I believe if you check your facts you'll find that every industrialized nation has experienced just the opposite in the last 10 years.
Also, although you will undoubtedly experience a higher tax burden when the baby boom generation retires, the job opportunities and prospects will be a lot better because of the openings those retiring boomers will create. The Gen-X'ers will be next in line for the best jobs once that happens.
And so what if you got off to a bad start. Even if you are like me at the older end of the Gen-X generation you still have 30 years to go before retirement age. That's plenty enough time to correct the mistakes of our youth, plan ahead and retire comfortably.
If you even want to retire. I'm hoping medical science can do something for me in the next 30 years to increase my lifespan and my ability to enjoy it. Personally I don't really want to "retire" because people tend to keel over and die shortly after they stop using their minds and/or bodies to be productive.
Well I agree with you, splitting up an OTP has the advantages of being able to use the same pad several times but what I was really saying was that in theory there's no difference. It's still an OTP even if its broken up and used only a little at a time.
If the key is reused, we can take CypherText1 (which is really ClearText1 XOR key) and XOR it to the original known text and get the key.
The only conceiveable way to turn an OTP into a many time pad would be to only use a segment of the pad once. Probably this is why he wanted to make the pad so big - so it could continue to be used for a while until the pad has been used up. Big deal. That is no different from standard OTP and the same results would be obtained simply by generating a new OTP every time something needed to be encrypted.
Now, I am far from an expert in cryptography - and programming an OTP is as far as I've ever gotten. But even to me this story looks very amateurish.
Since you aren't taking money, its wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem. Tell your users you self-signed to save money, no big deal. You don't have to go through a CA to use SSL, its just an added level of perceived security for a customer. The customer trusts Verisign because they are an authority and Verisign tells the customer they can trust this business. But you can take Verisign entirely out of the equation if you want.
For the 85-90% of you using Internet Explorer, take a look at Tools->Internet Options->Content->Certificates->Trusted Root Certification Authorities.
The established certification companies are already on this list. You are not. If you self-sign, you are basically counting on your potential customers to trust you as a certification authority. They can add you to that list individually. The question is, will they?
Since you are an unknown, small company, basically your customer has to trust that you have done everything right in order to protect their security. That's a lot to ask someone. Having a big player certify you tells your potential customer that even though you are a small unknown, you have done everything right.
It's just my personal opinion, but its one based on running an e-commerce site for the last four years. Go with an established certifier. If you are doing any sort of business at all online that requires SSL you will more than make up the annual fee in the sales you don't turn away because you were too cheap to get a real certificate.
the future world you are referring to won't happen when 7 companies supply 95% of media and a single company supplies 90% of all desktop software. Further, how many viable broadband providers are there? I bet you could count them on the fingers of one hand.
Sigh, you should be right about this, but if you were the majority of people would already be using broadband. The very few powers that be have a vested interest in keeping their product(media, software,information) scarce, so although possible, your vision of the future is not likely to take place for a very long time.
The alien sightings in Roswell, NM depict aliens(beginning in 1947) as little green men with egg-shaped heads pointing sharply at the chin. Also sighted were the classic flying saucers. If you visit the alien museum in Roswell(and no, I don't recommend going to Roswell on your vacation) you'll see lots of pictures and drawings of the little green men and flying saucers.
I believe the Roswell sightings are in fact the oldest and most widely publicized alien sightings, so I would guess that was where the myth began.
I think you are right - anyone who knows a little bit of history is going to picture Mao's gang of four right away. Its like a CEO refering to himself as Caesar or referring to your workplace as the gulag.
Since/.ers aren't known to be history buffs, you're likely to to have some nazi moderator mod you down. Oops.
Would you mind explaining in what way you are so "undoubtedly" the freeest(sic) country in the world?
For several reasons.
Freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly to a degree that would shame most of Europe. Not only do we have dissenters here, many, like Noam Chomsky for instance, are fairly prominent.
Freedom to keep and bear arms. You can now scratch Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand off the list of "freest nations".
Our businesses have far more freedom to hire and fire workers than the vast majority of industrialized countries. Conversely, our working population has more freedom to change jobs, move to a different location, acquire new skills.
Because our country has so much freedom, we also enjoy much higher social mobility than virtually anywhere else in the world. All that it takes to go from poor to rich here in the U.S. is the willingness to work hard.
As a result of our freedoms, we enjoy the highest standard of living in the world. From the CIA factbook: "US business firms enjoy considerably greater flexibility than their counterparts in Western Europe and Japan in decisions to expand capital plant, lay off surplus workers, and develop new products."
You might be saying, so what, that's business firms, not the general public. Well, 2/3 of all Americans are employed by small, family-owned businesses. Small business in America is widely seen to be the engine of economic growth. That's just another indicator of the freedoms we enjoy here in this country.
Far from being brainwashed, my statement about being the freest country came about as a result of trying to find another country, anywhere in the world, that could claim to have as much freedom as U.S. citizens do. I couldn't find one.
That so much hatred could be directed toward what is undoubtedly the worlds freest country. I'm sick of all the anti-American sentiment I've heard in the last year. We are either blamed for not doing enough(East Timor is a really good example) or for doing too much(supporting Israel, etc.) We're just like the rest of the world, only more successful. The rest of world's problems are not our fault.
That in over 50 years since Israel was founded, their enemies still don't recognize them enough to even put them on their maps.
That Palestinian children are so brainwashed into hating Israel, scores of them have strapped bombs on themselves in order to blow themselves up as well as many Israeli citizens as they can take out.
That Iraq is able to scoff at international law, kicking out the U.N inspectors and rebuilding their weapons of mass destruction while the rest of the world(except the U.S.) turns a blind eye.
The really sad thing is that when all is said and done, Palestine will end up with no more than they were already promised before the start of the infitada. The Taliban is gone, Al-Qaeda has been scattered to the wind, and Iraq will undoubtedly see a regime change. All that vehement hatred directed toward the U.S. and Israel, and what is it going to get them? Nothing, if not less than what they had before.
Are there ways of communicating to management that long hours to rush a project to completion is not the way to complete a successful project?
What about the many stories of caffiene-addled coders working 36 hours at a time, and sleeping under their desks, coding under pressure to get the job done on time? See here for a good one.
I mean yeah, most normal people want to work 8 hours a day. But others want to be supermen, and are willing to put in long, long hours of work to beat the competition.
found in jeffy124s journal, long before its on Slashdot. There are many others like it.
Props!
How Object-Oriented is Perl
on
Ask Larry Wall
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Larry, Perl has been accused of not being object-oriented because it only supports one of The Three Pillars(encapsulation, the other two being inheritance and polymorphism) of Object-Oriented programming.
In my experience having the programming language handle the complexities of the object type is just as good as having explicit types like int, float, string, etc. But others disagree. And, I'm sure that by creating packages that call other packages, inheritance can be simulated. Others would disagree with this as well.
Additionally, the people who criticize Perl's object-orientedness claim that Object-Oriented programming is "bolted on" to Perl, and therefore is somehow unnatural compared to a language like Java which is built to be object-oriented from the ground up.
How would you answer these critics, and how well does Perl in fact support Object-Oriented Programming, in your opinion?
and timothy posted that one as well! I was going to post the repeat but you beat me to it. I was just thinking, geez, thats pretty bad if I remember the book review and the guy that posted it in the first place didn't.
I couldn't agree more. I know two people getting a degree in education because they want to be schoolteachers. Every time we talk about college I try and persuade them to take at least one calculus class before graduating.
Its not required, so they are not bothering. Jeez, I'm sorry, but a bachelor's degree without even a single calculus class isn't worth the paper its printed on. And these are the people who will instruct the next generation of kids.
Great Book, Cool author
on
Perl & LWP
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I started working through this book the day it came out. So far, great book - I used to write bots in C++ of all languages because I had a decent C++ library to work with, but since I switched to Perl and LWP its been a lot easier and more productive. I was able to put some things to work almost immediately retrieving info from sites like amazon.com and abebooks.com(I program for an online bookstore so the examples in this book were very useful) The author happens to live in the same city as me and even stopped by my work to chat for 1/2 hour! Great guy, great book.
In fact I wanted to write a review for this book, but obviously got beaten to the punch. My only wish(2nd edition perhaps) for this book is that it spent a little more time dealing with things like logging into sites, handling redirection, multi-page forms, dealing with stupid HTML tricks that try to throw off bots, etc. But for a first edition this is a great book.
Re:Regulare Expressions for HTML?
on
Perl & LWP
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· Score: 2
I.e. if the structure of a web page changes, you can still extract the right information.
Um, OK, whatever. If I have an HTML parser and your HTML page changes, my program is broken. Whereas if I'm looking for say, the Amazon sales rank for a certain book, and the format of amazon's page changes, but I can still grep for Amazon Sales Rank: xxx, I still have a working program.
What diploma thesis? Where's the link? Parent post should be considered a troll until further explanation is given.
Besides, this book in fact covers HTML parsers in addition to other useful techniques, like regular expressions. And since when is HTML a dyck language?
Avoiding 'goto' was one of the first things I ever learned in my first programming class. It is to be avoided because it leads to 'spaghetti code' - or code in which the execution of the program jumps all over the place, rather than an orderly, line-by-line execution of code. Spaghetti code is rather unreadable and unmaintainable.
I've never seen anything that could be accomplished with a goto that couldn't be accomplished by simply calling functions.
Then again, now that I think of it, if gotos are bad, recursion could be considered bad for the same reason - because it can be difficult to tell sometimes where code is being executed. Try following the code in a recursive descent parser and you'll see what I mean.
get their bandwidth from? What I really want to know is why pricing of T1 lines has remained amazingly static since, oh, 1996. I figured by now T1's would be installed in new housing and cost under $100 a month. I realized back then gains in networking wouldn't be like the gains in CPU speed(remember back in 1996 a "good" computer was a Pentium 133 with 16MB or RAM), but I figured there would be at least some improvement every year.
Nope. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Bandwidth is still every bit as expensive as it was when we were still using 486's and first gen Pentiums. No wonder the internet never took off like it should have. As I recall, many of the pie-in-the-sky projections for the dot-com companies were based on the assumption that everyone would soon have high speed bandwidth. Based on the last six years I would have to project that the internet will never see significant bandwidth gains.
Why? Because if computing and home network power continues to increase as it has, while internet connection speeds remain static, the internet itself will become more and more useless. Our own personal networks will be faster and contain more information, so why bother?
oh come on, it could have been much worse than that. Think about it. We didn't become a world power until the Spanish-American war in 1898. If the South would have won the Civil War, the U.S. would have been a much weaker country - since the North would have been the side undergoing Reconstruction instead of being the economic powerhouse that got electricity, oil, and automobiles into mass production. The South winning would have meant the U.S. as a whole would have been primarily an agrarian state with human rather than mechanical labor. Not entirely, of course, but certainly enough to cause us not to be the world leaders we became in the 20th century.
And had we not become world leaders, who knows if there would have been someone strong enough to stop communism, the nazi party, fascism, etc.
The U.S. Civil War was truly a turning point, not just for the freedom of blacks, but for all human history.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe if you check your facts you'll find that every industrialized nation has experienced just the opposite in the last 10 years.
Also, although you will undoubtedly experience a higher tax burden when the baby boom generation retires, the job opportunities and prospects will be a lot better because of the openings those retiring boomers will create. The Gen-X'ers will be next in line for the best jobs once that happens.
And so what if you got off to a bad start. Even if you are like me at the older end of the Gen-X generation you still have 30 years to go before retirement age. That's plenty enough time to correct the mistakes of our youth, plan ahead and retire comfortably.
If you even want to retire. I'm hoping medical science can do something for me in the next 30 years to increase my lifespan and my ability to enjoy it. Personally I don't really want to "retire" because people tend to keel over and die shortly after they stop using their minds and/or bodies to be productive.
And that surely wouldn't be worth a patent.
And there's no way to "improve upon OTP by turning it into a 'Many Time Pad'". You use an OTP more than once and its absolutely worthless:
CypherText1 = ClearText1 XOR Key
ClearText1 = CypherText1 XOR Key
If the key is reused, we can take CypherText1 (which is really ClearText1 XOR key) and XOR it to the original known text and get the key.
The only conceiveable way to turn an OTP into a many time pad would be to only use a segment of the pad once. Probably this is why he wanted to make the pad so big - so it could continue to be used for a while until the pad has been used up. Big deal. That is no different from standard OTP and the same results would be obtained simply by generating a new OTP every time something needed to be encrypted.
Now, I am far from an expert in cryptography - and programming an OTP is as far as I've ever gotten. But even to me this story looks very amateurish.
Since you aren't taking money, its wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem. Tell your users you self-signed to save money, no big deal. You don't have to go through a CA to use SSL, its just an added level of perceived security for a customer. The customer trusts Verisign because they are an authority and Verisign tells the customer they can trust this business. But you can take Verisign entirely out of the equation if you want.
The established certification companies are already on this list. You are not. If you self-sign, you are basically counting on your potential customers to trust you as a certification authority. They can add you to that list individually. The question is, will they?
Since you are an unknown, small company, basically your customer has to trust that you have done everything right in order to protect their security. That's a lot to ask someone. Having a big player certify you tells your potential customer that even though you are a small unknown, you have done everything right.
It's just my personal opinion, but its one based on running an e-commerce site for the last four years. Go with an established certifier. If you are doing any sort of business at all online that requires SSL you will more than make up the annual fee in the sales you don't turn away because you were too cheap to get a real certificate.
Sigh, you should be right about this, but if you were the majority of people would already be using broadband. The very few powers that be have a vested interest in keeping their product(media, software,information) scarce, so although possible, your vision of the future is not likely to take place for a very long time.
I believe the Roswell sightings are in fact the oldest and most widely publicized alien sightings, so I would guess that was where the myth began.
Since /.ers aren't known to be history buffs, you're likely to to have some nazi moderator mod you down. Oops.
That's hilarious. I only wish he had a turtle so I could create a more definitive "Programming Logo" cover.
For several reasons.
Freedom of speech and of the press and of assembly to a degree that would shame most of Europe. Not only do we have dissenters here, many, like Noam Chomsky for instance, are fairly prominent.
Freedom to keep and bear arms. You can now scratch Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand off the list of "freest nations".
Our businesses have far more freedom to hire and fire workers than the vast majority of industrialized countries. Conversely, our working population has more freedom to change jobs, move to a different location, acquire new skills.
Because our country has so much freedom, we also enjoy much higher social mobility than virtually anywhere else in the world. All that it takes to go from poor to rich here in the U.S. is the willingness to work hard.
As a result of our freedoms, we enjoy the highest standard of living in the world. From the CIA factbook: "US business firms enjoy considerably greater flexibility than their counterparts in Western Europe and Japan in decisions to expand capital plant, lay off surplus workers, and develop new products."
You might be saying, so what, that's business firms, not the general public. Well, 2/3 of all Americans are employed by small, family-owned businesses. Small business in America is widely seen to be the engine of economic growth. That's just another indicator of the freedoms we enjoy here in this country.
Far from being brainwashed, my statement about being the freest country came about as a result of trying to find another country, anywhere in the world, that could claim to have as much freedom as U.S. citizens do. I couldn't find one.
That in over 50 years since Israel was founded, their enemies still don't recognize them enough to even put them on their maps.
That Palestinian children are so brainwashed into hating Israel, scores of them have strapped bombs on themselves in order to blow themselves up as well as many Israeli citizens as they can take out.
That Iraq is able to scoff at international law, kicking out the U.N inspectors and rebuilding their weapons of mass destruction while the rest of the world(except the U.S.) turns a blind eye.
The really sad thing is that when all is said and done, Palestine will end up with no more than they were already promised before the start of the infitada. The Taliban is gone, Al-Qaeda has been scattered to the wind, and Iraq will undoubtedly see a regime change. All that vehement hatred directed toward the U.S. and Israel, and what is it going to get them? Nothing, if not less than what they had before.
That is truly sad.
What about the many stories of caffiene-addled coders working 36 hours at a time, and sleeping under their desks, coding under pressure to get the job done on time? See here for a good one.
I mean yeah, most normal people want to work 8 hours a day. But others want to be supermen, and are willing to put in long, long hours of work to beat the competition.
Props!
Larry, Perl has been accused of not being object-oriented because it only supports one of The Three Pillars(encapsulation, the other two being inheritance and polymorphism) of Object-Oriented programming.
In my experience having the programming language handle the complexities of the object type is just as good as having explicit types like int, float, string, etc. But others disagree. And, I'm sure that by creating packages that call other packages, inheritance can be simulated. Others would disagree with this as well.
Additionally, the people who criticize Perl's object-orientedness claim that Object-Oriented programming is "bolted on" to Perl, and therefore is somehow unnatural compared to a language like Java which is built to be object-oriented from the ground up.
How would you answer these critics, and how well does Perl in fact support Object-Oriented Programming, in your opinion?
its there, its in the CRT.
Good question. Now how much effort do you think it would require to achieve mastery in a particular instrument(hint: a lot)
The same can be said of any discipline, programming included.
Well, I'll be sure and give /. the benefit of the doubt. This time, the repeat was intentional! :)
and timothy posted that one as well! I was going to post the repeat but you beat me to it. I was just thinking, geez, thats pretty bad if I remember the book review and the guy that posted it in the first place didn't.
Guess I'll find out what's below 'excellent' now.
Its not required, so they are not bothering. Jeez, I'm sorry, but a bachelor's degree without even a single calculus class isn't worth the paper its printed on. And these are the people who will instruct the next generation of kids.
In fact I wanted to write a review for this book, but obviously got beaten to the punch. My only wish(2nd edition perhaps) for this book is that it spent a little more time dealing with things like logging into sites, handling redirection, multi-page forms, dealing with stupid HTML tricks that try to throw off bots, etc. But for a first edition this is a great book.
Um, OK, whatever. If I have an HTML parser and your HTML page changes, my program is broken. Whereas if I'm looking for say, the Amazon sales rank for a certain book, and the format of amazon's page changes, but I can still grep for Amazon Sales Rank: xxx, I still have a working program.
What diploma thesis? Where's the link? Parent post should be considered a troll until further explanation is given.
Besides, this book in fact covers HTML parsers in addition to other useful techniques, like regular expressions. And since when is HTML a dyck language?
I've never seen anything that could be accomplished with a goto that couldn't be accomplished by simply calling functions.
Then again, now that I think of it, if gotos are bad, recursion could be considered bad for the same reason - because it can be difficult to tell sometimes where code is being executed. Try following the code in a recursive descent parser and you'll see what I mean.
Nope. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Bandwidth is still every bit as expensive as it was when we were still using 486's and first gen Pentiums. No wonder the internet never took off like it should have. As I recall, many of the pie-in-the-sky projections for the dot-com companies were based on the assumption that everyone would soon have high speed bandwidth. Based on the last six years I would have to project that the internet will never see significant bandwidth gains.
Why? Because if computing and home network power continues to increase as it has, while internet connection speeds remain static, the internet itself will become more and more useless. Our own personal networks will be faster and contain more information, so why bother?
And had we not become world leaders, who knows if there would have been someone strong enough to stop communism, the nazi party, fascism, etc.
The U.S. Civil War was truly a turning point, not just for the freedom of blacks, but for all human history.