Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:You know you want to... (Score 2) 39

I think they already did. From TFA:

Sometimes the hype tends to pan out and concepts such as âoee-commerceâ become a normal way to shop.

60% of the time, it works every time.

Either way, the term âoesoftware definedâ is with us to stay, and there is real meaning and value behind it if you look past the hype.

Except that the term "software defined" is not itself defined except by whatever marketing department wants to make it fit their product.
And the term will eventually be replaced with another marketing term.
Just as SaaS replaced ASP.
Just as ASP replaced thin-client.

What all these âoesoftware-definedâ concepts really boil down to is: Virtualization of the underlying component and accessibility through some documented API to provision, operate and manage the low-level component.

Which means that you'll only have the access and granularity that the API gives you.

And somewhere, someone will have to deal with the real servers and switches and such. And to him, you'll just be another account in a bunch of accounts. Sure, they'll deduct the cost of your downtime from your next bill. Well, the cost of what you pay them per business hour per business day.

Don't like it? Just try to get your data from them so that you can move it to a different provider.

And each provider will be under the same pressures to reduce costs as much as possible in order to maximize their profits.

Comment Re:And water is wet (Score 5, Insightful) 583

People are corrupt, greedy, and stupid... this naturally leads to an erosion of individual rights.

Not just that. Freedom is scary. There are always lots of "reasonable" arguments to give up some freedom (even just for a little while) in order to defeat or defend against the "bad guys".

You don't want your freedom getting in the way of fighting the bad guys, do you?

The bad guys will abuse your freedom so that they can attack us good guys.

As always, Fascism begins when the efficiency of the Government becomes more important than the Rights of the People.

Comment Re:Snowden is fucked (Score 4, Insightful) 583

... damaged American interests.

That is not the same as declaring war on the USofA.

By telling the Chinese and the world that the US spies on them and leaking important details, he has empowered our enemies.

How? Look up ECHELON. The story here is how much the USofA spies on its own citizens.

Furthermore, he fled to China to escape US justice, and then did a weak post-hoc justification of fleeing to an enemy country ...

So China is an "enemy country"?

Where do you think your mobile phone is manufactured? If they're an "enemy" then we certainly do a lot to help their economy and employment.

I stand by what I said. He's knowingly committed suicide by doing this.

Taking a stand is not the same as committing suicide.

Our Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence knowing that their signatures would be used to convict them if they lost the war. But it was not a suicide pact. It was them standing up for their beliefs.

Anything else is tyranny.

Comment Re:No (Score 2) 183

Or, to phrase it another way: if you have the hacking skills to retaliate then you have the skills to be invulnerable to the attack in the first place.

The enemy cracker has a limited number of targets:
1. your router.
2. your firewall.
3. whatever service you provide through your firewall (you do have a DMZ, right?).
4. flooding your bandwidth with traffic from thousands of zombies.

Anyone have any other types of attack that I forgot? And if you cannot secure those (except for #4) then you probably won't be able to "hack back".

Comment Bullshit. (Score 2) 434

If you read what I wrote carefully, you'll see that I was talking about the inability of science to do something, not religion's ability to do things.

That part is okay. It's accurate.

Which is why the belief that the universe started with a big bang, for example, is faith-based.

Bullshit. That's wrong.

Science is falsifiable.
Faith is NOT falsifiable.

The CURRENT model says that the "Big Bang" was the origin of this universe. But that model is based upon specific, identified observations and experiments and PREDICTIONS.

Now that model may be incorrect. But whatever new model replaces it will still have to account for all the specific, identified observations and experiments and PREDICTIONS that formed the basis for the "Big Bang" model.

Comment So start demanding changes. (Score 5, Interesting) 101

First off, demand that every software vendor provide a list of files that their product installs, where those files are installed by default and different checksums/hashes/etc for them.

It should be possible to boot a machine with a live CD (or PXE) and inventory every single file on that machine and identify the origin of each of them.

At least you'd know whether a machine was cracked or not.

Right now, with existing anti-virus, all you can say is that a machine does not have anything that matches the signatures that you have right now.

Comment Re:The same (Score 5, Insightful) 184

No movement to outsource the management of the machines to outside cloud services?

Of course there will be.

And there will be the opposite where things that were moved "to the cloud" are being brought "in house".

It's the beautiful cycle of IT.
Outsource to save money.
Insource to provide reliability/accountability.
Repeat.

That may or may not happen where you are, but there's a lot of it going on, and it invalidates much of your list.

It depends upon which part of the cycle the company is on.

Remember that CIO's do not get credit for "maintaining the status quo". They have to identify and "fix" a "problem".

Accounting servers are expensive and techs to maintain them cost too much. Move it all to the vendor's "cloud".

Can't write paychecks because someone is DDOS'ing that vendor or the ISP flooded or a backhoe cut the fiber? Better bring it in house.

Comment Re:Constitution (Score 1) 568

Because telling Bin Laden the date and time we were coming for him probably isn't a good idea?

Seriously? You think that the NSA had metadata on bin Laden's calls? But not the content of those calls?

Comment Re:seems all the politicos are in favor (Score 5, Informative) 568

From that article:

This renewal is carried out by the FISA Court under the business records section of the Patriot Act. Therefore, it is lawful.

Lawful is not the same as Constitutional. I'm pretty sure that our Founding Fathers would NOT have supported this.

As you know, this is just metadata.

If it is "just" anything then why are you so concerned about collecting it?

The information goes into a database, ...

That's even worse. They're COMPILING information about citizens without even having a "reasonable suspicion" about those citizens.

... the metadata, but cannot be accessed without whatâ(TM)s called, and I quote, "reasonable, articulable suspicion" that the records are relevant and related to terrorist activity.

Who cares? If there is "reasonable, articulable suspicion" THEN you go after the records. With a WARRANT. And the warrant IDENTIFIES those SPECIFIC people you have a "reasonable, articulable suspicion" of.

As you know, and Iâ(TM)ve pointed out many times, there have been approximately 100 plots and also arrests made since 2009 by the FBI.

Go on ...

I do not know to what extent metadata was used or if it was used, but I do know this: ...

If YOU do not know then who DOES know?

And if YOU do not know then YOU should not be trying to IMPLY that there is any link between collecting this information and cracking any plots.

I do not know to what extent metadata was used or if it was used, but I do know this: That terrorists will come after us if they can and the only thing we have to deter this is good intelligence.

More of our people die when their own family kills them than die from "terrorists" in the US.

If "the only thing" that will protect us from these "terrorists" is collecting information on our own citizens then I am willing to take that risk.

Comment Re:Constitution (Score 5, Insightful) 568

My first question would be WHY do these have to be SECRET? If there's a legitimate need for the government to access them then why not be open about it?

Fascism begins when the efficiency of the Government becomes more important than the Rights of the People.

Comment Re:Who cares. (Score 5, Insightful) 404

That is correct for home users.

But for corporate users, a system level exploit allows things like installing sniffers and key loggers so that more passwords can be collected. Including the admin/root passwords.

Which can be used against the computers in the Accounting department to transfer money from the corporate accounts to "money mules".

Comment Re:I work in groups so it happens faster (Score 1) 195

With 8 people, you get the results of 4 people !

So a basketball team with 4 people will tie a team with 8 people 50% of the time? (all individual skill levels being equal)

Or a tug-of-war competition between two teams (one with 4 people and one with 8) of people with similar physical builds will be a tie.

I always took Ringelmann's findings as support for "work expands to fill the available time" rather than an upper limit on a group's capabilities.

Comment Re:I work in groups so it happens faster (Score 4, Insightful) 195

But WHY does it take longer when you add more people? The answer is "communication channels".

And they follow the formula of (n*(n-1))/2
So 1 person has 0 communication channels to maintain.
3 people have 3 channels.
5 people have 10 channels.
And if the EXACT same message is not present upon every one of those channels then problems start.

So the key is NOT to focus on 10 communication channels between 5 people but to focus on reducing the scope as quickly as possible so that fewer people are needed. And the means that your best programmers can spend more of their time programming and less on maintaining communication channels.

Slashdot Top Deals

All seems condemned in the long run to approximate a state akin to Gaussian noise. -- James Martin

Working...