Most modern protocols and standards are designed to be agile. Basically, this means that they don't mandate any one particular algorithm, but rather are designed such that alternatives can be used. Otherwise, many specs would be woefully out-of-date every few years as computing power and cryptographic algorithms advance. The 3 examples you give above are all considered "agile", read the specs and note that they use algorithm identifiers and allow for a wide variety of different algorithms to be used, none of the above are strictly bound to use SHA-1 or MD5.
Repeat after me: A hash algorithm is NOT encryption.
The original article is full of misstatements like this doozy:
this SHA-1 encryption includes the world's gold standard Message-Digest algorithm 5 (MD5). Before Professor Wang cracked it, the MD5 could only be deciphered by today's fastest supercomputer running codes for more than a million years.
SHA-1 is NOT encryption, and it certainly doesn't "include" MD5. They are 2 completely different hashing algorithms. Hash algorithms are not "deciphered". Neither of them has been "cracked". They have been found, in theory, to not be as collision-proof as previously thought, but noone has yet found a way to take one block of data and modify it such that it would have an identical hash signature as the original. Both are merely found to be not quite as collision-proof (the most important thing for any hashing algorithm) as previously thought. This is old news.
The original article blows and contains no useful information whatsoever, it was written by someone who hasn't the faintest hint of knowledge about cryptography or mathematics in general.
What's the point? Why spend $600+ on a PS3 only to put Linux on it.
You can get a PC much cheaper, one which will happily accept
most any Linux distro with alot less pain.
*If* I buy a PS3, it will be so I can play cool games and watch
Hi-Def (blu-ray) movies, not so I can load Linux and surf
the web on a 65" screen.
1. Lots of people already have an Xbox 360
"Lots of people" ?? Gee, that sounds like hard, scientific, evidence. I'm not a Sony defender by any means (still playing my 4 year old PS2 just fine), but to insinuate that XB360/HD-DVD as king's of the hill is a little premature. PS3 has only been available in very limited fashion for about 2 months. XB360 has been out for how a while and still lags behind the old PS2 in sales. The high-end XB360 is $400. Tack on the cost of the HD-DVD and you are probably gonna spend over $600, same as you would for a PS3.
Neither HD-DVD or Blu-Ray really excite me much now, at least as a video medium. DVDs in progressive scan on a high-quality bigscreen TV look pretty damn good to my tired old eyes. HiDef discs might be nice, but not enough to justify the change, at least not for a couple of years.
and Solaris specific technologies including ZFS and Dtrace.
Linux already has tracing technologies and it has multiple excellent file systems, as well as a roadmap for ext4. Maybe ZFS and DTrace will have some small influence on their evolution, but for the most part, Linux will go its own way there.
My prediction: OpenSolaris is going to be a dud.
Get real - Linux tracing capabilities are like primitive caveman tools compared to DTrace. Just because something wasn't developed by the "Linux community" (whatever the hell that means) doesn't mean it is worthless. ZFS is a major evolutionary step forward for file systems. Again, just because it wasn't born and raised as a sourceforge project doesn't mean it must be crap. Take off the blinders, zealot. Great technology knows no religion, it can come from anywhere. Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, et al, are not staffed by idiots (well, at least
not in the engineering ranks). Just because they work for "the man" doesn't make their contributions to the field of software any less relevant or useful. Judge the tools by their merits, ignore the religion.
Whether or not OpenSolaris "takes over" in 2007 remains to be seen, but to dismiss the contributions of Sun's engineers (or Microsoft's for that matter) is to ignore history and to ignore some truly innovative contributions to the field.
NASA is one of the most poorly managed bureaucratic nightmares in the entire US Goverment, and that is saying something. I think
the chances of congress actually funding this thing to completion are about 0. NASA will say just about anything to grab a headline and generate some publicity (and subsequenly, a piece of the budget), but the fact is that they rarely deliver what they promise.
If they could just deliver something on time and relatively close to the budget that they originally request, they might have more success and generate more faith in congress, but as it stands, NASA has a horrible track record and is rife with politics typical of any other government agency.
The moon is just a giant ball of rotton cheese anyway, what the hell are we going to do if they actually succeed?
I'd much rather see the money spent on establishing an actually useful space station which could hold more than 3 people and didn't spring deadly leaks all the time.
What kind of person says "I really want Windows Vista for Christmas"?? For that matter, what kind of dork asks for any specific operating system for Christmas anyway? I can see wanting a new computer, but a specific OS, for Christmas?
Regarding the Zune thing - aren't there already like 50 different MP3 players on the market - not counting the iPod family?
So again, who the hell cares? What a stupid article.
What still amazes me is who draws the large crowds, and who doesn't. What band of the last 5 years is going to draw the attendance of say, the Rolling Stones, U2, or even Bad Company or Cheap Trick in another 5 years? (I can't think of any that recieve top 40 radio play on ClearChannel or Inifity...)
It's hard to tell. U2 didn't draw huge crowds immediately. Even after they released their 3rd album, "War", in 1983, they were still basically an opening act or playing small venues - and Oh, don't I regret not seeing them in a club back then (I was in high school/college at the time, Im an old man now). Check back in 5 years and see which of the big acts of today are still relevant or if you regret not seeing some of todays bands while they are still playing bars and clubs.
I refuse to shave until the blade vendors give away their
ingenious technology for free! I wish they would hurry up,
though, my beard keeps getting into my soup.
What else would you expect from IBM? Their entire Linux strategy is based on the idea of luring people in with Linux and then signing them up for ridiculously overpriced "consulting services' that usually results in a recommendation to purchase their own proprietary hardware running AIX and ever more extensive service contracts and recurring revenue for IBM. They are now seeing customers running Solaris 10 on IBM hardware and more and more requests for Solaris 10 instead of their own stuff and its not a pleasant prospect to see where the trends are heading for IBM.
When they open AIX and their Power chips like Sun has done with Solaris and SPARC, then they can compare and see how things stack up. For now, its just alot of sour grapes from an aging dinosaur to one that has recently been seen rising up again.
It would be nice if they would maintain some of the products they already spewed out or at least issued the occasional bug fix. Picasa2 is a real nice little tool (great for quick fixes and for organizing photos), but it has alot of annoying little bugs that don't seem to have workarounds yet and they have been very slow about releasing updates for it.
If your best argument against free software is that the arguments are "tired", then you're flat out intellectually lazy. There have been plenty of people here making valid points regarding forking, on both sides of the debate. Plenty of people talking about standardisation. Again, plenty of valid points on both sides. My point was that I enjoy the freedom that comes with open sourcing software. If you want to make the point that having that freedom is a bad thing, by all means take me on. But don't just call my point "tired" and treat it as case closed.
I never said I am against the freedoms of open sourcing or that having freedom is a bad thing. I am against using an idealistic line of reasoning to argue in favor of "freeing" a bit of software.
Arguments about forking and standardization and fracturing the community are all valid and, IMO,
pragmatic arguments for keeping *some* software closed. Arguments for opening Java simply because one believes strongly that all software should be "free" are never going to be resolved because it then becomes a religious issue. Explain to me, in practical terms, how opening Java will make your life easier or better. That is what I am not getting from your position. I get that it would be nice because it would fit your world-view, but how exactly would that benefit Sun and how would it improve the software? I just haven't read alot of convincing arguments as to why it would be a good thing, from you or anyone else.
I am not an anti-opensource person, I use it and enjoy it. I've contributed code to mozilla and gnome, and you and I probably agree on more than you would expect (I read your blog). On this matter, however, we are getting nowhere as you apparently think I am an intellectually lazy dolt.
Look, Mr. Ideals, this is a basic argument of pragmatism versus idealism. I prefer to be a pragmatist, I have jobs to do and need the tools to do them. I don't give a shit if the tool is free or costs me some $$ or is encumbered by a restrictive license. If it is the best tool for the job, I'm going to use it. And, I don't give a shit if you never use a piece of proprietary software again or not. If you get everything you need from the "free" ( beer or speech, whatever), then good for you.
It's just fucking annoying to hear the same tired arguments from idealists who try to push their version of "free" (beer/speech/lunch) on everyone piece of software that doesn't fit their vision.
Go enjoy your idealistic religion, that is cool with me. Just don't come knocking on my door handing out pamphlets from Richard Stallman.
. But imagine if, tomorrow, everyone insisted that they would only buy free software from now on. Just a simple choice. Do you think the world would be a better or worse place? Do you think that convenience and interoperability would improve or go down? Do you think the longevity of data, the ability to read files on multiple platforms, or any other aspect of what you call convenience and I call freedom, would be affected negatively? Do you REALLY THINK that the software industry would collapse?
This is a strawman argument - you are proposing something that will never happen and then propping it up with rhetorical questions that cannot be answered. One thing is for sure, not all software is ever going to be free. The world would be a better place if more software actually WORKED and was released with no bugs. That's not going to happen either, regardless of whatever religious tag is associated with the code. There is plenty of shitty open source software out there, just as there is plenty of shitty proprietary software. This line of reasoning leads nowhere.
Why do people just assume that saying the magic words "open source" will automatically
improve a particular piece of software? Rarely do the most vocal proponents of
"open sourcing" something actually get involved and start contributing to the codebase.
It's all about religion for the most part, unfortunately.
I still fail to see the benefits of "open sourcing" Java. How will it be improved?
It's not as if the engineers at Sun are stupid and don't know how to engineer
enterprise software. Don't you think Sun has heard that same complaint from
some major league/big $$$$$ customers and done everything they could to improve
said performance?
Even if they *do* open it up, Im sure the slashdot community will still hate them
because they don't use a GPL variant license. Its a lose-lose situation for Sun,
I don't get why they would even consider it. Is there a business case that will
generate a 9-figure revenue jump from giving away the source for Java? I don't
see it, but Im sure someone around here will happily clue me in.
No, using SSH does not mean you are using PKI technologies at all.
SSH is nice, it is secure, it is widespread. It is NOT PKI.
Re:Where to get decent photo editing done [a bit O
on
Adobe Lightroom Review
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Take Ansel Adams' top best most perfect photo ever. Odds are it can look even better if a skilled person were to process it, purposefully adjusting various attributes of the photo.
Someone already did this - Ansel Adams.
Not only did Adams carefully compose his pictures and often wait many hours and days for
exactly the right lighting, he was a master of the darkroom and creating perfect prints.
I seriously doubt that many people are capable of taking his originals and making them
look any better than he did.
Digital post-processing is analagous to working in a darkroom processing your own prints - it takes skill and vision. Rarely do any pictures go right from the film (or raw file) to print without any sort of processing or adjustments.
Yes, employers do want to see more than "book education", however, Sun makes it
pretty damn easy and cheap to get started on your own.
Download Solaris 10 and run it yourself, it's free you know. Why do you think
you have to go take some special class to figure it out? The source is free
(opensolaris.com), The documentation is free (docs.sun.com), and so are the numerous "blueprints" and technical whitepapers that they publish. Plus, there are the employee blogs (blogs.sun.com) that often go into great detail about how to exercise some of the more esoteric (and pretty amazing) features of Solaris 10.
Bottom line: The learning curve for administering Solaris 10 is not so steep if you are coming from a Linux or BSD background and its free and easy to get started.
There is this little detail that Solaris 8 sucked, especially when compared to the Linux versions at that time.
What?!?!
Solaris 8 was probably the most successful of all versions of Solaris.
At the time that it came out (late 1990s), Linux was not nearly
as useful or widespread as it is today. If you compare Solaris 8 with
a Linux release from TODAY, then perhaps you might think "it sucks" by not having
all the kewl eye-candy and desktop features of a modern OS, but
I'd wager that a Solaris 8 box still outperforms even the most up-to-date
Linux release (choose your favorite distro) on multi-processor big iron servers.
There are probabaly Solaris 8 servers online today that have been running continously for several years without crashes or unscheduled reboots. I doubt you could find any 1998/1999 Linux distros that perform nearly as well.
2. Find a real, living recruiter. Monster and CareerBuilder are not
the answer. They are one of many possibilities, but you gotta
work your contacts and make new ones to expand your reach. It helps
to have a human contact that you can talk to once in a while.
3. Move.
4. Ft. Wayne? No offense, but that just isn't a hotbed
of technological development. Try Austin, Raleigh-Durham, Denver,
Boston, Northern Virginia, NYC, LA, or Silicon Valley. Hell, move to any
MAJOR city (Indianapolis is cute, but probably not gonna be all that
hot when it comes to finding tech jobs). Find a friend to move with
you and share the rent for a while. Yes, some of those places
are more expensive than Ft. Wayne, but they also have jobs that
pay better and offer a bigger variety of opportunities. The tradeoff
in the long run is more than worth the initial sticker-shock.
5. Borrow money from family, live with a relative, do *something* before
you get stuck taking a crappy job for 5 or 6 years and realize you've
wasted your time and energy and haven't achieved a goddamn thing and
are no closer to finding a technically intersting CAREER. Do it while
you are young, it gets harder and harder to make major changes like
that as you grow older, trust me. If the jobs are not in your area
you HAVE TO go to where the jobs are.
6. Network yourself like crazy. Follow up any and all leads.
Really? If your car's engine has a problem, do you sue the machinist who made the faulty part or just sue his company? Individual engineers who work for a company that creates software are responsible within the company, but should not be exposed personally. The company takes the ultimate responsibility for the products they produce. If they shortchange the development cycle in order to rush to market and the product is crap, the company takes the hit, not the engineer who wrote the code.
Slashdot Mirror
Most modern protocols and standards are designed to be agile. Basically, this means that they don't mandate any one particular algorithm, but rather are designed such that alternatives can be used. Otherwise, many specs would be woefully out-of-date every few years as computing power and cryptographic algorithms advance. The 3 examples you give above are all considered "agile", read the specs and note that they use algorithm identifiers and allow for a wide variety of different algorithms to be used, none of the above are strictly bound to use SHA-1 or MD5.
The original article is full of misstatements like this doozy:
this SHA-1 encryption includes the world's gold standard Message-Digest algorithm 5 (MD5). Before Professor Wang cracked it, the MD5 could only be deciphered by today's fastest supercomputer running codes for more than a million years.
SHA-1 is NOT encryption, and it certainly doesn't "include" MD5. They are 2 completely different hashing algorithms. Hash algorithms are not "deciphered". Neither of them has been "cracked". They have been found, in theory, to not be as collision-proof as previously thought, but noone has yet found a way to take one block of data and modify it such that it would have an identical hash signature as the original. Both are merely found to be not quite as collision-proof (the most important thing for any hashing algorithm) as previously thought. This is old news.
The original article blows and contains no useful information whatsoever, it was written by someone who hasn't the faintest hint of knowledge about cryptography or mathematics in general.
*If* I buy a PS3, it will be so I can play cool games and watch Hi-Def (blu-ray) movies, not so I can load Linux and surf the web on a 65" screen.
Just because you *can* doesn't mean you *should*.
"Lots of people" ?? Gee, that sounds like hard, scientific, evidence. I'm not a Sony defender by any means (still playing my 4 year old PS2 just fine), but to insinuate that XB360/HD-DVD as king's of the hill is a little premature. PS3 has only been available in very limited fashion for about 2 months. XB360 has been out for how a while and still lags behind the old PS2 in sales. The high-end XB360 is $400. Tack on the cost of the HD-DVD and you are probably gonna spend over $600, same as you would for a PS3.
Neither HD-DVD or Blu-Ray really excite me much now, at least as a video medium. DVDs in progressive scan on a high-quality bigscreen TV look pretty damn good to my tired old eyes. HiDef discs might be nice, but not enough to justify the change, at least not for a couple of years.
Get real - Linux tracing capabilities are like primitive caveman tools compared to DTrace. Just because something wasn't developed by the "Linux community" (whatever the hell that means) doesn't mean it is worthless. ZFS is a major evolutionary step forward for file systems. Again, just because it wasn't born and raised as a sourceforge project doesn't mean it must be crap. Take off the blinders, zealot. Great technology knows no religion, it can come from anywhere. Microsoft, Sun, Oracle, et al, are not staffed by idiots (well, at least not in the engineering ranks). Just because they work for "the man" doesn't make their contributions to the field of software any less relevant or useful. Judge the tools by their merits, ignore the religion.
Whether or not OpenSolaris "takes over" in 2007 remains to be seen, but to dismiss the contributions of Sun's engineers (or Microsoft's for that matter) is to ignore history and to ignore some truly innovative contributions to the field.
A "bra" bomber would have made flying a bit more interesting.
NASA is one of the most poorly managed bureaucratic nightmares in the entire US Goverment, and that is saying something. I think the chances of congress actually funding this thing to completion are about 0. NASA will say just about anything to grab a headline and generate some publicity (and subsequenly, a piece of the budget), but the fact is that they rarely deliver what they promise.
If they could just deliver something on time and relatively close to the budget that they originally request, they might have more success and generate more faith in congress, but as it stands, NASA has a horrible track record and is rife with politics typical of any other government agency.
The moon is just a giant ball of rotton cheese anyway, what the hell are we going to do if they actually succeed?
I'd much rather see the money spent on establishing an actually useful space station which could hold more than 3 people and didn't spring deadly leaks all the time.
Regarding the Zune thing - aren't there already like 50 different MP3 players on the market - not counting the iPod family? So again, who the hell cares? What a stupid article.
It's hard to tell. U2 didn't draw huge crowds immediately. Even after they released their 3rd album, "War", in 1983, they were still basically an opening act or playing small venues - and Oh, don't I regret not seeing them in a club back then (I was in high school/college at the time, Im an old man now). Check back in 5 years and see which of the big acts of today are still relevant or if you regret not seeing some of todays bands while they are still playing bars and clubs.
-Richard Stallman
Sun.
What else would you expect from IBM? Their entire Linux strategy is based on the idea of luring people in with Linux and then signing them up for ridiculously overpriced "consulting services' that usually results in a recommendation to purchase their own proprietary hardware running AIX and ever more extensive service contracts and recurring revenue for IBM. They are now seeing customers running Solaris 10 on IBM hardware and more and more requests for Solaris 10 instead of their own stuff and its not a pleasant prospect to see where the trends are heading for IBM.
When they open AIX and their Power chips like Sun has done with Solaris and SPARC, then they can compare and see how things stack up. For now, its just alot of sour grapes from an aging dinosaur to one that has recently been seen rising up again.
It would be nice if they would maintain some of the products they already spewed out or at least issued the occasional bug fix. Picasa2 is a real nice little tool (great for quick fixes and for organizing photos), but it has alot of annoying little bugs that don't seem to have workarounds yet and they have been very slow about releasing updates for it.
I never said I am against the freedoms of open sourcing or that having freedom is a bad thing. I am against using an idealistic line of reasoning to argue in favor of "freeing" a bit of software. Arguments about forking and standardization and fracturing the community are all valid and, IMO, pragmatic arguments for keeping *some* software closed. Arguments for opening Java simply because one believes strongly that all software should be "free" are never going to be resolved because it then becomes a religious issue. Explain to me, in practical terms, how opening Java will make your life easier or better. That is what I am not getting from your position. I get that it would be nice because it would fit your world-view, but how exactly would that benefit Sun and how would it improve the software? I just haven't read alot of convincing arguments as to why it would be a good thing, from you or anyone else.
I am not an anti-opensource person, I use it and enjoy it. I've contributed code to mozilla and gnome, and you and I probably agree on more than you would expect (I read your blog). On this matter, however, we are getting nowhere as you apparently think I am an intellectually lazy dolt.
Nice.
Look, Mr. Ideals, this is a basic argument of pragmatism versus idealism. I prefer to be a pragmatist, I have jobs to do and need the tools to do them. I don't give a shit if the tool is free or costs me some $$ or is encumbered by a restrictive license. If it is the best tool for the job, I'm going to use it. And, I don't give a shit if you never use a piece of proprietary software again or not. If you get everything you need from the "free" ( beer or speech, whatever), then good for you.
It's just fucking annoying to hear the same tired arguments from idealists who try to push their version of "free" (beer/speech/lunch) on everyone piece of software that doesn't fit their vision.
Go enjoy your idealistic religion, that is cool with me. Just don't come knocking on my door handing out pamphlets from Richard Stallman.
This is a strawman argument - you are proposing something that will never happen and then propping it up with rhetorical questions that cannot be answered. One thing is for sure, not all software is ever going to be free. The world would be a better place if more software actually WORKED and was released with no bugs. That's not going to happen either, regardless of whatever religious tag is associated with the code. There is plenty of shitty open source software out there, just as there is plenty of shitty proprietary software. This line of reasoning leads nowhere.
I still fail to see the benefits of "open sourcing" Java. How will it be improved? It's not as if the engineers at Sun are stupid and don't know how to engineer enterprise software. Don't you think Sun has heard that same complaint from some major league/big $$$$$ customers and done everything they could to improve said performance?
Even if they *do* open it up, Im sure the slashdot community will still hate them because they don't use a GPL variant license. Its a lose-lose situation for Sun, I don't get why they would even consider it. Is there a business case that will generate a 9-figure revenue jump from giving away the source for Java? I don't see it, but Im sure someone around here will happily clue me in.
No, using SSH does not mean you are using PKI technologies at all. SSH is nice, it is secure, it is widespread. It is NOT PKI.
Someone already did this - Ansel Adams.
Not only did Adams carefully compose his pictures and often wait many hours and days for exactly the right lighting, he was a master of the darkroom and creating perfect prints. I seriously doubt that many people are capable of taking his originals and making them look any better than he did.
Digital post-processing is analagous to working in a darkroom processing your own prints - it takes skill and vision. Rarely do any pictures go right from the film (or raw file) to print without any sort of processing or adjustments.
Download Solaris 10 and run it yourself, it's free you know. Why do you think you have to go take some special class to figure it out? The source is free (opensolaris.com), The documentation is free (docs.sun.com), and so are the numerous "blueprints" and technical whitepapers that they publish. Plus, there are the employee blogs (blogs.sun.com) that often go into great detail about how to exercise some of the more esoteric (and pretty amazing) features of Solaris 10.
Bottom line: The learning curve for administering Solaris 10 is not so steep if you are coming from a Linux or BSD background and its free and easy to get started.
What?!?!
Solaris 8 was probably the most successful of all versions of Solaris. At the time that it came out (late 1990s), Linux was not nearly as useful or widespread as it is today. If you compare Solaris 8 with a Linux release from TODAY, then perhaps you might think "it sucks" by not having all the kewl eye-candy and desktop features of a modern OS, but I'd wager that a Solaris 8 box still outperforms even the most up-to-date Linux release (choose your favorite distro) on multi-processor big iron servers. There are probabaly Solaris 8 servers online today that have been running continously for several years without crashes or unscheduled reboots. I doubt you could find any 1998/1999 Linux distros that perform nearly as well.
2. Find a real, living recruiter. Monster and CareerBuilder are not the answer. They are one of many possibilities, but you gotta work your contacts and make new ones to expand your reach. It helps to have a human contact that you can talk to once in a while.
3. Move.
4. Ft. Wayne? No offense, but that just isn't a hotbed of technological development. Try Austin, Raleigh-Durham, Denver, Boston, Northern Virginia, NYC, LA, or Silicon Valley. Hell, move to any MAJOR city (Indianapolis is cute, but probably not gonna be all that hot when it comes to finding tech jobs). Find a friend to move with you and share the rent for a while. Yes, some of those places are more expensive than Ft. Wayne, but they also have jobs that pay better and offer a bigger variety of opportunities. The tradeoff in the long run is more than worth the initial sticker-shock.
5. Borrow money from family, live with a relative, do *something* before you get stuck taking a crappy job for 5 or 6 years and realize you've wasted your time and energy and haven't achieved a goddamn thing and are no closer to finding a technically intersting CAREER. Do it while you are young, it gets harder and harder to make major changes like that as you grow older, trust me. If the jobs are not in your area you HAVE TO go to where the jobs are.
6. Network yourself like crazy. Follow up any and all leads.
7. Good luck.
Really? If your car's engine has a problem, do you sue the machinist who made the faulty part or just sue his company? Individual engineers who work for a company that creates software are responsible within the company, but should not be exposed personally. The company takes the ultimate responsibility for the products they produce. If they shortchange the development cycle in order to rush to market and the product is crap, the company takes the hit, not the engineer who wrote the code.
I think every business he tried to start since leaving Netscape have bombed.
Color me unimpressed by lucky Mark's business acumen.
So they chose a license that is most compatible with their business needs. Wow. Big surprize. What is wrong with that?