Of course, this is just like writing secure code in PHP. It is possible, yet no one practices it...
2002 called, they want their criticisms of PHP back.:) While there will always be examples of bad code in any language, and PHP may have more examples than any of them, this is no longer a general rule. It's not hard to find fantastic, modern, highly secure web apps written in PHP these days.
My guess is that 99% of proprietary code contains a big trade secret: The secret of just how crappy the source code really is.
If they were expecting their code to be opened to the public, they would have taken the effort to fix up "spaghetticode.inc" which contains the single comment "//This works though i'm not sure why... clean up l8r!!!!".
I was hit while driving in a parking lot. I was following the marked path and got blindsided by a guy cutting across parking spaces. The police said that because it was a private lot, they couldn't assign blame or write the guy a ticket. This led to a major nuisance for me, because in the absence of a clear traffic violation the insurance companies had a battle over who was responsible. They tried to assign me 10-20% of the blame because maybe, hypothetically, I could have done something to avoid the accident. Ridiculous!
Since then I run stop signs and drive across yellow lines in parking lots whenever I deem it safe to do so. These signs and markings are merely suggestions.
How was this modded informative? The parent links to two articles, the first of which is completely about using nuclear power to launch into orbit. It's a great article by the way, which presents a fascinating concept and addresses many of the potential knee-jerk criticisms that go along with any discussion of nuclear propulsion. Maybe you should - oh, I don't know - read it before replying?
The space elevator has great potential, but the nuclear launch vehicle could fill several important roles as well:
Technologically speaking, the nuclear launch vehicle (NLV) could be feasibly built much sooner than the SE. It could be 20 years ahead, it could be 100 years. The SE still has huge question marks attached to it.
The NLV might be very important for getting the space elevator into orbit in the first place, and for servicing it as needed.
The NLV could respond much more quickly to any emergency developments in space, when you don't want your rescue crew sitting on an elevator for two days.
The technologies developed for the NLV will be important for exploring the solar system.
Frankly, unless there's some show-stopper issue preventing it from being feasible, I think it's crazy that we don't have a major project in the works developing such a vehicle.
The point of a prediction like this one is not to get the details and the timeline right. It's to stir the imagination and to contemplate what might be. It disappoints me how little of a sense of wonder, excitement, and curiosity there is about space exploration today. The world had that sense in the sixties, but once the moon had been reached the world's interest passed to the next fad. Perhaps imagining the future can show people what is possible and inspire them, so that bright minds and better funding will be directed towards reaching that next milestone.
So would "hippocracy" be the term for a government by horses? Now I want to right a story about a hippocracy full of hypocrisy, just for the puns!
Hippopotamacracy = Government by hippopotamuses
I can't find any way to justify the "hippocraticy" formation. Hippocratically would be to govern (or apply power) in the manner of horses. Hippopotamacratically, well that would just be silly.
I hope that one day, someone will search the web for the word hippopotamacratically and find this post.
Does anyone sell a pre-built, pre-configured MythTV box? I personally have no interest in dealing with the quirks of setting one up, but I'd like to run one. Here's what I'd look for:
Packaged in the smallest possible, living-room friendly case
Runs quietly, with good power and heat management
Plays files off a USB drive and/or over ethernet
Online zero-effort software updates
Shouldn't cost a ton more than the cost of the required hardware
If someone does this right I'd think they could have quite a hit on their hands.
Yes, the car analogy is terrible, but in this case that's part of the point. This is how many commercial DVDs begin playing now, forcing you to sit through a lecture that begins with a bad car analogy. It's just as obnoxious for them to stick that at the start of the DVD as it would be for someone to force this onto the start of the lecture.
I don't think the suggestion was completely serious, but I really hope some student or local resident decides to do this. If I had the chance to do it, I would bring a megaphone, and everytime someone tried to stop me I'd point at them and yell "Prohibited Action!" It's not the most productive response but it would be damn funny and it would sure feel good.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the ability to plan ahead will always be relevant. Sure, less planning may be required for informal get-togethers now that cell phones are pervasive. But kids who grow up not learning to plan anything might get a rude awakening when they enter the business world and start screwing up important schedules.
I'm curious just how this works - what does a recipient of this email need to do to get infected?
First they need to open the message. It should have gotten filtered into a junk folder (if not blocked altogether) so the user must be actually going through their junk mail folder and reading things. Who has time to waste on that?
Now, I'd assume noone will get infected just by opening the mail. They'd have to at the very least click on the link. Will clicking be enough to infect a computer? Does it depend on the brand of browser and/or how recently it has been patched? Is the latest (Oh, let me pick a browser out of a hat here) IE6/IE7 in fully patched form still vulnerable?
Now of course, if anyone is dumb enough to follow the link, AND accept an executable download, AND run that download, they will be infected. Is that what's actually happening here?
Hey now everyone, let's chill out! I think we're forgetting the bigger picture here: Secure Computing. During this little software glitch, there may have been some minor inconveniences, but computing remained secure at all times.
When my Windows machine got hung up trying to upgrade WMP, I didn't panic. No, I just shut it down for the night and turned in early. Slept like a baby!
I agree that the CLI needs to keep an important role, but I think we should get to the point where the average desktop user can do most everything without ever having to use it.
I also have an idea to make the CLI more friendly. Even for those of us who aren't afraid of it, it can be a pain to have to recall switches or reread man pages to use a command that is only run occasionally. It might be nice to have a wizard for building CLI commands. For example, let's say I need to extract a.tar but I don't remember the specific details. I type "wizard tar" and see a text-based page like this:
===== tar - Archiving program that stores and extracts files from an archive file known as a tarfile.
Would you like to:
c - Create a new tarfile x - Extract files from an existing archive t - List the contents of an archive (...)
1 - Cancel 2 - See a list of other related programs =====
Selecting one of those options might take you to a second wizard page with more options based on your first choice. When you're finished, it would dump you back to the CLI with your command entered but not yet executed. You could then run it as is, or edit it if needed. By seeing the command, if you ran wizard frequently you'd eventually learn it and not need the wizard.
(Yes, I know that suggesting a wizard for the CLI lowers my geek cred quite a bit. No, I don't think CLIppy would also be a good idea!)
I'm sure that GPS on a phone is useful, but at the same time I think an overreliance on technology can be kind of scary. I already know people who are incapable of planning ahead - if they want to get a group of people together for a meal, for example, it involves countless last-minute phone calls and chaos. I imagine that once GPS phones become more pervasive, there will be a new group of people who are incapable of navigation without technology. These will be people who can't or won't read a map ahead of time, and who will be driving around town with half their attention directed towards a 3x5" screen in their hand.
The Iranian who is making his own UAV is a 17 year old blogger / tech geek. If we openly share with him and help him, we're building bridges. If we cut him out just because of his nationality we're going to have one pissed off guy with a good reason for ill will towards the US.
When people across national borders can grow up knowing each other and interacting over the internet, there's a good chance that they'll have more common sense and open minds to apply towards international politics down the road. It's not the final solution to world peace but it's certainly a good step in the right direction.
Slashdot Mirror
Linux should be installable from Windows? Does it also then follow that Windows should be installable from Linux?
I'm using whichever service charges by weight.
Imagine seeing Google Earth in 64 bits! It'd be like being there!
My guess is that 99% of proprietary code contains a big trade secret: The secret of just how crappy the source code really is.
If they were expecting their code to be opened to the public, they would have taken the effort to fix up "spaghetticode.inc" which contains the single comment "//This works though i'm not sure why... clean up l8r!!!!".
I was hit while driving in a parking lot. I was following the marked path and got blindsided by a guy cutting across parking spaces. The police said that because it was a private lot, they couldn't assign blame or write the guy a ticket. This led to a major nuisance for me, because in the absence of a clear traffic violation the insurance companies had a battle over who was responsible. They tried to assign me 10-20% of the blame because maybe, hypothetically, I could have done something to avoid the accident. Ridiculous!
Since then I run stop signs and drive across yellow lines in parking lots whenever I deem it safe to do so. These signs and markings are merely suggestions.
The space elevator has great potential, but the nuclear launch vehicle could fill several important roles as well:
Frankly, unless there's some show-stopper issue preventing it from being feasible, I think it's crazy that we don't have a major project in the works developing such a vehicle.
The point of a prediction like this one is not to get the details and the timeline right. It's to stir the imagination and to contemplate what might be. It disappoints me how little of a sense of wonder, excitement, and curiosity there is about space exploration today. The world had that sense in the sixties, but once the moon had been reached the world's interest passed to the next fad. Perhaps imagining the future can show people what is possible and inspire them, so that bright minds and better funding will be directed towards reaching that next milestone.
The reason pay phones are going away is that we ARE in the Matrix! They are just patching a security hole.
Sigh... I was so enamored with my fanciful formations that I didn't notice I wrote the wrong write. Ah well.
So would "hippocracy" be the term for a government by horses? Now I want to right a story about a hippocracy full of hypocrisy, just for the puns!
Hippopotamacracy = Government by hippopotamuses
I can't find any way to justify the "hippocraticy" formation. Hippocratically would be to govern (or apply power) in the manner of horses. Hippopotamacratically, well that would just be silly.
I hope that one day, someone will search the web for the word hippopotamacratically and find this post.
If someone does this right I'd think they could have quite a hit on their hands.
I agree as well. Unfortunately, that's 3 of us slashdotters now, and according to the grandparent post, you really should trust none of us!
*Woosh* (Point sailing over your head.)
Yes, the car analogy is terrible, but in this case that's part of the point. This is how many commercial DVDs begin playing now, forcing you to sit through a lecture that begins with a bad car analogy. It's just as obnoxious for them to stick that at the start of the DVD as it would be for someone to force this onto the start of the lecture.
I don't think the suggestion was completely serious, but I really hope some student or local resident decides to do this. If I had the chance to do it, I would bring a megaphone, and everytime someone tried to stop me I'd point at them and yell "Prohibited Action!" It's not the most productive response but it would be damn funny and it would sure feel good.
Actually, I'm pretty sure the ability to plan ahead will always be relevant. Sure, less planning may be required for informal get-togethers now that cell phones are pervasive. But kids who grow up not learning to plan anything might get a rude awakening when they enter the business world and start screwing up important schedules.
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of which browsers are vulnerable in what ways. I googled Q4rollup but it was only mentioned here on /.
Bottom line, if I tell my Mom to only use Firefox, is she protected against all of this?
I'm curious just how this works - what does a recipient of this email need to do to get infected?
First they need to open the message. It should have gotten filtered into a junk folder (if not blocked altogether) so the user must be actually going through their junk mail folder and reading things. Who has time to waste on that?
Now, I'd assume noone will get infected just by opening the mail. They'd have to at the very least click on the link. Will clicking be enough to infect a computer? Does it depend on the brand of browser and/or how recently it has been patched? Is the latest (Oh, let me pick a browser out of a hat here) IE6/IE7 in fully patched form still vulnerable?
Now of course, if anyone is dumb enough to follow the link, AND accept an executable download, AND run that download, they will be infected. Is that what's actually happening here?
Even better, why charge by the network at all? Send me the program listing for every single station, and charge by the show or by the minute.
Hey now everyone, let's chill out! I think we're forgetting the bigger picture here: Secure Computing. During this little software glitch, there may have been some minor inconveniences, but computing remained secure at all times.
When my Windows machine got hung up trying to upgrade WMP, I didn't panic. No, I just shut it down for the night and turned in early. Slept like a baby!
So the sysadmins won't be appreciated until the whole lot has gone up in flames? Yikes! I hope they come up with a better metric than that.
I agree that the CLI needs to keep an important role, but I think we should get to the point where the average desktop user can do most everything without ever having to use it.
.tar but I don't remember the specific details. I type "wizard tar" and see a text-based page like this:
I also have an idea to make the CLI more friendly. Even for those of us who aren't afraid of it, it can be a pain to have to recall switches or reread man pages to use a command that is only run occasionally. It might be nice to have a wizard for building CLI commands. For example, let's say I need to extract a
=====
tar - Archiving program that stores and extracts files from an archive file known as a tarfile.
Would you like to:
c - Create a new tarfile
x - Extract files from an existing archive
t - List the contents of an archive
(...)
1 - Cancel
2 - See a list of other related programs
=====
Selecting one of those options might take you to a second wizard page with more options based on your first choice. When you're finished, it would dump you back to the CLI with your command entered but not yet executed. You could then run it as is, or edit it if needed. By seeing the command, if you ran wizard frequently you'd eventually learn it and not need the wizard.
(Yes, I know that suggesting a wizard for the CLI lowers my geek cred quite a bit. No, I don't think CLIppy would also be a good idea!)
I'm sure that GPS on a phone is useful, but at the same time I think an overreliance on technology can be kind of scary. I already know people who are incapable of planning ahead - if they want to get a group of people together for a meal, for example, it involves countless last-minute phone calls and chaos. I imagine that once GPS phones become more pervasive, there will be a new group of people who are incapable of navigation without technology. These will be people who can't or won't read a map ahead of time, and who will be driving around town with half their attention directed towards a 3x5" screen in their hand.
:)
I'm an irrelevant luddite, I know.
The Iranian who is making his own UAV is a 17 year old blogger / tech geek. If we openly share with him and help him, we're building bridges. If we cut him out just because of his nationality we're going to have one pissed off guy with a good reason for ill will towards the US.
When people across national borders can grow up knowing each other and interacting over the internet, there's a good chance that they'll have more common sense and open minds to apply towards international politics down the road. It's not the final solution to world peace but it's certainly a good step in the right direction.
They create an innovative source of energy, and then demonstrate it by powering a Walkman?
When they get around to inventing Mr. Fusion, will they demonstrate how it can power a vaccuum tube radio?