A friend of mine is of the opinion that Sircam was originally intended as a corporate espionage tool that would be basically untracable. I think he's wrong and that anything intended for that would be better-written, but I don't think that something similar would be out of the question.
If Sircam had a way to get messages back to a particular point from several generations along, I'd agree with him completely.
Personally I actually have glanced at the contents of one of the Sircam messages that was sent to me (in a hex editor), but only because the filename was my birthday.
They're out of print now, but they cover a good range of subjects that aren't covered in most computer books.
There are three books, covering almost all of the columns he wrote for Computer Language magazine and grouped into three categories:
Programming on Purpose: Essays on Software Design (note: Amazon lists this as "Programming Design")
Programming on Purpose II: Essays on Software People
Programming on Purpose III: Essays on Software Technology
Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls books would also be good for a library to have.
Of the Plauger books, I think the one on People is probably the most important - Design and Technology are covered pretty well in a wide range of books, but much of People is about roles, personalities and the like, not something that's as well covered.
If it's built into the operating system why do you have to DL something?
You have to download something because for the most part it's left up to the application to control its transparency and most applications don't do anything along those lines. What's built into the OS are the hooks that applications can use.
The only application I've used that uses this is DUMeter, which displays a graph of inbound/outbound network traffic. In the current version, you can set the window to any transparency in 10% increments, then leave it in the corner of the screen and still be able to see what's behind it.
The one feature I'd like to have added is for it to pass any mouse activity through to the window behind it unless that window is the desktop - have your traffic meter visible but not interfering with any application use! Since it normally resides in the system tray, this wouldn't keep you from interacting with DUMeter itself.
I wonder if there might be a way for the engine to have a two way back-and-forth "conversation" with the user. IOW, if the engine interprets the query to have several possible meanings, a few multiple choice questions might clarify the meaning and narrow the search parameters.
I believe it was Altavista that had (and may still have, though I don't see any sign of it) something along these lines - after a query, it would also present an option to narrow the query by selecting some other key words that appeared in some of the pages. If I recall correctly this was not on the main query results pages, but there was a link to it.
For the example someone posted earlier where he gets a lot of hits from people looking for masturbation tips, using that option would present you with several groupings of words - one group might include "masturbate" and other terms likely to be found on that sort of pages, another group might include "network," "security," and "adware." Each group and each word within a group had a checkbox that could be used to select additional words to use in limiting the search.
I suspect that this was dropped for load reasons, though I could be wrong - it may be that people just didn't use it and they decided it wasn't worth the hassle.
Anyone doing much user interface work (particularly for consumer-oriented devices) should read Alan Cooper's About Face and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum.
One of the main things he recommends is developing a "persona" that you're developing for. Never say "Well, the user will understand this," you have to be able to say "Alice the 45 year old real estate agent whose only experience with computers is a browser-based home listing service using nothing but drop-down lists will understand this." By focusing your development on just a few personas that cover (or are close enough to) your target audience you'll find it much easier to target your development.
Has answers for this: No, it doesn't support CompactFlash. There are two reasons - an issue with being able to use the processor's CF support at the same time as a keyboard(presumably emulated?) interface, and size. Apparently MemoryStick might be a possibility someday.
Since there's no CF support, the MicroDrive is out. That gets answered anyway as well: the MicroDrive pulls down about five times as much power as the rest of the unit combined, so even if CF was supported using a MicroDrive would probably be an iffy proposition at best - particularly since (as with most PDAs) RAM gets wiped if the batteries go completely dead.
The Unofficial FAQ is at www.lardcave.net/agenda/agenda-faq.html. It's a bit out of date, but it covers things that people working with the developer version ran into.
For example, if you hire someone who's involved with open-source game development (particularly for games in the same genre or style as yours) then you need to be prepared for the possibility of techniques creeping from your games to the open source games that they're working on - maybe not immediately, but eventually. After all, if you hire them based in part on their open source background you can't reasonably expect them to give up the projects they're already involved in. Another risk of pulling in game developers is the chance that they'll start to burn out on game development if they keep up with the open source project as well.
Something that may help address both of the above problems is making sure that what they're working on for you is sufficiently different from what they're working on independently. That may cost you some of the advantage of initial skill set, though not always since individuals are likely to have worked on multiple areas of development in open source projects. What it shouldn't affect is that specific incoming skills are less critical than bringing in good people with talent - the skills they'll need for your specific environment can be learned on the job (assuming you're hoping to keep people for some significant amount of time).
Finally, you can decide that the risk of leakage or the potential damage isn't large enough to overshadow the advantages of getting qualified and motivated people - maybe they do end up using the same techniques in your game and the open source game and maybe they don't have a problem with burning out on what they're doing. As long as there's not too much overlap in the games, it's not going to cost you much if anything in sales. For example if you're doing yet another first-person shooter and you hire someone who's been working on Tux Racer, what's the harm if some of the graphics rendering is handled the same way between them?
that would be the most dangerous type of program. A program that can take any document and paraphrase it randomly to result in an entirely new document that covers the same information.
I may come off sounding like a conservative old fart, but if this is her first tat and she doesn't already have something personally meaningful that she wants to use then perhaps she should reconsider getting (semi-)permanently inked.
Of course if she already has other tats and wants to add a formula as another but doesn't have anything particularly meaningful to her in mind, I think it'd be hard to beat Grey's suggestion or something patterned after it. Failing that, there are all sorts of interesting things to use from the simple, compact fundamentals to larger "unexpected" items. Ask one of the math faculty or a calculus student about curves where the area under the curve is infinite but the volume of the solid created by spinning it is finite.
If nothing else, she should keep in mind that she's likely to be asked semi-regularly what it means, and if she can't explain it she's going to end up feeling stupid. "Hey, what's the math tat mean?" "Um, I can't really explain it, I just thought it looked neat..."
Nah, there are very few ways you can eat chicken that are illegal. For the ways that are illegal, it's generally in state jurisdiction instead of federal - there aren't a lot of federal-level sex crimes.
Go to one of the manufacturer or major retailer sites (Micron is at www.crucial.com) and plug through their manufacturer/product line/model dropdowns. They'll give you a list of what works with your machine (possibly only what they sell, but that should cover just about everything except proprietary modules).
They also have a decent FAQ covering issues like buffered/nonbuffered, registered/nonregistered, ecc/non-ecc, edo, etc. For ECC in particular, I believe that your system has to specifically be able to use it....
[In MUMPS,] "I have seen more bugs due to stray spaces than misplaced braces"
When you try to run a program with inconsistent spacing, python will complain about it - the simple program:
print "First Line"
print "Second Line"
will cause an error when you try to run it, because the second line isn't indented properly.
There's also tabnanny, a standard module that's designed to check for inconsistent indentation. From its doc string: "The Tab Nanny despises ambiguous indentation. She knows no mercy."
Take a look at this article from Computerworld a couple weeks ago.
Basically what the manufacturer is working on (it's not available yet) is a motion sensor and alarm, tied in with some form of drive encryption. Move it far enough that it thinks it's being stolen (user-configurable parameters) and it bluescreens the system and won't restart without a 16-digit code; the drive contents are protected because they're encrypted using keys built into the motion sensor system.
This is far from optimal:
it presumably requires some significant driver support and will probably be limited to Win2k initially;
anyone serious enough about it may be able to extract encryption keys from the device itself;
hm, 16-digit number.... Guess I'll have to go through the guy's garbage for his credit card numbers;
it's not available (though apparently betas exist).
Still, at the moment there aren't a lot of other options out there either. I'd expect to see quite a few more products along similar lines cropping up in the next few years.
There are certainly more effective possibilities out there....
One possibility would be a combination of hardware-level drive encryption keys and this sort of motion-sensor setup to keep the system from being stolen while active. Keys would be read from a removable device (iButton- or USBKey-like) as part of the power-up process and would be kept in RAM. Removing the key device would trigger a hardware-level system lock (many notebooks have these already, completely independent of the OS) but the system could keep running. Because the system stays on, it remains easy to step away from it while leaving it well protected - requiring the key to be present for drive access would be much more troublesome, because it would mean either shutting down or hibernating the system or having the OS aware of the protection so disk activity could be prevented without the key. This could be done almost entirely independent of the OS, with a fairly simple interface to make configuration changes.
Pop3Now (www.pop3now.com) has a similar service available, and I think it's still free for basic use. What isn't still free is having an account with them that lets you configure settings and have them preserved - they recently changed that to $5/year, which is worth it to me.
The distinguising feature of their service is that the connection between your browser and their site is SSL encrypted. If I'm checking mail from a public place, I figure it's much more likely that someone has slapped a sniffer on the public terminals than it is that someone's done the same on the networks at Pop3Now or my ISP (or in between), so that added bit of security is a nice thing to have. They also allow checking of up to 5 accounts, but with the page design using more than one or two can slow things down.
You don't really see a lot of this on the PC side (though I've seen it for some development tools), but on larger systems I believe it's pretty standard to have a code escrow option available. Any large package that's in a mission-critical niche probably has this available, especially products that aren't easily replacable. Examples of products where I'd be surprised if this wasn't available: PeopleSoft, SAP.
Basically with code escrow, you have the rights to obtain the source code to the product under defined conditions, including the company going under or the product being discontinued. The details of how it's managed vary from contract to contract - the code may be stored with a third party (generally a law firm) or may be retained by the software provider.
The kicker is that escrow contracts have a cost associated with them, and it may not be small (on an absolute scale; if you're doing a $10 million replacement of all your financial software then $100,000 for code escrow becomes just another mid-sized line item). They're also generally term contracts, renewable either when you renew your software license or annually though as with any contract other terms are possible.
Would you still feel this same way if I published your home phone & address against your wishes? How about if I asked if someone could please use this information to harrass you (literally) to death?
I think the second question there is what would get you into trouble - the first while objectionable is legal, the second is at best questionable. Heck, following your next question on identity theft is Forbes criminally liable along with the New York busboy who was impersonating people on it's "wealthiest people" list? After all, they provided the base information.
Slashdot Mirror
Consider a virus writer being caught, then going after the major antivirus software vendors for breaking the encryption on his virus...
-- fencepost
If Sircam had a way to get messages back to a particular point from several generations along, I'd agree with him completely.
Personally I actually have glanced at the contents of one of the Sircam messages that was sent to me (in a hex editor), but only because the filename was my birthday.
-- fencepost
There are three books, covering almost all of the columns he wrote for Computer Language magazine and grouped into three categories:
Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls books would also be good for a library to have.
Of the Plauger books, I think the one on People is probably the most important - Design and Technology are covered pretty well in a wide range of books, but much of People is about roles, personalities and the like, not something that's as well covered.
-- fencepost
You have to download something because for the most part it's left up to the application to control its transparency and most applications don't do anything along those lines. What's built into the OS are the hooks that applications can use.
The only application I've used that uses this is DUMeter, which displays a graph of inbound/outbound network traffic. In the current version, you can set the window to any transparency in 10% increments, then leave it in the corner of the screen and still be able to see what's behind it.
The one feature I'd like to have added is for it to pass any mouse activity through to the window behind it unless that window is the desktop - have your traffic meter visible but not interfering with any application use! Since it normally resides in the system tray, this wouldn't keep you from interacting with DUMeter itself.
-- fencepost
That one seems a bit odd to block - isn't it a game of some sort? If so, what are the movies? The equivalent of saved DOOM, etc. runs?
-- fencepost
I believe it was Altavista that had (and may still have, though I don't see any sign of it) something along these lines - after a query, it would also present an option to narrow the query by selecting some other key words that appeared in some of the pages. If I recall correctly this was not on the main query results pages, but there was a link to it.
For the example someone posted earlier where he gets a lot of hits from people looking for masturbation tips, using that option would present you with several groupings of words - one group might include "masturbate" and other terms likely to be found on that sort of pages, another group might include "network," "security," and "adware." Each group and each word within a group had a checkbox that could be used to select additional words to use in limiting the search.
I suspect that this was dropped for load reasons, though I could be wrong - it may be that people just didn't use it and they decided it wasn't worth the hassle.
-- fencepost
Sure Hefner's "girlfriends" are nice if your tastes run to blondes, but that's a lot of money to spend on always-on porn....
-- fencepost
One of the main things he recommends is developing a "persona" that you're developing for. Never say "Well, the user will understand this," you have to be able to say "Alice the 45 year old real estate agent whose only experience with computers is a browser-based home listing service using nothing but drop-down lists will understand this." By focusing your development on just a few personas that cover (or are close enough to) your target audience you'll find it much easier to target your development.
-- fencepost
Since there's no CF support, the MicroDrive is out. That gets answered anyway as well: the MicroDrive pulls down about five times as much power as the rest of the unit combined, so even if CF was supported using a MicroDrive would probably be an iffy proposition at best - particularly since (as with most PDAs) RAM gets wiped if the batteries go completely dead.
The Unofficial FAQ is at www.lardcave.net/agenda/agenda-faq.html. It's a bit out of date, but it covers things that people working with the developer version ran into.
-- fencepost
Something that may help address both of the above problems is making sure that what they're working on for you is sufficiently different from what they're working on independently. That may cost you some of the advantage of initial skill set, though not always since individuals are likely to have worked on multiple areas of development in open source projects. What it shouldn't affect is that specific incoming skills are less critical than bringing in good people with talent - the skills they'll need for your specific environment can be learned on the job (assuming you're hoping to keep people for some significant amount of time).
Finally, you can decide that the risk of leakage or the potential damage isn't large enough to overshadow the advantages of getting qualified and motivated people - maybe they do end up using the same techniques in your game and the open source game and maybe they don't have a problem with burning out on what they're doing. As long as there's not too much overlap in the games, it's not going to cost you much if anything in sales. For example if you're doing yet another first-person shooter and you hire someone who's been working on Tux Racer, what's the harm if some of the graphics rendering is handled the same way between them?
-- fencepost
"... and nobody but us is allowed to screw visitors to Las Vegas."
-- fencepost
"Research Assistant"
-- fencepost
Of course if she already has other tats and wants to add a formula as another but doesn't have anything particularly meaningful to her in mind, I think it'd be hard to beat Grey's suggestion or something patterned after it. Failing that, there are all sorts of interesting things to use from the simple, compact fundamentals to larger "unexpected" items. Ask one of the math faculty or a calculus student about curves where the area under the curve is infinite but the volume of the solid created by spinning it is finite.
If nothing else, she should keep in mind that she's likely to be asked semi-regularly what it means, and if she can't explain it she's going to end up feeling stupid. "Hey, what's the math tat mean?" "Um, I can't really explain it, I just thought it looked neat..."
-- fencepost
What I found amusing is that this movie is about half the AD&D games I've ever played in....
-- fencepost
Nah, there are very few ways you can eat chicken that are illegal. For the ways that are illegal, it's generally in state jurisdiction instead of federal - there aren't a lot of federal-level sex crimes.
-- fencepost
They also have a decent FAQ covering issues like buffered/nonbuffered, registered/nonregistered, ecc/non-ecc, edo, etc. For ECC in particular, I believe that your system has to specifically be able to use it....
-- fencepost
Ah, but what if it's "Abby or Gloria or Nikky or Angel" that horked it up and you're trying to butter them up for a date?
-- fencepost
2821 is here,
2822 is here.
-- fencepost
After looking through more of the photos all I can say is those things'd better be heated!
-- fencepost
When you try to run a program with inconsistent spacing, python will complain about it - the simple program:
print "First Line"
print "Second Line"
will cause an error when you try to run it, because the second line isn't indented properly.
There's also tabnanny, a standard module that's designed to check for inconsistent indentation. From its doc string: "The Tab Nanny despises ambiguous indentation. She knows no mercy."
-- fencepost
Basically what the manufacturer is working on (it's not available yet) is a motion sensor and alarm, tied in with some form of drive encryption. Move it far enough that it thinks it's being stolen (user-configurable parameters) and it bluescreens the system and won't restart without a 16-digit code; the drive contents are protected because they're encrypted using keys built into the motion sensor system.
This is far from optimal:
Still, at the moment there aren't a lot of other options out there either. I'd expect to see quite a few more products along similar lines cropping up in the next few years.
There are certainly more effective possibilities out there....
One possibility would be a combination of hardware-level drive encryption keys and this sort of motion-sensor setup to keep the system from being stolen while active. Keys would be read from a removable device (iButton- or USBKey-like) as part of the power-up process and would be kept in RAM. Removing the key device would trigger a hardware-level system lock (many notebooks have these already, completely independent of the OS) but the system could keep running. Because the system stays on, it remains easy to step away from it while leaving it well protected - requiring the key to be present for drive access would be much more troublesome, because it would mean either shutting down or hibernating the system or having the OS aware of the protection so disk activity could be prevented without the key. This could be done almost entirely independent of the OS, with a fairly simple interface to make configuration changes.
-- fencepost
The distinguising feature of their service is that the connection between your browser and their site is SSL encrypted. If I'm checking mail from a public place, I figure it's much more likely that someone has slapped a sniffer on the public terminals than it is that someone's done the same on the networks at Pop3Now or my ISP (or in between), so that added bit of security is a nice thing to have. They also allow checking of up to 5 accounts, but with the page design using more than one or two can slow things down.
-- fencepost
Just go through the Modify Services section and change your Forwarding Address. That page has a button to allow you to add more addresses.
-- fencepost
Basically with code escrow, you have the rights to obtain the source code to the product under defined conditions, including the company going under or the product being discontinued. The details of how it's managed vary from contract to contract - the code may be stored with a third party (generally a law firm) or may be retained by the software provider.
The kicker is that escrow contracts have a cost associated with them, and it may not be small (on an absolute scale; if you're doing a $10 million replacement of all your financial software then $100,000 for code escrow becomes just another mid-sized line item). They're also generally term contracts, renewable either when you renew your software license or annually though as with any contract other terms are possible.
-- fencepost
I think the second question there is what would get you into trouble - the first while objectionable is legal, the second is at best questionable. Heck, following your next question on identity theft is Forbes criminally liable along with the New York busboy who was impersonating people on it's "wealthiest people" list? After all, they provided the base information.
-- fencepost