IF the system is so mission-critical, you don't just go around updating it like that. You update an exact replica, and test it for a while on parallel with the working system. And THEN you switch.
So you make sure nothing breaks in the first place! You don't just update the packages and then whine about breaking everything, if the system means so much to you.
Your argument about market share determining the amount of security problems through the number of attempts against the software was disproved by the Apache case.
Apache has less security problems than IIS despite higher market share. You can interpret this to mean that people don't use IIS (they do), or that Apache is of higher quality (or, equivalently: IIS is of inferior quality).
The market share of course has an effect (not THE effect), likewise quality, design etc. of software has an effect (not THE effect). The overall quality is a sum of many variables. It does not, however, take a genius or twisting of words or skewing of data to realize the lack of quality, and the amount of security problems inherent in Microsoft products. Linux is not perfect, but at least it's better.
Walk the walk if you talk the talk
on
Ballmer on Linux
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· Score: 1
Slashdot/OSDN is a hypocrite in this regard.
I would not say it's a gain nothing game. An influential person might be persuaded by the advertisement to further Microsoft's adoption in his company. If even one such event happens, then the advertisement has worked!
This is because each such decision will have network effects, i.e. a major "collateral damage" of the "adoption bomb", the size of the damage which depends on the size of the company. Big companies outsource their things, and they might require subcontractors to have the same systems to ease up working, and so on. So if you cave in for worth of 5 for a large company, it will end up having an overall positive effect of 35, to put it in such overly simple terms.
I would rather see Slashdot stick to its principals and remove those Microsoft advertisements. Or, if that turns out to be impossible for them, to stop talking the talk if they're unwilling to walk the walk, because in this case in this case, money does stink.
Yet the conditions were not outright from "out there". This is an issue for which follow-up research would be very interesting to see.
Of course, we will not be able to know what truly happened. But we can explain it as best as we can, if for nothing else than to amuse ourselves. As with all explanations, some explanations tend to be better and more plausible than others.
...what kind of emergence explains the transition from water and bare rock to self-contained, self-replicating organic assemblies?
It doesn't. But it might explain how the first amino acids eventually started to self-replicate.
And how do you know everything was "water and bare rock"? Why not milk and M&Ms? Or just rock. Where did the water come from, then? Anyway... You've got chemicals of all sorts, you've got electricity, you've got heat. So maybe the amino acids just sprang forth when the environment was pleasant enough, who knows.
Emergence is just an idea. It's not God or a thing like that. The idea offers to explain some of the dynamics of how simple things can beget such wonderful complexity.
As for Miller... Life in its most primitive form consists of amino acids. From what I can tell, Miller created the building blocks of life in a situation which was completely possible millions of years ago. One organism's poison is another organism's food.
About the "never get beyond these acids randomly, since the chemistry of more complex molecules pushes everything the other way"-part, where does the chemistry of more complex molecules push them, then? To break up into tiny pieces? I'm not very familiar with Miller's experiment, except the highlights, so would you care to elaborate on this?
Check out the phenomena known as emergence. For example, ants find the shortest route to a food source through clever use of their pheromones. Clever in the sense that the system is ingenious, however the ants do not consciously do anything except mark their trails as they randomly run about and follow other pheromone trails. The pheromone path-creation is not programmed into the ants. They just follow a couple of simple rules.
The result is very ingenious: the shortest route will eventually have the strongest pheromones. As the pheromones vaporize over time, the less used paths die away, and the most used paths (which are also shorter as distance equals time spent in this case) will rule.
That's the organizing principle (or at least one of them). Emergence through synergy. Great complexity comes from the interaction of very small agents (particles, molecules, whatever). Check out the authors Holland, Wolfram and Flake, to name just some from the top of my head.
It's like putting a bunch of threads into a bag and rolling them around with your hands in the bags. You end up with knots.
We didn't become humans at once. What happens in micro level also exhibits emergence upwards up to the macro level. Eventually there's a clump called a human. Humans then form societies, come up with culture and build houses which are emergent properties of humans. Houses clump together into cities, and cities into a metropolis, everytime giving birth to new kind of complexity and new kind of things. And so on. We don't have to consciously "build a city". All it takes is for many people to build houses next to a nice river where lots of fish can be found. In time, there will be a city there, although nobody "built the city" per se.
Also, if the "organizing principle" was broken somehow, there would have appeared no intelligent life, and we would not be observing all this, thus we would not know that the organizing principle was broken!
Are you willing to PAY some amount of money, to see the sports score or whatever, in your cellphone NOW, OR will you wait until you're at home/work where you can see the same score from the Internet for NO COST?
I usually go for no cost, i.e. home or work or friend's place, although I could check using the cellphone... but it's just too cumbersome and slow. In short, inconvenient. And this even though I don't pay for my phone bills!
The "services" and whatever, those are just too difficult and cumbersome to use or start using.
How many people are like me: I buy a computer, get a Windoze license, then at some point in time stop using it when I switch to Linux?
So, I get calculated as point for Windows in the desktop, but actually use Linux. The metric might actually be lower than expected for the MS products.
Well if that's the case, and life/evolution is as easy as the theories make it sound (all it takes is heat and time)...then why isn't the universe like something out of Star TRek with hundreds of alien species flittering about, dropping in to violate the prime directive, establish moonbases, and so forth? Think about it.
There's only one logical conclusion: we are the first ones, the first race to appear.
Sometimes, version numbers don't mean jack shit. Sometimes, if it's below 1, it doesn't mean anything. Sometimes, if it's 3, it doesn't mean anything. Sometimes, the version numbers are used in a controlled way, based on the roadmap so that given feature will bump version number upwards.
I would prefer the build number as version number:-)
Apparently the government of Australia has nothing better to do than to attempt the killing of the IT industry of Australia.
The idea behind the so-called "Free Trade" treaty will work when ALL countries on this Earth adhere to it, and enforce it. But while there are countries which do not have such strict laws, the countries implementing such laws will suffer a severe competitive disadvantage.
The result will be that the law will be evaded by taking work elsewhere. This means lost revenues and hurts the Australian IT industry.
Have you noticed how the Internet and things dealing with it are slowly sinking into a swamp full of legalization? The reason is to attach to the Internet the same power structures as the "old" business has, the same rulers, the same power players, the same mind-numbing consumer-grade nothingness.
Messing with Bayesian filters won't make the spam problem go away. It's just closing ones eyes to it. Kind of like wars in distant countries disappear if you turn off the TV and don't follow the news.
Think how much bandwidth is wasted globally due to spam... Bandwidth is not cheap, it has a price. And in the end the people who pay that price are the customers of ISPs. It's a problem because spam is just something which uses up the bandwidth but which gets ignored in the receiving end; it has no value to the recipient. In other words, the traffic generated by spam is just a bandwidth-hogging parasite in the system.
So in aggregate I argue that you do lose actual money in the form of higher prices of Internet access, even if tuning your Bayesian filter has zero cost.
I never said we shouldn't TRY to solve problems. What I said was "TYPICALLY, our world is far more complex than simple solutions allow for."
You also said "In short, don't you really think these relatively simple solutions you have proposed would have alreday [sic] been applied if they'd work so well?" whereupon the red blinders descended:)
Not all ISPs make you pay more if you run a server.
Also, as for bandwidth, if you're sold 512 Mbit/s line, you can damn well use the 512 Megabits per second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That's what you pay for. If not, contact your local consumer protection agency and complain about fraudulent advertising.
In short, don't you really think these relatively simple solutions you have proposed would have alreday been applied if they'd work so well?
I see red whenever someone uses this argument. We'd still be sitting on the ground had certain two brothers decided that they could build a flying machine. They didn't think "Oh, if it were possible someone else would have already built it".
It is trivial to find a phone number or a name + address from any spam I receive. For me, these addresses always point to the USA (for some reason I don't get Russian, Chinese or French spam). I wish there would be some avenue of letting the US authorities know of a company who utilizes spamming to market their products. Anyone who is part of the spam value chain deserves to be fined.
At the minimum, start at the end of the chain, at the company which sells the stuff. That's where the money comes. Without advertising, there will be no spam.
Typically, our world is far more complex than simple solutions allow for.
This is not always the case. There can be remarkable complexity stemming from even the simplest of solutions. Check out Wolfram's book for examples.
Food for thought: maybe it's just the spams which I receive, but I've noticed that there is no political spam around. No religious spam either, everything is about selling some cheap crap. Wonder why this is so?
If the purpose of a human being is to work its ass off for the entire life, then I agree this is a problem, since it results in unemployment.
But if the purpose of a human being is not to work the best years of their lives, then I don't see this as any kind of problem. Let machines do the dirty work, and humans reap the benefits.
Those are terms, just like "garbage collection" or "monolithic kernel" are. Do you sneer at those terms? How about the computing terms you don't (yet) understand?
The business terms are more abstract than computing terms, they often refer to people's behavior (people in large groups), they do not refer to anything crisp but something very fuzzy at best. They define concepts.
But they're not "bullshit" as you so bluntly put it. Look behind them, there's actually many interesting things.
Of course some people just throw them around like rice in a wedding, in which case the person is at fault, not the terms themselves.
Re:Now we can start waiting for a total break of A
on
IEEE Approves 802.11i
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· Score: 1
AFAIK, DES/3DES, a 20+ year old algorithm is still only vulnerable to brute force attacks.
Actually, DES is vulnerable to some attacks (differential, linear) which have a smaller workload than using brute force, but they're quite not as practical and straightforward. And much depends on the implementation. If improperly done, you can extract some key bits with cleverly examining the device while it works.
As for AES, once you come up with a system of efficiently solving "an overdefined system of multivariate quadratic equations", you can recover the key. I think nobody has come up with such a method, at least in public.
Now we can start waiting for a total break of AES
on
IEEE Approves 802.11i
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· Score: 1
Now, let's put on our tinfoil hats and start waiting for a total break of AES, or faults in the implementation of AES in the devices (at least the major ones).
If you went ahead and did a "full nuclear exchange" between the Warsaw Pact countries and NATO, the resulting dust from the explosions would create something called "nuclear winter". The dust would block the Sun, the plants would die, the dust would also move the radiating particles all around the Earth.
So for the reason of nuclear winter, the 10% feels quite low. Do you have some reference for that number?
Why do you think it wouldn't scale linearly? Each added human/animal is that much more consumed O2 and water, meaning that much more plant matter to maintain equilibrium, all of which needs support by the other elements of the system.
True. I was thinking about something with the reproductive properties of plants and the length of the trip, but apparently I didn't quite think far enough...
Couple this with superresolution techniques...
on
70 Megapixel Webcam
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, you could also build a closed circulation system, a biosphere if you will, kind of like they tried with Biosphere 1 and 2.
A small replica of the ecosystem, in essence: plants make O2 and consume CO2, humans and fish etc. consume O2 and make CO2, food is fish and plants etc. Pesticides include ladybugs. And so forth, and so on.
Read more here about the Biosphere experiments and biospherics in general.
Don't know if it would add much weight to a space ship, but I guess there's some initial weight to get things rolling rolling and after that all subsequent humans and plants would go in pretty cheaply, weight-wise. So it would not scale linearly as it would in the case of O2 gas canisters.
Slashdot Mirror
IF the system is so mission-critical, you don't just go around updating it like that. You update an exact replica, and test it for a while on parallel with the working system. And THEN you switch.
So you make sure nothing breaks in the first place! You don't just update the packages and then whine about breaking everything, if the system means so much to you.
Apache has less security problems than IIS despite higher market share. You can interpret this to mean that people don't use IIS (they do), or that Apache is of higher quality (or, equivalently: IIS is of inferior quality).
The market share of course has an effect (not THE effect), likewise quality, design etc. of software has an effect (not THE effect). The overall quality is a sum of many variables. It does not, however, take a genius or twisting of words or skewing of data to realize the lack of quality, and the amount of security problems inherent in Microsoft products. Linux is not perfect, but at least it's better.
Slashdot/OSDN is a hypocrite in this regard.
I would not say it's a gain nothing game. An influential person might be persuaded by the advertisement to further Microsoft's adoption in his company. If even one such event happens, then the advertisement has worked!
This is because each such decision will have network effects, i.e. a major "collateral damage" of the "adoption bomb", the size of the damage which depends on the size of the company. Big companies outsource their things, and they might require subcontractors to have the same systems to ease up working, and so on. So if you cave in for worth of 5 for a large company, it will end up having an overall positive effect of 35, to put it in such overly simple terms.
I would rather see Slashdot stick to its principals and remove those Microsoft advertisements. Or, if that turns out to be impossible for them, to stop talking the talk if they're unwilling to walk the walk, because in this case in this case, money does stink.
Yet the conditions were not outright from "out there". This is an issue for which follow-up research would be very interesting to see.
Of course, we will not be able to know what truly happened. But we can explain it as best as we can, if for nothing else than to amuse ourselves. As with all explanations, some explanations tend to be better and more plausible than others.
There's lies, damn lies, statistics, and then there's Russian media.
It doesn't. But it might explain how the first amino acids eventually started to self-replicate.
And how do you know everything was "water and bare rock"? Why not milk and M&Ms? Or just rock. Where did the water come from, then? Anyway... You've got chemicals of all sorts, you've got electricity, you've got heat. So maybe the amino acids just sprang forth when the environment was pleasant enough, who knows.
Emergence is just an idea. It's not God or a thing like that. The idea offers to explain some of the dynamics of how simple things can beget such wonderful complexity.
As for Miller... Life in its most primitive form consists of amino acids. From what I can tell, Miller created the building blocks of life in a situation which was completely possible millions of years ago. One organism's poison is another organism's food.
About the "never get beyond these acids randomly, since the chemistry of more complex molecules pushes everything the other way"-part, where does the chemistry of more complex molecules push them, then? To break up into tiny pieces? I'm not very familiar with Miller's experiment, except the highlights, so would you care to elaborate on this?
Check out the phenomena known as emergence. For example, ants find the shortest route to a food source through clever use of their pheromones. Clever in the sense that the system is ingenious, however the ants do not consciously do anything except mark their trails as they randomly run about and follow other pheromone trails. The pheromone path-creation is not programmed into the ants. They just follow a couple of simple rules.
The result is very ingenious: the shortest route will eventually have the strongest pheromones. As the pheromones vaporize over time, the less used paths die away, and the most used paths (which are also shorter as distance equals time spent in this case) will rule.
That's the organizing principle (or at least one of them). Emergence through synergy. Great complexity comes from the interaction of very small agents (particles, molecules, whatever). Check out the authors Holland, Wolfram and Flake, to name just some from the top of my head.
It's like putting a bunch of threads into a bag and rolling them around with your hands in the bags. You end up with knots.
We didn't become humans at once. What happens in micro level also exhibits emergence upwards up to the macro level. Eventually there's a clump called a human. Humans then form societies, come up with culture and build houses which are emergent properties of humans. Houses clump together into cities, and cities into a metropolis, everytime giving birth to new kind of complexity and new kind of things. And so on. We don't have to consciously "build a city". All it takes is for many people to build houses next to a nice river where lots of fish can be found. In time, there will be a city there, although nobody "built the city" per se.
Also, if the "organizing principle" was broken somehow, there would have appeared no intelligent life, and we would not be observing all this, thus we would not know that the organizing principle was broken!
I usually go for no cost, i.e. home or work or friend's place, although I could check using the cellphone... but it's just too cumbersome and slow. In short, inconvenient. And this even though I don't pay for my phone bills!
The "services" and whatever, those are just too difficult and cumbersome to use or start using.
How many people are like me: I buy a computer, get a Windoze license, then at some point in time stop using it when I switch to Linux?
So, I get calculated as point for Windows in the desktop, but actually use Linux. The metric might actually be lower than expected for the MS products.
Well if that's the case, and life/evolution is as easy as the theories make it sound (all it takes is heat and time)...then why isn't the universe like something out of Star TRek with hundreds of alien species flittering about, dropping in to violate the prime directive, establish moonbases, and so forth? Think about it.
There's only one logical conclusion: we are the first ones, the first race to appear.
Do we live up to that idea?
AFAIK only in Japan do you own the land under your house, up to the center of the Earth.
Sometimes, version numbers don't mean jack shit. Sometimes, if it's below 1, it doesn't mean anything. Sometimes, if it's 3, it doesn't mean anything. Sometimes, the version numbers are used in a controlled way, based on the roadmap so that given feature will bump version number upwards.
I would prefer the build number as version number :-)
Apparently the government of Australia has nothing better to do than to attempt the killing of the IT industry of Australia.
The idea behind the so-called "Free Trade" treaty will work when ALL countries on this Earth adhere to it, and enforce it. But while there are countries which do not have such strict laws, the countries implementing such laws will suffer a severe competitive disadvantage.
The result will be that the law will be evaded by taking work elsewhere. This means lost revenues and hurts the Australian IT industry.
Have you noticed how the Internet and things dealing with it are slowly sinking into a swamp full of legalization? The reason is to attach to the Internet the same power structures as the "old" business has, the same rulers, the same power players, the same mind-numbing consumer-grade nothingness.
Think how much bandwidth is wasted globally due to spam... Bandwidth is not cheap, it has a price. And in the end the people who pay that price are the customers of ISPs. It's a problem because spam is just something which uses up the bandwidth but which gets ignored in the receiving end; it has no value to the recipient. In other words, the traffic generated by spam is just a bandwidth-hogging parasite in the system.
So in aggregate I argue that you do lose actual money in the form of higher prices of Internet access, even if tuning your Bayesian filter has zero cost.
I never said we shouldn't TRY to solve problems. What I said was "TYPICALLY, our world is far more complex than simple solutions allow for."
You also said "In short, don't you really think these relatively simple solutions you have proposed would have alreday [sic] been applied if they'd work so well?" whereupon the red blinders descended :)
Not all ISPs make you pay more if you run a server.
Also, as for bandwidth, if you're sold 512 Mbit/s line, you can damn well use the 512 Megabits per second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That's what you pay for. If not, contact your local consumer protection agency and complain about fraudulent advertising.
In short, don't you really think these relatively simple solutions you have proposed would have alreday been applied if they'd work so well?
I see red whenever someone uses this argument. We'd still be sitting on the ground had certain two brothers decided that they could build a flying machine. They didn't think "Oh, if it were possible someone else would have already built it".
It is trivial to find a phone number or a name + address from any spam I receive. For me, these addresses always point to the USA (for some reason I don't get Russian, Chinese or French spam). I wish there would be some avenue of letting the US authorities know of a company who utilizes spamming to market their products. Anyone who is part of the spam value chain deserves to be fined.
At the minimum, start at the end of the chain, at the company which sells the stuff. That's where the money comes. Without advertising, there will be no spam.
Typically, our world is far more complex than simple solutions allow for.
This is not always the case. There can be remarkable complexity stemming from even the simplest of solutions. Check out Wolfram's book for examples.
Food for thought: maybe it's just the spams which I receive, but I've noticed that there is no political spam around. No religious spam either, everything is about selling some cheap crap. Wonder why this is so?
But that's a big ass dish and DSP gear they're using to catch the signals from Cassini...
And if everything is free, how would the powers that be make any money?
Why should they, any more than others...?
If the purpose of a human being is to work its ass off for the entire life, then I agree this is a problem, since it results in unemployment.
But if the purpose of a human being is not to work the best years of their lives, then I don't see this as any kind of problem. Let machines do the dirty work, and humans reap the benefits.
Those are terms, just like "garbage collection" or "monolithic kernel" are. Do you sneer at those terms? How about the computing terms you don't (yet) understand?
The business terms are more abstract than computing terms, they often refer to people's behavior (people in large groups), they do not refer to anything crisp but something very fuzzy at best. They define concepts.
But they're not "bullshit" as you so bluntly put it. Look behind them, there's actually many interesting things.
Of course some people just throw them around like rice in a wedding, in which case the person is at fault, not the terms themselves.
AFAIK, DES/3DES, a 20+ year old algorithm is still only vulnerable to brute force attacks.
Actually, DES is vulnerable to some attacks (differential, linear) which have a smaller workload than using brute force, but they're quite not as practical and straightforward. And much depends on the implementation. If improperly done, you can extract some key bits with cleverly examining the device while it works.
As for AES, once you come up with a system of efficiently solving "an overdefined system of multivariate quadratic equations", you can recover the key. I think nobody has come up with such a method, at least in public.
Now, let's put on our tinfoil hats and start waiting for a total break of AES, or faults in the implementation of AES in the devices (at least the major ones).
So for the reason of nuclear winter, the 10% feels quite low. Do you have some reference for that number?
Why do you think it wouldn't scale linearly? Each added human/animal is that much more consumed O2 and water, meaning that much more plant matter to maintain equilibrium, all of which needs support by the other elements of the system.
True. I was thinking about something with the reproductive properties of plants and the length of the trip, but apparently I didn't quite think far enough...
Check out this paper for images.
Well, you could also build a closed circulation system, a biosphere if you will, kind of like they tried with Biosphere 1 and 2.
A small replica of the ecosystem, in essence: plants make O2 and consume CO2, humans and fish etc. consume O2 and make CO2, food is fish and plants etc. Pesticides include ladybugs. And so forth, and so on.
Read more here about the Biosphere experiments and biospherics in general.
Don't know if it would add much weight to a space ship, but I guess there's some initial weight to get things rolling rolling and after that all subsequent humans and plants would go in pretty cheaply, weight-wise. So it would not scale linearly as it would in the case of O2 gas canisters.