For computer security professionals, we might as well start with the proposition that it's already been hacked and start working on what the consequences will be.
Seriously. Why does this scrub have a job when a developer who was solving this problem in 1994 is out of work? Might have something to do with outsourcing, pay rates, and idiot management who don't want to deal with a professional who would tell them up front that nixing multi-user concurrency in the design is stupid.
Why does *this* guy have a job and a developer with 10+ years experience going back to the beginning of the web is on unemployment? Oh right, because I'm the guy who'd have looked management in the face when they first nixed proper concurrency design and said, "you can't do it that way, it'll break edits" and they'd have me out the door.
Pretty sure I read that this study was funded buy an industry group representing companies that, among other things, make shower heads and home plumbing fixtures.
As for your 3rd question, "Does hot water kill this bacteria?", any water hot enough to kill bacteria would badly scald a person instantly.
This is slashdot. Walking 1/2 block is considered exercise, and gets the average slashdotter winded. A block and a half is a freaking marathon to them.
Or wait -- maybe the problem is that the block size is too big? If there are fewer than 20 blocks/mile, like in Portland, OR, the grid is too spread out and there should be more than 1 meter/block. Guess what? Many cities are 10-15, but Chicago has a grid of just eight blocks per mile.
By "cursive" English writing learned in school, most people probably got taught the Palmer Method or possibly D'Nealian. While it was considered to be aesthetically pleasing, it was really hard to do right. I learned it in 3rd grade and never was any good at it. Not only that, but the Palmerian style was the one you lefties like me hated, either because they forced you to use your right hand or just because you could never get the slant right and still form all the letters while staying on the baseline.
On the other hand (haha), writing by hand neatly and legibly still has value, and if you like working with your hands its worth looking at something like Getty-Dubay or other modern italic handwriting style. I re-taught myself from a couple of books over a summer a few years ago.
In any case, if we are losing the ability to do Palmer Method writing, who cares? It's not even that easy to read when written well.
BTW this is very Western alphabet-centric. Arabic, Hebrew, and most asian languages still have a strong handwriting grounding.
You're both half right. The GIF format uses lossless LZW compression. It also only supports 256 colors. Any pixels that don't match one of the 256 colors in the index are forced to an available color -- hence the posterization effect when the source image is from a larger colorspace. If the original image is 256 colors (not very likely these days) then the GIF format is entirely lossless.
The Range Safety Officer can't let it just crash back to the ground. The stark reality is that in the event of a guidance failure the RSO's job is to activate the destruct system. Although the lives of the astronauts might be lost, the lives of hundreds of people on the ground take precedence. And no, there isn't really going to be time to determine which way the rocket is going. In the time it would take to figure that out, Cocoa Beach could be a flaming inferno.
No less a personage than Brendan Eich says the whole issue with slow startup in the NSS module is snake oil that does nothing but "waste users' time at startup pretending to scrape entropy off the filesystem."
This really is the core of the issue. An application that was written before multicores were common will not necessarily have partitioned up its work in a way that can take advantage of true parallelism. See Ahmdal's Law and Gustafson's Law.
In general, writing good parallel algorithms is a Hard Problem, and simply pushing the work onto the O/S only gets a slight speedup, hardly worth the cost and effort.
1. Super-secure process opens private.txt 2. Super-secure process truncates private.txt 3. Super-secure process closes the file. 4. O/S re-allocates those disk blocks just freed by the truncate. 5. Nosy process opens a new file using the recently-reallocated blocks. 6. Nosy process reads through the undeleted data left by Super-secure process and sends them over a network connection to someplace bad. 7. Nosy process writes some random noise to the blocks. 8. O/S deletes the data on disk and then writes the data supplied by Nosy.
See the problem? See why it's good to delete on disk at the time of truncation? Even if you include a step between 2 and 3 where Super-secure process writes back, what happens if the system crashes right after the truncate and before the write? Yep -- the blocks of private.txt are out there, on the disk, for anyone to read.
You're letting everyone run with root access, aren't you?
Admit it --- the reason they can do anything they want to the machine is because you're too clueless to actually administer a multi-user secure O/S, and you just cloned the Windows situation where every so-called unprivileged ordinary User is actually just an Administrator with certain corporate-mandated privileges revoked.
Because in the effed-up Microsoft world, even a User with limited privileges can totally hose a system by opening an email in Outlook or clicking on the wrong link in IE, you think you need to still enforce ineffectual but "Enterprise-Wide" restrictions. These "security policies" that let the network admins claim they were following good security practices while letting the malware-infested bloated risk that is Windows claim the desktop are just so much idiocy. Porting them over to the Linux desktop world reveals a level of cluelessness that screams "luser".
none of the things mentioned really sound like "features"
That was my impression after skimming it. Maybe a couple of those things are actually new features, most of them are just "we changed the way it does something" but calling them bug fixes would be bad marketing.
Instead of trying to dissuade them, just lay out the risks you know about, and then say, "if you choose to ignore my advice and change directions, don't hesitate to call me when you have issues". They'll be back.
Slashdot Mirror
For computer security professionals, we might as well start with the proposition that it's already been hacked and start working on what the consequences will be.
Seriously. Why does this scrub have a job when a developer who was solving this problem in 1994 is out of work? Might have something to do with outsourcing, pay rates, and idiot management who don't want to deal with a professional who would tell them up front that nixing multi-user concurrency in the design is stupid.
Why does *this* guy have a job and a developer with 10+ years experience going back to the beginning of the web is on unemployment? Oh right, because I'm the guy who'd have looked management in the face when they first nixed proper concurrency design and said, "you can't do it that way, it'll break edits" and they'd have me out the door.
Would love to see anything you have on VLC. Very capable piece of software. Worst UI since the teletype.
Dubay & Getty are my heroes.
125 degrees C is indeed above the boiling point of water at 1 atm. However, 125C is NOT 75 degrees F. More like 257F.
We should all be glad that 75F is not above the boiling point of water, otherwise our bodies would turn to puffs of steam.
Pretty sure I read that this study was funded buy an industry group representing companies that, among other things, make shower heads and home plumbing fixtures. As for your 3rd question, "Does hot water kill this bacteria?", any water hot enough to kill bacteria would badly scald a person instantly.
This is slashdot. Walking 1/2 block is considered exercise, and gets the average slashdotter winded. A block and a half is a freaking marathon to them. Or wait -- maybe the problem is that the block size is too big? If there are fewer than 20 blocks/mile, like in Portland, OR, the grid is too spread out and there should be more than 1 meter/block. Guess what? Many cities are 10-15, but Chicago has a grid of just eight blocks per mile.
By "cursive" English writing learned in school, most people probably got taught the Palmer Method or possibly D'Nealian. While it was considered to be aesthetically pleasing, it was really hard to do right. I learned it in 3rd grade and never was any good at it. Not only that, but the Palmerian style was the one you lefties like me hated, either because they forced you to use your right hand or just because you could never get the slant right and still form all the letters while staying on the baseline. On the other hand (haha), writing by hand neatly and legibly still has value, and if you like working with your hands its worth looking at something like Getty-Dubay or other modern italic handwriting style. I re-taught myself from a couple of books over a summer a few years ago. In any case, if we are losing the ability to do Palmer Method writing, who cares? It's not even that easy to read when written well. BTW this is very Western alphabet-centric. Arabic, Hebrew, and most asian languages still have a strong handwriting grounding.
> That's not a disadvantage in many cases, especially for the long term. You Aren't Going to Need It.
You're both half right. The GIF format uses lossless LZW compression. It also only supports 256 colors. Any pixels that don't match one of the 256 colors in the index are forced to an available color -- hence the posterization effect when the source image is from a larger colorspace. If the original image is 256 colors (not very likely these days) then the GIF format is entirely lossless.
The Range Safety Officer can't let it just crash back to the ground. The stark reality is that in the event of a guidance failure the RSO's job is to activate the destruct system. Although the lives of the astronauts might be lost, the lives of hundreds of people on the ground take precedence. And no, there isn't really going to be time to determine which way the rocket is going. In the time it would take to figure that out, Cocoa Beach could be a flaming inferno.
Racist much?
No less a personage than Brendan Eich says the whole issue with slow startup in the NSS module is snake oil that does nothing but "waste users' time at startup pretending to scrape entropy off the filesystem."
This is new and different! Microsoft has never before made intentionally vague and obtuse promises and later broken them!
Oddly enough enough, there's a corp in Eve known as the Somali Coastguard Authority.
OK, so where are the "Java is slow" comments? o.O
Alienware sucks and has sucked since at least 2005.
Sure, they are wasting bandwidth. In fact, so are vowels. Lets remove all the vowels from text, that'll save even more!
This really is the core of the issue. An application that was written before multicores were common will not necessarily have partitioned up its work in a way that can take advantage of true parallelism. See Ahmdal's Law and Gustafson's Law. In general, writing good parallel algorithms is a Hard Problem, and simply pushing the work onto the O/S only gets a slight speedup, hardly worth the cost and effort.
Security. Consider the following scenario
1. Super-secure process opens private.txt
2. Super-secure process truncates private.txt
3. Super-secure process closes the file.
4. O/S re-allocates those disk blocks just freed by the truncate.
5. Nosy process opens a new file using the recently-reallocated blocks.
6. Nosy process reads through the undeleted data left by Super-secure process and sends them over a network connection to someplace bad.
7. Nosy process writes some random noise to the blocks.
8. O/S deletes the data on disk and then writes the data supplied by Nosy.
See the problem? See why it's good to delete on disk at the time of truncation? Even if you include a step between 2 and 3 where Super-secure process writes back, what happens if the system crashes right after the truncate and before the write? Yep -- the blocks of private.txt are out there, on the disk, for anyone to read.
You're letting everyone run with root access, aren't you?
Admit it --- the reason they can do anything they want to the machine is because you're too clueless to actually administer a multi-user secure O/S, and you just cloned the Windows situation where every so-called unprivileged ordinary User is actually just an Administrator with certain corporate-mandated privileges revoked.
Because in the effed-up Microsoft world, even a User with limited privileges can totally hose a system by opening an email in Outlook or clicking on the wrong link in IE, you think you need to still enforce ineffectual but "Enterprise-Wide" restrictions. These "security policies" that let the network admins claim they were following good security practices while letting the malware-infested bloated risk that is Windows claim the desktop are just so much idiocy. Porting them over to the Linux desktop world reveals a level of cluelessness that screams "luser".
the rendering engine sticks around because it's used elsewhere in the operating system for other tasks
Meaning, of course, it's still there to be exploited by anything that exploits IE rendering bugs.
none of the things mentioned really sound like "features" That was my impression after skimming it. Maybe a couple of those things are actually new features, most of them are just "we changed the way it does something" but calling them bug fixes would be bad marketing.
Instead of trying to dissuade them, just lay out the risks you know about, and then say, "if you choose to ignore my advice and change directions, don't hesitate to call me when you have issues". They'll be back.