The problem with the methodology of greenpeace is that the energy used to power the "internet" (data centers, switching centers, telcos etc) is already accounted for all over the place, so it makes not sense to refer to it as a wholly independent entity.
Now, talking about internet companies energy usage is a complete different beast worth of consideration.
Well, I use both all the time and I must say that VNC is superior to X11 network transparency in one important instance: if the connection between client and server goes down, the whole session is gone. Any applications using the now unreachable X server are killed and of course any unsaved data is lost. That one reason just pretty much rules out using X11 over a remote link like a VPN connection from home to work.
That is really interesting, in particular because Nature magazine (where the paper will appear) used to have a policy of not accepting submissions that are being or have been patented.
I used to have free certificates too, but saddly they were not thrusted by pretty much any email client at the time, and adding them to the thrust list was a non trivial task for my intended audience. I have not tried any free one since them, perhaps when the ones from VeriSign expire I will give them another try.
Well it can't get more simple than using a digital certificate for this. They are supported by almost every email client out there and the user only needs to click the encrypt button. The only problem is finding cheap certificates, I have a few from VeriSign that are $19.99 a year (still a bit expensibe for my taste).
I have been hearing about formal verification for hardware design for the last 10 years and at some point I had to opportunity to do minor work on one of the formal verification products that my company produces. The technology is really interesting and contrary the the uninformed opinion of other slashdotters in this thread, it delivers tangible results and provides a clear advantage over classic verification techniques (vector testing, testbenches and so for).
It took a long time but a lot of the major design houses (Intel, PMC sierra, Freescale, ST micro, IBM and such), now use a form or another of formal verification during their design cycle. It has been a silent revolution, but be assured that many modern microchips have been verified this way.
Perhaps some day we could have a succesful formal verification product for software (After all, Verilog and VHDL could be seen as programming languages no?). In the meantime, it has proven its worth on the hardware side. Congratulations are due to these pioneers.
The main article should be changed to read: Mathematics' Breakthrough of the year.
Not trying to be picky, but there is a substantial difference between Science and Mathematics (although that might be a surprise to some people, it is true).
It is nice to see that Plan9 ideas keep flowing into mainstream OS's. Fossil+venti has been around for several years now (one of the best things of Plan9 btw).
The interesting thing about the essay linked in your message is how some years back, Black hole theory was considered outside mainstream science, heretical if you like. I lost count of all the objections raised to the physical existence and meaning of those mathematical singularities, but, with the passing of enough time and after some generational renewal at the right places, Black hole theory is now mainstream.
Funny how MECO theory finds itself on the same position that black hole theory was all those years back, but that is the beauty of science, time (and data) will tell what is the correct one.
Well, it could be possible if OS designers actually used the full Intel chip capabilities. You said:
"For example, what happens when I overflow a string on the stack and overwrite a return pointer?"
Using the segment attributes on the Intel chips (from 386 and up), if the return pointer is pointing to a non executable segment, then a processor fault should be generated. That is the most likely location, because the malicious code would reside on the stack itself (injected thru the same buffer overflow).
So in conclusion buffer overflows could be stopped in any langue (including C and C++) with the current processor architecture(Intel), but the prominent OS's (Windows and Linux) don't take advantage of the powerful segmentation capabilities that they offer.
Well, as far as I remember the Intel chips have had the ability to stop buffer overflows. Since the old days of the 80386, the memory segments contain flags to mark them as execution/read only (or data read/write, or data read only). So any attempt to write over a execution segment will trigger a processor fault, also any attemp to execute arbitrary code in a segment not marked as executable will also trigger a fault (like code stored in the stack segment). The problem is because of design constrains, time or simple laziness, OS programmers barely make use of the advance features of the chip, and this kind of exploits are still possible today.
I would recommend that you read the specs. This is indeed a truly revolutionary processor. In fact what you get is 9 processors in a single chip, but instead of the classical SMP, you get 1 PPE that is optimized to run an OS (basically a PowerPC core), and 8 SPE's that are optimized for media rich applications (which of course includes heavy math ones too) but can not run an OS.
The PPE has full access the the main memory, while the SPE's only have direct access to local 256Kb memory areas that you can use at L1 cache speeds, but the best part is that you can use DMA transfers from the main memory to the local SPE's one, so the PPE does not even have to bother assisting the other ones on that.
Also, although other posters seem to think that the Linux port is trivial, it is not. Adding the support for the 8 SPE's required a great deal of imagination from the IBM engineers. I really liked the way they solved this problem too (more information on the original documents).
I am not sure, but donating US $5000 is enough to swing the vote of a US Senator ? From the article that is what the Preston Gates firm contributed to the guy (perhaps the table is listing the amount in thousands, who knows). If that is the case, then the hard times are hitting even Congress.
This is not intended as a flame, but given the amount of automation of most of the attacks, it is better to stick with old technologies at least as email and web browsing is related.
I still read my email at the office with netscape 4.77 and with Thunderbird at home (with view->plain text for all my messages).
At least when I do a ps -ax on my Linux box I can recognize every single daemon, but in Windows bringing the process windows does not help at all, it seems that the process names follow some cryptographic convention so spotting a keylogger is futile, at least for me.
Thank you for clarifying the last part of my post. I overlooked the detail about the Stadium being a voter-approved initiative.
However my point still stands, the conclusion:
- Person A is bad at sports
Does not follow the premise:
- Person A complains about its tax dollars being spent in a Sports stadium.
Does not matter how much you want to dress your argument, it is still a non-sequitur (and you know it).
Personally, I understand that you wanted to spice up your response to the original poster and in the process an ad-hominem was added. No big deal, each person has a different style in the way they respond to others.
Do you realize that your argument is a huge non-sequitor ?
I am bad at almost all the sports known to the human kind, and yet I manage to enjoy most of them, I don't see how complaining about tax spending is a reflection in the sporting abilities of the original poster.
I do agree with the mayor premise though, the goverment will find ways to spend our money, and most of the time we will not agree with them. But that is the price of a Republic: someone else, empowered by the "people" makes the decisions, period.
I agree with you, I don't think that practical uses for the billionth digit of pi will be found in the near term. However exploring Pi is a good exercise for numbers theorists because it allows them to peer inside the irrational numbers and their properties. There is still a lot if uncharted territory in that area. One of the most sought after peculiaritis of an irrational number (Pi in particular) is to check if any kind of patterns can be discerned in the long list of decimal digits.
Carl Sagan, dreamed long ago (through one of his characters) to find a "circle" pattern inside Pi (i.e another series of Pi inside).
Who knows, perhaps something interesting will be found.
I disagree with your analogy. Aerial mosaics have nothing to do with the work that the brothers had to accomplish.
For instance, in aerial photagraphy the landscape being photagraphed changes very little if it changes at all (most of the changes are not even perceptible at the resolution of the cameras). Therefore reconstructing the full image is pretty much trivial (finding the overlapping sections is straightforward).
In this case, and from TA, the images changed from frame to frame! because of several factors, temperature, humidity, light conditions etc. Also the paper cover that the photographers used also disturbed the fine threading in the images. So determining the overlapping sections between tiles could not be easyly automated, in fact from the article it seems that they were not even discernible with the naked eye.
I thing that the time spent in that project was actually productive, and that in the process a bunch of original algorithms were created (I hope they are published in some place).
Your post really makes terrible use of every single buzzword, Leftists, Capitalism, Rulling class etc.
It seems that you have very strong preconceived ideas about their meanings. But at the end they are all wrong.
Left and Right are just labels of two opposite sides of power and cannot, should not, be used to brand any particular set of ideologies in an universal way. In my home country for instance. We have a Right wing liberal goverment (I am not kidding you). And during the early 90's we had a "neo" Liberal goverment that was all in favor of free markets, changed the constitution to allow religios freedom and dissolved congress.
So you see, your post makes no sense to me at all, because in my own epistemologic system, Left and Right don't mean the same thing that in yours.
Perhaps if you cared to provide more detailed definitions in your rants, your post would be taken more seriously.
Oddly enough, the article cites the Horizon problem as unexplained. It seems that they don't think that inflation is a satisfactory explanation. I wonder if the author of the article had access to the data from WMAP that actually validated several models of inflationary theories.
Back at the day, I used a Suzuki FZ50 to cover the 10 miles comnute to my school, the speed (40mph) was never a problem for me. The lack of horse power was the main draw back. In a particulary hilly section of the road (with a high grade), I had to dismount and push the motorcycle for several meters, that of course provided the comic relief for whoever was driving on the roadway at that time.
Ah, and god forbid, if some of my friends wanted to ride with me.
The wording should be changed to read: No sane person should connect any machine to the internet without at least a hardware firewall in between. They are really inexpensive and provide a critical line of defense against comprimise by worms.
Long ago I made the experiment of pluging an old Red Hat 6.x box directly to the internet with most of the ports open: telnet, ftp (anonymous), rsh etc. It was compromised in no time. The new owners did a decent job of hiding the tracks, they installed a kernel patch to provide "hidden" files, a new "top", several interesting cron jobs, thousands of new entries in/dev, etc.
But they screwed up netstat. I was monitoring the machine remotely and could not see my own connection ! that gave it away. It seems they were half way thru the process. I was able to locate most of the source for the "worm" (I assumed it was one), the code was nicely annotated and the paradigm was really interesting, very close to the dream of the platform independent worm.
That was years ago, I don't even want to image how far the techniques have advanced in this time.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with the methodology of greenpeace is that the energy used to power the "internet" (data centers, switching centers, telcos etc) is already accounted for all over the place, so it makes not sense to refer to it as a wholly independent entity. Now, talking about internet companies energy usage is a complete different beast worth of consideration.
Well, I use both all the time and I must say that VNC is superior to X11 network transparency in one important instance: if the connection between client and server goes down, the whole session is gone. Any applications using the now unreachable X server are killed and of course any unsaved data is lost. That one reason just pretty much rules out using X11 over a remote link like a VPN connection from home to work.
That is really interesting, in particular because Nature magazine (where the paper will appear) used to have a policy of not accepting submissions that are being or have been patented.
I used to have free certificates too, but saddly they were not thrusted by pretty much any email client at the time, and adding them to the thrust list was a non trivial task for my intended audience. I have not tried any free one since them, perhaps when the ones from VeriSign expire I will give them another try.
Well it can't get more simple than using a digital certificate for this. They are supported by almost every email client out there and the user only needs to click the encrypt button. The only problem is finding cheap certificates, I have a few from VeriSign that are $19.99 a year (still a bit expensibe for my taste).
I have been hearing about formal verification for hardware design for the last 10 years and at some point I had to opportunity to do minor work on one of the formal verification products that my company produces. The technology is really interesting and contrary the the uninformed opinion of other slashdotters in this thread, it delivers tangible results and provides a clear advantage over classic verification techniques (vector testing, testbenches and so for).
It took a long time but a lot of the major design houses (Intel, PMC sierra, Freescale, ST micro, IBM and such), now use a form or another of formal verification during their design cycle. It has been a silent revolution, but be assured that many modern microchips have been verified this way.
Perhaps some day we could have a succesful formal verification product for software (After all, Verilog and VHDL could be seen as programming languages no?). In the meantime, it has proven its worth on the hardware side. Congratulations are due to these pioneers.
That was great, I wonder how many here have spotted the reference to Neil Stephenson and the Baroque Cycle.
The main article should be changed to read: Mathematics' Breakthrough of the year.
Not trying to be picky, but there is a substantial difference between Science and Mathematics (although that might be a surprise to some people, it is true).
It is nice to see that Plan9 ideas keep flowing into mainstream OS's. Fossil+venti has been around for several years now (one of the best things of Plan9 btw).
The interesting thing about the essay linked in your message is how some years back, Black hole theory was considered outside mainstream science, heretical if you like. I lost count of all the objections raised to the physical existence and meaning of those mathematical singularities, but, with the passing of enough time and after some generational renewal at the right places, Black hole theory is now mainstream.
Funny how MECO theory finds itself on the same position that black hole theory was all those years back, but that is the beauty of science, time (and data) will tell what is the correct one.
Well, it could be possible if OS designers actually used the full Intel chip capabilities. You said:
"For example, what happens when I overflow a string on the stack and overwrite a return pointer?"
Using the segment attributes on the Intel chips (from 386 and up), if the return pointer is pointing to a non executable segment, then a processor fault should be generated. That is the most likely location, because the malicious code would reside on the stack itself (injected thru the same buffer overflow).
So in conclusion buffer overflows could be stopped in any langue (including C and C++) with the current processor architecture(Intel), but the prominent OS's (Windows and Linux) don't take advantage of the powerful segmentation capabilities that they offer.
Well, as far as I remember the Intel chips have had the ability to stop buffer overflows. Since the old days of the 80386, the memory segments contain flags to mark them as execution/read only (or data read/write, or data read only). So any attempt to write over a execution segment will trigger a processor fault, also any attemp to execute arbitrary code in a segment not marked as executable will also trigger a fault (like code stored in the stack segment). The problem is because of design constrains, time or simple laziness, OS programmers barely make use of the advance features of the chip, and this kind of exploits are still possible today.
Sorry I meant to moderate this "Informative", Oh well.
I would recommend that you read the specs. This is indeed a truly revolutionary processor. In fact what you get is 9 processors in a single chip, but instead of the classical SMP, you get 1 PPE that is optimized to run an OS (basically a PowerPC core), and 8 SPE's that are optimized for media rich applications (which of course includes heavy math ones too) but can not run an OS.
The PPE has full access the the main memory, while the SPE's only have direct access to local 256Kb memory areas that you can use at L1 cache speeds, but the best part is that you can use DMA transfers from the main memory to the local SPE's one, so the PPE does not even have to bother assisting the other ones on that.
Also, although other posters seem to think that the Linux port is trivial, it is not. Adding the support for the 8 SPE's required a great deal of imagination from the IBM engineers. I really liked the way they solved this problem too (more information on the original documents).
I am not sure, but donating US $5000 is enough to swing the vote of a US Senator ? From the article that is what the Preston Gates firm contributed to the guy (perhaps the table is listing the amount in thousands, who knows). If that is the case, then the hard times are hitting even Congress.
This is not intended as a flame, but given the amount of automation of most of the attacks, it is better to stick with old technologies at least as email and web browsing is related.
I still read my email at the office with netscape 4.77 and with Thunderbird at home (with view->plain text for all my messages).
At least when I do a ps -ax on my Linux box I can recognize every single daemon, but in Windows bringing the process windows does not help at all, it seems that the process names follow some cryptographic convention so spotting a keylogger is futile, at least for me.
Thank you for clarifying the last part of my post. I overlooked the detail about the Stadium being a voter-approved initiative.
However my point still stands, the conclusion:
- Person A is bad at sports
Does not follow the premise:
- Person A complains about its tax dollars being spent in a Sports stadium.
Does not matter how much you want to dress your argument, it is still a non-sequitur (and you know it).
Personally, I understand that you wanted to spice up your response to the original poster and in the process an ad-hominem was added. No big deal, each person has a different style in the way they respond to others.
Do you realize that your argument is a huge non-sequitor ?
I am bad at almost all the sports known to the human kind, and yet I manage to enjoy most of them, I don't see how complaining about tax spending is a reflection in the sporting abilities of the original poster.
I do agree with the mayor premise though, the goverment will find ways to spend our money, and most of the time we will not agree with them. But that is the price of a Republic: someone else, empowered by the "people" makes the decisions, period.
I agree with you, I don't think that practical uses for the billionth digit of pi will be found in the near term. However exploring Pi is a good exercise for numbers theorists because it allows them to peer inside the irrational numbers and their properties. There is still a lot if uncharted territory in that area. One of the most sought after peculiaritis of an irrational number (Pi in particular) is to check if any kind of patterns can be discerned in the long list of decimal digits.
Carl Sagan, dreamed long ago (through one of his characters) to find a "circle" pattern inside Pi (i.e another series of Pi inside).
Who knows, perhaps something interesting will be found.
I disagree with your analogy. Aerial mosaics have nothing to do with the work that the brothers had to accomplish.
For instance, in aerial photagraphy the landscape being photagraphed changes very little if it changes at all (most of the changes are not even perceptible at the resolution of the cameras). Therefore reconstructing the full image is pretty much trivial (finding the overlapping sections is straightforward).
In this case, and from TA, the images changed from frame to frame! because of several factors, temperature, humidity, light conditions etc. Also the paper cover that the photographers used also disturbed the fine threading in the images. So determining the overlapping sections between tiles could not be easyly automated, in fact from the article it seems that they were not even discernible with the naked eye.
I thing that the time spent in that project was actually productive, and that in the process a bunch of original algorithms were created (I hope they are published in some place).
For anyone that can actually understand it click here (in pdf format)
Your post really makes terrible use of every single buzzword, Leftists, Capitalism, Rulling class etc.
It seems that you have very strong preconceived ideas about their meanings. But at the end they are all wrong.
Left and Right are just labels of two opposite sides of power and cannot, should not, be used to brand any particular set of ideologies in an universal way. In my home country for instance. We have a Right wing liberal goverment (I am not kidding you). And during the early 90's we had a "neo" Liberal goverment that was all in favor of free markets, changed the constitution to allow
religios freedom and dissolved congress.
So you see, your post makes no sense to me at all, because in my own epistemologic system, Left and Right don't mean the same thing that in yours.
Perhaps if you cared to provide more detailed definitions in your rants, your post would be taken more seriously.
Oddly enough, the article cites the Horizon problem as unexplained. It seems that they don't think that inflation is a satisfactory explanation. I wonder if the author of the article had access to the data from WMAP that actually validated several models of inflationary theories.
Back at the day, I used a Suzuki FZ50 to cover the 10 miles comnute to my school, the speed (40mph) was never a problem for me. The lack of horse power was the main draw back. In a particulary hilly section of the road (with a high grade), I had to dismount and push the motorcycle for several meters, that of course provided the comic relief for whoever was driving on the roadway at that time.
Ah, and god forbid, if some of my friends wanted to ride with me.
The wording should be changed to read: No sane person should connect any machine to the internet without at least a hardware firewall in between. They are really inexpensive and provide a critical line of defense against comprimise by worms.
/dev, etc.
Long ago I made the experiment of pluging an old Red Hat 6.x box directly to the internet with most of the ports open: telnet, ftp (anonymous), rsh etc. It was compromised in no time. The new owners did a decent job of hiding the tracks, they installed a kernel patch to provide "hidden" files, a new "top", several interesting cron jobs, thousands of new entries in
But they screwed up netstat. I was monitoring the machine remotely and could not see my own connection ! that gave it away. It seems they were half way thru the process. I was able to locate most of the source for the "worm" (I assumed it was one), the code was nicely annotated and the paradigm was really interesting, very close to the dream of the platform independent worm.
That was years ago, I don't even want to image how far the techniques have advanced in this time.