechanical valves, cams, and timing belts are extremely reliable mechanisms in ICEs that have been refined over decades. Electric valves and all the high power, complex electronics behind them just aren't proven. Even if they came out in production cars tomorrow, I wouldn't buy one for at least 5-10 years. Why? They're not proven reliable in the long run.
;)
While I'd like fuel efficiency (hence the reason I have and usually drive a 95 del Sol - nearly 40 mpg with no exotic technologies at all, perfectly reliable for its first 180k miles), reliability is absolutely paramount. I travel into some of the more remote parts of the US and Canada that are still accessible by road, and a breakdown hundreds of miles from the nearest service facility or cell tower is not acceptable. I carry a rather extensive set of tools for dealing with most minor issues and some not so minor (anybody ever spent most of the night changing a halfshaft in a parking lot of your hotel?), but a major drivetrain failure in one of these places would be more than annoying. A dead valve would be just that, especially if it was the only one the exhaust side of a cylinder - a major failure. There just aren't that many ways that a mechanical valve can fail.
Not saying it can't be done, but if I was a car company engineer, I'd make sure those things had been in a fleet prototype test vehicles for 5 years and 250k miles before ever turning them loose on the mechnically-inept public.
As others have posted, though, a significant portion of the benefits can be gained by adjusting the timing on a mechanical cam - Honda's VTEC, a well proven technology, powering my del Sol since, well, 1995.
Don't worry, it's lost on a great number of us Americans, too. I'm an old-school right wing nutjob - concerned about excessive government intrusion on personal freedom, size of government powers and entities, wastes of tax money, and making sure of transparency and openness in government because I don't trust it one bit... you know, all that good stuff. I don't want my religion, your religion, or anybody else's religion driving the government, and I damn sure don't want it legislating things any of those religions think is "the will of God/Gaia/Satan/Allah/Budda/Zeus/Deity-of-Choice"
The sitting Prez has done everything but be a good old-style Republican, aside from some tax cuts that I'll argue were largely misplaced and mistimed. (Unlike most people think, not all of us old-style Republicans would cut taxes to zero - most of us would rather see the debt paid off than lower taxes right now, as we think its a greater risk to the country's fiscal stability.) We've gotten government bloat on a grand scale (Dept Homeland Security, TSA, etc.), loss of personal freedom (pick any moral legislation that's been attempted, or the trampling of the law on freedoms we still enjoy, hoping we won't know the law) loss of controls over government intrusion into our lives (PATRIOT and secret warrants), and general dishonesty and disregard for evidence at hand when making important decisions (environment, Iraq, pick any two). As they said last night "God, Guns, and Gays" is what the new Republican party is all about, and aside from guns, I don't think any of that is the government's business.
To tell you the truth, I don't know where my side of the Republicans went. I think we've been 0wn3d by the militant, puritanical Christian right-wing. I'm incredibly liberal when it comes to keeping government out of purely personal issues, especially those that are only despised because of someone's religious beliefs. So I voted for all sorts of things yesterday in four different parties (including one Republican), including John Kerry for president. As a lifelong conservative, that hurts a bit.
Signed,
One of dying breed of Republicans
Even if you do believe that (and, while I don't necessarily agree, it's a reasonable position), the fact is that somebody is still going to get that role, regardless of whether you vote or not. Even if you hate them all, it's more rational to vote for the one you believe least likely to use that power inappropriately. That's a step towards your stated goal, whereas not voting just amplifies the views of those who do bother to do so.
*waving* Over here... I'm one of those smaller government Republicans who was an advocate for more freedom and privacy. I think I'm the only one left, haven't seen another of my kind in almost five years.
Guess I'll just give up and become a Democrat - I'm volunteering for the Kerry campaign this cycle anyway.
Like many have pointed out, switches aren't a universal panacea to cure sniffing evils. They're much more effective when you look to them to segment and maximize network capacity, not provide security.
Besides, really, the average home user has no idea what's going on in their home network. While installing a new wireless card in my laptop the other night, I discovered (by accident) that my neighbor's completely unsecured wireless (no WEP, no MAC restrictions, and the SSID was linksys...) network actually has better signal strength in my living room than does my own.
A great many people I know don't even have software firewalls (which I've always considered mostly a joke), let alone hardware-based ones, between them and their cable modem. My own father proudly called me up to let me know he'd gotten a cable modem and hooked up his computer - so I demonstrated the problem by connecting to his machine and reading his email to him over the phone. Needless to say, the cable modem got turned off until he could run out and grab a consumer-grade NAT device the next day.
People are just not going to wake up and smell the coffee until it hits them. They seem to come with this mentality of "why would anybody attack me?" or that their computer should be secure because Dell/Gateway/etc. set it up for them three years ago and they wouldn't make it insecure...
I'm not saying I'm a typical American, because I'm almost certainly not. That said, I'm also a very early adopter of most technologies. As an example, my photography went 50% digital in 1997, and 100% in 1999. My first DVD burner was nearly $1000, and the disks were like $8/each. However, it'll be a very long time until I adopt HDTV. I just don't see a reason to upgrade. Sure, I watched some stuff on my parents' Sony HD plasma screen while I was home, but realistically there's no reason for me to junk three perfectly good (though one is a decade old) TVs when I find myself watching less and less TV by the year. Mainstream programming really just keeps getting dumber and less interesting, the HD crap is all encumbered by a "copyright" bit and other such, DVDs look pretty bad (due to artifacting) on HD, and if it wasn't for two hours of Stargate a week, plus a helping of stuff from Comedy Central and CSPAN/CSPAN2 when I'm bored, I'd barely watch any TV at all.
I don't think I'm alone. Many of my co-workers, also technology nuts, are also not even remotely interested in upgrading. Only one of the lot (about 20 of us) has an HD-capable TV. It's going to be a long, hard battle to compel enough of us to switch to HD. Oh wait, no it's not, they've got the FCC in their back pocket and will force us all over a bit after 2008! Stupid me, I forgot that they bought the government to push something that I don't want...
Haven't had one in any of my or my wife's machines for nearly four years. CD-Rs or CD-RWs worked fine for most cases, then USB dongles showed up. I do keep a floppy in the closet on the off chance I need to flash BIOS.
I'm completely, 110% with you on this one. USB-serial works on some stuff, but there are specific applications where it does not work well. Plus, from a pure hack point of view, serial is the most useful interface out there, IMHO. I can put together a device based on a micro, controlled over the serial port, very, very quickly. No user interface to design, no nothing. For application-specific, one-off hacks just to get the job done, it's an excellent control/telemetry connection. You can pretty much use echo, cat, shell pipes and redirects, and /dev/ttyS0 to do all of your control and logging. This one is one of the applications USB->serial usually works pretty well, but if you bastardize the flow control lines to do other stuff, then things start to fall apart rather quickly, in my experience.
USB, on the other hand, is a pain in the ass to build even simple devices for. Part of this is my lack of experience with it, I'm sure, but it's a far more complex communications link than serial. Of course if I had a USB-serial library to compile into my micro of choice, then maybe...
Likewise - I hate being categorized, but I tend to be of the view that smaller, less intrusive government is almost always better. For most of my life, that's made me a Republican in the two-significant-party system we're stuck with at the moment.
My side of the Republican Party has been lost. We've been overrun by the religious right faction and by other similar elements - like the "it's for the children" faction (often related to the first problem group mentioned). Those of us who think we should constantly be working to increase our liberties and rights, to cut off excesses in order to return to a small non-intrusive government, and to try to provide a wide open framework where we can all pursue our own interests, passions, and issues.
That's my part of the GOP, but other than a few contacts I still maintain that feel as stifled as I do, I haven't seen that part of my old GOP in years. Now it's all about prayer and commandments on rock monuments and anti-gay, anti-abortion, take away my freedoms for my safety, anti-anti-anti-everything they don't like. I'd join the Libertarians, but their economics don't make any sense at all, at least to me.
Where'd those of us go that cared about our freedom, both from foreign oppressors but also from our own government? Those who tried to enact the will of the majority while still protecting and enhancing the rights of the minority? Neo-Republicans want to take away my freedom to make me safe, and neo-Democrats want to tax the hell out of me. Oppression is oppression, whether you're taking away my rights directly or robbing me of the money I'd use to make use of those rights. Rights and liberties are no good unless we actually are able to exercise them. Perhaps I just came from a small, odd pocket of the Republican party, but even that small pocket seems to have dried up.
Bush is a bumbling idiot. It's his bag of goons that's dangerous (Ashcroft, Ridge, etc.) There's no way in hell I'd vote for him again (boy, was that a mistake). I don't have a good feel about Kerry, but I'm going to have to learn to stomach him brand of politics. I'd have much preferred Dean to have gotten the Dem's nod - now there's a candidate I could actively support, as opposed to hating less than Shrubby.
Why do I hate Flash? Because 99% of the ways it gets used on the web annoy me, waste my time, or could have been done better with just good ol' HTML. If you want to make a vector animation for the artistic purpose of doing so, that's fine, but don't make flash essential for navigating your site - that's what friggin' standard html is for.
Cutesy animations? Annoy me. Fancy popping/flashing/over-under/etc. menus? Yup, those annoy me too. Intro animations that don't do anything useful, well, aside from - you guessed it - annoy me. These are all examples of flash, misapplied, that waste my time and annoy me. I consider it only one tiny step above pop-up ads, which also (as you may have guessed) annoy me.
I should have clarified that the technology itself isn't bad, it's that it's been bastardized and misapplied. A website's functionality shouldn't depend on a proprietary extension whose primary purpose, in my opinion, is to allow artsy webmonkeys to screw up my search for information.
Like someone once summarized me - Makes progress through conflict, is primarily motivated by anger. Trust me, it's not the only thing I get pissed about, it's just the only thing right now that pertains to this discussion.
ND