I think you live in a fantasy world of Standin' Up To Da Man, where you release info, even when its hurtful to what your nation's engaged in, on principle.
What if your nation is engaged in an activity that's counterproductive or one that violates human rights? In a situation like that it is the duty of every citizen to petition the government until it changes its ways.
I do not think the publisher is being a good citizen. I think the publisher is reacting to pressure being placed on it by the national security apparatus and is helping the government cover up its incompetence. All this ensures is that the errors and incompetents are allowed more time to fester and compound, hurting our effort in Afghanistan even more.
Second, people have Flash largely because it came preinstalled. I don't know of anyone who has actually gone out of their way to install Flash. This means that those statistics could change on a dime.
I don't know that Flash comes "pre-installed" per se, but most mainstream browsers (like IE and Firefox) make it very easy and unobtrusive to install Flash. So in practice, there's not a lot of difference between the person that installs Flash and the person who has it pre-installed.
He's not. In his (and therefore Apple Computer Inc.'s) opinion, Flash is outdated and is inappropriate for mobile platforms. There's no force that's pushing people to use (or not use) Flash. The only thing is the same fanboy-ism and bandwagon following that you see everywhere else in this industry.
That said, I still disagree with the article. You can't justify claims about the future by pointing to snapshot figures. Sure, Flash has 97%+ market share *right* *now*. But, then again, Internet Explorer had 90% of the browser market share when IE5 was riding high. Microsoft's inattention (to the point of dissolving the IE team) led to that lead being erased in a matter of a few years. If Flash doesn't improve its performance on mobile devices, it could find itself in the same position as IE.
Square Enix used to be in that list. Lately, though, the Final Fantasy series has dropped to Madden levels in terms of originality and innovation. Sure, the plot is different in every game, and the graphics get a bump up, but the gameplay mechanics have consistently been different combinations of the mechanics from Final Fantasies 6, 7, 8, and (to some extent) 9.
From the above, I've concluded that Square Enix jumped the shark around 1999, right before the launch of Final Fantasy IX. Every title after that game has been the same ingredients, just mixed in different ways.
Do you have kids? I know that many of my co-workers complain that their kids won't communicate with them via any form but text messages. So if you're the parents of one of those teens that sends more than 100 text messages per day, I'd imagine that your text message numbers are higher than average as well.
Everyone 45 and younger now has significant proficiency in computing skills, compared to users past.
That is absolutely and utterly false. I've met kids my age (mid-twenties) who have become flustered because the default browser on my laptop wasn't IE. Just because they know enough to post on Facebook doesn't mean they know enough to survive a change in their operating system. Heck, even power users can be flustered by the fact that there aren't "drives" any more on Linux. They're used to seeing C: or D: to indicate which drive they're currently operating on. The concept of having a unified filesystem where different drives and partitions can be mounted to various directories seemingly at will flustered me at first. However, I was self motivated, and kept trying until I understood how the filesystem worked. The average Windows power user isn't going to be that motivated.
The Linux 'brand' has been so tarnished by this migration that its impossible to rescue. Migrating to Windows 7 won't fix their issues, but it will give them a new scapegoat.
The state Department of Homeland Security is a "fusion center" serving to "facilitate" cooperation between state and federal authorities. Given that, I wouldn't rule out federal involvement.
There's a big difference in the problem. Namely, its possible to work at a coarser level of granularity when dealing with galaxies. You might not be able to simulate individual stars, but you can simulate star clusters and the clumps of dark matter to get approximations. With the brain simulation, its not possible to abstract away as much detail, hence the higher hardware requirements.
The Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security doesn't benefit from disclosing the names of protesters. However, the politicians in the Pennsylvania state legislature and the Pennsylvania governor's office most certainly do. Therefore, they start pressuring the Homeland Security Department to collect this information and share it with the oil companies involved.
Those jamming devices are illegal and if caught, you will get in serious trouble for using them. The trouble is that its very hard to localize the effects of a jammer - either its too weak and it doesn't cover the ends of the classroom or (more likely) its too strong and it spills over into neighboring areas. This has public safety implications, and, as such, use of wireless jamming devices is frowned upon by the FCC and law enforcement.
some simluations run a long time and create a lot of data which would be costly to reproduce, and what I wish someone had told me early on was that I should comment my *data files*, not just my code. Each file should include the exact parameters used to create it, an explanation of what each column represents, and preferably there should be a way of knowing what version of your simulation code was used to create it.
Well done. I've worked on some simulation code too, and I can say that its an absolute bear to try to reproduce a simulation when you don't know what the original parameters were. Sometimes you can try to guess the parameters from the data, but when you do, you're never sure whether your guess was correct, or whether your implementation of the model is subtly different and happened to produce the same output for different input parameters.
Having said that, I don't think commenting data is as big of an issue in the business side of things, simply because business data tends to be stored in databases, rather than files. Databases have a lot more "natural" documentation around them, since their columns are named (the names may not make sense, but at least they exist), and the relationships between data tables are captured with foreign keys.
Hear hear. I think that a large part of the reason that programmers don't have any idea whether something is passed by value or reference is that these days, all the new programming languages pass by reference. If you're programming in Java, C#, Python, or Perl, the number of times a user defined type will be passed by value can usually be counted on one hand.
The problem with stored procs. is that there aren't as many tools for testing and debugging as there are with more mainstream programming languages. I understand that this isn't a total deal breaker - stored procedures are more difficult to test, but testing isn't impossible. I do think, though, that ease of testing and debugging is one factor that needs to be taken into consideration when deciding whether to implement something in the application or in the database.
What damage? What stolen files? The military has said nothing about files being stolen. From the article:
The worm, dubbed agent.btz, caused the military’s network administrators major headaches. It took the Pentagon nearly 14 months of stop and go effort to clean out the worm — a process the military called “Operation Buckshot Yankee.” The endeavor was so tortuous that it helped lead to a major reorganization of the armed forces’ information defenses, including the creation of the military’s new Cyber Command.
But exactly how much (if any) information was compromised because of agent.btz remains unclear. And members of the military involved in Operation Buckshot Yankee are reluctant to call agent.btz the work of a hostile government — despite ongoing talk that the Russians were behind it.
No mention of any files stolen. All the article says is that it took the military 14 months to clean the worm off its network. Given the size of the military's network, the level of bureaucracy involved in administrating it, and the incompetence of said bureaucrats, I don't find this to be a surprising figure at all. It doesn't speak to the sophistication of the attack. It highlights the lack of sophistication in the military's network administration skills.
Sure, those numbers are impressive, but they're tiny compared to the thirteen trillion dollar American economy. As a percentage of its overall GDP, America exports less than almost any other industrialized nation. Certainly we export a lot less (proportionally) than either Germany or Japan. And they export less than China.
Your explanation gives the Pentagon a lot of benefit. In my view, its equally likely that these government officials are exaggerating the impact and sophistication of the attack to keep from looking like fools when the inevitable congressional hearing on this subject arises. You'll get a lot more sympathy from the senator on the other side of the hearing room if you say you were hacked by a foreign intelligence agency as opposed to some 16 year old Chinese kid. Given how hard it is to trace the origin of these attacks, its quite easy to twist the limited evidence available to support one hypothesis or the other.
My take on this? Some DoD employee brought a thumbdrive from home and infected his work PC. When others used their thumbdrives to copy information from this person's PC, they also got infected. Thanks to autorun and the relatively low profile this attack kept (e.g. it didn't do much to slow down infected computers) it took a long time for the IT department to find out about the infection. At that point the worm had become endemic to the network and many man-hours were spent rooting it out, hence the claim of "large expenses".
Even if you don't find my explanation entirely reasonable, you have to admit that the existing evidence doesn't exactly prove that the Pentagon was attacked by sophisticated and nefarious spies. Could they have been? Sure. But its equally likely that they were attacked by a garden variety piece of malware for which they were unprepared.
The damning portion of this experience isn't that a worm got on to military networks. The damage comes from the fact that this was an autorun worm. These worms are dependent entirely on human intervention to spread, and therefore spread much more slowly than automated worms targeting operating system vulnerabilities. Yet the military was unable to defend itself against this inept attack. If they have trouble defeating an autorun worm (something that a reasonably competent IT department can handle) how are they going to defend against the more sophisticated threats that sure to be on the way?
The Civil War started because the South was afraid of losing its political power as the North's population and industrial base exploded thanks to the confluence of the Industrial Revolution and a rise in immigration from Europe. As such, the South wanted to secede from the Union in order to maintain political control over its own territory (including the ability to maintain slavery). The Union went to great lengths to prevent that from happening, including suspending rights to habeas corpus and implementing military tribunals.
If any territory or group of individuals tried to rebel today, the government would treat the Constitution the same way as Lincoln's government treated it in 1861. As Lincoln himself stated when he suspended habeas corpus, "In nearly one-third of the States had subverted the whole of the laws . . . Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" The government can and will suspend Constitutional rights during an existential crisis. It has happened before, and it most definitely will happen again if an insurrection gains enough momentum to threaten the integrity of the union.
Blaming Wikileaks for publishing the names of Afghan informants is like blaming the noticeboard when someone pins a compromising picture of you on it. Instead of shooting the messenger, why doesn't the American military look over its grossly inadequate information security protocols and try to reform those so that future disclosures of this sort are prevented? The fact that its easier for the government to sue Wikileaks than it is for them to actually find the person leaking the information speaks ill about our government's ability to secure classified information.
Really? You're saying that the US assassinates journalists when they get too close to a story that is embarrassing to the government? Or do we implement a Great Firewall to keep our people from seeing content that is objectionable to government (including Slashdot)?
The US isn't perfect, but our press is a lot freer than those in Russia and China. Its just that our press uses that freedom to deliver the information that people want rather than information that people need.
Wikileaks verifies the provenance of its documents, and tries to collect background information to put things in context. I'd say that counts as journalism in my book. And how do you define "broad audience", anyway? I mean, under a strict interpretation of that phrase, Slashdot and Ars Technica wouldn't count as journalism, since they cater to a fairly narrow band of the overall populace.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you live in a fantasy world of Standin' Up To Da Man, where you release info, even when its hurtful to what your nation's engaged in, on principle.
What if your nation is engaged in an activity that's counterproductive or one that violates human rights? In a situation like that it is the duty of every citizen to petition the government until it changes its ways.
I do not think the publisher is being a good citizen. I think the publisher is reacting to pressure being placed on it by the national security apparatus and is helping the government cover up its incompetence. All this ensures is that the errors and incompetents are allowed more time to fester and compound, hurting our effort in Afghanistan even more.
Second, people have Flash largely because it came preinstalled. I don't know of anyone who has actually gone out of their way to install Flash. This means that those statistics could change on a dime.
I don't know that Flash comes "pre-installed" per se, but most mainstream browsers (like IE and Firefox) make it very easy and unobtrusive to install Flash. So in practice, there's not a lot of difference between the person that installs Flash and the person who has it pre-installed.
He's not. In his (and therefore Apple Computer Inc.'s) opinion, Flash is outdated and is inappropriate for mobile platforms. There's no force that's pushing people to use (or not use) Flash. The only thing is the same fanboy-ism and bandwagon following that you see everywhere else in this industry.
That said, I still disagree with the article. You can't justify claims about the future by pointing to snapshot figures. Sure, Flash has 97%+ market share *right* *now*. But, then again, Internet Explorer had 90% of the browser market share when IE5 was riding high. Microsoft's inattention (to the point of dissolving the IE team) led to that lead being erased in a matter of a few years. If Flash doesn't improve its performance on mobile devices, it could find itself in the same position as IE.
Square Enix used to be in that list. Lately, though, the Final Fantasy series has dropped to Madden levels in terms of originality and innovation. Sure, the plot is different in every game, and the graphics get a bump up, but the gameplay mechanics have consistently been different combinations of the mechanics from Final Fantasies 6, 7, 8, and (to some extent) 9.
From the above, I've concluded that Square Enix jumped the shark around 1999, right before the launch of Final Fantasy IX. Every title after that game has been the same ingredients, just mixed in different ways.
Do you have kids? I know that many of my co-workers complain that their kids won't communicate with them via any form but text messages. So if you're the parents of one of those teens that sends more than 100 text messages per day, I'd imagine that your text message numbers are higher than average as well.
Everyone 45 and younger now has significant proficiency in computing skills, compared to users past.
That is absolutely and utterly false. I've met kids my age (mid-twenties) who have become flustered because the default browser on my laptop wasn't IE. Just because they know enough to post on Facebook doesn't mean they know enough to survive a change in their operating system. Heck, even power users can be flustered by the fact that there aren't "drives" any more on Linux. They're used to seeing C: or D: to indicate which drive they're currently operating on. The concept of having a unified filesystem where different drives and partitions can be mounted to various directories seemingly at will flustered me at first. However, I was self motivated, and kept trying until I understood how the filesystem worked. The average Windows power user isn't going to be that motivated.
The Linux 'brand' has been so tarnished by this migration that its impossible to rescue. Migrating to Windows 7 won't fix their issues, but it will give them a new scapegoat.
The state Department of Homeland Security is a "fusion center" serving to "facilitate" cooperation between state and federal authorities. Given that, I wouldn't rule out federal involvement.
There's a big difference in the problem. Namely, its possible to work at a coarser level of granularity when dealing with galaxies. You might not be able to simulate individual stars, but you can simulate star clusters and the clumps of dark matter to get approximations. With the brain simulation, its not possible to abstract away as much detail, hence the higher hardware requirements.
How much do you want to bet that National Security Letters were involved here somehow?
The Pennsylvania Department of Homeland Security doesn't benefit from disclosing the names of protesters. However, the politicians in the Pennsylvania state legislature and the Pennsylvania governor's office most certainly do. Therefore, they start pressuring the Homeland Security Department to collect this information and share it with the oil companies involved.
Those jamming devices are illegal and if caught, you will get in serious trouble for using them. The trouble is that its very hard to localize the effects of a jammer - either its too weak and it doesn't cover the ends of the classroom or (more likely) its too strong and it spills over into neighboring areas. This has public safety implications, and, as such, use of wireless jamming devices is frowned upon by the FCC and law enforcement.
some simluations run a long time and create a lot of data which would be costly to reproduce, and what I wish someone had told me early on was that I should comment my *data files*, not just my code. Each file should include the exact parameters used to create it, an explanation of what each column represents, and preferably there should be a way of knowing what version of your simulation code was used to create it.
Well done. I've worked on some simulation code too, and I can say that its an absolute bear to try to reproduce a simulation when you don't know what the original parameters were. Sometimes you can try to guess the parameters from the data, but when you do, you're never sure whether your guess was correct, or whether your implementation of the model is subtly different and happened to produce the same output for different input parameters.
Having said that, I don't think commenting data is as big of an issue in the business side of things, simply because business data tends to be stored in databases, rather than files. Databases have a lot more "natural" documentation around them, since their columns are named (the names may not make sense, but at least they exist), and the relationships between data tables are captured with foreign keys.
Hear hear. I think that a large part of the reason that programmers don't have any idea whether something is passed by value or reference is that these days, all the new programming languages pass by reference. If you're programming in Java, C#, Python, or Perl, the number of times a user defined type will be passed by value can usually be counted on one hand.
Er, C# is .NET. Also, the problem you cite isn't just limited to "proprietary" programming languages: look at Python 2 vs Python 3.
The problem with stored procs. is that there aren't as many tools for testing and debugging as there are with more mainstream programming languages. I understand that this isn't a total deal breaker - stored procedures are more difficult to test, but testing isn't impossible. I do think, though, that ease of testing and debugging is one factor that needs to be taken into consideration when deciding whether to implement something in the application or in the database.
What damage? What stolen files? The military has said nothing about files being stolen. From the article:
The worm, dubbed agent.btz, caused the military’s network administrators major headaches. It took the Pentagon nearly 14 months of stop and go effort to clean out the worm — a process the military called “Operation Buckshot Yankee.” The endeavor was so tortuous that it helped lead to a major reorganization of the armed forces’ information defenses, including the creation of the military’s new Cyber Command.
But exactly how much (if any) information was compromised because of agent.btz remains unclear. And members of the military involved in Operation Buckshot Yankee are reluctant to call agent.btz the work of a hostile government — despite ongoing talk that the Russians were behind it.
No mention of any files stolen. All the article says is that it took the military 14 months to clean the worm off its network. Given the size of the military's network, the level of bureaucracy involved in administrating it, and the incompetence of said bureaucrats, I don't find this to be a surprising figure at all. It doesn't speak to the sophistication of the attack. It highlights the lack of sophistication in the military's network administration skills.
Sure, those numbers are impressive, but they're tiny compared to the thirteen trillion dollar American economy. As a percentage of its overall GDP, America exports less than almost any other industrialized nation. Certainly we export a lot less (proportionally) than either Germany or Japan. And they export less than China.
Your explanation gives the Pentagon a lot of benefit. In my view, its equally likely that these government officials are exaggerating the impact and sophistication of the attack to keep from looking like fools when the inevitable congressional hearing on this subject arises. You'll get a lot more sympathy from the senator on the other side of the hearing room if you say you were hacked by a foreign intelligence agency as opposed to some 16 year old Chinese kid. Given how hard it is to trace the origin of these attacks, its quite easy to twist the limited evidence available to support one hypothesis or the other.
My take on this? Some DoD employee brought a thumbdrive from home and infected his work PC. When others used their thumbdrives to copy information from this person's PC, they also got infected. Thanks to autorun and the relatively low profile this attack kept (e.g. it didn't do much to slow down infected computers) it took a long time for the IT department to find out about the infection. At that point the worm had become endemic to the network and many man-hours were spent rooting it out, hence the claim of "large expenses".
Even if you don't find my explanation entirely reasonable, you have to admit that the existing evidence doesn't exactly prove that the Pentagon was attacked by sophisticated and nefarious spies. Could they have been? Sure. But its equally likely that they were attacked by a garden variety piece of malware for which they were unprepared.
The damning portion of this experience isn't that a worm got on to military networks. The damage comes from the fact that this was an autorun worm. These worms are dependent entirely on human intervention to spread, and therefore spread much more slowly than automated worms targeting operating system vulnerabilities. Yet the military was unable to defend itself against this inept attack. If they have trouble defeating an autorun worm (something that a reasonably competent IT department can handle) how are they going to defend against the more sophisticated threats that sure to be on the way?
The Civil War started because the South was afraid of losing its political power as the North's population and industrial base exploded thanks to the confluence of the Industrial Revolution and a rise in immigration from Europe. As such, the South wanted to secede from the Union in order to maintain political control over its own territory (including the ability to maintain slavery). The Union went to great lengths to prevent that from happening, including suspending rights to habeas corpus and implementing military tribunals.
If any territory or group of individuals tried to rebel today, the government would treat the Constitution the same way as Lincoln's government treated it in 1861. As Lincoln himself stated when he suspended habeas corpus, "In nearly one-third of the States had subverted the whole of the laws . . . Are all the laws, but one, to go unexecuted, and the government itself go to pieces, lest that one be violated?" The government can and will suspend Constitutional rights during an existential crisis. It has happened before, and it most definitely will happen again if an insurrection gains enough momentum to threaten the integrity of the union.
Damn straight. William Randolph Hearst was the Rupert Murdoch of his era. The Spanish-American War was their equivalent of our Iraq war.
Blaming Wikileaks for publishing the names of Afghan informants is like blaming the noticeboard when someone pins a compromising picture of you on it. Instead of shooting the messenger, why doesn't the American military look over its grossly inadequate information security protocols and try to reform those so that future disclosures of this sort are prevented? The fact that its easier for the government to sue Wikileaks than it is for them to actually find the person leaking the information speaks ill about our government's ability to secure classified information.
Really? You're saying that the US assassinates journalists when they get too close to a story that is embarrassing to the government? Or do we implement a Great Firewall to keep our people from seeing content that is objectionable to government (including Slashdot)?
The US isn't perfect, but our press is a lot freer than those in Russia and China. Its just that our press uses that freedom to deliver the information that people want rather than information that people need.
Wikileaks verifies the provenance of its documents, and tries to collect background information to put things in context. I'd say that counts as journalism in my book. And how do you define "broad audience", anyway? I mean, under a strict interpretation of that phrase, Slashdot and Ars Technica wouldn't count as journalism, since they cater to a fairly narrow band of the overall populace.