I remember around 1996-1997 when Altavista turned to absolute shit, didn't matter what you searched for, at least half of the top 20 results were porn, porn and more porn.
Of course, that was back in the days when search engines often just assumed that pages were honest about their own content so just having a huge block of keywords in the same color as the page background at the bottom of every page meant you'd show up in searches for those keywords.
When I first heard of the basic idea of how Google's search algorithm worked I was actually a bit surprised, even as a teenager at the time I had kind of assumed every major search engine worked in a similar way. I suspect I was far from alone in that assumption...
NOTE: This mostly seems to apply to American women. I have found foreign women to be far more accepting of nice and/or intellectual guys. American women are mostly spoiled bitches with an overarching sense of entitlement.
My experience is that this is true of at least most western women (no, I haven't dated the majority of western women but I have traveled a lot).
The thing is, just by virtue of being an "exotic" foreigner you somehow become more exciting, even if you're the nicest and most timid guy in the world. So to simplify it a bit, the further you are from your country of origin the more likely women are to find you exciting.
Ah, but when it comes to Hulu, eyeballs are eyeballs. Remember, they don't have to lower the price per impression on their advertising for old episodes of That 70's Show or MASH because it "airs" at odd hours, there are no such restrictions, there is no logical reason to withhold it from the viewer. They're trying to push TV advertising reasoning onto a medium which is very much not like TV in this sense.
What if I build a $50 million safe with walls as thick as a normal house, a hundred different lock mechanisms and all sorts of thinkable measures to protect its content to the point where you would need to pour insane amounts of resources (costing along the lines of the cost of a supercomputer or two) to get into it. Would that mean I should suddenly be held in contempt by default if I forget how to access my safe's contents?
I'm pretty sure you guys still have a large portion of the 2nd. Not that it matters though, all the machine guns, rifles and such you can carry don't mean a lot when you're faced with IFVs, main battle tanks and combat aircraft...
He also claimed this lag happens on Macs which seems ludicrous to me, if there's any operating system I've seen which has strange UI lag it's Windows (menus, both things like the Start menu and in-application ones, taking a second or two to load, entire forms "freezing" because some other application was using the hard drive and Windows "helpfully" swapped the current program to disk because it was inactive for a minute or so).
Of course, if he's talking about application launches then that depends entirely on the application, some programs simply take longer to start up (hell, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SQL Server Management Studio should be a somewhat lightweight program for a modern machine yet when I start it on my 2.53 GHz C2D with 4 GB of RAM at work it takes 20+ seconds before it's done loading, and after connecting to a db server I get at least another five seconds of heavy disk access while the UI is practically unresponsive).
Writing clear, readable code that was modular and extensible doesn't mean too much in the academic world (unless writing the code in that way is your primary reason for writing the code).
Looking back at some of the code I wrote as a student, as well as code from other students and faculty members that I encountered I have to admit that there was very little future-proofing involved. Rewrites were very common (due to code often being written to just do one thing).
Not to mention the attitude of "it's supposed to do X, it does X, thus the inability to handle input from software package Y is not a bad thing" even though Y was the most commonly used software on the market. Didn't matter how simple the fix was. In a way I can see some striking similarities between this and the attitude displayed by the maintainers of some open source projects back in the 90s (hell, a few still have this "Closing: SEP, Wontfix" attitude and in extreme cases won't even accept patches because they don't feel the bug/feature is important enough for them to skim the submitted code before merging it).
Of course, that's not to say the business world is all about perfect code, one thing I never saw in the academic world was atrocities like 40+ character variable names (complete with multiple typos) or applications that did all their business logic in T-SQL stored procedures with no comments, heavy use of cursors and of course the obligatory 50+ line SELECT query with at least 15 joins...
Fascism is not "rooted in socialism". Fascism is at its core a nationalist authoritarian ideology. One of the core concepts of every fascist ideology is that the people must rally around the leaders and follow them without question. Now, there have certainly been regimes that have called themselves socialist but in practice behaved more like fascists (come, you know you were going to drag that one out there) but that does not mean fascism is rooted in socialism.
Fascism is also a very conservative ideology (socially).
How far to the right a fascist party has been has varied, the Nazis were pretty staunchly to the right as were Mussolini's Italian fascists (although they did have some fringe "national syndicalists". Other fascist parties have outright denied being on the classic left-right scale instead basically positioning themselves as an "alternative" to democracy. Also, keep in mind that many of these parties are at their core dependent on popular support from the masses and thus are likely to remain fairly vague on these issues (to get support from as large a portion of the population as possible).
And what pissed all you fanboys off wasn't how fast it got hacked, but the statement by the hacker that he chose the Mac because "it was the easiest to compromise quickly".
Skip the ad hominems, will you?
And most complaints were about the media blowing this out of proportion while leaving details out (I've seen lots of pwn2own reports in the media where it was basically stated "the first browser to get hacked was Apple's Safari raising concerns that blablabla..." with no mention of the fact that this was not a "everyone goes in blind and attacks the browser of their choice for the first time simultaneously" situation) and the anti-fanboys hollering about how this proved that everything Apple had ever done was inferior to everything else ever made.
It gets even more ridiculous when the Apple or Microsoft brand sudoku puzzle is the first one scheduled to be solved and everyone screams about how this is proof that those puzzles are easier to solve than the Mozilla or Google brand puzzles.
And yeah, this has happened in previous years, Safari scheduled to be attacked first so the media and anti-Apple people online scream about how Safari is the least secure browser because it was broken "first" (even though if you look at the event schedule this obviously happened because the demonstrations of the browsers were all scheduled at different times with it simply being the first target as opposed to all browsers being attacked simultaneously).
Most new projectors have DVI or HDMI inputs (my home cinema-type projector at home has two HDMI ports, a VGA port and for some reason RGB+Audio input (no, it doesn't have a speaker, that's the weird part)).
Of course, I've also seen plenty of corporate projector installations where they deliberately buy projectors that only support VGA ("as cheap as possible" and "with VGA input because all our other projectors use VGA"). Creates some funny situations when one of the CxOs shows up to hold a presentation and he's only got adapters for DVI, HDMI and DP for his laptop...
Wow, do you work for my former employer by any chance? When I left there a couple of years ago they were still throwing out DVI cables and buying VGA cables because they had "standardized" on VGA. Especially annoying when half the computers had their VGA cables wrapped around bundles of other cables so tightly that you got all sorts of weird interference...
Well, if for some reason someone is already using Arduino boards to do a bunch of stuff it might make sense if it was just fast enough. But yeah, if you have a choice it doesn't make much sense to pick an Arduino for this task.
So far the only "usefulness" I've seen in the Arduino has been for that retro kick, being artificially limited to the kind of environment I haven't had to work in for a long time, but if I wanted to build something useful I'd probably at least want a 16-bit processor these days, the difference in price is negligible for any hobby project (hell, a 32-bit processor probably wouldn't be a major budget concern considering what you're likely to spend on the rest of your hardware when building something)...
True, but from what I've read about the topic (hey, serial killers are fascinating in their own morbid way) there are also plenty of them that seem to have turned to true crazy after spending many years as unwilling social outcasts.
So to a small degree the parent poster may be sort of right, there might now somewhere out there be some guy who just happened to finally get laid and thanks to that he never snapped completely...
Oh, Sweden has its beautiful parts, it's just that you have to go north of Dalälven to find them (which means most foreign tourists never see them because they don't come up here).
Oh there are plenty of marketing people out there who think that when someone says "It's impossible" or "It will take months to build" that it is in fact a negotiation, that it's a person v person thing that can be dealt with by talking them into making it possible.
These are the ones in high enough positions that they need to be obeyed who don't understand arguments like "I fail to see how we could do that without boiling the oceans" or "The time required just for planning is at least a week and building it will take another month or two" and instead insist on "Well, we need it by friday"...
Wow, you really have a thing for sales and marketing, don't you?
Personally I have plenty of social skills (although this may not be evident when I'm ranting on Slashdot) but I've also seen enough of the insides of sales and marketing departments to know I would never want to do that job. Even as a developer I've had to implement various schemes by these people and no matter how many times they smile like used car salesmen and repeat the "Oh, it's not lying or making them want something they don't need, we're simply making them understand that they needed something they didn't know they needed" mantra I can't shake the feeling that they're basically making a living preying on others.
I simply find both sales and marketing immoral (at least in the forms they commonly have in our society).
They're meant for displaying tabular data, not page design.
You're doing it wrong, there are plenty of people who can do layouts just fine without resorting to tables.
Don't remember 1x1 "spacer" pixels and other horrible kludges required for any design more advanced than you average personal web page in 1999, do you?
<?php
if(true) {
$mycar = "volvo";
}
echo $mycar;// Disturbingly enough, this prints "volvo", causes all sorts of interesting quirky behavior if you forget about it...
?>
Most website developers don't even understand what a hash is. They are simply not capable of using hashes on their sites, even less to do some sane salting. Most of the top used development frameworks also don't help securing passwords, some even make them harder to secure.
I'm not so sure it's a matter of developers not understanding hashing and salting, from what I've seen a lot of times there are also legacy and policy issues (in corporate environments).
Once you have one system in place it takes time (and thus money) to replace it and it doesn't matter if you have ten competent in-house devs who know there's a security problem, management isn't about to let them "waste" money fixing something that has yet to be exploited just because that contractor the company brought in six years ago was incompetent (not to mention the common corporate delusion that contractors are more competent than in-house developers because, uh, they cost more or something so clearly the in-house guys are just exaggerating or don't know what they're talking about when they say that storing plain text passwords is a bad idea).
I do think something has changed though. Just look at sci-fi movies, I'm not saying it was ever a prioritized genre or that it was always great but it seems that with every year that passes sci-fi, like other "fringe" genres, is becoming bastardized into a blend of other genres (unless you start looking for low-budget indie films). These days if you go to see a "sci-fi" Hollywood movie you're likely to get a blend of action and horror with some romance "for the girlfriends" and completely unnecessary comic relief bits "for the kids" and finally they slap on some "IN SPACE/IN THE FUTURE" and label it sci-fi...
And no, I'm not claiming all sci-fi was hard sc-fi or relevant social commentary but every year it just seems like the movie making process gets increasingly streamlined to be as generic as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
All the cool kids used Alta Vista.
I remember around 1996-1997 when Altavista turned to absolute shit, didn't matter what you searched for, at least half of the top 20 results were porn, porn and more porn.
Of course, that was back in the days when search engines often just assumed that pages were honest about their own content so just having a huge block of keywords in the same color as the page background at the bottom of every page meant you'd show up in searches for those keywords.
When I first heard of the basic idea of how Google's search algorithm worked I was actually a bit surprised, even as a teenager at the time I had kind of assumed every major search engine worked in a similar way. I suspect I was far from alone in that assumption...
NOTE: This mostly seems to apply to American women. I have found foreign women to be far more accepting of nice and/or intellectual guys. American women are mostly spoiled bitches with an overarching sense of entitlement.
My experience is that this is true of at least most western women (no, I haven't dated the majority of western women but I have traveled a lot).
The thing is, just by virtue of being an "exotic" foreigner you somehow become more exciting, even if you're the nicest and most timid guy in the world. So to simplify it a bit, the further you are from your country of origin the more likely women are to find you exciting.
Ah, but when it comes to Hulu, eyeballs are eyeballs. Remember, they don't have to lower the price per impression on their advertising for old episodes of That 70's Show or MASH because it "airs" at odd hours, there are no such restrictions, there is no logical reason to withhold it from the viewer. They're trying to push TV advertising reasoning onto a medium which is very much not like TV in this sense.
What if I build a $50 million safe with walls as thick as a normal house, a hundred different lock mechanisms and all sorts of thinkable measures to protect its content to the point where you would need to pour insane amounts of resources (costing along the lines of the cost of a supercomputer or two) to get into it. Would that mean I should suddenly be held in contempt by default if I forget how to access my safe's contents?
I'm pretty sure you guys still have a large portion of the 2nd. Not that it matters though, all the machine guns, rifles and such you can carry don't mean a lot when you're faced with IFVs, main battle tanks and combat aircraft...
He also claimed this lag happens on Macs which seems ludicrous to me, if there's any operating system I've seen which has strange UI lag it's Windows (menus, both things like the Start menu and in-application ones, taking a second or two to load, entire forms "freezing" because some other application was using the hard drive and Windows "helpfully" swapped the current program to disk because it was inactive for a minute or so).
Of course, if he's talking about application launches then that depends entirely on the application, some programs simply take longer to start up (hell, Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SQL Server Management Studio should be a somewhat lightweight program for a modern machine yet when I start it on my 2.53 GHz C2D with 4 GB of RAM at work it takes 20+ seconds before it's done loading, and after connecting to a db server I get at least another five seconds of heavy disk access while the UI is practically unresponsive).
Sadly I think there is some truth to this.
Writing clear, readable code that was modular and extensible doesn't mean too much in the academic world (unless writing the code in that way is your primary reason for writing the code).
Looking back at some of the code I wrote as a student, as well as code from other students and faculty members that I encountered I have to admit that there was very little future-proofing involved. Rewrites were very common (due to code often being written to just do one thing).
Not to mention the attitude of "it's supposed to do X, it does X, thus the inability to handle input from software package Y is not a bad thing" even though Y was the most commonly used software on the market. Didn't matter how simple the fix was. In a way I can see some striking similarities between this and the attitude displayed by the maintainers of some open source projects back in the 90s (hell, a few still have this "Closing: SEP, Wontfix" attitude and in extreme cases won't even accept patches because they don't feel the bug/feature is important enough for them to skim the submitted code before merging it).
Of course, that's not to say the business world is all about perfect code, one thing I never saw in the academic world was atrocities like 40+ character variable names (complete with multiple typos) or applications that did all their business logic in T-SQL stored procedures with no comments, heavy use of cursors and of course the obligatory 50+ line SELECT query with at least 15 joins...
Fascism is not "rooted in socialism". Fascism is at its core a nationalist authoritarian ideology. One of the core concepts of every fascist ideology is that the people must rally around the leaders and follow them without question. Now, there have certainly been regimes that have called themselves socialist but in practice behaved more like fascists (come, you know you were going to drag that one out there) but that does not mean fascism is rooted in socialism.
Fascism is also a very conservative ideology (socially).
How far to the right a fascist party has been has varied, the Nazis were pretty staunchly to the right as were Mussolini's Italian fascists (although they did have some fringe "national syndicalists". Other fascist parties have outright denied being on the classic left-right scale instead basically positioning themselves as an "alternative" to democracy. Also, keep in mind that many of these parties are at their core dependent on popular support from the masses and thus are likely to remain fairly vague on these issues (to get support from as large a portion of the population as possible).
Expanding skin and dripping fuel? Sounds more like the SR-71...
Why are they supposed to be "big, formal events"?
And what pissed all you fanboys off wasn't how fast it got hacked, but the statement by the hacker that he chose the Mac because "it was the easiest to compromise quickly".
Skip the ad hominems, will you?
And most complaints were about the media blowing this out of proportion while leaving details out (I've seen lots of pwn2own reports in the media where it was basically stated "the first browser to get hacked was Apple's Safari raising concerns that blablabla..." with no mention of the fact that this was not a "everyone goes in blind and attacks the browser of their choice for the first time simultaneously" situation) and the anti-fanboys hollering about how this proved that everything Apple had ever done was inferior to everything else ever made.
It gets even more ridiculous when the Apple or Microsoft brand sudoku puzzle is the first one scheduled to be solved and everyone screams about how this is proof that those puzzles are easier to solve than the Mozilla or Google brand puzzles.
And yeah, this has happened in previous years, Safari scheduled to be attacked first so the media and anti-Apple people online scream about how Safari is the least secure browser because it was broken "first" (even though if you look at the event schedule this obviously happened because the demonstrations of the browsers were all scheduled at different times with it simply being the first target as opposed to all browsers being attacked simultaneously).
That sounds an awful lot like a software problem.
I've had no such weird issues with OS X or Linux.
Most new projectors have DVI or HDMI inputs (my home cinema-type projector at home has two HDMI ports, a VGA port and for some reason RGB+Audio input (no, it doesn't have a speaker, that's the weird part)).
Of course, I've also seen plenty of corporate projector installations where they deliberately buy projectors that only support VGA ("as cheap as possible" and "with VGA input because all our other projectors use VGA"). Creates some funny situations when one of the CxOs shows up to hold a presentation and he's only got adapters for DVI, HDMI and DP for his laptop...
Wow, do you work for my former employer by any chance? When I left there a couple of years ago they were still throwing out DVI cables and buying VGA cables because they had "standardized" on VGA. Especially annoying when half the computers had their VGA cables wrapped around bundles of other cables so tightly that you got all sorts of weird interference...
Well, if for some reason someone is already using Arduino boards to do a bunch of stuff it might make sense if it was just fast enough. But yeah, if you have a choice it doesn't make much sense to pick an Arduino for this task.
So far the only "usefulness" I've seen in the Arduino has been for that retro kick, being artificially limited to the kind of environment I haven't had to work in for a long time, but if I wanted to build something useful I'd probably at least want a 16-bit processor these days, the difference in price is negligible for any hobby project (hell, a 32-bit processor probably wouldn't be a major budget concern considering what you're likely to spend on the rest of your hardware when building something)...
True, but from what I've read about the topic (hey, serial killers are fascinating in their own morbid way) there are also plenty of them that seem to have turned to true crazy after spending many years as unwilling social outcasts.
So to a small degree the parent poster may be sort of right, there might now somewhere out there be some guy who just happened to finally get laid and thanks to that he never snapped completely...
Oh, Sweden has its beautiful parts, it's just that you have to go north of Dalälven to find them (which means most foreign tourists never see them because they don't come up here).
That'll be "Windows 9": Xenix.
Oh there are plenty of marketing people out there who think that when someone says "It's impossible" or "It will take months to build" that it is in fact a negotiation, that it's a person v person thing that can be dealt with by talking them into making it possible.
These are the ones in high enough positions that they need to be obeyed who don't understand arguments like "I fail to see how we could do that without boiling the oceans" or "The time required just for planning is at least a week and building it will take another month or two" and instead insist on "Well, we need it by friday"...
Wow, you really have a thing for sales and marketing, don't you?
Personally I have plenty of social skills (although this may not be evident when I'm ranting on Slashdot) but I've also seen enough of the insides of sales and marketing departments to know I would never want to do that job. Even as a developer I've had to implement various schemes by these people and no matter how many times they smile like used car salesmen and repeat the "Oh, it's not lying or making them want something they don't need, we're simply making them understand that they needed something they didn't know they needed" mantra I can't shake the feeling that they're basically making a living preying on others.
I simply find both sales and marketing immoral (at least in the forms they commonly have in our society).
Reasons not to use tables:
Lexical scope. PHP needs it desperately.
<?php // Disturbingly enough, this prints "volvo", causes all sorts of interesting quirky behavior if you forget about it...
if(true) {
$mycar = "volvo";
}
echo $mycar;
?>
Most website developers don't even understand what a hash is. They are simply not capable of using hashes on their sites, even less to do some sane salting. Most of the top used development frameworks also don't help securing passwords, some even make them harder to secure.
I'm not so sure it's a matter of developers not understanding hashing and salting, from what I've seen a lot of times there are also legacy and policy issues (in corporate environments).
Once you have one system in place it takes time (and thus money) to replace it and it doesn't matter if you have ten competent in-house devs who know there's a security problem, management isn't about to let them "waste" money fixing something that has yet to be exploited just because that contractor the company brought in six years ago was incompetent (not to mention the common corporate delusion that contractors are more competent than in-house developers because, uh, they cost more or something so clearly the in-house guys are just exaggerating or don't know what they're talking about when they say that storing plain text passwords is a bad idea).
I do think something has changed though. Just look at sci-fi movies, I'm not saying it was ever a prioritized genre or that it was always great but it seems that with every year that passes sci-fi, like other "fringe" genres, is becoming bastardized into a blend of other genres (unless you start looking for low-budget indie films). These days if you go to see a "sci-fi" Hollywood movie you're likely to get a blend of action and horror with some romance "for the girlfriends" and completely unnecessary comic relief bits "for the kids" and finally they slap on some "IN SPACE/IN THE FUTURE" and label it sci-fi...
And no, I'm not claiming all sci-fi was hard sc-fi or relevant social commentary but every year it just seems like the movie making process gets increasingly streamlined to be as generic as possible.