Some things don't scale well. Like with the space race - humanity went from sending a pound of metal into low orbit to putting a man on the moon within 12 years. Everybody assumed that by 2012 we would be colonizing the moons of Jupiter. Yet it turned out human space travel becomes exponentially difficult with the distance.
I'm afraid the same thing goes for software. The more complicated it gets the more fragile it is.
I don't believe it is exponentially more difficult, but the distances to other objects increase exponentially.
Moon 238,855 miles
Mars 62,000,000 miles (now)
Jupiter 370,000,000 miles (closest)
They had a bit about it on Radio 4, and it is to study all threats that could destroy the human race or at least put it back to pre-civilisation levels. This includes "rogue AI", but also climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology.
I can't help thinking that they are being politically correct not to mention the one thing that has already brought great civilisations to barbarism as one of their threats; Islam.
I'd like to see what that includes on the labour side. I've seen proposals before showing massive savings in software purchases but it didn't account for anything else such as expert labour, training for the staff and the headaches and inefiencies that come with changing users world. Obviously once the dust settles it doesn't matter what software you have as long as it does what it needs to do for the business.
I expect that is why the migration to Office 2010 and Windows 7 was included - it would mean that both sides had a boat-load of training
But an incompetent Linux admin can cause far worse damage than an incompetent windows one.
I'm not sure that this is right. Certainly it depends on how you measure damage. In my opinion an incompetent linux admin will likely not have a functioning system whereas an incompetent windows admin is more likely to have an insecure system leaking information.
Yes, SSL does increase latency, and no, it's not enough to notice in a well written page. But if you go making a ton of different connections, it will be quite noticeable.
So what's the proper way to incorporate advertisements (which pay the writing and hosting bills) and recommendation widgets (which attract readers) "in a well written page"? Those tend to make "a ton of different connections".
The "ton of different connections" is a two-edged sword. Obviously each needs to establish a session, and incurs a concurrency overhead. On the other hand requests can be overlepped past the "connection per server" limit you would get if they all came from the same site".
Meaning that Googles own load takes 99% of the CPU load.
For people with less CPU intensive pages, the numbers will be different. For static pages, the load generated should be very low (if not, you're using the wrong server software), and that could easily be as low as the SSL overhead, meaning each will be 50% of the total load. In that case, switching to SSL means doubling the number of active CPUs.
I wouldn't have thought that gmail was that CPU-intensive on the front-end server. Based on AJAX front-ends I have worked on a lot of the work will be at the data retrieval level and the servers are more likely to be IO bound that CPU bound. It would be interesting to have some figures for the cpu load increase for static content. BTW one way to reduce the CPU load is to disable the 3DES protocol options. Newer protocols are more secure and use much less processor time.
What "breaking of PKI" are you referring to? If you mean certificates generated with non-random keys then this does not break TLS itself - though of course connections using weak certificates could be compromised. Ditto to certificates issues with short keys. The compromised CAs then this could be seen as a weakness in the whole idea of centralised trusted CAs. While I like the idea of decentralised CAs but think that it is not something to be rushed in to.
You can see "delay" with https sites easily, no benchmarks required either. It's just the performance price paid for the (hopefully) added security.
Yes there is added latency due to the handshake, though on my broadband connection I can't say that I can see it. Google has proposed and is implementing several standards to reduce this delay though. Of course the biggest reduction in the effects of latency came with "Keep Alive" which we have now had for years.
Whenever *anything* becomes popular -- whatever it is -- it seems to be ruined. It's such a sad fact.
In this case I think that the only practical way to break it would be to break TLS. This is something that many people have tried and with the current version failed (though you should avoid TLS 1.0.
Isn't the point of mixed web sites to lessen server load from https? I was always under the impression a mixed environment only using https when necessary was a better idea. Obvoiusly not mixing SSL and non on any single page like the article mentions, but wouldn't just be as effective to advocate for better SSL implementations?
all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that.
When South Africa did this (to black people, rather than women), under Apartheid, the civilised world rightly condemned it, and imposed trade sanctions.
Where are the trade embargoes on Saudi Arabia? They're in contravention of the UN declaration of Human Rights.
This is not a "limited classic mode" but an agreement to support already existing extensions.From TFA:
As part of the planning for the DropOrFixFallbackMode feature[1],
we've decided that we will compile a list of supported gnome-shell
extensions. This will be a small list, focused on just bringing back
some central 'classic' UX elements: classic alt tab, task bar, min/max
buttons, main menu. To ensure that these extensions keep working, we
will release them as a tarball, just like any other module. Giovanni
already added an --enable-extensions=classic-mode configure option to
the gnome-shell-extensions repository, which we will use for this
work.
Also, they make it clear that this is not their preference:
Q: Why not just make gnome-shell itself more tweakable ?
A: We still believe that there should be a single, well-defined UX for
GNOME 3, and extensions provide a great mechanism to allow tweaks
without giving up on this vision. That being said, there are examples
like the a11y menu[2] or search[3], where the shell will become more
configurable in the future.
Hardly. If you read about the Stasi, they were actually a self-perpetuating elite rather than state police. The moment you give anyone power, they devolve into an elite. It's an unfortunate part of human nature.
What I meant was that if you were ever interviewed by the real stasi you would have not said "fuck you stasi bastards" to them (unless you had already lost all hope!)
I am feeling very grateful that I don't have such a myopic world-view that I believe that everyone participates in the same cultural festivals as I do.-- ~~~~
If it won't use race, religion, or country then its a bit like asking someone to run a race without using their legs. When will people accept that a woman's institute member is a lot less likely to be a terrorist than someone who has just converted to Islam
Every time I've been in a discussion on pot here on slashdot, this is what I have asked for - a standard and reproducible test for when someone has consumed too much. Strangely enough, it causes the pro-pot people to call me a fascist and the anti-drug people to call me a druggie.
I'm undecided on the issue you druggie, fascist, insensitive clod.
I'm damned if I can remember any policy, enactment or decision good or bad that John Major's government did.
Very, Very, bad: Railway privatization.
Even if you think railways should not be state run, the way privatization was done - by shattering British Rail into hundreds of parts, each with myriad contractual relationships and conflicting priorities - was a disaster; it has been partly undone by subsequent consolidation but the franchise system is still producing farcical results, and fares just keep on going up.
Privatization also directly led to a number of deaths due to poor maintenance - e.g. where routine track upkeep was subcontracted and further subcontracted down to one-man-and-a-rail-trolley type operations with clapped out equipment (see Tebay), and other disasters related to fragmentation and Railtrack deciding to virtual stop all preventative track maintenance to increase their profits.
After Railtrack's collapse, its not-for-profit successor Network Rail eventually bought all routine maintenance back in house.
Ironically, a major objective of the exercise was to break the power of the rail unions, but in fact they now have the power to bring a train operating company to its knees (financially) in a few weeks, so train drivers virtually write their own pay cheques.
You might be able to guess from this that I detest John Major more than any other recent UK politician.
I agree that this was very very bad, but if you had asked me I would have sworn that Thatcher had done this. It just shows that Major was a "stealth prime minister".
Slashdot Mirror
Some things don't scale well. Like with the space race - humanity went from sending a pound of metal into low orbit to putting a man on the moon within 12 years. Everybody assumed that by 2012 we would be colonizing the moons of Jupiter. Yet it turned out human space travel becomes exponentially difficult with the distance.
I'm afraid the same thing goes for software. The more complicated it gets the more fragile it is.
I don't believe it is exponentially more difficult, but the distances to other objects increase exponentially.
Moon 238,855 miles
Mars 62,000,000 miles (now)
Jupiter 370,000,000 miles (closest)
They had a bit about it on Radio 4, and it is to study all threats that could destroy the human race or at least put it back to pre-civilisation levels. This includes "rogue AI", but also climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology.
I can't help thinking that they are being politically correct not to mention the one thing that has already brought great civilisations to barbarism as one of their threats; Islam.
I'd like to see what that includes on the labour side. I've seen proposals before showing massive savings in software purchases but it didn't account for anything else such as expert labour, training for the staff and the headaches and inefiencies that come with changing users world. Obviously once the dust settles it doesn't matter what software you have as long as it does what it needs to do for the business.
I expect that is why the migration to Office 2010 and Windows 7 was included - it would mean that both sides had a boat-load of training
But an incompetent Linux admin can cause far worse damage than an incompetent windows one.
I'm not sure that this is right. Certainly it depends on how you measure damage. In my opinion an incompetent linux admin will likely not have a functioning system whereas an incompetent windows admin is more likely to have an insecure system leaking information.
Yes, SSL does increase latency, and no, it's not enough to notice in a well written page. But if you go making a ton of different connections, it will be quite noticeable.
So what's the proper way to incorporate advertisements (which pay the writing and hosting bills) and recommendation widgets (which attract readers) "in a well written page"? Those tend to make "a ton of different connections".
The "ton of different connections" is a two-edged sword. Obviously each needs to establish a session, and incurs a concurrency overhead. On the other hand requests can be overlepped past the "connection per server" limit you would get if they all came from the same site".
Meaning that Googles own load takes 99% of the CPU load.
For people with less CPU intensive pages, the numbers will be different. For static pages, the load generated should be very low (if not, you're using the wrong server software), and that could easily be as low as the SSL overhead, meaning each will be 50% of the total load. In that case, switching to SSL means doubling the number of active CPUs.
I wouldn't have thought that gmail was that CPU-intensive on the front-end server. Based on AJAX front-ends I have worked on a lot of the work will be at the data retrieval level and the servers are more likely to be IO bound that CPU bound. It would be interesting to have some figures for the cpu load increase for static content. BTW one way to reduce the CPU load is to disable the 3DES protocol options. Newer protocols are more secure and use much less processor time.
Does breaking the PKI consist of break TLS?
What "breaking of PKI" are you referring to? If you mean certificates generated with non-random keys then this does not break TLS itself - though of course connections using weak certificates could be compromised. Ditto to certificates issues with short keys. The compromised CAs then this could be seen as a weakness in the whole idea of centralised trusted CAs. While I like the idea of decentralised CAs but think that it is not something to be rushed in to.
You can see "delay" with https sites easily, no benchmarks required either. It's just the performance price paid for the (hopefully) added security.
Yes there is added latency due to the handshake, though on my broadband connection I can't say that I can see it. Google has proposed and is implementing several standards to reduce this delay though. Of course the biggest reduction in the effects of latency came with "Keep Alive" which we have now had for years.
Whenever *anything* becomes popular -- whatever it is -- it seems to be ruined. It's such a sad fact.
In this case I think that the only practical way to break it would be to break TLS. This is something that many people have tried and with the current version failed (though you should avoid TLS 1.0.
Isn't the point of mixed web sites to lessen server load from https? I was always under the impression a mixed environment only using https when necessary was a better idea. Obvoiusly not mixing SSL and non on any single page like the article mentions, but wouldn't just be as effective to advocate for better SSL implementations?
No, mixed web sites were never recommended and many browsers will give a "mixed content" warning. The overhead isn't that high, Google commented after its switch to https only for gmail:
all of our users use HTTPS to secure their email between their browsers and Google, all the time. In order to do this we had to deploy no additional machines and no special hardware. On our production frontend machines, SSL/TLS accounts for less than 1% of the CPU load, less than 10KB of memory per connection and less than 2% of network overhead. Many people believe that SSL takes a lot of CPU time and we hope the above numbers (public for the first time) will help to dispel that.
wouldn't it be Grey Thursday, then?
Or in Apple's case a gay thursday
as long as you treat half of your society like cattle, you are never going to have a happy, prosperous, or just culture.
News flash they don't want it, they're Muslims. They like life to be bad so it fits their "hate life and love death" philosophy,
When South Africa did this (to black people, rather than women), under Apartheid, the civilised world rightly condemned it, and imposed trade sanctions. Where are the trade embargoes on Saudi Arabia? They're in contravention of the UN declaration of Human Rights.
Because a lot of people who will condemn westerners for almost anything (you haven't got a black disabled transexual speaking at your Ruby conference, you must be a fascist), they put complete asshole behaviour of Muslims down to "religious freedom" or "ethnic diversity". Sure tag the women, abduct Hindu girls, murder those priests, its just the expression of your beliefs.
Gimp and a bunch of other projects seem to be headed the same way
Hint: There's a lot of developers that do work on both projects. Now some of them have migrated to Libreoffice. Expect more UI carnage to come.
Please no ... not the fucking ribbon
As part of the planning for the DropOrFixFallbackMode feature[1], we've decided that we will compile a list of supported gnome-shell extensions. This will be a small list, focused on just bringing back some central 'classic' UX elements: classic alt tab, task bar, min/max buttons, main menu. To ensure that these extensions keep working, we will release them as a tarball, just like any other module. Giovanni already added an --enable-extensions=classic-mode configure option to the gnome-shell-extensions repository, which we will use for this work.
Also, they make it clear that this is not their preference:
Q: Why not just make gnome-shell itself more tweakable ?
A: We still believe that there should be a single, well-defined UX for GNOME 3, and extensions provide a great mechanism to allow tweaks without giving up on this vision. That being said, there are examples like the a11y menu[2] or search[3], where the shell will become more configurable in the future.
I've given thanks for biergartens in Germany many times!
Ah but did you wear chamois leather shorts and slap your thighs!
Hardly. If you read about the Stasi, they were actually a self-perpetuating elite rather than state police. The moment you give anyone power, they devolve into an elite. It's an unfortunate part of human nature.
What I meant was that if you were ever interviewed by the real stasi you would have not said "fuck you stasi bastards" to them (unless you had already lost all hope!)
I bailed on it (with a proverbial "fuck you stasi bastards" ...
And ironically demonstrating that you did not believe them to be like the stasi!
I am feeling very grateful that I don't have such a myopic world-view that I believe that everyone participates in the same cultural festivals as I do.-- ~~~~
If it won't use race, religion, or country then its a bit like asking someone to run a race without using their legs. When will people accept that a woman's institute member is a lot less likely to be a terrorist than someone who has just converted to Islam
John Major was Prime Minister???
Yes, and the only man ever to run away from the circus to become an accountant.
Every time I've been in a discussion on pot here on slashdot, this is what I have asked for - a standard and reproducible test for when someone has consumed too much. Strangely enough, it causes the pro-pot people to call me a fascist and the anti-drug people to call me a druggie.
I'm undecided on the issue you druggie, fascist, insensitive clod.
I'm damned if I can remember any policy, enactment or decision good or bad that John Major's government did.
Very, Very, bad: Railway privatization. Even if you think railways should not be state run, the way privatization was done - by shattering British Rail into hundreds of parts, each with myriad contractual relationships and conflicting priorities - was a disaster; it has been partly undone by subsequent consolidation but the franchise system is still producing farcical results, and fares just keep on going up. Privatization also directly led to a number of deaths due to poor maintenance - e.g. where routine track upkeep was subcontracted and further subcontracted down to one-man-and-a-rail-trolley type operations with clapped out equipment (see Tebay), and other disasters related to fragmentation and Railtrack deciding to virtual stop all preventative track maintenance to increase their profits.
After Railtrack's collapse, its not-for-profit successor Network Rail eventually bought all routine maintenance back in house.
Ironically, a major objective of the exercise was to break the power of the rail unions, but in fact they now have the power to bring a train operating company to its knees (financially) in a few weeks, so train drivers virtually write their own pay cheques.
You might be able to guess from this that I detest John Major more than any other recent UK politician.
I agree that this was very very bad, but if you had asked me I would have sworn that Thatcher had done this. It just shows that Major was a "stealth prime minister".
Annoying drivers are among the most dangerous. They make everyone around them drive more recklessly.
Hey, is that you Dick Dastardly?
Just ask the driver what snack they'd like from the police car.
Wouldn't work in Texas - where the default answer is "all of them".