Just get an RFID reader, like many stores will soon have, and see if you can read the RFID number from inside your passport. If you can read the number, it's not shielded.
It seems as though the author's main complaint is that instead of using native american or other ethnic actors, the producers used almost all white actors. That complaint is fine and good if race plays a role in the story, but her original reason for making diverse characters comes across as pretty shallow ("I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill"). Sure, it would have been nice to have a diverse cast, and it would have been more realistic, but the author comes across as very whiney in her blog. Perhaps it was the use of "honky" when it was completely inappropriate.
Contrary to popular belief, Google does not have unlimited processing ability. Anyone who has worked with databases knows that sorting many records adds quite a bit to processing time and processing power. If by removing the sort by date ability they're freeing up more processing power for video search and other projects, then that's a good thing. You're not paying for it either way.
Besides, they didn't remove search by date (look in advanced search options)... they removed the ability to sort by date within a search. Not that big of a deal, so settle down.
If you've been turned down for credit, they're required to mail you a copy of your credit report within 60 days. You don't even have to request it. It was a part of the Fair Credit laws that were passed in the mid 90's.
Except that a large number of universities receive state and federal money. I don't even think they're trying to track progress within college; I think it's moreso that they want to see which high schools are actually getting students enrolled and graduated from college. There's currently no way to do this, so there's no metrics for high school achievement.
That said, I'm normally one of the people saying 'so what', but in this case I don't agree with a national database that includes names and social security numbers. Instead just have a database that anonymously tracks which HS a student came from and what grade they've achieved in college, as well as if they have a degree or not. Much simpler database and it'll achieve all of the same things.
HTML? HTML is a markup language (it's in the name), not a programming language. This is like calling the garbage that Word spits out programming code.
Anyway, it's a good idea for anyone to learn HTML (or even better, XHTML), since it's everywhere now. However, learning php as a first programming language is a bad idea. Don't get me wrong, php is THE language I use for work (a little Perl and C++ on the side), but it won't allow a person to learn any other programming languages any easier.
I started with Pascal, then C++, and later Perl, PHP, and many more. Pascal is actually a VERY good starter language, but doesn't have a whole lot of real-world applications. Perl is a good starting place, but people should learn the "right" way to do it instead of the way it's commonly used. use strict and turn on warnings is the best way to do this. Then Perl is a good starting point and will making learning more complicated languages (C++, Java, etc) or simpler languages (PHP, Basic, Python) much easier.
We use two different classification levels. The first is tagged spam, the other is blocked spam. Out of over 1,000,000 email messages, I've only had 2 complaints about non-spam being marked as spam. As for messages being blocked, I've scanned the logfiles and have never seen one handled improperly. For an average user per day, we get around 50 blocked, 2-3 tagged, 20 virus infected, and 10 allowed through.
We turn off all bounce messages on the system, and just glance through the blocked messages log once in a while. If you take the time to train the Baynesian filter, it will be even more accurate than my results.
I believe they just put in support for SPF (think I noticed it in the latest firmware), but we haven't implemented it yet.
Barracuda has a 30 day trial, where you can get a unit and try it out. I'd recommend doing so. If you don't like how it works, just return it. The only changes you need to make are to have your firewall point incoming email to the barracuda (instead of your current email server) and then point the cuda to your email server. Simple.:)
Purchase a Barracuda Spam Firewall (see ads on Slashdot for website address). We purchased the smallest one for around $1000, spent 10 minutes rack mounting it and configuring it, and have only had to spend 5 minutes every couple of months to update the firmware (it notifies us via email when new firmware is available). So we spent $1000 and less than 30 minutes a year for a product that has worked flawlessly. It's actually a very cost effective solution. It evens blocks a lot of email viruses.
This is a logical step considering the military suits they're designed come with a computer built in. A secure network will be required for tracking and communicating with soliders on the battlefield. You obviously wouldn't want them on any public network.
A small side-note: I doubt www content will be a primary usage of the network. Possibly some voice-over-IP applications and a ton of proprietary stuff.
I like everything you said, except one problem: 4 candidates per screen with a "more" button. Anyone who designs web pages or newspapers knows that people don't like going "below the fold/crease". A voter who is undecided (or lazy for that matter) is less likely to even see a candidate on the 4th page than one on the 1st page. You get the same problems with touchscreens, but the scrolling may be more intuitive for most people.
Perhaps one solution would be to have the software randomize the order of the candidates, so it would eliminate the crease arguement altogether. You could have your 5 buttons then.
Each machine would still require a printer for our voter-verified paper trail, but coming up with a fast, efficient, inexpensive, and stable (no jams) shouldn't be THAT big of an issue.;)
See here. Averages out to just over 42 hours per week over the entire year. Hell, even if you put in a month of 85 hour weeks you're still under 45h/week average.
The fact remains that if they don't like the policies of the company, they can move on to another job. There's plenty of programmers out there without jobs right now that WOULD work those hours.
Another way to look at this. Since they consider 48 hours more than usual (the first crunch time), it's safe to assume they usually work 40 hour weeks. Let's say that's for 42 weeks a year. Let's say 6 48 hour weeks and 2 85 hour weeks (missing 2 weeks are vacation). That averages out to about 42 hours / week over the year. Not bad, IMHO.
Any/. reader who has worked at a software company knows that these things go on before every major release. I glanced quickly at the article and noticed 8 hour days, 6 day weeks for a while before crunch time. That's 48 hours. How many Slashdotters work at least a 48 hour week EVERY week, with no overtime pay? Raise you hand. See all those hands... it's common. And crunch time? Even non-programmers face periods of time like this. My company is moving right now and we've had to put in long hours for the past month to get everything in order.
It's just an inevitable consequence of working in this industry, and most of us understood that even before going to school for it. Get over it... there's a lot of IT people that would LOVE to work at EA, even with the long hours. Hell, there's many that don't even have a job right now. If your husband doesn't like it, tell him to quit and find a different job. That simple..
The original poster made the point that the ads would be attached to email pulled from Gmail's POP3 server, not that the ads would be attached to all OUTGOING emails. Big difference. Then only the people using the POP3 server would have ads attached to their messages, whereas people using the web interface would still see them on the page itself. Same number of ad hits for Google, and a nice feature for users that want POP3.
Yeah, now that I've RTFA, I realize just how cool these advances are. They've basically taken some of LISP and built it into Perl, but added a few extensions and predefined strings on top of it. Besides looking MUCH cleaner and being MUCH easier to read/maintain, it should be much more powerful for programmers that know LISP.
Those of us that use Perl as more than just system duct-tape know it's a programming language. Perl 6 will make that even more clear by being based on OO fundamentals rather than being a procedural language with OO tacked on top of it. This is just another debate that makes the OS community look like a bunch of freaks and zealots... just like the GNU/Linux thing. Get over it and start focusing on what the software does, not how to classify/name it.
Keep the polls open for a few days? That does nothing to help the problem. You realize that in many areas of the country they're struggling to get the required election inspectors at each polling station? You realize that these people already give 12 hours of their day, and that many of them are senior citizens? You can't ask them to work three 12 hour days in a row, and you can't find the workforce to fill in where needed.
The nation as a whole already acknowledges every citizen's right to vote, hence the creation of absentee ballots, ballots for prisoners who don't have a felony conviction, and ballots for homeless citizens.
The solution to the problem is to have an electronic voting machine that produces a voter-verified paper slip that is placed in a locked box in case of a recount. Slot machine inspectors in Las Vegas have recommended them for Nevada, which is sufficient recommendation for me.
Another solution to many voting problems is the creation of a national identification card, and require that it be shown when voting, but most people on Slashdot will complain about potential privacy issues. Did you know that you don't need to show photo ID to vote? You could easily vote multiple times, just as a Marquette student did in the 2000 election. He wouldn't have gotten caught if he didn't brag about it.
Obviously multilayered security is a solution to many problems. A worm would have to exploit problems at multiple levels before being able to do what it wants. This would make it much harder for the average script kiddie to write a worm, and would force an excellent programmer to write a much larger program. It also has the benefit of stopping worm variations by applying a security fix at any one of the security levels, since it's unlikely for that complex a worm to include multiple attacks for every level.
My big problem with the movie, based on the trailers, is that they just adapted the graphical style of Van Allsburg to animation. While the illustrations in the book are riveting and amazingly done, I don't think they work well as animation. It looks hokey and kind of creepy. I don't know how they could have done this differently while paying the proper respect to Van Allsburg. It's the same as seeing Mickey Mouse in 3D animation... it just doesn't have the proper feel.
Except not all situations that require speakers need high quality. For example, we have a VoIP system at work that allows users to listen to voicemail from their Exchange account. It requires speakers, obviously. Why would we want to hook up a large stereo for each user in this situation?
Second, if computers all go to wireless sound, I'm sure you'd see stereos hit the market that have Bluetooth (or whatever standard) receivers inside. Then you don't even need a cable.
Why not have a small cradle to charge the speakers when you're not using them? That would be ideal for a headphone version as well. As far as audiophiles go, this is ideal. You could have the computer send the signal digitally, so if their stereo has a bluetooth receiver or similar they'd get digital all the way to their high end equipment. Then the quality of the wires or jacks don't play a role, just the quality of the speaker itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Just get an RFID reader, like many stores will soon have, and see if you can read the RFID number from inside your passport. If you can read the number, it's not shielded.
It seems as though the author's main complaint is that instead of using native american or other ethnic actors, the producers used almost all white actors. That complaint is fine and good if race plays a role in the story, but her original reason for making diverse characters comes across as pretty shallow ("I didn't see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill"). Sure, it would have been nice to have a diverse cast, and it would have been more realistic, but the author comes across as very whiney in her blog. Perhaps it was the use of "honky" when it was completely inappropriate.
:/
Why does everything have to be about race?
- refridgerator for the Internet
- shoehorn for the Internet
- cable box for the Internet
- "Pure Funk" cd for the Internet
A Tivo for the Internet is about as useful as the above. Use your browser cache, IM history, email storage options, etc.
Contrary to popular belief, Google does not have unlimited processing ability. Anyone who has worked with databases knows that sorting many records adds quite a bit to processing time and processing power. If by removing the sort by date ability they're freeing up more processing power for video search and other projects, then that's a good thing. You're not paying for it either way.
Besides, they didn't remove search by date (look in advanced search options)... they removed the ability to sort by date within a search. Not that big of a deal, so settle down.
If you've been turned down for credit, they're required to mail you a copy of your credit report within 60 days. You don't even have to request it. It was a part of the Fair Credit laws that were passed in the mid 90's.
Except that a large number of universities receive state and federal money. I don't even think they're trying to track progress within college; I think it's moreso that they want to see which high schools are actually getting students enrolled and graduated from college. There's currently no way to do this, so there's no metrics for high school achievement.
That said, I'm normally one of the people saying 'so what', but in this case I don't agree with a national database that includes names and social security numbers. Instead just have a database that anonymously tracks which HS a student came from and what grade they've achieved in college, as well as if they have a degree or not. Much simpler database and it'll achieve all of the same things.
HTML? HTML is a markup language (it's in the name), not a programming language. This is like calling the garbage that Word spits out programming code.
Anyway, it's a good idea for anyone to learn HTML (or even better, XHTML), since it's everywhere now. However, learning php as a first programming language is a bad idea. Don't get me wrong, php is THE language I use for work (a little Perl and C++ on the side), but it won't allow a person to learn any other programming languages any easier.
I started with Pascal, then C++, and later Perl, PHP, and many more. Pascal is actually a VERY good starter language, but doesn't have a whole lot of real-world applications. Perl is a good starting place, but people should learn the "right" way to do it instead of the way it's commonly used. use strict and turn on warnings is the best way to do this. Then Perl is a good starting point and will making learning more complicated languages (C++, Java, etc) or simpler languages (PHP, Basic, Python) much easier.
We use two different classification levels. The first is tagged spam, the other is blocked spam. Out of over 1,000,000 email messages, I've only had 2 complaints about non-spam being marked as spam. As for messages being blocked, I've scanned the logfiles and have never seen one handled improperly. For an average user per day, we get around 50 blocked, 2-3 tagged, 20 virus infected, and 10 allowed through.
:)
We turn off all bounce messages on the system, and just glance through the blocked messages log once in a while. If you take the time to train the Baynesian filter, it will be even more accurate than my results.
I believe they just put in support for SPF (think I noticed it in the latest firmware), but we haven't implemented it yet.
Barracuda has a 30 day trial, where you can get a unit and try it out. I'd recommend doing so. If you don't like how it works, just return it. The only changes you need to make are to have your firewall point incoming email to the barracuda (instead of your current email server) and then point the cuda to your email server. Simple.
Purchase a Barracuda Spam Firewall (see ads on Slashdot for website address). We purchased the smallest one for around $1000, spent 10 minutes rack mounting it and configuring it, and have only had to spend 5 minutes every couple of months to update the firmware (it notifies us via email when new firmware is available). So we spent $1000 and less than 30 minutes a year for a product that has worked flawlessly. It's actually a very cost effective solution. It evens blocks a lot of email viruses.
More than likely it's an ISP thing. Remember that some ISPs cache websites, especially ones as popular as Google.
This is a logical step considering the military suits they're designed come with a computer built in. A secure network will be required for tracking and communicating with soliders on the battlefield. You obviously wouldn't want them on any public network.
A small side-note: I doubt www content will be a primary usage of the network. Possibly some voice-over-IP applications and a ton of proprietary stuff.
I like everything you said, except one problem: 4 candidates per screen with a "more" button. Anyone who designs web pages or newspapers knows that people don't like going "below the fold/crease". A voter who is undecided (or lazy for that matter) is less likely to even see a candidate on the 4th page than one on the 1st page. You get the same problems with touchscreens, but the scrolling may be more intuitive for most people.
;)
Perhaps one solution would be to have the software randomize the order of the candidates, so it would eliminate the crease arguement altogether. You could have your 5 buttons then.
Each machine would still require a printer for our voter-verified paper trail, but coming up with a fast, efficient, inexpensive, and stable (no jams) shouldn't be THAT big of an issue.
See here. Averages out to just over 42 hours per week over the entire year. Hell, even if you put in a month of 85 hour weeks you're still under 45h/week average.
The fact remains that if they don't like the policies of the company, they can move on to another job. There's plenty of programmers out there without jobs right now that WOULD work those hours.
Another way to look at this. Since they consider 48 hours more than usual (the first crunch time), it's safe to assume they usually work 40 hour weeks. Let's say that's for 42 weeks a year. Let's say 6 48 hour weeks and 2 85 hour weeks (missing 2 weeks are vacation). That averages out to about 42 hours / week over the year. Not bad, IMHO.
Any /. reader who has worked at a software company knows that these things go on before every major release. I glanced quickly at the article and noticed 8 hour days, 6 day weeks for a while before crunch time. That's 48 hours. How many Slashdotters work at least a 48 hour week EVERY week, with no overtime pay? Raise you hand. See all those hands... it's common. And crunch time? Even non-programmers face periods of time like this. My company is moving right now and we've had to put in long hours for the past month to get everything in order.
It's just an inevitable consequence of working in this industry, and most of us understood that even before going to school for it. Get over it... there's a lot of IT people that would LOVE to work at EA, even with the long hours. Hell, there's many that don't even have a job right now. If your husband doesn't like it, tell him to quit and find a different job. That simple..
The original poster made the point that the ads would be attached to email pulled from Gmail's POP3 server, not that the ads would be attached to all OUTGOING emails. Big difference. Then only the people using the POP3 server would have ads attached to their messages, whereas people using the web interface would still see them on the page itself. Same number of ad hits for Google, and a nice feature for users that want POP3.
Yeah, now that I've RTFA, I realize just how cool these advances are. They've basically taken some of LISP and built it into Perl, but added a few extensions and predefined strings on top of it. Besides looking MUCH cleaner and being MUCH easier to read/maintain, it should be much more powerful for programmers that know LISP.
Those of us that use Perl as more than just system duct-tape know it's a programming language. Perl 6 will make that even more clear by being based on OO fundamentals rather than being a procedural language with OO tacked on top of it. This is just another debate that makes the OS community look like a bunch of freaks and zealots... just like the GNU/Linux thing. Get over it and start focusing on what the software does, not how to classify/name it.
Keep the polls open for a few days? That does nothing to help the problem. You realize that in many areas of the country they're struggling to get the required election inspectors at each polling station? You realize that these people already give 12 hours of their day, and that many of them are senior citizens? You can't ask them to work three 12 hour days in a row, and you can't find the workforce to fill in where needed.
The nation as a whole already acknowledges every citizen's right to vote, hence the creation of absentee ballots, ballots for prisoners who don't have a felony conviction, and ballots for homeless citizens.
The solution to the problem is to have an electronic voting machine that produces a voter-verified paper slip that is placed in a locked box in case of a recount. Slot machine inspectors in Las Vegas have recommended them for Nevada, which is sufficient recommendation for me.
Another solution to many voting problems is the creation of a national identification card, and require that it be shown when voting, but most people on Slashdot will complain about potential privacy issues. Did you know that you don't need to show photo ID to vote? You could easily vote multiple times, just as a Marquette student did in the 2000 election. He wouldn't have gotten caught if he didn't brag about it.
Obviously multilayered security is a solution to many problems. A worm would have to exploit problems at multiple levels before being able to do what it wants. This would make it much harder for the average script kiddie to write a worm, and would force an excellent programmer to write a much larger program. It also has the benefit of stopping worm variations by applying a security fix at any one of the security levels, since it's unlikely for that complex a worm to include multiple attacks for every level.
My big problem with the movie, based on the trailers, is that they just adapted the graphical style of Van Allsburg to animation. While the illustrations in the book are riveting and amazingly done, I don't think they work well as animation. It looks hokey and kind of creepy. I don't know how they could have done this differently while paying the proper respect to Van Allsburg. It's the same as seeing Mickey Mouse in 3D animation... it just doesn't have the proper feel.
Except not all situations that require speakers need high quality. For example, we have a VoIP system at work that allows users to listen to voicemail from their Exchange account. It requires speakers, obviously. Why would we want to hook up a large stereo for each user in this situation?
Second, if computers all go to wireless sound, I'm sure you'd see stereos hit the market that have Bluetooth (or whatever standard) receivers inside. Then you don't even need a cable.
Why not have a small cradle to charge the speakers when you're not using them? That would be ideal for a headphone version as well. As far as audiophiles go, this is ideal. You could have the computer send the signal digitally, so if their stereo has a bluetooth receiver or similar they'd get digital all the way to their high end equipment. Then the quality of the wires or jacks don't play a role, just the quality of the speaker itself.
PS: # should read: "better than the alternative", since some people that will vote Republican feel that way.
Bu++RWI
:(
Hmm... Bu++ looks like Butt.