Would've been a much better article if it didn't force use of javascript and didn't force you through some 30 pages of crap. 3 pages of crap would've sufficed.
Interesting how the delivery mechanism is so hated by many techies, but so loved by others./luddite
It's not the moderator system per se that causes such abuses, but the abuse of it by people who are given power to mod. It doesn't take many abusive people to break most systems, and as slashdot has found out over the years, people generally prefer to mod down when they disagree, no matter how valid the response, more often than they like to mod up.
Similarly, the "flag as inappropriate" tends to be abused due to an overblown sense of justice and being too powerful of a tool, with no penalty to use it. People generally want to censor those with different views, but they know it's generally wrong (IMHO)... yet they can do it here anonymously. There isn't a good way to avoid abuses by such people, without allowing other abuses to happen (the purpose of the flag as inappropriate tool).
Something that might make it better is to implement a penalty when clicking that "flag as inappropriate" link. It should harm the person's votes, or be somehow detrimental (e.g. could only be done once a day and would also remove all your other votes). People will still self-sacrifice to remove something that's grossly inappropriate such as racial comments.
As a rogue player the latest season I had chances to down =mail armoured opponents in arena in 10 seconds. Some other time I was so unlucky that I could only pray to be defeated fast.
The resilience stat reduces the variance you're seeing, and reduces damage from crits. I remember back @70, a 400+ resilience rogue managed to survive 3 people hitting him. Your rogue can down someone in plate very fast, if the plate wearer doesn't have any resilience and your crit/hit stats are good.
Most people want variance, and play by intentionally getting a slow, hard-hitting weapon. This makes a lot of sense, because spike damage wins matches.
Stop paying, don't play, lower queue times for the next guy
... and most importantly, STFU after you quit. The players don't care why you quit or how stupid you think we are because we're still enjoying what you don't.
It's amazing how many try to convince the other foxes to cut off their tails, when only they are unable to enjoy it any longer.
You get to torture a prisoner with electricity, throw molotov cocktails at starving trolls, poke young apes with a sharp stick to piss off its mother and many other disturbing things
I did one [of several(!)] torture quest until the guy spilled the beans.
Man was that needler fun to use. I stayed there and zapped him at least another 5 minutes. The Dalaran mage that put me to the task left the tower in tears.
Actually, I forgot what he said and why I even tortured him. What a great game!
Next up - The Scat in the Hat, Digging Through Poo! It's stanktastic.
Obviously, all computers use physical memory... duh:) The question should be "why swap memory to disk in modern systems?"
The answer is that pretty much ALL performance-based systems (such as everything in the top 500 supercomputers, do not page. It is a performance versus convenience issue. Swapping is a huge convenience for most users, which allows large programs to load and run, yet not monopolize limited resources such as physical memory. If you do very little wrt running memory hog applications, then swapping will not be done, and will hardly affect you.
Nevertheless, equating virtual memory to page swapping on the front page of a geek journal was plainly wrong and should've been addressed.
They've sped up the front end so it feels like you're getting more done, but in terms of real productivity it's no better than Vista
I take exception to this. Obviously, if the video encoding tests were written well, there will be little speedup. But if a window environment "feels" faster, you actually DO get more done. There is less frustration in waiting, and you can generally multi-task much easier.
There was recently a discussion of a faster X server. Frankly, I get plenty done on the old "slow" X server, but if one feels faster, it will actually eliminate a lot of brainpower consumed by waiting on a context switch.
There was recently a discussion on a faster Linux boot-up, which preloaded your configuration as you're typing your password, and had lots of other fast features... But that doesn't actually speed up Linux, in terms of encoding video. It just makes it "feel" faster.
I like OSS, but I see lots of bad tags being made. Unfair comparisons are simply unfair comparisons. You can't hail a nice feature in one OS, and discount exactly the same feature on a different OS. Without being hypocritical, anyway.
Am I just a vim noob? After doing a search and loving the nice highlighting, is there a way to unhighlight the search term without doing a "/lkasjdfkjdfdf"? In less(1), you'd hit <esc>u but haven't found anything for vim.
The tricks I use in vi/vim are mostly the arcane flags.
:set nows
will not search past the top or bottom.
:set sw=4
will make a nice indentation shiftwidth, especially for using the indent command (>). Works great for programming, especially with autoindent (:set ai). But when programming with autoindent, you often need to unindent one shiftwidth... do that by typing control-D at the beginning of the line. You can go to the very beginning of an autoindented line with 0 control-D.
:set list :set nolist
will turn on/off hidden characters, and show end of lines. Great for finding tabs or spaces at the end of a line.
:set nu
will turn on line numbering.
Of course, if you want actual line numbers in your file, in *nix you'd use :%!cat -n
%
when pressed over a parenthesis, finds the matching parenthesis or brackets
Now, I want someone to write a lisp interpreter based in vi macros. That way we can port emacs to vi.
So let's see, Linksys makes generic crap. I'm not completely impressed with my NETGEAR device so I don't think they're that great either. Don't even get me started on how bad Belkin's stuff was. D-Link sounded good, but now this?
Netgear was the one that set the time to a hardcoded ntp address, every hour on the hour. As more and more were sold, they started crushing the ntp server with an hourly packetstorm. They couldn't load balance, either, because it was a hardcoded ip address.
Linksys makes generic crap, although I just dropped my linksys router (twice... stepped on the cable) and it's still chunking packets like a champ. Plus, you can get OSS for them even today.... although they don't have as much flash as they used to so the software is a bit more limited.
You added links to stupid shit, posted to a techie journal. While I do appreciate your diligence, do you really think the average/. viewer doesn't know wtf a computer virus is?
Don't pull the "you can turn off domain names in links" BS... there was simply no point to making all those links for even the stupidest/. viewer, and it just obfuscated the entire article.
Slashdot is not Reader's Digest. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Nerds know what an apple macintosh is, and linking to wikipedia's definition of computer virus does not matter to a nerd.:-)
The glaring fallacy is, of course, that the cost of beer wasn't reduced 20%. In fact, it's either stayed the same, or gone up in price and the "beer cost break" of $20 has really become a $2/week bill being added to the "tab" of all the patrons equally without them ever seeing it. The bartender has been borrowing money to buy stuff to make the bar look more attractive, and to buy baseball bats to beat up owners of competing bars. Baseball bats cost money, but it's all in the name of making sure we have good beer. You want security in beer, right?
At some point far later, the bartender will be forced to go after the families and children of all the patrons, demanding they pay for beer their father drank, but did not pay for fully. But debt is divided equally. The bar sells off all the stools and now everyone has to stand, even though the poorest didn't accumulate this debt -- how could they? They thought the beer was free! -- while the richest man brings his own stool which was somehow billed to the bar.
And the poorest will also have to do without $2/week for however many weeks this continued, which will affect them far more than the richest, just to pay off the debt from their fathers. And this is all in the name of "fairness", just like the fable above.
I buy software. I don't abide most of the bullshit copy protection, though. I didn't carry a CD player in my laptop, I don't like the battery drain, and I don't like having to have the disk with me. NoCD patches made such games tolerable.
I hear the roads in Nevada are used to allow Kentucky residents to gamble. Kentucky should set up roadblocks on those roads, too.
The title of your post is appropriate. I believe that electricity used to run Mae-West and Mae-East are used to bring gambling to Kentucky residents. The state should use its claim to take over the national power grids. Heck, the international power grids.
Right... an anonymous car warranty seller won't get ANY business. They have to leave contact information somehow.
Find out who it is from one of the angry callers. Hell, use caller ID to call them back and ask:-)
Once you know who it is, you probably can't really prove they made the calls... they probably hired someone. That doesn't matter. Get a junkyard dog lawyer, and sue the corporation. A civil suit only has to convince 2/3 of a jury. Who the hell won't side with the grandma? They will know this, and settle far before it even reaches jury selection, and they'll pay your grandma for her trouble.
If this is the holy grail of crypto that it's been described as, then it will never be the weakest link.
Bruce is saying that this technology is not significant in the overall security of things, due to many other weaker links that aren't using quantum key distribution. You can't hold this up as the holy grail, because its importance has already been dismissed in favor of bigger issues. Bruce is saying that these bigger issues occur even with our pre-quantum systems.
I'm saying that due to cost and infrastructure, this quantum system does have a use with those groups that have money and take security very seriously, because within those groups, social engineering is not nearly as weak as with "normal people". This system may never attain common public usage until quantum computing is also in common public usage. But this system certainly has a strong use today, with those groups that have strong measures in place to eliminate the social weak links.
From what I understand, quantum cryptography only prevents eavesdropping by taking a part of the signal. Nothing seems to forbid a man in the middle attack (take all the signal and reproduce it), or eavesdropping at a router location. Am I mis-leaded ?
You're mis-leaded. Or misled, rather.
This is quantum key distribution, which uses entangled photons to send keys. It is not vulnerable to m-i-m attacks because a m-i-m cannot reproduce an entangled photon. Even observing it breaks it... so you can't even monitor communications.
In a very rare disagreement, I'm certain Bruce is wrong.
Either he is wrong, or he's arbitrarily drawing a cutoff line for strong crypto, where it has already reached the maximum strength it ever needs to be.
The reasoning of why he's wrong (at least from the summary) is thus: At some point in the past, crypto could be cracked. At some point in the past, communication could be tapped.
It's well-known that communication is tapped. Even closed systems are tapped, and have been since electronic and radio communication was possible. Even fiber optics can be tapped.
Saying that quantum technology doesn't matter is equivalent to saying current technology cannot be cracked or effectively eavesdropped. But it can be, and has been, and what cannot be done today may very likely be possible someday. Eliptic curve algorithms aren't proven, but are the basis of the current crop... it's possible an algorithm can be found to crack them quickly.
So, using induction to previous technologies, the same argument applies. At some point in the far past, we're left with the caesar cipher and it's clear that is insufficient and the argument that new technology doesn't matter is false. At some point recently, we have DES, and again we see that technology is important.
So, somewhere either Bruce is drawing a line and saying "it's good enough now", or he's as wrong as saying "tapping communication is never the weakest link." He's claiming that the chance of social engineering, attacking a user interface or RNG, etc, is much greater than the chance of cracking the crypto.
But the only people that will implement quantum crypto key transfer are not just technophiles like he claims. Governments are the most likely source for now, for the incredibly high-security remote sites. And the security of governments is designed to eliminate or mitigate the weak points that Bruce is depending on to support his claim.
The crypto technology must advance, because the capability to crack existing tech is always advancing. The technology was the weakest link (enigma, DES, etc) and will be again in the future. And it takes time to get new tech to be usable. It's been decades since entangled photons were sent to different places, but we're just getting the key distribution now.
Thus, I respectfully cannot agree with Bruce on this one. (Disrespectfully, I think he's out of his frikkin gourd.)
Slashdot Mirror
You slide these right off the end of your pencil onto paper.
You know, pencils make pretty good r/w memory, too, although the number of r/w cycles is limited.
Shouldn't they have done this with a serif font if it is meant to save ink/toner?
They started with a serif font. What's left is sans serif.
Would've been a much better article if it didn't force use of javascript and didn't force you through some 30 pages of crap. 3 pages of crap would've sufficed.
Interesting how the delivery mechanism is so hated by many techies, but so loved by others. /luddite
It's not the moderator system per se that causes such abuses, but the abuse of it by people who are given power to mod. It doesn't take many abusive people to break most systems, and as slashdot has found out over the years, people generally prefer to mod down when they disagree, no matter how valid the response, more often than they like to mod up.
Similarly, the "flag as inappropriate" tends to be abused due to an overblown sense of justice and being too powerful of a tool, with no penalty to use it. People generally want to censor those with different views, but they know it's generally wrong (IMHO) ... yet they can do it here anonymously. There isn't a good way to avoid abuses by such people, without allowing other abuses to happen (the purpose of the flag as inappropriate tool).
Something that might make it better is to implement a penalty when clicking that "flag as inappropriate" link. It should harm the person's votes, or be somehow detrimental (e.g. could only be done once a day and would also remove all your other votes). People will still self-sacrifice to remove something that's grossly inappropriate such as racial comments.
As a rogue player the latest season I had chances to down =mail armoured opponents in arena in 10 seconds. Some other time I was so unlucky that I could only pray to be defeated fast.
The resilience stat reduces the variance you're seeing, and reduces damage from crits. I remember back @70, a 400+ resilience rogue managed to survive 3 people hitting him. Your rogue can down someone in plate very fast, if the plate wearer doesn't have any resilience and your crit/hit stats are good.
Most people want variance, and play by intentionally getting a slow, hard-hitting weapon. This makes a lot of sense, because spike damage wins matches.
how about "suddenbricktothehead"?
Stop paying, don't play, lower queue times for the next guy
... and most importantly, STFU after you quit. The players don't care why you quit or how stupid you think we are because we're still enjoying what you don't.
It's amazing how many try to convince the other foxes to cut off their tails, when only they are unable to enjoy it any longer.
You get to torture a prisoner with electricity, throw molotov cocktails at starving trolls, poke young apes with a sharp stick to piss off its mother and many other disturbing things
I did one [of several(!)] torture quest until the guy spilled the beans.
Man was that needler fun to use. I stayed there and zapped him at least another 5 minutes. The Dalaran mage that put me to the task left the tower in tears.
Actually, I forgot what he said and why I even tortured him. What a great game!
Next up - The Scat in the Hat, Digging Through Poo! It's stanktastic.
"why use physical memory in modern systems"
Obviously, all computers use physical memory... duh :)
The question should be "why swap memory to disk in modern systems?"
The answer is that pretty much ALL performance-based systems (such as everything in the top 500 supercomputers, do not page. It is a performance versus convenience issue. Swapping is a huge convenience for most users, which allows large programs to load and run, yet not monopolize limited resources such as physical memory. If you do very little wrt running memory hog applications, then swapping will not be done, and will hardly affect you.
Nevertheless, equating virtual memory to page swapping on the front page of a geek journal was plainly wrong and should've been addressed.
so they 'Trademark' a physical object instead of a name & logo. anybody wonder why they lost?
You *can* trademark shapes.
Maglight shape and lettering around the top are trademarks (so they claim).
IIRC, Pace won a trademark case against a competitor picante sauce that made a confusingly similar bottle shape.
The only thing we need now is a Mickey Mouse-shaped lego that references Harry Potter.
They've sped up the front end so it feels like you're getting more done, but in terms of real productivity it's no better than Vista
I take exception to this. Obviously, if the video encoding tests were written well, there will be little speedup. But if a window environment "feels" faster, you actually DO get more done. There is less frustration in waiting, and you can generally multi-task much easier.
There was recently a discussion of a faster X server. Frankly, I get plenty done on the old "slow" X server, but if one feels faster, it will actually eliminate a lot of brainpower consumed by waiting on a context switch.
There was recently a discussion on a faster Linux boot-up, which preloaded your configuration as you're typing your password, and had lots of other fast features... But that doesn't actually speed up Linux, in terms of encoding video. It just makes it "feel" faster.
I like OSS, but I see lots of bad tags being made. Unfair comparisons are simply unfair comparisons. You can't hail a nice feature in one OS, and discount exactly the same feature on a different OS. Without being hypocritical, anyway.
Am I just a vim noob? After doing a search and loving the nice highlighting, is there a way to unhighlight the search term without doing a "/lkasjdfkjdfdf"? In less(1), you'd hit <esc>u but haven't found anything for vim.
The tricks I use in vi/vim are mostly the arcane flags.
will not search past the top or bottom.
will make a nice indentation shiftwidth, especially for using the indent command (>). Works great for programming, especially with autoindent (:set ai). But when programming with autoindent, you often need to unindent one shiftwidth... do that by typing control-D at the beginning of the line. You can go to the very beginning of an autoindented line with 0 control-D.
will turn on/off hidden characters, and show end of lines. Great for finding tabs or spaces at the end of a line.
will turn on line numbering.
Of course, if you want actual line numbers in your file, in *nix you'd use
:%!cat -n
%
when pressed over a parenthesis, finds the matching parenthesis or brackets
Now, I want someone to write a lisp interpreter based in vi macros. That way we can port emacs to vi.
So let's see, Linksys makes generic crap. I'm not completely impressed with my NETGEAR device so I don't think they're that great either. Don't even get me started on how bad Belkin's stuff was. D-Link sounded good, but now this?
Netgear was the one that set the time to a hardcoded ntp address, every hour on the hour. As more and more were sold, they started crushing the ntp server with an hourly packetstorm. They couldn't load balance, either, because it was a hardcoded ip address.
Linksys makes generic crap, although I just dropped my linksys router (twice... stepped on the cable) and it's still chunking packets like a champ. Plus, you can get OSS for them even today.... although they don't have as much flash as they used to so the software is a bit more limited.
The newer ones have far less flash, and don't use OSS... thus, hacking into them isn't as obvious.
Be aware that it's harder to install your own software on the newer linksys wrt54g routers.
I believe you missed the point.
You added links to stupid shit, posted to a techie journal. While I do appreciate your diligence, do you really think the average /. viewer doesn't know wtf a computer virus is?
Don't pull the "you can turn off domain names in links" BS ... there was simply no point to making all those links for even the stupidest /. viewer, and it just obfuscated the entire article.
Slashdot is not Reader's Digest. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. Nerds know what an apple macintosh is, and linking to wikipedia's definition of computer virus does not matter to a nerd. :-)
I'll vote for Palin as long as it's Michael Palin.
I'd love to see Samuel L. Jackson do the role for a season or two ...
Snakes on a TARDIS!
The glaring fallacy is, of course, that the cost of beer wasn't reduced 20%. In fact, it's either stayed the same, or gone up in price and the "beer cost break" of $20 has really become a $2/week bill being added to the "tab" of all the patrons equally without them ever seeing it. The bartender has been borrowing money to buy stuff to make the bar look more attractive, and to buy baseball bats to beat up owners of competing bars. Baseball bats cost money, but it's all in the name of making sure we have good beer. You want security in beer, right?
At some point far later, the bartender will be forced to go after the families and children of all the patrons, demanding they pay for beer their father drank, but did not pay for fully. But debt is divided equally. The bar sells off all the stools and now everyone has to stand, even though the poorest didn't accumulate this debt -- how could they? They thought the beer was free! -- while the richest man brings his own stool which was somehow billed to the bar.
And the poorest will also have to do without $2/week for however many weeks this continued, which will affect them far more than the richest, just to pay off the debt from their fathers. And this is all in the name of "fairness", just like the fable above.
Let me get this straight... we get free hydrogen AND pie ?! Sign me up.
Yes, but unfortunately it smells like piss.
NoCD patches are incredibly useful.
I buy software. I don't abide most of the bullshit copy protection, though. I didn't carry a CD player in my laptop, I don't like the battery drain, and I don't like having to have the disk with me. NoCD patches made such games tolerable.
I hear the roads in Nevada are used to allow Kentucky residents to gamble. Kentucky should set up roadblocks on those roads, too.
The title of your post is appropriate. I believe that electricity used to run Mae-West and Mae-East are used to bring gambling to Kentucky residents. The state should use its claim to take over the national power grids. Heck, the international power grids.
Right... an anonymous car warranty seller won't get ANY business. They have to leave contact information somehow.
Find out who it is from one of the angry callers. Hell, use caller ID to call them back and ask :-)
Once you know who it is, you probably can't really prove they made the calls... they probably hired someone. That doesn't matter. Get a junkyard dog lawyer, and sue the corporation. A civil suit only has to convince 2/3 of a jury. Who the hell won't side with the grandma? They will know this, and settle far before it even reaches jury selection, and they'll pay your grandma for her trouble.
If this is the holy grail of crypto that it's been described as, then it will never be the weakest link.
Bruce is saying that this technology is not significant in the overall security of things, due to many other weaker links that aren't using quantum key distribution. You can't hold this up as the holy grail, because its importance has already been dismissed in favor of bigger issues. Bruce is saying that these bigger issues occur even with our pre-quantum systems.
I'm saying that due to cost and infrastructure, this quantum system does have a use with those groups that have money and take security very seriously, because within those groups, social engineering is not nearly as weak as with "normal people". This system may never attain common public usage until quantum computing is also in common public usage. But this system certainly has a strong use today, with those groups that have strong measures in place to eliminate the social weak links.
From what I understand, quantum cryptography only prevents eavesdropping by taking a part of the signal. Nothing seems to forbid a man in the middle attack (take all the signal and reproduce it), or eavesdropping at a router location. Am I mis-leaded ?
You're mis-leaded. Or misled, rather.
This is quantum key distribution, which uses entangled photons to send keys. It is not vulnerable to m-i-m attacks because a m-i-m cannot reproduce an entangled photon. Even observing it breaks it... so you can't even monitor communications.
In a very rare disagreement, I'm certain Bruce is wrong.
Either he is wrong, or he's arbitrarily drawing a cutoff line for strong crypto, where it has already reached the maximum strength it ever needs to be.
The reasoning of why he's wrong (at least from the summary) is thus:
At some point in the past, crypto could be cracked.
At some point in the past, communication could be tapped.
It's well-known that communication is tapped. Even closed systems are tapped, and have been since electronic and radio communication was possible. Even fiber optics can be tapped.
Saying that quantum technology doesn't matter is equivalent to saying current technology cannot be cracked or effectively eavesdropped. But it can be, and has been, and what cannot be done today may very likely be possible someday. Eliptic curve algorithms aren't proven, but are the basis of the current crop... it's possible an algorithm can be found to crack them quickly.
So, using induction to previous technologies, the same argument applies. At some point in the far past, we're left with the caesar cipher and it's clear that is insufficient and the argument that new technology doesn't matter is false. At some point recently, we have DES, and again we see that technology is important.
So, somewhere either Bruce is drawing a line and saying "it's good enough now", or he's as wrong as saying "tapping communication is never the weakest link." He's claiming that the chance of social engineering, attacking a user interface or RNG, etc, is much greater than the chance of cracking the crypto.
But the only people that will implement quantum crypto key transfer are not just technophiles like he claims. Governments are the most likely source for now, for the incredibly high-security remote sites. And the security of governments is designed to eliminate or mitigate the weak points that Bruce is depending on to support his claim.
The crypto technology must advance, because the capability to crack existing tech is always advancing. The technology was the weakest link (enigma, DES, etc) and will be again in the future. And it takes time to get new tech to be usable. It's been decades since entangled photons were sent to different places, but we're just getting the key distribution now.
Thus, I respectfully cannot agree with Bruce on this one. (Disrespectfully, I think he's out of his frikkin gourd.)