All of your credit/debit card transactions eventually go through a mainframe still running their original code.
That's not necessarily the case. I work for First Data, and we process about 53% of the CC and ATM transactions in the world. While the code behind the processing doesn't change often, nor without a lot of commotion, there is definitely a change cycle. I can't speak for our competitors.
It was 80, total, hits, and if the overall sample was 100,000, that is, in my mind a quite acceptable false positive rate. There were 5 or so real positives, and several other associates that were reasonable links. It's about a 10% or so real hit rate in the positives. It's far better than the false positive rate of airline security searches for example, where your average airport pulls, what, 200 people a day aside for the detailed search? This method at least found true positives, in sharp contrast to -all- the measures being used by the government today.
If you assume for a minute that the author of TFA is smart enough to figure out if this was a google search or not, this is probably pretty interesting. I'm going to, perhaps naively, assume that the data mining approach was done as a reasonable experiment of a mining approach on some set of data, and arrived at a set of names that should be interesting to check up up. I'll further assume that he properly restricted his training set of data to only data that was available before 9/11.
If that is the case, this is a pretty impressive set of results. Being able to identify, say, 5 of the attackers, and to have a number of the other hits be known associates, when the training set likely consisted of at least 10's of thousands of names, is pretty fair accuracy. The false positive rate is pretty fair, as well, especially when you contrast it to the No Fly list, which has numerous false positives, and no known successes in identifying anyone of interest.
There is likely some sort of clustering algorithm behind this, and the math behind those is pretty solid. Before you dis this, or even get excited about privacy issues, I'd suggest you check out a reference such as this
I'm not really concerned about data mining as a privacy issue, and I think it's a pretty legitimate approach for law enforcement. As a side note, I do data mining and predictive analytics for a living. It's objective, it's factual, and if the practitioner is knowledgable about it, it shouldn't be stigmatizing. Indeed, it would reduce scrutiny on the majority of the folks that would otherwise be tarred by having an arabic surname and swarthy skin.
It would have the potential to be vastly more effective, and vastly less expensive than the path we are on now. One reason that we might not be using could be that we -have- used it, and didn't find anything. That's the thing about objective data mining, if there is nothing there, it'll tell you that. I don't think, for our current administration, that it's a desireable outcome to find that there is nothing to worry about. If that happened, the populace would be less fearful, and less easy to control.
Take this one step further, and apply this bit of thought. It has been shown time and again that the TSA is incompetent, and that any motivated terrorist could get a weapon on board a plane. It is further obvious that our ports are porous, and that soft targets abound. We have seen no triumphant pictures of the authorities frog marching attempted terrorists away, no success stories of how these measures have saved our lives again. We have also seen no further attacks.
This strongly suggests to this practitioner that we have a near zero incidence rate of terrorists in the US; that when a terrorist attempts an attack, he succeeds, and that the lack of attacks suggests that the attack rate is close to zero.
Data mining would be a useful tool to calibrate this theory.
I dunno if I think that's accurate. On fan boiz topics, yeah, you see a lot of +5 insightful to anything that trashes Steve Balmer. For material that plays away from Linux vs The Evilest Empire Of Them All, I think the moderation works better than any other site I read. Generally this is the smartest high volume site I read regularly.
In some of these cases, the people in the conversation may not have your good hearing. I, for one, now have to ask people to speak up in cluttered surroundings such as a bus or a restaurant, because of hearing loss. I hear just fine in situations where there isn't a lot of background noise, and well enough in the cluttered situations that I don't want to get hearing aids. Sadly for you though, when I am conversing in a public situation, you're going to hear some of it.
You won't always be young with everything working (except perhaps your compassion).
We chose it in response after reading a thread here on/., when Twitter was having performance probs a few months back. I looked it up after it was mentioned here, and found a lot of good things about it.
Django is not hard. We use it over Rails, and have had no complaints. We're just in dev, though, I don't have high volume experience. We chose it because of a better reputation on the net, which has not yet been contradicted by my experiences. I've only been using it for about 4 months. No complaints yet.
I think it's unlikely, but don't really know. This was in a house in Portland, OR, dated 1911. The area was bustling at the time, and logging was a major industry. My belief is that the lumber was locally cut, and fairly fresh. It was very roughly hewn. There are large toothed circular saw marks. That's not a blade that you'd use with hard, seasoned wood, and is typical of western sawmills.
(disclaimer: my father used to work for a northwest timber company, Crown Zellerbach, so I claim some knowledge, probably without justification). At any rate, to the general point, modern timber is cut to dimension and then kilned, in which it reaches its final dimensions. There isn't too much variation in the results ( 1/32 in), and they don't mill it further after kilning. That means that the process is fully planned - there can't be a lot shrinkage involved, or the result would be more variable. So the lumber companies can make lumber whatever dimension they want from the first cut of the log.
2x4's are definitely 1.5" x 3.5" as purchased. It's close enough to exact as to not matter (construction grade lumber is not a tight precision material). They -have- to be pretty close to this spec, or the plans won't work out. Framers don't even measure them to check. They've been this way as long as I have built stuff, which is coming up on 40 years.
Around the turn of the century, a 2 x 4 was definitely a 2x4. I had an older house that used them. However, the studs were still on 16 inch centers.
I don't buy any planing and shrinking argument. The turn of the century boards didn't shrink, and they were cut from douglas firs, same as the modern ones I use. I think the industry just wanted to get more boards out of a tree. Interestingly, they are still priced by the board foot, which is calculated on the nominal, rather than the actual measurements. This is true for 2 x 6's, 2 x 8's, 2 x 12's, etc, as well.
he REAL question is: Are there *ANY* *nix system admins out there that WANT MS to manage their systems?
This part time admin wouldn't mind a single console that could reach and manage all my machines, about half of which are Linux and half of which are windows. I wouldn't care if it runs on Linux or Windows Server. It would be nice if it was free, though, which suggests that Linux would be the delivery point.
On the 'well managed MS Data Centers', I've seen several that are just as well managed as the best unix/linux shops. Possibly better, as the hierarchical structure of the domains lends itself well to structured management. I have never had tools for the linux side that match the MS tools. This is probably due to my ignorance, which I would welcome correction of. I have never found anything that manages sets of user IDs across sets of machines in a coherent fashion. The MS 'domain' concept is pretty handy for that. If anyone wants to point me to one, I would be appreciative.
As to the text versus gui tool approach, I've spent a lot of years using the Unix text commands, and I much prefer the gui approach. Admin isn't my day job, and I don't have enough brain cells remaining to be able to summon up from the depths the commands to configure DNS without grabbing my well thumbed Linux System Administration book. From just the Gnome gui, though, I can always get the box running without consulting a reference. I have the same experience on Windoze servers.
The first thing a defense attorney wants is 12 jurors with logical thinking skills.
Well, if you think that your client is innocent, that's probably true. I'm not sure that that's what Reiser's attorney would or should have wanted.
Please don't read any criticism of attorneys into my statement, that was not my intent. I think that the overall system has an inherent flaw, which is that the attorneys' (both prosecuting and defense) goal is to persuade a jury, rather than to find the truth. As such, each side is strongly motivated to find jurors that are amenable to being persuaded, rather than finding jurors that will reach a correct conclusion.
They'll be treated as terrorists and killed by blackwater or some faction of private army controlled by the copyright holders.
If this were likely, wouldn't it already be happening around the Pacific Rim countries? There are plenty of pirated copies of Windows around, and I get the opportunity to buy more ever day in my In Box.
The last thing we need to do is criminalized the third world. It's people who think like you, who supported the war on drugs in an effort to criminalized the ghettos. It's people who think like you who do everything you can to support the construction of prisons.
You voted for George W Bush didn't you? Sure you might not admit it now, but we all know who you voted for and whats in your heart. You sir are a neo-conservative pro war corporatist.
Actually, I support the full legalization and light regulation of all recreational drugs for adult use. The war on some drugs is a pox on our nation. The neo-cons as a group as as loony as the "Linux or Nothing" Microsoft haters. They have an opinion and an agenda, and invent facts to support their opinion.
Sucks to be him, then. If you're not smart enough to play the game when you're charged with murder, how smart are you? I think Mr. Reiser just learned a painful life lesson.
I think he's guilty, myself. Just based on probabilities. 1) spouse of the victim. 2) past history of less than stable personality. 3) blood evidence. 4) removal of seat in car. 5) evidence of body disposal research.
Having sat for jury duty a few times, and being rejected every time, I can tell you that the -last- thing a lawyer wants on a jury is somebody with critical thinking skills.
Whatever. Please don't put words in my mouth. You know nothing of what I want. You're inventing ridiculous arguments to support your fanaticism.
There are more than a few people out there who are able to navigate both worlds. If the kids end up with a windows based PC, some of them will still learn computer skills. Poor countries have a natural drive towards low cost environments, so most of these kids will grow up to either use Linux or to steal Windows. Why would you care, either way? Does it just irk your soul that someone even sees Windows, whether they pay for it or not?
For the record, I run about a dozen each of windows and Linux machines. They're just tools, not idols to worship. If kids in africa use windows to browse the net, they still learn. If they learn C# rather than Java, they still learn. The goal is to open the door of knowledge for them, not to further our petty grievances.
But in the long term, the kid will grow up, and he's likely to find that the only OS he learned how to use isn't being offered to adults for free
And once he is that sophisticated, what prevents him from downloading [Ubuntu|Fedora|Mandrake|etc] like the rest of us? I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of posters here used Windows before they ever touched Linux. It isn't like a zombie curse, fer cryin' out loud.
If you choose to use a card supported by the chip manufacturer under Linux you wouldn't have a problem
Oh, would that this were true. I have a new Toshiba laptop with the Atheros chipset. Neither Ubuntu nor Fedora will correctly operate the chipset as installed and updated. The Mad-wifi driver, which is recommended by the chipset manufacturer (and countless forum posts), doesn't fix the problem.
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I'm guessing you might have been distracted. We forgive you.
All of your credit/debit card transactions eventually go through a mainframe still running their original code.
That's not necessarily the case. I work for First Data, and we process about 53% of the CC and ATM transactions in the world. While the code behind the processing doesn't change often, nor without a lot of commotion, there is definitely a change cycle. I can't speak for our competitors.
It was 80, total, hits, and if the overall sample was 100,000, that is, in my mind a quite acceptable false positive rate. There were 5 or so real positives, and several other associates that were reasonable links. It's about a 10% or so real hit rate in the positives. It's far better than the false positive rate of airline security searches for example, where your average airport pulls, what, 200 people a day aside for the detailed search? This method at least found true positives, in sharp contrast to -all- the measures being used by the government today.
If you assume for a minute that the author of TFA is smart enough to figure out if this was a google search or not, this is probably pretty interesting. I'm going to, perhaps naively, assume that the data mining approach was done as a reasonable experiment of a mining approach on some set of data, and arrived at a set of names that should be interesting to check up up. I'll further assume that he properly restricted his training set of data to only data that was available before 9/11.
If that is the case, this is a pretty impressive set of results. Being able to identify, say, 5 of the attackers, and to have a number of the other hits be known associates, when the training set likely consisted of at least 10's of thousands of names, is pretty fair accuracy. The false positive rate is pretty fair, as well, especially when you contrast it to the No Fly list, which has numerous false positives, and no known successes in identifying anyone of interest.
There is likely some sort of clustering algorithm behind this, and the math behind those is pretty solid. Before you dis this, or even get excited about privacy issues, I'd suggest you check out a reference such as this
I'm not really concerned about data mining as a privacy issue, and I think it's a pretty legitimate approach for law enforcement. As a side note, I do data mining and predictive analytics for a living. It's objective, it's factual, and if the practitioner is knowledgable about it, it shouldn't be stigmatizing. Indeed, it would reduce scrutiny on the majority of the folks that would otherwise be tarred by having an arabic surname and swarthy skin.
It would have the potential to be vastly more effective, and vastly less expensive than the path we are on now. One reason that we might not be using could be that we -have- used it, and didn't find anything. That's the thing about objective data mining, if there is nothing there, it'll tell you that. I don't think, for our current administration, that it's a desireable outcome to find that there is nothing to worry about. If that happened, the populace would be less fearful, and less easy to control.
Take this one step further, and apply this bit of thought. It has been shown time and again that the TSA is incompetent, and that any motivated terrorist could get a weapon on board a plane. It is further obvious that our ports are porous, and that soft targets abound. We have seen no triumphant pictures of the authorities frog marching attempted terrorists away, no success stories of how these measures have saved our lives again. We have also seen no further attacks.
This strongly suggests to this practitioner that we have a near zero incidence rate of terrorists in the US; that when a terrorist attempts an attack, he succeeds, and that the lack of attacks suggests that the attack rate is close to zero.
Data mining would be a useful tool to calibrate this theory.
I've got five bucks that is no more than 10% of this population, and I wouldn't be surprised if it were less than 5%.
I dunno if I think that's accurate. On fan boiz topics, yeah, you see a lot of +5 insightful to anything that trashes Steve Balmer. For material that plays away from Linux vs The Evilest Empire Of Them All, I think the moderation works better than any other site I read. Generally this is the smartest high volume site I read regularly.
In some of these cases, the people in the conversation may not have your good hearing. I, for one, now have to ask people to speak up in cluttered surroundings such as a bus or a restaurant, because of hearing loss. I hear just fine in situations where there isn't a lot of background noise, and well enough in the cluttered situations that I don't want to get hearing aids. Sadly for you though, when I am conversing in a public situation, you're going to hear some of it.
You won't always be young with everything working (except perhaps your compassion).
We chose it in response after reading a thread here on /., when Twitter was having performance probs a few months back. I looked it up after it was mentioned here, and found a lot of good things about it.
Django is not hard. We use it over Rails, and have had no complaints. We're just in dev, though, I don't have high volume experience. We chose it because of a better reputation on the net, which has not yet been contradicted by my experiences. I've only been using it for about 4 months. No complaints yet.
I think it's unlikely, but don't really know. This was in a house in Portland, OR, dated 1911. The area was bustling at the time, and logging was a major industry. My belief is that the lumber was locally cut, and fairly fresh. It was very roughly hewn. There are large toothed circular saw marks. That's not a blade that you'd use with hard, seasoned wood, and is typical of western sawmills.
(disclaimer: my father used to work for a northwest timber company, Crown Zellerbach, so I claim some knowledge, probably without justification). At any rate, to the general point, modern timber is cut to dimension and then kilned, in which it reaches its final dimensions. There isn't too much variation in the results ( 1/32 in), and they don't mill it further after kilning. That means that the process is fully planned - there can't be a lot shrinkage involved, or the result would be more variable. So the lumber companies can make lumber whatever dimension they want from the first cut of the log.
2x4's are definitely 1.5" x 3.5" as purchased. It's close enough to exact as to not matter (construction grade lumber is not a tight precision material). They -have- to be pretty close to this spec, or the plans won't work out. Framers don't even measure them to check. They've been this way as long as I have built stuff, which is coming up on 40 years.
Around the turn of the century, a 2 x 4 was definitely a 2x4. I had an older house that used them. However, the studs were still on 16 inch centers.
I don't buy any planing and shrinking argument. The turn of the century boards didn't shrink, and they were cut from douglas firs, same as the modern ones I use. I think the industry just wanted to get more boards out of a tree. Interestingly, they are still priced by the board foot, which is calculated on the nominal, rather than the actual measurements. This is true for 2 x 6's, 2 x 8's, 2 x 12's, etc, as well.
They are right there, next to the books on how to program in Solaris, HP-UX, and, of course, SCO.
Why is this guy modded troll? He's right, he's courteous, and he's on point. S/B insightful +5
What can you do with *nix that you can't do with Windows
One thing that will always be true is, deploy a machine for $800 less. Over a farm of web/compute servers, that adds up.
Windows is no threat to Linux. Of course, the reverse is true, as well.
he REAL question is: Are there *ANY* *nix system admins out there that WANT MS to manage their systems?
This part time admin wouldn't mind a single console that could reach and manage all my machines, about half of which are Linux and half of which are windows. I wouldn't care if it runs on Linux or Windows Server. It would be nice if it was free, though, which suggests that Linux would be the delivery point.
On the 'well managed MS Data Centers', I've seen several that are just as well managed as the best unix/linux shops. Possibly better, as the hierarchical structure of the domains lends itself well to structured management. I have never had tools for the linux side that match the MS tools. This is probably due to my ignorance, which I would welcome correction of. I have never found anything that manages sets of user IDs across sets of machines in a coherent fashion. The MS 'domain' concept is pretty handy for that. If anyone wants to point me to one, I would be appreciative.
As to the text versus gui tool approach, I've spent a lot of years using the Unix text commands, and I much prefer the gui approach. Admin isn't my day job, and I don't have enough brain cells remaining to be able to summon up from the depths the commands to configure DNS without grabbing my well thumbed Linux System Administration book. From just the Gnome gui, though, I can always get the box running without consulting a reference. I have the same experience on Windoze servers.
Never seen her up close, have you?
A strip club? In Saudi Arabia? Is that where you get to see some hot ankle? RTFA.
You can get yours here.
The first thing a defense attorney wants is 12 jurors with logical thinking skills.
Well, if you think that your client is innocent, that's probably true. I'm not sure that that's what Reiser's attorney would or should have wanted.
Please don't read any criticism of attorneys into my statement, that was not my intent. I think that the overall system has an inherent flaw, which is that the attorneys' (both prosecuting and defense) goal is to persuade a jury, rather than to find the truth. As such, each side is strongly motivated to find jurors that are amenable to being persuaded, rather than finding jurors that will reach a correct conclusion.
My friend, you're whacked.
They'll be treated as terrorists and killed by blackwater or some faction of private army controlled by the copyright holders.
If this were likely, wouldn't it already be happening around the Pacific Rim countries? There are plenty of pirated copies of Windows around, and I get the opportunity to buy more ever day in my In Box.
The last thing we need to do is criminalized the third world. It's people who think like you, who supported the war on drugs in an effort to criminalized the ghettos. It's people who think like you who do everything you can to support the construction of prisons.
You voted for George W Bush didn't you? Sure you might not admit it now, but we all know who you voted for and whats in your heart. You sir are a neo-conservative pro war corporatist.
Actually, I support the full legalization and light regulation of all recreational drugs for adult use. The war on some drugs is a pox on our nation. The neo-cons as a group as as loony as the "Linux or Nothing" Microsoft haters. They have an opinion and an agenda, and invent facts to support their opinion.
As you are doing, about me.
Sucks to be him, then. If you're not smart enough to play the game when you're charged with murder, how smart are you? I think Mr. Reiser just learned a painful life lesson.
I think he's guilty, myself. Just based on probabilities. 1) spouse of the victim. 2) past history of less than stable personality. 3) blood evidence. 4) removal of seat in car. 5) evidence of body disposal research.
C'mon.
Having sat for jury duty a few times, and being rejected every time, I can tell you that the -last- thing a lawyer wants on a jury is somebody with critical thinking skills.
Whatever. Please don't put words in my mouth. You know nothing of what I want. You're inventing ridiculous arguments to support your fanaticism.
There are more than a few people out there who are able to navigate both worlds. If the kids end up with a windows based PC, some of them will still learn computer skills. Poor countries have a natural drive towards low cost environments, so most of these kids will grow up to either use Linux or to steal Windows. Why would you care, either way? Does it just irk your soul that someone even sees Windows, whether they pay for it or not?
For the record, I run about a dozen each of windows and Linux machines. They're just tools, not idols to worship. If kids in africa use windows to browse the net, they still learn. If they learn C# rather than Java, they still learn. The goal is to open the door of knowledge for them, not to further our petty grievances.
But in the long term, the kid will grow up, and he's likely to find that the only OS he learned how to use isn't being offered to adults for free
And once he is that sophisticated, what prevents him from downloading [Ubuntu|Fedora|Mandrake|etc] like the rest of us? I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of posters here used Windows before they ever touched Linux. It isn't like a zombie curse, fer cryin' out loud.
If you choose to use a card supported by the chip manufacturer under Linux you wouldn't have a problem
Oh, would that this were true. I have a new Toshiba laptop with the Atheros chipset. Neither Ubuntu nor Fedora will correctly operate the chipset as installed and updated. The Mad-wifi driver, which is recommended by the chipset manufacturer (and countless forum posts), doesn't fix the problem.