*First, no doctor is going to volunteer "this is cancer, but it doesn't look dangerous so we'll just monitor the situation" because God help them if that person dies.*
Actually, that is EXACTLY how prostate cancer is handled. Prostate cancer is very common in elderly males. It is generally a slow growing cancer. The treatment can have unpleasant consequences. In general, physicians recommend treatment for younger men as the cancer is more likely to be a comparatively rare aggressive prostate cancer. Men over the age of say 70 will generally be advised to monitor the cancer rather than treating it immediately. The meme is that old men die WITH prostate cancer, not OF prostate cancer.
Most of the comments in this thread are accurate enough (or at least defensible), but miss the point of the article. The claim in the article is that even if one gets everything right in their model's math and needs only to compute a few constants, the constants will be miscomputed. Personally, I don't have any trouble at all with the thesis that economic models are all -- each and every one -- wrong. That seems to match experience pretty well.
I do have considerable problem with the claim that seems to be made that even with perfect data one can't precisely compute the parameters defining a simple model like a straight line or exponential curve. That really seems a most extraordinary assertion and I really don't see anything that supports it.
A reasonable question. The problem is that if you leave unused bits in your protocol that can be used to flag extended capabilities, various digital geniuses will use them for all sorts of things. Then, years later, when you need to use them for a real purpose like flagging an extended address field, you will find routers and devices dropping like flies. You'll have analogous problems with any other expansion technique you try to use.
For starters, the US would be the world's number three oil producer with or without the Bakken Shale. In fact it has been second or third (depending on what is going on in Russia and Saudi Arabia) since 1970. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Russia and note that the accompanying chart shows conventional oil production only. The US also produces about 3 million barrels a day of "Natural Gas Liquids" -- Basically liquid hydrocarbons that are coming out of gas wells along with natural gas.
And production from the Bakken Shale is about 400,000 bpd -- about 5% of total US production and about 2.5% of US oil consumption. Yes, the Bakken (and other formations) will help. No, these discoveries are extremely unlikely to solve the US energy problems. Anyone who is seriously interested in world and US energy issues should spend some time at www.theoildrum.org
I assume that "Hugh Pickens" is getting his information from the editorial page of the WSJ. IMHO. The Wall Street Journal editorial page should be read only by those whose goal is to be systematically and seriously misinformed on a wide variety of subjects. The paper version of the editorial page is excellent for lining bird cages.
**Am I the only one who cringes at reading this?**
I kind of hope so
**If you are dealing with someone who needs a recovery disk in the first place, do you really want them to deploy hopelessly outdated drivers and software on their machines?**
Well, I would. At least the old stuff used to work on that PC. You apparently would like them to magically acquire improved drivers and software that quite possibly won't work on their configuration. How are they going to get that sterling new software BTW? Their PC presumably isn't working all that well or they probably wouldn't be trying to reinstall their OS.
**I've never really understood the purpose of a recovery partition as a means of restoring a system. If a disk fails, a common reason for wanting to restore the PC, then that partition becomes useless. It's much better to just include disks so that a user can restore the PC them selves after the new hard drive is in place.**
I'm pretty much Windowed out and hardly ever use Windows, so I don't pay a lot of attention to PC distribution issues, but my impression is that low end PCs come with a (stupid) recovery partition INSTEAD of an OS CD. I assumed the reason is cost. But I would note in passing that the cheapest PCs often don't even have a cdrom drive.
**It's always possible that this isn't a deliberate targeted attack at all;**
I'm thinking that you are correct.. I doubt that drone control is done through the Comcast or Verizon at Area 54 and thence to the Internet. More likely communications are through secure satellite links. Injecting a virus via such a link is likely to be something of a challenge. It's possible that some governments could do that, but why would they go to all that trouble to load a common virus? OTOH accidentally loading a virus from a flash drive seems pretty straightforward. Who knows, it could have come from another secure facility -- secret software, and -- as a bonus -- a rootkit.
**(Minor) distortion in the picture of a CRT TV (these guys still use CRTs?) I can believe but not the others.**
Not that uncommon actually. Most CRT consumer devices --monitors,TVs-- are shielded and also automatically degauss themselves when they are turned on. But that may not help if the magnetic field causing the problem is strong and persistent. Back in the days when LCD monitors were uncommon and expensive, I had a problem with a CRT monitor. in one office displaying unusable video. It took a while to figure out that the problem wasn't Windows (for once) or the video card. We eventually traced it to a maze of HVAC control wiring on the back side of the wall the monitor was sitting against. Since rearranging the (tiny) office to put the monitor further from the wiring was not very feasible, the meager IT budget paid for an LCD monitor.
There seems to be a considerable literature on CRT monitors and magnetic fields
**All you folks encourgaging your friends and families to buy Macs for the specific reason of their security are in for a world of hurt in a few years when Mac hits ~30+% market share. Kits are already starting to appear.**
Yep. And predictably in a few years, kits will include Ubuntu as well as Windows and Mac. And in a few more years, Unix in general will be only marginally more secure than Windows. In point of fact, Unix uses pretty much the same implementation technologies as Windows, and has pretty much the same types of vulnerabilities. IMHO, the notion that Unix is substantially more secure than Windows is almost surely delusional. It's obscurity that protects Unix, not superior technology.
The good news is that as I recall, floppy disk records have a CRC appended. The bad news is that my sometimes faulty memory tells me that MSDOS floppy disk drivers used the CRC to correct reads and didn't tell the user that the record did not read properly. I think that means that any record reported as being in error has at least two errors. But maybe I'm wrong.
Sometimes using a different drive helps.
I do seem to recall that it was sometimes possible to read a faulty record multiple times and patch the record back together using DEBUG. There's probably software somewhere that automates that process.
I solution I've used occasionally for manufactured cables that are too long is similar..75 or 1 inch Polyethylene pipe joins. They are cheap and they can hold a meter or so of excess cable neatly tucked into the join. Not my idea. I'm not sure where I first saw them used to tidy up wiring.
"Candle makers across Europe are building up their inventory."
As indeed they should be. If any large country in the world has the will and technical ability to make renewable energy work, it is Germany. But I simply don't see how they can pull this off. Wind has major limitations. Germany is too close to the pole for solar to provide much power in Winter. They don't have large undeveloped hydro resources. They don't have that much in the way of oil. They might have 20 years worth of natural gas at current consumption levels (and might not), but they will burn through that pretty quickly if they use it to replace existing power sources. Germans are already pretty energy efficient.
I wish them luck. Really. But I don't think this is going to end well.
"What I fear, is that the proposed shorter release cycles are going to make Ubuntu break too often. That will turn off users, and they cannot afford to lose even more users after the 11.04 release."
That's not unreasonable or irrational.
If you folks will forgive a geezer, I was doing software release management, testing and version control long before most of you were born. I've watched with interest and occasional amusement while you kids have managed to relearn much of what we learned rather painfully in the 1960s. And I'll give you credit. PC software works better than I would have thought possible given the way you approach it. And by "you" I don't mean just Ubuntu, or just open source, Microsoft has quality problems also.
Nonetheless, I gave up on Ubuntu and its spawn years ago -- mostly because of quality issues. Apt-get is wonderful... if the stuff that is apt-gotten works. Too often it didn't. It appears to me that the problem is that software gets captured, locked down, and released without adequate testing.
Anyway, three thoughts:
1. Rolling releases probably are not a good idea except for really critical fixes. My experience (which I agree may not apply to your world) is that you really, really need to consolidate a release, then test it thoroughly before inflicting it on users.
2. It is perfectly possible to do releases in parallel with several in different states of production. Developers don't like it. So what? What matters is user experience, not developer inconvenience. But there is a limit to how many parallel products you can keep straight. And it is not a large number.
3. In the world I worked in, there was a minimum time required to consolidate and test a release. For us, it was 8 weeks. We tried 6 weeks (once) and couldn't do it. Your world is quite different, but I'll bet you have a minimum time also, and it may well be longer than one month.
If you want to order a kit similar to a Heathkit right now this evening, try TenTec http://www.tentec.com/ Their kits are mostly radio related and the manuals aren't quite up to what I remember from Heathkit, but they are pretty good.
'A slow sort of country!' said the (Red) Queen. 'Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!' Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
If fax works -- and it does, why "upgrade" to something that really doesn't work any better? And may actually be harder to use? Change just because some geeks find fax technology to be antiquated? The point of a hammer is to insert nails, not to showcase technology.
When selecting kitchen appliances and garage tools, I try to avoid digital technology unless it actually does something I need done.. Why? Because the old fashioned mechanical stuff, if you can find it, usually lasts longer and works more reliably than its digital counterpart.
The kids probably do that from time to time in Winter at home. We fairly routinely stash stuff in the snow on the table on the deck in Winter and Vermont is warmer than most villages in rural Alaska..
Maybe something to do with organic batteries? I don't have any hands on experience, but they do exist, and some don't involve toxic chemistry. I sort of vaguely think there are even some very minor practical applications in some places. At the very least, you should be able to gin up enough power to light an LED or spin a small motor from a kit you can carry in your suitcase. Maybe you can even generate/store power from/in something cobbled together from local materials at the school.
Hmmm. I see them at 72.3.246.59 where they are responding to pings. The site called up from that IP looks like the Register.. I never thought about it before, but the page information from opera and konqueror doesn't seem to tell me what the IP I'm looking at is when I feed them a URL. Probably there's a stunningly obvious way to get the IP and I just need some sleep.
Of course people still use FTP. A lot of us want the master copy of our web site to be on our own machine and our own backups. But Website Hosts have these neat GUIs to automate upload? I have not the slightest inclination to manually update 800 files four times a year. I doubt you would either. Most Website Hosts (Google excepted) support FTP. But there are better ways? Probably. But I have my hands full fixing stuff that is actually broken.
"I was astonished to find that I could do anything, except fuck up the system, as a normal user. I didn't need admin privileges at all. Only when installing new applications or configuring the system I had to log in as root."
I'm guessing that you don't back up your system very often. There really are a lot of jobs like printer administration, backups, etc that don't work without some admin priviliges. Worse, you aren't necessarily told that they aren't working or why they are failing. And really, most of the things that malware might do can be done without admin priviliges if you set your mind to it -- which malware creators presumably do. And don't overlook the risk of creating multiple application data files -- one in root and one in your normal user's directory. That'll cause things to run differently if you are running as root to do some maintenance job.
I'm not saying that Linux security is as iffy as Windows although neither system was actually designed to be secure. I'm just saying that the illusion of Unix security is just that -- an illusion. The practical difference is that Windows is under constant attack whereas Unix attacks are more sporadic and less intensive.
By all means, continue to do what you're doing. But don't be too confident that you've found an answer to malware.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, what's all the grousing? I was saying just this morning that what this country needs is more idiotic, unenforceable, federal laws.
*First, no doctor is going to volunteer "this is cancer, but it doesn't look dangerous so we'll just monitor the situation" because God help them if that person dies.*
Actually, that is EXACTLY how prostate cancer is handled. Prostate cancer is very common in elderly males. It is generally a slow growing cancer. The treatment can have unpleasant consequences. In general, physicians recommend treatment for younger men as the cancer is more likely to be a comparatively rare aggressive prostate cancer. Men over the age of say 70 will generally be advised to monitor the cancer rather than treating it immediately. The meme is that old men die WITH prostate cancer, not OF prostate cancer.
Most of the comments in this thread are accurate enough (or at least defensible), but miss the point of the article. The claim in the article is that even if one gets everything right in their model's math and needs only to compute a few constants, the constants will be miscomputed. Personally, I don't have any trouble at all with the thesis that economic models are all -- each and every one -- wrong. That seems to match experience pretty well.
I do have considerable problem with the claim that seems to be made that even with perfect data one can't precisely compute the parameters defining a simple model like a straight line or exponential curve. That really seems a most extraordinary assertion and I really don't see anything that supports it.
A reasonable question. The problem is that if you leave unused bits in your protocol that can be used to flag extended capabilities, various digital geniuses will use them for all sorts of things. Then, years later, when you need to use them for a real purpose like flagging an extended address field, you will find routers and devices dropping like flies. You'll have analogous problems with any other expansion technique you try to use.
"Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it"
Trust me. You don't really want to repeat the 1970s ... or the 1980s ... and especially not the 2000s.
For starters, the US would be the world's number three oil producer with or without the Bakken Shale. In fact it has been second or third (depending on what is going on in Russia and Saudi Arabia) since 1970. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petroleum_industry_in_Russia and note that the accompanying chart shows conventional oil production only. The US also produces about 3 million barrels a day of "Natural Gas Liquids" -- Basically liquid hydrocarbons that are coming out of gas wells along with natural gas.
And production from the Bakken Shale is about 400,000 bpd -- about 5% of total US production and about 2.5% of US oil consumption. Yes, the Bakken (and other formations) will help. No, these discoveries are extremely unlikely to solve the US energy problems. Anyone who is seriously interested in world and US energy issues should spend some time at www.theoildrum.org
I assume that "Hugh Pickens" is getting his information from the editorial page of the WSJ. IMHO. The Wall Street Journal editorial page should be read only by those whose goal is to be systematically and seriously misinformed on a wide variety of subjects. The paper version of the editorial page is excellent for lining bird cages.
**Windows though is a PITA due to the architecture**
Windows has an architecture? Who knew? I've always thought the damn thing had pretty much the beauty and elegance of a third world slum.
**Am I the only one who cringes at reading this?**
I kind of hope so
**If you are dealing with someone who needs a recovery disk in the first place, do you really want them to deploy hopelessly outdated drivers and software on their machines?**
Well, I would. At least the old stuff used to work on that PC. You apparently would like them to magically acquire improved drivers and software that quite possibly won't work on their configuration. How are they going to get that sterling new software BTW? Their PC presumably isn't working all that well or they probably wouldn't be trying to reinstall their OS.
**I've never really understood the purpose of a recovery partition as a means of restoring a system. If a disk fails, a common reason for wanting to restore the PC, then that partition becomes useless. It's much better to just include disks so that a user can restore the PC them selves after the new hard drive is in place.**
I'm pretty much Windowed out and hardly ever use Windows, so I don't pay a lot of attention to PC distribution issues, but my impression is that low end PCs come with a (stupid) recovery partition INSTEAD of an OS CD. I assumed the reason is cost. But I would note in passing that the cheapest PCs often don't even have a cdrom drive.
**It's always possible that this isn't a deliberate targeted attack at all;**
I'm thinking that you are correct.. I doubt that drone control is done through the Comcast or Verizon at Area 54 and thence to the Internet. More likely communications are through secure satellite links. Injecting a virus via such a link is likely to be something of a challenge. It's possible that some governments could do that, but why would they go to all that trouble to load a common virus? OTOH accidentally loading a virus from a flash drive seems pretty straightforward. Who knows, it could have come from another secure facility -- secret software, and -- as a bonus -- a rootkit.
**but I've NEVER been infected.**
That you know of. For all you know, your PC has been sending every keystroke that you enter to some dude in Kiev for the last five years.
**(Minor) distortion in the picture of a CRT TV (these guys still use CRTs?) I can believe but not the others.**
Not that uncommon actually. Most CRT consumer devices --monitors,TVs-- are shielded and also automatically degauss themselves when they are turned on. But that may not help if the magnetic field causing the problem is strong and persistent. Back in the days when LCD monitors were uncommon and expensive, I had a problem with a CRT monitor. in one office displaying unusable video. It took a while to figure out that the problem wasn't Windows (for once) or the video card. We eventually traced it to a maze of HVAC control wiring on the back side of the wall the monitor was sitting against. Since rearranging the (tiny) office to put the monitor further from the wiring was not very feasible, the meager IT budget paid for an LCD monitor.
There seems to be a considerable literature on CRT monitors and magnetic fields
**All you folks encourgaging your friends and families to buy Macs for the specific reason of their security are in for a world of hurt in a few years when Mac hits ~30+% market share. Kits are already starting to appear.**
Yep. And predictably in a few years, kits will include Ubuntu as well as Windows and Mac. And in a few more years, Unix in general will be only marginally more secure than Windows. In point of fact, Unix uses pretty much the same implementation technologies as Windows, and has pretty much the same types of vulnerabilities. IMHO, the notion that Unix is substantially more secure than Windows is almost surely delusional. It's obscurity that protects Unix, not superior technology.
The good news is that as I recall, floppy disk records have a CRC appended. The bad news is that my sometimes faulty memory tells me that MSDOS floppy disk drivers used the CRC to correct reads and didn't tell the user that the record did not read properly. I think that means that any record reported as being in error has at least two errors. But maybe I'm wrong.
Sometimes using a different drive helps.
I do seem to recall that it was sometimes possible to read a faulty record multiple times and patch the record back together using DEBUG. There's probably software somewhere that automates that process.
I solution I've used occasionally for manufactured cables that are too long is similar. .75 or 1 inch Polyethylene pipe joins. They are cheap and they can hold a meter or so of excess cable neatly tucked into the join. Not my idea. I'm not sure where I first saw them used to tidy up wiring.
"Candle makers across Europe are building up their inventory."
As indeed they should be. If any large country in the world has the will and technical ability to make renewable energy work, it is Germany. But I simply don't see how they can pull this off. Wind has major limitations. Germany is too close to the pole for solar to provide much power in Winter. They don't have large undeveloped hydro resources. They don't have that much in the way of oil. They might have 20 years worth of natural gas at current consumption levels (and might not), but they will burn through that pretty quickly if they use it to replace existing power sources. Germans are already pretty energy efficient.
I wish them luck. Really. But I don't think this is going to end well.
"What I fear, is that the proposed shorter release cycles are going to make Ubuntu break too often. That will turn off users, and they cannot afford to lose even more users after the 11.04 release."
That's not unreasonable or irrational.
If you folks will forgive a geezer, I was doing software release management, testing and version control long before most of you were born. I've watched with interest and occasional amusement while you kids have managed to relearn much of what we learned rather painfully in the 1960s. And I'll give you credit. PC software works better than I would have thought possible given the way you approach it. And by "you" I don't mean just Ubuntu, or just open source, Microsoft has quality problems also.
Nonetheless, I gave up on Ubuntu and its spawn years ago -- mostly because of quality issues. Apt-get is wonderful ... if the stuff that is apt-gotten works. Too often it didn't. It appears to me that the problem is that software gets captured, locked down, and released without adequate testing.
Anyway, three thoughts:
1. Rolling releases probably are not a good idea except for really critical fixes. My experience (which I agree may not apply to your world) is that you really, really need to consolidate a release, then test it thoroughly before inflicting it on users.
2. It is perfectly possible to do releases in parallel with several in different states of production. Developers don't like it. So what? What matters is user experience, not developer inconvenience. But there is a limit to how many parallel products you can keep straight. And it is not a large number.
3. In the world I worked in, there was a minimum time required to consolidate and test a release. For us, it was 8 weeks. We tried 6 weeks (once) and couldn't do it. Your world is quite different, but I'll bet you have a minimum time also, and it may well be longer than one month.
If you want to order a kit similar to a Heathkit right now this evening, try TenTec http://www.tentec.com/ Their kits are mostly radio related and the manuals aren't quite up to what I remember from Heathkit, but they are pretty good.
'A slow sort of country!' said the (Red) Queen. 'Now, HERE, you see, it takes all the running YOU can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!' Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll
If fax works -- and it does, why "upgrade" to something that really doesn't work any better? And may actually be harder to use? Change just because some geeks find fax technology to be antiquated? The point of a hammer is to insert nails, not to showcase technology.
When selecting kitchen appliances and garage tools, I try to avoid digital technology unless it actually does something I need done.. Why? Because the old fashioned mechanical stuff, if you can find it, usually lasts longer and works more reliably than its digital counterpart.
"or you could just set it in a box outside"
The kids probably do that from time to time in Winter at home. We fairly routinely stash stuff in the snow on the table on the deck in Winter and Vermont is warmer than most villages in rural Alaska..
Maybe something to do with organic batteries? I don't have any hands on experience, but they do exist, and some don't involve toxic chemistry. I sort of vaguely think there are even some very minor practical applications in some places. At the very least, you should be able to gin up enough power to light an LED or spin a small motor from a kit you can carry in your suitcase. Maybe you can even generate/store power from/in something cobbled together from local materials at the school.
Hmmm. I see them at 72.3.246.59 where they are responding to pings. The site called up from that IP looks like the Register.. I never thought about it before, but the page information from opera and konqueror doesn't seem to tell me what the IP I'm looking at is when I feed them a URL. Probably there's a stunningly obvious way to get the IP and I just need some sleep.
Of course people still use FTP. A lot of us want the master copy of our web site to be on our own machine and our own backups. But Website Hosts have these neat GUIs to automate upload? I have not the slightest inclination to manually update 800 files four times a year. I doubt you would either. Most Website Hosts (Google excepted) support FTP. But there are better ways? Probably. But I have my hands full fixing stuff that is actually broken.
"I was astonished to find that I could do anything, except fuck up the system, as a normal user. I didn't need admin privileges at all. Only when installing new applications or configuring the system I had to log in as root."
I'm guessing that you don't back up your system very often. There really are a lot of jobs like printer administration, backups, etc that don't work without some admin priviliges. Worse, you aren't necessarily told that they aren't working or why they are failing. And really, most of the things that malware might do can be done without admin priviliges if you set your mind to it -- which malware creators presumably do. And don't overlook the risk of creating multiple application data files -- one in root and one in your normal user's directory. That'll cause things to run differently if you are running as root to do some maintenance job.
I'm not saying that Linux security is as iffy as Windows although neither system was actually designed to be secure. I'm just saying that the illusion of Unix security is just that -- an illusion. The practical difference is that Windows is under constant attack whereas Unix attacks are more sporadic and less intensive.
By all means, continue to do what you're doing. But don't be too confident that you've found an answer to malware.
"I can't get this website to work,"
Me either. I think we need a secret decoder ring or something. They probably don't want idiots like us desecrating their site.