Any sufficiently advanced neural net should be able to deterministically find changes in common data communication where information can be hidden. And do you truly think that your data is not being checked by big brother?
I doubt there's enough computational resources for a sufficiently advanced neural net.
If chunks of known ciphertext in something like AES-256 can't be broken in times measured in universe ages, then I can't foresee much success in wholesale scanning of all information, searching for embedded secret strings which, if properly encrypted, should be indistinguishable from random noise.
An old Slashdot story mentioned one of the most fertile fields for laying down stego messages: within spam.
US claiming that they will bring their flavour of 'democracy' to Iraq
Most people weren't supposed to notice that the CPA was doing massive privatisation of Iraqi government owned businesses. And loosen up restrictions on foreign ownership, etc.
"Democracy" is interesting, though. What would happen if the electorate votes in representatives who decide to nationalize oil production, for example? Will the U.S. uphold democracy in that case?
It is more likely that the IMF and World Bank will tell any would-be socialists that their credit rating on the world market would go to zero.
With the U.S. trade and federal deficits, it is only a short time before such international financial pressure is exerted on the U.S. government itself.
It is not going to be easy to come up with alternative to the current system.
No, but I suspect there will be even greater pressure to use a web based system of publishing as Google begins to make available searches into various library collections of paper archive journals.
One of the hidden economic transactions in today's publishing world has to do with academic laurels related to publishing volume and publishing quality.
If I publish in a a free webjournal my CV doesn't look as impressive as if I publish the same article in Journal that Published Lord Rayleigh. My chances for tenure and raises are related to those journal publications.
I suspect the valuable names of those journals will serve as collection points for web repositories. Already most of the journals distribute downloadable PDF's of articles with a subscription anyway. If the subscription price came down, that would be a likely scenario.
I wrote FORTRAN77 for more than a decade for numerical applications. Where FORTRAN really got to be a pain was in text processing, parsing input, trying to control devices like displays, etc.
I haven't kept up with FORTRAN90, 95 and the later variants because I learned C (and then C++) and didn't see a reason to learn an improved FORTRAN that was essentially trying to make up for what the other languages already had.
FORTRAN is a great efficient language for numerical processing, but I think it should be considered like assembly, as modules (just as the fastest BLAS implementations are not FORTRAN, but assembly) that can be accessed from a higher level language like Python.
Funny. The early mission statement was a more accurate and complete description, but one which more people would disagree with (namely, competitors). The early mission was factual and specific.
The latter mission statements are agreeable and vague on the details of what specifically the company does. You can say "I'm doing X to uphold the principle of Y" and get a free pass a lot of the time.
It's a lot like like
"Spreading freedom and democracy throughout the world"
- almost everyone likes that principle and would like to see that happen, but the devil is in the exact details of what is done to achieve that goal.
1. Accountability means you can point your finger at me and I'll say "yep, my bad."
2. Responsibility means I then have to fix it.
Clearly stated. What customers typically overlook, too, is how a vendor will release some fixes for free as part of your initial purchase price, but that, eventually, I'll encourage you to upgrade to a new product for a price to eliminate all those inconveniences you've been experiencing, including the wait times for the next patch to the old version of software.
The anxieties and headaches of your average CIO are played like a fiddle by MSFT.
At MyCorp we tend to move haltingly and staggeringly towards greater security and inconvenience. [No, we're not quite up to military standards where no security policy, no matter how stupid and ineffective, would ever be rejected on the grounds that it caused inconvenience:)]
There's a well-known tradeoff between security and convenience, but it's possible to not be on the maximum locus of that curve: i.e., it's possible to have incredibly inconvenient security policies that provide very little actual security.
Anyway, given that 8 character gobbledygook passwords can be brute-forced in increasingly shorter time intervals which, at some point, make it tough on users to remember new passwords, we're moving towards SecureID.
With good hardware, MythTV is easy to get running.
What constitutes "good" hardware for MythTV?
[Not trolling; I'm actually planning to build a MythTV box in the next couple of months. Apart from lots of disk drives, a fast CPU, I'm interested in IEE1394 both for my camcorder and for 169time feeds, also I bought a pcHDTV 3000 card for OTA HD. What kind of video card and audio setup should I get?]
It's a well-proven fact that adding too many developers to a project has negative effects on productivity...
Wrong on this one. And I did RTFB by Brooks, too.
While it would take one proficient C programmer 1 minute to dig a fence post hole, me and 59 friends have been digging fence post holes in 1 second flat for a while now.
Now all we need are multiplexed fence posts with 60 short, distributed nubs on their ends....
A couple decades ago a high school class did a similar survey.
Using tactics similar to push-polling, by phrasing questions in terms of "getting rid of technicalities that coddle criminals", these civics students were able to persuade a frightening majority of Americans to be in favor of abolishing the Bill of Rights.
Current rhetoric, clothed in patriotism and fear of terrorism, is, in fact, persuading Americans that civil liberties are worth sacrificing.
Not that the U.S. has any monopoly on nationalism - the other 2 major world powers, Russia and China, have politicians using nationalism as a distraction from their own inept or corrupt policies.
The starter edition is a lesser product at a lesser price.
It's hard to believe that this "lesser" product is a genuine deficiency. It's a deliberately hobbled horse.
What I mean is that Windows Thai edition doesn't seem like it should have cost proportionately less to create than the Windows XP Industrialized Country Corporate Edition.
Likewise, a few years back people noticed that the difference between NT Server (expensive) and Workstation (less expensive) amounted to, well, not much more than a few registry key settings. Tweaking a few bits meant a much higher priced OS.
And, from what we know now based on the experience of the Linux OS (desktop and server where, BTW, it seems Red Hat is trying to pursue a a similar strategy of differential pricing) it seems quite plausible that the actual "differences" in the Windows OS are not at all commensurate with the differences in pricing: they are artificially created differences and have little relation to actual production costs of the different products.
It is a good business practice for Microsoft to maintain a single codebase of Windows NT 6 or whatever they want to call it and to tweak and release and price customized versions based on what the market will bear.
But it is because the distorted market allows Microsoft to do this that it is good business practice - it is not because inherent differences in production costs of their product demand the differential pricing that the market sees.
Tips in restaurants can be calculated to the exact penny.
Sounds a little imprecise to me.
I've found that waitresses are much more impressed when you leave the exact 15% tip, which is why I carry penny wedges cut into slices of US$0.0005 denomination.
Add three of those twentieth of a penny wedges on the table and it really says you care.
Now it's 6 months later, they've scrapped the whole project because...
I think Slashdot ought to do a whole story on people's experiences with Project Zombie, ill-conceived, the living undead, Death March, etc.
Management always trumpets success and ignores failure - but how better to learn how to avoid failure than to have examples of it dissected in front of you?
It wouldn't surprise if sometime in the future that more sophisticated means are developed to communicate with the brain more directly, kind of like an EEG on steriods.
When that happens, probably we'll discover a couple of things that will make people uncomfortable and have to rethink their ethical positions. We may discover human fetuses (simmering pro-choice, pro-life abortion debate) capable of more cognitive ability and we may discover animals (you know, the kind we eat for food) are also capable of thoughts, feelings, communication.
It seems to me that opening up Solaris might allow the good ideas from Solaris to seep into other open source trees, mainly Linux, but possibly also the BSDs as well.
Likewise, the odd device drivers and binary compatibility with Linux that would be valuable for Solaris/x86 could seep into the Solaris codebase.
In essence, this could reverse the 1980's schism in UNIX where every RISC hardware vendor created their own slightly different flavor of UNIX (SunOS, AIX, HP/UX, Irix, DG/UX, OSF/1, UNICOS, etc.)
But given how late Sun has opened up Solaris (they would have done much better doing this in 1995), I suspect the Linux codebase will be the larger Borg than Solaris.
Like, when the 800 lb gorilla is viewing your business.
A recent Frontline piece about Walmart included quotes from suppliers getting squeezed by the retailing giant to the effect of
Walmart knew our costs better than we did - they could squeeze us into accepting razor thin margins and thereby forcing us to outsource and to relocate to reduce our costs in order to get their business
I don't immediately see why a company can't provide a friendly exterior interface without giving away the family jewels. Maybe it just takes too much work, or else customers asking for super detailed technical specifications turn out to be competitors looking for instructions on how to eat your lunch?
Software markets develop quickly compared to the time scales that govern the legal system.
Consequently, a Windows XP without an embedded Microsoft media player practically becomes an inconvenience to users accustomed to it being there.
While intended to provide a level playing field for all competitors that can provide media player technology, all the EU ruling does is to level a playing field too late, with only one player left on the field, after the near-vertical playing field has caused all lesser competitors to fall off the cliff because they have no desktop to leverage.
If we'd learned anything from Watergate, that would be it.
1974? I wish. We have a lot of influential people in power that could stand to learn historical lessons about Vietnam from the 1960's, Chile in 1973, Bay of Pigs, etc.
more people should consider starting their own company since small businesses have always been a staple of the American economy.
As much as I believe some people should consider starting their own company because they would be good at it, be happier and make a better living and, as much as I believe it's the lifeblood of the American economy and its future, I don't see where the logical connection is made between
"More people should X because Y"
I don't mean to be a troll; it's just that I don't see the logical connection.
Slashdot Mirror
Project managers exist because so many managers are incompetent.
At MyCorp project managers are way overworked.
Lessee, that would mean that our managers are...
Any sufficiently advanced neural net should be able to deterministically find changes in common data communication where information can be hidden. And do you truly think that your data is not being checked by big brother?
I doubt there's enough computational resources for a sufficiently advanced neural net.
If chunks of known ciphertext in something like AES-256 can't be broken in times measured in universe ages, then I can't foresee much success in wholesale scanning of all information, searching for embedded secret strings which, if properly encrypted, should be indistinguishable from random noise.
An old Slashdot story mentioned one of the most fertile fields for laying down stego messages: within spam.
Given a decade's improvement in technology, why not put up a new space-based optical telescope?
IIRC, the first Hubble had a flawed mirror that was corrected on a later repair mission in software.
A Hubble 2 could have better mirrors and more of them.
US claiming that they will bring their flavour of 'democracy' to Iraq
Most people weren't supposed to notice that the CPA was doing massive privatisation of Iraqi government owned businesses. And loosen up restrictions on foreign ownership, etc.
"Democracy" is interesting, though. What would happen if the electorate votes in representatives who decide to nationalize oil production, for example? Will the U.S. uphold democracy in that case?
It is more likely that the IMF and World Bank will tell any would-be socialists that their credit rating on the world market would go to zero.
With the U.S. trade and federal deficits, it is only a short time before such international financial pressure is exerted on the U.S. government itself.
Does it count when they've *all* been left behind?
Excuse me, but I find it easier to Lead when, like, everyone falls in behind me. Doh!
Besides, what kind of messages does that send to our troops and to our enemies, to question my Leadership?
If this is their understanding of an open format, then what would a closed format be in Microsoft's book?
Any proprietary format owned by a competitor.
Someday soon, too, Steve Ballmer will complain that GPL'd formats are "closed to Innovation®".
It is not going to be easy to come up with alternative to the current system.
No, but I suspect there will be even greater pressure to use a web based system of publishing as Google begins to make available searches into various library collections of paper archive journals.
One of the hidden economic transactions in today's publishing world has to do with academic laurels related to publishing volume and publishing quality.
If I publish in a a free webjournal my CV doesn't look as impressive as if I publish the same article in Journal that Published Lord Rayleigh. My chances for tenure and raises are related to those journal publications.
I suspect the valuable names of those journals will serve as collection points for web repositories. Already most of the journals distribute downloadable PDF's of articles with a subscription anyway. If the subscription price came down, that would be a likely scenario.
I wrote FORTRAN77 for more than a decade for numerical applications. Where FORTRAN really got to be a pain was in text processing, parsing input, trying to control devices like displays, etc.
I haven't kept up with FORTRAN90, 95 and the later variants because I learned C (and then C++) and didn't see a reason to learn an improved FORTRAN that was essentially trying to make up for what the other languages already had.
FORTRAN is a great efficient language for numerical processing, but I think it should be considered like assembly, as modules (just as the fastest BLAS implementations are not FORTRAN, but assembly) that can be accessed from a higher level language like Python.
Funny. The early mission statement was a more accurate and complete description, but one which more people would disagree with (namely, competitors). The early mission was factual and specific.
The latter mission statements are agreeable and vague on the details of what specifically the company does. You can say "I'm doing X to uphold the principle of Y" and get a free pass a lot of the time.
It's a lot like like
- almost everyone likes that principle and would like to see that happen, but the devil is in the exact details of what is done to achieve that goal.1. Accountability means you can point your finger at me and I'll say "yep, my bad."
2. Responsibility means I then have to fix it.
Clearly stated. What customers typically overlook, too, is how a vendor will release some fixes for free as part of your initial purchase price, but that, eventually, I'll encourage you to upgrade to a new product for a price to eliminate all those inconveniences you've been experiencing, including the wait times for the next patch to the old version of software.
The anxieties and headaches of your average CIO are played like a fiddle by MSFT.
At MyCorp we tend to move haltingly and staggeringly towards greater security and inconvenience. [No, we're not quite up to military standards where no security policy, no matter how stupid and ineffective, would ever be rejected on the grounds that it caused inconvenience:)]
There's a well-known tradeoff between security and convenience, but it's possible to not be on the maximum locus of that curve: i.e., it's possible to have incredibly inconvenient security policies that provide very little actual security.
Anyway, given that 8 character gobbledygook passwords can be brute-forced in increasingly shorter time intervals which, at some point, make it tough on users to remember new passwords, we're moving towards SecureID.
With good hardware, MythTV is easy to get running.
What constitutes "good" hardware for MythTV?
[Not trolling; I'm actually planning to build a MythTV box in the next couple of months. Apart from lots of disk drives, a fast CPU, I'm interested in IEE1394 both for my camcorder and for 169time feeds, also I bought a pcHDTV 3000 card for OTA HD. What kind of video card and audio setup should I get?]
It's a well-proven fact that adding too many developers to a project has negative effects on productivity...
Wrong on this one. And I did RTFB by Brooks, too.
While it would take one proficient C programmer 1 minute to dig a fence post hole, me and 59 friends have been digging fence post holes in 1 second flat for a while now.
Now all we need are multiplexed fence posts with 60 short, distributed nubs on their ends....
We have to come to terms with the fact that the media is not biased towards the left, or biased towards the right. It is biased towards power.
Quite so.
Four major institutions exercise great power.
- Money.
- Government.
- Religion.
- Media.
Mix any pair of the above and both ingredient institutions are corrupted.A couple decades ago a high school class did a similar survey.
Using tactics similar to push-polling, by phrasing questions in terms of "getting rid of technicalities that coddle criminals", these civics students were able to persuade a frightening majority of Americans to be in favor of abolishing the Bill of Rights.
Current rhetoric, clothed in patriotism and fear of terrorism, is, in fact, persuading Americans that civil liberties are worth sacrificing.
Not that the U.S. has any monopoly on nationalism - the other 2 major world powers, Russia and China, have politicians using nationalism as a distraction from their own inept or corrupt policies.
The starter edition is a lesser product at a lesser price.
It's hard to believe that this "lesser" product is a genuine deficiency. It's a deliberately hobbled horse.
What I mean is that Windows Thai edition doesn't seem like it should have cost proportionately less to create than the Windows XP Industrialized Country Corporate Edition.
Likewise, a few years back people noticed that the difference between NT Server (expensive) and Workstation (less expensive) amounted to, well, not much more than a few registry key settings. Tweaking a few bits meant a much higher priced OS.
And, from what we know now based on the experience of the Linux OS (desktop and server where, BTW, it seems Red Hat is trying to pursue a a similar strategy of differential pricing) it seems quite plausible that the actual "differences" in the Windows OS are not at all commensurate with the differences in pricing: they are artificially created differences and have little relation to actual production costs of the different products.
It is a good business practice for Microsoft to maintain a single codebase of Windows NT 6 or whatever they want to call it and to tweak and release and price customized versions based on what the market will bear.
But it is because the distorted market allows Microsoft to do this that it is good business practice - it is not because inherent differences in production costs of their product demand the differential pricing that the market sees.
Tips in restaurants can be calculated to the exact penny.
Sounds a little imprecise to me.
I've found that waitresses are much more impressed when you leave the exact 15% tip, which is why I carry penny wedges cut into slices of US$0.0005 denomination.
Add three of those twentieth of a penny wedges on the table and it really says you care.
Now it's 6 months later, they've scrapped the whole project because...
I think Slashdot ought to do a whole story on people's experiences with Project Zombie, ill-conceived, the living undead, Death March, etc.
Management always trumpets success and ignores failure - but how better to learn how to avoid failure than to have examples of it dissected in front of you?
look for traces of human cognitive behavior.
It wouldn't surprise if sometime in the future that more sophisticated means are developed to communicate with the brain more directly, kind of like an EEG on steriods.
When that happens, probably we'll discover a couple of things that will make people uncomfortable and have to rethink their ethical positions. We may discover human fetuses (simmering pro-choice, pro-life abortion debate) capable of more cognitive ability and we may discover animals (you know, the kind we eat for food) are also capable of thoughts, feelings, communication.
So, if WINE fails to properly run a Windows virus under Linux, is it considered a bug or a feature?
It seems to me that opening up Solaris might allow the good ideas from Solaris to seep into other open source trees, mainly Linux, but possibly also the BSDs as well.
Likewise, the odd device drivers and binary compatibility with Linux that would be valuable for Solaris/x86 could seep into the Solaris codebase.
In essence, this could reverse the 1980's schism in UNIX where every RISC hardware vendor created their own slightly different flavor of UNIX (SunOS, AIX, HP/UX, Irix, DG/UX, OSF/1, UNICOS, etc.)
But given how late Sun has opened up Solaris (they would have done much better doing this in 1995), I suspect the Linux codebase will be the larger Borg than Solaris.
Like, when the 800 lb gorilla is viewing your business.
A recent Frontline piece about Walmart included quotes from suppliers getting squeezed by the retailing giant to the effect of
I don't immediately see why a company can't provide a friendly exterior interface without giving away the family jewels. Maybe it just takes too much work, or else customers asking for super detailed technical specifications turn out to be competitors looking for instructions on how to eat your lunch?
Software markets develop quickly compared to the time scales that govern the legal system.
Consequently, a Windows XP without an embedded Microsoft media player practically becomes an inconvenience to users accustomed to it being there.
While intended to provide a level playing field for all competitors that can provide media player technology, all the EU ruling does is to level a playing field too late, with only one player left on the field, after the near-vertical playing field has caused all lesser competitors to fall off the cliff because they have no desktop to leverage.
If we'd learned anything from Watergate, that would be it.
1974? I wish. We have a lot of influential people in power that could stand to learn historical lessons about Vietnam from the 1960's, Chile in 1973, Bay of Pigs, etc.
more people should consider starting their own company since small businesses have always been a staple of the American economy.
As much as I believe some people should consider starting their own company because they would be good at it, be happier and make a better living and, as much as I believe it's the lifeblood of the American economy and its future, I don't see where the logical connection is made between
I don't mean to be a troll; it's just that I don't see the logical connection.