As the wood in the violin ages its sound will change.
That's why the best violins available are plastic, milled by a CNC machine to extremely tight tolerances. It'll sound exactly the same in 1000 years as it does now.
Exactly this. The only advantage of the proposed HH calendar is that any given date falls on the same day of the week, every year. Hell, if you're going to change it you may as well make it as useful as possible. The 28-day-per-month calendar gives that benefit every month, and gives us an extra-special New Year's Day as a bonus. And we don't have to remember which months have 30 days and which ones have 31.
But why stop there? What's with this nutty 7-day week fetish? Let's switch to a regimen of 36 10-day weeks, grouped into six months of six weeks each. That leaves a dangling extra half week, but that's easier to deal with than the extra week every 5 (or sometimes 6) years proposed by HH. Just have a leap week every other year. And give every other leap week an extra day. Simple.
It's not even cynical, it's a statement of fact. I've had corporate lawyers tell me flat out, "Don't save anything. Delete all email after 30 days. Don't save IM logs. If we're in a court situation and the other side is subpoenaing our email records, they *will* be able to take innocent messages out of context and make them sound damning. Don't make it easy for them."
The GMO salmon that are safe to eat are so big because they never stop growing, so they never stop eating. Is that a species that you think would have no ecological impact if accidentally released into the wild?
Regardless of their effect in real life, that'd make one awesome movie. "In a world devastated by hunger... A genetic engineering experiment escapes the lab into the wild... It never stops eating, never stops growing... It's... Megasalmon!"
Forget it. The battle's already lost. The big media companies are actually running pro-SOPA commercials on TV. "Tell your representatives to protect our information!" Where "our" is cleverly used to imply that the viewer is part of the same "us" that's running the commercials.
Wikipedia already begs for money just to keep the site running. A strike will have as much effect on decision makers as all those "occupy" people sleeping in the park.
The test questions grate on me. "You can use a calculator." Yes, I suppose I'm capable of using one. But am I allowed to? It's hard to take seriously the complaints that people are failing a test in one of the three Rs, when the test itself is failing another.
Anyone who tries to tell me that it's okay because language evolves is cordially invited to get off my lawn.
I read the question as, "Hi. Real online backup sites are expensive. I want to backup my drive on one of the cheap 'unlimited storage' web hosts, but none of them allow wholesale backup. So, I'm going to call this an 'art project' and claim that it's not a backup, but a legitimate functioning web site. What hosting companies are dumb enough to fall for it?"
Maybe I'm just a philistine, but I really can't imagine how a live copy of someone's hard drive can be considered "art".
This. Think about it. The data's on the disk in the clear. You're either going to overwrite it with random bits, or with an encrypted version of itself. Magnetically there's not a lot of difference there. If the original data can be retrieved in one scenario it can be retrieved in the other one. What's more, if you're encrypting rather than overwriting with garbage, now you have the encrypted data that can be attacked. (Obviously if the cleartext never hits the hard drive in the first place it's a completely different problem. But it doesn't sound like that's what the OP has in mind.)
Maybe this is exactly why there are such strict data remanence requirements in the first place. It's a hard problem, and they don't want everyone out there trying to solve it (and failing!) independently.
The only question I have about this is, why is there a requirement to get rid of the drives being re-used for a continuation of the same contract? I can understand it if the project has changed or if the drives are being decommissioned, so maybe I've misunderstood the bit about "renewing" the contract.
Oh, and finally... If your company is only now "just discovering" a clause in the contract that's going to wind up costing them a lot of money... Maybe, just maybe, someone there ought to be reading the contracts before signing them? Just sayin'.
Too much tech is bad for kids. It's obvious. I don't let my kids use the computer at all, just to be safe. Nor do they have mobile phones. Or even use the phone in the house. I don't let them watch TV or listen to the radio... You can never be sure the evil tech isn't corrupting them. I keep them away from other technology, too. They don't get to see doctors or dentists. Or use indoor plumbing. And you know what? They'll thank me for it someday. And until they do, dammit, they can run around naked in the woods and eat whatever they can catch with their bare hands. The way kids were meant to live!
What "known rules of the Doctor Who universe"? Practically every episode either conveniently forgets established events, or retcons them right out of existence. As long as they give us an alien with two hearts who travels through time in a blue box, they can't very well damage the shredded tatters of continuity.
I do agree that Hugh Laurie would be a great Doctor. I'd pay eight bucks to see that.
They're missing the real reason for the success of Angry Birds: The music is a hypnotic ear-worm with mind-control properties. That, and you get to smash things. No one is safe from such a devious combination!
Is it a coincidence that they're gearing up for a nationwide emergency "test" the day after an asteroid is supposed to have a "near miss"? I don't think so! Someone out there knows that we're going to need some serious emergency response the day after tomorrow, and they're trying to get everyone ready without causing a major panic. Duck and cover!
Sorry that you feel like your corn flakes have been pissed in, but you can't go blaming this on the editor's bad choice of headlines. Your own submission says "[...] yet it still troubles me that picking up random data from/dev/random to do this is well, cheating. It's not random. It bugs me." Then you go on to describe a mechanism that's far, far less random than/dev/random or any halfway decent pseudo-random number generator.
Your blog post doesn't actually try to say that the network captures are random, just that they're a good source of variation for this purpose. I, and probably the majority of the Slasdot crowd, have to complaint with that. It may even be true that the *non* random qualities of the network traffic make it a more pleasing source of noise than a truly random source.
But that's not what the Slashdot submission says. It baldly states that you don't think/dev/random is random enough, and that "short of bringing in and using an atomic source" the network captures are a good source of randomness. Okay, that doesn't exactly say that you think network captures are more random than/dev/random, but it sure the heck implies it.
And that's what's raised our collective hackles. If your submission had read, "Hey, here's an interesting source of noise to make computer-generated music more natural-sounding." I don't think anyone would have complained. It is interesting, especially if it turns out that it produces a more pleasing result than truly random noise. The complaint is about your use of the term "random", which has a strict mathematical definition that is not very well satisfied by network traffic.
So, I'm sorry we beat you up over the summary rather than the actual article, but this is Slashdot. The summary had better be good, because no one ever reads the article.
The answer to each and every question is the same: "Thank you for your interest, but we've already made up our minds about this and we're not interested in hearing arguments to the contrary." Pretty much what you'd expect from something like this.
Disk is cheap. My whole library is FLAC... With a mirror in MP3 format for the devices which don't do FLAC. Someday I'll probably just throw out the MP3s and transcode on the fly as I download, but my CPU isn't quite up to it yet.
Even so, Apple has some 'splaining to do. I upgraded my Mac to 10.7.2 yesterday, which includes iCloud. I don't have any other iDevices, and I don't want my stuff uploaded anywhere. I opened up the iCloud prefs to specifically say DO NOT WANT. I logged in and unchecked all the boxes.
Today I open it up again. Surprise! Contacts, Calendar, Bookmarks, and Documents & Data are all checked, even though I specifically unchecked them yesterday. What's more, when I go to uncheck them again I get this:
"If you turn off Documents & Data, all documents stored in iCloud will be removed from this Mac."
WTF?!!? Yesterday I said don't do that, but they went and did it anyway. And now they're threatening to delete it all if I have the gall to tell them "NO!" again?
So what exactly has it stored in "the cloud", anyway? What does "Documents & Data" encompass? My home directory? My ~/Documents directory? Just files made by certain apps? If so, which ones? I can't find anything that actually tells me what it means. (And clicking the little (?) help icon just takes me to the "Content not available; you're not connected to the Internet" page in the help viewer. Um, yes, I am. But it's nice to see that the Mac is still "just working".)
Clicking the "Manage..." button doesn't show that any files are actually stored by iCloud, so I went ahead and unchecked everything. Again. Maybe it'll stick this time. Maybe it won't. Gosh, the cloud is exciting!
Simple, yes, but it'd be black-and-white (-and-grey). I don't think anyone would want to pay for a picture frame that can't display color.
I used to work for Gyricon, which made its own type of electronic paper (though it was a very different approach than what E-Ink does). We were also looking for the killer app, focusing on large-scale signage rather than hand-held devices. The lack of color e-paper technology is a huge hurdle. Full color LCD displays are available that are cheap enough and efficient enough for most applications. If color is available for nearly the same cost, no one is going to choose black-and-white. The one and only exception to this is, you guessed it, books.
While not as much a concern as lack of color, refresh rate is also a problem for e-paper. Last time I looked at a Kindle, it took about a second to refresh the display. That kind of kills the idea of video. And the whole display flashes while refreshing, which kills the idea of basic animation. Again, this isn't a problem with LCD.
Electronic paper in general is doomed to be nothing more than a minor niche technology until it overcomes these hurdles.
"I used to be with it, but then they changed what *it* was. Now what I'm with isn't *it*, and what's *it* seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you... "
Slashdot Mirror
That's why the best violins available are plastic, milled by a CNC machine to extremely tight tolerances. It'll sound exactly the same in 1000 years as it does now.
Exactly this. The only advantage of the proposed HH calendar is that any given date falls on the same day of the week, every year. Hell, if you're going to change it you may as well make it as useful as possible. The 28-day-per-month calendar gives that benefit every month, and gives us an extra-special New Year's Day as a bonus. And we don't have to remember which months have 30 days and which ones have 31.
But why stop there? What's with this nutty 7-day week fetish? Let's switch to a regimen of 36 10-day weeks, grouped into six months of six weeks each. That leaves a dangling extra half week, but that's easier to deal with than the extra week every 5 (or sometimes 6) years proposed by HH. Just have a leap week every other year. And give every other leap week an extra day. Simple.
It's not even cynical, it's a statement of fact. I've had corporate lawyers tell me flat out, "Don't save anything. Delete all email after 30 days. Don't save IM logs. If we're in a court situation and the other side is subpoenaing our email records, they *will* be able to take innocent messages out of context and make them sound damning. Don't make it easy for them."
Regardless of their effect in real life, that'd make one awesome movie. "In a world devastated by hunger... A genetic engineering experiment escapes the lab into the wild... It never stops eating, never stops growing... It's... Megasalmon!"
Yes. They'll busywait your CPU even faster now.
So, a snowball really does have a chance in hell.
Forget it. The battle's already lost. The big media companies are actually running pro-SOPA commercials on TV. "Tell your representatives to protect our information!" Where "our" is cleverly used to imply that the viewer is part of the same "us" that's running the commercials.
Wikipedia already begs for money just to keep the site running. A strike will have as much effect on decision makers as all those "occupy" people sleeping in the park.
And a Merry Christmas to you all.
Yeah, no kidding. My cable modem is way faster than my employer's measly little 10 Mbit link!
The test questions grate on me. "You can use a calculator." Yes, I suppose I'm capable of using one. But am I allowed to? It's hard to take seriously the complaints that people are failing a test in one of the three Rs, when the test itself is failing another.
Anyone who tries to tell me that it's okay because language evolves is cordially invited to get off my lawn.
Anti-virus vendor says there's yet another way to get a virus, and you need their product even more. Film at eleven.
I read the question as, "Hi. Real online backup sites are expensive. I want to backup my drive on one of the cheap 'unlimited storage' web hosts, but none of them allow wholesale backup. So, I'm going to call this an 'art project' and claim that it's not a backup, but a legitimate functioning web site. What hosting companies are dumb enough to fall for it?"
Maybe I'm just a philistine, but I really can't imagine how a live copy of someone's hard drive can be considered "art".
This. Think about it. The data's on the disk in the clear. You're either going to overwrite it with random bits, or with an encrypted version of itself. Magnetically there's not a lot of difference there. If the original data can be retrieved in one scenario it can be retrieved in the other one. What's more, if you're encrypting rather than overwriting with garbage, now you have the encrypted data that can be attacked. (Obviously if the cleartext never hits the hard drive in the first place it's a completely different problem. But it doesn't sound like that's what the OP has in mind.)
Maybe this is exactly why there are such strict data remanence requirements in the first place. It's a hard problem, and they don't want everyone out there trying to solve it (and failing!) independently.
The only question I have about this is, why is there a requirement to get rid of the drives being re-used for a continuation of the same contract? I can understand it if the project has changed or if the drives are being decommissioned, so maybe I've misunderstood the bit about "renewing" the contract.
Oh, and finally... If your company is only now "just discovering" a clause in the contract that's going to wind up costing them a lot of money... Maybe, just maybe, someone there ought to be reading the contracts before signing them? Just sayin'.
Too much tech is bad for kids. It's obvious. I don't let my kids use the computer at all, just to be safe. Nor do they have mobile phones. Or even use the phone in the house. I don't let them watch TV or listen to the radio... You can never be sure the evil tech isn't corrupting them. I keep them away from other technology, too. They don't get to see doctors or dentists. Or use indoor plumbing. And you know what? They'll thank me for it someday. And until they do, dammit, they can run around naked in the woods and eat whatever they can catch with their bare hands. The way kids were meant to live!
What "known rules of the Doctor Who universe"? Practically every episode either conveniently forgets established events, or retcons them right out of existence. As long as they give us an alien with two hearts who travels through time in a blue box, they can't very well damage the shredded tatters of continuity.
I do agree that Hugh Laurie would be a great Doctor. I'd pay eight bucks to see that.
They're missing the real reason for the success of Angry Birds: The music is a hypnotic ear-worm with mind-control properties. That, and you get to smash things. No one is safe from such a devious combination!
Is it a coincidence that they're gearing up for a nationwide emergency "test" the day after an asteroid is supposed to have a "near miss"? I don't think so! Someone out there knows that we're going to need some serious emergency response the day after tomorrow, and they're trying to get everyone ready without causing a major panic. Duck and cover!
Sorry that you feel like your corn flakes have been pissed in, but you can't go blaming this on the editor's bad choice of headlines. Your own submission says "[...] yet it still troubles me that picking up random data from /dev/random to do this is well, cheating. It's not random. It bugs me." Then you go on to describe a mechanism that's far, far less random than /dev/random or any halfway decent pseudo-random number generator.
Your blog post doesn't actually try to say that the network captures are random, just that they're a good source of variation for this purpose. I, and probably the majority of the Slasdot crowd, have to complaint with that. It may even be true that the *non* random qualities of the network traffic make it a more pleasing source of noise than a truly random source.
But that's not what the Slashdot submission says. It baldly states that you don't think /dev/random is random enough, and that "short of bringing in and using an atomic source" the network captures are a good source of randomness. Okay, that doesn't exactly say that you think network captures are more random than /dev/random, but it sure the heck implies it.
And that's what's raised our collective hackles. If your submission had read, "Hey, here's an interesting source of noise to make computer-generated music more natural-sounding." I don't think anyone would have complained. It is interesting, especially if it turns out that it produces a more pleasing result than truly random noise. The complaint is about your use of the term "random", which has a strict mathematical definition that is not very well satisfied by network traffic.
So, I'm sorry we beat you up over the summary rather than the actual article, but this is Slashdot. The summary had better be good, because no one ever reads the article.
xkcd on standards
The answer to each and every question is the same: "Thank you for your interest, but we've already made up our minds about this and we're not interested in hearing arguments to the contrary." Pretty much what you'd expect from something like this.
Disk is cheap. My whole library is FLAC... With a mirror in MP3 format for the devices which don't do FLAC. Someday I'll probably just throw out the MP3s and transcode on the fly as I download, but my CPU isn't quite up to it yet.
No, politicians are the ultimate in accountability because they need to do the will of the people in order to get re-elected every few years.
*snerk* Oops, couldn't quite keep a straight face while saying that...
Even so, Apple has some 'splaining to do. I upgraded my Mac to 10.7.2 yesterday, which includes iCloud. I don't have any other iDevices, and I don't want my stuff uploaded anywhere. I opened up the iCloud prefs to specifically say DO NOT WANT. I logged in and unchecked all the boxes.
Today I open it up again. Surprise! Contacts, Calendar, Bookmarks, and Documents & Data are all checked, even though I specifically unchecked them yesterday. What's more, when I go to uncheck them again I get this:
"If you turn off Documents & Data, all documents stored in iCloud will be removed from this Mac."
WTF?!!? Yesterday I said don't do that, but they went and did it anyway. And now they're threatening to delete it all if I have the gall to tell them "NO!" again?
So what exactly has it stored in "the cloud", anyway? What does "Documents & Data" encompass? My home directory? My ~/Documents directory? Just files made by certain apps? If so, which ones? I can't find anything that actually tells me what it means. (And clicking the little (?) help icon just takes me to the "Content not available; you're not connected to the Internet" page in the help viewer. Um, yes, I am. But it's nice to see that the Mac is still "just working".)
Clicking the "Manage..." button doesn't show that any files are actually stored by iCloud, so I went ahead and unchecked everything. Again. Maybe it'll stick this time. Maybe it won't. Gosh, the cloud is exciting!
Simple, yes, but it'd be black-and-white (-and-grey). I don't think anyone would want to pay for a picture frame that can't display color.
I used to work for Gyricon, which made its own type of electronic paper (though it was a very different approach than what E-Ink does). We were also looking for the killer app, focusing on large-scale signage rather than hand-held devices. The lack of color e-paper technology is a huge hurdle. Full color LCD displays are available that are cheap enough and efficient enough for most applications. If color is available for nearly the same cost, no one is going to choose black-and-white. The one and only exception to this is, you guessed it, books.
While not as much a concern as lack of color, refresh rate is also a problem for e-paper. Last time I looked at a Kindle, it took about a second to refresh the display. That kind of kills the idea of video. And the whole display flashes while refreshing, which kills the idea of basic animation. Again, this isn't a problem with LCD.
Electronic paper in general is doomed to be nothing more than a minor niche technology until it overcomes these hurdles.
"I used to be with it, but then they changed what *it* was. Now what I'm with isn't *it*, and what's *it* seems weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you... "
--Grandpa Simpson
Then you just get a couple smart-ass college kids to sneak aboard and change the EPROM. Next thing you know your spiffy new house is ruined.