No, he advised people the same as any lawyer would when you're a defendant in a legal proceeding: shut up, answer questions posed precisely in as few words as possible, and don't go answering questions unasked. The #2 reason why lawyers don't interrupt people attempting to hang themselves on their own words is because then the other person can do the lawyer's job for them. (The #1 reason, of course, is because they're generally paid by the hour, but that's another topic.)
At least, that's the charitable (and probably legal) way to take the advice.
My wife was summoned for Jury duty. The date for appearance was approximately 1 week prior to our first child being due. We quickly asked for her to be excused on the grounds that she'd be as likely as not giving birth in the court room. (Turns out the child was 6 days early, so labour would have started during any jury questioning.)
I got a summons for jury duty that asked me to appear about 3 weeks later. I don't think the ink was dry on our request for my wife to be excused before this one was on its way. Seriously - they wanted to drag both adults in a house into jury duty pretty much simultaneously? I asked to be excused on the grounds that I was the only driver in a house that would have a 2-3-week-old baby in it, which would cause my wife and our child undue hardship.
If I could have gone, I would have. But not for your high-and-mighty reasons. More to get an up-close-and-personal experience of why the court system is a joke. I doubt I would have made it to trial, assuming that the case involved actually got to trial, merely due to my cynicism. One of the lawyers would likely have asked me to leave before the trial started.
I'm just curious. I'm not a fan of Democrats or Obama. I'm starting to be disillusioned by the Repubs, and, though I'm not American, the Tea Party intrigues me. But I have to ask: why do you think the (R) tags would vote any differently?
If it's just to "oppose the Dems", which apparently seems to be a valiant effort made by corrupt politicians (oh, there I go, being redundant... again) the world over as a way of pretending to be different than those in power to encourage others who are disillusioned by those in power to vote for the other party next time, I would actually expect most (R)'s to vote in favour of this, too. Not that I think it's a good law, but I just don't expect politicians of any stripe to look past their list of campaign donors.
Pay for it through auctioning off confiscated cell phones discovered through the service.
Or, if you're really evil (read: "Guvmint"), amend the law against cell phone use by currently incarcerated inmates to remove expectations of privacy as a legal term - this could be as devious as having a completely independent law that states that there is no expectation of privacy in jail and/or during the commission of certain classes of laws (which would happen to include cell phone possession/use while incarcerated, without explicitly stating it), just like causing death during the commission of a felony is automatically murder-one in some jurisdictions. Then you can use those towers to listen in on any non-whitelisted call, and suddenly you know about a lot more stuff: who has which cell phones, what they're smuggling in and out, who they're controlling on the outside, etc. Some of this would have value in and of itself that would at least partially justify said towers, other aspects would have auctionable value (cell phones, especially the pre-paid kind, cigarettes, other goods that are prohibited in jail, but not outside of jail).
The super devious would also remove all forms of legal privilege (conversations with lawyers, doctors, etc.) when conducted through illegal means. Thus allowing blanket surveillance of those non-whitelisted phones, including their conversations with their lawyers, which would otherwise probably be the easiest way to stop this non-sense. Of course, lawyers will ensure their clients are talking on jail-sanctioned payphones or whatever, but the purpose of this deviousness would not be to listen to what would otherwise be privileged conversations, it would be to prevent the lawyers from suing the prison for listening in on privileged conversations, and thereby forcing the removal of those expensive towers. You'd probably get evidence enough to keep a few of the more stupid inmates behind bars for the rest of their lives, but not likely anything significant.
Once a few "test" systems go up, and a few nationally-televised convictions were made with them, prisons would just need to put up towers within a few hundred feet of other prisons, ensure their flashing lights work, and not actually plug them in to anything. I'm sure illegal cell phone use would plummet with very little extra cost.
This is the reason I clicked on the story at all. Just two weeks ago, my mother (59) called in a panic about over 300 viruses that some program found, and was about to click on the "run this executable" popup that IE gave her (my father won't let her run Firefox? Not that FF is likely to have stopped this*) when she thought to call someone. She tried to get a hold of my father, but he wasn't available, so she called me. I told her it was a scam, and to abort immediately. Not knowing really what else to do, I asked her to ensure her legitimate virus scanner was run that very night just to be sure. I think the trouble was averted, but only barely. It's an effective social hack. The question that makes it worth discussing is what, if anything, can we do technically to stop these hacks, and, in the meantime, what can we do socially to educate?
(*) I've seen the scam on Firefox, too, although that was years ago. FF may be blocking it since, I guess I don't know. But I found it funny because, of course, it looked like a bunch of Windows windows, which looked really out of place on my KDE/Linux desktop. And I knew that even if I did download it, it would be unlikely to be able to do anything (not that I did download it).
Big Blue is probably one of the biggest Java development firms in the world. I'm guessing here, but their expenditure on the JVM itself probably rivals Sun's, plus most of their apps either support Java, are partially written in Java, or completely written in Java, and often ship/embed Java (if you have 10 IBM products installed on your machine, you probably have 11 copies of Java).
Their dependence on Java is, I think, obvious. As is their long-running feud with Oracle in the database sphere. On the other hand, as recently as about 7 or 8 years ago, from what I can tell, AIX spent more money optimising their platform for Oracle than they spent optimising for DB2. Not sure if that's still the case. IBM competes fiercely with Oracle (software) and works closely with them (hardware). I'm not sure why IBM wants to allow the balance of power to shift more in Oracle's direction, actually.
For the first two or three months (6 if you want to be sure), send it over in plain text. After that, start encrypting everything. If challenged immediately, you can say it's for security purposes. If you aren't challenged for a year or more, ask them why they're just bringing it up now after having received so many (daily) reports this way? Obviously they aren't using them, so the whole request is obviously fraudulent.
Of course, it's even better if you can't find the private key to decrypt with.
Can't help but wonder if these people even need a connection to the internet. Now granted that's not to say infections can't happen to everyone, because they can and they do but I think we can all agree the vast majority of infections delivered by shady sites are borne by the vast vapid masses. I mean you don't turn on your car and get on the freeway with nary a clue how it works do you? Why on earth should you get on the information superhighway when you don't even what a processor or memory is?
You had me until here. I get in to my car with nary an idea on what nearly everything in the engine (processor/memory) is or does. All I know about a vehicle is what I can reach from the driver's seat: ignition, steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, radio, climate control, spedometer, odometer. There's also a tachometer (or something) which strongly correlates with engine noise, and also tells me when my gas engine turns off while I'm stopped (hybrid) - beyond that, I have no care.
I don't see why a computer user needs to know what a processor or memory is. They need to know how to navigate: turn it on and off (safely), get on the applications they care about, save their progress (e.g., in a word processor) such that a power outage doesn't destroy hours of work, and they need to know "defensive computing", that is, how to recognise dangers to their safety, both personal safety and the safety of the machine they're operating. We take driver's ed and defensive driving courses. Equivalents can be created for computing. But we don't all take mechanic's training, nor should most users need to know how to crack open their case and manipulate the contents.
Can't help but wonder if these people even need a connection to the internet. Now granted that's not to say infections can't happen to everyone, because they can and they do but I think we can all agree the vast majority of infections delivered by shady sites are borne by the vast vapid masses. I mean you don't turn on your car and get on the freeway with nary a clue how it works do you? Why on earth should you get on the information superhighway when you don't even what a processor or memory is?
You had me until here. I get in to my car with nary an idea on what nearly everything in the engine (processor/memory) is or does. All I know about a vehicle is what I can reach from the driver's seat: ignition, steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, radio, climate control, spedometer, odometer. There's also a tachometer (or something) which strongly correlates with engine noise, and also tells me when my gas engine turns off while I'm stopped (hybrid) - beyond that, I have no care.
I don't see why a computer user needs to know what a processor or memory is. They need to know how to navigate: turn it on and off (safely), get on the applications they care about, save their progress (e.g., in a word processor) such that a power outage doesn't destroy hours of work, and they need to know "defensive computing", that is, how to recognise dangers to their safety, both personal safety and the safety of the machine they're operating. We take driver's ed and defensive driving courses. Equivalents can be created for computing. But we don't all take mechanic's training, nor should most users need to know how to crack open their case and manipulate the contents.
From someone who despises McDonald's food, I'd argue that, yes, they do provide the best food in their price range. Of course, the definition of "best" doesn't have anything to do with "nutrition".
For me, there's nothing in that price range that is palatable from a restaurant (loose term here), thus I either eat at home or splurge more.
Well, I think Java-the-language is already out there. I can't imagine a way for Oracle to get those worms back in the can. So we must be talking about the VM, and maybe their extensions (SE/EE).
My prediction? The VM continues to be free. EE becomes premium. SE, not sure about. And there may be a pay-for-fixes model for the VM that is, by definition, not free. If you need something fixed NOW, you pay. If you need more performance from the VM, you pay. Those fixes may or may not make it into the generally-available VM.
The community solution? IMO, it is to finish Parrot, get a "Java-the-language"-to-Parrot compiler built (perhaps by starting with a Java-the-VM-to-Parrot bytecode converter), and then you can pretty much discard Java-the-VM. Parrot already supports a bunch of different languages (at different levels of completeness), so it seems to me to be a natural fit.
After that project gets going, approach gcc to have gj able to target Parrot instead of Java bytecode, like all their other cross-compiling solutions. It makes Oracle irrelevant.
Maybe, though, we'll have to wait and see what Oracle's real plans are before we, as a community, start down this road. It's an expensive road (in manpower more than $$), and if everyone continues to be happy with Oracle's free offerings, there won't be much impetus to go around Oracle. That said, I can imagine some people still worried enough about Oracle's next move to start work on this, or a similar, solution.
This is exactly what I have. I do have to admit a few issues with it, though.
The zoom "keys" don't work in Linux (yet?). The keyboard uses two USB identifiers, and this confuses Linux somehow. Thus far, not a show stopper as I don't really know what I'd assign to it anyway.
The Calculator button doesn't seem to work in Linux. It's not that the key doesn't work - xev shows that the key is read and interpreted properly, and when I assign it to the kcalc command, the kde menu editor accepts it - it's that once it's been assigned, it still does launch. This has worked with earlier levels of kde/xorg, so there's a linux bug somewhere.
Everything else works great for me. The fact that it's corded is a non-issue. I use this thing 8-12 hours a day, 5 days a week (plus a couple hours on the weekends), so cordless would have me going through batteries way too quickly anyway. Every once in a while, the usb acts up, but that has mostly gone away as pieces of the OS get upgraded (kernel modules for the most part, I think, though xorg may have had something to do with it).
("brownian motion", motherfucker, have you heard of it?).
I'm going to bet "no".
Then again, I only learned about brownian motion due to reading about a slightly warm cup of liquid that was not entirely unlike tea. But I'm not sure this guy would respect a book any more than a bubble.
So let me get this straight.. In the beginning we had a very simple very open design. Any host can talk to any other host on any port. Then, over the years bouts of paranoia, fear, and idiocy have created default drop firewalls and nat devices that fundamentally break the open nature of the internet, protocols that rely on that nature break when presented with that stupidity, and somehow it's the fault of the protocol designer?
Well, no. You got the beginning part right. However, the reasons for NAT are off.
It's more like years of:
Worms and trojans (one of the easiest ways to keep someone from rooting a box not necessarily under your control is to simply block the port from a firewall - not perfect, but gets many of the easy problems out of the way)
Functionality demanded by computer-unsavvy users (think: professors outside comp-sci/engineering who want to use insecure software)
ISPs providing few IP addresses, partly due to scarcity, partly because they like control, and sometimes due to limitations such as dial-up (a NAT router hooked up to a modem can service your entire network, my cable co only offers two IP addresses per user, and I have 4 computers plus a WDTV network device, easier to just NAT than try to get more IP addresses)
Besides all that, assuming that you can abuse ports/connections willy-nilly is overly optimistic, even on an open network. Growth will mean more users on a box (so your 20 ports being used can multiple by 200 users, and starts to add up). As well as more inter-network connections (more users from your uni dealing with users at another uni, across the state, country, continent, or even world), and thus bottlenecks. Reducing your traffic can be very important here.
It turns out that NAT devices share many problems with other aspects of our modern internet, even exacerbating some otherwise-existing issues. It's not idiocy. There is much malice here, but not on the part of NAT engineers/devs.
Personally, I'll likely continue using a NAT device even after the entire world is IPv6, though I'll obviously have to find an IPv6 NAT router, if only to provide a relatively trivial-to-set-up firewall between my TCP/IP printer and WDTV device, neither of which I can otherwise control too easily from prying hackers, and said hackers. I don't want some nimwit in Nigeria to start printing their 419 scams directly to my printer. And I don't know what vulnerabilities are in the WDTV device, I don't trust it much, so, again, keeping it away from inbound connections is probably a good thing.
I could set this all up with a real firewall instead. But NAT provides it simply enough, and UPnP is, well, universal enough to make it easy to configure.
If the infections were coming via Java Applets then it becomes pertinent to ask how did they get on the machine. Java appplets must be signed to write to the user's hard drive. This means the user was prompted to approve an untrusted certificate and they did so, or the malware organisation had a trusted certificate, in which case the trust authority should revoke the certificate. It is not like applets are without protection to the end user.
Unless, of course, said exploit allowed the bypassing of the certificate requirement.
There is another great simple idea hidden here: get them done in real time. All carriers will have the incentive to get this done when they realise that they won't be able to back-charge you for minutes prior to the texted warning. If that's not an incentive to get this done in real time *now*, nothing is.
Information in consumer's hands is not only good for consumers, but good for ethical businesses, too. If the carriers give any excuse(*) for doing this, they're really just telling us how they want to continue to make money unethically.
(*) saying that they need a couple of months (say 2-6) to implement this real-time conversions is fine. Continued delays is just lying, and thus unethical.
It's stealing when they provide a contract that is multiple pages of legalese which not only run contrary to common sense and what the sales guy told me, but also states that it takes precedence over any lies the sales guy told me to entice me to sign (bold part is my paraphrase, not their literal terms). That we cannot have a peer relationship in signing the contracts (not like any of their competitors are any better) makes the entire process lopsided against the consumer.
Just my opinion.
If we could somehow mandate "sane" contracts for consumers... no idea how to make that workable, but if it could be worked out, it could go a long way to being a reasonable way through the issue. Unfortunately, that's outside of the FCC's scope/mandate, so it won't be a result from this investigation.
And, like it or not (and I don't), the Ninth Circuit has declared this to be consistent with due process, thus they are gathering evidence perfectly legally.
Of course, as many here like to point out, legal != ethical, and I think the Ninth Circuit judges have too many cops up their collective asses to see rationally, but as the law stands at the moment, there doesn't seem to be a problem with due process here. I'm not a fan of the ACLU very often, but I'm cheering for them on this one.
Note, however, that, despite critics' claims to the contrary, there is a significant difference between a strategic strike that kills a bunch of "bad" people, and killing them after you've captured them. In the latter case, you already have them constrained and, assuming a non-corrupt penal system (ok, a bit of a stretch), they can do no further damage. In the former case, not only are the "bad" guys still actively pursuing their "bad" goals, but they probably have firepower to defend their actions. Sometimes a sniper shot from 2 miles away is far safer for the "good" guys than to try to take them alive. In my opinion, it's crazy to risk losing a half-dozen cops/soldiers just so you can capture, try, and, if successful, feed somebody like that for the rest of their lives.
Thus, I don't find your desire to use super powers in killing those "bad" people to be actually contrary to your position on the death penalty.
Now to disclaim my biases. I would be pro death penalty if it could be proven 100% correct (i.e., never killing an innocent). Since we're limited by human failings, that can't be the case, thus I'm against it. I am, in general, suspicious and distrustful of police. Lying to a "bad" guy means you're no better than they are. A police agency without a civilian (non-police, non-union, and especially non-police-union) oversight is not to be trusted anywhere in the world. Even with that oversight, maybe not. A police agency that does not arrest at least 0.1% of its own every year is lying to us. Soldiers, on the other hand, are put in really horrible situations where all they have left is fight-or-flight. I wouldn't want to live in an occupied land because the troops would concern me, though I trust them more than the police.
When talking about collateral damage, I think the media fails to compare the collateral damage from taking out "bad" guys vs not taking them out. Yes, unnecessary human deaths are tragic. But a warlord that is causing 300 deaths a year vs taking him and his family out and any others unfortunate enough to be near by (say 25 "innocents"), it seems to be a numerical gain.
Have you ever met a india IT worker that has one speck of innovative thinking? I certainly haven't, they are fantastic of doing what they are told but ask them to come up with something on their own and expect to be disappointed. I cannot say I am surprised they want to install a branding wall paper and call it the new India OS.
I know I'm going to get killed here, but I pretty much agree. In my experience, the likelihood of finding a competent developer in India is about the same as finding a completely useless developer in North America or Europe. Which is to say, not necessarily rare, but not the normal case, either. And I know the "racism" card will come out, but I'm also not talking race. I'm actually not even talking nationality. I'm really talking about location. The Indians I've met in North America, even if born and educated in India, were, as far as I could tell, statistically the same as the rest of the North Americans (which would also include, with no pun intended, boat loads of Chinese immigrants as well as Arabians, Africans, and, yes, even a few Caucasians): some incompetents, but generally somewhat competent to excellent. The ones who were still in India were almost never competent, though I can think of a few stand-outs that were above-average even among Westerners.
Generally speak, humor is found in the unexpected. If you don't expect to see that reference in the given context, and it is made, or if it's being applied in a context that is unexpected, that is funny. At least to the observer that both gets the reference and doesn't expect it.
That said, SQL injection attacks are not only unexpected in a child's name, but I've forwarded that comic on to a number of developers of a large commercial database product (as well as many others) as a way to teach people to USE F*CKING PLACEHOLDERS. It has been fairly successful, I might add. After spending 15 minutes trying and failing to get across to them why "SELECT * FROM MYTABLE WHERE FOO = $foo" is bad, I go look up the xkcd comic and show it to them. In 30 seconds, xkcd's author gets across what I can't in 15 minutes over the phone (perhaps I could do it in person with a whiteboard to share).
Now, maybe a troll will come along and say that I'm not a very good teacher. Although I have plenty of experience to the contrary, let's assume this to be true. My point still stands: those comics teach against SQL injection more effectively than I can, thus it's an invaluable tool. The unexpected reference makes it funny enough for me to remember it, the pointed truth of it makes it a good teaching tool.
I have seen generated code. And I've written code generators. And really, the quality of the generated code is completely dependant on whether the developer of the generation tool was merely doing whatever was required to get working generated code, or to provide a useful tool to users to learn and expand upon.
Too often I see devs handed a task and do the bare minimum to get that one specific task completed. Instead of looking for a bigger picture of the task and seeing if they can get more out of it with little to no extra effort. Because, really, getting your output to be readable is not nearly as complex as creating the UI for it anyway. Took me on the order of hours to tweak my output to look right, and not even 50% of that time again to tweak it in the way that feedback recommended (some of which I disagreed with and responded as such, the rest I agreed with or was ambivalent upon and thus changed). The rest of the project took months of effort. Skimping out on readable output is a false savings here.
It's not hard to do. A good template tool (in perl, I use Template Toolkit), and 90% of the problem of readable output is solved.
The only times I don't care about readable output have been generating xml and xhtml. Even when I generate C++ and Java code that is going directly from there to the compiler and not read by any user, I try to get the output reasonably readable - which makes it much easier to deal with compile errors when they point to a line number that has only a single statement on it, or when I bring the resultant app up in a debugger and want to step through the code for one reason or another. The time saved in debugging compile or runtime errors alone can pay for the effort in readable output over and over again.
I regularly max out all "8" i7-930 cores here, though almost only when compiling. "make -j25" (with distcc spreading it out to my quad-core phenom box) generally will max it out when compiling openoffice, firefox (xulrunner) and kdelibs, and many others. 12GB RAM, though I doubt that to make a difference.
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No, he advised people the same as any lawyer would when you're a defendant in a legal proceeding: shut up, answer questions posed precisely in as few words as possible, and don't go answering questions unasked. The #2 reason why lawyers don't interrupt people attempting to hang themselves on their own words is because then the other person can do the lawyer's job for them. (The #1 reason, of course, is because they're generally paid by the hour, but that's another topic.)
At least, that's the charitable (and probably legal) way to take the advice.
My wife was summoned for Jury duty. The date for appearance was approximately 1 week prior to our first child being due. We quickly asked for her to be excused on the grounds that she'd be as likely as not giving birth in the court room. (Turns out the child was 6 days early, so labour would have started during any jury questioning.)
I got a summons for jury duty that asked me to appear about 3 weeks later. I don't think the ink was dry on our request for my wife to be excused before this one was on its way. Seriously - they wanted to drag both adults in a house into jury duty pretty much simultaneously? I asked to be excused on the grounds that I was the only driver in a house that would have a 2-3-week-old baby in it, which would cause my wife and our child undue hardship.
If I could have gone, I would have. But not for your high-and-mighty reasons. More to get an up-close-and-personal experience of why the court system is a joke. I doubt I would have made it to trial, assuming that the case involved actually got to trial, merely due to my cynicism. One of the lawyers would likely have asked me to leave before the trial started.
I'm just curious. I'm not a fan of Democrats or Obama. I'm starting to be disillusioned by the Repubs, and, though I'm not American, the Tea Party intrigues me. But I have to ask: why do you think the (R) tags would vote any differently?
If it's just to "oppose the Dems", which apparently seems to be a valiant effort made by corrupt politicians (oh, there I go, being redundant... again) the world over as a way of pretending to be different than those in power to encourage others who are disillusioned by those in power to vote for the other party next time, I would actually expect most (R)'s to vote in favour of this, too. Not that I think it's a good law, but I just don't expect politicians of any stripe to look past their list of campaign donors.
My kingdom for a handful of mod points...
Deal.
Something tells me I'm coming out behind on this one.
Pay for it through auctioning off confiscated cell phones discovered through the service.
Or, if you're really evil (read: "Guvmint"), amend the law against cell phone use by currently incarcerated inmates to remove expectations of privacy as a legal term - this could be as devious as having a completely independent law that states that there is no expectation of privacy in jail and/or during the commission of certain classes of laws (which would happen to include cell phone possession/use while incarcerated, without explicitly stating it), just like causing death during the commission of a felony is automatically murder-one in some jurisdictions. Then you can use those towers to listen in on any non-whitelisted call, and suddenly you know about a lot more stuff: who has which cell phones, what they're smuggling in and out, who they're controlling on the outside, etc. Some of this would have value in and of itself that would at least partially justify said towers, other aspects would have auctionable value (cell phones, especially the pre-paid kind, cigarettes, other goods that are prohibited in jail, but not outside of jail).
The super devious would also remove all forms of legal privilege (conversations with lawyers, doctors, etc.) when conducted through illegal means. Thus allowing blanket surveillance of those non-whitelisted phones, including their conversations with their lawyers, which would otherwise probably be the easiest way to stop this non-sense. Of course, lawyers will ensure their clients are talking on jail-sanctioned payphones or whatever, but the purpose of this deviousness would not be to listen to what would otherwise be privileged conversations, it would be to prevent the lawyers from suing the prison for listening in on privileged conversations, and thereby forcing the removal of those expensive towers. You'd probably get evidence enough to keep a few of the more stupid inmates behind bars for the rest of their lives, but not likely anything significant.
Once a few "test" systems go up, and a few nationally-televised convictions were made with them, prisons would just need to put up towers within a few hundred feet of other prisons, ensure their flashing lights work, and not actually plug them in to anything. I'm sure illegal cell phone use would plummet with very little extra cost.
Maybe I'm too cynical.
This is the reason I clicked on the story at all. Just two weeks ago, my mother (59) called in a panic about over 300 viruses that some program found, and was about to click on the "run this executable" popup that IE gave her (my father won't let her run Firefox? Not that FF is likely to have stopped this*) when she thought to call someone. She tried to get a hold of my father, but he wasn't available, so she called me. I told her it was a scam, and to abort immediately. Not knowing really what else to do, I asked her to ensure her legitimate virus scanner was run that very night just to be sure. I think the trouble was averted, but only barely. It's an effective social hack. The question that makes it worth discussing is what, if anything, can we do technically to stop these hacks, and, in the meantime, what can we do socially to educate?
(*) I've seen the scam on Firefox, too, although that was years ago. FF may be blocking it since, I guess I don't know. But I found it funny because, of course, it looked like a bunch of Windows windows, which looked really out of place on my KDE/Linux desktop. And I knew that even if I did download it, it would be unlikely to be able to do anything (not that I did download it).
Big Blue is probably one of the biggest Java development firms in the world. I'm guessing here, but their expenditure on the JVM itself probably rivals Sun's, plus most of their apps either support Java, are partially written in Java, or completely written in Java, and often ship/embed Java (if you have 10 IBM products installed on your machine, you probably have 11 copies of Java).
Their dependence on Java is, I think, obvious. As is their long-running feud with Oracle in the database sphere. On the other hand, as recently as about 7 or 8 years ago, from what I can tell, AIX spent more money optimising their platform for Oracle than they spent optimising for DB2. Not sure if that's still the case. IBM competes fiercely with Oracle (software) and works closely with them (hardware). I'm not sure why IBM wants to allow the balance of power to shift more in Oracle's direction, actually.
Encoding format? No. Just encrypt it.
For the first two or three months (6 if you want to be sure), send it over in plain text. After that, start encrypting everything. If challenged immediately, you can say it's for security purposes. If you aren't challenged for a year or more, ask them why they're just bringing it up now after having received so many (daily) reports this way? Obviously they aren't using them, so the whole request is obviously fraudulent.
Of course, it's even better if you can't find the private key to decrypt with.
Can't help but wonder if these people even need a connection to the internet. Now granted that's not to say infections can't happen to everyone, because they can and they do but I think we can all agree the vast majority of infections delivered by shady sites are borne by the vast vapid masses. I mean you don't turn on your car and get on the freeway with nary a clue how it works do you? Why on earth should you get on the information superhighway when you don't even what a processor or memory is?
You had me until here. I get in to my car with nary an idea on what nearly everything in the engine (processor/memory) is or does. All I know about a vehicle is what I can reach from the driver's seat: ignition, steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, radio, climate control, spedometer, odometer. There's also a tachometer (or something) which strongly correlates with engine noise, and also tells me when my gas engine turns off while I'm stopped (hybrid) - beyond that, I have no care.
I don't see why a computer user needs to know what a processor or memory is. They need to know how to navigate: turn it on and off (safely), get on the applications they care about, save their progress (e.g., in a word processor) such that a power outage doesn't destroy hours of work, and they need to know "defensive computing", that is, how to recognise dangers to their safety, both personal safety and the safety of the machine they're operating. We take driver's ed and defensive driving courses. Equivalents can be created for computing. But we don't all take mechanic's training, nor should most users need to know how to crack open their case and manipulate the contents.
Can't help but wonder if these people even need a connection to the internet. Now granted that's not to say infections can't happen to everyone, because they can and they do but I think we can all agree the vast majority of infections delivered by shady sites are borne by the vast vapid masses. I mean you don't turn on your car and get on the freeway with nary a clue how it works do you? Why on earth should you get on the information superhighway when you don't even what a processor or memory is?
You had me until here. I get in to my car with nary an idea on what nearly everything in the engine (processor/memory) is or does. All I know about a vehicle is what I can reach from the driver's seat: ignition, steering wheel, gas and brake pedals, radio, climate control, spedometer, odometer. There's also a tachometer (or something) which strongly correlates with engine noise, and also tells me when my gas engine turns off while I'm stopped (hybrid) - beyond that, I have no care.
I don't see why a computer user needs to know what a processor or memory is. They need to know how to navigate: turn it on and off (safely), get on the applications they care about, save their progress (e.g., in a word processor) such that a power outage doesn't destroy hours of work, and they need to know "defensive computing", that is, how to recognise dangers to their safety, both personal safety and the safety of the machine they're operating. We take driver's ed and defensive driving courses. Equivalents can be created for computing. But we don't all take mechanic's training, nor should most users need to know how to crack open their case and manipulate the contents.
From someone who despises McDonald's food, I'd argue that, yes, they do provide the best food in their price range. Of course, the definition of "best" doesn't have anything to do with "nutrition".
For me, there's nothing in that price range that is palatable from a restaurant (loose term here), thus I either eat at home or splurge more.
Well, I think Java-the-language is already out there. I can't imagine a way for Oracle to get those worms back in the can. So we must be talking about the VM, and maybe their extensions (SE/EE).
My prediction? The VM continues to be free. EE becomes premium. SE, not sure about. And there may be a pay-for-fixes model for the VM that is, by definition, not free. If you need something fixed NOW, you pay. If you need more performance from the VM, you pay. Those fixes may or may not make it into the generally-available VM.
The community solution? IMO, it is to finish Parrot, get a "Java-the-language"-to-Parrot compiler built (perhaps by starting with a Java-the-VM-to-Parrot bytecode converter), and then you can pretty much discard Java-the-VM. Parrot already supports a bunch of different languages (at different levels of completeness), so it seems to me to be a natural fit.
After that project gets going, approach gcc to have gj able to target Parrot instead of Java bytecode, like all their other cross-compiling solutions. It makes Oracle irrelevant.
Maybe, though, we'll have to wait and see what Oracle's real plans are before we, as a community, start down this road. It's an expensive road (in manpower more than $$), and if everyone continues to be happy with Oracle's free offerings, there won't be much impetus to go around Oracle. That said, I can imagine some people still worried enough about Oracle's next move to start work on this, or a similar, solution.
This is exactly what I have. I do have to admit a few issues with it, though.
Everything else works great for me. The fact that it's corded is a non-issue. I use this thing 8-12 hours a day, 5 days a week (plus a couple hours on the weekends), so cordless would have me going through batteries way too quickly anyway. Every once in a while, the usb acts up, but that has mostly gone away as pieces of the OS get upgraded (kernel modules for the most part, I think, though xorg may have had something to do with it).
("brownian motion", motherfucker, have you heard of it?).
I'm going to bet "no".
Then again, I only learned about brownian motion due to reading about a slightly warm cup of liquid that was not entirely unlike tea. But I'm not sure this guy would respect a book any more than a bubble.
Oh crap, I'm going to be sued for 1m, too.
So let me get this straight.. In the beginning we had a very simple very open design. Any host can talk to any other host on any port. Then, over the years bouts of paranoia, fear, and idiocy have created default drop firewalls and nat devices that fundamentally break the open nature of the internet, protocols that rely on that nature break when presented with that stupidity, and somehow it's the fault of the protocol designer?
Well, no. You got the beginning part right. However, the reasons for NAT are off.
It's more like years of:
Besides all that, assuming that you can abuse ports/connections willy-nilly is overly optimistic, even on an open network. Growth will mean more users on a box (so your 20 ports being used can multiple by 200 users, and starts to add up). As well as more inter-network connections (more users from your uni dealing with users at another uni, across the state, country, continent, or even world), and thus bottlenecks. Reducing your traffic can be very important here.
It turns out that NAT devices share many problems with other aspects of our modern internet, even exacerbating some otherwise-existing issues. It's not idiocy. There is much malice here, but not on the part of NAT engineers/devs.
Personally, I'll likely continue using a NAT device even after the entire world is IPv6, though I'll obviously have to find an IPv6 NAT router, if only to provide a relatively trivial-to-set-up firewall between my TCP/IP printer and WDTV device, neither of which I can otherwise control too easily from prying hackers, and said hackers. I don't want some nimwit in Nigeria to start printing their 419 scams directly to my printer. And I don't know what vulnerabilities are in the WDTV device, I don't trust it much, so, again, keeping it away from inbound connections is probably a good thing.
I could set this all up with a real firewall instead. But NAT provides it simply enough, and UPnP is, well, universal enough to make it easy to configure.
If the infections were coming via Java Applets then it becomes pertinent to ask how did they get on the machine. Java appplets must be signed to write to the user's hard drive. This means the user was prompted to approve an untrusted certificate and they did so, or the malware organisation had a trusted certificate, in which case the trust authority should revoke the certificate. It is not like applets are without protection to the end user.
Unless, of course, said exploit allowed the bypassing of the certificate requirement.
How about those of us running multiple VM's on a single box? I'm sure that skew is being ignored, too :-P
There is another great simple idea hidden here: get them done in real time. All carriers will have the incentive to get this done when they realise that they won't be able to back-charge you for minutes prior to the texted warning. If that's not an incentive to get this done in real time *now*, nothing is.
Information in consumer's hands is not only good for consumers, but good for ethical businesses, too. If the carriers give any excuse(*) for doing this, they're really just telling us how they want to continue to make money unethically.
(*) saying that they need a couple of months (say 2-6) to implement this real-time conversions is fine. Continued delays is just lying, and thus unethical.
It's stealing when they provide a contract that is multiple pages of legalese which not only run contrary to common sense and what the sales guy told me, but also states that it takes precedence over any lies the sales guy told me to entice me to sign (bold part is my paraphrase, not their literal terms). That we cannot have a peer relationship in signing the contracts (not like any of their competitors are any better) makes the entire process lopsided against the consumer.
Just my opinion.
If we could somehow mandate "sane" contracts for consumers... no idea how to make that workable, but if it could be worked out, it could go a long way to being a reasonable way through the issue. Unfortunately, that's outside of the FCC's scope/mandate, so it won't be a result from this investigation.
And, like it or not (and I don't), the Ninth Circuit has declared this to be consistent with due process, thus they are gathering evidence perfectly legally.
Of course, as many here like to point out, legal != ethical, and I think the Ninth Circuit judges have too many cops up their collective asses to see rationally, but as the law stands at the moment, there doesn't seem to be a problem with due process here. I'm not a fan of the ACLU very often, but I'm cheering for them on this one.
Note, however, that, despite critics' claims to the contrary, there is a significant difference between a strategic strike that kills a bunch of "bad" people, and killing them after you've captured them. In the latter case, you already have them constrained and, assuming a non-corrupt penal system (ok, a bit of a stretch), they can do no further damage. In the former case, not only are the "bad" guys still actively pursuing their "bad" goals, but they probably have firepower to defend their actions. Sometimes a sniper shot from 2 miles away is far safer for the "good" guys than to try to take them alive. In my opinion, it's crazy to risk losing a half-dozen cops/soldiers just so you can capture, try, and, if successful, feed somebody like that for the rest of their lives.
Thus, I don't find your desire to use super powers in killing those "bad" people to be actually contrary to your position on the death penalty.
Now to disclaim my biases. I would be pro death penalty if it could be proven 100% correct (i.e., never killing an innocent). Since we're limited by human failings, that can't be the case, thus I'm against it. I am, in general, suspicious and distrustful of police. Lying to a "bad" guy means you're no better than they are. A police agency without a civilian (non-police, non-union, and especially non-police-union) oversight is not to be trusted anywhere in the world. Even with that oversight, maybe not. A police agency that does not arrest at least 0.1% of its own every year is lying to us. Soldiers, on the other hand, are put in really horrible situations where all they have left is fight-or-flight. I wouldn't want to live in an occupied land because the troops would concern me, though I trust them more than the police.
When talking about collateral damage, I think the media fails to compare the collateral damage from taking out "bad" guys vs not taking them out. Yes, unnecessary human deaths are tragic. But a warlord that is causing 300 deaths a year vs taking him and his family out and any others unfortunate enough to be near by (say 25 "innocents"), it seems to be a numerical gain.
Have you ever met a india IT worker that has one speck of innovative thinking? I certainly haven't, they are fantastic of doing what they are told but ask them to come up with something on their own and expect to be disappointed. I cannot say I am surprised they want to install a branding wall paper and call it the new India OS.
I know I'm going to get killed here, but I pretty much agree. In my experience, the likelihood of finding a competent developer in India is about the same as finding a completely useless developer in North America or Europe. Which is to say, not necessarily rare, but not the normal case, either. And I know the "racism" card will come out, but I'm also not talking race. I'm actually not even talking nationality. I'm really talking about location. The Indians I've met in North America, even if born and educated in India, were, as far as I could tell, statistically the same as the rest of the North Americans (which would also include, with no pun intended, boat loads of Chinese immigrants as well as Arabians, Africans, and, yes, even a few Caucasians): some incompetents, but generally somewhat competent to excellent. The ones who were still in India were almost never competent, though I can think of a few stand-outs that were above-average even among Westerners.
Generally speak, humor is found in the unexpected. If you don't expect to see that reference in the given context, and it is made, or if it's being applied in a context that is unexpected, that is funny. At least to the observer that both gets the reference and doesn't expect it.
That said, SQL injection attacks are not only unexpected in a child's name, but I've forwarded that comic on to a number of developers of a large commercial database product (as well as many others) as a way to teach people to USE F*CKING PLACEHOLDERS. It has been fairly successful, I might add. After spending 15 minutes trying and failing to get across to them why "SELECT * FROM MYTABLE WHERE FOO = $foo" is bad, I go look up the xkcd comic and show it to them. In 30 seconds, xkcd's author gets across what I can't in 15 minutes over the phone (perhaps I could do it in person with a whiteboard to share).
Now, maybe a troll will come along and say that I'm not a very good teacher. Although I have plenty of experience to the contrary, let's assume this to be true. My point still stands: those comics teach against SQL injection more effectively than I can, thus it's an invaluable tool. The unexpected reference makes it funny enough for me to remember it, the pointed truth of it makes it a good teaching tool.
I have seen generated code. And I've written code generators. And really, the quality of the generated code is completely dependant on whether the developer of the generation tool was merely doing whatever was required to get working generated code, or to provide a useful tool to users to learn and expand upon.
Too often I see devs handed a task and do the bare minimum to get that one specific task completed. Instead of looking for a bigger picture of the task and seeing if they can get more out of it with little to no extra effort. Because, really, getting your output to be readable is not nearly as complex as creating the UI for it anyway. Took me on the order of hours to tweak my output to look right, and not even 50% of that time again to tweak it in the way that feedback recommended (some of which I disagreed with and responded as such, the rest I agreed with or was ambivalent upon and thus changed). The rest of the project took months of effort. Skimping out on readable output is a false savings here.
It's not hard to do. A good template tool (in perl, I use Template Toolkit), and 90% of the problem of readable output is solved.
The only times I don't care about readable output have been generating xml and xhtml. Even when I generate C++ and Java code that is going directly from there to the compiler and not read by any user, I try to get the output reasonably readable - which makes it much easier to deal with compile errors when they point to a line number that has only a single statement on it, or when I bring the resultant app up in a debugger and want to step through the code for one reason or another. The time saved in debugging compile or runtime errors alone can pay for the effort in readable output over and over again.
You must not run Gentoo, then. :-P
I regularly max out all "8" i7-930 cores here, though almost only when compiling. "make -j25" (with distcc spreading it out to my quad-core phenom box) generally will max it out when compiling openoffice, firefox (xulrunner) and kdelibs, and many others. 12GB RAM, though I doubt that to make a difference.