That's an incredibly childish response, which completely ignores the user base which his site was serving, and ignores the nature of the PCI-SIG organization.
All Jim has to do is get some good advice (some of which can be found on/. today), write a short letter, add a disclaimer to his site, and get rid of the logo. He doesn't even need a lawyer. If PCI-SIG then chooses to try to escalate the matter, then Jim might have cause for complaint.
The world is full of idiots. If you behave like an idiot in response to them, we all lose.
Man, I agree completely. Why are people such fucking weenies?
I'll third that. If people weren't such fucking weenies, a lot of this stuff would just be a non-issue. In fact, if I were feeling trollish, I'd go so far as to say that Nazi Germany, apartheid South Africa, and McCarthyism in America would not have happened, if the world was not populated primarily by said fucking weenies.
What's wrong with working to "Create a similar database... which would be available on the official PCI-SIG website," as they themselves wrote?
That sounds fine and all, but the PCI-SIG actually does not have the legal right to shut down Jim's web site. They have the right to prevent him from using their logo, and to require that he put up a disclaimer saying that the site is not official, not sanctioned by PCI-SIG, etc.
Other than that, unless Jim is posting actual information that's proprietary to someone (which has not been claimed), there's nothing they can do about the existence of his site.
What actually seems to be happening here is that they are trying use a trivial logo issue to scare Jim into giving them his content.
And Jim has responded either with incredibly naivete in believing that he has to shut down his site; or perhaps with an excess of guile in playing all hurt about it, perhaps to get attention. All he really needs to do is issue a response letter, remove the logo from his site, and put up a disclaimer so that he can continue using the PCI name in the context of the site - which is perfectly valid! If you're writing about PCI cards, you're allowed to use their name - you're just not allowed to use the name as a way of selling a product or service, misleading people into thinking that you're the official holder of the name.
There's really no issue here. PCI-SIG are being silly, and I can't tell whether Jim's response is simply naive, or whether he's trying to achieve some other goal. I suspect the former.
According to various reports (scientific papers, etc. not stories) it is quite possible to recover multiple generations of data from harddrives.
Yes, I'm familiar with some of those, starting with Guttman's now-ancient 1996 paper Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory. The OP's sentence that I was responding to was "Theoretically anything that has previously been on the drive should be recoverable through such methods." But it's nowhere near as simple or as "reliable" as that. Besides, I haven't seen any papers in the last few years that talk about doing this with today's drive capacities. Guttman's paper talks about the more advanced drives at the time as being easier to securely erase:
The latest high-density drives use methods like Partial-Response Maximum-Likelihood (PRML) encoding [...] Since PRML codes don't try to separate peaks in the same way that non-PRML RLL codes do, all we can do is to write a variety of random patterns because the processing inside the drive is too complex to second-guess. Fortunately, these drives push the limits of the magnetic media much more than older drives ever did by encoding data with much smaller magnetic domains, closer to the physical capacity of the magnetic media (the current state of the art in PRML drives has a track density of around 6700 TPI (tracks per inch) and a data recording density of 170 kFCI, nearly double that of the nearest (1,7) RLL equivalent. A convenient side-effect of these very high recording densities is that a written transition may experience the write field cycles for successive transitions, especially at the track edges where the field distribution is much broader [15]. Since this is also where remnant data is most likely to be found, this can only help in reducing the recoverability of the data). If these drives require sophisticated signal processing just to read the most recently written data, reading overwritten layers is also correspondingly more difficult. A good scrubbing with random data will do about as well as can be expected.
In addition, remember that many parts of a disk undergo a *lot* of reading and writing of different bit patterns. Recovering a prior generation of data may in fact mean recovering what was written at a particular spot thousands of writes ago. That's just not always possible.
And even when it is, it can be guarded against, as I alluded to in my post. The thrust of the abovementioned paper, in fact, is how to delete data so that it can't be recovered, even with the use of advanced techniques.
In short, the notion of realistically recovering data that's been properly erased - not just by an OS-level format - even with hundreds of thousands of dollars at your disposal, is more of a myth than anything else. It's a possibility for security wonks to scare each other with and try to guard against, not something that's happening in practice. Companies that do professional recovery don't even remotely get into this kind of thing, for example, and they're the ones who might have the financial incentive to do so.
Theoretically anything that has previously been on the drive should be recoverable through such methods.
"Theoretically"? Which theory is that - the theory of infinite data storage? You're dreaming.
The FBI has no magic. It's just that "formatting" is often not quite the irreversible, data-destroying operation people often imagine it is. Depending on exactly what technique you use to format, it can involve as little as writing a new root directory structure, leaving the rest of the disk's data intact, but just a little more difficult to get at. Even supposedly more destructive means of formatting aren't necessarily perfect. However, if you know what you're doing, you can clean a drive so that even the FBI can't get anything off it.
I'd tell you how to do it, but then you'd have to put up with black helicopters buzzing around your house all the time...
I'm sorry to hear about your cousin. I know many people who suffer from all sorts of disabilities. However, that doesn't detract from the fact that these people have certain characteristics, many of which are not desirable to emulate for someone not so afflicted. Some of the people I know joke about their own limitations.
It's only an insult when it is applied to someone who is capable of doing more. Actually, in the case of the guy who thinks Tetris requires "a lot of thinking", I'm not quite sure which category he falls into...
It can also be very interesting to hack a class and rename it, then write your own class with the original class's name and interface that just wraps the original, giving you a chance to inspect and modify everything flowing into or out of objects of the original class.
Neat idea!
In fact, it occurs to me that you could probably write a little program to automate that -- use introspection to examine the original class and then automatically generate an instrumented wrapper that logs everything... hmmm....
;)
You can do a lot of this stuff with object code, too, but you're disassembling, not decompiling and the difference is huge.
I developed two commercial add-on products, which were able to integrate with their host products because I had disassembled library object code, originally written in C. Java takes all the challenge out of that sort of thing, but I don't miss it at all!;)
I have to qualify one thing I mentioned, about the pool of water at the North Pole, since that is one of the items allegedly "debunked" at the site referenced by the OP. Since cracks which create "leads" of water in the Arctic ice are common in the summer months, questions were raised about the various original reports, in 2000, of pools of water at the North Pole. It's rather difficult for non-experts to determine how normal it is to find large pools of water at or near the North Pole, but there's other less anecdotal data we can turn to, e.g. as described in
this BBC report, which reports on the widespread thinning of the Arctic ice.
There's not a whole lot of doubt that global warming has been taking place. The only real points in dispute are what the major causes are, whether one of the causes is human behavior, and whether the trend will continue upward. If human behavior is a major factor, then the answer is that the trend will continue upwards unless we do something.
As for your comparison to theories about population, the scare from the '60s was not based on the same degree of scientific study. In fact, it was a popular scare, much more than a scientific scare, based on popular books like Erlich's "The Population Bomb". The scientific aspect of that scare was actually tailing off, having first been raised around 1800 by Malthus.
In fact, Malthus' predictions were not completely wrong - the rate at which the human population of Earth is doubling is increasing, from about 120 years for the doubling from 1 billion to 2 billion, down to 47 years for the doublings to 4 billion. Do the math - unless population growth slows a lot, we will run into serious population problems, just not in our lifetimes.
The global warming situation is already having an effect, in our lifetime. Average global temperature increases have been measured and aren't disputed - only the causes are disputed. There's a big pool of water at the North Pole, where explorers once planted flags. There are huge and ancient ice shelfs melting and falling into the sea around Antarctica. The permafrost in Canada and Alaska is melting and affecting the few people who live there.
Sticking your head in the sand and believing what you want to believe, won't make this problem go away. So rather than spreading misinformation, like that found at the site you referenced, I recommend trying to educate yourself a bit more. No-one benefits from ignorance and the spread thereof.
You're misunderstanding the scientific method. If you come up with a hypothesis, by whatever means, one of the things you then have to do is look for evidence to support that hypothesis. Otherwise, no new theories could ever arise.
Separately from that, you also need to try to falsify your hypothesis - look for evidence that contradicts it. To a large extent, this is often left to the peer-review process, since those involved in finding evidence for a hypothesis may not in fact be the best people to falsify it - which is the point you were picking up on.
However, that's normal - scientists are human, too. I don't know if you develop software, but it's similar to the situation with software developers - you write some code, which you can think of as the embodiment of a hypothesis about how to solve some set of problems. You try to test it as best you can, but other testers or users are still likely to find bugs that you missed - in other words, your "hypothesis" (the software) was wrong in some respect.
One reason this happens is that during development, you tend to try harder to provide input that will make the software work, than make it fail. Only once it's working reasonably well, does it make sense to try to make it fail - before that, it's too fragile. A similar process often occurs in science - theories don't always spring fully-formed from a scientist's mind.
I've played a little with the 68HC11, and in the old days with the 6800 and 6809, but never with the 68000. I imagine there's a bit of a difference;) Somehow they've just never crossed my path, and I haven't gone looking...
I like to be able to have a little deeper understanding of what's going on and it always seemed that with Windows there was just too much stuff hidden from me. Linux is, of course, ideal in that respect. How much you understand is dependent on how much time you have to invest in learning, not on how much someone will allow you to learn.
I completely agree. Aside from satisfying curiosity, that deeper understanding translates directly into the ability to do things more efficiently - being able to understand what's really happening, rather than having to rely on guesswork based on something halfheartedly written up by a documentation department which was being fed tidbits by the developers... You also don't have to spend time working around bugs in black boxes if you're willing to dive in and attack the problem at its source, for example.
I've seen this in the Java world too - people working on top of open source server products are amazingly empowered, compared to those stuck with closed source application servers and tools. I think open source at various levels is a big reason behind the corporate success of Java, but one that's often not recognized.
I don't remember specifically what Booch said, and my copy is in storage in another state, but my memory is that he described and explained mixins in general, and related that to the use of MI in C++. Of course, I might have made some obvious connections on my own.
Afaict, Booch's 1st edition ('91) came out the year before Meyer's 1st edition of Effective C++ ('92). Not as big a gap as I remembered - I think I only came across Meyers a few years after that.
I only used the COM stuff when it was new, and it basically had to be done in C at that point (and was a huge pain). That experience drove me to get a job writing code for embedded systems -- as far away from MS as I could manage...
Cool! No-one ever regretted avoiding Microsoft...;) What kind of embedded systems? Purely as a hobby, I've had fun playing with programming PIC and Scenix chips, although my conclusion based on that experience was that I'd really rather work with *slightly* more powerful processors. I realize there are plenty of those, but I haven't yet gotten around to trying any of them (it has too high a distraction potential!:)
As someone else pointed out, use of interfaces has been common in the Win32 world, with COM, for at least about eight years.
Hehe. That strikes me as a rather odd example, since COM is so much newer than all of the other technologies we're discussing,
I should have said "use of interfaces in C++". The point is that COM's entire model is based on the use of interfaces in C++ specifically. A COM interface is basically a C++ virtual function table, by design. COM code in C++ consists of using MI to combine implementations of multiple interfaces - basically, mixins. Of course, the mixin approach was described in the C++ context at least as far back as Booch's OO book. I would expect someone writing books about C++ to be aware of all this, but Scott's comments against MI never seemed to take any of this into account.
It's nice to hear that the authors weren't responsible for this travesty.
I could care less about what the mass media calls a "hacker". But the problem I have with this book title is that it's horribly misleading. I first thought, based on the title, that it might be a book I would be interested in - a book about hacking Linux, sounds great. Then I found out it was all about security. It took a while for this to completely sink in to the point where I finally realized that I'm really not that interested in the subject matter. The title makes no sense whatsoever!
Next time, explain to your editors/publishers that even if they don't understand the terminology, the target market just might!
I realized, in trying to conclude my mild rant, that the real problem I have with this title is that no-one will be punished for it. I want justice! Revenge! Heads must roll! Stupidity must be stamped out! Death to idiots!
Scott said in the interview that the C++ community doesn't have a name for interface classes. Maybe not, but I've been using the term "pure abstract class" for close to a decade and I don't think I've come across a single marginally-competent C++ programmer who didn't immediately understand the term, and I'm pretty sure I picked the term up from comp.lang.c++.
In the interview, Scott exhibits amazing ignorance for an author of his supposed stature. As someone else pointed out, use of interfaces has been common in the Win32 world, with COM, for at least about eight years. Smalltalk has used implicit interfaces for decades, and that's where the Objective-C construct presumably came from.
Scott seems to have a very ad-hoc approach to programming - "I do it this way because it seems simpler and it works". That's fine, but if you're going to be writing about this stuff, you'd think you'd perhaps study it a bit, understand the formal underpinnings (type theory in this case), to be able to put your choices into a wider context - but he doesn't do this, unless he's playing dumb in the interview to avoid confusing the readership.
Basically, Scott seems to be a step above authors like Bruce Eckel, who write intro/overview "how to program in language X" books. One shouldn't be looking to him for insight into software design.
Another impulse was 'gad... that made it into Nature!?' (the journal, the article cited is a self congratulatory summary of their Nature paper).
What are you referring to? In the article that appears in ACM Communications, it says:
"
Nature magazine reported a study [1] resembling the first part of our effort - encoding meaningful information as DNA sequences [in a naked DNA strand...] In fact, a naked DNA molecule is easily destroyed [...] Our solution is to provide a living host for the DNA that tolerates the addition of artificial gene sequences and survives extreme environmental conditions."
The cited Nature article has a completely different set of authors (Taylor, Risca, Bancroft) from the ACM article (Pak Chung Wong, Kwong-Kwok Wong, Harlan Foote). Based admittedly on the authors' own claims, the ACM article seems to go significantly beyond the Nature article (the latter sounds like as much a test of the US Postal Service than anything else!)
I suspect it is due to the fact that "NetSaint" is offensive to those of us that are atheists.
Oh yeah, people are always caving and changing things to satisfy the huge and influential atheist lobby! As an atheist myself, I'm proud that we're able to have such a huge influence on social policy!
You're being silly. The reasons for the change had nothing to do with offended atheists (it was a trademark issue), and besides, why would atheists be offended?
Why do you say the Boehm GC can't do much with C? Have you actually tried it? Operation with C is one of its major strengths, and reasons for existence. It automatically collects allocated data that's no longer referenced. For memory management, what more do you need? Sizing buffer allocations is a separate issue, which can be dealt with separately.
The one problem Boehm GC can have is if data on the stack or in the heap happens to look like it contains pointers to allocated data, but doesn't actually, which can lead to space leakage. In practice, in most applications, this isn't a problem. If it is, in many cases, there are ways it can be dealt with.
Re:its the management stupid
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· Score: 2
How do you get around this? Should you just quit? When do you know to quit caring and instead give up and move on?
Look after yourself - look for a position with better prospects, and once you've found one, then quit. Life is too short to waste working for (and enriching!) idiots.
You don't really want to know this, I'm sure, but the amount of sugar in coke, or any soda, has a number of bad effects on your body, most of which have to do with the sudden spike in your blood sugar level which it causes. It raises your triglyceride levels, which is implicated in heart disease (think of it as a cousin of cholesterol). It increases oxidation, causing cell damage and aging, including potential skin damage (per recent dermatologist findings).
If you must drink soda, do it along with a meal. But don't drink it all the time. Wean yourself off it - sugary things are for children, so unless you still qualify, you should be developing an adult palate. Yeah, it's difficult to do that, in the U.S...
At it's heart this is a product of the Telstra cultural malignancy whereby they actually believe that eight plus digit numbers define the pinnacle of usability.
This kooky shortsightedness is not unique to Telstra. This sort of thing is what passes for invention amongst the MBA and marketing crowd, especially in entrenched industries like phone service. "Everyone knows how to use a telephone number - let's just use it for everything!! In fact, Bob, from now on, I'm going to address you as 800-555-1212! Can I call you "eight-hun" for short?"
I hardly ever feed trolls as a rule. I dunno, it was a weird mixture of fun and peversion. Mondays are so tedious sometimes... Sorry if it wasn't good for you. You pegged me perfectly, I am insanely persistent and can be quite joyless at times. But I'm really warm and fuzzy once you get to know me.
Anyway, I was all ready to let it go at HAND, but you didn't want to.
I'm sure CmdrTaco and No More Trolls are pleased with my work here today...
BTW, the German poetry is from Beethoven/Schiller's Ode to Joy, and it just seemed like a good antidote to the stuff you were quoting, like garlic for a vampire...:O)
(Imagine a/. where all the trolls are pretentious... Oh wait, that's kuro5hin.)
Slashdot Mirror
All Jim has to do is get some good advice (some of which can be found on /. today), write a short letter, add a disclaimer to his site, and get rid of the logo. He doesn't even need a lawyer. If PCI-SIG then chooses to try to escalate the matter, then Jim might have cause for complaint.
The world is full of idiots. If you behave like an idiot in response to them, we all lose.
That sounds fine and all, but the PCI-SIG actually does not have the legal right to shut down Jim's web site. They have the right to prevent him from using their logo, and to require that he put up a disclaimer saying that the site is not official, not sanctioned by PCI-SIG, etc.
Other than that, unless Jim is posting actual information that's proprietary to someone (which has not been claimed), there's nothing they can do about the existence of his site.
What actually seems to be happening here is that they are trying use a trivial logo issue to scare Jim into giving them his content.
And Jim has responded either with incredibly naivete in believing that he has to shut down his site; or perhaps with an excess of guile in playing all hurt about it, perhaps to get attention. All he really needs to do is issue a response letter, remove the logo from his site, and put up a disclaimer so that he can continue using the PCI name in the context of the site - which is perfectly valid! If you're writing about PCI cards, you're allowed to use their name - you're just not allowed to use the name as a way of selling a product or service, misleading people into thinking that you're the official holder of the name.
There's really no issue here. PCI-SIG are being silly, and I can't tell whether Jim's response is simply naive, or whether he's trying to achieve some other goal. I suspect the former.
Yes, I'm familiar with some of those, starting with Guttman's now-ancient 1996 paper Secure Deletion of Data from Magnetic and Solid-State Memory. The OP's sentence that I was responding to was "Theoretically anything that has previously been on the drive should be recoverable through such methods." But it's nowhere near as simple or as "reliable" as that. Besides, I haven't seen any papers in the last few years that talk about doing this with today's drive capacities. Guttman's paper talks about the more advanced drives at the time as being easier to securely erase:
In addition, remember that many parts of a disk undergo a *lot* of reading and writing of different bit patterns. Recovering a prior generation of data may in fact mean recovering what was written at a particular spot thousands of writes ago. That's just not always possible.And even when it is, it can be guarded against, as I alluded to in my post. The thrust of the abovementioned paper, in fact, is how to delete data so that it can't be recovered, even with the use of advanced techniques.
In short, the notion of realistically recovering data that's been properly erased - not just by an OS-level format - even with hundreds of thousands of dollars at your disposal, is more of a myth than anything else. It's a possibility for security wonks to scare each other with and try to guard against, not something that's happening in practice. Companies that do professional recovery don't even remotely get into this kind of thing, for example, and they're the ones who might have the financial incentive to do so.
"Theoretically"? Which theory is that - the theory of infinite data storage? You're dreaming.
The FBI has no magic. It's just that "formatting" is often not quite the irreversible, data-destroying operation people often imagine it is. Depending on exactly what technique you use to format, it can involve as little as writing a new root directory structure, leaving the rest of the disk's data intact, but just a little more difficult to get at. Even supposedly more destructive means of formatting aren't necessarily perfect. However, if you know what you're doing, you can clean a drive so that even the FBI can't get anything off it.
I'd tell you how to do it, but then you'd have to put up with black helicopters buzzing around your house all the time...
It's only an insult when it is applied to someone who is capable of doing more. Actually, in the case of the guy who thinks Tetris requires "a lot of thinking", I'm not quite sure which category he falls into...
Wow, talk about someone who lacks a sense of humor!
You have games (1) that require a lot of thinking to progress -- tetris
Ha! Nice troll! Wait... you're not serious? "A lot of thinking"? Tetris? Are you retarded? Well, I suppose that has to be a rhetorical question...
Good news, and easy problem to solve - you haven't been seeing it used incorrectly, it's just that everyone else knows the definition and you don't:
Main Entry: dampen /'damp-ni[ng], 'dam-p&-/
Pronunciation: 'dam-p&n
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): dampened; dampening
Date: 1547
transitive senses
1 : to check or diminish the activity or vigor of : DEADEN <the heat dampened our spirits>
Neat idea!
In fact, it occurs to me that you could probably write a little program to automate that -- use introspection to examine the original class and then automatically generate an instrumented wrapper that logs everything... hmmm....
You can do a lot of this stuff with object code, too, but you're disassembling, not decompiling and the difference is huge.
I developed two commercial add-on products, which were able to integrate with their host products because I had disassembled library object code, originally written in C. Java takes all the challenge out of that sort of thing, but I don't miss it at all! ;)
I have to qualify one thing I mentioned, about the pool of water at the North Pole, since that is one of the items allegedly "debunked" at the site referenced by the OP. Since cracks which create "leads" of water in the Arctic ice are common in the summer months, questions were raised about the various original reports, in 2000, of pools of water at the North Pole. It's rather difficult for non-experts to determine how normal it is to find large pools of water at or near the North Pole, but there's other less anecdotal data we can turn to, e.g. as described in this BBC report, which reports on the widespread thinning of the Arctic ice.
There's not a whole lot of doubt that global warming has been taking place. The only real points in dispute are what the major causes are, whether one of the causes is human behavior, and whether the trend will continue upward. If human behavior is a major factor, then the answer is that the trend will continue upwards unless we do something.
As for your comparison to theories about population, the scare from the '60s was not based on the same degree of scientific study. In fact, it was a popular scare, much more than a scientific scare, based on popular books like Erlich's "The Population Bomb". The scientific aspect of that scare was actually tailing off, having first been raised around 1800 by Malthus.
In fact, Malthus' predictions were not completely wrong - the rate at which the human population of Earth is doubling is increasing, from about 120 years for the doubling from 1 billion to 2 billion, down to 47 years for the doublings to 4 billion. Do the math - unless population growth slows a lot, we will run into serious population problems, just not in our lifetimes.
The global warming situation is already having an effect, in our lifetime. Average global temperature increases have been measured and aren't disputed - only the causes are disputed. There's a big pool of water at the North Pole, where explorers once planted flags. There are huge and ancient ice shelfs melting and falling into the sea around Antarctica. The permafrost in Canada and Alaska is melting and affecting the few people who live there.
Sticking your head in the sand and believing what you want to believe, won't make this problem go away. So rather than spreading misinformation, like that found at the site you referenced, I recommend trying to educate yourself a bit more. No-one benefits from ignorance and the spread thereof.
Separately from that, you also need to try to falsify your hypothesis - look for evidence that contradicts it. To a large extent, this is often left to the peer-review process, since those involved in finding evidence for a hypothesis may not in fact be the best people to falsify it - which is the point you were picking up on.
However, that's normal - scientists are human, too. I don't know if you develop software, but it's similar to the situation with software developers - you write some code, which you can think of as the embodiment of a hypothesis about how to solve some set of problems. You try to test it as best you can, but other testers or users are still likely to find bugs that you missed - in other words, your "hypothesis" (the software) was wrong in some respect.
One reason this happens is that during development, you tend to try harder to provide input that will make the software work, than make it fail. Only once it's working reasonably well, does it make sense to try to make it fail - before that, it's too fragile. A similar process often occurs in science - theories don't always spring fully-formed from a scientist's mind.
I like to be able to have a little deeper understanding of what's going on and it always seemed that with Windows there was just too much stuff hidden from me. Linux is, of course, ideal in that respect. How much you understand is dependent on how much time you have to invest in learning, not on how much someone will allow you to learn.
I completely agree. Aside from satisfying curiosity, that deeper understanding translates directly into the ability to do things more efficiently - being able to understand what's really happening, rather than having to rely on guesswork based on something halfheartedly written up by a documentation department which was being fed tidbits by the developers... You also don't have to spend time working around bugs in black boxes if you're willing to dive in and attack the problem at its source, for example.
I've seen this in the Java world too - people working on top of open source server products are amazingly empowered, compared to those stuck with closed source application servers and tools. I think open source at various levels is a big reason behind the corporate success of Java, but one that's often not recognized.
Afaict, Booch's 1st edition ('91) came out the year before Meyer's 1st edition of Effective C++ ('92). Not as big a gap as I remembered - I think I only came across Meyers a few years after that.
I only used the COM stuff when it was new, and it basically had to be done in C at that point (and was a huge pain). That experience drove me to get a job writing code for embedded systems -- as far away from MS as I could manage...
Cool! No-one ever regretted avoiding Microsoft... ;) What kind of embedded systems? Purely as a hobby, I've had fun playing with programming PIC and Scenix chips, although my conclusion based on that experience was that I'd really rather work with *slightly* more powerful processors. I realize there are plenty of those, but I haven't yet gotten around to trying any of them (it has too high a distraction potential! :)
I could care less about what the mass media calls a "hacker". But the problem I have with this book title is that it's horribly misleading. I first thought, based on the title, that it might be a book I would be interested in - a book about hacking Linux, sounds great. Then I found out it was all about security. It took a while for this to completely sink in to the point where I finally realized that I'm really not that interested in the subject matter. The title makes no sense whatsoever!
Next time, explain to your editors/publishers that even if they don't understand the terminology, the target market just might!
I realized, in trying to conclude my mild rant, that the real problem I have with this title is that no-one will be punished for it. I want justice! Revenge! Heads must roll! Stupidity must be stamped out! Death to idiots!
Aaaaaaaahh... that's better.
In the interview, Scott exhibits amazing ignorance for an author of his supposed stature. As someone else pointed out, use of interfaces has been common in the Win32 world, with COM, for at least about eight years. Smalltalk has used implicit interfaces for decades, and that's where the Objective-C construct presumably came from.
Scott seems to have a very ad-hoc approach to programming - "I do it this way because it seems simpler and it works". That's fine, but if you're going to be writing about this stuff, you'd think you'd perhaps study it a bit, understand the formal underpinnings (type theory in this case), to be able to put your choices into a wider context - but he doesn't do this, unless he's playing dumb in the interview to avoid confusing the readership.
Basically, Scott seems to be a step above authors like Bruce Eckel, who write intro/overview "how to program in language X" books. One shouldn't be looking to him for insight into software design.
What are you referring to? In the article that appears in ACM Communications, it says:
The cited Nature article has a completely different set of authors (Taylor, Risca, Bancroft) from the ACM article (Pak Chung Wong, Kwong-Kwok Wong, Harlan Foote). Based admittedly on the authors' own claims, the ACM article seems to go significantly beyond the Nature article (the latter sounds like as much a test of the US Postal Service than anything else!)Oh yeah, people are always caving and changing things to satisfy the huge and influential atheist lobby! As an atheist myself, I'm proud that we're able to have such a huge influence on social policy!
You're being silly. The reasons for the change had nothing to do with offended atheists (it was a trademark issue), and besides, why would atheists be offended?
Why do you say the Boehm GC can't do much with C? Have you actually tried it? Operation with C is one of its major strengths, and reasons for existence. It automatically collects allocated data that's no longer referenced. For memory management, what more do you need? Sizing buffer allocations is a separate issue, which can be dealt with separately.
The one problem Boehm GC can have is if data on the stack or in the heap happens to look like it contains pointers to allocated data, but doesn't actually, which can lead to space leakage. In practice, in most applications, this isn't a problem. If it is, in many cases, there are ways it can be dealt with.
Look after yourself - look for a position with better prospects, and once you've found one, then quit. Life is too short to waste working for (and enriching!) idiots.
Unfortunately, he is a crank - but a crank who often has some good points.
If you must drink soda, do it along with a meal. But don't drink it all the time. Wean yourself off it - sugary things are for children, so unless you still qualify, you should be developing an adult palate. Yeah, it's difficult to do that, in the U.S...
This kooky shortsightedness is not unique to Telstra. This sort of thing is what passes for invention amongst the MBA and marketing crowd, especially in entrenched industries like phone service. "Everyone knows how to use a telephone number - let's just use it for everything!! In fact, Bob, from now on, I'm going to address you as 800-555-1212! Can I call you "eight-hun" for short?"
Anyway, I was all ready to let it go at HAND, but you didn't want to.
I'm sure CmdrTaco and No More Trolls are pleased with my work here today...
BTW, the German poetry is from Beethoven/Schiller's Ode to Joy, and it just seemed like a good antidote to the stuff you were quoting, like garlic for a vampire... :O)
(Imagine a /. where all the trolls are pretentious... Oh wait, that's kuro5hin.)