because there are only two or three who know why --
God,
you,
and maybe the person observed.
There may be demons involved, but they always seem to misunderstand everything. (You can't understand much of anything if you persistently lie because you know the other person is not going to tell the whole truth, and such things.)
You say you don't know why? Then you must ask God, or you must be satisfied with thinking you don't know why.
The problem with trying to explain God and prayer, etc., scientifically, is precisely the problem of reproducibility. What God is going to sit still so that a bunch of silly (essentially) children can measure him/her with mostly irrelevent instruments? I mean, say one of your kids came up to you and said, "Dad, I don't believe you exist. Sit still while I put a voltmeter across your eyelids."
Or, how about,
"Hey, Dad, last time we were here you bought us all ice cream sundaes."
"Yeah?"
"Well, are you going to buy us ice cream sundaes today?"
"No."
"Okay, the experiment is not reproducible. Therefore you must not exist."
"Fine, buy your own ice cream sundaes from now on."
So, yes, those computers have souls. Those souls are the combination of the plans (schematics, etc.,) by which they are made and the hardware of which they are made, influenced to a smaller or greater extent by patterns of use which leave effects behind. (We talk about reading bits off of magnetic surfaces which have been overwritten, for instance.) One of the important tricks with digital computers is to restrict the chain of causality using hysteresis so that after-effects of useage patterns don't effect the chain until the machine falls apart, but the operator can and often does operate the machine out-of-spec, where those patterns do matter.
Now, whether it is within the nature of those souls to hate or not, I'm not sure.
And it's possibly not relevent here.
When people are being observed, they generally tend not to use techniques they think the observer might find questionable. It's a very common problem in testing human interfaces. Sometimes the testers are far too willing to cooperate with the techs and engineers.
What it appears these guys were focused on were out-of-band data and control paths. If I were going to find fault, I would be asking why they didn't try to find those data and control paths. Finding the effects of unknown processes is easy. Finding the processes themselves is much more interesting, even when it may not yield processes of practical use.
There does seem to be some conservation of probability, though. You may be able to push a machine a little, but when you release it it tends to balance out. This is particularly true when you are slapping a pinball machine or tapping a roulette table. One of the tricks is to quit while you're ahead, or to know which side of the table to bet on when you are pushing, and which when you aren't. And to keep the slaps small enough that the machine doesn't go to tilt and the guy running the table doesn't notice. Or to use slaps they don't know how to detect.
You know, I was hoping for boxes from Apple to fit those holes, but the Apple TV and some other offerings show me what Apple intends there.
So I suppose I'll probably buy a Soekris and install openBSD on it to do what I might have wanted the $400 Mac Mini to do. Wish I ccould find a decent PPC mobo in the price range.
2nd year: desktop OS, server OS, handheld OS, etc.; word processing, spreadsheet, db, mail, calendar, etc.; VB,.net, VC, etc.; etc.
The only interaction the baby MSses would be allowed would be through API documents published under the EFF's documentation license, and all patents held by Microsoft placed in the public domain. The reason for giving them the year is that it would take that long to produce the APIs. Of course, the judge would probably have to place a limit on the length of the API documents.
No, that's probably not possible, and that's the real reason Microsoft should cease to exist.
Actually, the only security available is through two things. One is courtesy and the other is obscurity.
No, really. Hear me out.
If everyone behaves like sheep and no one behaves like wolves, no sheep get eaten, right?
Of course not right. Wolves serve a purpose in the overall scheme of things. But the simplification helps for people who don't understand that true courtesy derives from enlightened self-interest and a certain amount of laziness:
If I keep my hands off other people's stuff, that's one less person making it fashionable to take what isn't theirs.
If I don't want somebody messing with my stuff, I'll mark it as something not to be messed with. That's also courtesy, although I should understand that "No Trespassing" signs are more bait than warning. A fence that is just tall and strong enough to keep the casual passerby out usually goes a long way without advertizing that there is something to protect behind it. Also, if one wants to reclaim some property that has developed a public path through the center, the best way is usually to build a path along the edge and not make it too hard to use that path.
Letting people know that something has a claim on it is part of the courtesy, just as much as providing alternatives where possible for those who will insist on going through anyway.
One of the best fences for letting people know something is off limits without making it bait just happens to be one of the simpler forms of obscurity: the picket fence around the garden.
Fences are not unscalable, neither are locks are not unbreakable or unpickable. The harder it is to feel where the tumblers fall, the better a lock is (other things equal). That is another form of obscurity. Assymetric cryptographic keys are also a form of obscurity. In theory, there is a vanishingly small chance someone could guess if they tried, but there's no chance at all they'll guess if they don't. They claimed difficulty of cryptographic security makes it more secure from casual entry. If it's easy, casual passersby might give it a try. If it's known to be hard, only someone with motivation tries it.
That's why houses in middle-class neighborhoods in the US (as opposed to Japan) have garden fences, walkways, and front doors. The garden fence is the courtesy announcement that the property is not public. The door and lock are enough out of the public eye to remove temptation for most casual trespassers. And the tumblers in the lock are hidden from prying eyes, if not hidden from skilled fingers holding a pick. Two levels of obscurity, two levels of courtesy. If you need more security, the safe is inside the house, even less visible to casual inspection.
Now, what about Microsoft?
Microsoft says that obscurity is using fancy tumblers on the latch on the garden gate without putting them in a strong case and then saying that there's no need of a lock on the door, and no need to hide the safe. To overcompensate, they then put cheap padlocks on everything in sight, while leaving it all in sight.
And then they say that courtesy is obeying the "No Trespassing" sign.
See the difference?
The final element of security is not to have things that others want, or if you must have them, not to advertise them. Obscurity and courtesy play there, as well.
If e-mail providers hadn't been pushed into such a rush by Microsoft's desire to rule the world through software, your average mail provider would provide you with multiple addresses, whitelists for your private addresses, and blacklists for your public addresses. That would remove most of the incentive for spam.
Likewise, if Microsoft had not been intent on winning the war through the browser, bank access would be through special-purpose browsers, probably provided in Java or something similar on CDs to reduce the likelihood of spoofing. The best protection against phishing, you see, is exactly the non-standard browser.
Precisely because nobody understands the rules well enough to dare rewrite.
Business rules do change, and the old business rules never were really correct, just close enough for the time and then they got momentum.
Still, to make a real replacement for CoBOL, we need to make the syntax for subprograms part of the language and fix the overhead so that subprograms can be called with no more penalty than procedure calls in Pascal. That, and make the linkage work so subprograms will be re-entrant.
Trying to make PROCEDURE calls re-entrant will break too much.
Only if you have such tools and they happen to conform to the coding standards favored by your current bosses.
Only in business could coding standards be an acceptable substitute for automatic scoping rules.
Of course, no modern language gets automatic scoping right, either, so even if the suits didn't like global/explicit scope on everything, what modern languages provide really isn't enough of an improvement.
I remember RPG. I had thought the rest of the world might have forgotten it.
But, yeah, the real reason CoBOL sticks is that the suits don't like scope in their rules, and when they have to have it, they prefer it to be explicit.
Which means that I'm going to expect the _entire_ new interface to be basically of a bunch of collections of "these cool features that group X likes" and "those cool features that group Y likes".
Tabbed menus in MSWindows are almost invariably the result of UI designers deciding to punt rather than actually attempt to decide what the purpose of a dialog is. In the case of MSWindows, we've often been glad they decided to punt rather than force their bizarre view of the universe on us. But it's not real design.
My guess is that this is essentially Microsoft saying, "We gave you all these wonderful features and then we took a survey of the most popular ones and put those at the top of our new interface." Which is why some places say they are more productive. They can now push the buttons they've been trained to push much faster.
They combined CJK but failed to combine Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic.
Glyphs were originally intended to not combine, but of course that wasn't practical. Eventually they added a set of composition rules for the CJK radicals, and a set of radicals.
Lots of tradeoffs where the first guess was wrong. But we needed the "univeral" character set sooner, rather than later.
works pretty well on the Mac for me. It's a little behind the main openoffice release, but the integration is good, especially including fonts.
Working in Japanese, I prefer neooffice on the Mac to openoffice on Linux. I'd probably have fewer format issues on OO if I took the time to make sure I had good Japanese fonts on the Linux box, but I haven't taken the time to do that because the neooffice branch works well enough for me.
It's a bit of a headache to work out the logistics, but the banks simply should not allow logging in with a general purpose browser. All sorts of things can be done with a special purpose browser, from preventing any transmission from proceeding when either side provides the correct encrypted response, to using one-time pads,...
And then I remember that, if there is spyware on the box, it's kind of hard to be sure that the one-time pad list, the encrypted response generator, and all the other fancy gadgets, are not being commanded by the adware instead of directly by the human.
But general purpose browsers (including the QuickTime browser) have just gotten too stuffed with functions.
while those with less to lose fight at the front, let those with more to lose fight with finesse. Don't brow-beat your allies.
It takes both fighting from the outside and from the inside. Fighting from the inside has different rules, requires somewhat of a concilliatory approach, involves understanding things from a different point of view, provides different opportunities for corruption.
(And, yes, fighting from the outside does have its own opportunities for corruption.)
I've been using a _client_ Mac OS X box as my personal website server for several years now, 80 for apache. I have basically the same results, lots of brute force attempts, no successes.
Slashdot Mirror
because there are only two or three who know why --
God,
you,
and maybe the person observed.
There may be demons involved, but they always seem to misunderstand everything. (You can't understand much of anything if you persistently lie because you know the other person is not going to tell the whole truth, and such things.)
You say you don't know why? Then you must ask God, or you must be satisfied with thinking you don't know why.
The problem with trying to explain God and prayer, etc., scientifically, is precisely the problem of reproducibility. What God is going to sit still so that a bunch of silly (essentially) children can measure him/her with mostly irrelevent instruments? I mean, say one of your kids came up to you and said, "Dad, I don't believe you exist. Sit still while I put a voltmeter across your eyelids."
Or, how about,
"Hey, Dad, last time we were here you bought us all ice cream sundaes."
"Yeah?"
"Well, are you going to buy us ice cream sundaes today?"
"No."
"Okay, the experiment is not reproducible. Therefore you must not exist."
"Fine, buy your own ice cream sundaes from now on."
rocks, the earth, trees, everything.
...
Including man-made objects, including machines.
So, yes, those computers have souls. Those souls are the combination of the plans (schematics, etc.,) by which they are made and the hardware of which they are made, influenced to a smaller or greater extent by patterns of use which leave effects behind. (We talk about reading bits off of magnetic surfaces which have been overwritten, for instance.) One of the important tricks with digital computers is to restrict the chain of causality using hysteresis so that after-effects of useage patterns don't effect the chain until the machine falls apart, but the operator can and often does operate the machine out-of-spec, where those patterns do matter.
Now, whether it is within the nature of those souls to hate or not, I'm not sure.
And it's possibly not relevent here.
When people are being observed, they generally tend not to use techniques they think the observer might find questionable. It's a very common problem in testing human interfaces. Sometimes the testers are far too willing to cooperate with the techs and engineers.
What it appears these guys were focused on were out-of-band data and control paths. If I were going to find fault, I would be asking why they didn't try to find those data and control paths. Finding the effects of unknown processes is easy. Finding the processes themselves is much more interesting, even when it may not yield processes of practical use.
There does seem to be some conservation of probability, though. You may be able to push a machine a little, but when you release it it tends to balance out. This is particularly true when you are slapping a pinball machine or tapping a roulette table. One of the tricks is to quit while you're ahead, or to know which side of the table to bet on when you are pushing, and which when you aren't. And to keep the slaps small enough that the machine doesn't go to tilt and the guy running the table doesn't notice. Or to use slaps they don't know how to detect.
I'm not sure what I'm trying to say here,
You know, I was hoping for boxes from Apple to fit those holes, but the Apple TV and some other offerings show me what Apple intends there.
So I suppose I'll probably buy a Soekris and install openBSD on it to do what I might have wanted the $400 Mac Mini to do. Wish I ccould find a decent PPC mobo in the price range.
Split the company along product lines, then split it again in a year.
.net, VC, etc.; etc.
1st year: OS, office productivity, development, others
2nd year: desktop OS, server OS, handheld OS, etc.; word processing, spreadsheet, db, mail, calendar, etc.; VB,
The only interaction the baby MSses would be allowed would be through API documents published under the EFF's documentation license, and all patents held by Microsoft placed in the public domain. The reason for giving them the year is that it would take that long to produce the APIs. Of course, the judge would probably have to place a limit on the length of the API documents.
No, that's probably not possible, and that's the real reason Microsoft should cease to exist.
Actually, the only security available is through two things. One is courtesy and the other is obscurity.
No, really. Hear me out.
If everyone behaves like sheep and no one behaves like wolves, no sheep get eaten, right?
Of course not right. Wolves serve a purpose in the overall scheme of things. But the simplification helps for people who don't understand that true courtesy derives from enlightened self-interest and a certain amount of laziness:
If I keep my hands off other people's stuff, that's one less person making it fashionable to take what isn't theirs.
If I don't want somebody messing with my stuff, I'll mark it as something not to be messed with. That's also courtesy, although I should understand that "No Trespassing" signs are more bait than warning. A fence that is just tall and strong enough to keep the casual passerby out usually goes a long way without advertizing that there is something to protect behind it. Also, if one wants to reclaim some property that has developed a public path through the center, the best way is usually to build a path along the edge and not make it too hard to use that path.
Letting people know that something has a claim on it is part of the courtesy, just as much as providing alternatives where possible for those who will insist on going through anyway.
One of the best fences for letting people know something is off limits without making it bait just happens to be one of the simpler forms of obscurity: the picket fence around the garden.
Fences are not unscalable, neither are locks are not unbreakable or unpickable. The harder it is to feel where the tumblers fall, the better a lock is (other things equal). That is another form of obscurity. Assymetric cryptographic keys are also a form of obscurity. In theory, there is a vanishingly small chance someone could guess if they tried, but there's no chance at all they'll guess if they don't. They claimed difficulty of cryptographic security makes it more secure from casual entry. If it's easy, casual passersby might give it a try. If it's known to be hard, only someone with motivation tries it.
That's why houses in middle-class neighborhoods in the US (as opposed to Japan) have garden fences, walkways, and front doors. The garden fence is the courtesy announcement that the property is not public. The door and lock are enough out of the public eye to remove temptation for most casual trespassers. And the tumblers in the lock are hidden from prying eyes, if not hidden from skilled fingers holding a pick. Two levels of obscurity, two levels of courtesy. If you need more security, the safe is inside the house, even less visible to casual inspection.
Now, what about Microsoft?
Microsoft says that obscurity is using fancy tumblers on the latch on the garden gate without putting them in a strong case and then saying that there's no need of a lock on the door, and no need to hide the safe. To overcompensate, they then put cheap padlocks on everything in sight, while leaving it all in sight.
And then they say that courtesy is obeying the "No Trespassing" sign.
See the difference?
The final element of security is not to have things that others want, or if you must have them, not to advertise them. Obscurity and courtesy play there, as well.
If e-mail providers hadn't been pushed into such a rush by Microsoft's desire to rule the world through software, your average mail provider would provide you with multiple addresses, whitelists for your private addresses, and blacklists for your public addresses. That would remove most of the incentive for spam.
Likewise, if Microsoft had not been intent on winning the war through the browser, bank access would be through special-purpose browsers, probably provided in Java or something similar on CDs to reduce the likelihood of spoofing. The best protection against phishing, you see, is exactly the non-standard browser.
CoBOL code inherently has serious problems emulating context sensitivity.
That's why it can be so fast. You can't really parse with it, you can only run batch.
Unless, of course, your program implements a stack or two and your coding rules make everyone go to the stacks for private variables.
Precisely because nobody understands the rules well enough to dare rewrite.
Business rules do change, and the old business rules never were really correct, just close enough for the time and then they got momentum.
Still, to make a real replacement for CoBOL, we need to make the syntax for subprograms part of the language and fix the overhead so that subprograms can be called with no more penalty than procedure calls in Pascal. That, and make the linkage work so subprograms will be re-entrant.
Trying to make PROCEDURE calls re-entrant will break too much.
Only if you have such tools and they happen to conform to the coding standards favored by your current bosses.
Only in business could coding standards be an acceptable substitute for automatic scoping rules.
Of course, no modern language gets automatic scoping right, either, so even if the suits didn't like global/explicit scope on everything, what modern languages provide really isn't enough of an improvement.
MULTIPLY 9190-B BY 9190-B GIVING 9190-B-SQUARED. .5.
MULTIPLY 4 BY 4320-A GIVING 4320-FOUR-A.
MULTIPLY 4320-FOUR-A BY 9180-C GIVING 9190-FOUR-A-C.
SUBTRACT 9190-FOUR-A-C FROM 9190-B-SQUARED GIVING 1000-RESULT-1.
COMPUTE 1000-RESULT-2 = 1000-RESULT-1 **
SUBTRACT 9190-B FROM 1000-RESULT-2 GIVING 77340-NUMERATOR.
MULTIPLY 2 BY 4320-A GIVING 77340-DENOMINATOR.
DIVIDE 77340-NUMERATOR BY 77340-DENOMINATOR GIVING 5500-X.
I remember RPG. I had thought the rest of the world might have forgotten it.
But, yeah, the real reason CoBOL sticks is that the suits don't like scope in their rules, and when they have to have it, they prefer it to be explicit.
will find the SUBTRACT TOTAL-EXPENSES form better.
Except my memory is that it is more likely to be
SUBTRACT 1200-TOTAL-EXPENSES FROM 5000-GROSS-SALES GIVING 3300-NET-PROFIT.
where the 1200, the 5000, and the 3300 are essentially scoping prefixes. Managed by the programmer according to the coding rules.
... if we are going to talk about capitalization.
Co_mmon B_usiness O_riented L_anguage
For_mula Tran_slator
MkLinux?
Mach Linux?
McClean-ix?
McKleenex?
?
per dollar of advertising, I think you meant to say?
is what it looks like to me.
Which means that I'm going to expect the _entire_ new interface to be basically of a bunch of collections of "these cool features that group X likes" and "those cool features that group Y likes".
Tabbed menus in MSWindows are almost invariably the result of UI designers deciding to punt rather than actually attempt to decide what the purpose of a dialog is. In the case of MSWindows, we've often been glad they decided to punt rather than force their bizarre view of the universe on us. But it's not real design.
My guess is that this is essentially Microsoft saying, "We gave you all these wonderful features and then we took a survey of the most popular ones and put those at the top of our new interface." Which is why some places say they are more productive. They can now push the buttons they've been trained to push much faster.
Sure. Ribbons and bows.
Man that ribbon just looks like they moved the cursed tab dialog concept up to the menu bar.
I hate tabbed dialogs. They're usually what the UI designer uses when he'd rather punt.
They combined CJK but failed to combine Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic.
Glyphs were originally intended to not combine, but of course that wasn't practical. Eventually they added a set of composition rules for the CJK radicals, and a set of radicals.
Lots of tradeoffs where the first guess was wrong. But we needed the "univeral" character set sooner, rather than later.
works pretty well on the Mac for me. It's a little behind the main openoffice release, but the integration is good, especially including fonts.
Working in Japanese, I prefer neooffice on the Mac to openoffice on Linux. I'd probably have fewer format issues on OO if I took the time to make sure I had good Japanese fonts on the Linux box, but I haven't taken the time to do that because the neooffice branch works well enough for me.
joudanzuki
are the only problem you mention of substance.
They are a problem of substance, however.
Unicode is not the solution it should have been, and surrogate pairs is the evidence of why.
would be popular in Japan, I'm sure.
Especially among teenagers and otaku. (And geeks who think that otaku is equivalent to geek.)
metaphors, you have to understand them.
A partial solution is actually pretty simple.
...
It's a bit of a headache to work out the logistics, but the banks simply should not allow logging in with a general purpose browser. All sorts of things can be done with a special purpose browser, from preventing any transmission from proceeding when either side provides the correct encrypted response, to using one-time pads,
And then I remember that, if there is spyware on the box, it's kind of hard to be sure that the one-time pad list, the encrypted response generator, and all the other fancy gadgets, are not being commanded by the adware instead of directly by the human.
But general purpose browsers (including the QuickTime browser) have just gotten too stuffed with functions.
while those with less to lose fight at the front, let those with more to lose fight with finesse. Don't brow-beat your allies.
It takes both fighting from the outside and from the inside. Fighting from the inside has different rules, requires somewhat of a concilliatory approach, involves understanding things from a different point of view, provides different opportunities for corruption.
(And, yes, fighting from the outside does have its own opportunities for corruption.)
I've been using a _client_ Mac OS X box as my personal website server for several years now, 80 for apache. I have basically the same results, lots of brute force attempts, no successes.
at least, not cutting edge for everything.
Use non-leader products for your routers, NAS, lightweight servers, etc. Maybe even use non-x86 CPUs.