We don't call something "a science" because we like it. At least I don't.
A science is a field of study which has a number of characteristics, the main one being that it is based on inductive reasoning from experiment and observation. Mathematics is based on deductive reasoning, not inductive, and therefore is not a science. The entire way we study mathematics is different than how we approach a real science.
Similarly "Computer Science" isn't. A science that is...
Cheers, Ben
PS Disclaimer: I am not an unbiased observer in this. I am all but dissertation a PhD in mathematics.
Nearly a year ago Corel sold GraphOn their technology for allowing remote access to Windows boxes in a platform neutral way. This announced agreement would appear to be based on that old event. Corel would presumably prefer it if you used Linux. But if you have a legacy Windows application that must be run, Corel wants that not to be a barrier.
Pluse Corel does partly own GraphOn, so what is good for GraphOn is good for Corel.:-)
This seems to be a case where the facts are clear, the crime is obvious, but nobody has a very good idea what kind of punishment could work out. I am beginning to wonder if that is Jackson's position here. Jackson avoided complaining about contempt of court when he could have thrown it down for perjury. He separated the findings of fact from the findings of law. He wrote the first as a bullet-proof document that could nail Microsoft. He keeps on asking for a settlement. And now he has appointed as a mediator someone whose advice cannot lightly be rejected who - in a reasonable world - might actually have a chance of settling this.
Doesn't it look like he is doing his level best to avoid having the judgement that is handed down be his? (And therefore avoid responsibility if it is ineffective or too strong.)
That is right. If you set out to do it in a sane way from the beginning you will very likely get the same task done more quickly than if you just hack out something on the fly and try to make it work. The maintainability and lower bug rate is a bonus on top of that.
The stuff at the end about coding environments is very similar to what I have heard Smalltalkers describe as how a good Smalltalk environment works.
And of course anyone who wants to avoid accidentally using a few of those practices could be worse advised than to buy, read, and apply the concepts in a copy of Code Complete...
These are the judge's FoF. Period. Who done what when to whom and how that was done. Very difficult to reverse.
The next phase involves submissions on findings of law. Do the actions described in the FoF violate the law? This is much easier to reverse but must remain consistent with the FoF.
After *that* comes penalties, which can be reversed more easily still.
At least this is the case if you are talking about the same Microsoft trial whose judge just released the findings of fact...
First of all the Dow Jones Industrial Average may be hit, but that isn't going to stop this judge.
Second the findings of FACT are that Microsoft did hurt people, and it lists various forms of damage.
Third yes, they will get sued to hell and back again. The result of that will cast doubt on the future of their OS and that will help Linux.
Fourth MSFT's products are also damaging US industries. I am sure we will survive nicely with a little collateral damage.
And the biggest point that you have missed in your FUD is that the tone of the article most certainly indicates that lowering the application barrier is a likely goal of the outcome. And *THAT* is something that we all look forward to!
The judge ruled, as a finding of fact, that Microsoft is a monopoly and has maintained that monopoly through anti-competitive behaviour that resulted in collateral damage to customers, consumers, and third parties.
And this is not "naughty" behaviour? These facts completely suffice to determine that Microsoft has violated US law. The facts as stated open up further ground, for instance many companies could - Monday - file a lawsuit against Microsoft for costs incurred due to web browsing on computers that had browsers installed for no good reason.
HP could sue for increased support costs. It only takes 3 support calls before an OEM is no longer makes a profit. They had the lowest support calling rate in the business (better than Apple's) until Microsoft forced them to use a crappy boot sequence.
IBM could sue, WOW could they sue!
And, of course, AOL owns Netscape. They could *definitely* sue.
Plus this will help the Caldera case (even though Dr. DOS took place before the events covered in the document).
I am looking for a lot of lawsuits. And they will be for big - as in 8-9 digit figures - chunks of change.
My NT4/IIS4 PII/266 server was handling an average of 9,000 requests/hour with spikes of 20,000 requests/hour and handling as many as 1,000 email messages/hour - not average, but spikes. Does that count as heavy? I needed to reboot that machine about every 3 months.
No, that does not count as very heavy. Go over a couple of forums to the answers from the person who switched the Royal Family over to Linux to get real life judgement of how to handle a somewhat heavier load.
And no, you should not need to reboot every 3 months.
Would Apache have handled the load? Most likely but the point is NT and IIS are more than capable of handling as much as you have bandwidth to support.
Exactly right. Virtually anything can do the basic job. Now look at licensing costs, stability, and security. While NT and IIS can do it, various variations on the Unix theme with Apache can deliver more value for less.
Part of the vision of the Founding Fathers is that the people should be free to overthrow the government - by force if need be. They were quite convinced of the benefits of doing this, having just done it themselves.
However the fact that much of the constitution (and some early amendments) has clauses supportive of rebellion doesn't mean that anyone wants to really see one.
It is the same principle. The ability to fork is good. Using that ability is bad and only justified if it not forking is going to be worse...
Given the history of scams among the founders of this gem, you might just want to watch that credit card, see if any "unexpected expenses" start turning up on it...
The -w line turns on optional run-time warnings. That is not a change in syntax, it is like adding a lot of debugging code all over the place. It does not change the syntax
Using strict does change the syntax - it turns off the really flexible "Guess What I Mean" features. Yes, Perl has a lot of those. Yes, they are dangerous. They are fine in short scripts, but not in long ones.
However when 2000 line C programs turn into 75 line Perl programs, maintainability is assisted. Overly verbose syntax, and overly low-level syntax, both are the cause of much grief. There is a trade-off, and for what I do Perl gets it right.
And yes, explore some odd corners. Looping over a/g match is not something that is widely known, but if you have to take parsing to the next level it is utterly invaluable!
They can start with my favorite kernel site, Kernel traffic. If you want to have a reasonable sense of what is going on with the kernel but don't want to follow the mailing list - then visit this site every week.
By and large the sorts of services that people need are already available. They should recognize that, list a few, and then move on.
I would say that some advice on kernel programming would be good. Sprinkle said advice with links to a few of Torvalds' rants on sending patches.:-)
How should people publish them to the world? Just post them to/.? Ah heck, here is one to play with...
Let me start with a really bad algorithm. Take a fixed buffer of random data, and xor it with your data stream, reusing data as you go. What is wrong with this? Well if you xor the result with itself shifted by the period your key drops out and you just have plain-text xored with plaintext, which can easily be attacked (try xoring sections with common words), and with each piece you attack you can extract some key, extracting other text and before long... voila! (There are techniques to identify the length...)
OK, so let us be a bit smarter. Have 2 buffers of different lengths! Well OK, a little harder since you have made the effective period in the above longer, but you can attack it as before or you can use the non-random nature of your "longer" key to attack it as well. 2 implementations of a bad idea is still bad.
But wait! Look at the stream. It is quite easy to have 1 stream of data encode 3. All that you do is have protocol that sends a header saying which stream is getting the next x characters, then send the block, then send the next header. So the sender can send 3 streams of data, one of which is information on how to replace your first cipher, the second containing information on how to replace the other, and the third being your actual data. The actual placements of header and choices of sizes of data is random so an attacker has no idea what is data and what are actual keys.
(Clearly this is only usable for an ongoing stream of information where you have large amounts of random data available, RAM is not an issue, and bandwidth is not very important to you.)
So my question is how you can attack this algorithm? Where would you start?
And if it is hard to break, how does the replacement rates in the two buffers correlate with the minimum amount of plaintext sent to crack it?
No, if you want to waste cycles, send complete data. It looks just like encrypted data, but there isn't anything to find.:-) (OK, take your garbage, since it isn't *really* random compress it, strip off the header, etc. But send garbage.)
Google has a ranking system which is based on the way that the net is linked. It brings up matches, and sorts them according to its ranking.
A lot of pages (good and bad) link to Microsoft's home page. Therefore that page has a high rating. So if it matches enough words in your query to be a match, it will be one of the first ones.
Always.
Now if they could just get past those duplicate pages. OK, so issue foo of The Linux Gazette matched the query. OK, everyone and his dog mirrored it. OK, I looked at it. Now can I please look at what comes next..?
Slashdot Mirror
We don't call something "a science" because we like it. At least I don't.
A science is a field of study which has a number of characteristics, the main one being that it is based on inductive reasoning from experiment and observation. Mathematics is based on deductive reasoning, not inductive, and therefore is not a science. The entire way we study mathematics is different than how we approach a real science.
Similarly "Computer Science" isn't. A science that is...
Cheers,
Ben
PS Disclaimer: I am not an unbiased observer in this. I am all but dissertation a PhD in mathematics.
Nearly a year ago Corel sold GraphOn their technology for allowing remote access to Windows boxes in a platform neutral way. This announced agreement would appear to be based on that old event. Corel would presumably prefer it if you used Linux. But if you have a legacy Windows application that must be run, Corel wants that not to be a barrier.
:-)
Pluse Corel does partly own GraphOn, so what is good for GraphOn is good for Corel.
Cheers,
Ben
Nearly a year ago Corel sold GraphOn their technology for allowing remote access to Windows boxes in a platform neutral way. This announced agreement would appear to be based on that old event. Corel would presumably prefer it if you used Linux. But if you have a legacy Windows application that must be run, Corel wants that not to be a barrier.
:-)
Pluse Corel does partly own GraphOn, so what is good for GraphOn is good for Corel.
Cheers,
Ben
This seems to be a case where the facts are clear, the crime is obvious, but nobody has a very good idea what kind of punishment could work out. I am beginning to wonder if that is Jackson's position here. Jackson avoided complaining about contempt of court when he could have thrown it down for perjury. He separated the findings of fact from the findings of law. He wrote the first as a bullet-proof document that could nail Microsoft. He keeps on asking for a settlement. And now he has appointed as a mediator someone whose advice cannot lightly be rejected who - in a reasonable world - might actually have a chance of settling this.
Doesn't it look like he is doing his level best to avoid having the judgement that is handed down be his? (And therefore avoid responsibility if it is ineffective or too strong.)
Wondering,
Ben
That is right. If you set out to do it in a sane way from the beginning you will very likely get the same task done more quickly than if you just hack out something on the fly and try to make it work. The maintainability and lower bug rate is a bonus on top of that.
Cheers,
Ben
The stuff at the end about coding environments is very similar to what I have heard Smalltalkers describe as how a good Smalltalk environment works.
And of course anyone who wants to avoid accidentally using a few of those practices could be worse advised than to buy, read, and apply the concepts in a copy of Code Complete...
Cheers,
Ben
I knew about this one over a week ago. Here is a description of the cause from the VNC mailing list.
Cheers,
Ben
These are the judge's FoF. Period. Who done what when to whom and how that was done. Very difficult to reverse.
The next phase involves submissions on findings of law. Do the actions described in the FoF violate the law? This is much easier to reverse but must remain consistent with the FoF.
After *that* comes penalties, which can be reversed more easily still.
At least this is the case if you are talking about the same Microsoft trial whose judge just released the findings of fact...
Cheers,
Ben
The way I see it, tie their hands and let everyone sue the heck outta them.
Breaking them up just gives the pieces some legal protection...
Cheers,
Ben
Vote exactly what you believe.
:-)
Cheers,
Ben
First of all the Dow Jones Industrial Average may be hit, but that isn't going to stop this judge.
Second the findings of FACT are that Microsoft did hurt people, and it lists various forms of damage.
Third yes, they will get sued to hell and back again. The result of that will cast doubt on the future of their OS and that will help Linux.
Fourth MSFT's products are also damaging US industries. I am sure we will survive nicely with a little collateral damage.
And the biggest point that you have missed in your FUD is that the tone of the article most certainly indicates that lowering the application barrier is a likely goal of the outcome. And *THAT* is something that we all look forward to!
Ben
The judge ruled, as a finding of fact, that Microsoft is a monopoly and has maintained that monopoly through anti-competitive behaviour that resulted in collateral damage to customers, consumers, and third parties.
And this is not "naughty" behaviour? These facts completely suffice to determine that Microsoft has violated US law. The facts as stated open up further ground, for instance many companies could - Monday - file a lawsuit against Microsoft for costs incurred due to web browsing on computers that had browsers installed for no good reason.
HP could sue for increased support costs. It only takes 3 support calls before an OEM is no longer makes a profit. They had the lowest support calling rate in the business (better than Apple's) until Microsoft forced them to use a crappy boot sequence.
IBM could sue, WOW could they sue!
And, of course, AOL owns Netscape. They could *definitely* sue.
Plus this will help the Caldera case (even though Dr. DOS took place before the events covered in the document).
I am looking for a lot of lawsuits. And they will be for big - as in 8-9 digit figures - chunks of change.
:-)
Cheers,
Ben
This is a good thing, but it is part of a more general problem.
And that problem is that we accept tools for Linux development that are distinctly sub par. There is a lot that could, and should, be done.
I would say more, but I cannot possibly say it better than this rant does.
Cheers,
Ben
PS The Microsoft program works right and has a bad interface, the Linux program has a nice interface but sucks! Whodathunkit? (Read the link.)
My NT4/IIS4 PII/266 server was handling an average of 9,000 requests/hour with spikes of 20,000 requests/hour and handling as many as 1,000 email messages/hour - not average, but spikes. Does that count as heavy? I needed to reboot that machine about every 3 months.
No, that does not count as very heavy. Go over a couple of forums to the answers from the person who switched the Royal Family over to Linux to get real life judgement of how to handle a somewhat heavier load.
And no, you should not need to reboot every 3 months.
Would Apache have handled the load? Most likely but the point is NT and IIS are more than capable of handling as much as you have bandwidth to support.
Exactly right. Virtually anything can do the basic job. Now look at licensing costs, stability, and security. While NT and IIS can do it, various variations on the Unix theme with Apache can deliver more value for less.
BTW do yourself a favour and try ZOPE...
Cheers,
Ben
Part of the vision of the Founding Fathers is that the people should be free to overthrow the government - by force if need be. They were quite convinced of the benefits of doing this, having just done it themselves.
However the fact that much of the constitution (and some early amendments) has clauses supportive of rebellion doesn't mean that anyone wants to really see one.
It is the same principle. The ability to fork is good. Using that ability is bad and only justified if it not forking is going to be worse...
Cheers,
Ben
But Mastering Regular Expressions credited Ken Thompson with the original version of grep, circa 1968.
Cheers,
Ben
There are just too many to make it a good sample, but the above were darned fine moments.
Cheers,
Ben
Given the history of scams among the founders of this gem, you might just want to watch that credit card, see if any "unexpected expenses" start turning up on it...
HTH,
Ben
The -w line turns on optional run-time warnings. That is not a change in syntax, it is like adding a lot of debugging code all over the place. It does not change the syntax
/g match is not something that is widely known, but if you have to take parsing to the next level it is utterly invaluable!
Using strict does change the syntax - it turns off the really flexible "Guess What I Mean" features. Yes, Perl has a lot of those. Yes, they are dangerous. They are fine in short scripts, but not in long ones.
However when 2000 line C programs turn into 75 line Perl programs, maintainability is assisted. Overly verbose syntax, and overly low-level syntax, both are the cause of much grief. There is a trade-off, and for what I do Perl gets it right.
And yes, explore some odd corners. Looping over a
Cheers,
Ben
In your competitor's systems!
But still...there are ads for web development in COBOL.
*sigh*
Ben
They can start with my favorite kernel site, Kernel traffic. If you want to have a reasonable sense of what is going on with the kernel but don't want to follow the mailing list - then visit this site every week.
:-)
By and large the sorts of services that people need are already available. They should recognize that, list a few, and then move on.
I would say that some advice on kernel programming would be good. Sprinkle said advice with links to a few of Torvalds' rants on sending patches.
Cheers,
Ben
How should people publish them to the world? Just post them to /.? Ah heck, here is one to play with...
Let me start with a really bad algorithm. Take a fixed buffer of random data, and xor it with your data stream, reusing data as you go. What is wrong with this? Well if you xor the result with itself shifted by the period your key drops out and you just have plain-text xored with plaintext, which can easily be attacked (try xoring sections with common words), and with each piece you attack you can extract some key, extracting other text and before long... voila! (There are techniques to identify the length...)
OK, so let us be a bit smarter. Have 2 buffers of different lengths! Well OK, a little harder since you have made the effective period in the above longer, but you can attack it as before or you can use the non-random nature of your "longer" key to attack it as well. 2 implementations of a bad idea is still bad.
But wait! Look at the stream. It is quite easy to have 1 stream of data encode 3. All that you do is have protocol that sends a header saying which stream is getting the next x characters, then send the block, then send the next header. So the sender can send 3 streams of data, one of which is information on how to replace your first cipher, the second containing information on how to replace the other, and the third being your actual data. The actual placements of header and choices of sizes of data is random so an attacker has no idea what is data and what are actual keys.
(Clearly this is only usable for an ongoing stream of information where you have large amounts of random data available, RAM is not an issue, and bandwidth is not very important to you.)
So my question is how you can attack this algorithm? Where would you start?
And if it is hard to break, how does the replacement rates in the two buffers correlate with the minimum amount of plaintext sent to crack it?
Ben_tilly/at/hotmail(dot)com
Crypt is insecure, and not noticable.
:-) (OK, take your garbage, since it isn't *really* random compress it, strip off the header, etc. But send garbage.)
No, if you want to waste cycles, send complete data. It looks just like encrypted data, but there isn't anything to find.
Ben
Google has a ranking system which is based on the way that the net is linked. It brings up matches, and sorts them according to its ranking.
A lot of pages (good and bad) link to Microsoft's home page. Therefore that page has a high rating. So if it matches enough words in your query to be a match, it will be one of the first ones.
Always.
Now if they could just get past those duplicate pages. OK, so issue foo of The Linux Gazette matched the query. OK, everyone and his dog mirrored it. OK, I looked at it. Now can I please look at what comes next..?
*sigh*
Ben
Take a look at their site to see the definition. As far as I can see it is pleasant BS, but hey, Visa works on the principle...
Ben