A very limited Intranet has developed, consisting of an email inbox, a few news sites relaying regime propaganda, and a browser providing access to the databank Web pages of the country’s three biggest libraries: the Grand People’s Study House and those of the Kim Il-Sung and Kim Chaek Universities. This Intranet is accessible only by academics, businessmen and high-ranking civil servants who have received special clearance.
Here's to hoping that once that intranet is connected to our internet we see those academics online:)
Oh, also, I like how one hour of internet usage in a cafe in North Korea will set you back $8.19 (high even by my cushy American standards) and yet the monthly wage in North Korea is a paltry $17.74. So yeah, go ahead and walk into an internet cafe and blow a month's salary in two hours. I almost feel guilty about bitching about Comcast's $40/month cable internet.
Furthermore Eritrea beat them out in 2009 leaving them at 174/175 on their worst violators... there are nation states and there are sad states. I wish there was a non-detrimental way to help the people inside North Korea.
You're right in that the research of MMann didn't cost the university more than $500k but if you do a google search you'll find a WSJ article stating that he recived $541k dollars in stimulus funds in june 2009, so his drain on taxpayers money directly is still greater than the litigation costs, and of course the implementation cost of the policy he advocates and do research to support would have a pricetag several magnitudes higher.
I believe this is the article you're talking about. And I believe it's referring to 'last June' when Michael Mann was teaching at Penn State. Mann only taught at UVA from 1999 to 2005. Here's the paragraph:
According to the conservative think tank the National Center for Public Policy Research, Mann received $541,184 in economic stimulus funds last June to conduct climate change research.
Emphasis mine. So he received another half a million to continue his research this year? And that's wrong because? Also, Ken Cuccinelli holds no domain over Pennsylvania State University. See, when a university is given the authority to decide where its funds go, you usually don't spend twice that much money investigating whether or not the research done meets your statistical muster or political goals -- especially when you're not an expert in that field!
... so his drain on taxpayers money directly is still greater than the litigation costs...
Yeah, you could look at Mann's whole life and his health insurance and everything but we're not. We're focusing on one particular study done by Mann for half a million dollars carried out at UVA.
Have fun tracking down every climate scientist gathering funds for any kind of climate research and charging them with wasting taxpayers dollars. By the time you're done, it will be impossible to draw any scientific conclusion about climate change because any indication that you construe to be economically painful will be met with lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit.
The litigation has so far cost the university $352,874.76, Wood said, adding that the fees have been paid for from private funds.
And that's just legal fees from the university's side of things, the state itself has its own costs to look at for the first investigation and I'm sure many people are spending hours handling this. So you might be wondering what the original research that Mann did cost the university? Answer: under $500,000. So with this latest round of litigation, the Attorney General -- who is championing this effort under the guise of protecting tax payer dollars -- will force the state of Virginia to pay up again.
When I submitted this, I was hoping to find some news of this latest round from the more conservative press (Fox News, Washington Times) instead of the more liberal (New York Times, Washington Post) but there's nothing from that side of the spectrum. I think a local paper put it best in an editorial entitled Cuccinelli Needs to Cut Our Losses.
To be fair, we are probably talking about people who use the same password for everything.
Well then in your suggested case, to be fair, where is the real security issue? Is it Facebook or is it the user?
The best and most flawless computer security systems will always have a human being as a security hole. The best 'hackers' reported in the news these days are those that use social hacks like sweet talking and shoulder surfing to gain access to very secure systems.
I wouldn't go around faulting Facebook for catering to the lowest common denominator. Their security measures are okay. They probably could be better but, hey, it's a mostly free service.
If I hack your FB account, can't I change the email associated with it?
Yes, but the original e-mail address associated with your account gets e-mailed a notification allowing that to be blocked and if you do block it you have to change your password:
Hey XXXXX,
We've received your request to associate your account with the email address malicious@hotmail.com.
An email was sent to malicious@hotmail.com to confirm the request and account ownership. To confirm that email address, just click on the confirmation link in the email sent to malicious@hotmail.com.
However, if that address is not familiar or you did not request to change your contact email, please follow this link to cancel the request: http://www.facebook.com/cancel_contact.php?t=XXXXX&u=XXXXX... (If clicking on the link doesn't work, try copying and pasting it into your browser.)
If you cancel the contact email change request, your account will remain with your current email (goodguys@umn.edu) and you will be asked to reset your password as a security precaution.
Thanks, The Facebook Team
Now, you'd probably prefer that the original e-mail address has to okay the transition but that's how they have it implemented. So you're right, they could change the account associated with it if they know your Facebook password (it asks you at every step of the way). Then they could request the zip and wait to get the e-mail. But if you checked your e-mail in that time and canceled the new e-mail and changed your password you'd be safe.
That's definitely something they could do -- block the request of a new e-mail until an old one is okayed. But then you run into the trouble of someone hacking your e-mail account and gaining access to your Facebook account that way. In that case, they could change your Facebook account over to their e-mail account and then okay it in your hacked e-mail account. Once that's done, how would you reclaim your profile? They would always have the account associated with it.
Also if your old e-mail gets hacked and you have no way of getting it back, you're kind of at the mercy of the person who has your old e-mail as you'll never be able to change the e-mail address associated with your Facebook status and if you do, you'll tip them off that they also have your Facebook account to do with as they please.
What it usually boils down to is if your account is compromised, your account is compromised.
Unless your account (or their servers) get hacked...
If your account gets hacked, they still need to have your e-mail hacked. The link to download the zip file is later sent to your e-mail address when the processing is done. Zipping up videos and images takes a while so basically you request this data and they put it in a queue and an hour/day/week/month later you get your data to download e-mailed to you in a link and you re-enter your user password. I thought I described this in my summary but that means that even if your account is hacked they would need access to your e-mail and for quite sometime unless you had already requested it and left that e-mail in your account. Yes, this means that if they know the e-mail associated with your Facebook account, they can just hack that and then request a new Facebook password sent to that account and then initiate the profile zipping.
Let's say their servers get hacked. Well, the data is still not zipped up unless they are retaining that data after someone requests it. So at most they'll have access to whoever is waiting to retrieve their data. And it's going to be a lot of data. So there are a lot of logistics involved to get access to only a few random person's data. And even if the hackers are smart enough to invoke the zip script for every single account, that's not something that will happen overnight.
Basically if they have access to your account or the Facebook servers, they already have access to everything on your profile or Facebook as a whole (respectively). So while this presents mild security issues, it's already assuming that everything is compromised... it just presents the possibility that a hacker could more easily zip up your data... and then that requires time... and access to another resource of yours. For me, this risk is acceptable consider the benefit involved. As I mentioned, I suspect this will allow you to move the history of your profile to another site, which is really really good.
Maybe, but it already looks like Diaspora development is starting to slow down. OK, there have been some commits today, but I expected to see more activity than what's currently going on.
Well, following the release of the Diaspora source code everyone did kind of rip them apart (myself included). We all sort of hoped that such criticism would be constructive and the developers would redouble their efforts or seek more help or new developers would aid them.
It's equally likely that after receiving black eyes instead of kudos, developers left Diaspora in droves. It might end up being a failed project with important lessons learned.
Ah, good, thanks for the link, you'd think it would be something that would be incredibly obvious to include in the story, but apparently not.
I included it in my summary that I submitted a half hour before pickens but they selected his instead because mine was voted down to purple in firehose for some reason. Guess I wrote the wrong headline as I've got the same quotes he does plus the picture.
"The problem we're facing right now is there is already a lot of excitement for HTML5, but it's a little too early to deploy it because we're running into interoperability issues," including differences between video on devices...
Well, I read an entire book on HTML5 and, as web developers have usually done, you just build in graceful fallbacks for unsupported browsers or devices. If APIs change, then they change but a lot of developers would probably rather opt for that than something a lot more proprietary and complicated. A whole chapter of the book I reviewed was devoted to extensively detailing how one would get video working in increasingly fallback ways depending on your preference of support. Why can't we keep up that mentality? The worst case is we just default back to the Flash/HTML4 route.
"HTML 5 is at various stages of implementation right now through the Web browsers. If you look at the various browsers, most of the aggressive implementations are in the beta versions,"
Another sage lesson from Mark Pilgrim's book: "Those who ship code win." You can sit there and tell everyone to 'hold on' all you want but if you don't give them a good reason to stop pushing forward with the implementation, they aren't going to wait for your consortium to debate for another five years. We're moving forward. There will be bumps. The time for discussing a completely perfect approach has passed and browsers will thrust what support they can into practice, warts and all. At some point this has to be done, it will never be truly perfect.
I fought in WWII, and mainland America never faced the "threat of every person coming under the rule of a handful of tyrants".
Right, I'm sure that once Germany had taken all of Europe and Russia they'd have just sat on their hands contented. They wouldn't have used those extensive resources to make a push to conquer the world. Tell me, since they fought everyone around them to the bitter end, where would have Germany and Japan halted? What borders could have possibly satiated their thirst for power and resources?
I guess my understanding is 'blatantly wrong' and my opinions are 'bullshit each and every way' but I do know that there were divided opinions in America at the time. The isolationists who thought that all Hitler wanted was to conquer a few surrounding countries and the other people who thought that Hitler would stop at nothing until he controlled the world. After reading Winston Churchill's account of the Second World War, I'm in the latter camp. It appears you're confident Hitler would have stopped had he won the Battle for Britain and overrun the Eastern front. He sure didn't stop after the Invasion of Poland and the Battle of France. The German war machine excelled at turning conquered territories into another cog in the war machine. Hitler didn't shut down all the factories producing munitions and arms once he overtook a country.
I appreciate all you did for your country and I'm sorry you are dismally appalled at my attempts to learn and understand the part of history you influenced. I'd be happy to listen to another point of view from anyone who fought in World War II but it would take a great deal of startling revelations to change my opinion on America's risk had the Allies lost.
As time goes on, each generation of youth born after 1950 adds their own layer of "understanding" to history, and usually this "understanding" is blatantly wrong. You're no exception.
And you wonder why your children and grandchildren never visit you...
Nothing spurs innovation like trying to kill the other guy.
What about trying to stop the other guy from killing you? I think the US military has the luxury of being the hunters that occasionally succumb to attrition. You can still lose that way (Vietnam) but we're not afraid of every single person in America being killed or captured. I'd argue you saw more innovation come out of World War II when we actually faced a threat of every person coming under the rule of a handful of tyrants (and really one very bad tyrant). Sure, Hitler's V1 and V2 Schneider Programs were innovative but look at what the work of the Polish and, later, British at Bletchley Park did to start us into the computer age. When you're striving to solve a problem and the fate of your entire country rests on it... I think you forgo sleeping, eating, playing video games, etc. The guys 'innovating' in Afghanistan still go to sleep at night. The guys calling the shots probably don't live any differently than you or I and that is quite comfortably.
Right.... until they start adding commercials to books as electronic readers start becoming more mainstream. You won't be able to turn the page until you sit through this 15 second commercial that the publisher figures might interest you based on the content of the book.
And if your choice is watching that with not having to pay for the book versus shelling out the usual $20 for the book... I might actually opt for that.
From reading the paragraph in context, it seems like Google was just showing an example of how a broadcaster or content provider could become indifferent to how their broadcasting revenue is generated. The patent gives three examples for making up $1-$2 of advertising revenue on a one hour program for each viewer. It could be done through commercials as traditionally is done, by survey or even at a direct charge to the viewer. I think it's important to note that the $2 figure doesn't seem to be set in stone, it's more an example of how a broadcaster who demands $2 in advertising revenue per viewer could recoup or mitigate those costs.
The real question is: how is this any different than someone forking over a couple bucks to watch the latest Futurama episode on iTunes?
You can call it "skipping commercials" or you can call it "selling the right to view content once" or whatever the hell you want. But it all comes down to you reimbursing the broadcasters for their content--which has traditionally been done through advertising. I'm surprised this is invoking so much ire from the Slashdot crowd.
I don't know how much of an net positive environmental impact recycling rare earths from circuitry provides (is your acid economically and environmentally friendly? what are the byproducts? are they less damaging than the circuitry to the environment?) but I don't think it's wise to thank countries for exacerbating a territorial dispute. The world has enough of those now, we don't need another escalation or spat between countries.
Does this book talk about any non-x86 arch issues?
They are few and far between. On page 176 and 177 when Love is discussing Atomic Integer Operations (Chapter 10, Kernel Synchronization Methods), he mentions the atomic_t structure and Love mentions the SPARC port of Linux and an odd implementation choice to have the lower 8 bits of the atomic_t structure be lock bits. This means that there were only 24 bits available to be used on SPARC machines. Now, I assume this has since been rectified but you generally don't get another architecture mentioned unless there are curiosities that Love wants to mention about code in the asm director of the source tree.
So from there he starts talking about asm/atomic.h and explains to the reader that because atomic integer operations are architecture dependent, you get different support for additional methods that may be unique to an architecture. He treats 64 bit specific things the same way. You don't get as full of an explanation but you do get something when it's interesting and noteworthy.
Now, of course, Chapter 19 on portability covers many architectures but doesn't really dive deep into any of the alternatives. Love remains at a pretty high level and adheres to English explanations of caveats that occur with different architectures. Which is why I think this book would be good for you despite a 32 bit x86 architecture. Even though he might be looking at x86 architecture code, most of the code cited in this book is architecture independent. On top of that, you're getting an English explanation alongside it so that if you were really pressed to look at the PPC equivalent, the English is going to tell you what something does and there will probably be a lot of similarities in what function must be performed.
no descriptions about devices NOT on a PCI bus
As for your second point I don't recall a bias to PCI, ISA or USB devices in chapter 17. In fact, it was more so about the four kernel components (device types, modules, kernel objects and sysfs) the kernel has implemented to support any possible device. The downside is that if you're looking for a detailed guide on the PCI bus, this isn't it. This is more about what code is in the kernel to take care of any device technology with no favoritism given. I just checked the index for any of those three acronyms and must confess that if they were mentioned, little time was given to them. This book is about the kernel code and how the kernel code handles those kinds of things. I think the scope of this book and the length of it is not meant to include something like individual specific bus technologies.
Remind me, why do we have such a fragile system at the very core of modern civilisation?
Define 'core of civilization.' I don't view stock markets as that kind of thing. Regardless, I believe the reasoning they allow it is that -- like everything else in that crazy place of Wall Street -- it can help you make or lose money. This wasn't the only investigation where an algorithm screwed up. I submitted a story that wasn't accepted about an algorithm that lost one company a million dollars in five seconds.
So, you know, before you sign up to let a high frequency trader manage your trades, take note of the risks you are accepting. In the story I reported, the company that lost the money just fired the guy who wrote the algorithm and keeps doing it.
If it's like margin trading where people were taking loans and lost it all and everything died because everyone was doing it, then it's bad. The question is whether or not these micro translations are going to suddenly force everyone all at once to realize their losses. I don't think that's the case but the 'flash crash' might be proof otherwise.
In defense of high frequency trading, I don't see it as anymore of a gamble than regular trading. You are shifting money around to make more money. So you shift tinier amounts faster and for shorter periods of time to get better returns. I'm not doing it so if it turns out to be bad for the people doing it then I'm going to benefit. If it turns out to be good for the people doing it then I bitch because I don't have that same benefit. If the HFTs are putting everyone at risk, I'd like to hear precisely how that logic follows because right now it's looking like it sporadically injects chance volatility that we've dealt with before.
It would have been nice if your review had compared other books on the same topic so I could know which is best to get.
I think you want to reference the latest edition of that book which is also the Third Edition and also based on the 2.6 kernel. The book you linked is from 2000 and based on 2.3 I believe.
It appears that the O'Reilly book focuses more on the tiny implementation details while Love's book has more theory. The O'Reilly book is more than twice as long as Love's book. The O'Reilly book was also published in November 2005 so I doubt it would have anything on the Completely Fair Scheduler or any advancements since then.
I wish I had more time to give you a better review but the fact is that I'm new to this stuff and this is the only book I've read devoted solely to the Linux Kernel. The Love book is a solid book though (hence the 10/10) and if you're looking for a current Linux guide, it's probably the newest.
"To keep this review relatively concise, I'll only fully cover the content in the first half of the book."
Yeah, I only read the first half of my assignments before writing the reports, too:-)
I guess I have to pick between comments like the above and comments like these? Twenty thousand bytes it is next time.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you have about the other subjects he wrote of (timers and their management, memory management, VFS, address space, I/O, page caching, debugging and portability).
Just feels like nobody reads the really long reviews anyway.
Another book about developing a skillset I wish I had. I hate being web developer, I get no respect.
As the reviewer, I too am a web developer (Java & Ruby). While I might not be using Linux Kernel Development in my profession on a regular basis, there's no reason why you can't hack away at home in your spare time. As I mention in the review, the 2.6 kernel basically keeps my web apps afloat so it's nice to know more about how the kernel operates internally. Am I qualified to release a distribution optimized for web hosting? Definitely not right now but after the chapter on debugging and understanding how the scheduler works, I feel more confident when I SSH into a box to check out what's going on with Mongrel or Tomcat.
Your education doesn't have to end the second you accept your first paycheck. If you don't know C, that's just another thing to learn before starting down this road. I implore you to expand your skill set, who knows what you may find? The great thing about this book was that it's mostly English. So even if you don't know C, you could hobble through the code examples (like Legolas' singing in Lord of the Rings) and stick mostly to Love's English explanation of it.
They're just 'future proofing' the game for when we invade China and Gliese 581g. It will even work for our upcoming 'Civil War II: More Civil' planned by Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert.
However, posting your own post in your own post is a bit excessive, and there could have been better ways to do this than just repost your entire freakin story as the first comment.
Yo dawg, I heard you liked my post so I put a post inside my post so you could enjoy it while you're enjoying my post!
It appears that the problem, that affect the available memory in a chip when multiple cores are working on the same chunks of data, is getting worse and may be hitting a peak somewhere in the neighborhood of 48 cores, when entirely new operating systems will be needed, the report says.
eldavojohn writes "Multicore (think tens or hundreds of cores) will come at a price for current operating systems. A team at MIT found that as they approached 48 cores their operating system slowed down. After activating more and more cores in their simulation, a sort of memory leak occurred whereby data had to remain in memory as long as a core might need it in its calculations. But the good news is that in their paper (PDF), they showed that for at least several years Linux should be able to keep up with chip enhancements in the multicore realm. To handle multiple cores, Linux keeps a counter of which cores are working on the data. As a core starts to work on a piece of data, Linux increments the number. When the core is done, Linux decrements the number. As the core count approached 48, the amount of actual work decreased and Linux spent more time managing counters. But the team found that 'Slightly rewriting the Linux code so that each core kept a local count, which was only occasionally synchronized with those of the other cores, greatly improved the system's overall performance.' The researchers caution that as the number of cores skyrockets, operating systems will have to be completely redesigned to handle managing these cores and SMP. After reviewing the paper, one researcher is confident Linux will remain viable for five to eight years without need for a major redesign."
I don't know, guess I picked a bad title or something?
Luckily we aren't anywhere near 48 cores and there is some time left to come up with a new Linux (Windows?).
Again, seriously? What does "(Windows?)" even mean? As you pass a certain number of cores, modern operating systems will need to be redesigned to handle extreme SMP. It's going to differ from OS to OS but we won't know about Windows until somebody takes the time to test it.
I guess all those warnings about how Tylenol can damage your liver are true!
Once the dead snakes are doped on acetaminophen, don't they face the risk of whatever native species might eat them overdosing on acetaminophen? As I've said before, I steer clear of all that crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the official blog announcement since I didn't see it in the summary or article.
The state has been dubbed the world's worst violator of press freedom by the media rights body Reporters Without Borders (RSF).
Huh, you must be referencing an older report. Allow me to bring you up to date on 2010's assessment of the illustrious Democratic People's Republic of Korea!
Internet: Nothing but a vague rumor
A very limited Intranet has developed, consisting of an email inbox, a few news sites relaying regime propaganda, and a browser providing access to the databank Web pages of the country’s three biggest libraries: the Grand People’s Study House and those of the Kim Il-Sung and Kim Chaek Universities. This Intranet is accessible only by academics, businessmen and high-ranking civil servants who have received special clearance.
Here's to hoping that once that intranet is connected to our internet we see those academics online :)
... there are nation states and there are sad states. I wish there was a non-detrimental way to help the people inside North Korea.
Oh, also, I like how one hour of internet usage in a cafe in North Korea will set you back $8.19 (high even by my cushy American standards) and yet the monthly wage in North Korea is a paltry $17.74. So yeah, go ahead and walk into an internet cafe and blow a month's salary in two hours. I almost feel guilty about bitching about Comcast's $40/month cable internet.
Furthermore Eritrea beat them out in 2009 leaving them at 174/175 on their worst violators
You're right in that the research of MMann didn't cost the university more than $500k but if you do a google search you'll find a WSJ article stating that he recived $541k dollars in stimulus funds in june 2009, so his drain on taxpayers money directly is still greater than the litigation costs, and of course the implementation cost of the policy he advocates and do research to support would have a pricetag several magnitudes higher.
I believe this is the article you're talking about. And I believe it's referring to 'last June' when Michael Mann was teaching at Penn State. Mann only taught at UVA from 1999 to 2005. Here's the paragraph:
According to the conservative think tank the National Center for Public Policy Research, Mann received $541,184 in economic stimulus funds last June to conduct climate change research.
Emphasis mine. So he received another half a million to continue his research this year? And that's wrong because? Also, Ken Cuccinelli holds no domain over Pennsylvania State University. See, when a university is given the authority to decide where its funds go, you usually don't spend twice that much money investigating whether or not the research done meets your statistical muster or political goals -- especially when you're not an expert in that field!
... so his drain on taxpayers money directly is still greater than the litigation costs ...
Yeah, you could look at Mann's whole life and his health insurance and everything but we're not. We're focusing on one particular study done by Mann for half a million dollars carried out at UVA.
Have fun tracking down every climate scientist gathering funds for any kind of climate research and charging them with wasting taxpayers dollars. By the time you're done, it will be impossible to draw any scientific conclusion about climate change because any indication that you construe to be economically painful will be met with lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit.
The litigation has so far cost the university $352,874.76, Wood said, adding that the fees have been paid for from private funds.
And that's just legal fees from the university's side of things, the state itself has its own costs to look at for the first investigation and I'm sure many people are spending hours handling this. So you might be wondering what the original research that Mann did cost the university? Answer: under $500,000. So with this latest round of litigation, the Attorney General -- who is championing this effort under the guise of protecting tax payer dollars -- will force the state of Virginia to pay up again.
When I submitted this, I was hoping to find some news of this latest round from the more conservative press (Fox News, Washington Times) instead of the more liberal (New York Times, Washington Post) but there's nothing from that side of the spectrum. I think a local paper put it best in an editorial entitled Cuccinelli Needs to Cut Our Losses.
To be fair, we are probably talking about people who use the same password for everything.
Well then in your suggested case, to be fair, where is the real security issue? Is it Facebook or is it the user?
The best and most flawless computer security systems will always have a human being as a security hole. The best 'hackers' reported in the news these days are those that use social hacks like sweet talking and shoulder surfing to gain access to very secure systems.
I wouldn't go around faulting Facebook for catering to the lowest common denominator. Their security measures are okay. They probably could be better but, hey, it's a mostly free service.
If I hack your FB account, can't I change the email associated with it?
Yes, but the original e-mail address associated with your account gets e-mailed a notification allowing that to be blocked and if you do block it you have to change your password:
Now, you'd probably prefer that the original e-mail address has to okay the transition but that's how they have it implemented. So you're right, they could change the account associated with it if they know your Facebook password (it asks you at every step of the way). Then they could request the zip and wait to get the e-mail. But if you checked your e-mail in that time and canceled the new e-mail and changed your password you'd be safe.
That's definitely something they could do -- block the request of a new e-mail until an old one is okayed. But then you run into the trouble of someone hacking your e-mail account and gaining access to your Facebook account that way. In that case, they could change your Facebook account over to their e-mail account and then okay it in your hacked e-mail account. Once that's done, how would you reclaim your profile? They would always have the account associated with it.
Also if your old e-mail gets hacked and you have no way of getting it back, you're kind of at the mercy of the person who has your old e-mail as you'll never be able to change the e-mail address associated with your Facebook status and if you do, you'll tip them off that they also have your Facebook account to do with as they please.
What it usually boils down to is if your account is compromised, your account is compromised.
Unless your account (or their servers) get hacked ...
If your account gets hacked, they still need to have your e-mail hacked. The link to download the zip file is later sent to your e-mail address when the processing is done. Zipping up videos and images takes a while so basically you request this data and they put it in a queue and an hour/day/week/month later you get your data to download e-mailed to you in a link and you re-enter your user password. I thought I described this in my summary but that means that even if your account is hacked they would need access to your e-mail and for quite sometime unless you had already requested it and left that e-mail in your account. Yes, this means that if they know the e-mail associated with your Facebook account, they can just hack that and then request a new Facebook password sent to that account and then initiate the profile zipping.
... it just presents the possibility that a hacker could more easily zip up your data ... and then that requires time ... and access to another resource of yours. For me, this risk is acceptable consider the benefit involved. As I mentioned, I suspect this will allow you to move the history of your profile to another site, which is really really good.
Let's say their servers get hacked. Well, the data is still not zipped up unless they are retaining that data after someone requests it. So at most they'll have access to whoever is waiting to retrieve their data. And it's going to be a lot of data. So there are a lot of logistics involved to get access to only a few random person's data. And even if the hackers are smart enough to invoke the zip script for every single account, that's not something that will happen overnight.
Basically if they have access to your account or the Facebook servers, they already have access to everything on your profile or Facebook as a whole (respectively). So while this presents mild security issues, it's already assuming that everything is compromised
Maybe, but it already looks like Diaspora development is starting to slow down. OK, there have been some commits today, but I expected to see more activity than what's currently going on.
Well, following the release of the Diaspora source code everyone did kind of rip them apart (myself included). We all sort of hoped that such criticism would be constructive and the developers would redouble their efforts or seek more help or new developers would aid them.
It's equally likely that after receiving black eyes instead of kudos, developers left Diaspora in droves. It might end up being a failed project with important lessons learned.
Ah, good, thanks for the link, you'd think it would be something that would be incredibly obvious to include in the story, but apparently not.
I included it in my summary that I submitted a half hour before pickens but they selected his instead because mine was voted down to purple in firehose for some reason. Guess I wrote the wrong headline as I've got the same quotes he does plus the picture.
Won't anybody stop this insanity and think of the adults who crave link-shortened pictures of "a scantily clad lady with some bottle in her hand"?
I wouldn't even call her 'scantily clad' but you can judge for yourself here.
"The problem we're facing right now is there is already a lot of excitement for HTML5, but it's a little too early to deploy it because we're running into interoperability issues," including differences between video on devices ...
Well, I read an entire book on HTML5 and, as web developers have usually done, you just build in graceful fallbacks for unsupported browsers or devices. If APIs change, then they change but a lot of developers would probably rather opt for that than something a lot more proprietary and complicated. A whole chapter of the book I reviewed was devoted to extensively detailing how one would get video working in increasingly fallback ways depending on your preference of support. Why can't we keep up that mentality? The worst case is we just default back to the Flash/HTML4 route.
"HTML 5 is at various stages of implementation right now through the Web browsers. If you look at the various browsers, most of the aggressive implementations are in the beta versions,"
Another sage lesson from Mark Pilgrim's book: "Those who ship code win." You can sit there and tell everyone to 'hold on' all you want but if you don't give them a good reason to stop pushing forward with the implementation, they aren't going to wait for your consortium to debate for another five years. We're moving forward. There will be bumps. The time for discussing a completely perfect approach has passed and browsers will thrust what support they can into practice, warts and all. At some point this has to be done, it will never be truly perfect.
I fought in WWII, and mainland America never faced the "threat of every person coming under the rule of a handful of tyrants".
Right, I'm sure that once Germany had taken all of Europe and Russia they'd have just sat on their hands contented. They wouldn't have used those extensive resources to make a push to conquer the world. Tell me, since they fought everyone around them to the bitter end, where would have Germany and Japan halted? What borders could have possibly satiated their thirst for power and resources?
I guess my understanding is 'blatantly wrong' and my opinions are 'bullshit each and every way' but I do know that there were divided opinions in America at the time. The isolationists who thought that all Hitler wanted was to conquer a few surrounding countries and the other people who thought that Hitler would stop at nothing until he controlled the world. After reading Winston Churchill's account of the Second World War, I'm in the latter camp. It appears you're confident Hitler would have stopped had he won the Battle for Britain and overrun the Eastern front. He sure didn't stop after the Invasion of Poland and the Battle of France. The German war machine excelled at turning conquered territories into another cog in the war machine. Hitler didn't shut down all the factories producing munitions and arms once he overtook a country.
I appreciate all you did for your country and I'm sorry you are dismally appalled at my attempts to learn and understand the part of history you influenced. I'd be happy to listen to another point of view from anyone who fought in World War II but it would take a great deal of startling revelations to change my opinion on America's risk had the Allies lost.
As time goes on, each generation of youth born after 1950 adds their own layer of "understanding" to history, and usually this "understanding" is blatantly wrong. You're no exception.
And you wonder why your children and grandchildren never visit you ...
Nothing spurs innovation like trying to kill the other guy.
What about trying to stop the other guy from killing you? I think the US military has the luxury of being the hunters that occasionally succumb to attrition. You can still lose that way (Vietnam) but we're not afraid of every single person in America being killed or captured. I'd argue you saw more innovation come out of World War II when we actually faced a threat of every person coming under the rule of a handful of tyrants (and really one very bad tyrant). Sure, Hitler's V1 and V2 Schneider Programs were innovative but look at what the work of the Polish and, later, British at Bletchley Park did to start us into the computer age. When you're striving to solve a problem and the fate of your entire country rests on it ... I think you forgo sleeping, eating, playing video games, etc. The guys 'innovating' in Afghanistan still go to sleep at night. The guys calling the shots probably don't live any differently than you or I and that is quite comfortably.
Right.... until they start adding commercials to books as electronic readers start becoming more mainstream. You won't be able to turn the page until you sit through this 15 second commercial that the publisher figures might interest you based on the content of the book.
And if your choice is watching that with not having to pay for the book versus shelling out the usual $20 for the book ... I might actually opt for that.
From reading the paragraph in context, it seems like Google was just showing an example of how a broadcaster or content provider could become indifferent to how their broadcasting revenue is generated. The patent gives three examples for making up $1-$2 of advertising revenue on a one hour program for each viewer. It could be done through commercials as traditionally is done, by survey or even at a direct charge to the viewer. I think it's important to note that the $2 figure doesn't seem to be set in stone, it's more an example of how a broadcaster who demands $2 in advertising revenue per viewer could recoup or mitigate those costs.
The real question is: how is this any different than someone forking over a couple bucks to watch the latest Futurama episode on iTunes?
You can call it "skipping commercials" or you can call it "selling the right to view content once" or whatever the hell you want. But it all comes down to you reimbursing the broadcasters for their content--which has traditionally been done through advertising. I'm surprised this is invoking so much ire from the Slashdot crowd.
In fact, we should say thank you to China on this one.
Recent news reports have Japan accusing China of this being over a territorial dispute. The traders are saying that things have resumed but that this is just an excuse for China to harass traders and outbound exports with "preshipment" checks. China denies this has anything to do with the dispute but the timing is more than a bit suspect and why is this only directed at Japan?
I don't know how much of an net positive environmental impact recycling rare earths from circuitry provides (is your acid economically and environmentally friendly? what are the byproducts? are they less damaging than the circuitry to the environment?) but I don't think it's wise to thank countries for exacerbating a territorial dispute. The world has enough of those now, we don't need another escalation or spat between countries.
Does this book talk about any non-x86 arch issues?
They are few and far between. On page 176 and 177 when Love is discussing Atomic Integer Operations (Chapter 10, Kernel Synchronization Methods), he mentions the atomic_t structure and Love mentions the SPARC port of Linux and an odd implementation choice to have the lower 8 bits of the atomic_t structure be lock bits. This means that there were only 24 bits available to be used on SPARC machines. Now, I assume this has since been rectified but you generally don't get another architecture mentioned unless there are curiosities that Love wants to mention about code in the asm director of the source tree.
So from there he starts talking about asm/atomic.h and explains to the reader that because atomic integer operations are architecture dependent, you get different support for additional methods that may be unique to an architecture. He treats 64 bit specific things the same way. You don't get as full of an explanation but you do get something when it's interesting and noteworthy.
Now, of course, Chapter 19 on portability covers many architectures but doesn't really dive deep into any of the alternatives. Love remains at a pretty high level and adheres to English explanations of caveats that occur with different architectures. Which is why I think this book would be good for you despite a 32 bit x86 architecture. Even though he might be looking at x86 architecture code, most of the code cited in this book is architecture independent. On top of that, you're getting an English explanation alongside it so that if you were really pressed to look at the PPC equivalent, the English is going to tell you what something does and there will probably be a lot of similarities in what function must be performed.
no descriptions about devices NOT on a PCI bus
As for your second point I don't recall a bias to PCI, ISA or USB devices in chapter 17. In fact, it was more so about the four kernel components (device types, modules, kernel objects and sysfs) the kernel has implemented to support any possible device. The downside is that if you're looking for a detailed guide on the PCI bus, this isn't it. This is more about what code is in the kernel to take care of any device technology with no favoritism given. I just checked the index for any of those three acronyms and must confess that if they were mentioned, little time was given to them. This book is about the kernel code and how the kernel code handles those kinds of things. I think the scope of this book and the length of it is not meant to include something like individual specific bus technologies.
Remind me, why do we have such a fragile system at the very core of modern civilisation?
Define 'core of civilization.' I don't view stock markets as that kind of thing. Regardless, I believe the reasoning they allow it is that -- like everything else in that crazy place of Wall Street -- it can help you make or lose money. This wasn't the only investigation where an algorithm screwed up. I submitted a story that wasn't accepted about an algorithm that lost one company a million dollars in five seconds.
So, you know, before you sign up to let a high frequency trader manage your trades, take note of the risks you are accepting. In the story I reported, the company that lost the money just fired the guy who wrote the algorithm and keeps doing it.
If it's like margin trading where people were taking loans and lost it all and everything died because everyone was doing it, then it's bad. The question is whether or not these micro translations are going to suddenly force everyone all at once to realize their losses. I don't think that's the case but the 'flash crash' might be proof otherwise.
In defense of high frequency trading, I don't see it as anymore of a gamble than regular trading. You are shifting money around to make more money. So you shift tinier amounts faster and for shorter periods of time to get better returns. I'm not doing it so if it turns out to be bad for the people doing it then I'm going to benefit. If it turns out to be good for the people doing it then I bitch because I don't have that same benefit. If the HFTs are putting everyone at risk, I'd like to hear precisely how that logic follows because right now it's looking like it sporadically injects chance volatility that we've dealt with before.
It would have been nice if your review had compared other books on the same topic so I could know which is best to get.
I think you want to reference the latest edition of that book which is also the Third Edition and also based on the 2.6 kernel. The book you linked is from 2000 and based on 2.3 I believe.
It appears that the O'Reilly book focuses more on the tiny implementation details while Love's book has more theory. The O'Reilly book is more than twice as long as Love's book. The O'Reilly book was also published in November 2005 so I doubt it would have anything on the Completely Fair Scheduler or any advancements since then.
I wish I had more time to give you a better review but the fact is that I'm new to this stuff and this is the only book I've read devoted solely to the Linux Kernel. The Love book is a solid book though (hence the 10/10) and if you're looking for a current Linux guide, it's probably the newest.
"To keep this review relatively concise, I'll only fully cover the content in the first half of the book."
Yeah, I only read the first half of my assignments before writing the reports, too :-)
I guess I have to pick between comments like the above and comments like these? Twenty thousand bytes it is next time.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you have about the other subjects he wrote of (timers and their management, memory management, VFS, address space, I/O, page caching, debugging and portability).
Just feels like nobody reads the really long reviews anyway.
Another book about developing a skillset I wish I had. I hate being web developer, I get no respect.
As the reviewer, I too am a web developer (Java & Ruby). While I might not be using Linux Kernel Development in my profession on a regular basis, there's no reason why you can't hack away at home in your spare time. As I mention in the review, the 2.6 kernel basically keeps my web apps afloat so it's nice to know more about how the kernel operates internally. Am I qualified to release a distribution optimized for web hosting? Definitely not right now but after the chapter on debugging and understanding how the scheduler works, I feel more confident when I SSH into a box to check out what's going on with Mongrel or Tomcat.
Your education doesn't have to end the second you accept your first paycheck. If you don't know C, that's just another thing to learn before starting down this road. I implore you to expand your skill set, who knows what you may find? The great thing about this book was that it's mostly English. So even if you don't know C, you could hobble through the code examples (like Legolas' singing in Lord of the Rings) and stick mostly to Love's English explanation of it.
They're just 'future proofing' the game for when we invade China and Gliese 581g. It will even work for our upcoming 'Civil War II: More Civil' planned by Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert.
However, posting your own post in your own post is a bit excessive, and there could have been better ways to do this than just repost your entire freakin story as the first comment.
Yo dawg, I heard you liked my post so I put a post inside my post so you could enjoy it while you're enjoying my post!
It appears that the problem, that affect the available memory in a chip when multiple cores are working on the same chunks of data, is getting worse and may be hitting a peak somewhere in the neighborhood of 48 cores, when entirely new operating systems will be needed, the report says.
Seriously? You picked that over my submission?
I submitted this earlier this morning I guess my submission was lacking. But if you're interested in the original MIT article and the actual paper (PDF):
eldavojohn writes "Multicore (think tens or hundreds of cores) will come at a price for current operating systems. A team at MIT found that as they approached 48 cores their operating system slowed down. After activating more and more cores in their simulation, a sort of memory leak occurred whereby data had to remain in memory as long as a core might need it in its calculations. But the good news is that in their paper (PDF), they showed that for at least several years Linux should be able to keep up with chip enhancements in the multicore realm. To handle multiple cores, Linux keeps a counter of which cores are working on the data. As a core starts to work on a piece of data, Linux increments the number. When the core is done, Linux decrements the number. As the core count approached 48, the amount of actual work decreased and Linux spent more time managing counters. But the team found that 'Slightly rewriting the Linux code so that each core kept a local count, which was only occasionally synchronized with those of the other cores, greatly improved the system's overall performance.' The researchers caution that as the number of cores skyrockets, operating systems will have to be completely redesigned to handle managing these cores and SMP. After reviewing the paper, one researcher is confident Linux will remain viable for five to eight years without need for a major redesign."
I don't know, guess I picked a bad title or something?
Luckily we aren't anywhere near 48 cores and there is some time left to come up with a new Linux (Windows?).
Again, seriously? What does "(Windows?)" even mean? As you pass a certain number of cores, modern operating systems will need to be redesigned to handle extreme SMP. It's going to differ from OS to OS but we won't know about Windows until somebody takes the time to test it.
I guess all those warnings about how Tylenol can damage your liver are true!
Once the dead snakes are doped on acetaminophen, don't they face the risk of whatever native species might eat them overdosing on acetaminophen? As I've said before, I steer clear of all that crap.