I've got a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science & Electronics.
That was one hell of a course - of the 26 that started only two of us ever graduated with it.
I did a small amount of contract programming in high school and was a fairly competant programmer before i started the theoretical stuff. That worked very well for me because i could sit there hearing about things like inheritance and mutexes and while most people's eyes were glazed over i was thinking of all the useful things I could do with them.
Being unecumbered by the technical aspects of programming made it so much easier to complete practical assignments while focusing on the theory.
The electronics side of it was very different. Before getting to college I could scarcely string up a few logic chips to make an LED flash. I probably had to work 5 times harder on that than I did on the comp sci side.
It used to be when something came up you'd need to grab a few coworkers from their cubes and huddle round a monitor to get it fixed.
I've been in situations where i'm the only one in a given time zone. It can easily take a day to schedule a meeting with three people in it - that sort of inefficiency isn't good.
I work on the data in a number of reports and frequently print the works in copy while i tweak the calculations or formatting.
99% of the time they are in the recycle bin within the hour, but sometimes i'll have a particular issue that means i need the printout for a week or more.
The other big plus to paper is that i can annotate things that might be hard on screen. I imagine if i make pencil scribblings on it it'll be useless for recycling.
In the corporate world many things are printed and never read. I had a tech lead years ago that swore he put a photocopied page from a russian engineering textbook in every large report he ever submitted to management - never got asked about it.
But assuming a perfectly random distribution, 1 in 10,000 accounts will have the password 1337. If you have 10,000 account numbers and 10,000 different computers to try them from then you can find one pretty damn easily.
A particularly incidious use of patents is found in cross licensing.
Say you have three companies, called A B and C. The account for 99% of the widget market and all file assloads of useless patents. Normally you'd expect that if company A files a patent saying widgets are black, then the other giants in the field would fight it and have it struck down as obvious. Instead they can agree to cross license their portfolio and each pay the others a trillion dollars.
The end result is that it's impossible for a new-comer to break into the market because the are unable to pony up the licensing fee or pay for enough legal consul to fight the massive portfolios of useless patents that can be used against them.
Most british construction from the last 30 years is timber-framed with the bricks added afterwards. I believe the bricks provide some support, but the main weight of the roof is supported by the frame.
The biggest difference that I see in construction is in the roofing materials. My house in colorado has composite shingles that have virtually no weight to them. You can reroof a house easily in a day. My parents house has clay tiles and many houses in britain use slate - this results in the roof literally weighing tonnes and i'd imagine dictates a much stronger house design.
I'm not really sure which is better, but i feel a heavier house should be stronger.
I don't really see wood house construction as a major longetivity issue. If the house is well maintained then it'll easily last a few hundred years. I realize that a stone house will probably last longer, but I wont live long enough to reap the benifits. I have however lived long enough to realize that retrofitting Cat-5 into a building with stone internal walls is a pain in the ass.
I'm quite familiar with the workings on email and I too have written email clients that connect directly to SMTP listeners.
However for you to suggest that a direct connection from sender to recipient is the norm then i'd say you were the ignorant one. In fact if you actually try to do that on a regular basis then you'll quickly encounter ISPs who block outbound port 25, spam filters that consider email directly from broadband hosts to be less reliable, problems implementing SenderKeys etc...
I've worked in several entirely *nix environments and every one of them has used a combination of SMTP and IMAP to handle email.
The simple counter to your argument is that their are IM clients where the messages travel directly from client to client without travelling between servers; so once again there's no real difference between the two.
You compose an email message and send it to your email server. The email server then figures out which server it needs to be delivered to based on the recipient. It gets sent to that server and the user sees it in their inbox, and their email software examines the header to find out who it came from.
Compare to IM where you compose a message and send it to your IM server. AOL then figure out which of their servers the recipient is connected to and send it there. The user then sees it on their screen and the IM software examines the header to find out who it came from.
It's not like the law specified SMTP or POP3. Electronic mail already includes many other protocols.
I agree that it's bad to have such a vague law, but an Email Service and an IM Service are almost functionally identical - just used in different ways.
Right now i've got ~300GB of digital photography. That'll likely grow closer to 500 by the time i finish digitizing all my film.
Right now it's kept on an external disk and i'm slowly uploading it to an online storage system.
Within 10 years i'm sure i'll be able to keep the entire thing on one recordable optical disk. What is today a difficult to manage quantity of data will become easier in the future.
I used to live in Scotland, and if you look back through my high school log books, it seems that the lake next to our school would freeze to the point that they'd close the school and everyone would go skating.
In ~20 years of living in that area I only once saw the loch frozen sufficiently to walk around the edges, and never frozen over like the old photos and records show.
If two phones are moving down the same street and one is going much faster than the other, then you can probably assume the slower of the two is a pedestrian.
If a phone is moving the wrong way down a one way street then it's a pedestrian (or elderly driver)
Pedestrians tend to move at a much more regular speed in urban areas. Sure they have to stop at lights, but they keep moving steadily whereas traffic jam traffic is usually stop/start.
Once you've identified a phone as a pedestrian then you can exclude it's data for some period of time or until they exceed 10mph.
Things like lightrail could be more problematic though.
They didn't build it from scratch. They used all sorts of screws and nails that had been engineered by other people.
This is just a natural progression. A few years ago we stopped having to write quicksort routines because they were already done, now we dont have to write webservers or rich text editors because they are done for us.
The end result will be that it becomes cheaper to make complex applications and so the customer will demand even more complex ones.
I'd hazard a guess that more people are concerned about bird flu than the garden variety (i know it varies from year to year) yet they are more likely to die from the latter.
Hmmm I grew up in Scotland and have never observed that. I know the beeb can target relatively small regions, but they dont really carry advertising. It seemed very unusual to see any commercial for a business that wasn't national.
Is that we dont have local TV channels. The smallest adversting market is probably "Scotland" which is still 5 million people spead out over a country.
If you run a car dealership then you can't afford to run TV ads because you'll be targetting people who live many hours away from you.
Most of the particularly distasteful US commercials are more small businesses. I think people like Geico and Apple have pretty clever ads.
Well if you aren't actually using your 4x4 then you are going to be making above average use of your parking space, so i say you should be charged more:)
If the republicans won every single vote in the country, then it would be clear that the election was rigged and they'd pretty much be forced to acknowledge that the system was flawed.
If they are going to rid their site of copyrighted material then their only option is to make it even easier to submit user created content. I'm sure cell phones are by far the main source of user generated videos in the world, so that seems like a sensible direction.
I moved from Scotland to the US and i'm perfectly happy with it.
There are good well paying job prospects in the tech field. When you are young, at least, healthcare isn't that expensive, salaries are much higher and taxes are much lower.
On my EE degree program, a couple of our professors handed out full photocopied sections of the pages we needed to save us from having to buy the books. Since they owned the copyright, they figured it was theirs to do with as they pleased. (Of course those were generally not the same professors that drove sports cars)
I wouldn't be surprised if you could find academically minded authors who'd take a relatively small payoff and the feeling that they'd done good for the world.
The drive in my laptop crapped out and i replaced it with a larger drive, ghosted across an image of the old drive before it died and windows didn't so much as flinch.
Virtually everywhere i've worked has forced you to proxy port 80 traffic, which essentially means that they've got to use HTTP or their requests just wont go through. A connection that was streaming VOIP audio out via http posts would probably look pretty damn suspicious to any network administrator that actually paid attention.
Slashdot Mirror
I've got a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science & Electronics.
That was one hell of a course - of the 26 that started only two of us ever graduated with it.
I did a small amount of contract programming in high school and was a fairly competant programmer before i started the theoretical stuff. That worked very well for me because i could sit there hearing about things like inheritance and mutexes and while most people's eyes were glazed over i was thinking of all the useful things I could do with them.
Being unecumbered by the technical aspects of programming made it so much easier to complete practical assignments while focusing on the theory.
The electronics side of it was very different. Before getting to college I could scarcely string up a few logic chips to make an LED flash. I probably had to work 5 times harder on that than I did on the comp sci side.
http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/CoverageLocator Controller?requesttype=newsearch
It's like europe was in 1993.
It used to be when something came up you'd need to grab a few coworkers from their cubes and huddle round a monitor to get it fixed.
I've been in situations where i'm the only one in a given time zone. It can easily take a day to schedule a meeting with three people in it - that sort of inefficiency isn't good.
I work on the data in a number of reports and frequently print the works in copy while i tweak the calculations or formatting.
99% of the time they are in the recycle bin within the hour, but sometimes i'll have a particular issue that means i need the printout for a week or more.
The other big plus to paper is that i can annotate things that might be hard on screen. I imagine if i make pencil scribblings on it it'll be useless for recycling.
In the corporate world many things are printed and never read. I had a tech lead years ago that swore he put a photocopied page from a russian engineering textbook in every large report he ever submitted to management - never got asked about it.
That's a remarkably elegant system which (depending on how you establish the password) pretty much defeats any kind of screen scraping technology.
It seems even better than the banks that mail out one-time password cards.
If we could convince a bank to actually send out cds with their certificates and a certificate for each user then it'd be almost infallable.
Until of course the phisher sets up a page that says "For verification purposes we'll now ask you to type your password once a month..."
sigh
But assuming a perfectly random distribution, 1 in 10,000 accounts will have the password 1337. If you have 10,000 account numbers and 10,000 different computers to try them from then you can find one pretty damn easily.
A particularly incidious use of patents is found in cross licensing.
Say you have three companies, called A B and C. The account for 99% of the widget market and all file assloads of useless patents. Normally you'd expect that if company A files a patent saying widgets are black, then the other giants in the field would fight it and have it struck down as obvious. Instead they can agree to cross license their portfolio and each pay the others a trillion dollars.
The end result is that it's impossible for a new-comer to break into the market because the are unable to pony up the licensing fee or pay for enough legal consul to fight the massive portfolios of useless patents that can be used against them.
I'm from Scotland and moved to the US.
Most british construction from the last 30 years is timber-framed with the bricks added afterwards. I believe the bricks provide some support, but the main weight of the roof is supported by the frame.
The biggest difference that I see in construction is in the roofing materials. My house in colorado has composite shingles that have virtually no weight to them. You can reroof a house easily in a day. My parents house has clay tiles and many houses in britain use slate - this results in the roof literally weighing tonnes and i'd imagine dictates a much stronger house design.
I'm not really sure which is better, but i feel a heavier house should be stronger.
I don't really see wood house construction as a major longetivity issue. If the house is well maintained then it'll easily last a few hundred years. I realize that a stone house will probably last longer, but I wont live long enough to reap the benifits. I have however lived long enough to realize that retrofitting Cat-5 into a building with stone internal walls is a pain in the ass.
I'm quite familiar with the workings on email and I too have written email clients that connect directly to SMTP listeners.
However for you to suggest that a direct connection from sender to recipient is the norm then i'd say you were the ignorant one. In fact if you actually try to do that on a regular basis then you'll quickly encounter ISPs who block outbound port 25, spam filters that consider email directly from broadband hosts to be less reliable, problems implementing SenderKeys etc...
I've worked in several entirely *nix environments and every one of them has used a combination of SMTP and IMAP to handle email.
The simple counter to your argument is that their are IM clients where the messages travel directly from client to client without travelling between servers; so once again there's no real difference between the two.
You compose an email message and send it to your email server. The email server then figures out which server it needs to be delivered to based on the recipient. It gets sent to that server and the user sees it in their inbox, and their email software examines the header to find out who it came from.
Compare to IM where you compose a message and send it to your IM server. AOL then figure out which of their servers the recipient is connected to and send it there. The user then sees it on their screen and the IM software examines the header to find out who it came from.
It's not like the law specified SMTP or POP3. Electronic mail already includes many other protocols.
I agree that it's bad to have such a vague law, but an Email Service and an IM Service are almost functionally identical - just used in different ways.
Right now i've got ~300GB of digital photography. That'll likely grow closer to 500 by the time i finish digitizing all my film.
Right now it's kept on an external disk and i'm slowly uploading it to an online storage system.
Within 10 years i'm sure i'll be able to keep the entire thing on one recordable optical disk. What is today a difficult to manage quantity of data will become easier in the future.
I used to live in Scotland, and if you look back through my high school log books, it seems that the lake next to our school would freeze to the point that they'd close the school and everyone would go skating.
In ~20 years of living in that area I only once saw the loch frozen sufficiently to walk around the edges, and never frozen over like the old photos and records show.
If two phones are moving down the same street and one is going much faster than the other, then you can probably assume the slower of the two is a pedestrian.
If a phone is moving the wrong way down a one way street then it's a pedestrian (or elderly driver)
Pedestrians tend to move at a much more regular speed in urban areas. Sure they have to stop at lights, but they keep moving steadily whereas traffic jam traffic is usually stop/start.
Once you've identified a phone as a pedestrian then you can exclude it's data for some period of time or until they exceed 10mph.
Things like lightrail could be more problematic though.
They didn't build it from scratch. They used all sorts of screws and nails that had been engineered by other people.
This is just a natural progression. A few years ago we stopped having to write quicksort routines because they were already done, now we dont have to write webservers or rich text editors because they are done for us.
The end result will be that it becomes cheaper to make complex applications and so the customer will demand even more complex ones.
kills a ton of people each year.
I'd hazard a guess that more people are concerned about bird flu than the garden variety (i know it varies from year to year) yet they are more likely to die from the latter.
Hmmm I grew up in Scotland and have never observed that. I know the beeb can target relatively small regions, but they dont really carry advertising. It seemed very unusual to see any commercial for a business that wasn't national.
Is that we dont have local TV channels. The smallest adversting market is probably "Scotland" which is still 5 million people spead out over a country.
If you run a car dealership then you can't afford to run TV ads because you'll be targetting people who live many hours away from you.
Most of the particularly distasteful US commercials are more small businesses. I think people like Geico and Apple have pretty clever ads.
Well if you aren't actually using your 4x4 then you are going to be making above average use of your parking space, so i say you should be charged more :)
If the republicans won every single vote in the country, then it would be clear that the election was rigged and they'd pretty much be forced to acknowledge that the system was flawed.
Are going to HAVE to start doing this.
If they are going to rid their site of copyrighted material then their only option is to make it even easier to submit user created content. I'm sure cell phones are by far the main source of user generated videos in the world, so that seems like a sensible direction.
Pretty mcuh could analzye http://alterslash.org/
I moved from Scotland to the US and i'm perfectly happy with it.
There are good well paying job prospects in the tech field. When you are young, at least, healthcare isn't that expensive, salaries are much higher and taxes are much lower.
On my EE degree program, a couple of our professors handed out full photocopied sections of the pages we needed to save us from having to buy the books. Since they owned the copyright, they figured it was theirs to do with as they pleased. (Of course those were generally not the same professors that drove sports cars)
I wouldn't be surprised if you could find academically minded authors who'd take a relatively small payoff and the feeling that they'd done good for the world.
The drive in my laptop crapped out and i replaced it with a larger drive, ghosted across an image of the old drive before it died and windows didn't so much as flinch.
Virtually everywhere i've worked has forced you to proxy port 80 traffic, which essentially means that they've got to use HTTP or their requests just wont go through. A connection that was streaming VOIP audio out via http posts would probably look pretty damn suspicious to any network administrator that actually paid attention.