You mean frequently adjacent letters like in 'tion' and 'er' and 'ing', very common endings?
Lessee, tion is left-right-right-right... er is left-left, ing is left-left-right... hmmm.
No.
Of the unsubstantiated qwerty origin stories, the only one I believe is that having all the letters in the word 'TYPEWRITER' be in the top row. To make sales demos easier. That's the kind of design constraint we all know...
Dvorak is no faster for coding than qwerty. It's really not -faster- for typing generally. It is, however, designed to use the home row for the most frequently hit keys, and for the 'reach' keys, to have the easiest reaches be for common letters. The rarer the letter (or symbol) the harder the reach. It was designed for typing English words, though, not C code. It has no real advantages in typing code itself (it does have advantages in typing comments... and variable names that look like dissertations...) Anyway. I use dvorak to reduce my carpal tunnel risks, not for speed.
I don't think that does what the poster wants to do though.
The poster wants, I believe, to have a 'live' release, so that some 'get the current "live"' will always get the code considered to be released. For example, by a cron-job doing an update at 3:47 AM each night.
This kind of thing is not really amenable to doing an 'svn switch', which requires knowing whether or not things have changed and what the new version is called.
Perhaps the correct answer is 'write a more complex cron job that detects whether there is a tag 'live-.*' where.* is a number greater than the current version.'
Or perhaps the correct answer is to use a branch.
Or perhaps something else that a subversion user would know.
(I'm not, and don't know, the original poster - but having worked with CVS as web-site tracker and CVS as compiled-code tracker... the poster sounds like he's doing something much more like the former... )
Most of what the LSB says is very, very basic stuff. The file system hierarchy says where to put files in the directory tree. Your revolutionary graphical interface can present whatever it wants to the end user. It doesn't -matter- to the end user if you put programs in "/Linux System/Program Files/" or in "/usr/bin". The end user isn't going to be poking around there anyway unless something already went deeply wrong.
It also talks about your basic system libraries... err, unless you had a revolutionary new way to implement libc? Without the ANSI standards, maybe? Or perhaps your libm will use the 'New Math'?
It talks about authentication, users, groups and such... were you going to replace -that- in your revolutionary new system? Maybe not bother with passwords or file permissions, that'd be easier?
C'mon, be real, the stuff you're blathering about building is all up in the GUI layer, and has -zero- to do with the LSB. But if you follow the LSB you'll have a bedrock for your revolutionary new system that can have a vast amount of infrastructure compiled and added on instantly.
There's really no good reason -not- to follow the LSB.
I've always thought that Word's grammar checker was incapable of complaining about anything other than run-on sentences, and that it thought every sentence was a run-on sentence. This is particulary amusing and/or frustrating with lists.
"We expect to implement these features:
- Spell Checking
- Grammar Checking
- Linux Incompatibility"
** Clippy's mutant descendent FrooFroo the Poodle
has detected a run-on sentence! Perhaps you
should use more commas! **
Now, my interests have nothing to do with anything played on any commercial radiostation, but nonetheless. I checked out emusic.com because it was unrestricted mp3 files for legal, low-cost download. Mostly, I wanted to check out the service, I didn't think I'd actually -stay- a subscriber... but it turns out they have a lot of tracks that I actually want. And of course, I can do whatever I want with them. (I'm not supposed to redistribute them, of course, and I don't.)
The consultant is consulted as often or as rarely as the studio chooses, and there is no need to abide by the consultant's wishes. This is the standard hollywood clause, and only very powerful authors can take greater control.
As for damages, absolutely not. Objectively speaking, the mini-series cannot possibly harm sales of the books, and will likely increase them. Since there are no -financial- damages, there's no legal liability.
I suppose she could sue for 'psychological trauma' of seeing her book mutilated, but I think such a case would see a -very- fast dismissal.
...is a raving nutcase who doesn't understand the technologies he's criticizing, the meaning of 'common carrier', the meaning of 'fair use' or the meaning of 'moderation'. He has always in his dialogue been exceedingly opionated and one-sided, but this is the first time he's taken it to legal extremes, and if you think this case is one-sided, you haven't read anything but Harlan's rants.
In a nutshell, the case is this: Somebody out there (not at AOL) posted Harlan's work at AOL, and Harlan discovered that you can download his work from AOL (via newsgroups). He is not suing the ISP that posted his work, he is not suing the user that posted his work, he is suing -AOL- for not removing a -usenet posting- from its news servers. As if it wasn't on 10,000 other news-servers around the world as well. Which he didn't notify and didn't sue.
And, despite the obvious theory, I don't think this is because AOL has deep pockets, I think it's because Harlon revels in being a flaming asshole. Seriously. He makes a fortune in speaker's fees because he's an extremely -talented- opinionated asshole, who can be fun to listen to when his opinions don't conflict too badly with yours, but I've heard him questioned about the internet, and it's clear that he -doesn't have a fucking clue- about how any of this stuff works, but he's still sure that somebody out there should be responsible for making nothing gets onto the internet that shouldn't be there, and since AOL tries to be 'the internet' via ad campaigns... well, you get the idea.
I was about to say 'look around and you'll find plenty of criticism of Harlan's position', but actually, it's hard to search for, since it's generally phrased like, 'unlike certain other science-fiction authors who... *insert criticism, irony, and backhanded compliments*', but really, of course Harlan's going to represent his own story as one sided. With Harlan, there's always only one side that makes sense and he's on it.
--Parity None
Re:Now That It's Written Down
on
Debugging
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Actually, the 'too many cooks' problem has already been covered pretty thoroughly in The Mythical Man Month, but it does sound like this book might get a place beside MMM and be equally useful for steering managers.
IIRC, the original VCR ruling held that it was legal to time-shift a program, that is, to record it at one time and watch it at another time. It is not legal to watch a taped tv show more than once, far less to transfer it to another individual, and even less than that to transfer a -duplicate- to another individual.
Fortunately, it is also not legal for the media industry to forcibly monitor what we do with our VCRs and tapes. (Of course it's not illegal for someone to produce a product that does monitor your use of that product, so maybe the media industry will find a different way of pressuring the recording devices industry... make it required for THX certification or something...)
I've already bought 6 games for Linux, 5 of which are loki ports. More than that, I've bought every title I own through Microcenter. (My local Electronics Boutique doesn't carry linux games.) Microcenter annoys me by putting boxes and boxes of the latest Windows at one end of the 'Linux' aisle (no doubt a paid placement issue, trying to 'recapture' free-os users), however, the fact that they -have- a Linux aisle and that it contains more than just distributions (Corel Office, both windows emulators, the borland products, and of course the games. Also BeOS and BeOS apps, BSD stuff, etc, get put in that aisle) is good enough to keep me shopping there for my games.
Vaio's are great, and they run Linux great too.;)
I've got a PCG-FX210, and though I needed to upgrade to kernel 2.4 for the latest drivers to get sound to work, it's been a wonderful system. My only complaint is that the ATI-RAGE3D graphics has only 8MB of memory, which isn't enough for the high-end games.
They also come pre-partitioned, so I simply reformatted the empty partition as a Linux partition, which left the windows side pretty tight on space, but I only use windows to play a couple video games and DVDs. (The linux side plays DVDs, but not in what I'd call an acceptable manner... getting there, though.)
I worked on the embedded code for one component of an 4-makes-1 LCD Panel like the one described. Except, our customer, who would then be the manufacturer of the panel, was called 'Harmony' not 'VisuaLabs'. Anyway, the prototype worked just fine then, so -someone- out there has this technology. It may not be VisuaLabs though.
I'm sorry, but, I've worked under good managers and under bad managers, and under the first you feel informed, motivated, like you're contributing to the project. Under a bad manager, you never feel anything but another deadline. Managers need a lot of skills - to be able to talk to the suits (if you have a good manager, you won't feel he -is- one of the suits... he's one of the team), to translate techie-speak to suit-speak to customer-speak and back again without losing anything in the translation; to prioritize sanely (maybe the customer only cares about adding feature X, but programmer is worried about bug Y and wants to spend time on it... factor in importance of the feature, whether the bug has effects that make work on the product hard - low-level bugs affect code above them, messing up things for the programmer trying to add functionality; high-level bugs may not have any effect other than the obvious one.) A manager doesn't have to have a tech background to do these things, but he does have to have an open mind and an ability to ask the right questions, to make decisions quickly, and to not be afraid to change his mind if a decision starts to look wrong.
I'm not sure if you've only had good managers or only had bad managers, but if you'd had some of each, you'd notice that there is definitely skill involved!
There are lots of people contradicting this article, but I have to say, that I'm not a manager, but I still get involved in the interview process, to assess people's technical skills. I give them a little quiz, usually, a coding test of some kind. There are several ways to fail this test:
Say you're rusty in language X; then, not know what pseudo-code is; then not be able to write the algorithm in pseudo code; then not be able to write an even something as simple as "a loop to print the numbers from one to ten."
Say you're not prepared, and ask to do the test as a take home or to come back later. This is not a graduate exam, this is something any 1st year compsci undergraduate should be able to do, and if you can't do it in C (or whatever) I'll let you do it in pseudo-code... you shouldn't need to take it home where I can't see that -you- wrote it!
Write down something really scrambled that does utterly the wrong thing, and blame errors on being more familiar with language Y than with language X. No, sorry, doesn't wash. Syntax errors, yes, fine, whatever, I don't care. Logic errors, no. An algorithm is an algorithm, and none of C/C++/Java/Pascal/or even BASIC are far enough apart to make this a viable excuse. 'If' is 'If' and 'For' is 'For' and either you can think a problem through into code or you can't.
And that is why we hired the fourth person, who when asked to write an addelement() and removeelement() for a FIFO Queue (implementation details not specified... you could use an array of ten ints and error on overflow and that'd be fine)... she wrote down a linked-list queue straight from a data-structures course, with a couple of small errors but the logic was mostly right. So, hey, if we have to wait for an H1B Visa, we're going to wait for it, because while the point of on-the-job training is well taken (we expect to do that; we wanted ability to program and understanding of networking, things -any- B.S. in compsci -ought- to know, plus a little RL coding experience). Sorry, but no, we are -not- going to teach people on the job the basics of basic coding, and given some of the people I've seen come through (and be handed to me by managers with glowing words only for me to find out they don't even know what code should look like, much less how to do it.) And -that- is my little story and why I believe the above person is not distorting facts. (Also, on that retraining... the above poster hired a -contractor-. You don't train contractors, you train full-timers.)
This seems to have spun off a whole line of 'be careful of dictionary attacks' comments; I think people are failing to realize the difficulty of a dictionary attack on a long string. Dictionary attacks are powerful on pass'words' (or concatenations of words) because you save a huge amount over brute force.
There are, however, many more than 26 words...
Thus, an eight word pass*phrase* is -vastly- more difficult to dictionary-attack than an eight character pass-word-. If this isn't powerful enough for you, add more words... gpg and pgp allow some silly length of passphrase.
But supposing there are 10000 words in the english language (and that your passphrase is in english, but why should it be? Even we under-cultured americans take some token foreign language class and can cobble together a sentance or three in another language...), well, then, an eight word passphrase has 10000^8 = (10^4)^8 = 10^48... possibilities. I think in actuality there's a few orders of magnitude more involved, and even if there isn't, just adding in the considerations that capitalization and punctuation add increases the complexity dramatically.
(ie, "this is my secret passphrase dont you know" is different from "This is my secret passphrase, don't you know." is different from "THIS IS MY SECRET PASS... " eh, you get the idea.)
In short, passphrases are not vulnerable to dictionary attacks if your passphrase is a reasonable length. (Or rather, the removal of a few orders of magnitude from the problem will not make it crackable on todays hardware, and when
it -does- make a difference, brute force will be only a few years behind, the same way that 8 character passwords are brute-forceable today and were only dictionary attackable a few years back...)
Though, it would be advisable to avoid using famous lines and quotes, since the first passphrase dictionary attack attempt would almost certainly include the 'to be or not to be' speech with various truncations, the first line and chorus line from every top forty song in the last fifty years, etc.
Also, remember, most dictionary based cracking tools try substituting zero for 'O', four for 'A', etc, to match 31337 'spelling' styles, and trying all the case combinations... so those obfuscations don't really help.
It -does- help to try something like, taking the first letter of every word in a sentence, like,
'I'm going to obfuscate my password' -> 'igtomp', which you can that capitalize or obfuscate at leisure (though -nothing- will make a six-character password secure, so use a longer sentence!); this gives the benefits of passphrases (memorizability) even for passwords that have to fit in some small space (like 32 characters or whatever, where a password spelled out might be short enough to still be dictionary vulnerable because it's only 5 words instead of 8 to 10... )
While I agree with you about rms' fanaticism, this little troll of yours can be refuted with the simple observation that OV is an open standard and anyone can make a closed source implementation, whether or not they use the GPLed code. Your scenario is simply impossible.
(Also as other answers noted, FSF does not control OV nor Xiph).
I'm not terribly familiar with European law, but I do recall it was not many years ago that my fellow Americans were mocking the Brits for having a horribly restrictive copyright act which reads damn close to the way the DMCA reads, so, at least in GB the same arguments against DeCSS could be made.
You might want to check your country's copyright code -before- the MPAA finishes here and goes around the world trying to establish precedent in other countries...
As for the re-burying issue, I think your parallel to my argument would only be valid if the minerals were extracted from the river in the first place. Dumping lime, which was mined from the ground, into the river, is different from the radioactive wastes which are coming from the ground, going to the ground. Concentration is a good point, though, but it could always be diluted. Maybe deliver radioactive waste back to the refinery, mix it the radioactive waste with the non-radioactive 'waste' material from refining (so you have approximately the original mix) and then re-bury that. You could even refill the original mines as they're spent (assuming they aren't strip mines... the radioactive waste is probably smaller-grained than the original ore strata so putting it on the -surface- would be a bad thing.)
Presumably there's a lot of engineering details I don't know about, but it's a thought. --Parity
Nuclear waste is just non-fissionable radiocactive material, but, nuclear powerplants don't create -more- radioactives... they take radioactives and accelerate their decay by hitting a critical mass to cause rapid fissioning instead of slow decay one particle at a time.
And where does all that uranium come from? The ground... so... exactly how are we creating more danger by digging it up, using it, and burying it again? (well, aside from the transportation and use phases with their obvious dangers; but as far as I can see, once it's re-buried we're no worse off than before it was mined.)
Also, the salt caves proposal estimates something like a 2% chance that the caves would be ruptured in the next 10,000 years or so, which is probably at least as good of odds as any given uranium deposit remaining buried.
I cannot believe the moderation that this troll has gotten; people have been moderating down natalie portman naked and petrified with grits and honey for so long they don't recognize a real troll, I suppose. (Clue: thinly explain parallels that claim 'this is just like commies' or 'this is just like nazis' are either Trolls or Fanatics.)
Anyway, the reason this whole post is not worthy of its rating is that, a) we passed the unsolicited fax law in the U.S. and we have not yet joined the communist bloc, if there even -is- a communist bloc anymore, and b) we have lots of laws like 'do not steal' and 'do not speed' but we don't tag everyone with remote transmitters to enforce those laws. Neither does outlawing UCE necessitate that we will pass laws to monitor every computer. If you're worried about it, join the EFF to make sure privacy issues are watched in any anti-spam legislation.
Are you nuts? The school system does NOT owe the kid money any more than the mysterious "security company" does. So sad.
Depends on what you mean by 'owe'... legally, a verbal promise is a verbal contract... which is usually meaningless because it's 'your word against mine' but -this- promise was witnessed by an entire class. Thus, it's arguable in court (winnable being another thing) that money is due.
Now, if you mean, OTOH, 'sensible people would realize', well, sensible people should realize that, if it was a joke the kid took seriously, no harm done and pretty good job testing security. Maybe give him extra credit points for the effort.
Or, in other words, if the school is going to be nitpicky and leverage the words instead of the meaning of the law, then why shouldn't the student and his family? (turnabout is fair play... )
Slashdot Mirror
You mean frequently adjacent letters like in 'tion' and 'er' and 'ing', very common endings?
Lessee, tion is left-right-right-right... er is left-left, ing is left-left-right... hmmm.
No.
Of the unsubstantiated qwerty origin stories, the only one I believe is that having all the letters in the word 'TYPEWRITER' be in the top row. To make sales demos easier. That's the kind of design constraint we all know...
Dvorak is no faster for coding than qwerty. It's really not -faster- for typing generally. It is, however, designed to use the home row for the most frequently hit keys, and for the 'reach' keys, to have the easiest reaches be for common letters. The rarer the letter (or symbol) the harder the
reach. It was designed for typing English words,
though, not C code. It has no real advantages in typing code itself (it does have advantages in typing comments... and variable names that look like dissertations...) Anyway. I use dvorak to reduce my carpal tunnel risks, not for speed.
I don't think that does what the poster wants to
.* is a number greater
do though.
The poster wants, I believe, to have a 'live'
release, so that some 'get the current "live"'
will always get the code considered to be
released. For example, by a cron-job doing
an update at 3:47 AM each night.
This kind of thing is not really amenable to doing an 'svn switch', which requires knowing whether or not things have changed and what the new version is called.
Perhaps the correct answer is 'write a more complex cron job that detects whether there is
a tag 'live-.*' where
than the current version.'
Or perhaps the correct answer is to use a branch.
Or perhaps something else that a subversion user
would know.
(I'm not, and don't know, the original poster -
but having worked with CVS as web-site tracker
and CVS as compiled-code tracker... the poster
sounds like he's doing something much more like
the former... )
Most of what the LSB says is very, very basic stuff. The file system hierarchy says where to put files in the directory tree. Your revolutionary graphical interface can present whatever it wants to the end user. It doesn't -matter- to the end user if you put programs in "/Linux System/Program Files/" or in "/usr/bin". The end user isn't going to be poking around there anyway unless something already went deeply wrong.
It also talks about your basic system libraries... err, unless you had a revolutionary new way to implement libc? Without the ANSI standards, maybe? Or perhaps your libm will use the 'New Math'?
It talks about authentication, users, groups and such... were you going to replace -that- in your revolutionary new system? Maybe not bother with passwords or file permissions, that'd be easier?
C'mon, be real, the stuff you're blathering about building is all up in the GUI layer, and has -zero- to do with the LSB. But if you follow the LSB you'll have a bedrock for your revolutionary new system that can have a vast amount of infrastructure compiled and added on instantly.
There's really no good reason -not- to follow the LSB.
At first it looks like just another tired
April Fool's press release, but if you click
through to the demo...
SoundWave Demo
For a demo of SoundWave, Opera's P2P real-time voice technology, simply ask someone in your vicinity the following question:
"What is today's date?"
I found that refreshing, and worthy of a smile and
a small snerk. That's more humor than anything else
posted today has had!
--Parity None
I've always thought that Word's grammar checker
was incapable of complaining about anything other
than run-on sentences, and that it thought every
sentence was a run-on sentence. This is
particulary amusing and/or frustrating with lists.
"We expect to implement these features:
- Spell Checking
- Grammar Checking
- Linux Incompatibility"
** Clippy's mutant descendent FrooFroo the Poodle
has detected a run-on sentence! Perhaps you
should use more commas! **
Ugh.
Now, my interests have nothing to do with anything played on any commercial radiostation, but nonetheless. I checked out emusic.com because it was unrestricted mp3 files for legal, low-cost download. Mostly, I wanted to check out the service, I didn't think I'd actually -stay- a subscriber... but it turns out they have a lot of tracks that I actually want. And of course, I can do whatever I want with them. (I'm not supposed to redistribute them, of course, and I don't.)
Anyway, you might check it out.
Nice try, and a nice dream, but no.
The consultant is consulted as often or as rarely as the studio chooses, and there is no need to abide by the consultant's wishes. This is the standard hollywood clause, and only very powerful authors can take greater control.
As for damages, absolutely not. Objectively speaking, the mini-series cannot possibly harm sales of the books, and will likely increase them. Since there are no -financial- damages, there's no legal liability.
I suppose she could sue for 'psychological trauma' of seeing her book mutilated, but I think such a case would see a -very- fast dismissal.
--Parity None
IANALATINLAIYRLAYSCWAA
Yes, the same was said of Reagan, and furthermore, each word in Reagan's name had six letters! Ronald Wilson Reagan = 6 6 6, the number of the beast!
.
I'm still waiting for the apocalypse..
...is a raving nutcase who doesn't understand the technologies he's criticizing, the meaning of 'common carrier', the meaning of 'fair use' or the meaning of 'moderation'. He has always in his dialogue been exceedingly opionated and one-sided, but this is the first time he's taken it to legal extremes, and if you think this case is one-sided, you haven't read anything but Harlan's rants.
... *insert criticism, irony, and backhanded compliments*', but really, of course Harlan's going to represent his own story as one sided. With Harlan, there's always only one side that makes sense and he's on it.
In a nutshell, the case is this: Somebody out there (not at AOL) posted Harlan's work at AOL, and Harlan discovered that you can download his work from AOL (via newsgroups). He is not suing the ISP that posted his work, he is not suing the user that posted his work, he is suing -AOL- for not removing a -usenet posting- from its news servers. As if it wasn't on 10,000 other news-servers around the world as well. Which he didn't notify and didn't sue.
And, despite the obvious theory, I don't think this is because AOL has deep pockets, I think it's because Harlon revels in being a flaming asshole. Seriously. He makes a fortune in speaker's fees because he's an extremely -talented- opinionated asshole, who can be fun to listen to when his opinions don't conflict too badly with yours, but I've heard him questioned about the internet, and it's clear that he -doesn't have a fucking clue- about how any of this stuff works, but he's still sure that somebody out there should be responsible for making nothing gets onto the internet that shouldn't be there, and since AOL tries to be 'the internet' via ad campaigns... well, you get the idea.
I was about to say 'look around and you'll find plenty of criticism of Harlan's position', but actually, it's hard to search for, since it's generally phrased like, 'unlike certain other science-fiction authors who
--Parity None
Actually, the 'too many cooks' problem has already been covered pretty thoroughly in The Mythical Man Month, but it does sound like this book might get a place beside MMM and be equally useful for steering managers.
--Parity None
... at least, when I was taking a networking class, TCP/IP was describe as a peer-to-peer networking protocol. What does the internet run on again? ;)
--Parity Odd
IIRC, the original VCR ruling held that it was legal to time-shift a program, that is, to record it at one time and watch it at another time. It is not legal to watch a taped tv show more than once, far less to transfer it to another individual, and even less than that to transfer a -duplicate- to another individual.
Fortunately, it is also not legal for the media industry to forcibly monitor what we do with our VCRs and tapes. (Of course it's not illegal for someone to produce a product that does monitor your use of that product, so maybe the media industry will find a different way of pressuring the recording devices industry... make it required for THX certification or something...)
Parity None
I've already bought 6 games for Linux, 5 of which are loki ports. More than that, I've bought every title I own through Microcenter. (My local Electronics Boutique doesn't carry linux games.) Microcenter annoys me by putting boxes and boxes of the latest Windows at one end of the 'Linux' aisle (no doubt a paid placement issue, trying to 'recapture' free-os users), however, the fact that they -have- a Linux aisle and that it contains more than just distributions (Corel Office, both windows emulators, the borland products, and of course the games. Also BeOS and BeOS apps, BSD stuff, etc, get put in that aisle) is good enough to keep me shopping there for my games.
Vaio's are great, and they run Linux great too. ;)
I've got a PCG-FX210, and though I needed to upgrade to kernel 2.4 for the latest drivers to get sound to work, it's been a wonderful system. My only complaint is that the ATI-RAGE3D graphics has only 8MB of memory, which isn't enough for the high-end games.
They also come pre-partitioned, so I simply reformatted the empty partition as a Linux partition, which left the windows side pretty tight on space, but I only use windows to play a couple video games and DVDs. (The linux side plays DVDs, but not in what I'd call an acceptable manner... getting there, though.)
Parity Odd
I worked on the embedded code for one component of an 4-makes-1 LCD Panel like the one described. Except, our customer, who would then be the manufacturer of the panel, was called 'Harmony' not 'VisuaLabs'. Anyway, the prototype worked just fine then, so -someone- out there has this technology. It may not be VisuaLabs though.
I'm sorry, but, I've worked under good managers and under bad managers, and under the first you feel informed, motivated, like you're contributing to the project. Under a bad manager, you never feel anything but another deadline. Managers need a lot of skills - to be able to talk to the suits (if you have a good manager, you won't feel he -is- one of the suits... he's one of the team), to translate techie-speak to suit-speak to customer-speak and back again without losing anything in the translation; to prioritize sanely (maybe the customer only cares about adding feature X, but programmer is worried about bug Y and wants to spend time on it... factor in importance of the feature, whether the bug has effects that make work on the product hard - low-level bugs affect code above them, messing up things for the programmer trying to add functionality; high-level bugs may not have any effect other than the obvious one.) A manager doesn't have to have a tech background to do these things, but he does have to have an open mind and an ability to ask the right questions, to make decisions quickly, and to not be afraid to change his mind if a decision starts to look wrong.
I'm not sure if you've only had good managers or only had bad managers, but if you'd had some of each, you'd notice that there is definitely skill involved!
Parity Odd
--Parity
There are lots of people contradicting this article, but I have to say, that I'm not a manager, but I still get involved in the interview process, to assess people's technical skills. I give them a little quiz, usually, a coding test of some kind. There are several ways to fail this test:
... she wrote down a linked-list queue straight from a data-structures course, with a couple of small errors but the logic was mostly right. So, hey, if we have to wait for an H1B Visa, we're going to wait for it, because while the point of on-the-job training is well taken (we expect to do that; we wanted ability to program and understanding of networking, things -any- B.S. in compsci -ought- to know, plus a little RL coding experience). Sorry, but no, we are -not- going to teach people on the job the basics of basic coding, and given some of the people I've seen come through (and be handed to me by managers with glowing words only for me to find out they don't even know what code should look like, much less how to do it.) And -that- is my little story and why I believe the above person is not distorting facts. (Also, on that retraining... the above poster hired a -contractor-. You don't train contractors, you train full-timers.)
Say you're rusty in language X; then, not know what pseudo-code is; then not be able to write the algorithm in pseudo code; then not be able to write an even something as simple as "a loop to print the numbers from one to ten."
Say you're not prepared, and ask to do the test as a take home or to come back later. This is not a graduate exam, this is something any 1st year compsci undergraduate should be able to do, and if you can't do it in C (or whatever) I'll let you do it in pseudo-code... you shouldn't need to take it home where I can't see that -you- wrote it!
Write down something really scrambled that does utterly the wrong thing, and blame errors on being more familiar with language Y than with language X. No, sorry, doesn't wash. Syntax errors, yes, fine, whatever, I don't care. Logic errors, no. An algorithm is an algorithm, and none of C/C++/Java/Pascal/or even BASIC are far enough apart to make this a viable excuse. 'If' is 'If' and 'For' is 'For' and either you can think a problem through into code or you can't.
And that is why we hired the fourth person, who when asked to write an addelement() and removeelement() for a FIFO Queue (implementation details not specified... you could use an array of ten ints and error on overflow and that'd be fine)
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This seems to have spun off a whole line of 'be careful of dictionary attacks' comments; I think people are failing to realize the difficulty of a dictionary attack on a long string. Dictionary attacks are powerful on pass'words' (or concatenations of words) because you save a huge amount over brute force.
... possibilities. I think in actuality there's a few orders of magnitude more involved, and even if there isn't, just adding in the considerations that capitalization and punctuation add increases the complexity dramatically.
There are, however, many more than 26 words...
Thus, an eight word pass*phrase* is -vastly- more difficult to dictionary-attack than an eight character pass-word-. If this isn't powerful enough for you, add more words... gpg and pgp allow some silly length of passphrase.
But supposing there are 10000 words in the english language (and that your passphrase is in english, but why should it be? Even we under-cultured americans take some token foreign language class and can cobble together a sentance or three in another language...), well, then, an eight word passphrase has 10000^8 = (10^4)^8 = 10^48
(ie, "this is my secret passphrase dont you know" is different from "This is my secret passphrase, don't you know." is different from "THIS IS MY SECRET PASS... " eh, you get the idea.)
In short, passphrases are not vulnerable to dictionary attacks if your passphrase is a reasonable length. (Or rather, the removal of a few orders of magnitude from the problem will not make it crackable on todays hardware, and when
it -does- make a difference, brute force will be only a few years behind, the same way that 8 character passwords are brute-forceable today and were only dictionary attackable a few years back...)
Though, it would be advisable to avoid using famous lines and quotes, since the first passphrase dictionary attack attempt would almost certainly include the 'to be or not to be' speech with various truncations, the first line and chorus line from every top forty song in the last fifty years, etc.
Also, remember, most dictionary based cracking tools try substituting zero for 'O', four for 'A', etc, to match 31337 'spelling' styles, and trying all the case combinations... so those obfuscations don't really help.
It -does- help to try something like, taking the first letter of every word in a sentence, like,
'I'm going to obfuscate my password' -> 'igtomp', which you can that capitalize or obfuscate at leisure (though -nothing- will make a six-character password secure, so use a longer sentence!); this gives the benefits of passphrases (memorizability) even for passwords that have to fit in some small space (like 32 characters or whatever, where a password spelled out might be short enough to still be dictionary vulnerable because it's only 5 words instead of 8 to 10... )
Anyway, that's my thoughts for to-day.
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Err, that one's already being done, you know. LokiGames ... right there on the front page, it says (under news 11.05.00), 'Tribes2 Beta Testers Needed'
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While I agree with you about rms' fanaticism, this little troll of yours can be refuted with the simple observation that OV is an open standard and anyone can make a closed source implementation, whether or not they use the GPLed code. Your scenario is simply impossible.
(Also as other answers noted, FSF does not control OV nor Xiph).
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I'm not terribly familiar with European law, but I do recall it was not many years ago that my fellow Americans were mocking the Brits for having a horribly restrictive copyright act which reads damn close to the way the DMCA reads, so, at least in GB the same arguments against DeCSS could be made.
You might want to check your country's copyright code -before- the MPAA finishes here and goes around the world trying to establish precedent in other countries...
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That's cool about the arkansas plant...
As for the re-burying issue, I think your parallel to my argument would only be valid if the minerals were extracted from the river in the first place. Dumping lime, which was mined from the ground, into the river, is different from the radioactive wastes which are coming from the ground, going to the ground. Concentration is a good point, though, but it could always be diluted. Maybe deliver radioactive waste back to the refinery, mix it the radioactive waste with the non-radioactive 'waste' material from refining (so you have approximately the original mix) and then re-bury that. You could even refill the original mines as they're spent (assuming they aren't strip mines... the radioactive waste is probably smaller-grained than the original ore strata so putting it on the -surface- would be a bad thing.)
Presumably there's a lot of engineering details I don't know about, but it's a thought.
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Nuclear waste is just non-fissionable radiocactive material, but, nuclear powerplants don't create -more- radioactives... they take radioactives and accelerate their decay by hitting a critical mass to cause rapid fissioning instead of slow decay one particle at a time.
And where does all that uranium come from? The ground... so... exactly how are we creating more danger by digging it up, using it, and burying it again? (well, aside from the transportation and use phases with their obvious dangers; but as far as I can see, once it's re-buried we're no worse off than before it was mined.)
Also, the salt caves proposal estimates something like a 2% chance that the caves would be ruptured in the next 10,000 years or so, which is probably at least as good of odds as any given uranium deposit remaining buried.
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I cannot believe the moderation that this troll has gotten; people have been moderating down natalie portman naked and petrified with grits and honey for so long they don't recognize a real troll, I suppose. (Clue: thinly explain parallels that claim 'this is just like commies' or 'this is just like nazis' are either Trolls or Fanatics.)
Anyway, the reason this whole post is not worthy of its rating is that, a) we passed the unsolicited fax law in the U.S. and we have not yet joined the communist bloc, if there even -is- a communist bloc anymore, and b) we have lots of laws like 'do not steal' and 'do not speed' but we don't tag everyone with remote transmitters to enforce those laws. Neither does outlawing UCE necessitate that we will pass laws to monitor every computer. If you're worried about it, join the EFF to make sure privacy issues are watched in any anti-spam legislation.
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Are you nuts? The school system does NOT owe the kid money any more than the mysterious "security company" does. So sad.
Depends on what you mean by 'owe'... legally, a verbal promise is a verbal contract... which is usually meaningless because it's 'your word against mine' but -this- promise was witnessed by an entire class. Thus, it's arguable in court (winnable being another thing) that money is due.
Now, if you mean, OTOH, 'sensible people would realize', well, sensible people should realize that, if it was a joke the kid took seriously, no harm done and pretty good job testing security. Maybe give him extra credit points for the effort.
Or, in other words, if the school is going to be nitpicky and leverage the words instead of the meaning of the law, then why shouldn't the student and his family? (turnabout is fair play... )
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