Hotmail and Gmail have the same timeout -- 9 months.
Dunno about hotmail, but Gmail doesn't seem to have such a timeout -- I just logged into some gmail accounts that I haven't touched in years (since 2007 in one case), and all the email was there...
I've had a yahoo mail account longer than any other web-mail account, but I haven't used it so much recently (gmail has a much better user-interface). Still, I like to keep it around for various reasons.
I logged into it for the first time in half a year yesterday, and... it tells me "Your account has been made dormant due to inactivity of over 4 months. All your mail has been deleted."
Oh. Thanks yahoo!
Though I'm sure that policy makes sense to the accountants ("they were just using up our disk space and not generating us any income!"), it says an awful lot about their attitude towards their users.
I don't think the main issue is really what they don't want to sell.
It's the fact they're erasing previously bought material with no notice or consent that's really nasty.
Amazon deserves to take a PR bath over this sort of thing. Hopefully they'll realize sooner rather than later that such actions are almost never justifiable, and they'd be far better off simply removing the functionality to do so from the Kindle's firmware and telling anybody who pressures them "sorry, nothing we can do."
But in fact, this years prize seems to actually go in the other direction, of rewarding somebody who truly took personal risks to advance the cause of peaceful political evolution.
Of course China's amazing degree of freak-out about it simply drives the point home.
I'm a bit curious about the reasoning of the various countries that are "not attending" though -- which ones did it to curry political favor with China (at little perceived cost), and which ones did it because they're also busy killing/imprisoning anybody who makes a stand for democratic freedoms...?
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't think that screwing around on the internet doing non-work things ought to be acceptable. Personally, I don't want to have my morale harmed by being asked to pick up the slack because there isn't enough productivity to cover the work needed. Doesn't matter whether it's too few employees or too much goofing off online.
It strongly depends on the job. If your business only requires mouth-breathers, you can do what you want, because you're scraping the bottom of the barrel anyway; they're desperate. But if you need employees with some degree of intelligence/creativity/etc, and you go all control-freak, you will lose all the good ones.
Your choice I suppose.
[Of course logic rarely has anything to do with it -- authoritarian bosses tend to be that way for personal reasons, not because it's actually the best way to run their business...]
The communist party has shown that all the "benefits" of the internet--rapid communication, access to technology, skills and educational enhancements, new mass entertainment forms, and greater facilitation of art and commerce--can be had without opening up society in any significant way or of empowering citizens in the slightest.
Certainly the Chinese government is going to try to control it, and has succeeded to some degree -- but compared to china without the internet, the internet probably has been a positive force, even if not to the degree that people wish (and the chinese regime fears).
Typically it seems that their control measures are often reactive, and only really take effect after an initial outburst of activity about some topic -- they can dampen discussion after-the-fact, but they don't seem to have been very successful at preventing it. The result, of course is that the internet is serving to spread information the Chinese government doesn't wish spread. To do more, they'd have to clamp down more.
because wikileaks didn't try and retract names & information that could be used to identify a person and put them at risk?
I wrote "there are certainly cases where discretion is called for"; such cases are not necessarily only those where an individual is put immediately at risk (e.g., spy names).
"Discretion" is a wider term, and for instance might include "not screwing up difficult negotiations with country X by mentioning embarrassing (but irrelevant) facts about their leader". Wikileaks may try to redact certain obviously dangerous information but it appears that they don't care about discretion, or less immediately obvious harm that they might cause. [Ok, to be fair, they may indeed care, but their actions don't seem to support that...]
Unfortunately, perhaps, discretion is important in diplomacy, and thus is a part of solving international conflicts peacefully. As Rubin's essay notes, by damaging diplomatic efforts, wikileaks may actually be working against the underlying interests of many of their supporters...
What is the difference between wikileaks and the pentagon papers? Both used material that the government wanted to keep quite, was classified, and illegally leaked to the press. Yet one wins the Pulitzer and a generation later people are advocating for the others death?
Well among other things, the pentagon papers were a relatively focused release of information intended to highlight an obvious crime.
Wikileaks -- especially with the latest release -- is releasing far more materials, with far less obvious reason for many of them. There may be criminal actions revealed somewhere in the pile of "cablegate" (note the name, which seems obviously intended to imply "scandal" -- but no obvious scandal), but for the most part it's simply embarrassing for the actors, and the effect of the leaks will have is not very clear -- they may actually do more harm than good in the end
Wikileaks seems generally well-intentioned, but they don't appear to have strong justifications for the specific material they leak in many cases, other than a vague sort of "there should be nothing hidden" ("information wants to be free"?) attitude. While transparency in government/etc is good in general, I think there are certainly cases where discretion is called for; however wikileaks seems to not agree. Maybe that's the only realistic attitude these days, but again, it's unclear whether society is better off by embracing it...
I kind of think of wikileaks as being sort of like "/b/tards gone to college".... sometimes admirable and brave, sometimes infuriating and childish, basically chaotic neutral...:]
"I'd be interested in seeing how Google would react if someone drove into their parking lot, hauled out a camera and started photographing their campus"
Actually, I'm curious: why did you use bing? Plugging your bing search into google yields much better results -- the google search actually turns up mostly photos of google campuses (with your first link as the first hit!), whereas the bing results seem to all be just photos of various college campuses that happen to be hosted on google sites....
Of course one reason such "massive security breaches" happen is that companies have stupidly draconian policies which make "normal" operation so annoying/dangerous that clueful employees bypass it as a matter of course.
Yeah, they can threaten "you might be fired!", but threats are very rarely effective unless they coincide with common sense — which policies like "we can wipe whatever we want!" don't.
I suppose the larger the company, the more likely they are to choose "draconian/bluster" over working with the employees to find an agreeable technical solution...
Another attribute that currently differentiates most DSLRs from non-DSLRs is that DSLRs can use "phase-detection" autofocusing, by redirecting some of the light to the phase-detection sensors in the mirror-down state. Phase-detection autofocusing is typically much faster than the "contrast-detection" autofocusing used by most cameras without a mirror, and fast autofocusing is hugely important to many professional photographers.
[The reason that it's faster is pretty simple: with phase-detection, the camera can tell which direction to adjust the focus in, with some indication of how much, whereas with contrast-detection systems, it can't tell those things, and in fact, doesn't even know whether the picture is in focus or not without adjusting the focus and seeing what the effect is. So contrast-based systems have to "hunt" for proper focus, and even with clever algorithms, hunting involves mechanically adjusting the focus, which is slow, especially as it typically needs to constantly change direction.
I'm not entirely sure why a camera without a mirror can't use phase-detection focusing, except that it involves having something in the optical path (the beam-splitter that redirects light to the phase-detection sensors), and maybe that unacceptably degrades photo quality. [I suppose maybe you could have a camera without a mirror, but with a PD beam-splitter that flips out of the way like mirrors do in DSLRs...]
And if anyone wants to complain about these programs taking jobs from U.S. citizens, then it should start by reducing the number of student visas on offer. Once someone is well trained by our schools it's insane to not let them stay and add to our GDP.
My impression (from helping a foreign national through the application process) is that many universities (including Ivy League universities) treat foreign students as something of a cash-cow: unlike U.S. citizens, foreign nationals receive no discounts and no assistance from the university, regardless of financial hardship, and so end up paying the full price up front (there are exceptions, like Harvard, but they're very rare). The more famous the name, the more willing they're to pay, even at Ivy League prices.
So I expect if anyone suggests limiting student visas, universities will freak.
Moreover, from a less cynical point of view, limiting the number of foreign students will make universities poorer places in non-financial terms as well — the presence of people from many cultures, with many different points of view, is one of the things that make universities a cool place to be, and makes for a more vibrant and intellectually stimulating environment. Restricting that for short-term protectionist reasons would be folly.
[I'd suggest that the same thing holds generally, despite all the anti-H1B whining on slashdot, but in the case of universities, it's an especially aburd notion.]
Im not exactly clear why the DHS would be super good at proposing network security requirements though
Is there anything the DHS is good at?
I suppose one way to look at it is: they probably suck massively at network security, just as they do at everything else; since we've already thrown tons of other random powers at them, why not this...
It seems like every time I stop playing a game in the middle, it's because I reach a boss or something that's simply too insanely difficult, with no obvious indication that anything except raw luck and endurance will get me past.
If there's any hint that I'm getting better with repetition, even if slowly, then I may stick it out, but few games really seem to have that finely tuned a difficulty curve -- they tend to either be fairly easy (boss takes 2-3 tries) or just insane beyond reason...
But what seems ironic here is that this woman actually represented a success of the Chinese government's attempt to use "controlled nationalism" to redirect peoples' passions anytime they seem to be leaning against the government (or other powerful interests the government tacitly protects).
I guess they [the government] get scared anytime people get too passionate, even if government themselves stoked the fires in the first place...
Think in broader ways. Maybe it offers you a cheapwine/hard liqour bottle if you have a few days' worth of beard.
Offers the little kids the Super Robot whatever sugar in a can etc...
Here's some advice Zuckerberg. When you can summarize it in a sentence, people will pay attention.
The thing is, though, that zuckerberg doesn't need people to pay attention -- all he needs is to flip a switch and whatever creaky jibber-jabber he's pimping will be in all his users' faces 24/7 popping up little "hey! wanna try something cool?! lol!" boxes...
Well, except for the fact that its nothing like Google Wave, which was largely a collaborative editing platform.
Note that newest version of Google Docs does suddenly have really, really, excellent collaborative editing, and I've heard people say that the tech came from Wave...
Many of the same things were said when the Japanese started exporting electronics and cars to the U.S. It is a fatal mistake by many Americans to assume that lack of quality in the past guarantees lack of quality in the future, or more to the point, that their aerospace products will be manufactured in the same factory as goods destined for Walmart.
Sure, but it's also a "fatal mistake" to assume that what happened with Japan will also happen with China. In the case of Japan, there were significant cultural and historical reasons for the way their industry developed following WWII, and China is a very, very, different culture, with a very different history.
Chinese products will almost certainly get better, but it seems pretty unlikely that they'll improve quite to the degree Japan's did.
There are other reasons Microsoft's idea is a bad one such as the higher licensing costs, no possible reason to want to write custom, non GUI software from scratch on Windows etc.
From Microsoft's point of view, it's good, as it allows them to test/prove their algorithms, etc; presumably scalability will be useful for future consumer-level hardware.
For the supercomputer user/developer though, there seems to be utterly no point to running windows -- pretty much all of window's strengths (consumer familiarity, driver availability, availability of mainstream apps, widespread support) are irrelevant for that class of hardware/application -- and there are many negatives to doing so (licensing/legal restrictions, cost, excessive GUI dependency, difficulty of customization, lack of commonality with other supercomputer-relevant apps/libraries/users, etc).
I suppose the actual reason is that MS is throwing buckets of money at them...
boot windows a few times, and pay half your staffs' salaries for a year...
Really, they should just hire the Falun Gong people. Experts at protesting and garnering sympathy. This hunger strike just looks kind of stupid.
Of course as soon as the Chinese government noticed that Falun Gong was involved, in even the most tangential way, they'd freak out and nuke the entire town... Hmm, I guess that'd show Google though!
Slashdot Mirror
Hotmail and Gmail have the same timeout -- 9 months.
Dunno about hotmail, but Gmail doesn't seem to have such a timeout -- I just logged into some gmail accounts that I haven't touched in years (since 2007 in one case), and all the email was there...
I've had a yahoo mail account longer than any other web-mail account, but I haven't used it so much recently (gmail has a much better user-interface). Still, I like to keep it around for various reasons.
I logged into it for the first time in half a year yesterday, and ... it tells me "Your account has been made dormant due to inactivity of over 4 months. All your mail has been deleted."
Oh. Thanks yahoo!
Though I'm sure that policy makes sense to the accountants ("they were just using up our disk space and not generating us any income!"), it says an awful lot about their attitude towards their users.
(and wtf, 4 months?! That's a long vacation!)
Ask yourself: why didn't they hire Julian Assange? I am sure the cultural reasons will fill several pages for a start.
Wait... Julian Assange has actual skills?!
I don't think the main issue is really what they don't want to sell.
It's the fact they're erasing previously bought material with no notice or consent that's really nasty.
Amazon deserves to take a PR bath over this sort of thing. Hopefully they'll realize sooner rather than later that such actions are almost never justifiable, and they'd be far better off simply removing the functionality to do so from the Kindle's firmware and telling anybody who pressures them "sorry, nothing we can do."
it tastes like a charred hamster
Where do you get charred hamster?
By incorrectly calculating the cooking time, when making roast hamster.
But in fact, this years prize seems to actually go in the other direction, of rewarding somebody who truly took personal risks to advance the cause of peaceful political evolution.
Of course China's amazing degree of freak-out about it simply drives the point home.
I'm a bit curious about the reasoning of the various countries that are "not attending" though -- which ones did it to curry political favor with China (at little perceived cost), and which ones did it because they're also busy killing/imprisoning anybody who makes a stand for democratic freedoms...?
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't think that screwing around on the internet doing non-work things ought to be acceptable. Personally, I don't want to have my morale harmed by being asked to pick up the slack because there isn't enough productivity to cover the work needed. Doesn't matter whether it's too few employees or too much goofing off online.
It strongly depends on the job. If your business only requires mouth-breathers, you can do what you want, because you're scraping the bottom of the barrel anyway; they're desperate. But if you need employees with some degree of intelligence/creativity/etc, and you go all control-freak, you will lose all the good ones.
Your choice I suppose.
[Of course logic rarely has anything to do with it -- authoritarian bosses tend to be that way for personal reasons, not because it's actually the best way to run their business...]
The communist party has shown that all the "benefits" of the internet--rapid communication, access to technology, skills and educational enhancements, new mass entertainment forms, and greater facilitation of art and commerce--can be had without opening up society in any significant way or of empowering citizens in the slightest.
Certainly the Chinese government is going to try to control it, and has succeeded to some degree -- but compared to china without the internet, the internet probably has been a positive force, even if not to the degree that people wish (and the chinese regime fears).
Typically it seems that their control measures are often reactive, and only really take effect after an initial outburst of activity about some topic -- they can dampen discussion after-the-fact, but they don't seem to have been very successful at preventing it. The result, of course is that the internet is serving to spread information the Chinese government doesn't wish spread. To do more, they'd have to clamp down more.
however wikileaks seems to not agree
because wikileaks didn't try and retract names & information that could be used to identify a person and put them at risk?
I wrote "there are certainly cases where discretion is called for"; such cases are not necessarily only those where an individual is put immediately at risk (e.g., spy names).
"Discretion" is a wider term, and for instance might include "not screwing up difficult negotiations with country X by mentioning embarrassing (but irrelevant) facts about their leader". Wikileaks may try to redact certain obviously dangerous information but it appears that they don't care about discretion, or less immediately obvious harm that they might cause. [Ok, to be fair, they may indeed care, but their actions don't seem to support that...]
Unfortunately, perhaps, discretion is important in diplomacy, and thus is a part of solving international conflicts peacefully. As Rubin's essay notes, by damaging diplomatic efforts, wikileaks may actually be working against the underlying interests of many of their supporters...
What is the difference between wikileaks and the pentagon papers? Both used material that the government wanted to keep quite, was classified, and illegally leaked to the press. Yet one wins the Pulitzer and a generation later people are advocating for the others death?
Well among other things, the pentagon papers were a relatively focused release of information intended to highlight an obvious crime.
Wikileaks -- especially with the latest release -- is releasing far more materials, with far less obvious reason for many of them. There may be criminal actions revealed somewhere in the pile of "cablegate" (note the name, which seems obviously intended to imply "scandal" -- but no obvious scandal), but for the most part it's simply embarrassing for the actors, and the effect of the leaks will have is not very clear -- they may actually do more harm than good in the end
Wikileaks seems generally well-intentioned, but they don't appear to have strong justifications for the specific material they leak in many cases, other than a vague sort of "there should be nothing hidden" ("information wants to be free"?) attitude. While transparency in government/etc is good in general, I think there are certainly cases where discretion is called for; however wikileaks seems to not agree. Maybe that's the only realistic attitude these days, but again, it's unclear whether society is better off by embracing it...
I kind of think of wikileaks as being sort of like "/b/tards gone to college".... sometimes admirable and brave, sometimes infuriating and childish, basically chaotic neutral... :]
"I'd be interested in seeing how Google would react if someone drove into their parking lot, hauled out a camera and started photographing their campus"
What? you mean like this... http://chrisonstad.blogspot.com/2007/02/my-trip-to-google-with-photos.html
More: http://www.bing.com/search?q=my+photos+of+google+campus
haha! you used bing!
Actually, I'm curious: why did you use bing? Plugging your bing search into google yields much better results -- the google search actually turns up mostly photos of google campuses (with your first link as the first hit!), whereas the bing results seem to all be just photos of various college campuses that happen to be hosted on google sites....
They didn't hash the passwords with something decent like SHA2? Really?
I mean if they encrypted them weakly or used SHA1 or MD5, that's about as bad as going plaintext. I'd expect far better from them.
According to the announcement, they were apparently brute-forced, so nothing to do with the hash-function used.
Of course one reason such "massive security breaches" happen is that companies have stupidly draconian policies which make "normal" operation so annoying/dangerous that clueful employees bypass it as a matter of course.
Yeah, they can threaten "you might be fired!", but threats are very rarely effective unless they coincide with common sense — which policies like "we can wipe whatever we want!" don't.
I suppose the larger the company, the more likely they are to choose "draconian/bluster" over working with the employees to find an agreeable technical solution...
Another attribute that currently differentiates most DSLRs from non-DSLRs is that DSLRs can use "phase-detection" autofocusing, by redirecting some of the light to the phase-detection sensors in the mirror-down state. Phase-detection autofocusing is typically much faster than the "contrast-detection" autofocusing used by most cameras without a mirror, and fast autofocusing is hugely important to many professional photographers.
[The reason that it's faster is pretty simple: with phase-detection, the camera can tell which direction to adjust the focus in, with some indication of how much, whereas with contrast-detection systems, it can't tell those things, and in fact, doesn't even know whether the picture is in focus or not without adjusting the focus and seeing what the effect is. So contrast-based systems have to "hunt" for proper focus, and even with clever algorithms, hunting involves mechanically adjusting the focus, which is slow, especially as it typically needs to constantly change direction.
I'm not entirely sure why a camera without a mirror can't use phase-detection focusing, except that it involves having something in the optical path (the beam-splitter that redirects light to the phase-detection sensors), and maybe that unacceptably degrades photo quality. [I suppose maybe you could have a camera without a mirror, but with a PD beam-splitter that flips out of the way like mirrors do in DSLRs...]
And if anyone wants to complain about these programs taking jobs from U.S. citizens, then it should start by reducing the number of student visas on offer. Once someone is well trained by our schools it's insane to not let them stay and add to our GDP.
My impression (from helping a foreign national through the application process) is that many universities (including Ivy League universities) treat foreign students as something of a cash-cow: unlike U.S. citizens, foreign nationals receive no discounts and no assistance from the university, regardless of financial hardship, and so end up paying the full price up front (there are exceptions, like Harvard, but they're very rare). The more famous the name, the more willing they're to pay, even at Ivy League prices.
So I expect if anyone suggests limiting student visas, universities will freak.
Moreover, from a less cynical point of view, limiting the number of foreign students will make universities poorer places in non-financial terms as well — the presence of people from many cultures, with many different points of view, is one of the things that make universities a cool place to be, and makes for a more vibrant and intellectually stimulating environment. Restricting that for short-term protectionist reasons would be folly.
[I'd suggest that the same thing holds generally, despite all the anti-H1B whining on slashdot, but in the case of universities, it's an especially aburd notion.]
Im not exactly clear why the DHS would be super good at proposing network security requirements though
Is there anything the DHS is good at?
I suppose one way to look at it is: they probably suck massively at network security, just as they do at everything else; since we've already thrown tons of other random powers at them, why not this...
[head explodes]
It seems like every time I stop playing a game in the middle, it's because I reach a boss or something that's simply too insanely difficult, with no obvious indication that anything except raw luck and endurance will get me past.
If there's any hint that I'm getting better with repetition, even if slowly, then I may stick it out, but few games really seem to have that finely tuned a difficulty curve -- they tend to either be fairly easy (boss takes 2-3 tries) or just insane beyond reason...
But what seems ironic here is that this woman actually represented a success of the Chinese government's attempt to use "controlled nationalism" to redirect peoples' passions anytime they seem to be leaning against the government (or other powerful interests the government tacitly protects).
I guess they [the government] get scared anytime people get too passionate, even if government themselves stoked the fires in the first place...
Think in broader ways. Maybe it offers you a cheapwine/hard liqour bottle if you have a few days' worth of beard. Offers the little kids the Super Robot whatever sugar in a can etc...
Hmm, it still has to decide whether to offer Ultra Cider or Ultra Cola though...
Here's some advice Zuckerberg. When you can summarize it in a sentence, people will pay attention.
The thing is, though, that zuckerberg doesn't need people to pay attention -- all he needs is to flip a switch and whatever creaky jibber-jabber he's pimping will be in all his users' faces 24/7 popping up little "hey! wanna try something cool?! lol!" boxes...
Well, except for the fact that its nothing like Google Wave, which was largely a collaborative editing platform.
Note that newest version of Google Docs does suddenly have really, really, excellent collaborative editing, and I've heard people say that the tech came from Wave...
Many of the same things were said when the Japanese started exporting electronics and cars to the U.S. It is a fatal mistake by many Americans to assume that lack of quality in the past guarantees lack of quality in the future, or more to the point, that their aerospace products will be manufactured in the same factory as goods destined for Walmart.
Sure, but it's also a "fatal mistake" to assume that what happened with Japan will also happen with China. In the case of Japan, there were significant cultural and historical reasons for the way their industry developed following WWII, and China is a very, very, different culture, with a very different history.
Chinese products will almost certainly get better, but it seems pretty unlikely that they'll improve quite to the degree Japan's did.
There are other reasons Microsoft's idea is a bad one such as the higher licensing costs, no possible reason to want to write custom, non GUI software from scratch on Windows etc.
From Microsoft's point of view, it's good, as it allows them to test/prove their algorithms, etc; presumably scalability will be useful for future consumer-level hardware.
For the supercomputer user/developer though, there seems to be utterly no point to running windows -- pretty much all of window's strengths (consumer familiarity, driver availability, availability of mainstream apps, widespread support) are irrelevant for that class of hardware/application -- and there are many negatives to doing so (licensing/legal restrictions, cost, excessive GUI dependency, difficulty of customization, lack of commonality with other supercomputer-relevant apps/libraries/users, etc).
I suppose the actual reason is that MS is throwing buckets of money at them... boot windows a few times, and pay half your staffs' salaries for a year...
From the website:
Target: £500,000
Raised so far: £140
Really, they should just hire the Falun Gong people. Experts at protesting and garnering sympathy. This hunger strike just looks kind of stupid.
Of course as soon as the Chinese government noticed that Falun Gong was involved, in even the most tangential way, they'd freak out and nuke the entire town... Hmm, I guess that'd show Google though!