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User: alansz

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  1. Re:Exactly. Almost. on Avatars Need Personal Space Too · · Score: 1

    But people's willingness to take risks in real life is domain-specific, so which domain of willingness did you mean?

  2. Re:LCD not for everyone, selling my 24" Dell. on Group Testing Widescreen LCD Monitors · · Score: 1

    I would agree that these are not for everyone. I have one of the 20" (or 21"?) Dell LCDs at work, and while I love it now (especially having two 8.5"x11" pages open on the screen when writing papers, etc. - just general screen real estate), it definitely took my eyes and habits about 2 weeks to really become comfortable using it at "business range".

  3. Re:Okay, someone please explain this hobby to me.. on Mark Newport's Knitted Heroes · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's sort of hard to explain, but the appeal is like that of most crafts:

    * You make something that's unique (even if you start from a pattern, you can vary it, the materials you use, techniques, etc.)

    * You've made something with your own hands that provides a basic human necessity.

    * You can make something that fits perfectly, far better than clothes off the rack, and that fits the wearer's personality.

    * The physical sensation of knitting can be pleasurable (with good yarn), although there are repetitive stress issues.

    * It can be very challenging or it can be something for multitasking, depending on what you like.

    * (But you're right that it's expensive.)

    Gee, reading the above, you could substitute recreational coding for 'knitting' and make many of the same points. :)

  4. He knit what? on Mark Newport's Knitted Heroes · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm a major knitter, but frankly, I think this site says it all with respect to this story.

  5. Re:Magazine Ad Overload on Why Do You Block Ads? · · Score: 1

    Many genre novels come out in paperback and include a teaser of the author's coming hardback novel at the back (a chapter or so). Some include a chapter of some other author's novel published by the same press. Those are ads (but often worthwhile ones!)

  6. Re:HP-11C on Technology That You Loved from the 70/80/90's? · · Score: 1

    Me too!

  7. Related US news on Dutch Academics Declare Research Free-For-All · · Score: 3, Informative

    In the US, the National Institutes of Health recently announced that NIH-funded researchers will now be required to submit final copies of their published manuscripts to PubMed Central providing free access. For folks in the health sciences, this will have a substantial impact (and journals will adjust their copyright rules to permit it if they want to get submissions from folks successful enough to get NIH funding.)

  8. Re:Genres of future works? on Ask Neal Stephenson · · Score: 1

    Don't forget Zodiac, which I keep coming back to as well. NS is an amazingly versatile writer when it comes to genre.

  9. Re:Open Source Development HOWTO on Challenges in Releasing Open Source Software? · · Score: 1

    8. Get sued by SCO, FUD'd by MS, and pooh-poohed by Sun.

    9. Profit!

  10. Re:So it only affects people we don't want flying? on TSA's "CAPPS II" System Prompts Lawsuit · · Score: 3, Informative

    No, it's not what we really want, as Carnival Booth clearly shows.

  11. Re:A good document describing DNS and identities on A Snag For Verisign's Suit Against ICANN · · Score: 1
    Here is the excerpt from section 4.3 of that draft that applies (not so generically, I'd say!) to SiteFinder:
    Having the DNS server doing a "search", undertaking "fuzzy matching" or inferring some additional context to a query that guides the server to choose a particular response is ill-advised. The DNS server can not know the context of the query, nor should it guess what the DNS response is to be used for. It is always tempting to assume that the response is to be used by the most popular operating system for the most popular application of the day. It must though be remembered that other operating systems and other applications might break when fuzzy matching happens. For example, instead of giving back a "no such response" it is conceivable to give back something which pushes a potential error to the application layer by returning a synthesized answer that has resource records pointing to some form of application- level service. This implies the DNS server must know what application layer protocol is in use, and that a "no" at the application layer has the same semantics as a "no" on the DNS (naming) layer. Often TCP is used at the application layer which implies a "no" might only be signalled to the other end by not accepting the connection, which means the querying client cannot differentiate between "no such (dns) name" and "no response in application protocol".
  12. Re:Blog text - before it gets slashdotted on TeacherReviews.com Forced Offline · · Score: 1

    I am an assistant professor at a large state university. At my university, during your contact period (9, 11, or 12 months), all of your time - 24/7 - belongs to the university. In principle, an invention you create on the weekends is owned by them unless you have (prior) approval of work you're doing outside the university and demonstrate that it does not conflict with your commitment to the university.

    In practice, our administrators seem to actually be in the business of providing for scholarship, including teaching, research, and service, and aren't wasting their energy chasing down professors.

    Course notes, textbooks, and research papers are different, and the rules aren't always clear. The current status seems to be that you own your course notes/lectures, but that you grant the Univ a royalty-free perpetual license to use them. Writing textbooks and research papers is an expected part of a professor's job, but the University does not make copyright claims on them unless they were produced as a direct work-for-hire. (Of course, the journal or book publisher will want you to assign copyright to them, but that's another story).

  13. Algorhyme (karma whoring) on Cisco Networking Simplified · · Score: 2, Informative

    Those interested in Algorhyme can find it in the abstract to Perlman's paper on spanning trees

  14. Re:I'm a switcher... on Fedora Core 1 Released · · Score: 1

    Exactly.

  15. Re:A Vey Useful Book on The Visual Display of Quantitative Information · · Score: 1

    I'll second this. It is also required reading for experimental psychologists and other social scientists who analyze and present quantitative data.

  16. Re:Author of the article has a good reputation... on Electronic Voting: The Other Side of the Story · · Score: 1

    As one of his co-authors on the last version of Practical Unix and Internet Security (3rd ed), I assure you that he practices, reesearches, and writes about security, and is not being ghostwritten. Yes, he's a good writer, but he's also a computer professional (you might search for some of his academic research papers). O'Reilly typically uses editors to help engineers format their thoughts, not authors. :)

    Of course, that doesn't mean you have to agree with anything he's written, or think that his journalism is relevant. But he always makes me stop and question my assumptions.

    Cheers.

  17. Re:Second opinion(s) on Practical Unix & Internet Security · · Score: 1

    I'm a co-author of this book, and I can tell you two things that were omitted. We don't spend a lot of time on web application security, because the other ORA book, Web Security, Privacy, and Commerce focuses exclusively on that. And we don't do much about 802.11 wireless security beyond noting that WEP isn't enough, because again, there's a whole book on this and the field is changing very quickly.

    Of course, I still think it's a great book, but that's to be expected. :)

  18. Re:and also importantly... on Practical Unix & Internet Security · · Score: 1

    Actually, we did spend some time on that.

    - Alan (one of the co-authors)

  19. Re:It's not about class on Washington State Restricts Anti-Cop Videogames · · Score: 1
    Yeah, that publication list. Most of those journals do not qualify as scientific publication outlets in this research psychologist's humble opinion.

    You'd do better starting with Johnson et al.'s Science 2002 Mar 29;295(5564):2468-71 (TV) or Anderson and Bushman's meta-analysis in Psychol Sci 2001 Sep;12(5):353-9 (video games)

    Both of those do demonstrate a relationship between violent media exposure and aggressive behaviors, and those are scientific studies in good journals.

  20. The four player types on Developing Online Games · · Score: 3, Informative

    For what I think is the source of the fourfold player type thing (explore, socialize, kill, achieve), see this 1996 article by Richard Bartle, a mud pioneer.

  21. Re:Where to get some Suse love? on First Look At SuSE Linux 8.2 · · Score: 2, Informative
    In the U.S., you might check out Ricis, Inc., which is a SuSE partner and sets up a lot of SuSE systems (including the open exchange server) for enterprises and organizations of many shaps and sizes. Their other specialty is security.

    [ Disclaimer: I consult for this company. ]

  22. Re:Good for ORA, Bad for Authors on O'Reilly Pushing Founder's Copyright System · · Score: 2, Informative

    Every ORA contract I've signed has included a clause that if they do a new edition of your book, you have right of first refusal to author it. If it gets included in someone else's work, you get a cut proportional to the page count used. IANAL, but I don't think those contractual terms change even if the book goes out of print or gets released to the public under a different license.

  23. Re:What is your book? on O'Reilly Pushing Founder's Copyright System · · Score: 4, Informative

    That one is Stopping Spam, but I also wrote Managing Mailing Lists, and am a co-author of Practical Unix and Internet Security, 3rd ed.

  24. Re:If O'Reilly's so committed to Open Source, on O'Reilly Pushing Founder's Copyright System · · Score: 4, Informative

    This is untrue. I just finished work on the 3rd edition of Practical Unix and Internet Security, which was written in Adobe FrameMaker, which is, as far as I know, one of their preferred formats.

    I have written other books for ORA in groff and in MS word, and I bet they'd be able to handle several other formats.

  25. Re:192.168.0.0/24 routing on IETF to Look at Spam · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You are asking a little too much in a few ways.

    Computationally, that's a lot of public key encryption in action. For sites that process large amounts of email, this is going to hurt. But let's say we can throw money and CPU at that problem. And I suppose we can do the same for the problem of the tens of millions of key/address pairs we'll need to store centrally. Not so bad, then.

    Socially, the existence of anonymous email may be important and valuable. But I suppose anonymous remailers could appear and use their own corporate keys to signed messages in your scheme.

    Practically, you'd need a way to prevent denial of service attacks against someone's email by generating sufficient fradulent 'bad reports' to cause their key to be centrally revoked. This seems bad.

    Nothing totally insurmountable, but still pretty annoying to deal with.

    (P.S. No packet on the internet is truly identified by its source in most cases. IP addresses can be forged fairly trivially. This doesn't really bear on your proposal, but thought you should know.)