as one of those unfortunate corporate slaves, I have been used to being able to set group policies and using deployment tools for IE for use in the coporate environment (for forcing proxy settings as one of many possible examples), how do I do this with firefox?
Scripting, my friend, scripting. For instance, I've got a script that makes sure the latest version of Firefox is installed, then sets the "forced proxy" for IE and FireFox (runs on any NT/2K/XP 'cmd.exe' shell, no VBscript). There are plenty of ways to force the script to run...
You're speaking to a community of people who haven't been outside of the basement in years. Everything they know about wildlife is from watching Disney movies. They think you want to kill Bambi, the sentient, loving deer. And Thumper!
Myself, I grew up in Texas where killing critters and varments is still considered an inalienable right. And I have a great story about punting a 'possum (literally).
With all due respect, I think your reaction is little bit knee-jerk on this. While, as it is often stated, there is no silver bullet and there will definitely be places where this is inappropriate, there are quite a few areas where it will work nicely. I'll be the first to admit I'm fairly naive when it comes to Java Server's caching capabilities (I'm more of a php / perl / shell scripting guy).
Serializing data to the disk is a good suggestion in many cases. Perl is fairly rich in this area, however, PHP (far more popular for web development, especially with less experienced programmers) is not. It has a serialize to string function, however, this is not terribly useful if you have several variables (unless you want to deal with delimiting the variables, making sure the proper character(s) are escaped, and then unrolling that later).
I'd absolutely agree that caching isn't rocket science for experienced programmers, however, many web developers cut their teeth on PHP (or - gasp / choke - visual basic) and have very little background in theory outside of making their pages work. They probably will not seek to become programming experts. The beauty of this approach (ok, maybe not beauty, but perhaps 'utility') is that it's extremely simple to understand. Basic file I/O and string concatination have a very gentle learning curve for the target audience. They don't have to worry about installing third-party libraries on their web server (which may or may not even be possible). They also don't have to worry about the various cases and caveats inherent in third-party caching solutions. This is simple enough to understand in its entirety - there are no 'black-box' aspects to it.
My goal here is to not turn web developers into professional programmers - not that it's not a noble goal, it's just not a realistic one. It's for people to be able to browse sites without seeing "could not connect..." errors (oh, yeah, and to help people have web sites that don't go down like a two-dollar hooker). You have to keep in mind that sometimes quick & simple is better than complex but elegant.
Why stop with sex offenders? Why not do this to all criminals? It would certainly make solving crimes a lot easier if you could look up a crime scene in a database and see who was there at the time.
Like many things in life, you weight the costs (in terms of civil liberties, etc) vs. the benefits (women and children not being raped and murdered). I'll admit I was dead wrong on the 100% statistic - it's "only" 40% - 60%, depending on whose numbers you use, whether you're talking about rapests or child molesters, etc. Let's split the difference and say half will commit another violent sexual offense. If that doesn't scare the hell out of you, you must be taking an extremely abstract view of things (I would suggest meeting some victims) or you are one heartless bastard.
Perhaps you are not familiar with the effects of rape and child molestation. It's easily the most seriously damaging offense outside of murder. This is not a crime that is "over and done with" right away, like robbery or vandalism or fraud. The effects last for years, if not a lifetime. It really, really fucks the person up. It can lead to long-term depression and suicide. Considering the costs of the crime, extra precautions are warranted.
It's your job as a parent to keep track of your children. It's your job as a parent to assume every stranger is dangerous to your child until you know otherwise. Don't expect the government to take care of your parental responsibilities.
Obviously you don't have children (especially teenagers). Your statement reflects an astounding degree of ignorance. Basically, what you are saying is that a parent needs to accompany their child everywhere, 24/7, until they 'leave the nest' - otherwise, it's unrealistic that they protect their children from every stranger romaing around.
I'm not going to wish you or those you know harm, but I think you need a serious case of perspective. I would suggest getting to know at least one victim of rape or child molestation and trying to help them through their recovery. Perhaps once you've helped a friend or family member put their life back together after this sort of tragedy you'll realize how horrendous the crimes we're discussing are, and how evil the people who commit them are. Perhaps it would help you get down from your ivory tower of bullshit and allow you to participate in the real world, where really (preventable) bad things happen to people that don't deserve it. Perhaps you'll come to be really annoyed by the naive asshats like yourself that live in a world of abstractions and pretend that weighing the costs and benefits of liberty and the persuit of happiness can be reduced to some simple "one size fits all" formula.
There have been numerous studies; quoting the first one you find (or the one that's convenient for your point) is hardly conclusive evidence. Additionally, I could not determine (the links referred to by this page were broken) if they only included convicted offenses, or offenses that did not result in convictions
Studies done using polygraphs (outside of law enforcement) show that ~45%% had committed additional violent sexual crimes (in line with the statistics you show), but 86% (nearly all of them!) had committed some form of non-violent sex crime.
Even if I am dead wrong and the actual rate is 42%, that's pretty high. Consided the amount of damage done by a rape or rape / murder vs. other crimes. You have to either really hate women or be completely clueless as to the consequences of something like this to not consider this an extremely bad situation (for your sake, I hope it's the latter). This isn't like robbery or vandalism or jaywalking, this really fucks up (or ends) somebody's life.
Because the rate of recidivism for violent sex offenders is nearly 100%, which means that they will almost certainly rape or murder someone it the future. Now, one could argue that people like this should be locked up permanently or at least be placed under very close supervision, but currently the law says that at one point or other we have to let them go.
This would not be the first step on a slippery slope. There are already a few classes of people that we track because they have proven to pose a threat to society. The key word here is proven - they've already been convicted of a serious crime, and as a condition of their (usually early) release from prison, they agree to be tracked. (Ok, ok, Martha Stewart is probably an exception unless you consider a complete lack of modernity in decor to be a threat to humanity, which I do.) This is very similar. We're dealing with people that are nearly impossible to rehabilitate. We're releasing them on the hope that they will behave, but we should also recognize the extreme danger that they do present.
Absolutely. I've been meaning to write an article on this (in my near-infinitely long queue, after the stuff that pays real money). The problem is that many web designers (esp. those without other programming backgrounds) learn the beauty of storing data in databases and they become overly enamoured with it. Databases are appropriate for many web applications but if you're hitting the database to, for instance, draw your home page, you're going to beat your server to death and your viewers are going to see a lot of "Cannot connect to MySQL / MSSQL / whatever".
There are two ways (maybe more, but these work for me) around this:
1) fairly simple sets of information that are infrequently updated should be stored in a text file (.INI format, XML, whatever you just pulled out of your ass). This would probably include page menus, tables of links to external sites, etc.
2) Cache the results of frequent, simple queries. The logic goes something likes this:
A) Collect your variables, turn them into a filename-compatible string, with two extensions - one for counting page hits on an hourly (use discretion here) basis, the other for caching generated pages.
B) Check to see if the page counting file exists; if it does, then increment the count. No elaborate locking mechanisms are necessary, because we're just trying to find out if a query is getting repeated at a high frequency. If we miss one or two that's ok. Check to see if the count is beyond a certain threshhold. If it is, then we start the page caching process; if not we send the page to the browser.
C) Check to see if such a cached generated-page file exists. If it does, send said file to the user's browser. Be sure to 'touch' or otherwise increment the file's mod date in the process (for the next step).
D) Run a reaping process to make sure your server doesn't fill up with such files. Delete anything that hasn't been updated in an hour (or day or whatever)
E) If you haven't already sent a cached page to the browser, generate the page as normal. The only difference is that rather than 'echo'ing or 'print'ing or whatever the results to the user's browser, you should accumulate them in a rather long string (hopefully you're using a language that won't let this overflow).
F) If your query count is over the threshhold , then write this string to the generated-page cache file.
G) Write the string out to the user's browser.
H) You can still have 'slightly dynamic content' like rotating banner ads, etc. implemented with a search-and-replace function within the generated page cache file / string.
Even though this looks like a lot of work, it's usually less than 50 lines of code per page, much of which can be copy/pasted, worked into a library, etc.
Wow, just outlined the article... maybe I'll get to it sooner than I thought...
Using flash (or, better yet, MRAM - faster, unlimited writes), to hold disk metadate, file and folder allocation information, etc, rather than just as a giant write-back cache.
Support for this would have to be included on a filesystem level, but if this were available I'd imagine the FOSS community would have it testable in a few days, and stable enough for general use in a few weeks.
Something about news articles in general (as I learned from one of my clients, a PR agency) - many "reporters" create "stories" by basically doing some light editing (if that) on a press release. If you want to get your product or service in a newspaper, magazine, etc., the best thing to do is to have a pre-written piece that the "reporter" can slap their name on. It's a reasonable bet, for instance, that any positive story in your local paper about some local business was written either by that business or their PR agency. That doesn't necessarily mean it contains untrue information, but it certainly colors whatever facts are included.
This is the actual main reason for many people's complaints that news sources lean too far left or right or whatever - much of the "news" is generated by PR firms, advocacy groups, political parties, etc., given a very thin coat of paint, and slapped on the page.
Some actual work is done on the editorial page, and in the reviews (although there have been some "reviews" done along these lines for things like restaurants - caveat emptor), but by and large you should take most newspaper and magazine stories with an appropriate grain of salt (unless you have a particularly high level of confidence in a specific writer or publication).
The head of a corporation that's sitting on ~US$50 Billion in cash yet whines that it doesn't have the resources / capabilities (they really mean "financial interest") in fixing major security defects in their less-than-current products is whining that they need cheaper labor?!??
I'm a fairly pro-immigration guy, but in this particular case Bill Gates can fuck himself in the ass with a cactus.
Was it really necessary to include a picture of a cactus? I mean honestly.
Well, yeah. There is a large variety of cacti out there - everything from little tiny ones to 20-foot saguaros. Some have tiny, thin needles, others have large, thick spikes.
The Cactus in question is about 4 inches in diameter, 3 feet high, with spikes about 3 inches long; each individual spike is surrounded by a cluster of inch-long spikes. This is a cactus appropriate for inflicting major rectal damage on fuckheads like the one mentioned here.
The head of a corporation that's sitting on ~US$50 Billion in cash yet whines that it doesn't have the resources / capabilities (they really mean "financial interest") in fixing major security defects in their less-than-current products is whining that they need cheaper labor?!??
I'm a fairly pro-immigration guy, but in this particular case Bill Gates can fuck himself in the ass with a cactus.
My basic reaction is that superconducting approaches make much more sense. Weight is pretty much not a factor for normal usages. When the quantity of electricity involved is large enough that the weight does become a factor, then you're probably thinking of power transmission lines, and in that scenario you can consider the tradeoff for seriously large amounts of power. I can imagine a small refrigerated tunnel containing a high-temperature ceramic semiconductor and carrying extremely large amounts of electricity with very little lossage.
Ummmm, dude, NASA is the one setting up the grant. That would imply that they're thinking about using it in spacecraft, satellites, probes, etc. where weight is a huge fucking deal.
From TFA:
"This is a small step but a very significant one from our perspective, as we try to develop new technology that will help us as we send humans out from Earth and into space," said Jefferson Howell Jr., director of NASA's Johnson Space Center. ...
NASA hopes to outfit future spacecraft with quantum wires rather than heavier copper wires. Doing so could shave critical pounds, which would save money on fuel and, ultimately, allow the craft to go farther into space. ...
Some engineers have also talked about building a 62,000-mile-long tether made of nanotubes for a space elevator that would carry astronauts and cargo into orbit.
Sorry, but you missed the point by about a lightyear.
A quote from within said piece to entice your fancy:
Of course these wires cost nearly as much as the DVD player itself, even more if you include the Monster-brand power filtration adapting converter unit which instantly converts your cash into lines of high grade Columbian cocaine for the company's CEO.
that I don't give a rusty fuck what George Lucas says, does, produces, or otherwise shits out onto the screen.
C'mon people. He's not been behind a great movie since "Empire", and notice that he didn't write the screenplay for or direct that one. Yes, he made a few classics. He founded what is still perhaps the world's best FX shop (ILM). He got thousands of theaters to upgrade to a better viewing / listening environment with the THX certification program. However, he's crashed and burned badly since. Why keep giving him so much attention?
One thing that always rubs me the wrong way is how proponents of Open Source tend to refer to Ms. Didio as "didiot." Being dishonest or even disingenuous does not neccessarily indicate a lack of intelligence. In fact, she's probably making good money doing very little real work; one could consider her smart.
A much better name would be "Dildio" - seeing as she provides an artificial source of stimulation and pleasure to those whos normal equipment is... lacking (you do know why they call it "Micro-Soft"?).
A spoon? That's rather pedestrian and boring. Try something edgier and more modern. These days, I use "Fuck 'em in the ass with a cactus." That tends to get the point across (pun intended).
Slashdot Mirror
What color is the screen when it crashes?
You're speaking to a community of people who haven't been outside of the basement in years. Everything they know about wildlife is from watching Disney movies. They think you want to kill Bambi, the sentient, loving deer. And Thumper!
Myself, I grew up in Texas where killing critters and varments is still considered an inalienable right. And I have a great story about punting a 'possum (literally).
With all due respect, I think your reaction is little bit knee-jerk on this. While, as it is often stated, there is no silver bullet and there will definitely be places where this is inappropriate, there are quite a few areas where it will work nicely. I'll be the first to admit I'm fairly naive when it comes to Java Server's caching capabilities (I'm more of a php / perl / shell scripting guy).
Serializing data to the disk is a good suggestion in many cases. Perl is fairly rich in this area, however, PHP (far more popular for web development, especially with less experienced programmers) is not. It has a serialize to string function, however, this is not terribly useful if you have several variables (unless you want to deal with delimiting the variables, making sure the proper character(s) are escaped, and then unrolling that later).
I'd absolutely agree that caching isn't rocket science for experienced programmers, however, many web developers cut their teeth on PHP (or - gasp / choke - visual basic) and have very little background in theory outside of making their pages work. They probably will not seek to become programming experts. The beauty of this approach (ok, maybe not beauty, but perhaps 'utility') is that it's extremely simple to understand. Basic file I/O and string concatination have a very gentle learning curve for the target audience. They don't have to worry about installing third-party libraries on their web server (which may or may not even be possible). They also don't have to worry about the various cases and caveats inherent in third-party caching solutions. This is simple enough to understand in its entirety - there are no 'black-box' aspects to it.
My goal here is to not turn web developers into professional programmers - not that it's not a noble goal, it's just not a realistic one. It's for people to be able to browse sites without seeing "could not connect..." errors (oh, yeah, and to help people have web sites that don't go down like a two-dollar hooker). You have to keep in mind that sometimes quick & simple is better than complex but elegant.
Hell, I'd mod him up just for the TI99-4/A mention...
Perhaps you are not familiar with the effects of rape and child molestation. It's easily the most seriously damaging offense outside of murder. This is not a crime that is "over and done with" right away, like robbery or vandalism or fraud. The effects last for years, if not a lifetime. It really, really fucks the person up. It can lead to long-term depression and suicide. Considering the costs of the crime, extra precautions are warranted.
Obviously you don't have children (especially teenagers). Your statement reflects an astounding degree of ignorance. Basically, what you are saying is that a parent needs to accompany their child everywhere, 24/7, until they 'leave the nest' - otherwise, it's unrealistic that they protect their children from every stranger romaing around.
I'm not going to wish you or those you know harm, but I think you need a serious case of perspective. I would suggest getting to know at least one victim of rape or child molestation and trying to help them through their recovery. Perhaps once you've helped a friend or family member put their life back together after this sort of tragedy you'll realize how horrendous the crimes we're discussing are, and how evil the people who commit them are. Perhaps it would help you get down from your ivory tower of bullshit and allow you to participate in the real world, where really (preventable) bad things happen to people that don't deserve it. Perhaps you'll come to be really annoyed by the naive asshats like yourself that live in a world of abstractions and pretend that weighing the costs and benefits of liberty and the persuit of happiness can be reduced to some simple "one size fits all" formula.
There have been numerous studies; quoting the first one you find (or the one that's convenient for your point) is hardly conclusive evidence. Additionally, I could not determine (the links referred to by this page were broken) if they only included convicted offenses, or offenses that did not result in convictions
Studies done using polygraphs (outside of law enforcement) show that ~45%% had committed additional violent sexual crimes (in line with the statistics you show), but 86% (nearly all of them!) had committed some form of non-violent sex crime.
Even if I am dead wrong and the actual rate is 42%, that's pretty high. Consided the amount of damage done by a rape or rape / murder vs. other crimes. You have to either really hate women or be completely clueless as to the consequences of something like this to not consider this an extremely bad situation (for your sake, I hope it's the latter). This isn't like robbery or vandalism or jaywalking, this really fucks up (or ends) somebody's life.
Because the rate of recidivism for violent sex offenders is nearly 100%, which means that they will almost certainly rape or murder someone it the future. Now, one could argue that people like this should be locked up permanently or at least be placed under very close supervision, but currently the law says that at one point or other we have to let them go.
This would not be the first step on a slippery slope. There are already a few classes of people that we track because they have proven to pose a threat to society. The key word here is proven - they've already been convicted of a serious crime, and as a condition of their (usually early) release from prison, they agree to be tracked. (Ok, ok, Martha Stewart is probably an exception unless you consider a complete lack of modernity in decor to be a threat to humanity, which I do.) This is very similar. We're dealing with people that are nearly impossible to rehabilitate. We're releasing them on the hope that they will behave, but we should also recognize the extreme danger that they do present.
Absolutely. I've been meaning to write an article on this (in my near-infinitely long queue, after the stuff that pays real money). The problem is that many web designers (esp. those without other programming backgrounds) learn the beauty of storing data in databases and they become overly enamoured with it. Databases are appropriate for many web applications but if you're hitting the database to, for instance, draw your home page, you're going to beat your server to death and your viewers are going to see a lot of "Cannot connect to MySQL / MSSQL / whatever".
There are two ways (maybe more, but these work for me) around this: 1) fairly simple sets of information that are infrequently updated should be stored in a text file (.INI format, XML, whatever you just pulled out of your ass). This would probably include page menus, tables of links to external sites, etc. 2) Cache the results of frequent, simple queries. The logic goes something likes this:
A) Collect your variables, turn them into a filename-compatible string, with two extensions - one for counting page hits on an hourly (use discretion here) basis, the other for caching generated pages. B) Check to see if the page counting file exists; if it does, then increment the count. No elaborate locking mechanisms are necessary, because we're just trying to find out if a query is getting repeated at a high frequency. If we miss one or two that's ok. Check to see if the count is beyond a certain threshhold. If it is, then we start the page caching process; if not we send the page to the browser. C) Check to see if such a cached generated-page file exists. If it does, send said file to the user's browser. Be sure to 'touch' or otherwise increment the file's mod date in the process (for the next step). D) Run a reaping process to make sure your server doesn't fill up with such files. Delete anything that hasn't been updated in an hour (or day or whatever) E) If you haven't already sent a cached page to the browser, generate the page as normal. The only difference is that rather than 'echo'ing or 'print'ing or whatever the results to the user's browser, you should accumulate them in a rather long string (hopefully you're using a language that won't let this overflow). F) If your query count is over the threshhold , then write this string to the generated-page cache file. G) Write the string out to the user's browser. H) You can still have 'slightly dynamic content' like rotating banner ads, etc. implemented with a search-and-replace function within the generated page cache file / string.
Even though this looks like a lot of work, it's usually less than 50 lines of code per page, much of which can be copy/pasted, worked into a library, etc.
Wow, just outlined the article... maybe I'll get to it sooner than I thought...
Come on? What makes you so sure this is real? Or did you take the Blue Pill?
Using flash (or, better yet, MRAM - faster, unlimited writes), to hold disk metadate, file and folder allocation information, etc, rather than just as a giant write-back cache.
Support for this would have to be included on a filesystem level, but if this were available I'd imagine the FOSS community would have it testable in a few days, and stable enough for general use in a few weeks.
Something about news articles in general (as I learned from one of my clients, a PR agency) - many "reporters" create "stories" by basically doing some light editing (if that) on a press release. If you want to get your product or service in a newspaper, magazine, etc., the best thing to do is to have a pre-written piece that the "reporter" can slap their name on. It's a reasonable bet, for instance, that any positive story in your local paper about some local business was written either by that business or their PR agency. That doesn't necessarily mean it contains untrue information, but it certainly colors whatever facts are included.
This is the actual main reason for many people's complaints that news sources lean too far left or right or whatever - much of the "news" is generated by PR firms, advocacy groups, political parties, etc., given a very thin coat of paint, and slapped on the page. Some actual work is done on the editorial page, and in the reviews (although there have been some "reviews" done along these lines for things like restaurants - caveat emptor), but by and large you should take most newspaper and magazine stories with an appropriate grain of salt (unless you have a particularly high level of confidence in a specific writer or publication).
The Cactus in question is about 4 inches in diameter, 3 feet high, with spikes about 3 inches long; each individual spike is surrounded by a cluster of inch-long spikes. This is a cactus appropriate for inflicting major rectal damage on fuckheads like the one mentioned here.
Any other questions?
The head of a corporation that's sitting on ~US$50 Billion in cash yet whines that it doesn't have the resources / capabilities (they really mean "financial interest") in fixing major security defects in their less-than-current products is whining that they need cheaper labor?!??
I'm a fairly pro-immigration guy, but in this particular case Bill Gates can fuck himself in the ass with a cactus.
Ummmm, dude, NASA is the one setting up the grant. That would imply that they're thinking about using it in spacecraft, satellites, probes, etc. where weight is a huge fucking deal.
From TFA:
Sorry, but you missed the point by about a lightyear.
Linkage.
A quote from within said piece to entice your fancy:
I don't know... Watching Episode I was probably about as bad as being raped by a Wookie. My wallet certainly got screwed.
that I don't give a rusty fuck what George Lucas says, does, produces, or otherwise shits out onto the screen.
C'mon people. He's not been behind a great movie since "Empire", and notice that he didn't write the screenplay for or direct that one. Yes, he made a few classics. He founded what is still perhaps the world's best FX shop (ILM). He got thousands of theaters to upgrade to a better viewing / listening environment with the THX certification program. However, he's crashed and burned badly since. Why keep giving him so much attention?
One thing that always rubs me the wrong way is how proponents of Open Source tend to refer to Ms. Didio as "didiot." Being dishonest or even disingenuous does not neccessarily indicate a lack of intelligence. In fact, she's probably making good money doing very little real work; one could consider her smart.
A much better name would be "Dildio" - seeing as she provides an artificial source of stimulation and pleasure to those whos normal equipment is... lacking (you do know why they call it "Micro-Soft"?).
Now your boss can find out which pr0n, mp3s, movies, and other stuff you've been Googling for...