Given the tone of your post I understand that you're making only a rhetorical point. E.g. the fact that the fire department will come out and extinguish a file at your neighbor's house too (so that it won't spread to yours) is a use of service. As is the rule with all regulated externalities.
The point is that there is no magic formula that indicates which service is more efficiently paid for "in bulk" and which is not.
Likewise there's no way to automatically guarantee that you won't at some point have a corrupt provider of a monopoly service, or that the whole idea of providing some service municipally might not be corrupt. Private services (a few zealots on either side notwithstanding) are generally somewhat better at correcting for this, at least when there's choice.
Finally, emotion or enthusiasm can cause people to make poor choices (e.g. "bridging the 'digital divide'") so it's often good to make certain centralizing decisions slowly, or even not at all so you can preserve optionality (i.e. choice) for the future.
I really like this from the cool factor point of view, but it raises a practical question for me.
I have never understood the keychain access point finders. Since they can't tell me if the net is open (much less if it's a protected one I have a key for) it isn't much more than, well, a radiation detector.
Worse, because of (3-space) registration issues, interference, etc. it can find access points that are from a practical standpoint electrically inaccessible to my laptop.
But this ring, that's something different, and very cool.
TFA says (among other good advice) that transparency is important. It really is. I hate getting bills I don't understand. So with our clients:
We don't do anything billable without a contract in place. This means there are no unpleasant surprises later when the client says "oh, I didn't realise this would be so much" or "we don't have the budget allocated." On the other hand, if there is no arrangement ahead of time (perhaps what I'm doing is outside the scope, or they're a new client) then we don't invoice, and the time we spent was our problem.
Don't charge for the small stuff. Quick phone calls don't add up to a ton of short charges as they do with a lawyer. But it also means that if the subject is clearly long then I have to pay attention and be sure to tell the client "You know, this is going to take more than a few minutes. Let's schedule a time to go over this in detail." It also means, as TFA says, that you have to fire people for whom this doesn't work -- in that case the calls are just a symptom of something worse wrong with the client relationship.
Basically our principle is: if you wouldn't like to receive a bill for it, you probably shouldn't be sending one for it.
A better way to defeat this class of attack is to move the metadata (in this case the link table) elsewhere to another, noncontiguous page. You could still induce a buffer overflow, but such an overflow would not corrupt the whole allocation mechanism.
For extra security you could put it in kernel space and give the library a new system call to do memory allocation, but that would increase memory allocation overhead, likely unacceptably.
Analysis and solution depend heavily on what attack you wish to defend against.
I understand your point. Where I don't think it applies to this article is that I don't consider the article "News" (much less news for nerds).
There are a gajillion cool research projects under way. The (someday) coolest ones probably look lame right now to the rest of us not specifically working on them. 99.99% of all research will never amount to anything, and when the few of them that will produce something ultimately get there, it'll be very close to the end, or even after the end, of the research project. That's part of why we call them "research" and why stories about them are almost never news.
Occasionally a story about some early-stage research project could be newsworthy, or at least fun and./-worthy. But this article is no more informative than a potato chip is nutritious. That's my complaint.
(Press releases aren't news either, but from time to time a wave of them makes it through the./ process. Big deal -- it happens. But in this submission's case I claim that this "article" is even less than a lowly press release).
C'mon guys, this isn't news. It isn't even a press release purporting to be news. It's just a gee-whizz-somebody-is-doing-research-on-an-idea news. It's so far away from being news that when it finally is, years or even decades from now, you won't be able to recogize the connection.
Let's leave this stuff unread in in Popular Science or Technology Review where it belongs.
The best sound-bite description I've heard of the responsibility of a manager is: "Eliminate uncertainty." A lot of the advice given here falls into this (clear goals, "run interference", "select good people" etc). It runs both ways: make things clear and unambiguous for your staff and ensure you provide consistent results for the company.
Don't "manage" -- "accomplish." I believe John Walker said that managers do just that: they manage a problem in perpetuity rather than make it go away which is what an engineer would. Don't fulfil his stereotype.
Don't try to be the friend of the people reporting to you. Respect them, of course. Be friendly, by all means. But you are not their friend, and if they have a problem you can't cut them slack you wouldn't cut anyone else (and likewise when they're awesome, don't take them for granted but let them know you know).
Keep your perspective. I once worked for a CFO who referred to all the developers as the "direct contributors." Her biz-school point was they were the ones whose work our customers wanted. The rest of us (except for the sales guys) were overhead.
I've been told in the past I was a great manager and I also know that at times I was a dreadful manager. It's a skill like any other and has its own disciplines, problems and rewards. As long as you don't crash the plane along the way you can get better at it. Good luck.
Rumsfeld's comment is an unremarkable epistemological truism. I don't understand the pseudo-uproar. Is there really anyone who doesn't believe what he said?
Given he's made so many outrageous (and I believe false and mendacious statements) this is such a bizarre thing to pick on.
And don't even get me started on things from the 30s or the 60s, when the human factor was taken into a lot more consideration and the general taste en vogue was not so obsessively attached to technology and 21st-century space cowboys.
Sorry, in the 30s and 40s "Streamlined" was in: look at the trains, the art, even the refrigerators and stuff like that. C'mon, a refrigerator only needs streamlining if you plan drop it off a tall building.
The 60s was the space age: cars had pointy fins and all sorts of products had gratuitous angularity (think: Jetsons).
All that stuff was user unfriendly. You can't imagine how much more reliable things are today (computers excepted). You used to have to warm up your car in the morning on a cold day, fer ghu's sake, and car breakdowns were not a surprise.
I have a rotary phone on my desk and still have a warm place in my heart for 36-bit architectures, but I also remember well how craptastic all that stuff was.
Wake me up when linux breaks double digit market share in the desktop world and then we can call it a revolution
The "revolution" is rarely won by frontal assault. Generally you have to shift the ground.
And that's happening. Mobile phones and other platforms are increasingly becoming the important terminals. And thus the server side is becoming really important. That's where Linux is holding its own well. MS needs to defend their desktop monopoly, but they are also working hard to try to control these other fronts. The desktop will likely be the last place that Linux gets significant share.
Great, another running toilet keeping me awake. At least if it's running linux I can run sudo poweroff as opposed to trying to find the "start" icon or worse, lifting up the lid and fiddling the plunger.
Big deal. Most pirated disks (mostly in the Far East, for whatever reason) are just faithful copies of the source disk (i.e. bit-for-bit copies) -- no decryption required. How can this stop them?
Slashdot Mirror
An amusing idea, but that's why the disks a holographic. Essentially the storage technology includes its own data reconstruction mechanism.
Given the tone of your post I understand that you're making only a rhetorical point. E.g. the fact that the fire department will come out and extinguish a file at your neighbor's house too (so that it won't spread to yours) is a use of service. As is the rule with all regulated externalities.
The point is that there is no magic formula that indicates which service is more efficiently paid for "in bulk" and which is not.
Likewise there's no way to automatically guarantee that you won't at some point have a corrupt provider of a monopoly service, or that the whole idea of providing some service municipally might not be corrupt. Private services (a few zealots on either side notwithstanding) are generally somewhat better at correcting for this, at least when there's choice.
Finally, emotion or enthusiasm can cause people to make poor choices (e.g. "bridging the 'digital divide'") so it's often good to make certain centralizing decisions slowly, or even not at all so you can preserve optionality (i.e. choice) for the future.
Security audits are a good application I hadn't thought of.
I really like this from the cool factor point of view, but it raises a practical question for me.
I have never understood the keychain access point finders. Since they can't tell me if the net is open (much less if it's a protected one I have a key for) it isn't much more than, well, a radiation detector.
Worse, because of (3-space) registration issues, interference, etc. it can find access points that are from a practical standpoint electrically inaccessible to my laptop.
But this ring, that's something different, and very cool.
Oh yea! Awesome! This way we can each have The One Ring.
Er...
I started working on Cyc in 1985 and can assure you that it did _not_ start in 1994. They already had a year or two under their belt when I showed up.
- We don't do anything billable without a contract in place. This means there are no unpleasant surprises later when the client says "oh, I didn't realise this would be so much" or "we don't have the budget allocated." On the other hand, if there is no arrangement ahead of time (perhaps what I'm doing is outside the scope, or they're a new client) then we don't invoice, and the time we spent was our problem.
- Don't charge for the small stuff. Quick phone calls don't add up to a ton of short charges as they do with a lawyer. But it also means that if the subject is clearly long then I have to pay attention and be sure to tell the client "You know, this is going to take more than a few minutes. Let's schedule a time to go over this in detail." It also means, as TFA says, that you have to fire people for whom this doesn't work -- in that case the calls are just a symptom of something worse wrong with the client relationship.
Basically our principle is: if you wouldn't like to receive a bill for it, you probably shouldn't be sending one for it.A better way to defeat this class of attack is to move the metadata (in this case the link table) elsewhere to another, noncontiguous page. You could still induce a buffer overflow, but such an overflow would not corrupt the whole allocation mechanism.
For extra security you could put it in kernel space and give the library a new system call to do memory allocation, but that would increase memory allocation overhead, likely unacceptably.
Analysis and solution depend heavily on what attack you wish to defend against.
Your note appears to be sarcasm, but that is unfair. All Microsoft files are written using the same de facto industry standard. It is the 8-bit byte.
At this time Microsoft has no plans to collect royalties for the use of this standard.
I understand your point. Where I don't think it applies to this article is that I don't consider the article "News" (much less news for nerds).
./-worthy. But this article is no more informative than a potato chip is nutritious. That's my complaint.
./ process. Big deal -- it happens. But in this submission's case I claim that this "article" is even less than a lowly press release).
There are a gajillion cool research projects under way. The (someday) coolest ones probably look lame right now to the rest of us not specifically working on them. 99.99% of all research will never amount to anything, and when the few of them that will produce something ultimately get there, it'll be very close to the end, or even after the end, of the research project. That's part of why we call them "research" and why stories about them are almost never news.
Occasionally a story about some early-stage research project could be newsworthy, or at least fun and
(Press releases aren't news either, but from time to time a wave of them makes it through the
Hope this is clear,
d
C'mon guys, this isn't news. It isn't even a press release purporting to be news. It's just a gee-whizz-somebody-is-doing-research-on-an-idea news. It's so far away from being news that when it finally is, years or even decades from now, you won't be able to recogize the connection.
Let's leave this stuff unread in in Popular Science or Technology Review where it belongs.
Shouldn't they just deploy the Sun Java Desktop(TM)?
Nobody will lose their job over this failure because "nobody ever lost their job for choosing...."
The best sound-bite description I've heard of the responsibility of a manager is: "Eliminate uncertainty." A lot of the advice given here falls into this (clear goals, "run interference", "select good people" etc). It runs both ways: make things clear and unambiguous for your staff and ensure you provide consistent results for the company.
Don't "manage" -- "accomplish." I believe John Walker said that managers do just that: they manage a problem in perpetuity rather than make it go away which is what an engineer would. Don't fulfil his stereotype.Don't try to be the friend of the people reporting to you. Respect them, of course. Be friendly, by all means. But you are not their friend, and if they have a problem you can't cut them slack you wouldn't cut anyone else (and likewise when they're awesome, don't take them for granted but let them know you know).
Keep your perspective. I once worked for a CFO who referred to all the developers as the "direct contributors." Her biz-school point was they were the ones whose work our customers wanted. The rest of us (except for the sales guys) were overhead.
I've been told in the past I was a great manager and I also know that at times I was a dreadful manager. It's a skill like any other and has its own disciplines, problems and rewards. As long as you don't crash the plane along the way you can get better at it. Good luck.
Rumsfeld's comment is an unremarkable epistemological truism. I don't understand the pseudo-uproar. Is there really anyone who doesn't believe what he said?
Given he's made so many outrageous (and I believe false and mendacious statements) this is such a bizarre thing to pick on.
Sorry, in the 30s and 40s "Streamlined" was in: look at the trains, the art, even the refrigerators and stuff like that. C'mon, a refrigerator only needs streamlining if you plan drop it off a tall building.
The 60s was the space age: cars had pointy fins and all sorts of products had gratuitous angularity (think: Jetsons).
All that stuff was user unfriendly. You can't imagine how much more reliable things are today (computers excepted). You used to have to warm up your car in the morning on a cold day, fer ghu's sake, and car breakdowns were not a surprise.
I have a rotary phone on my desk and still have a warm place in my heart for 36-bit architectures, but I also remember well how craptastic all that stuff was.
- Windows Insider says Windows is huge and will have 60% by '08.
- IDC says that Windows will drop to 35%(!?!) by then, with Linux only 15%
- but then a couple of months later IDC says that linux will be up to 37.6%
Looks like the data support both of our claims...so let's just shake hands and agree to disagree.The "revolution" is rarely won by frontal assault. Generally you have to shift the ground.
And that's happening. Mobile phones and other platforms are increasingly becoming the important terminals. And thus the server side is becoming really important. That's where Linux is holding its own well. MS needs to defend their desktop monopoly, but they are also working hard to try to control these other fronts. The desktop will likely be the last place that Linux gets significant share.Great, another running toilet keeping me awake. At least if it's running linux I can run sudo poweroff as opposed to trying to find the "start" icon or worse, lifting up the lid and fiddling the plunger.
I, for one, welcome our new overlords of the SIF! ...or so submits Darth Maul...
Big deal. Most pirated disks (mostly in the Far East, for whatever reason) are just faithful copies of the source disk (i.e. bit-for-bit copies) -- no decryption required. How can this stop them?
Use the voucher to buy software from the free software foundation: https://agia.fsf.org/order/
I always assumed that speech recognition was for cases where typing was not possible (e.g. in a car, if you are handicapped, etc).
I get more throughput typing my own letters than dictating to a stenographer, for example.
Personally I hope one day to be a teralo, or even a petalo!