More to the point, if a Linux based bomb is dropped on Iran and fails to go off so the Iranians have a flash chip with the binaries, can they ask the Pentagon for the source code under the GPL? What happens if they capture one of the planes or tanks? Seems like they definitely have the binary of the code then and have a right to the source code.
Actually if you believe in Enlightened Self Interest, selfishness doesn't make you inherently evil. I suspect it's mostly a matter of how much power people have. Provided it is not too much, their self interest will tend to be of the enlightened sort. So not only would someone like Stalin or Hitler be less likely to be elected in a democracy, they would have to behave better if they were or face impeachment, prison or assasination. Similarly most US presidents were the sort of clever, driven people that would be really dangeous if they had absolute power. The reason that they behave better than their totalitarian opponents is because they want power and behaving better is the price for that in a well designed system.
But you're right that voting won't change how enlightened the politicians are. That's a function of how well designed the checks and balances are in the system they operate in, not of party. Though partisans from either side will obviously try to convince you that it is since nothing gets people to vote like moral outrage. They're not lying to you per se, they are partisans because they actually believe it.
Actually there's another subtlety about the US. Since the people that get elected tend be successful, clever bastard you'd expect them to try to gnaw away at the checks and balances. But that's not necessarily in their interests. If the system changed to a more dictatorial one most of the current large ruling class would actually lost everything and only a small ruling clique would gain. And neither the winners nor the losers could count on a peaceful returement. You can sort of sense this when you read Churchill's comment about democracy being the 'worst system except for all of the others'. Incidentally Churchill is a good example of a successful elected leader that had an enormous ruthless streak when he operated outside a system of checks and balances, e.g. gassing the Kurds in the 1920's or advocating dropping anthrax on Germany in WWII.
The United States has a corrupt government, where people are lied to and brainwashed into supporting wars for the personal ambitions of a few wealthy men, not the benefit or defense of the nation. Yeah, no doubt. But apart from a few things like the coup in Chile, recognizing the PRC or abandoning South Vietnam ( basically most of what Nixon and Kissinger did) I think they did the right things anyway.
Also note, that (somewhat hypocritically) all versions of Windows prior to Vista borrow quite a bit of their networking code from BSD. Umm, like what? If you look at the TCP/IP stack in the Windows 2000 source code leak it's nothing like BSD. As you'd expect really, given that the top level API to the OS and the bottom level API to device drivers as vastly different and much more complicated than the ones you would have in Unix. They also need to be preemptible and thread safe, and it's safer to write that code from scratch than patch up some single threaded stuff from BSD. And it's not like Microsoft have a shortage of people do do it from scratch.
Maybe there is some BSD code buried in FTP.exe or some user mode stuff but so what? Even if a few functions in kernel mode are from BSD, so what actually? And why is it hypocrisy BTW? Microsoft have spoken out against the GPL, but they have never done so against BSD.
So now we're teaching our AI that it's a round, dot hungry trans-gender Miss-Man being chased by ghosts? What are you some sort of Post-structural, postmodern, post Marxist pre capitalist Feminist academic with a background in Post Queer gender studies? Ms Pacman wears a bow and therfore SHE is a GIRL. It's very simple.
That French shit won't get you laid round here either, cut it out.
Yeah, and it takes 5 business days. How many people can survive without a computer for that? Guess you'll need to buy a Macbook Pro as well as a backup.
Bad analogy, dude. A Windows app will run on 90% of computers. I can use MFC, API,.Net or a bunch of alternatives. It's very easier to hire people who know this stuff. I need to test it on XP, Vista and maybe 2000. That's quite doable. I actually have three laptops with those OSs on them.
If I buy myself a couple of Macs, Intel and PPC I can get another 6%. But that 6% is very, very expensive since I have to choose a portable development environment and class library. There are lots of these, but they all suck in various different ways. I also need to test on twice the number of platforms. And I need to chuck away any old Windows only code and rewrite it from scratch for the new library, which is probably much less mature than the Windows only library I'm moving away from.
Now a truly portable application will run on 100% of computers. But I need to test on probably hundreds of platforms, all with negligable market share. Suddenly something which a small team could do for Windows only do requires a huge infrastructure of testers and developers. And good luck convincing people releasing a desperately urgent bug fix on the majority platform to test on hundreds of others that they don't care about because they don't have any market share. And good luck trying to sell commercial, closed source software to users of 'free as in freedom' OSs.
Now there's a pattern here. The effort I expend on going from running on 90% market share to 96% is probably at least double the effort for 90% market share. And the effort to go from 96% to 100% is probably much, much worse. It's the law of diminishing returns. That's why the vast majority of software houses support the current version of Windows, the previous one and maybe the one before that. Because the alternative is to spend a fortune making stuff portable and get almost no additional benefit.
I've actually worked for companies making embedded systems that supported two platforms. And it's just not sustainable in the long run. If only support one you save a fortune. And if one of them has 90% market share it's pretty obvious which one to keep.
Nobody takes you people seriously and you are gonna have some really serious mental problems (if not already) if you go on believing '9/11 was a conspiracy' Yeah, but that's only because mind control rays beamed down from satellites the Bilderberg group and the Neoconservatives run on behalf of shape shifting lizards have driven him mad.
Then again, the only people that got carpet bombed recently were the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican guard, so it's not like they were innocent victims or even hapless conscripts. They were true believers who volunteered to fight for an evil regime. Not sure where you get your 11m figure from BTW, presumably one of those websites that includes all the people the Iraqi insurgents killed in Iraq as part of the number of people the US killed.
And the storage devices with built-in LCD display that shows how much space they have left. I sure hope that display can interpret file systems besides FAR32 and NTFS There is a real product that does this, and I spent far too much time figuring out how to make an E Ink fuel gauge work on all know file systems -
That said if I were making a flash drive with a fuel gauge, I'd only support the FAT variant it was pre-formatted with. Anything else will lead to ruinous support costs. There's a subtle device cost issue too - if you hardwire it to only support FAT you can reduce the amount of Ram the code in the flash disk controller needs.
Kind of easy to do on FAT too, just scan the FAT and count the zero entries.
Actually for a 1GB disk you could have ~65000 clusters or 16K each. That's 256 sectors of FAT, each holding 256 entries. When the drive is plugged in, scan the whole FAT and work out a free cluster count and total cluster count for the drive.
Whenever a FAT sector is overwritten just work out a delta between the old and new count of free clusters value in that sector and add it to the free cluster count for the drive, and update the display based on that. The cool thing is you don't slow down access at all, unlike if you need to rescan the FAT. You don't need to keep anything in presumably scarce controller RAM either, just a 32 bit free cluster count and a 32 bit total cluster count. And you don't need any software on the PC.
For a file system like NTFS or EXTx which uses a bitmap to track allocation each 512 bit bitmap sector gives the allocation status of 512*8=4096 clusters. The algorithm doesn't really change though - whenever there is a write to one of the bitmap sectors, work out a delta and add it to the free cluster count for the drive and then use that to update the display.
The drive firmware would recognize filesystems based on the boot sector and decide which sectors to monitor and which algorithm should be used to count the free clusters in the FAT or bitmap sector being monitored. For an unrecognized filesystem I'd blank the display, or maybe turn on a few segments in an error code pattern.
Of course in practice you'd probably only support the fuel gauge on the preformatted version of FAT, for support cost reasons. You don't want ReiserFS users yelling at you when the flash drive firmware dies when they reformat from Reiser4 which you do tested with to Reiser5 which you didn't because it wasn't released when you were testing. Same with people reformatting the drive with Vista and changing the NTFS version to one you haven't tested with.
Neocons are liberals. They want big spending, want an empire, want to expand the power of the fed, want to tell everyone what to do. By that definition Hitler was a liberal.
Actually Asia - specifically Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan is one of the reasons why I don't like the Ron Paul agenda of pulling troops home and downsizing US foreign policy.
The sad truth is that the US presence in Asia has probably infantilized the politicians (especially compared to Western Europe) and if they leave all these idiots will be swept along with a national mood they have done everything to encourage towards a major war. And the cost to the US of intervening in that will be far higher than keeping troops in Asia even indefinitely. And America being America they are sure to intervene if a major war breaks out.
Now if you're an Ron Paul supporter you could argue that the US should pull out and not intervene. But that seems too like the US's stance in the 1930's to me. The world quickly went to hell and the US was forced to intervene in the end. If something like that happened the next administration after the Ron Paul one would just need to rush troops to whatever commercially important ally was being attacked. And then fight and beat whovever was attacking them.
There's a system in place that evolved after that experience. In many ways it seems expensive, but look at the cost of WWII. WWIII would be much more dangerous. Any aspiring regional superpower thwarted by the US is likely to have enough nukes to level hundreds of US cities. And don't lump Iraq into "the system" - that was just adventurism. I'm talking purely about a system of allliances, bases and aircraft carriers scattered around the world to deter anyone else using force to change borders. Ron Paul seems to be against that too.
Yeah, that's outrageous. They should put a chip in their heads that causes them agonising pain if it detects drugs in their bloodstream and then release them.
Or, better, immunise them against the drug http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=31&art_id=vn20040726012855582C901135
Professor Nutt, head of psychopharmacology at the University of Bristol and a senior member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, said: "People could be vaccinated against drugs at birth as you are against measles. You could say cocaine is more dangerous than measles, for example. It is important that there is a debate on this issue. This is a huge topic - addiction and smoking are major causes of premature death."
According to the government's own figures, the annual cost of drug addiction, to the economy, through related crime and health problems, is £12-billion.
assume you mean "who don't know who SysInternals were".
The Beast of Redmond swallowed them back in '06. Yeah, but Mark Russinovich regularly tells us on his blog how he is VERY HAPPY to be working for Microsoft and is TOTALLY FREE to continue to reverse engineer bits of Windows and then write about it. And how he is NOT BEING MISTREATED AND HAS ENOUGH TO EAT. And then launches into a long post on THE EXCELLENT NEW FEATURES IN WINDOWS® VISTA®.
Actually it does help. Long range devices need some sort of security. E.g. Bluetooth has pairing to make sure that someone can't make calls on your phone without you allowing them to. If you require physical contact then you can relax that somewhat. I can imagine tapping devices together and getting a "Allow these services" dialog on the UI.
I'm not sure how Wireless USB will handle this. Bluetooth seems to have screwed it up completely - pairing confuses non technical users I suspect, and there are exploits where people have managed to use devices they have not paired with. Kind of an issue if people crack your phone and make long distance calls.
It's tricky to get right too - keys that are uncrackable are not user friendly. And the most sensitive devices - modems and mass storage - don't have any facility for a UI. I guess they'll fudge it Bluetooth style and have a short hardcoded key, e.g. 10 digits. But that's not a lot of bits and it could be brute forced. Stopping eavesdropping seems solvable to me - devices would advertise their public key and you'd encrypt with that when you talked to them. Authorisation - whether you're allowed to access a Wireless USB storage device seems harder to get right, especially on UI-less devices. Maybe 8-16 hex digits, for a total of 64-128 bits is really ok. I don't like the idea of storing really sensitive data on a device like this though. Still if you can make the time it takes to try a key long and remove the chance of snooping them out of the air via public key encryption it would be ok I suppose. Problem is, most of the time this stuff seems ok when announced and is cracked in a couple of years.
Hopefully someone on the WUSB standards groups has had a good idea of how to solve this properly.
Well Sauron's Ring of Power had some positive features for the user too. Invisibility, Kick Assitude, Frothing Megalomania to name but three, but that doesn't alter the fact its primary purpose was to bind people in the darkness. Same with Cocaine really.
Don't let it fool you though. Pretty soon you'll be stealing from your best friends and family and/or selling your ass on the street to get the money for a copy of Eragon Special Edition BluRay though, unless you cast your PS3 into the fires of Mount Doom and buy a chipped Wii off eBay.
Bring a gun and a cute kitten to the interview. Tell them to give you the job or they'll be washing kitten brains out of their hair for the next month. Odds on you'll get a cat person after a dozen tries or so.
Slashdot Mirror
I like "Give a man a Twinkie and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to steal Twinkies and he'll eat for life."
It's sort of appropriate too since they are shipping them to Nigeria, the place that invented 419 scam.
More to the point, if a Linux based bomb is dropped on Iran and fails to go off so the Iranians have a flash chip with the binaries, can they ask the Pentagon for the source code under the GPL? What happens if they capture one of the planes or tanks? Seems like they definitely have the binary of the code then and have a right to the source code.
Actually if you believe in Enlightened Self Interest, selfishness doesn't make you inherently evil. I suspect it's mostly a matter of how much power people have. Provided it is not too much, their self interest will tend to be of the enlightened sort. So not only would someone like Stalin or Hitler be less likely to be elected in a democracy, they would have to behave better if they were or face impeachment, prison or assasination. Similarly most US presidents were the sort of clever, driven people that would be really dangeous if they had absolute power. The reason that they behave better than their totalitarian opponents is because they want power and behaving better is the price for that in a well designed system.
But you're right that voting won't change how enlightened the politicians are. That's a function of how well designed the checks and balances are in the system they operate in, not of party. Though partisans from either side will obviously try to convince you that it is since nothing gets people to vote like moral outrage. They're not lying to you per se, they are partisans because they actually believe it.
Actually there's another subtlety about the US. Since the people that get elected tend be successful, clever bastard you'd expect them to try to gnaw away at the checks and balances. But that's not necessarily in their interests. If the system changed to a more dictatorial one most of the current large ruling class would actually lost everything and only a small ruling clique would gain. And neither the winners nor the losers could count on a peaceful returement. You can sort of sense this when you read Churchill's comment about democracy being the 'worst system except for all of the others'. Incidentally Churchill is a good example of a successful elected leader that had an enormous ruthless streak when he operated outside a system of checks and balances, e.g. gassing the Kurds in the 1920's or advocating dropping anthrax on Germany in WWII.
Dogs are actually afraid of ostriches.
Maybe there is some BSD code buried in FTP.exe or some user mode stuff but so what? Even if a few functions in kernel mode are from BSD, so what actually? And why is it hypocrisy BTW? Microsoft have spoken out against the GPL, but they have never done so against BSD.
Gah, there is enough bloat in the windows world as it is. Where are the linux equivalents of foobar2000 and utorrent?
You misspelled Winamp
That French shit won't get you laid round here either, cut it out.
Or you could get an Asus W7S for $1299. Faster CPU, faster GPU too.
Yeah, and it takes 5 business days. How many people can survive without a computer for that? Guess you'll need to buy a Macbook Pro as well as a backup.
Bad analogy, dude. A Windows app will run on 90% of computers. I can use MFC, API, .Net or a bunch of alternatives. It's very easier to hire people who know this stuff. I need to test it on XP, Vista and maybe 2000. That's quite doable. I actually have three laptops with those OSs on them.
If I buy myself a couple of Macs, Intel and PPC I can get another 6%. But that 6% is very, very expensive since I have to choose a portable development environment and class library. There are lots of these, but they all suck in various different ways. I also need to test on twice the number of platforms. And I need to chuck away any old Windows only code and rewrite it from scratch for the new library, which is probably much less mature than the Windows only library I'm moving away from.
Now a truly portable application will run on 100% of computers. But I need to test on probably hundreds of platforms, all with negligable market share. Suddenly something which a small team could do for Windows only do requires a huge infrastructure of testers and developers. And good luck convincing people releasing a desperately urgent bug fix on the majority platform to test on hundreds of others that they don't care about because they don't have any market share. And good luck trying to sell commercial, closed source software to users of 'free as in freedom' OSs.
Now there's a pattern here. The effort I expend on going from running on 90% market share to 96% is probably at least double the effort for 90% market share. And the effort to go from 96% to 100% is probably much, much worse. It's the law of diminishing returns. That's why the vast majority of software houses support the current version of Windows, the previous one and maybe the one before that. Because the alternative is to spend a fortune making stuff portable and get almost no additional benefit.
I've actually worked for companies making embedded systems that supported two platforms. And it's just not sustainable in the long run. If only support one you save a fortune. And if one of them has 90% market share it's pretty obvious which one to keep.
Stuff you build on Visual Studio works on 90+% of the computers in the world. For most people, that's enough.
This is what it looks like from the ground when a B52 carpet bombs
http://www.militaryfix.com/videos/b-52-carpet-bombing/
Then again, the only people that got carpet bombed recently were the Taliban and the Iraqi Republican guard, so it's not like they were innocent victims or even hapless conscripts. They were true believers who volunteered to fight for an evil regime. Not sure where you get your 11m figure from BTW, presumably one of those websites that includes all the people the Iraqi insurgents killed in Iraq as part of the number of people the US killed.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=417786&cid=22048494
That said if I were making a flash drive with a fuel gauge, I'd only support the FAT variant it was pre-formatted with. Anything else will lead to ruinous support costs. There's a subtle device cost issue too - if you hardwire it to only support FAT you can reduce the amount of Ram the code in the flash disk controller needs.
Actually someone did make a USB flash disk with an E Ink display.
http://www.eink.com/press/releases/pr90.html
Kind of easy to do on FAT too, just scan the FAT and count the zero entries.
Actually for a 1GB disk you could have ~65000 clusters or 16K each. That's 256 sectors of FAT, each holding 256 entries. When the drive is plugged in, scan the whole FAT and work out a free cluster count and total cluster count for the drive.
Whenever a FAT sector is overwritten just work out a delta between the old and new count of free clusters value in that sector and add it to the free cluster count for the drive, and update the display based on that. The cool thing is you don't slow down access at all, unlike if you need to rescan the FAT. You don't need to keep anything in presumably scarce controller RAM either, just a 32 bit free cluster count and a 32 bit total cluster count. And you don't need any software on the PC.
For a file system like NTFS or EXTx which uses a bitmap to track allocation each 512 bit bitmap sector gives the allocation status of 512*8=4096 clusters. The algorithm doesn't really change though - whenever there is a write to one of the bitmap sectors, work out a delta and add it to the free cluster count for the drive and then use that to update the display.
The drive firmware would recognize filesystems based on the boot sector and decide which sectors to monitor and which algorithm should be used to count the free clusters in the FAT or bitmap sector being monitored. For an unrecognized filesystem I'd blank the display, or maybe turn on a few segments in an error code pattern.
Of course in practice you'd probably only support the fuel gauge on the preformatted version of FAT, for support cost reasons. You don't want ReiserFS users yelling at you when the flash drive firmware dies when they reformat from Reiser4 which you do tested with to Reiser5 which you didn't because it wasn't released when you were testing. Same with people reformatting the drive with Vista and changing the NTFS version to one you haven't tested with.
Those girls have Sharp knees!
Actually Asia - specifically Japan, China, Korea and Taiwan is one of the reasons why I don't like the Ron Paul agenda of pulling troops home and downsizing US foreign policy.
The sad truth is that the US presence in Asia has probably infantilized the politicians (especially compared to Western Europe) and if they leave all these idiots will be swept along with a national mood they have done everything to encourage towards a major war. And the cost to the US of intervening in that will be far higher than keeping troops in Asia even indefinitely. And America being America they are sure to intervene if a major war breaks out.
Now if you're an Ron Paul supporter you could argue that the US should pull out and not intervene. But that seems too like the US's stance in the 1930's to me. The world quickly went to hell and the US was forced to intervene in the end. If something like that happened the next administration after the Ron Paul one would just need to rush troops to whatever commercially important ally was being attacked. And then fight and beat whovever was attacking them.
There's a system in place that evolved after that experience. In many ways it seems expensive, but look at the cost of WWII. WWIII would be much more dangerous. Any aspiring regional superpower thwarted by the US is likely to have enough nukes to level hundreds of US cities. And don't lump Iraq into "the system" - that was just adventurism. I'm talking purely about a system of allliances, bases and aircraft carriers scattered around the world to deter anyone else using force to change borders. Ron Paul seems to be against that too.
Or, better, immunise them against the drug
http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?set_id=1&click_id=31&art_id=vn20040726012855582C901135 Professor Nutt, head of psychopharmacology at the University of Bristol and a senior member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, said: "People could be vaccinated against drugs at birth as you are against measles. You could say cocaine is more dangerous than measles, for example. It is important that there is a debate on this issue. This is a huge topic - addiction and smoking are major causes of premature death."
According to the government's own figures, the annual cost of drug addiction, to the economy, through related crime and health problems, is £12-billion.
The Beast of Redmond swallowed them back in '06. Yeah, but Mark Russinovich regularly tells us on his blog how he is VERY HAPPY to be working for Microsoft and is TOTALLY FREE to continue to reverse engineer bits of Windows and then write about it. And how he is NOT BEING MISTREATED AND HAS ENOUGH TO EAT. And then launches into a long post on THE EXCELLENT NEW FEATURES IN WINDOWS® VISTA®.
My favourite was the Microwriter, invented by the bloke that wrote/produced and directed Zulu
Actually it does help. Long range devices need some sort of security. E.g. Bluetooth has pairing to make sure that someone can't make calls on your phone without you allowing them to. If you require physical contact then you can relax that somewhat. I can imagine tapping devices together and getting a "Allow these services" dialog on the UI.
I'm not sure how Wireless USB will handle this. Bluetooth seems to have screwed it up completely - pairing confuses non technical users I suspect, and there are exploits where people have managed to use devices they have not paired with. Kind of an issue if people crack your phone and make long distance calls.
It's tricky to get right too - keys that are uncrackable are not user friendly. And the most sensitive devices - modems and mass storage - don't have any facility for a UI. I guess they'll fudge it Bluetooth style and have a short hardcoded key, e.g. 10 digits. But that's not a lot of bits and it could be brute forced. Stopping eavesdropping seems solvable to me - devices would advertise their public key and you'd encrypt with that when you talked to them. Authorisation - whether you're allowed to access a Wireless USB storage device seems harder to get right, especially on UI-less devices. Maybe 8-16 hex digits, for a total of 64-128 bits is really ok. I don't like the idea of storing really sensitive data on a device like this though. Still if you can make the time it takes to try a key long and remove the chance of snooping them out of the air via public key encryption it would be ok I suppose. Problem is, most of the time this stuff seems ok when announced and is cracked in a couple of years.
Hopefully someone on the WUSB standards groups has had a good idea of how to solve this properly.
Well Sauron's Ring of Power had some positive features for the user too. Invisibility, Kick Assitude, Frothing Megalomania to name but three, but that doesn't alter the fact its primary purpose was to bind people in the darkness. Same with Cocaine really.
Don't let it fool you though. Pretty soon you'll be stealing from your best friends and family and/or selling your ass on the street to get the money for a copy of Eragon Special Edition BluRay though, unless you cast your PS3 into the fires of Mount Doom and buy a chipped Wii off eBay.
Bring a gun and a cute kitten to the interview. Tell them to give you the job or they'll be washing kitten brains out of their hair for the next month. Odds on you'll get a cat person after a dozen tries or so.