Sounds like an excerpt from some Islamic Da Vinci Code, maybe Contact, maybe even Stargate. Clearly encoded in these tiles is the plan for an interstellar transport system of some sort.
Or a way from keeping invading armies from stealing precious culture and a well developed body of knowledge. Not everything is trivial simply because it resembles contemporary fiction.
Of course, you're welcome to ask Dan Brown what he thinks.
Since it isn't known (as TFA points out) if they fully understood the mathematics behind the designs, we could have a bit of fun speculating, yes?
I am no expert on Islam but I really like to read and study up on various forms of encryption. I'm not a crypto genius by any means, I don't endeavour to break codes, I just like to be able to recognize them.
If I am not mistaken (flog me if I am), the mural depicted could in effect be a key to a cipher, and one's starting point applying that mural as a key would be very important. In fact, perhaps a key with infinite grooves and landings that fits a lock with only a few tumblers.
Now, if that structure was destoryed during war (many were), and that key easily re-created from mathematical notes, that would be something. The notes themselves would be useless to pretty much anyone else at the time.
I don't think they understood the math behind it was we do (or better wording would be the significance of the math beyond their application of it) but I do think they understood quite a bit more about cryptography than we previously thought.
Of course, it could just be that the design held some spiritual significance. A lot of trouble to go through, however.
Why does anyone have to be 'the best' or 'most innovative' ? This doesn't make free software authors strive to reach sume inane dumbass lists, it makes them pissed (or some I'd imagine rather happy) that once again their efforts didn't get them the attention others are receiving.
It also makes people want to get involved in OSS for what (some think) and (I think) are the wrong reasons. Crappier code [ could ] be the result.
Funding as everyone knows is a double edged sword. Corporate and investment interests often can and will butt heads with the principals of free software developers. I'd rather live on ramen noodles again than deal with 'suits' saying 'we're giving too much away, we need to save some for a commercial release. Yes yes, we need to bait them into getting the commercial version' Ahem, Qlusters? My god if QRM were any more 'baitware' you could go fishing with it.
For practically every need you could have there is free software to fill it. How can you single out only 10? More importantly, why would you? Doesn't this effectually leave you wearing blinders?
Unless one has downloaded, compiled, installed and used 90% of free software across all platforms.. you would not be in any position to write such a waste of disk space, in my opinion anyway. Why can't the motivation to create things be simply that.. make neat stuff and enjoy the fact that you made life just a little easier for someone else?
Why does *everything* alwas have to boil down to money and its commercial use? I think I'm not ranting about OSS anymore, I think this is turning into the world in general. But the two are getting a little too close for comfort, compared to how it was.. anyway.
Flog me if you like, agree with me if you want, do *anything* but take TFA at face value.
And you're surprized? You made your bed, now sleep in it.
I never get to see much of that in a GOOD month.
Or rather, stop sleeping until you've un-installed PHP on all your servers, because it will never be secure
Nothing connected to the Internet is secure.
thanks to the PHP team's attitude.
... the Internet will soon be flooded with more spam IRC wars and (quite possibly) extortion of small e-business than it would be otherwise. I think this is the first time you'll see a company really duck behind the "WITHOUT WARRANTY" clause in the software's open source license agreement.
Are these exploits or "exploits"? After all, a lot of "exploits" are huff and bluff about what really should be called bugs or even just quirks.
Of course he won't come out and say, I think the point of that interview was to simply irritate PHP. In effect, he's going to irritate a great many of us who have no choice but keep PHP installed.
I think (and this is just the feeling I got from TFA) that :
Maybe , 1/3 of them are really just 'bugs' that have the potential to cause undesirable effects (segfaults and such).
Another 1/3 are "Serious" exploits in the definition of the word, but you really need at least shell access to play with them, many (i'd assume) only come out and play with root.
Another 1/3 are most likely going to be the ones we're worried about. Now, of that 1/3, 1/2 of them may not be so easily exploited by your average script kiddie. It would take someone rather skilled to really see the value of the exploit. But, if just one brainiac posts a how-to on a forum.. well then so much for that.
I think, to be safe.. its time to go make sure all your key pairs are up to date and write a script to bulid, and rebuild, and rebuild (and rebuild) PHP. You should have a few days to finish that. Just don't write the script in PHP:)
've long argued that for as much as the pro-PHP group blames the coders, there is simply no excuse for some of the levels of vulnerability. So, while I'm loathe for the torrent of problems, I am glad to see someone finally calling PHP out in the open for some of the problems it created long before any kid touched a single line of code.
Since it is so widely used an in production, one could (almost) argue that some exploits and bugs can / should be kept quiet if they spark plans for major restructuring or re-writes. That type of move allows them to fix fundamental core problems without the world breathing down their back and stops this damn "bugfixed but more bugs resulted" releases. Some could also argue that PHP5 is this restructuring and rewrite, but apparently quite a bit of the exploits are tucked away in PHP's core and still exist in PHP5.. so I don't think that's the case.
So I guess the real question to ask would be :
"Was it apathy, fear of losing public confidence (and a ton of money) or both that let this laundry list grow so huge"? I will say that Zend and some of the people who hide behind obfuscated code were really quick to jump on me when I called the effectiveness of Zend source encryption into question and pointed out the cottage industry now thriving on breaking it.
Finally, we have yet to see these exploits. All we have is what someone obviously rather angry has to say about them. We really do not have enough information to say if PHP is hiding these or just dragging ass. I have no reason to doubt the seriousness claimed by TFA. What we can say for sure is next month the laundry hits the clothesline.
What was that about 'beware the ides of March?'... et tu.. Stefan?!'.. or, for us poor bastards who have to patch 500 servers (I can't seem to get past that, I know) a quote from Real Genius : "I drank WHAT?! - Socrates"
Starting to feel more like a STD than an interpreted scripting language.
Give people a day or two to respond to each exploit before he hands us another to go racing after.
Especially us poor bastards that have 500 + servers to patch. I'm sure (err, hope?) they will do it responsibly , however I still see this being a *very* interesting month.
Actually PHP is not that insecure.. Its the people who do not know hjow to write code who are insecure. You blame PHP. I blame peole who actually think they can program but are nothing more but scripters. PHP can be secure. If you write it correctly. Think about the script kiddys who use automated perl scripts.. Should perl not be on systems? If you want real security unplug your machine.. it will be safe. Otherwise any machine can be vouln.
You are correct, but that doesn't make net irritants that are permitted by insecure setups any less irritating. One of the biggest problems that come to mind are shared web hosting providers who have no choice but to run php 'wide open' allowing almost all functionality and without the benefit of phpsuexec to find what sites they host are letting the bots in.
They have no control or knowledge of what people upload. Someone could upload a 2 year old copy of phpBB they had on CD, not knowing any better and now you have a gigabit connected spam cannon hurling garbage at the rest of us.
I'm not saying its *just* shared hosts that (help to) give PHP the reputation its been getting, but they are a major contributor. Some take proactive measures to try and at least curtail it, most do not.
Its going to be a 'fun' month for those of us who have to deal with abuse issues. That is more than certain. I think I speak for many when I say : "Aww, SHIT."
How can that not be a bad thing? If a company is more critical of an employee months away from retirement, that is by definition age discrimination. Sorry, but saving a few bucks is not justification for prejudice in the workplace.
The world has two parts. The way things *should* be, and the way they *are*. While we should all endeavour to help make things more as they *should be*, we also have to deal with the reality of how things *are*.
If your months away from retirement and know your being watched with the explicit purpose of fucking you out of your pension, *don't* surf porn at work.
In court, PTSD is not an excuse for forgetting common sense unless someplace there exists medical documentation that PTSD inhibits your ability to know right from wrong.
That being said, an alarming number of people do suffer from PTSD, and I hope this case sets some precedence and finds its way into the ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act) so that PTSD is treated by employers like any other common disability.
In my painting of the perfect world, employers have hearts, too. I'm not saying he sould not be fired, but give the dude his money.. he worked for it.
You shouldn't be allowed to cite World Book or Britannica for any papers you write after.. third grade.. anyway.
Wikipedia is good for the same thing a conventional encyclopedia is good for: Learning enough about a subject to pick good search terms for, at a minimum, a general search engine, and possibly even more specialized catalogs.
Culminating a body of knowledge from many into one central place in a fashion where (all) mostly agree on the content is a wonderful thing. Research is often ill funded and every search on WP saves you quite a bit of money.
That being said, its most useful as a research tool than a source of authority on a topic, in fact all encyclopedias are. But I don't have to leave my chair to use wikipedia and I'm really really happy its available to me.
Research is rooted in a scientific curiosity, most times. Treat it like any other source, with a grain of salt.. and enjoy having some of your work done for you. Most importantly, EDIT IT when you are able to advance the body of knowledge presented to you by others.
Imagine if you would, an encyclopedia that gives you new information on almost every topic each time you open it. 20 years ago that would be called 'magic', treat it as if it were because the benefit is still the same no matter how boring and commonplace the technology making it happen becomes. Don't look at it as a cite-able source, look at it as a starting point that saved you 12 hours of weeding through junk article-wiki FUD.
It's worth a few bucks, and if more would realize that, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Go without one beer, or one pack of smokes and donate the money instead. If many did that, we'd all have a much better resource, without ads distracting our kids from their homework.
Call me what you will, but I fail to see why this has even become an issue, and I'm kind of pissed that it has. I'm going to go now and donate $20 to wikipedia. If you reply to this and flog me, you had better have done the same (first).
No, you are wrong. Being smart, or part of being smart, is having quick intelligence and ready mental capabilities. Therefore, the smarter you get, the more capable you should be to handle situations.
True. I'll rephrase -
The more we figure out, the less (some) can cope with what becomes obvious. Obvious and figuring out are of course relative to the individual.
Some examples :
You figured out your girlfriend or wife was having an affair.
You realized your company was into some bad stuff.
You realized the stuff you were making was hurting people.... and similar.
Thank you for pointing that out without 'flogging':)
There's a huge problem with people self-diagnosing autistic spectrum disorders, they read a paragraph or two on Asperger's and then they have the 'omg that's me!' moment. I can happily sit around all day picking bits out of DSM criteria that fit my personality.
There's a huge problem with self diagnosis period, especially when it leads to self medicating. However, I want to bring something to your attention that you (probably) didn't consider because, well.. you'd have no reason to.
Health Maintenance Organizations *hate* treating things without a diagnosis. HMO shrinks and doctors will fight tooth and nail diagnosisng anyone with anything that doesn't have a clear cut difinitive treatment plan (and clear cut estimated entire cost to recovery).
That being said, the situation for someone in my position gets.. hopeless. I'm too functional and otherwise happy to walk out the door with anything other than a generic "stress" or "adjustment" problem and given tranqs, paxil or other things that just don't work (I have tried many, many drugs), but make me go away in the eyes of my insurance company.
This has become a vicious cycle. I'm functional enough to work for myself (from home) and have a family (my wife is extremely tolerant and supportive). Unfortunately, I have to pay for my own medical BECAUSE I'm not able to function in an office very well, which means I can afford only basic (shitty) coverage. There are lots of people like me.
I'm tired of being the way I am, and since the people who are there to help me can't or won't, I have very little other recourse than to try to figure out what's wrong with me myself. Throw the fact that I have a 15 month old daughter into the mix and it gets even more scary. I did not start showing symptoms until I was close to my teens, will she? And if she does, I don't even know what to call it.
I did not say I have autism, I did not say I was autistic, and I'm not the one who tossed out Asperger syndrome (though most of it fit me like a glove). From wikipedia:
Due to the mixed nature of its effects, it remains controversial among researchers, physicians, and people who are diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome.
That is the *last* thing I want to toss at my HMO. That would be worse than not being able to find a diagnosis, as they instantly kick it citing the condition itself is foundless (hence they won't pay for it) and I have no hope of appeal.
I said I, and many others I know who also happen to be rather smart people show symptoms *very much like* autism. That is not a self diagnoses OF autism.
So in my case, there is no medication because I won't self medicate. But, if I can find and argue a diagnosis that has clinical foundations to the point where I can get or force my HMO to at least listen to me, I'm one step closer to living rather than surviving life.
Sometimes circumstances just suck. I don't want to seem argumentitive , you raised a very valid point.. but the mold you describe doesn't fit everyone. I've been dealing with this for over 20 years now, and its getting progressively worse. If someone is going to do something it obviously (has) to be me. Be careful generalizing:)
Check out Rackables , be warned ahead of time they are rather expensive (but also pretty sexy) servers. I had the luck of working with them a few years back on a cluster, and their engineers have some really cool ideas.
For a while, I worked for these guys , quite often we would be called in to do campus wide lighting retrofits to offset the cost of server rooms that were getting hungrier by the day. At least while I was there, no "magic bullet" to reduce costs in the DC itself existed.
I've had some success using virtualization tools such as Xen to consolidate servers (sometimes making up to 50 boxes go away) that were then reloaded and put to other use, but the electric bill never changed (sort of like getting free power to 50 servers).
I don't unfortunately have anything that could help you make a major dent in it however. Wattage is wattage and machines use what they use. AMD is coming out with some boards that can step down, or power down cores and their associated memory controllers when they go idle (independently of other cores and controllers on the same board), but I don't think thats hitting mainstream for a little while.
It would be nice if at the end of your project you published your steps and savings, and best of luck getting a plan in place that offers a fast enough payback to warrant implementing:)
Proxy = good, as other people have pointed out information is supposed to be available to everyone all of the time.
Giving something to someone's child allowing them to circumvent parental authority is bad. The school's authority? I'm kind of split down the middle. Legally, you'd be screwed and could be held accountable if you're a US citizen.
A kid would ask for a proxy to use his myspace account meanwhile dreaming of the gigs of porn he's going to download on county bandwidth. We're rather evolved, but giving kids porn is still frowned upon. It comes down to , do you have and can you show you had a reasonable expectation that you work would not be used to break laws? If the child used the proxy to do things that would not be illegal for a minor to do outside of school, you should be ok (but could catch some flack). But you can't count on kids to use things as intended.
If you configured phpproxy, for instance so that if the requested URL was ! myspace.com or somedomain.com, then you've done what is called 'due diligence'.
If you put up an OPEN proxy with no restrictions, then you can have a reasonable expectation that your proxy WILL be used to break laws (mostly CC fraud), which would make you rather irresponsible, and accountable.
The same debate can be applied to Gun makers enabling criminals to do bad things.
I'm sorry, but you've got a dangerous mistake. Richard Stallman really deserves the most credit for the Linux operating system environment, with his foundation of the GPL, the massive code base of gcc and glibc and other core open source projects, and the continuing work there. The Linux kernel is critical, but a similar project such as HURD coming out earlier could have filled the same spot.
I stand corrected (and your right) and I know better because I was there. The sentence should have said "Linus and Stallman", but Linus is the topic.
If any part of the 'big bang' had not happened just as it did, I'm quite sure the universe would still exist but I can't accurately say just how things would be within it.
Free software as we know it has more than one parent, you are 100% correct. Stallman laid the roads, no doubt about it.. but it took a 'Linus' to get people to spend the $300 in long distance calls to download the source over 2400 (or slower) bps. I was one of those people.
"Yes, hello, MCI? Yes about my bill, this call to California.. you see, my cat jumps up on my desk when I'm at work, and he accidentally triggered my modem to dial out.. Yes, yes, he must have pushed a key on my keyboard.. no no, you see it was a computer that made the call, do I have to pay for this call to California? Nobody was talking, it was just modems.... yes, M O D E M.. No? I don't? Really? THANKS!"
I'm not at all negating or diminishing the work of everyone else involved, but lines of code aren't the only measure of how much someone contributed.
HOwever I do think that assuming he has some degree of autism isn't unlikely, I myself suffer from quite serios mental disorders and I seem to find that autism and other mental disorders (or what you like to call them, doesn't matter much) is much more common in "the geek community" than in the world surrounding us. Probably has a lot to do with that the commputer is really a big help to people like me who have problems handling social situations.
If you get the occasion, read The curious incident of the dog in the night time by Mark Haddon. Its a very small and entertaining paperback, an avid reader could finish it off in one evening's sitting.
I also suffer from :
* Severe Anxiety In Social Situations
* Extreme difficulty making decisions when new options are in front of me
* Panic attacks when touched unexpectedly
* Panic attacks when people shout or demonstrate hostile / violent behavior
.. and an array of other extremely annoying ailments which lead me to believe that (most) very smart people could also be considered mildly (or more) autistic.
I'm not saying they / we ARE autistic, I'm only pointing out that reclusive geeks demonstrate very, very similar symptoms. From the research I've done, it seems that somewhere around Gen-X kids who are really smart were given an overdose of stimuli which grew their creativity and intellect but shot them in the foot emotionally. Right about the time of the Texas Instruments home computer, from what I can tell, and onward.
I had to wade through an enormous amount of kiddie-shrink finger pointing papers, and I'm still doing that.. to try and see how not to pass this along to my 15 month old daughter. I can only say I'm 100% convinced that Autism has more forms than documented, and one of them is developed, not acquired when we don our "genes".
There's also a school of thought that empathy is the next evolutionary "tool" we're devloping, and the feedback we get from the heightened sense literally drives us crazy to the point where we seem autistic.
People who stay home and work, electing not to interact much with the outside world around them do so for very good reasons, and we really need to be tolerant of eachother's quirks. This doesn't mean that you put on a T shirt that says "Hey world, I have a hard time coping with you so plese be nice to me all the time", however.
If you (yourself) won't make an effort to get past yourself, you can't expect more from those around you.
The smarter we get, the less we're able to handle it. I don't think the world is going to slow down so we feel more comfortable being in it.. so the word for today kids : cope.
Let us not forget, Linus is most directly responsible for this 'cool little safe haven' we found where not only can we interact at a level that also lets us feel safe, we can also have careers. When he talks, listen. If you don't like what he says, cope.
A simpler solution would be for the manufactures of these routers to have them refuse to act as routers with any of the default settings. i.e. with the default settings you could connect to it for configuration, but no Internet access until the password, SSID, etc had been changed.
Cars ship with seatbelts and big fat warning signs in the glove box and the top side of the sun visors that tell you to use them, but an alarming number of people don't.
Yet, if your car failed to start if you weren't buckled up, people would go ballistic.
I agree 100% with you, but I think all Cisco (Linksys) and others (may) do is go with the big fat warning label and a checkbox / button combo to make it go away, if even that.
Just because the folks submitting patches aren't being paid by Mozilla, doesn't mean they aren't monetizing their accomplishments.
Finding a popular / useful OS project to work on is a very common (and worthwhile) practice used to build resumes and compensate for lack of 'proven' experience. Another *really* good example of this is Xen.
I don't have statistics like these for Xen, however a quick glance through their mailing lists (xen-devel) will show a flurry of activity daily, sometimes up to 15 - 20 patches a day being submitted,... maybe 30% of them accepted as-is (or a bit less, this is off the top of my head).
The point is, being able to augment your resume or CV with "Patches xxx, yyy zzz for Firefox, xxx yyy zz for Xen, xxx yyy zzz for Open Office) really helps to show that you like doing what you do and quite a few people happen to think you're rather good at doing it.
So if you submit, say 10 patches, 3 of them get accepted which helps to get you that 80K a year job, well you did in fact (indirectly) get compensated for your efforts and so did everyone who uses the browser that now works a little better due to your contribs.
I really fail to see anything 'sinister' about that in and of itself, but had no idea that Mozilla brought in that kind of dough. I would have guessed maybe 1 - 2 million, not 50. But even knowing that, I still see it as a win-win situation. Maybe I'm a little more laid back than most.
I'm not scared, but then I'm not paranoid to a fault.
Spoken like a true anonymous coward.
And I understand the technology enough to know that your moronic "scary shit" scenario isn't possible.
That which is smaller than a flea and can track merchandise leaving a store (and marketed as such) is more than capable of doing as I described, you don't need to be a RF engineer to figure that out.
Think about it again.
Re:Something to worry about... but maybe not so mu
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Hitachi's Tiny RFID Chips
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You've got to be fucking joking. Try this: Go to rally. Go home. Take a shower. Problem solved.
Hmm, better also :
Wash your jacket (if you wore one, and never wear flannel to a protest rally), shoes, hat, backpack, etc, too, while you're at it.. and also consider that only a small fraction of the population would even understand what the heck RFID is or does, much less knowing to look for a 'flea'.
Then, hope, just HOPE the food you ate doesn't contain polymer coated versions of these that 'stick with you' until passed.
I'm kind of laughing at my own paranoia while writing this, the scary part is, this time its well founded. The only good that can come of this is millions of conspiracy nuts finally find the validation they've been searching for.. anyway you look at it : scary.
Re:Something to worry about... but maybe not so mu
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Hitachi's Tiny RFID Chips
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· Score: 2, Insightful
On the other hand, I don't know what the effective range is on these RFID chips. If it is more than 30 feet, then I'd definitely worry. If it's less than 3 feet, then by-hand scanning or pass-through-booth scanning are the only ways of effectively managing that.
Here's a scary thought :
You work for some branch of the Federal Government, and you attend a protest rally. You get "dusted", and when you show up for work the next day the RFID reader you walk through (in the metal detector you pass through) alerts your bosses that you were at the rally.
That information then effects your career, or worse.
I'm sorry, but if this is true , Hitachi has lost all of my respect (yeah, like they care).. but there is an ethical responsibility to think of "Well, what will people do with this once I invent it?" and they know it, realized it, and did it anyway. If I can think of the above, so can they, and so can whoever buys these.
On the bright side, a broad range RFID reader that oscillates from the lowest to highest frequencies could tell you if you were 'hot' , and possibly point out where on your body the 'flea' attached itself. I wonder if Hitachi will make those next? (If indeed there is merit to TFA).
Is this a true quantum computer, or one that simply uses certain quantum properties? Scientists weren't predicting this for another 20-30 years. Wouldn't a 1024 qubit computer be far faster than any cluser on earth? And if I'm not mistaken, a 16 qubit computer would be faster than any single computer. I'd like to see some speed comparisons for parallel tasks.
TFA was obviously written by someone who did not quite understand what they were reporting. They (sort of) did, but did manage to get quite a few things wrong. I'm not saying I could have done a better job, and I build HPC's for a living. This is a rather difficult concept to report.
Until (possibly) the point in time that this beast was fired up on a bench, no quantum computer 'per say' existed outside of some very very unstable and short lived labs that lasted only a few instructions, so its really hard to say if this really is a quantum computer since there isn't one to compare it to.
I can say for sure its 'quantum like' in construction, and beats the living piss out of anything any of us have ever seen, but I'm not 100% sure it is a quantum machine.
Words from TFA like "analog" and others have let some doubt creep up in my mind, enough to spark me onto another research tangent on the subject. Reading the author, it (almost) seemed like some kind of binary machine until you get most of the way through it, which also raised some doubts for me.
A (insert your favorite name for quantum bit [ that also seems to be up in the air ]) on a quantum machine exists in three states, on off or both, and this made no mention to how this is accomplished or used in computations, but that doesn't mean the information wasn't released.
Anyway, folks, read the reaction link, its from someone who obviously knows more than most of us and corrects the author of TFA in quite a few places, then perhaps go back and re-read TFA. The reaction does so some nit-picking, but also raises (and answers) some really valid questions.
I'm hoping someone much more well versed than I on the subject can critique the critique I just linked to.
Both articles linked mentioned that Vista just wasn't pushing PC sales as anticpated, but neither article shed much light on what set of numbers were used to determine what this push should be.
Is this a forecast that MS puts out for each release, or is it determined by historical data? Since there's nothing really historical about Vista's CPU demands for the average user (well, not much really), how the heck did they come up with any kind of number?
This would (I guess) have to be MS saying "This is what we expect people to do with it, this is what we expect businesses to do with it, and this is what we expect CPU demands will be in both cases, hence here's the data to forecast what you'll be selling, we expect to push xxxx copies per day.." (well maybe not that simple, but you get the point).
Another way of looking at this would then be (speaking as Intel or AMD):
"Microsoft sold us a load of fud, we need to keep focused on attacking the virtualization and server market, and the other guy already has a strong foot hold there." (as either could say that about the other).
So in short, it looks like both AMD and Intel learned nothing from Enron's "virtual asset" mindset, which was counting on money that wasn't in the bank yet, but you were *pretty* sure would be there. Typical, I'd say unless I'm way off on how these predictions come into play?
I also saw no data in either article about growth either company made which they now need to find another way of paying for, but I guess that's not going to be availble to sift through for a while.
If I were either company, I'd be treating Vista like Bob until some longer range (real) predictions could be made. But hey, cheap servers.. I'm not a stock holder of either, or complaining:)
Slashdot Mirror
Or a way from keeping invading armies from stealing precious culture and a well developed body of knowledge. Not everything is trivial simply because it resembles contemporary fiction.
Of course, you're welcome to ask Dan Brown what he thinks.
Since it isn't known (as TFA points out) if they fully understood the mathematics behind the designs, we could have a bit of fun speculating, yes?
I am no expert on Islam but I really like to read and study up on various forms of encryption. I'm not a crypto genius by any means, I don't endeavour to break codes, I just like to be able to recognize them.
If I am not mistaken (flog me if I am), the mural depicted could in effect be a key to a cipher, and one's starting point applying that mural as a key would be very important. In fact, perhaps a key with infinite grooves and landings that fits a lock with only a few tumblers.
Now, if that structure was destoryed during war (many were), and that key easily re-created from mathematical notes, that would be something. The notes themselves would be useless to pretty much anyone else at the time.
I don't think they understood the math behind it was we do (or better wording would be the significance of the math beyond their application of it) but I do think they understood quite a bit more about cryptography than we previously thought.
Of course, it could just be that the design held some spiritual significance. A lot of trouble to go through, however.
I agree.
.. you would not be in any position to write such a waste of disk space, in my opinion anyway. Why can't the motivation to create things be simply that .. make neat stuff and enjoy the fact that you made life just a little easier for someone else?
.. anyway.
Why does anyone have to be 'the best' or 'most innovative' ? This doesn't make free software authors strive to reach sume inane dumbass lists, it makes them pissed (or some I'd imagine rather happy) that once again their efforts didn't get them the attention others are receiving.
It also makes people want to get involved in OSS for what (some think) and (I think) are the wrong reasons. Crappier code [ could ] be the result.
Funding as everyone knows is a double edged sword. Corporate and investment interests often can and will butt heads with the principals of free software developers. I'd rather live on ramen noodles again than deal with 'suits' saying 'we're giving too much away, we need to save some for a commercial release. Yes yes, we need to bait them into getting the commercial version' Ahem, Qlusters? My god if QRM were any more 'baitware' you could go fishing with it.
For practically every need you could have there is free software to fill it. How can you single out only 10? More importantly, why would you? Doesn't this effectually leave you wearing blinders?
Unless one has downloaded, compiled, installed and used 90% of free software across all platforms
Why does *everything* alwas have to boil down to money and its commercial use? I think I'm not ranting about OSS anymore, I think this is turning into the world in general. But the two are getting a little too close for comfort, compared to how it was
Flog me if you like, agree with me if you want, do *anything* but take TFA at face value.
I never get to see much of that in a GOOD month.
Nothing connected to the Internet is secure.
... the Internet will soon be flooded with more spam IRC wars and (quite possibly) extortion of small e-business than it would be otherwise. I think this is the first time you'll see a company really duck behind the "WITHOUT WARRANTY" clause in the software's open source license agreement.
Of course he won't come out and say, I think the point of that interview was to simply irritate PHP. In effect, he's going to irritate a great many of us who have no choice but keep PHP installed.
I think (and this is just the feeling I got from TFA) that :
Maybe , 1/3 of them are really just 'bugs' that have the potential to cause undesirable effects (segfaults and such).
Another 1/3 are "Serious" exploits in the definition of the word, but you really need at least shell access to play with them, many (i'd assume) only come out and play with root.
Another 1/3 are most likely going to be the ones we're worried about. Now, of that 1/3, 1/2 of them may not be so easily exploited by your average script kiddie. It would take someone rather skilled to really see the value of the exploit. But, if just one brainiac posts a how-to on a forum
I think, to be safe
Since it is so widely used an in production, one could (almost) argue that some exploits and bugs can / should be kept quiet if they spark plans for major restructuring or re-writes. That type of move allows them to fix fundamental core problems without the world breathing down their back and stops this damn "bugfixed but more bugs resulted" releases. Some could also argue that PHP5 is this restructuring and rewrite, but apparently quite a bit of the exploits are tucked away in PHP's core and still exist in PHP5
So I guess the real question to ask would be :
"Was it apathy, fear of losing public confidence (and a ton of money) or both that let this laundry list grow so huge"? I will say that Zend and some of the people who hide behind obfuscated code were really quick to jump on me when I called the effectiveness of Zend source encryption into question and pointed out the cottage industry now thriving on breaking it.
Finally, we have yet to see these exploits. All we have is what someone obviously rather angry has to say about them. We really do not have enough information to say if PHP is hiding these or just dragging ass. I have no reason to doubt the seriousness claimed by TFA. What we can say for sure is next month the laundry hits the clothesline.
What was that about 'beware the ides of March?'
Starting to feel more like a STD than an interpreted scripting language.
Especially us poor bastards that have 500 + servers to patch. I'm sure (err, hope?) they will do it responsibly , however I still see this being a *very* interesting month.
You are correct, but that doesn't make net irritants that are permitted by insecure setups any less irritating. One of the biggest problems that come to mind are shared web hosting providers who have no choice but to run php 'wide open' allowing almost all functionality and without the benefit of phpsuexec to find what sites they host are letting the bots in.
They have no control or knowledge of what people upload. Someone could upload a 2 year old copy of phpBB they had on CD, not knowing any better and now you have a gigabit connected spam cannon hurling garbage at the rest of us.
I'm not saying its *just* shared hosts that (help to) give PHP the reputation its been getting, but they are a major contributor. Some take proactive measures to try and at least curtail it, most do not.
Its going to be a 'fun' month for those of us who have to deal with abuse issues. That is more than certain. I think I speak for many when I say : "Aww, SHIT."
The world has two parts. The way things *should* be, and the way they *are*. While we should all endeavour to help make things more as they *should be*, we also have to deal with the reality of how things *are*.
If your months away from retirement and know your being watched with the explicit purpose of fucking you out of your pension, *don't* surf porn at work.
In court, PTSD is not an excuse for forgetting common sense unless someplace there exists medical documentation that PTSD inhibits your ability to know right from wrong.
That being said, an alarming number of people do suffer from PTSD, and I hope this case sets some precedence and finds its way into the ADA (Americans With Disabilities Act) so that PTSD is treated by employers like any other common disability.
In my painting of the perfect world, employers have hearts, too. I'm not saying he sould not be fired, but give the dude his money
Culminating a body of knowledge from many into one central place in a fashion where (all) mostly agree on the content is a wonderful thing. Research is often ill funded and every search on WP saves you quite a bit of money.
That being said, its most useful as a research tool than a source of authority on a topic, in fact all encyclopedias are. But I don't have to leave my chair to use wikipedia and I'm really really happy its available to me.
Research is rooted in a scientific curiosity, most times. Treat it like any other source, with a grain of salt
Imagine if you would, an encyclopedia that gives you new information on almost every topic each time you open it. 20 years ago that would be called 'magic', treat it as if it were because the benefit is still the same no matter how boring and commonplace the technology making it happen becomes. Don't look at it as a cite-able source, look at it as a starting point that saved you 12 hours of weeding through junk article-wiki FUD.
It's worth a few bucks, and if more would realize that, we wouldn't be having this discussion. Go without one beer, or one pack of smokes and donate the money instead. If many did that, we'd all have a much better resource, without ads distracting our kids from their homework.
Call me what you will, but I fail to see why this has even become an issue, and I'm kind of pissed that it has. I'm going to go now and donate $20 to wikipedia. If you reply to this and flog me, you had better have done the same (first).
True. I'll rephrase -
The more we figure out, the less (some) can cope with what becomes obvious. Obvious and figuring out are of course relative to the individual.
Some examples :
You figured out your girlfriend or wife was having an affair.
You realized your company was into some bad stuff.
You realized the stuff you were making was hurting people.
Thank you for pointing that out without 'flogging'
There's a huge problem with self diagnosis period, especially when it leads to self medicating. However, I want to bring something to your attention that you (probably) didn't consider because, well
Health Maintenance Organizations *hate* treating things without a diagnosis. HMO shrinks and doctors will fight tooth and nail diagnosisng anyone with anything that doesn't have a clear cut difinitive treatment plan (and clear cut estimated entire cost to recovery).
That being said, the situation for someone in my position gets
This has become a vicious cycle. I'm functional enough to work for myself (from home) and have a family (my wife is extremely tolerant and supportive). Unfortunately, I have to pay for my own medical BECAUSE I'm not able to function in an office very well, which means I can afford only basic (shitty) coverage. There are lots of people like me.
I'm tired of being the way I am, and since the people who are there to help me can't or won't, I have very little other recourse than to try to figure out what's wrong with me myself. Throw the fact that I have a 15 month old daughter into the mix and it gets even more scary. I did not start showing symptoms until I was close to my teens, will she? And if she does, I don't even know what to call it.
I did not say I have autism, I did not say I was autistic, and I'm not the one who tossed out Asperger syndrome (though most of it fit me like a glove). From wikipedia
That is the *last* thing I want to toss at my HMO. That would be worse than not being able to find a diagnosis, as they instantly kick it citing the condition itself is foundless (hence they won't pay for it) and I have no hope of appeal.
I said I, and many others I know who also happen to be rather smart people show symptoms *very much like* autism. That is not a self diagnoses OF autism.
So in my case, there is no medication because I won't self medicate. But, if I can find and argue a diagnosis that has clinical foundations to the point where I can get or force my HMO to at least listen to me, I'm one step closer to living rather than surviving life.
Sometimes circumstances just suck. I don't want to seem argumentitive , you raised a very valid point
Check out Rackables , be warned ahead of time they are rather expensive (but also pretty sexy) servers. I had the luck of working with them a few years back on a cluster, and their engineers have some really cool ideas.
For a while, I worked for these guys , quite often we would be called in to do campus wide lighting retrofits to offset the cost of server rooms that were getting hungrier by the day. At least while I was there, no "magic bullet" to reduce costs in the DC itself existed.
I've had some success using virtualization tools such as Xen to consolidate servers (sometimes making up to 50 boxes go away) that were then reloaded and put to other use, but the electric bill never changed (sort of like getting free power to 50 servers).
I don't unfortunately have anything that could help you make a major dent in it however. Wattage is wattage and machines use what they use. AMD is coming out with some boards that can step down, or power down cores and their associated memory controllers when they go idle (independently of other cores and controllers on the same board), but I don't think thats hitting mainstream for a little while.
It would be nice if at the end of your project you published your steps and savings, and best of luck getting a plan in place that offers a fast enough payback to warrant implementing
When did your copy become self aware?
Proxy = good, as other people have pointed out information is supposed to be available to everyone all of the time.
Giving something to someone's child allowing them to circumvent parental authority is bad. The school's authority? I'm kind of split down the middle. Legally, you'd be screwed and could be held accountable if you're a US citizen.
A kid would ask for a proxy to use his myspace account meanwhile dreaming of the gigs of porn he's going to download on county bandwidth. We're rather evolved, but giving kids porn is still frowned upon. It comes down to , do you have and can you show you had a reasonable expectation that you work would not be used to break laws? If the child used the proxy to do things that would not be illegal for a minor to do outside of school, you should be ok (but could catch some flack). But you can't count on kids to use things as intended.
If you configured phpproxy, for instance so that if the requested URL was ! myspace.com or somedomain.com, then you've done what is called 'due diligence'.
If you put up an OPEN proxy with no restrictions, then you can have a reasonable expectation that your proxy WILL be used to break laws (mostly CC fraud), which would make you rather irresponsible, and accountable.
The same debate can be applied to Gun makers enabling criminals to do bad things.
I stand corrected (and your right) and I know better because I was there. The sentence should have said "Linus and Stallman", but Linus is the topic.
If any part of the 'big bang' had not happened just as it did, I'm quite sure the universe would still exist but I can't accurately say just how things would be within it.
Free software as we know it has more than one parent, you are 100% correct. Stallman laid the roads, no doubt about it
"Yes, hello, MCI? Yes about my bill, this call to California
I'm not at all negating or diminishing the work of everyone else involved, but lines of code aren't the only measure of how much someone contributed.
If you get the occasion, read The curious incident of the dog in the night time by Mark Haddon. Its a very small and entertaining paperback, an avid reader could finish it off in one evening's sitting.
I also suffer from :
* Severe Anxiety In Social Situations
* Extreme difficulty making decisions when new options are in front of me
* Panic attacks when touched unexpectedly
* Panic attacks when people shout or demonstrate hostile / violent behavior
I'm not saying they / we ARE autistic, I'm only pointing out that reclusive geeks demonstrate very, very similar symptoms. From the research I've done, it seems that somewhere around Gen-X kids who are really smart were given an overdose of stimuli which grew their creativity and intellect but shot them in the foot emotionally. Right about the time of the Texas Instruments home computer, from what I can tell, and onward.
I had to wade through an enormous amount of kiddie-shrink finger pointing papers, and I'm still doing that
There's also a school of thought that empathy is the next evolutionary "tool" we're devloping, and the feedback we get from the heightened sense literally drives us crazy to the point where we seem autistic.
People who stay home and work, electing not to interact much with the outside world around them do so for very good reasons, and we really need to be tolerant of eachother's quirks. This doesn't mean that you put on a T shirt that says "Hey world, I have a hard time coping with you so plese be nice to me all the time", however.
If you (yourself) won't make an effort to get past yourself, you can't expect more from those around you.
The smarter we get, the less we're able to handle it. I don't think the world is going to slow down so we feel more comfortable being in it
Let us not forget, Linus is most directly responsible for this 'cool little safe haven' we found where not only can we interact at a level that also lets us feel safe, we can also have careers. When he talks, listen. If you don't like what he says, cope.
Cars ship with seatbelts and big fat warning signs in the glove box and the top side of the sun visors that tell you to use them, but an alarming number of people don't.
Yet, if your car failed to start if you weren't buckled up, people would go ballistic.
I agree 100% with you, but I think all Cisco (Linksys) and others (may) do is go with the big fat warning label and a checkbox / button combo to make it go away, if even that.
Just because the folks submitting patches aren't being paid by Mozilla, doesn't mean they aren't monetizing their accomplishments.
... maybe 30% of them accepted as-is (or a bit less, this is off the top of my head).
Finding a popular / useful OS project to work on is a very common (and worthwhile) practice used to build resumes and compensate for lack of 'proven' experience. Another *really* good example of this is Xen.
I don't have statistics like these for Xen, however a quick glance through their mailing lists (xen-devel) will show a flurry of activity daily, sometimes up to 15 - 20 patches a day being submitted,
The point is, being able to augment your resume or CV with "Patches xxx, yyy zzz for Firefox, xxx yyy zz for Xen, xxx yyy zzz for Open Office) really helps to show that you like doing what you do and quite a few people happen to think you're rather good at doing it.
So if you submit, say 10 patches, 3 of them get accepted which helps to get you that 80K a year job, well you did in fact (indirectly) get compensated for your efforts and so did everyone who uses the browser that now works a little better due to your contribs.
I really fail to see anything 'sinister' about that in and of itself, but had no idea that Mozilla brought in that kind of dough. I would have guessed maybe 1 - 2 million, not 50. But even knowing that, I still see it as a win-win situation. Maybe I'm a little more laid back than most.
Spoken like a true anonymous coward.
That which is smaller than a flea and can track merchandise leaving a store (and marketed as such) is more than capable of doing as I described, you don't need to be a RF engineer to figure that out.
Think about it again.
Hmm, better also :
Wash your jacket (if you wore one, and never wear flannel to a protest rally), shoes, hat, backpack, etc, too, while you're at it
Then, hope, just HOPE the food you ate doesn't contain polymer coated versions of these that 'stick with you' until passed.
I'm kind of laughing at my own paranoia while writing this, the scary part is, this time its well founded. The only good that can come of this is millions of conspiracy nuts finally find the validation they've been searching for
Here's a scary thought :
You work for some branch of the Federal Government, and you attend a protest rally. You get "dusted", and when you show up for work the next day the RFID reader you walk through (in the metal detector you pass through) alerts your bosses that you were at the rally.
That information then effects your career, or worse.
I'm sorry, but if this is true , Hitachi has lost all of my respect (yeah, like they care)
On the bright side, a broad range RFID reader that oscillates from the lowest to highest frequencies could tell you if you were 'hot' , and possibly point out where on your body the 'flea' attached itself. I wonder if Hitachi will make those next? (If indeed there is merit to TFA).
Scary shit fellas. No doubt about it.
TFA was obviously written by someone who did not quite understand what they were reporting. They (sort of) did, but did manage to get quite a few things wrong. I'm not saying I could have done a better job, and I build HPC's for a living. This is a rather difficult concept to report.
If you look at this reaction to TFA you'll get a birds eye view of what I mean.
Until (possibly) the point in time that this beast was fired up on a bench, no quantum computer 'per say' existed outside of some very very unstable and short lived labs that lasted only a few instructions, so its really hard to say if this really is a quantum computer since there isn't one to compare it to.
I can say for sure its 'quantum like' in construction, and beats the living piss out of anything any of us have ever seen, but I'm not 100% sure it is a quantum machine.
Words from TFA like "analog" and others have let some doubt creep up in my mind, enough to spark me onto another research tangent on the subject. Reading the author, it (almost) seemed like some kind of binary machine until you get most of the way through it, which also raised some doubts for me.
A (insert your favorite name for quantum bit [ that also seems to be up in the air ]) on a quantum machine exists in three states, on off or both, and this made no mention to how this is accomplished or used in computations, but that doesn't mean the information wasn't released.
Anyway, folks, read the reaction link, its from someone who obviously knows more than most of us and corrects the author of TFA in quite a few places, then perhaps go back and re-read TFA. The reaction does so some nit-picking, but also raises (and answers) some really valid questions.
I'm hoping someone much more well versed than I on the subject can critique the critique I just linked to.
Both articles linked mentioned that Vista just wasn't pushing PC sales as anticpated, but neither article shed much light on what set of numbers were used to determine what this push should be.
.." (well maybe not that simple, but you get the point).
.. I'm not a stock holder of either, or complaining :)
Is this a forecast that MS puts out for each release, or is it determined by historical data? Since there's nothing really historical about Vista's CPU demands for the average user (well, not much really), how the heck did they come up with any kind of number?
This would (I guess) have to be MS saying "This is what we expect people to do with it, this is what we expect businesses to do with it, and this is what we expect CPU demands will be in both cases, hence here's the data to forecast what you'll be selling, we expect to push xxxx copies per day
Another way of looking at this would then be (speaking as Intel or AMD):
"Microsoft sold us a load of fud, we need to keep focused on attacking the virtualization and server market, and the other guy already has a strong foot hold there." (as either could say that about the other).
So in short, it looks like both AMD and Intel learned nothing from Enron's "virtual asset" mindset, which was counting on money that wasn't in the bank yet, but you were *pretty* sure would be there. Typical, I'd say unless I'm way off on how these predictions come into play?
I also saw no data in either article about growth either company made which they now need to find another way of paying for, but I guess that's not going to be availble to sift through for a while.
If I were either company, I'd be treating Vista like Bob until some longer range (real) predictions could be made. But hey, cheap servers
When you manage to find your way out of Darwin's waiting room, let the rest of us know, ok?