I know of at least one large site that uses telnet and other unencrypted protocols. They do use password + token encrypted authentication, but that is the exception. Their security policies are Orwellian. Their IDS watches everything. Encrypted sessions are assumed to be evil, and are hunted down and killed. The rest is matched against statistical usage patterns and off-pattern usage is popped up to a security administrator with a complete session trace.
That is all internal of course. Off-site access is through VPN.
All of this could not be easily done with encrypted protocols.
Your attitude doesn't make sense. After they give two weeks notice, they aren't going to give you 100%? What about the four weeks before that when they were considering quitting and/or taking long "lunch" hours for interviews at other companies?
And face it, unless lives are on the line, you aren't getting 100% from your people anyway. No one gives a true 100% for an accounting package or a web site. It just isn't that important and all the morale speeches in the world won't make it that important. So if your employee's last two weeks are at 60-80% effort, so what? Those two weeks are likely just as good as some previous weeks you did pay them for.
And about the "great new job" conversations with the other employees. Since this is Slashdot, I'll assume tech employees. Since I am one, I can say from personal experience that leaving a job hardly cuts off communication. Any friends they have are still in email and IM and cell phone lists. If they're in the same city, they meet at professional groups in town, a Linux group, a Java group, ACM or IEEE meetings, etc. If the new job is in the same tech park, they meet for lunch.
So the people left behind are still going to hear about the great new job.
For me the extra slow Slashdot is caused by their ?'s in their link URLs. Browsers and proxies are allowed to cache all GET requests, even with arguments, but so many web developers screwed up that idea that now browsers and cache proxies don't trust a URL with a ?.
So I have to reload EVERY SINGLE FREAKING JS and CSS FILE whenever I open a new browser to slashdot.
Flash is as fast as you want to pay for. Do you think those solid state hard drives that use fiber channel and sell for $15,000 read at 7MB/s? Heck no.
The SanDisk Ultra IV cards are another example. They do about 40 MB/s. It's basically a RAID stripe across the internal flash chips.
Consider that their mothers may believe their children fighting in Iraq are doing a good thing, and support them.
It isn't like the soldiers are there just for the fun of it. They're part of ensuring a stable Iraqi government that will be a democracy good for its citizens rather than a tyranny.
Plenty of mothers support their children risking their lives for the good of others. Life and safety are not the most important values, even for mothers.
I'm running Vista right now. I don't know what sort of system you're using but this is a Athlon 3800 X2 with 1 GB RAM, and Vista works great. I've got several IE windows open and Media Player. RAM usage is about 650 MB. CPU is averaging about 5%. Opening any control panels or applications like Freecell, Wordpad or the Photo Gallery takes less than 1 second, and usually feels instant.
For some comparison, I run Gentoo Linux on a Athlon 64 3200 laptop with 1 GB RAM. With a few browsers open and Evolution running, and Beagle indexing, RAM usage often tops 800 MB. Applications there also run quite quickly, except for Open Office, which takes over 20 seconds. Even Eclipse starts faster than OO.
So Vista is not any worse than Linux on performance, and looks prettier at the same time. (Definitely prettier: I had to quit using Compiz due to some nasty bugs involving X.org 7.1, Compiz, Gnome, focus and input grab).
There's an option to fix that resize problem. I'm not going to look up the details, but what it does it disable real-time window resizing and instead stretches the existing window contents, then does the actual resize event when you let go. It usually looks quite good and makes resize *much* faster.
I run a 1 GB laptop and it hits swap all the time. You should try running Gentoo and compiling KDE with kdeenablefinal turned on. GCC will hit 800 MB, easily.
Oh yes, the equality thing. It can really surprise you.
For example, I was debugging an infinite loop in some SVG library. I run Gentoo and I compile with crazy options, because what is life without risk? Anyway, it turns out that if you do a thing like A = B, run a few functions and then test equality, A != B. This is because the storage in RAM and the storage in registers have different precision. It happened to work on the original developer's systems, but you've got to remember: Not all the world is a Intel i386/i686.
I believe that having the GUI design and the coding happen in separate applications is better because it pushes the developer to see a separation between the GUI and the application.
The GUI is not the application. A developer with a well designed program should be able to bolt on a GUI, or HTML Forms, or AJAX, or a command line, and have the application's core code not change.
Haven't any of you been playing with the Vista betas? Vista has a sort of swap file / prefetch feature that you can enable on USB flash drive. Vista first benchmarks the device, to determine if it is fast enough. Then you can create a sort of swap file on it, as big as you like.
Re:What's the copy protection like?
on
Prey Review
·
· Score: 1
I hate digging out the DVD / CD as well. I like to just click on the icon and play.
But using the laptop battery as a reason for not requiring the DVD? No laptop I know of can play a game like Prey and run longer than an hour and a half on battery anyway. Probably less.
If it wasn't interesting, why are you even reading a/. article on IPv6 in the first place?
We've been waiting for years for everyone to just wake up and use IPv6 but that just isn't going to happen, so some kind of transistion method is necessary.
What dialog boxes need is a quiz at the end instead of an OK button.
Instead of: Format C: This will erase all data on this disk! OK?
It would be: Format C: This will erase all data on this disk!
Erasing means: 1. My data will be copied to Microsoft for safety in case I miss it later. 2. My data will be scanned for dangerous viruses. 3. My data will be GONE and I will NEVER SEE it again.
Enter the correct answer: ___
And of course, the questions would be randomly selected from a list, so the user cannot memorize "3" as the correct answer.
When Wal-Mart moves in, undercuts all the local businesses by selling at a loss, drives them out of business, and then raises prices, Wal-Mart is forcing me to buy from Wal-Mart.
Walmart employees went around to the other businesses and, what? Shot the owners? Threatened their families? They walked you into the store at gunpoint?
No, I don't think so.
Your neighbors put the local businesses out of business. Even then, you aren't forced to shop at Walmart. It's just more convenient. You're still perfectly free to pretend that you live deep in the Alaska wilderness, drive hundreds of miles to the nearest farmer's market and buy your six month supply of rice and beans.
Where do I fall on it? The FSF is full of it when they say that you can't write a proprietary binary that links into GPL software.
The only thing that the GPL can control is derived works. If the work isn't derived, it isn't under any sort of GPL control.
Now, creating a module that can link statically or dynamically without it being derived IS a tricky thing. But it can be done.
If the interface is well documented, the code creation trail is legally clear, and ideally it works unmodified on at least one non-GPL code base, the module cannot be derived from GPL code and the GPL doesn't apply. At all.
I'm not sure ATI or nVidia's modules qualify but they are close.
Actually distributing a static linked binary containing GPL code would probably be a GPL violation. (Note that nVidia's binary doesn't contain GPL code, and "magic numbers" from header files are not copyright, any more than the same sort of information taken from Windows headers taint WINE.)
Distributing a non-GPL-derived dynamic linked binary, or a binary with end-user compiled glue code would not be a GPL violation. The end-user just happens to dynamically link it to GPL code, or compile it with GPL code, but that is his right under the GPL and not the distributor's problem.
If your database can't handle recovery from a snapshot, then it's junk. Get a new DB.
The POINT of all those transaction log files, DB journals, and all the other things that make ACID guarantees real, is to recover from failure. A filesystem snapshot looks exactly like a system that just had a power loss. Your database center may have redundant power backups and all that shiznit, but I bet the datacenter still has a Big Red Button, so your DB had better be able to do recovery ANYWAY.
Some DB backup tools are designed to work with filesystem snapshots. They create a fast recovery point and stop updating the main DB files until after the snapshot. Otherwise the DB has to do basically the same thing as a snapshot, holding open an hours long transaction while doing the backup. When the filesystem or block layer can do a better, more efficient job than the DB, it makes more sense to let it take the load.
Just trying to make you see that snapshots exist for good reason, they do the job very well, and you should look into using the feature; some day you might need it.
I live in Colorado. I've driven icy mountain roads every winter for 15 years, starting with a 83 Toyota Tercel and now a Subaru STi, so I know what I'm talking about. I can tell you that there's no frelling way a car is going to stop faster on ice with locked brakes. If you're going to lock up the wheels, you're better off using ABS.
Here's a quote from a Swedish site that did braking studies: "The average deceleration was greater with ABS than without for all 24 combinations of tyres and road surfaces. However, many individual tests on the A-track resulted in greater deceleration when wheels were locked-up digging themselves down in the loose snow to a level with greater adhesion."
On ice, it'll never dig down through the snow, so that doesn't apply.
I find the Subaru ABS to be very effective. Threshold braking is more effective, but it still works. Brake until you get ABS chatter, then back off. There ya go.
ABS is really handy in situations where the traction isn't what you expect. There might be gravel on the pavement that you didn't notice, or a patch of glare ice hidden under a fresh layer of snow. That *whack* on the brake pedal is a lot better than not noticing your wheels stopped turning. Glare ice can do that. And I really doubt you can react fast enough to keep the wheels turning if you were doing heavy braking in a corner and hit gravel on pavement. Having the wheels locked up from the gravel slide when it hits pavement again is BAD.
I read the link about more deaths in ABS cars. The reason they give for it is drivers panic and quickly turn to avoid the collision, causing the car to hit on the less protected sides or driving off the road or into oncoming traffic. Ironically, ABS is working exactly as designed, giving the driver perfect control during a panic stop, but most drivers were better off when the car ignored them.
Subaru's "traction control" is all in the drive train instead of braking the loose wheel, and I love it. LOVE IT! When I had the STi for the first snow storm, it still had summer tires on it. Summer tires are basically slicks with rain grooves. I STILL managed to get it up and down 8 miles of mountain road on about an inch of unplowed, ungravelled snow that was packed by other drivers (more slippery than fresh powder). Do THAT in an old no-aids Camaro. I see cars like that struggling to even get out of their driveway down where it's FLAT. Watching them spin one little wheel is pathetic.
Driver aids are great. Badly implemented driver aids are crap.
In Quake 1 multiplayer, players who tried to play with the keyboard were called "targets." They were ridiculously easy to circle strafe and they couldn't dodge and aim at the same time.
Sorry, no, but you're the idiot here, 10GHz. What bladesjester said is that too many scientists refuse to even look at anything that might go against their favorite theories. That isn't science, it's religion.
Science must accept all the facts. If they go against well supported theories, then the new facts have to be carefully examined, sure. But inconvenient facts cannot be discarded out of hand by real scientists.
Nor can inconvenient questions be answered with, "It must be that way, or the theory of [whatever] would be false." Science has to say, "Interesting question. How can we create an experiment to answer it?"
He also said that theories aren't hard facts, which is only the truth. Simply look at every theory in the past that had to be modified or discarded in the face of new evidence.
Scientific theories are not "THE TRUTH." Theories are just the best available explanations that account for all of the known facts and make the fewest possible unprovable assumptions.
In a crime investigation, "THE TRUTH" and the theory is the difference between what really happened and what the detective thinks happened. All the evidence can point to the husband murdering his wife, while in reality the one-armed man actually did do it.
PDF is a horrible idea for ebooks. Are you reading the book in order to look at the pretty page with its perfect layout? I don't know about you, but I'm reading it for the story or for the information.
PDF means that I might have to read text that is either too small but I can see the whole page, or I have to scroll around to read the page.
HTML or a similar markup language means I can read the page and have the device word wrap it properly for its screen.
Slashdot Mirror
We're definitely going to need to overhaul our copyright laws.
What happens to copyright when your neural implants can record and transmit everything you see and hear with perfect digital fidelity?
At that point, going to a movie and making a copy of the movie are the same thing.
The only way to avoid that would require copy protection inside our implants, and I'm not standing for MPAA Untrusted Computing in MY brain.
I know of at least one large site that uses telnet and other unencrypted protocols. They do use password + token encrypted authentication, but that is the exception. Their security policies are Orwellian. Their IDS watches everything. Encrypted sessions are assumed to be evil, and are hunted down and killed. The rest is matched against statistical usage patterns and off-pattern usage is popped up to a security administrator with a complete session trace.
That is all internal of course. Off-site access is through VPN.
All of this could not be easily done with encrypted protocols.
Your attitude doesn't make sense. After they give two weeks notice, they aren't going to give you 100%? What about the four weeks before that when they were considering quitting and/or taking long "lunch" hours for interviews at other companies?
And face it, unless lives are on the line, you aren't getting 100% from your people anyway. No one gives a true 100% for an accounting package or a web site. It just isn't that important and all the morale speeches in the world won't make it that important. So if your employee's last two weeks are at 60-80% effort, so what? Those two weeks are likely just as good as some previous weeks you did pay them for.
And about the "great new job" conversations with the other employees. Since this is Slashdot, I'll assume tech employees. Since I am one, I can say from personal experience that leaving a job hardly cuts off communication. Any friends they have are still in email and IM and cell phone lists. If they're in the same city, they meet at professional groups in town, a Linux group, a Java group, ACM or IEEE meetings, etc. If the new job is in the same tech park, they meet for lunch.
So the people left behind are still going to hear about the great new job.
For me the extra slow Slashdot is caused by their ?'s in their link URLs. Browsers and proxies are allowed to cache all GET requests, even with arguments, but so many web developers screwed up that idea that now browsers and cache proxies don't trust a URL with a ?.
So I have to reload EVERY SINGLE FREAKING JS and CSS FILE whenever I open a new browser to slashdot.
Flash is as fast as you want to pay for. Do you think those solid state hard drives that use fiber channel and sell for $15,000 read at 7MB/s? Heck no.
The SanDisk Ultra IV cards are another example. They do about 40 MB/s. It's basically a RAID stripe across the internal flash chips.
Consider that their mothers may believe their children fighting in Iraq are doing a good thing, and support them.
It isn't like the soldiers are there just for the fun of it. They're part of ensuring a stable Iraqi government that will be a democracy good for its citizens rather than a tyranny.
Plenty of mothers support their children risking their lives for the good of others. Life and safety are not the most important values, even for mothers.
I'm running Vista right now. I don't know what sort of system you're using but this is a Athlon 3800 X2 with 1 GB RAM, and Vista works great. I've got several IE windows open and Media Player. RAM usage is about 650 MB. CPU is averaging about 5%. Opening any control panels or applications like Freecell, Wordpad or the Photo Gallery takes less than 1 second, and usually feels instant.
For some comparison, I run Gentoo Linux on a Athlon 64 3200 laptop with 1 GB RAM. With a few browsers open and Evolution running, and Beagle indexing, RAM usage often tops 800 MB. Applications there also run quite quickly, except for Open Office, which takes over 20 seconds. Even Eclipse starts faster than OO.
So Vista is not any worse than Linux on performance, and looks prettier at the same time. (Definitely prettier: I had to quit using Compiz due to some nasty bugs involving X.org 7.1, Compiz, Gnome, focus and input grab).
There's an option to fix that resize problem. I'm not going to look up the details, but what it does it disable real-time window resizing and instead stretches the existing window contents, then does the actual resize event when you let go. It usually looks quite good and makes resize *much* faster.
I run a 1 GB laptop and it hits swap all the time. You should try running Gentoo and compiling KDE with kdeenablefinal turned on. GCC will hit 800 MB, easily.
Oh yes, the equality thing. It can really surprise you.
For example, I was debugging an infinite loop in some SVG library. I run Gentoo and I compile with crazy options, because what is life without risk? Anyway, it turns out that if you do a thing like A = B, run a few functions and then test equality, A != B. This is because the storage in RAM and the storage in registers have different precision. It happened to work on the original developer's systems, but you've got to remember: Not all the world is a Intel i386/i686.
I believe that having the GUI design and the coding happen in separate applications is better because it pushes the developer to see a separation between the GUI and the application.
The GUI is not the application. A developer with a well designed program should be able to bolt on a GUI, or HTML Forms, or AJAX, or a command line, and have the application's core code not change.
Haven't any of you been playing with the Vista betas? Vista has a sort of swap file / prefetch feature that you can enable on USB flash drive. Vista first benchmarks the device, to determine if it is fast enough. Then you can create a sort of swap file on it, as big as you like.
l eID/48085/48085.html
It's part of the Vista SuperPrefetch.
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Windows/Article/Artic
I hate digging out the DVD / CD as well. I like to just click on the icon and play.
But using the laptop battery as a reason for not requiring the DVD? No laptop I know of can play a game like Prey and run longer than an hour and a half on battery anyway. Probably less.
If it wasn't interesting, why are you even reading a /. article on IPv6 in the first place?
We've been waiting for years for everyone to just wake up and use IPv6 but that just isn't going to happen, so some kind of transistion method is necessary.
Sitting there taking up a restaurant table for three months is definitely over the line.
More seriously, I like to take a book when I go out to eat by myself. I have been asked (politely!) to move after a couple of hours.
What dialog boxes need is a quiz at the end instead of an OK button.
Instead of:
Format C:
This will erase all data on this disk!
OK?
It would be:
Format C:
This will erase all data on this disk!
Erasing means:
1. My data will be copied to Microsoft for safety in case I miss it later.
2. My data will be scanned for dangerous viruses.
3. My data will be GONE and I will NEVER SEE it again.
Enter the correct answer: ___
And of course, the questions would be randomly selected from a list, so the user cannot memorize "3" as the correct answer.
Walmart employees went around to the other businesses and, what? Shot the owners? Threatened their families? They walked you into the store at gunpoint?
No, I don't think so.
Your neighbors put the local businesses out of business. Even then, you aren't forced to shop at Walmart. It's just more convenient. You're still perfectly free to pretend that you live deep in the Alaska wilderness, drive hundreds of miles to the nearest farmer's market and buy your six month supply of rice and beans.
You just don't want to.
Where do I fall on it? The FSF is full of it when they say that you can't write a proprietary binary that links into GPL software.
The only thing that the GPL can control is derived works. If the work isn't derived, it isn't under any sort of GPL control.
Now, creating a module that can link statically or dynamically without it being derived IS a tricky thing. But it can be done.
If the interface is well documented, the code creation trail is legally clear, and ideally it works unmodified on at least one non-GPL code base, the module cannot be derived from GPL code and the GPL doesn't apply. At all.
I'm not sure ATI or nVidia's modules qualify but they are close.
Actually distributing a static linked binary containing GPL code would probably be a GPL violation. (Note that nVidia's binary doesn't contain GPL code, and "magic numbers" from header files are not copyright, any more than the same sort of information taken from Windows headers taint WINE.)
Distributing a non-GPL-derived dynamic linked binary, or a binary with end-user compiled glue code would not be a GPL violation. The end-user just happens to dynamically link it to GPL code, or compile it with GPL code, but that is his right under the GPL and not the distributor's problem.
I am not a lawyer, etc, etc.
If your database can't handle recovery from a snapshot, then it's junk. Get a new DB.
The POINT of all those transaction log files, DB journals, and all the other things that make ACID guarantees real, is to recover from failure. A filesystem snapshot looks exactly like a system that just had a power loss. Your database center may have redundant power backups and all that shiznit, but I bet the datacenter still has a Big Red Button, so your DB had better be able to do recovery ANYWAY.
Some DB backup tools are designed to work with filesystem snapshots. They create a fast recovery point and stop updating the main DB files until after the snapshot. Otherwise the DB has to do basically the same thing as a snapshot, holding open an hours long transaction while doing the backup. When the filesystem or block layer can do a better, more efficient job than the DB, it makes more sense to let it take the load.
Just trying to make you see that snapshots exist for good reason, they do the job very well, and you should look into using the feature; some day you might need it.
I live in Colorado. I've driven icy mountain roads every winter for 15 years, starting with a 83 Toyota Tercel and now a Subaru STi, so I know what I'm talking about. I can tell you that there's no frelling way a car is going to stop faster on ice with locked brakes. If you're going to lock up the wheels, you're better off using ABS.
Here's a quote from a Swedish site that did braking studies: "The average deceleration was greater with ABS than without for all 24 combinations of tyres and road surfaces. However, many individual tests on the A-track resulted in greater deceleration when wheels were locked-up digging themselves down in the loose snow to a level with greater adhesion."
On ice, it'll never dig down through the snow, so that doesn't apply.
I find the Subaru ABS to be very effective. Threshold braking is more effective, but it still works. Brake until you get ABS chatter, then back off. There ya go.
ABS is really handy in situations where the traction isn't what you expect. There might be gravel on the pavement that you didn't notice, or a patch of glare ice hidden under a fresh layer of snow. That *whack* on the brake pedal is a lot better than not noticing your wheels stopped turning. Glare ice can do that. And I really doubt you can react fast enough to keep the wheels turning if you were doing heavy braking in a corner and hit gravel on pavement. Having the wheels locked up from the gravel slide when it hits pavement again is BAD.
I read the link about more deaths in ABS cars. The reason they give for it is drivers panic and quickly turn to avoid the collision, causing the car to hit on the less protected sides or driving off the road or into oncoming traffic. Ironically, ABS is working exactly as designed, giving the driver perfect control during a panic stop, but most drivers were better off when the car ignored them.
Subaru's "traction control" is all in the drive train instead of braking the loose wheel, and I love it. LOVE IT! When I had the STi for the first snow storm, it still had summer tires on it. Summer tires are basically slicks with rain grooves. I STILL managed to get it up and down 8 miles of mountain road on about an inch of unplowed, ungravelled snow that was packed by other drivers (more slippery than fresh powder). Do THAT in an old no-aids Camaro. I see cars like that struggling to even get out of their driveway down where it's FLAT. Watching them spin one little wheel is pathetic.
Driver aids are great. Badly implemented driver aids are crap.
In Quake 1 multiplayer, players who tried to play with the keyboard were called "targets." They were ridiculously easy to circle strafe and they couldn't dodge and aim at the same time.
Dammit. I read the headline and was all exciting about Google launching the Copernicus Moon Base.
So disappointing.
The neat thing about "die" in Perl is that it instantly converts into an exception just by wrapping the function call inside an "eval { }"
Sorry, no, but you're the idiot here, 10GHz. What bladesjester said is that too many scientists refuse to even look at anything that might go against their favorite theories. That isn't science, it's religion.
Science must accept all the facts. If they go against well supported theories, then the new facts have to be carefully examined, sure. But inconvenient facts cannot be discarded out of hand by real scientists.
Nor can inconvenient questions be answered with, "It must be that way, or the theory of [whatever] would be false." Science has to say, "Interesting question. How can we create an experiment to answer it?"
He also said that theories aren't hard facts, which is only the truth. Simply look at every theory in the past that had to be modified or discarded in the face of new evidence.
Scientific theories are not "THE TRUTH." Theories are just the best available explanations that account for all of the known facts and make the fewest possible unprovable assumptions.
In a crime investigation, "THE TRUTH" and the theory is the difference between what really happened and what the detective thinks happened. All the evidence can point to the husband murdering his wife, while in reality the one-armed man actually did do it.
PDF is a horrible idea for ebooks. Are you reading the book in order to look at the pretty page with its perfect layout? I don't know about you, but I'm reading it for the story or for the information.
PDF means that I might have to read text that is either too small but I can see the whole page, or I have to scroll around to read the page.
HTML or a similar markup language means I can read the page and have the device word wrap it properly for its screen.