At that time PDP-10s had a strong reputation as fast timesharing systems, so it seems plausible to me that one with few users could serve as a pretty powerful rendering box by 1981 standards
I don't doubt the bit about timesharing systems. Around 1988 in did an interview at a hospital which ran 60 or 70 concurrent users off a single PDP.
But I always associated the PDP line with rock solid real time stability and versatile I/O. I think the clock ran at about 1Mhz. The backplane was wirewrapped.
I don't doubt the story of how they animated Tron. I think its impressive that they pressed on with the limited tools they had.
I many times wonder whether I live in a developed country.
Speaking as an outsider (I am an Australian) I think the USA does many things very well. But because the US is a very big country, there are always plenty of stories to tell about people being incompetent. You could put any 10 European countries together and get a similar picture.
One problem, I think, is that homeland security (at least since 2001) is being built from scratch as an organisation. New outfits tend to get "business as usual" infrastructure much as would be used for an accounting firm or some such. If they went to an established agency like the FBI they might get less modern but more secure solutions.
somewhere between 0.5 and 2 earth masses would be nice.
A planet that big is likely to have many large moons, much like the gas giant planets in our own solar system. The same goes for gas giants found around other stars.
The nice thing about orbiting a large planet is that you get energy from tidal stress, which can help replace energy you would otherwise get from a star.
If there was a backdoor in the flight control software, I doubt it would help the UK if we gave them the source code because the backdoor would almost certainly be hidden very well.
They may have to pay a lot of smart guys to go into the code and find out what it does. Happens all the time, I assure you.
In fact, the backdoor could be in the compiler in which case they would not find anything in the source code. And they can't recompile the sourcecode with their own compiler because they would have to retest everything.
A full validation of the system is a good idea every couple of years anyway. I don't see why this shouldn't happen.
A quick test would be to compile the software and compare your executables with binaries from the distribution. It will at least tell you where there are issues.
You probably assume that CPS is written in PHP, which is not.
No I can see that its written in Python. My concern is that CMS applications have a lot of code connected to open sockets and undergo rapid development.
Other applications which keep sockets open to the world include apache and qmail, but these applications change so slowly that there is time to identify and close security holes.
Off The Shelf content management systems bother me because they must surely be full of well known security holes.
If I had to have a CMS I would prefer to develop my own tailored system. At least that way I will have a chance of finding the bugs before a potential attacker.
I have to say that I don't really know your requirements. You seem to need to digitise documents (and possibly OCR them) and then send them somewhere with a networking protocol. You mention FTP and SMB.
Start by breaking this down into components:
Scanning
OCR
File transfer
But your text indicates that you already have all of these components in place, so why are you looking for another solution? Is it just the cost?
Implied is the need to store the scanned documents in a database of some kind. Perhaps this should be considered in place of the "File Transfer" step.
Are you just being pessemistic in the sense that you want it to happen? Just wait a few more decades.
It won't happen unless somebody puts the effort in, which is why I asked the question. I think your guess of a few decades is about right. This is the sort of job which could be done in 20 years or so.
I am not being pessemistic, its just that if nobody else is having a go (and even if they do) I will try it myself. It pays to keep an eye on what others are up to in the field.
Sometime, do the following experiment: sudo cat/dev/mem | strings | grep
Yes I have seen that trick before.
I think in theory a console program could encrypt or at least obscure the password as it is entered from the console device. There is not much chance of doing this from a GUI.
All that the operating system/software need to know is how to verify that the password entered is correct. And that can be done without storing the root password at all (encrypted or not) with a hash.
I assume that the OpenBSD installer runs passwd to set the root password during installation, similar to NetBSD.
But if either of these OS's went to a graphical installer they would need to write a graphical passwd command which makes an effort to keep the plain text out of swap files, insecure memory, etc.
That's a big ask, IMHO. Which doesn't mean its ok to print the thing out, just that doing it properly is very hard.
But in this day and age of development frameworks, etc, there is less of a need for a programmer to think about the meaning of what he is reading from the UI. The backend programmer may assume that the UI guy understands about passwords, but he may not, to.
Ubuntu is Debian made easy for the masses. You get the bullet-proof Debian core with a great, easy interface. Nothing touches this at the moment.
I run Ubuntu on my laptop and FC4 on my workstation. Ubuntu is great for office type stuff: word processing and email. A surprising number of printers work out of the box.
But I also want to use the laptop for development and here I have struck a few problems. Development libraries are not installed by default (fair enough) but I got into loops trying to install Motif development libraries thorugh apt. I tried to copmpile motif but hit significant dependency problems in the process.
In general I don't think Ubuntu is suited to development work. I am considering dual booting the laptop with another OS for that purpose. But I do continue to recommend it to non-technical people who need to reinstall their systems.
I believe Breezy was released in October, so for five months install logs have been sitting, world-readable, often with the root password. Surely in that time someone well less savoury motives did a simple grep of an install looking for the most trivial of faults.
Anybody with an ounce of common sense should know that you never leave a critical password floating around in plain text. Not in memory, not in swap and you never print it to a bloody log file. Who's going to want to check it?
Passwords are supposed to be non-reversable. The NetBSD installer seems to run the passwd command directly during installation, so the installer never sees the password. Did somebody get the bright idea of prompting for the password in their own UI when the graphical installer was done? This should have been caught. The design of the installer is at fault. Not the log file. I wouldn't count this one as fixed until the installer never sees the password. Sorry for the rant.
How about encouraging the "patient" to go outside or do something constructive, instead of coercing him into repeating a mindless task for no real reward. Oh, right - because that's what he would have done ANYWAY if he weren't one of the majority who by about age six are infected with an affinity for pointless busywork, and an inability to learn except by rote.
Fifty years ago it would have been taken for granted that some people are born spend their lives guiding people up and down mountains or breaking in horses; while others were born to spend their time adding up columns of numbers in a bank.
Now we are all expected to sit in front of the TV between 6:30 and 8:30 every night, to paitently wait in the back seat of the car when going away on holiday. We don't let our seven year old boys roam the streets with their friends because they might get taken by child molestors.
The behaviours available to us are much narrower than would have been available to children of the 50's or 60's. I think some ADHD cases are really just behavior.
if the carbon dating is in fact accurate, then why hasn't this species evolved in the last 11 million years?
More to the point, why have crocodiles not changed much in 100 million years?
Perhaps it has something to do with the way creatures live. An organism which lives on the edge, so to speak, like a cheatah or a falcon, will experience selective pressure because there are so many ways for an individual in that species to fail at what they do.
Crocs just float into the water until their prey happens to come along: doesn't matter what really, then they eat it.
So maybe the answer is they they don't experience much selection pressure because of the (relatively) shit existance they live.
Another possibility is that the Crocodile lifestyle is a kind of local mininum for which they are well suited. Any change would make them less fit and their environment (creeks, estuaries, ditches) aren't going away any time soon.
A burning question... does this call into question the carbon dating methods that "proved" this creature was 11 million years old? Or does this finally prove that these creatures have resurrected from their fossilized remains?
Animals which died 11 million years ago can have their remains dated to 11 million years. Some of their descendants are still alive today, which doesn't change the fact that their ancestors died a long time ago.
Are you sure about that? With distributed content systems so common now I wouldn't be surprised if part of it winds up being hosted somewhere really cheap, ie, not Canada.
Slashdot Mirror
10 lines of code. I am impressed.
I don't doubt the bit about timesharing systems. Around 1988 in did an interview at a hospital which ran 60 or 70 concurrent users off a single PDP.
But I always associated the PDP line with rock solid real time stability and versatile I/O. I think the clock ran at about 1Mhz. The backplane was wirewrapped.
I don't doubt the story of how they animated Tron. I think its impressive that they pressed on with the limited tools they had.
I would never have considered a PDP-10 to be a fast rendering machine. This sounds like a way around paying for time on a cray.
Speaking as an outsider (I am an Australian) I think the USA does many things very well. But because the US is a very big country, there are always plenty of stories to tell about people being incompetent. You could put any 10 European countries together and get a similar picture.
One problem, I think, is that homeland security (at least since 2001) is being built from scratch as an organisation. New outfits tend to get "business as usual" infrastructure much as would be used for an accounting firm or some such. If they went to an established agency like the FBI they might get less modern but more secure solutions.
A planet that big is likely to have many large moons, much like the gas giant planets in our own solar system. The same goes for gas giants found around other stars.
The nice thing about orbiting a large planet is that you get energy from tidal stress, which can help replace energy you would otherwise get from a star.
They may have to pay a lot of smart guys to go into the code and find out what it does. Happens all the time, I assure you.
In fact, the backdoor could be in the compiler in which case they would not find anything in the source code. And they can't recompile the sourcecode with their own compiler because they would have to retest everything.A full validation of the system is a good idea every couple of years anyway. I don't see why this shouldn't happen.
A quick test would be to compile the software and compare your executables with binaries from the distribution. It will at least tell you where there are issues.
No I can see that its written in Python. My concern is that CMS applications have a lot of code connected to open sockets and undergo rapid development.
Other applications which keep sockets open to the world include apache and qmail, but these applications change so slowly that there is time to identify and close security holes.
Off The Shelf content management systems bother me because they must surely be full of well known security holes.
If I had to have a CMS I would prefer to develop my own tailored system. At least that way I will have a chance of finding the bugs before a potential attacker.
I have to say that I don't really know your requirements. You seem to need to digitise documents (and possibly OCR them) and then send them somewhere with a networking protocol. You mention FTP and SMB.
Start by breaking this down into components:
But your text indicates that you already have all of these components in place, so why are you looking for another solution? Is it just the cost?
Implied is the need to store the scanned documents in a database of some kind. Perhaps this should be considered in place of the "File Transfer" step.
It won't happen unless somebody puts the effort in, which is why I asked the question. I think your guess of a few decades is about right. This is the sort of job which could be done in 20 years or so.
I am not being pessemistic, its just that if nobody else is having a go (and even if they do) I will try it myself. It pays to keep an eye on what others are up to in the field.
Perhaps tomorrow a federal Government staffer will print out this article for John Howard to read while he has his morning tea.
I am sure I read about you in a Heinlein book.
Yes I have seen that trick before.
I think in theory a console program could encrypt or at least obscure the password as it is entered from the console device. There is not much chance of doing this from a GUI.
I assume that the OpenBSD installer runs passwd to set the root password during installation, similar to NetBSD.
But if either of these OS's went to a graphical installer they would need to write a graphical passwd command which makes an effort to keep the plain text out of swap files, insecure memory, etc.
That's a big ask, IMHO. Which doesn't mean its ok to print the thing out, just that doing it properly is very hard.
But in this day and age of development frameworks, etc, there is less of a need for a programmer to think about the meaning of what he is reading from the UI. The backend programmer may assume that the UI guy understands about passwords, but he may not, to.
I run Ubuntu on my laptop and FC4 on my workstation. Ubuntu is great for office type stuff: word processing and email. A surprising number of printers work out of the box.
But I also want to use the laptop for development and here I have struck a few problems. Development libraries are not installed by default (fair enough) but I got into loops trying to install Motif development libraries thorugh apt. I tried to copmpile motif but hit significant dependency problems in the process.
In general I don't think Ubuntu is suited to development work. I am considering dual booting the laptop with another OS for that purpose. But I do continue to recommend it to non-technical people who need to reinstall their systems.
Anybody with an ounce of common sense should know that you never leave a critical password floating around in plain text. Not in memory, not in swap and you never print it to a bloody log file. Who's going to want to check it?
Passwords are supposed to be non-reversable. The NetBSD installer seems to run the passwd command directly during installation, so the installer never sees the password. Did somebody get the bright idea of prompting for the password in their own UI when the graphical installer was done? This should have been caught. The design of the installer is at fault. Not the log file. I wouldn't count this one as fixed until the installer never sees the password. Sorry for the rant.
Sunday is probably peak development time for free software.
No it has a random password, which I assume is the password in the log file.
Fifty years ago it would have been taken for granted that some people are born spend their lives guiding people up and down mountains or breaking in horses; while others were born to spend their time adding up columns of numbers in a bank.
Now we are all expected to sit in front of the TV between 6:30 and 8:30 every night, to paitently wait in the back seat of the car when going away on holiday. We don't let our seven year old boys roam the streets with their friends because they might get taken by child molestors.
The behaviours available to us are much narrower than would have been available to children of the 50's or 60's. I think some ADHD cases are really just behavior.
Who is trying?
I know somebody who probably threw away 20 or so 11/84 and 11/83 systems recently.
I think your answer is "not much" if you know which bin to look in.
MSDOS is between *nix and VMS?
More to the point, why have crocodiles not changed much in 100 million years?
Perhaps it has something to do with the way creatures live. An organism which lives on the edge, so to speak, like a cheatah or a falcon, will experience selective pressure because there are so many ways for an individual in that species to fail at what they do.
Crocs just float into the water until their prey happens to come along: doesn't matter what really, then they eat it.
So maybe the answer is they they don't experience much selection pressure because of the (relatively) shit existance they live.
Another possibility is that the Crocodile lifestyle is a kind of local mininum for which they are well suited. Any change would make them less fit and their environment (creeks, estuaries, ditches) aren't going away any time soon.
I don't know about Diatomyidae, though.
Animals which died 11 million years ago can have their remains dated to 11 million years. Some of their descendants are still alive today, which doesn't change the fact that their ancestors died a long time ago.
Are you sure about that? With distributed content systems so common now I wouldn't be surprised if part of it winds up being hosted somewhere really cheap, ie, not Canada.