I studied electrical engineering, and it was specifically in the math-heavy courses that I appreciated blackboard-writers as opposed to slide-presenters.
Completely contrary to my experience. When I was in university (admittedly in the dark ages in the late 1980's), I much preferred teaches who wrote on the board rather than using slides. It was easier to keep up with them, and watching the board content "develop" over time somehow made the material stick in my brain much better than watching a slide.
Perl 6 is doomed. I develop in Perl 5 every day and love it. I also like the Perl community. But Perl 6 is the classic example of a software project heading for failure:
10 years in the making and only a bloated and slow alpha to show for it.
Pursuit of one line of development (Pugs) only to abandon it and pursue a totally different line (Parrot)
Lots of experimental features with very little real-world experience as to how they will turn out.
A massive re-engineering to "fix" all the perceived flaws in Perl 5
Why would an all powerful, self sufficient God create anything? The Bible presents one answer.
Where in the Bible does it say why the Universe was created? I don't remember reading that anywhere. (Disclaimer: I'm a Jewish atheist, so I'm only familiar with what you call the "Old Testament". Maybe the so-called "New Testament" tries to state why everything exists... I dunno.)
Except the $69 machines we bought are not crappier than new ones, and they are not significantly slower, either. (I erred when I quoted the clock speed: It's actually 1.9GHz, not 1.0GHz.)
Plus, we keep arsenic, lead and assorted nasty organic chemicals out of the landfill... that's 6 new computers that weren't manufactured.
Yeah, I know the article wanted all-new parts. But I prefer second-hand because it's usually much cheaper, usually just as reliable as new (except for power supplies and hard drives) and better for the environment. You're saving boxes that would end up in the landfill or some illegal third-world "recycling" dump.
That's crazy-expensive. We recently bought 6 second-hand little HP desktops for $69 each. They only came with 512MB of RAM, so another $15 each upgraded them to 1GB, and they are perfectly serviceable desktops for our sales and admin team.
The CPU is slower than in the story (single-core Athlon 64 at 1GHz), but performance is just fine.
This 43-year-old developer who's been coding for 29 years (professionally for 20 years) wouldn't touch Windows development even if you paid him $1 million/year.
I'd feel way too dirty to wallow in the cesspool of the Windows API.
I work at a 100% Linux company, but was thrust into the world of MSFT for one day today with some business partners. The one partner was busy trying to deal with a dead Exchange server; he'll be driving straight to the customer site and rebuilding it from scratch... a long night ahead.
The other partner was also having Exchange server hiccups. And one person's laptop got in a snit and refused to work. A reboot elicited about a dozen scary warnings about missing DLLs until finally it booted to the point where it could limp along.
And I realized that our on-the-cheap FOSS infrastructure is not only way cheaper than MSFT, but vastly more stable and reliable. I'd really hate to be stuck in the Windows world for more than a day; the nimble FOSS users are going to be the death knell for uncompetitive companies still stuck on MSFT.
Not all religious people are nutjobs or evil. (I used to be somewhat observant myself and still have religious friends and family.) Nevertheless, I contend that the inevitable end result of religion should it gain power is repression, barbarism, and descent into evil.
You see your co-worker's beliefs as "quirky" because you live in a free and secular society. It quickly becomes less quirky when you live in a society that kills you for disagreeing about the imaginary friend.
The sooner the world rids itself of Islam, the better. All religion should go, but the worst of the lot needs to go first.
I have no patience for so-called "moderate" Muslims. This kind of wacko nut-case extremism is the inevitable result of so-called "faith". It happened to Christianity in the Middle Ages, and the only reason Judaism hasn't damaged the lives of billions of people is that it never really became all that popular.
While Judaism and Christianity have found some grudging accomodation with modernity, Islam will not (and cannot). It's utterly incompatible with human dignity and progress.
Preservation of freedom of expression is worth offending billions of people.
Protesting against freedom of expression is not worth killing a single person.
That is the fundamental difference between Western philosophy and (apparently) Islamic philosophy. The Muslim protesters seem to value shutting down someone's speech over life itself.
Congratulations to whomever came up with Draw Muhammad Day. It's time to stop being subservient to hyper-sensitive extremists.
I understand the ClamAV team's motivation, but hitting a kill switch on software that is only a year old is extremely rude. Had a proprietary vendor done it,/. posters would have been up in arms.
We have many customers running ClamAV. We managed to upgrade almost all of them before the kill switch, and the rest (the ones we were unable to contact) we got within hours after the kill switch.
However, I'm now being forced into the ironic position of having to recommend non-open-source software over open-source software. Here's why: Some of our clients specify that we're not allowed to provide software with a built-in "kill switch". We know ClamAV has such a switch, so we may be disqualified from using it. (Sure, proprietary software may have a similar switch, but we don't know for a fact it does... unlike ClamAV.)
All in all, Sourcefire handled this very badly, IMO. They could have done it much more gracefully.
Sure, but legitimate programs might do that too, so the scheme would have to have a way to cope with this.
Touch the pages immediately after they get paged out to force them back into memory?
But the malware would have to be running to do that. If there's a kernel process paging everything out, the malware won't get a chance to run (at least... it should not be given a chance to run for the scheme to make any sense.)
A technique known as software-based attestation can provide an alternative defense against malware by performing infection scans periodically and detect the presence of any program that refuses to be inactivated – as well as any inactivated program that is known to be malicious.
So, it can detect malware that refuses to be inactivated which is a tiny (vanishingly-tiny?) percentage of malware, as well as inactivated software that is known to be malicious (eg, because of a known virus signature.)
So what's the advantage over signature-based virus-scanners? Well, you get to detect completely hypothetical software that (somehow) refuses to allow the kernel to swap it out (and how that is possible is never explained) at the cost of hugely-expensive computations.
I believe the purpose of the technique is to page everything out to disk. Malware won't like this and will try to keep itself from being paged out.
Malware won't like this? Huh?? How TF will the malware even know it's being paged out? And how can malware try to keep itself from being paged out? It can't unless it has infected the kernel, and in that case, it might as well just disable the entire scheme, which depends on a non-compromised kernel.
This looks like snake oil. On desktop machines, it's quite impractical to swap everything out and then do a scan. And how do you distinguish between malware and non-malware? All programs take up space, whether they're malware or not.
This may work for completely-constrained embedded devices that have rigid controls over what gets installed. But then again, how likely are such devices to be malware vectors?
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I studied electrical engineering, and it was specifically in the math-heavy courses that I appreciated blackboard-writers as opposed to slide-presenters.
Completely contrary to my experience. When I was in university (admittedly in the dark ages in the late 1980's), I much preferred teaches who wrote on the board rather than using slides. It was easier to keep up with them, and watching the board content "develop" over time somehow made the material stick in my brain much better than watching a slide.
Perl 6 is doomed. I develop in Perl 5 every day and love it. I also like the Perl community. But Perl 6 is the classic example of a software project heading for failure:
What we have is a classic Second System.
I have some very basic and simplistic measurements of Rakudo Star vs. Perl 5 on my blog and the numbers are downright depressing.
Why would an all powerful, self sufficient God create anything? The Bible presents one answer.
Where in the Bible does it say why the Universe was created? I don't remember reading that anywhere. (Disclaimer: I'm a Jewish atheist, so I'm only familiar with what you call the "Old Testament". Maybe the so-called "New Testament" tries to state why everything exists... I dunno.)
That's the sound of the competitiveness of the United States being knocked down a notch.
Except the $69 machines we bought are not crappier than new ones, and they are not significantly slower, either. (I erred when I quoted the clock speed: It's actually 1.9GHz, not 1.0GHz.)
Plus, we keep arsenic, lead and assorted nasty organic chemicals out of the landfill... that's 6 new computers that weren't manufactured.
We sell software. Of course, our sales people run Linux on their desktops, not Windows, so 8GB would be absurd.
Yeah, I know the article wanted all-new parts. But I prefer second-hand because it's usually much cheaper, usually just as reliable as new (except for power supplies and hard drives) and better for the environment. You're saving boxes that would end up in the landfill or some illegal third-world "recycling" dump.
That's crazy-expensive. We recently bought 6 second-hand little HP desktops for $69 each. They only came with 512MB of RAM, so another $15 each upgraded them to 1GB, and they are perfectly serviceable desktops for our sales and admin team.
The CPU is slower than in the story (single-core Athlon 64 at 1GHz), but performance is just fine.
The situation in Canada sucks. Bell and Rogers do whatever they want and the CRTC goes along with it.
Oh, well, I don't have cable TV or Internet, but I do have cell phone service through Rogers. Time to jump ship to Wind Mobile, I think...
This is an excellent move. Now, how about if the US stops trying to impose its laws on other countries? ACTA, anyone?
This 43-year-old developer who's been coding for 29 years (professionally for 20 years) wouldn't touch Windows development even if you paid him $1 million/year.
I'd feel way too dirty to wallow in the cesspool of the Windows API.
I work at a 100% Linux company, but was thrust into the world of MSFT for one day today with some business partners. The one partner was busy trying to deal with a dead Exchange server; he'll be driving straight to the customer site and rebuilding it from scratch... a long night ahead.
The other partner was also having Exchange server hiccups. And one person's laptop got in a snit and refused to work. A reboot elicited about a dozen scary warnings about missing DLLs until finally it booted to the point where it could limp along.
And I realized that our on-the-cheap FOSS infrastructure is not only way cheaper than MSFT, but vastly more stable and reliable. I'd really hate to be stuck in the Windows world for more than a day; the nimble FOSS users are going to be the death knell for uncompetitive companies still stuck on MSFT.
Not all religious people are nutjobs or evil. (I used to be somewhat observant myself and still have religious friends and family.) Nevertheless, I contend that the inevitable end result of religion should it gain power is repression, barbarism, and descent into evil.
You see your co-worker's beliefs as "quirky" because you live in a free and secular society. It quickly becomes less quirky when you live in a society that kills you for disagreeing about the imaginary friend.
Infidel! I went to http://127.0.01/ and saw all kinds of anti-Mohammed cartoons!!!!
The sooner the world rids itself of Islam, the better. All religion should go, but the worst of the lot needs to go first.
I have no patience for so-called "moderate" Muslims. This kind of wacko nut-case extremism is the inevitable result of so-called "faith". It happened to Christianity in the Middle Ages, and the only reason Judaism hasn't damaged the lives of billions of people is that it never really became all that popular.
While Judaism and Christianity have found some grudging accomodation with modernity, Islam will not (and cannot). It's utterly incompatible with human dignity and progress.
Also the 20th, 19th, 18th, 17th, 16th and 15th.
They grudgingly permit the 14th.
Preservation of freedom of expression is worth offending billions of people.
Protesting against freedom of expression is not worth killing a single person.
That is the fundamental difference between Western philosophy and (apparently) Islamic philosophy. The Muslim protesters seem to value shutting down someone's speech over life itself.
Congratulations to whomever came up with Draw Muhammad Day. It's time to stop being subservient to hyper-sensitive extremists.
I understand the ClamAV team's motivation, but hitting a kill switch on software that is only a year old is extremely rude. Had a proprietary vendor done it, /. posters would have been up in arms.
We have many customers running ClamAV. We managed to upgrade almost all of them before the kill switch, and the rest (the ones we were unable to contact) we got within hours after the kill switch.
However, I'm now being forced into the ironic position of having to recommend non-open-source software over open-source software. Here's why: Some of our clients specify that we're not allowed to provide software with a built-in "kill switch". We know ClamAV has such a switch, so we may be disqualified from using it. (Sure, proprietary software may have a similar switch, but we don't know for a fact it does... unlike ClamAV.)
All in all, Sourcefire handled this very badly, IMO. They could have done it much more gracefully.
Probably a bigger problem is that not many useful problems are "embarrassingly parallel".
Sending spam is. DoSing a victim is. Brute-forcing passwords is.
It's unfortunate, but a lot of problems of interest to unethical people are indeed embarrassingly parallel. :(
Allocate locked pages?
Sure, but legitimate programs might do that too, so the scheme would have to have a way to cope with this.
Touch the pages immediately after they get paged out to force them back into memory?
But the malware would have to be running to do that. If there's a kernel process paging everything out, the malware won't get a chance to run (at least... it should not be given a chance to run for the scheme to make any sense.)
From the Our Solutions page:
A technique known as software-based attestation can provide an alternative defense against malware by performing infection scans periodically and detect the presence of any program that refuses to be inactivated – as well as any inactivated program that is known to be malicious.
So, it can detect malware that refuses to be inactivated which is a tiny (vanishingly-tiny?) percentage of malware, as well as inactivated software that is known to be malicious (eg, because of a known virus signature.)
So what's the advantage over signature-based virus-scanners? Well, you get to detect completely hypothetical software that (somehow) refuses to allow the kernel to swap it out (and how that is possible is never explained) at the cost of hugely-expensive computations.
Great.
I believe the purpose of the technique is to page everything out to disk. Malware won't like this and will try to keep itself from being paged out.
Malware won't like this? Huh?? How TF will the malware even know it's being paged out? And how can malware try to keep itself from being paged out? It can't unless it has infected the kernel, and in that case, it might as well just disable the entire scheme, which depends on a non-compromised kernel.
This looks like snake oil. On desktop machines, it's quite impractical to swap everything out and then do a scan. And how do you distinguish between malware and non-malware? All programs take up space, whether they're malware or not.
This may work for completely-constrained embedded devices that have rigid controls over what gets installed. But then again, how likely are such devices to be malware vectors?
I'll let you know if/when my program halts...