If third parties had just as much access to Vista as the Application Layer programmers at MS themselves, things would be a lot more secure, not less.
The reason being that there would be a set of well defined interfaces that no software would be able to circumvent and the security of which could be reasoned about.
The provision of back-doors for internal use represents a major security hole. Even if no-one is actually reasoning about the defined interfaces from a security point of view, back-doors tend to be ad-hoc and therefore less secure.
Whether there are back doors I don't know - MS has certainly failed to fully document interfaces in the past, but the ones I have cared about were more in the nature of doc omissions. But, given that MS interfaces tend to be ad-hoc themselves, it could be hard to tell.
Specifically, this is a source to source translator. Those are as old as the hills too. C-front is probably the obvious well known example, but Perl to C translation is also well known. However, things like LALR parser generators and Code Generator Generators also fall into this category, and one would not really call those compilers (although the term compiler-compiler is common) - so source to source translators are not a subset of compilers.
There is also the concept of nested abstract machines that is relevant here. That idea certainly goes back at least as far as Niklaus Wirth's work in the mid to late 70's. Javascript is just a virtual machine on top of which you can implement another virtual machine that is the implementation vehicle for some other language. Looking at it this way helps you map one language to the other in detail.
I am afraid my eyes glazed over before I finished reading the disclosure of their technology, but I did not see anything that was in anyway not prior art. If there is an invention in there, it has a bodyguard of commonplaces.
Well, you have to admit that's a effective way to protect innocent bystanders from terrorist acts - if you have something on everybody, there aren't any.
Actually they have advanced far past that already. Chimps have been observed rolling leaves into little cylinders which they then hand out to their enemies.
IT at my company told us several weeks ago NOT to take the Microsoft patch as they were working on their own. They rolled it out to us this last week.
It was a complete disaster. Now my calendar entries for the affected week are mostly off by an hour (not all of them mind you) while a friend who displays dual timezones now has one less timezone in the continental US - the west coast is only two hours behind the east coast. Probably he can fix this by turning it off and back on, but it looks like we will have to rebook all meetings.
Of course, one can certainly argue that correctly implemented software would not have a problem since everything would be done internally in UTC, but clearly not all software is correctly implemented.
As for the stupid change - if they had brought us into line with Europe there would have been some logic to the change. This one was just make work for a cheap political stunt.
That might work. If you can find droppings left by their donkey, perhaps you can use that to identify the animal unambigously.
And in the US, property can be guilty of committing a crime - so you should be able to jail their ass in the same way they can confiscate your car for engaging in drug deals.
I have a plastic garbage bag with 1 to 2 hundred 3 1/4" floppies sitting on my basement floor. Was going to give them to free geek but I think I'll wait a few years then auction them off one by one on e-bay, and retire.
Oh BTW, I binned most of the AOL ones. They wouldn't reformat. Wondiws XP doesn't seem to be able to format a 720K floppy.
I think you missed the point entirely. Presuambly given the care with which they phrased the statement, they have evidence that it was damaged by a deliberate non-terrorist attack.
This means that they still accept that when foreign entities act to protect their own interests they are not automatically terrorists. Given some of the foreign policy that has been coming out of this administration you could be forgiven for being surprized by this.
Doesn't matter. Its classical - it comes out of the General Relativity equations. You don't need to postulate gravitons for gravity to travel at the speed of light.
(The metre was supposed to be one ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole on the meridian through Paris. Unfortunately some sans-cullottes failed to lift their feet so its a bit off)
The problem he is addressing is that the chargeout model for internet bandwidth usage is flawed if usage can frequently saturate any part of the shared network (ie any part where different users are competing for bandwidth). His argument supports charging for bandwidth, not differentiation on service type.
With any service, there's a fixed cost for hooking the thing up, plus a marginal cost for actually using it.
For the internet because the ratio of marginal costs to fixed costs is quite low, usage of bandwidth has been treated as free in recent times (it wasn't always so - in the 80s you paid by the packet and boy was it expensive).
That is ok while the capacity is high enough that users are not competing for bandwidth. As soon as it starts to saturate you've got the problem that there is no way to efficiently allocate capacity to users as long as the marginal cost of bandwidth is zero.
But a solution to this problem needs to be based on usage, not service type. That's the key point here - service type should not be permitted to be used as a proxy for usage.
Further, because most of the network is a natural monopoly, government regulation is not counter to liberal principles on markets. Its obvious that the local loop is a natural monopoly. The backbone is also, because of network effects.
Further, allowing service differentiating is allowing the monopolist to control the market for which services can be provided, and by whom.
So legislating for net neutrality is both a fair use of legislative power and is in support of, not counter to, free market principles.
The trick is to avoid 1 year of experience 10 times over.
To do that you have to always look for a challenge. When you get to saying "I can do this standing on one ear" its time to go do something you don't think you can handle.
As a beginner though, the big thing to learn is that software experience doesn't scale. Writing a 100 line program does not prepare you to write a 1000 line program which is nothing like writing a 10,000 line program and when you get past about 20,000 lines its totally different because you can't keep it all in your head at once.
The next most important thing after learning to write bigger and bigger programs is learning to not write programs. This comes in two flavors. Some tasks can be reduced to a specification and a generator. Some tasks should not be automated at all because they are wrong - the first step is to work out what the task really is or should be, not to implement what its claimed to be.
Actually, that's a good principle in general - and one I have never seen a graduate understand. Programming is gathering of knowledge and codifying it. On all but trivial projects you won't have all the knowledge at the start and you can only get it by starting to implement the system - the system is an experiment.
So early in the project the most important thing is to try to work out what are the most important unknowns and what would be the worst surprizes so you can go after these early.
And while programming it is important to build in adaptability so you can react to new information. Make your system as generalized as possible, even at the expense of some performance and extra coding at first - tuning should be done late.
Maybe not. You haven't factored in the time spent stuck on hold to tech support.
The story is that during the second world war, the Germans tried to reduce productivity in the British Civil Service by sabotaging the Times Crossword. I think this might work along similar lines.
US Money is very confusing to anybody who hasn't got long familiarity with it. In most countries bills are different sizes and colors so its easy to tell (say) a five from a one. In the US you actually have to check the numbers.
Even if you are familiar with it, its real easy to make mistakes. I've even seen it happen to my wife, and she's lived in this country all her life.
Now in Russia, when you change US money, they put every bill under a loop, to check if its fake. So not only is it currently hard to tell one bill from another, but its also easy to fake.
This http://www.ucita.com/pdf/PitfallsOfUCITA2002.pdf contains an interesting discussion of this problem in the context of UCITA. Its a really bad problem that needs legislation either at the state level (what the article calls a "bomb shelter" law) or preferably federally to render such clauses void and either criminally actionable or else not subject to contractual limitations on damages. As the linked article points out, civil penalties are not going to work here because you generally have to waive the kind of damages involved when you accept the license.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.
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That's what you get for allowing it to be designed by the Russians.
The reason being that there would be a set of well defined interfaces that no software would be able to circumvent and the security of which could be reasoned about.
The provision of back-doors for internal use represents a major security hole. Even if no-one is actually reasoning about the defined interfaces from a security point of view, back-doors tend to be ad-hoc and therefore less secure.
Whether there are back doors I don't know - MS has certainly failed to fully document interfaces in the past, but the ones I have cared about were more in the nature of doc omissions. But, given that MS interfaces tend to be ad-hoc themselves, it could be hard to tell.
Sounds like the only thing Liftport was planning to lift was wallets, and not as far as orbit!
There is also the concept of nested abstract machines that is relevant here. That idea certainly goes back at least as far as Niklaus Wirth's work in the mid to late 70's. Javascript is just a virtual machine on top of which you can implement another virtual machine that is the implementation vehicle for some other language. Looking at it this way helps you map one language to the other in detail.
I am afraid my eyes glazed over before I finished reading the disclosure of their technology, but I did not see anything that was in anyway not prior art. If there is an invention in there, it has a bodyguard of commonplaces.
2-3 hundred kilometres - that's long downslope.
Well, you have to admit that's a effective way to protect innocent bystanders from terrorist acts - if you have something on everybody, there aren't any.
Actually they have advanced far past that already. Chimps have been observed rolling leaves into little cylinders which they then hand out to their enemies.
By how many dB does it attentuate the circumstances?
It was a complete disaster. Now my calendar entries for the affected week are mostly off by an hour (not all of them mind you) while a friend who displays dual timezones now has one less timezone in the continental US - the west coast is only two hours behind the east coast. Probably he can fix this by turning it off and back on, but it looks like we will have to rebook all meetings.
Of course, one can certainly argue that correctly implemented software would not have a problem since everything would be done internally in UTC, but clearly not all software is correctly implemented.
As for the stupid change - if they had brought us into line with Europe there would have been some logic to the change. This one was just make work for a cheap political stunt.
And in the US, property can be guilty of committing a crime - so you should be able to jail their ass in the same way they can confiscate your car for engaging in drug deals.
I can remember installs of Unix from floppies taking a couple of days.
Oh BTW, I binned most of the AOL ones. They wouldn't reformat. Wondiws XP doesn't seem to be able to format a 720K floppy.
This means that they still accept that when foreign entities act to protect their own interests they are not automatically terrorists. Given some of the foreign policy that has been coming out of this administration you could be forgiven for being surprized by this.
(The metre was supposed to be one ten millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole on the meridian through Paris. Unfortunately some sans-cullottes failed to lift their feet so its a bit off)
With any service, there's a fixed cost for hooking the thing up, plus a marginal cost for actually using it. For the internet because the ratio of marginal costs to fixed costs is quite low, usage of bandwidth has been treated as free in recent times (it wasn't always so - in the 80s you paid by the packet and boy was it expensive).
That is ok while the capacity is high enough that users are not competing for bandwidth. As soon as it starts to saturate you've got the problem that there is no way to efficiently allocate capacity to users as long as the marginal cost of bandwidth is zero.
But a solution to this problem needs to be based on usage, not service type. That's the key point here - service type should not be permitted to be used as a proxy for usage.
Further, because most of the network is a natural monopoly, government regulation is not counter to liberal principles on markets. Its obvious that the local loop is a natural monopoly. The backbone is also, because of network effects.
Further, allowing service differentiating is allowing the monopolist to control the market for which services can be provided, and by whom.
So legislating for net neutrality is both a fair use of legislative power and is in support of, not counter to, free market principles.
If it has a rigid frame, its a dirigible. A blimp is non-rigid. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirigible
To do that you have to always look for a challenge. When you get to saying "I can do this standing on one ear" its time to go do something you don't think you can handle.
As a beginner though, the big thing to learn is that software experience doesn't scale. Writing a 100 line program does not prepare you to write a 1000 line program which is nothing like writing a 10,000 line program and when you get past about 20,000 lines its totally different because you can't keep it all in your head at once.
The next most important thing after learning to write bigger and bigger programs is learning to not write programs. This comes in two flavors. Some tasks can be reduced to a specification and a generator. Some tasks should not be automated at all because they are wrong - the first step is to work out what the task really is or should be, not to implement what its claimed to be.
Actually, that's a good principle in general - and one I have never seen a graduate understand. Programming is gathering of knowledge and codifying it. On all but trivial projects you won't have all the knowledge at the start and you can only get it by starting to implement the system - the system is an experiment.
So early in the project the most important thing is to try to work out what are the most important unknowns and what would be the worst surprizes so you can go after these early.
And while programming it is important to build in adaptability so you can react to new information. Make your system as generalized as possible, even at the expense of some performance and extra coding at first - tuning should be done late.
The story is that during the second world war, the Germans tried to reduce productivity in the British Civil Service by sabotaging the Times Crossword. I think this might work along similar lines.
It actually says that. I had to double check.
What happened to UV, Visible light, Infrared? Whole regions of the electromagnetic spectrum destroyed with one Journalistic Infelicity.
You'll just register as one long vehicle.
You do a hand-brake turn and head-butt him.
So I guess one should avoid ordering the snake shishkebab.
Even if you are familiar with it, its real easy to make mistakes. I've even seen it happen to my wife, and she's lived in this country all her life.
Now in Russia, when you change US money, they put every bill under a loop, to check if its fake. So not only is it currently hard to tell one bill from another, but its also easy to fake.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV.