I don't see how listing 4 errors would constitute as a debunking of a paper, much the less when after a cursory glance the last one is patently not debunked. The blog is trying to debunk Gutmann when he says that the DRM system is overcomplicated and might cause problems. The blogger basically says computers are fast enough to handle the DRM and equates Gutmann saying "polling every 30ms" with executing a single cpu instruction every 30ms and concludes it's not taxing at all.
Of course the "play audio and don't expect your gigabit card to work fast" easily disproves his whole counterargument.
Heuristic scanning is the opposite of "long lists of known to be disadvantageous programs".
I'm aware, the phrasing was maybe a bit confusing. I should have written something to the effect of "even the traditional list based method is quite inefficient and broken, but heuristic scanning even more so". The reason is because while in the case of lists it's trying to identify programs that cause harm, in the heuristic case it is trying to judge _intent_ of the programs.
A virus is just simply a user mode application and in order to judge intent you need AI, because the virus just uses a sequence of totally ordinary system calls to operate. That is why I ment to have said heuristical scanning is especially broken.
...only because it is going to have an open source driver.
Technically by the way, the specs would allow a open source Windows driver to be written aswell instead of the one supplied by ati for windows, right?
Nvidia is not really good with their drivers lately quality-wise and of course they don't even set their eyesight on things like working well with a tickless kernel. The damn thing generates a tick at the refresh rate of my monitor, a problem I cannot fix because the code is closed. Otherwise my system would be around 3-4 ticks per second when idle, so it is an ugly thing.
Currently in this monopoly culture, the platform (systems a virus can infect) is around 35-40% at best. There are patched systems, way too old operating systems and incompatibilities between different versions of windows, so that even if Microsoft has an OS monopoly on the desktop PCs, it still does not translate into totally monolithic platforms a virus can spread from. (Paradoxically if everyone would run a subscription based OS with updates aka windows live it would make the security situation in IT much much worse. Possibly a doomsday kind of scenario for IT.)
If an OS has 25% marketshare, it would translate to less than 10% of effective platform because of the incompatibilites between old and new versions, sane default settings and because at least some people patch their systems. As far as I know you only need to go below 10% or so to make it infeasible for a virus to spread. The virus would have to be very good at propagating in order to be able to spread at all. Think of the 10% as the number of pcs you could infect in theory, but of course if we for example talk about propagation by worm style or by spam, the real percentage is much lower since there are additional boundaries to pass, like spamfilters, even simple NAT home routers, etc. There are simply too many systems inbetween that the virus would waste time on trying to infect, so finding vulnerable systems is hard.
Thinking about 25% in this sense suddently makes more sense doesn't it?
Yes. Not having a mainstream OS to replace Windows with, but instead fragmenting the operating system landscape would eliminate a lot of problems. Pretty basic disease control principle: breed and use multiple types of plants and animals, so that any single disease can't kill off everything.
to bypass security protections such as anti-virus software
Anti-virus software isn't by any means "security protection", especially the type that works on a heuristical basis. They are simply long lists of known to be disadvantageous programs and a daemon that tries to match the list to data on the system.
Sure, they might offer some kind of bandaid for systems operated by people who do not have the necessary knowledge to operate a computer, but it is first and foremost a security theater and it does more harm than good by providing a false sense of security.
There are two solutions to the problem by the way. The former is educate the users and the latter is to switch to linux. No, seriously. The important part isn't linux, but switching away from a monoculture preferably to a desktop environment that is ruled by at least 3-4 systems that are different from each other and they are interoperating in well defined ways with each other. That way, you can get the platform (the systems it can possibly infect) down for a virus to a threshold where the percentage is simply too low for it to be able to spread.
No no no, you've done it wrong! Here is the way to do it:
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt.45 and a.38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
The moral zeitgeist of the pre-WWII world was much more accepting for anti-semitism than it is today. Just read the works of otherwise well respected and much revered people that lived in the 19th/early 20th century and you can find examples of anti-semitism that was apparently common. Starting from Boleslaw Prus to the catholic church. Henry For was merely more vocal about it than others I guess.
Everyone should be judged according to the time they lived in. Darwin isn't judged negatively because he believed in the superiority of white men either, because that was the commonly accepted view of his age.
When someone thinks about the founding fathers of the USA, they have held a lot of ideas that seem barbaric to us, but they are judged by the moral zeitgeist of their time. There shouldn't be an exception done about anti-semitism in this matter.
The year of linux is every year since 1992, just for different people. You can of course argue that from year to year, the group of people linux appeals to is getting larger and larger and that in 2007 the difference compared to the previous year is exceptionally large and I'd be inclined to agree with you.
I would love a lightweight browser with some of the capabilities of firefox, in this order:
Security
Stability, Speed
Lightweight resource usage in terms of memory, cpu, network bandwidth
Adblock, flashblock, noscript (full blown regular expression support needed!)
The spellcheck, the anti phishing features and shit like prefetch that I don't need and can't even remove (I can disable though) just add unnecessarily clutter. Make the spellcheck an officially supported default-on extension. Same for anti phishing, so that I can remove them.
Persinally I tink speelcheck isa bad idea, but now seriously it is almost completely useless: it recognizes very few of the words I commonly use in IT and it is absolutely useless against for example the "loose" vs. "lose" misspelling cases. It is more than an annoyance for me than help.
I realise that my needs might not match the users' needs, but what I listed as top priorities, Firefox only delivers on the security and extensions part. Users in a lot of cases don't know what they need, they can be easily distracted with shiny "cool" stuff, that ends up snowballing in a Katamari way to a big pile of stinking bloat (enjoy the image!).
The article links to a Javascript benchmark only. There are many many more variables involved in determining how fast a given browser is, although certainly Javascript plays it's part. Variables like how soon does the browser start processing incoming, but yet incomplete data, etc. influence the browser's snappiness a lot aswell.
Basically, the speed of the browser depends upon the speed of the html parsing engine, available bandwidth, browser settings, speed of the cache and Javascript, just to mention the main variables.
Still, I'm interested how comes Opera's Javascript is so fast compared to the other browsers.
You can joke all you want, but based on my own sample of Linux gaming, it is actually doing quite well.
For example in the case of Eve Online with a few hundred thousand subscribers, an officially supported Cider (Transgaming) client is in works and under beta testing. That is from an all out Microsoft shop.
The fact is, companies are reacting to demand. There are a lot of people who would ditch Windows in a heartbeat if only for windows-only games.
With the exception of the $25k, the same might be said for the USA aswell. Oh, I guess the "no one ever believed that the USA plotted 9/11" needs an exception too.
Re:Biggest myths of all have been around for ages.
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...they tend to be wrong.
I don't see how listing 4 errors would constitute as a debunking of a paper, much the less when after a cursory glance the last one is patently not debunked. The blog is trying to debunk Gutmann when he says that the DRM system is overcomplicated and might cause problems. The blogger basically says computers are fast enough to handle the DRM and equates Gutmann saying "polling every 30ms" with executing a single cpu instruction every 30ms and concludes it's not taxing at all.
Of course the "play audio and don't expect your gigabit card to work fast" easily disproves his whole counterargument.
A virus is just simply a user mode application and in order to judge intent you need AI, because the virus just uses a sequence of totally ordinary system calls to operate. That is why I ment to have said heuristical scanning is especially broken.
Wait, you actually read articles?
You must be new here!
...only because it is going to have an open source driver.
Technically by the way, the specs would allow a open source Windows driver to be written aswell instead of the one supplied by ati for windows, right?
Nvidia is not really good with their drivers lately quality-wise and of course they don't even set their eyesight on things like working well with a tickless kernel. The damn thing generates a tick at the refresh rate of my monitor, a problem I cannot fix because the code is closed. Otherwise my system would be around 3-4 ticks per second when idle, so it is an ugly thing.
Currently in this monopoly culture, the platform (systems a virus can infect) is around 35-40% at best. There are patched systems, way too old operating systems and incompatibilities between different versions of windows, so that even if Microsoft has an OS monopoly on the desktop PCs, it still does not translate into totally monolithic platforms a virus can spread from. (Paradoxically if everyone would run a subscription based OS with updates aka windows live it would make the security situation in IT much much worse. Possibly a doomsday kind of scenario for IT.)
If an OS has 25% marketshare, it would translate to less than 10% of effective platform because of the incompatibilites between old and new versions, sane default settings and because at least some people patch their systems. As far as I know you only need to go below 10% or so to make it infeasible for a virus to spread. The virus would have to be very good at propagating in order to be able to spread at all. Think of the 10% as the number of pcs you could infect in theory, but of course if we for example talk about propagation by worm style or by spam, the real percentage is much lower since there are additional boundaries to pass, like spamfilters, even simple NAT home routers, etc. There are simply too many systems inbetween that the virus would waste time on trying to infect, so finding vulnerable systems is hard.
Thinking about 25% in this sense suddently makes more sense doesn't it?
Yes. Not having a mainstream OS to replace Windows with, but instead fragmenting the operating system landscape would eliminate a lot of problems. Pretty basic disease control principle: breed and use multiple types of plants and animals, so that any single disease can't kill off everything.
nt
Sure, they might offer some kind of bandaid for systems operated by people who do not have the necessary knowledge to operate a computer, but it is first and foremost a security theater and it does more harm than good by providing a false sense of security.
There are two solutions to the problem by the way. The former is educate the users and the latter is to switch to linux. No, seriously. The important part isn't linux, but switching away from a monoculture preferably to a desktop environment that is ruled by at least 3-4 systems that are different from each other and they are interoperating in well defined ways with each other. That way, you can get the platform (the systems it can possibly infect) down for a virus to a threshold where the percentage is simply too low for it to be able to spread.
No no no, you've done it wrong! Here is the way to do it:
.. the next time you're out in the backyard exercising your Second Amendment rights, the liberals will see it! These satellites are sensitive enough to tell the difference between a Colt .45 and a .38 Special! And when they detect you with a firearm, their computers cross-reference the address to figure out your name, and then an enormous database housed at Berkeley is updated with information about you.
It amazes me that so many allegedly "educated" people have fallen so quickly and so hard for a fraudulent fabrication of such laughable proportions. The very idea that a gigantic ball of rock happens to orbit our planet, showing itself in neat, four-week cycles -- with the same side facing us all the time -- is ludicrous. Furthermore, it is an insult to common sense and a damnable affront to intellectual honesty and integrity. That people actually believe it is evidence that the liberals have wrested the last vestiges of control of our public school system from decent, God-fearing Americans (as if any further evidence was needed! Daddy's Roommate? God Almighty!)
Documentaries such as Enemy of the State have accurately portrayed the elaborate, byzantine network of surveillance satellites that the liberals have sent into space to spy on law-abiding Americans. Equipped with technology developed by Handgun Control, Inc., these satellites have the ability to detect firearms from hundreds of kilometers up. That's right, neighbors
Of course, this all works fine during the day, but what about at night? Even the liberals can't control the rotation of the Earth to prevent nightfall from setting in (only Joshua was able to ask for that particular favor!) That's where the "moon" comes in. Powered by nuclear reactors, the "moon" is nothing more than an enormous balloon, emitting trillions of candlepower of gun-revealing light. Piloted by key members of the liberal community, the "moon" is strategically moved across the country, pointing out those who dare to make use of their God-given rights at night!
Yes, I know this probably sounds paranoid and preposterous, but consider this. Despite what the revisionist historians tell you, there is no mention of the "moon" anywhere in literature or historical documents -- anywhere -- before 1950. That is when it was initially launched. When President Josef Kennedy, at the State of the Union address, proclaimed "We choose to go to the moon", he may as well have said "We choose to go to the weather balloon." The subsequent faking of a "moon" landing on national TV was the first step in a long history of the erosion of our constitutional rights by leftists in this country. No longer can we hide from our government when the sun goes down.
Yeah, there might be bugs. Who cares. That is the reason why we have the code, so that I can look at the source and fix stuff I want to get working.
My current card is nvidia because they had the best 3D drivers so far. That's going to change.
Thanks AMD for taking this step!
The moral zeitgeist of the pre-WWII world was much more accepting for anti-semitism than it is today. Just read the works of otherwise well respected and much revered people that lived in the 19th/early 20th century and you can find examples of anti-semitism that was apparently common. Starting from Boleslaw Prus to the catholic church. Henry For was merely more vocal about it than others I guess.
Everyone should be judged according to the time they lived in. Darwin isn't judged negatively because he believed in the superiority of white men either, because that was the commonly accepted view of his age.
When someone thinks about the founding fathers of the USA, they have held a lot of ideas that seem barbaric to us, but they are judged by the moral zeitgeist of their time. There shouldn't be an exception done about anti-semitism in this matter.
The year of linux is every year since 1992, just for different people. You can of course argue that from year to year, the group of people linux appeals to is getting larger and larger and that in 2007 the difference compared to the previous year is exceptionally large and I'd be inclined to agree with you.
Thanks a bunch kdawson.
(I've shown considerable restraint in pointing this out in the last 10 similarly crap stories, but enough is enough.)
As always, it works based on user stupidity, not programmer stupidity.
The spellcheck, the anti phishing features and shit like prefetch that I don't need and can't even remove (I can disable though) just add unnecessarily clutter. Make the spellcheck an officially supported default-on extension. Same for anti phishing, so that I can remove them.
Persinally I tink speelcheck isa bad idea, but now seriously it is almost completely useless: it recognizes very few of the words I commonly use in IT and it is absolutely useless against for example the "loose" vs. "lose" misspelling cases. It is more than an annoyance for me than help.
I realise that my needs might not match the users' needs, but what I listed as top priorities, Firefox only delivers on the security and extensions part. Users in a lot of cases don't know what they need, they can be easily distracted with shiny "cool" stuff, that ends up snowballing in a Katamari way to a big pile of stinking bloat (enjoy the image!).
Exactly. I'd say this is a bigger threat than terrorism was to Western civilization in the past 5 years.
The article links to a Javascript benchmark only. There are many many more variables involved in determining how fast a given browser is, although certainly Javascript plays it's part. Variables like how soon does the browser start processing incoming, but yet incomplete data, etc. influence the browser's snappiness a lot aswell.
Basically, the speed of the browser depends upon the speed of the html parsing engine, available bandwidth, browser settings, speed of the cache and Javascript, just to mention the main variables.
Still, I'm interested how comes Opera's Javascript is so fast compared to the other browsers.
You can joke all you want, but based on my own sample of Linux gaming, it is actually doing quite well.
For example in the case of Eve Online with a few hundred thousand subscribers, an officially supported Cider (Transgaming) client is in works and under beta testing. That is from an all out Microsoft shop.
The fact is, companies are reacting to demand. There are a lot of people who would ditch Windows in a heartbeat if only for windows-only games.
Exactly! Let's get away from the corporate bullshit!
Support Icedove and Iceweasel! They're just like thunderbird and firefox, but....
[% insert foot_icon_here %]
So you're saying, barring the Apple part, that slashdot is in trouble?
With the exception of the $25k, the same might be said for the USA aswell. Oh, I guess the "no one ever believed that the USA plotted 9/11" needs an exception too.
If only I had mod points...
Yay, Disneyland IN SPACE!