Most people are hired by someone who is himself an employee. That person is not going to hire anything outside the formula because he'll be in trouble if he does. Joelesque rants are luxuries that only the sort of people who run their own companies can indulge in. The moral? If your USP is that you are unusual, interesting, or otherwise don't fit the standard mould, go for the firms where the decision maker isn't worried about his job. Preferably where he owns the business. And - to second just about everyone's post - remember that you only suffer 1 first interview for a job. The poor employer suffers dozens: every one of them spent hoping that you're asking the right questions to do the candidate justice. That's why we're desperate to discard as many applications as we possibly can. Misplaced semicolon = discard the application = 1/2 hour less of agony.
There is no universal algorithm for case-matching or case conversion.
In most languages, the capital version of i-with-a-dot is I-without-a dot and the lowercase version of I-without-a-dot is i-with-a-dot.
In Turkish, the capital version of i-with-a-dot is I-with-a dot and the lowercase version of I-without-a-dot is i-without-a-dot. More logical.
So any program that enforces case matching and case conversion will not work the same on all computers.
Makes you wish the Turks had stuck to Arabic script and not changed to Latin in 1922. Except that Arabic was even more useless for the Turkish language than Latin is...
I'm about to change phones & It makes sense to go for one that I can develop Java applets on. If Nokia is so useless, what is the best phone to get for development? (preferably one that works as a phone as well).
There may have been an Ask Slashdot about this recently but I can't find it.
Assuming that end users are going to be writing things in this language, you have to use one that there are already books/courses about, that their friends already know how to program in, etc. This pretty much forces things like Javascript or VBScript, which may not be pretty but have the mindshare. You could use something more elegant and exotic, but will anyone bother to learn it? Will you be willing to support them when they haven't?
Many of your plurals, but not all, use apostrophe-s: eg. "algorithm's" but "processors". I don't believe that this is random and I'm very interested to know if you can see the subconscious rule you're following to decide when to use s and when to use apostrophe-s. This is really not a veiled criticism. I'm genuinely interested in linguistic phenomena, and I am convinced there must be a rule somewhere. I can't see it myself and I'm hoping that you can help.
My friend bought a second-hand laptop from me & used it to do German-to-English translations while sitting in mountaintop restaurants: at the end of his work session, he'd ski down with the laptop in his rucksack. One day he fell, landed on it... the laptop (Compaq 386) was OK but he cracked two ribs. The whole event was coincidentally captured on video & was the highlight of the ski bums' film evenings for some time afterwards. He didn't sue me (not sure why) or even Compaq. But be advised: athletic activity with laptops may lead to injury.
Whatever safeguards you build in, the fact is that once you use machines, you have no way of knowing who won an election, you have to take someone else's word for it. Only a traditional pencil-and-paper system can be understood in principle, and verified directly, by any voter or even any voter's child. See my The Dangers of Electronic Democracy for a fuller argument.
What I don't understand is why you need electronic/mechanical voting at all. I know the US is a poor country, but surely it can afford a few man-hours of bank tellers to count the paper votes? Or is it that the news media - who run politics as if it were a branch of entertainment - will boycott elections if the results take longer than 10 minutes to arrive?
If a manufacturer prevented you from knowing that your equipment was using FAT32, this would not change the fact that it was FAT32, and Microsoft could still order it to be seized and destroyed.
There's no need to put accents on things, you can spoof just as well without. For example: the Greek omicron, Russian lowercase o, and Latin lowercase o all look identical... but they are all different Unicode characters! Unless the registries all implement some sort of canonicalization, owners of domain names containing the letter "o" are going to have a combinatorial explosion!
Proposals for delivering power to Earth by microwaves do not include an energy density big enough to fry anything: you'd still need a big antenna (1km2) at the receiving end. It's that you get more energy than you'd get from the the sun: the point is that it's easier energy, that can be captured using aerials plus rectifiers, rather than photovoltaics. Directing the beam onto a city wouldn't make anyone feel warmer, though I suppose it could mess up overhead telephone lines.
"Need 4GB of physical memory before 64-bit is relevant"? Either he thinks he's telling the truth or he knows he isn't: either is pretty scary.
For the record: the major reason for wanting 64-bit addressing is that you can then map all your data files into memory space and let wonderful Windows deal with caching, paging, flushing, and all the rest of it. With 32-bit Windows you're effectively limited to small files (1GB) so you have to keep all your handrolled open/read/buffer/write/close code around in case a user makes a file that's bigger than that.
Not so relevant for Photoshop but pretty important for databases.
What we normally mean by "encryption" is "the transformation of readable stuff into stuff that can be seen by evil people without them able to understand anything". Encrypted data are a stream of bits just like anything else. Thus you can store your encrypted message on a disk, or write it down, or transmit it over a wire, or broadcast it.
In this sense "quantum encryption" isn't encryption at all. Quantum encryption is something that can only happen as part of the act of transmission. There is no such thing as "quantum-encrypted data" that can be recorded or written down or transmitted over conventional media. The act of doing any of those things collapses the wave packet and destroys communication just as effectively as interception would.
I'm not going to argue that we should start calling quantum encryption something else, the name is too snappy and too useful for getting research grants, but let's not get confused into comparing it with public-key or even private-key encryption: they're completely different animals.
When OLE2 was launched in 1994, Cairo was the Next Big Thing after NT. Compound files would be implemented natively, distributed everything, and so on. Cairo was due within two years. Replace "Cairo" with "Longhorn" in the above paragraph (and "1994" by "2003") and you get the picture. When we're discussing this in 2012, what will "Longhorn" (ready in two years) be called then?
Logic is messy in bases >2, but not much chip area is usually taken by logic-- much more is taken by memory.
Memory is a better candidate for base-N>2 than logic from the point of view of power consumption as well. If you have a picture of your mind of a typical CMOS arrangement with two transistors hanging between the power rails, one ON and one OFF, so that no current flows, it's true that a 3rd state would have to imply a flowing current. But most memory (from flash EPROM to DRAM) doesn't rely on the ON-ness or OFF-ness of transistors, it stores charge in a capacitor (DRAM) or on the other side of a tunnel barrier (EPROM). Stored charge just sits there, it doesn't flow, so no power gets wasted.
Of course, for arithmetic, the only natural base is base 1 anyway!
This is a good idea, but - how do you know the CDRW is readable?
You should get your friend to copy each CDRW you give him onto his computer, so that you know that the backup really is a backup and not a decorative ornament.
What I do is live in two places and every time I go from A to B or B to A, my entire life is burned onto CDR and CDRW (ie two backups) and reloaded at the other place. That way I'll know at once if a backup is unreadable.
The sooner that software liability comes about, the better. Customers will know upfront the cost of buying the s/w - at present no-one knows how much (eg) MSOutlook will cost them, they only know the purchase price, which is a lot less.
And the more reliable the software is, the lower the premiums will be and the lower the price of the software itself can be.
Any virus/worm that causes visible damage is relatively benign because you can see that it's there, and the more violent an effect it has on your system, the less harmful (in system terms) it really is.
After all, in human terms, which virus is more dangerous? Lassa fever, or HIV?
You can tell there's something strange when they don't mention the algorithm straight off. Eventually the spec comes clean and admits "40-bit DES"... which is fine except there's no such thing.
Either they've done something DES-inspired and called it DES, or they've just set the remaining 16 bits of the DES key to a fixed value.
40 bits = 2^40 = 10^12, which isn't many keys to check through at all. At a million keys a second it would take an average of 5.8 days to find the correct key. For slower cracking computers, scale up the time accordingly or use a small cluster.
Promoting insecure encryption with high-sounding phrases has a long history. I remember a rash of "even the spooks can't break it" encryption packages that were so weak you could practically break by hand: that was back in the 1980s but obviously the problem hasn't gone away!
Still, horses for courses: it's actually quite good not to use encryption that's stronger than you need, because if you do lose the key, you have some chance of paying someone to break it for you.
In civilized countries you are not only not allowed to set traps for burglars, it has now been established that you owe a duty of care to anyone who breaks into your premises and trespasses on your land. If you know that kids might climb through your fence to hide in the long grass and get stoned, then KEEP OUT notices are not enough and if you have any hazards (deep wells, wires hidden in the grass) they must be made safe.
The logical correlative of this is that if you provide files with the intention that they should be downloaded by people who break into your system, and those files are engineered to cause damage, you will be (possibly criminally) liable for any damage you cause. "I didn't expect anyone to come this way" would be no defence when the only conceivable purpose of these files is to cause harm.
First, remember that the proposal doesn't oblige you to post a reply to your expressions of opinion. Only purported statements of fact. Anyone who's ever been libelled by a large and powerful organization knows how hard it is to get redress: this is a step towards liberating the individual from arbitrary slander and vilification. (When a Sunday newspaper called a friend of mine "A NUTTER" in banner headlines, it took him a year of full-time work to fight the newspaper's lawyers and get compensation). Second, the proposal doesn't oblige you to post a reply, anyway. It obliges you to post a link to a reply, and that link can be to the complainant's web site. In fact, it generally ought to be. That's hardly too onerous. Now imagine a Web where these things happen as a matter of course. The innocent reader, stumbling on a statement that Coca-Cola have started to put the cocaine back into Coke, or that Hemos is still beating his boyfriend's wives, will see a link to Coca-Cola's or Hemos's rebuttal. And if the rebuttal says something untrue (as opposed to offensive) about the poster, then the poster can demand a link back to his own rebuttal. The lucky Web surfer gets to read a free and interesting debate, all for the price of a few hyperlinks. Assuming that we can find a way of authenticating the source of a reply (eg. by registration and digital signatures), I'd like to see this as a standard feature of blogging software. Offended by something untrue in this entry? Click here, enter a URL, and the entry will acquire a SED CONTRA item that points to that URL. No real cost to the blogger, and a richer and more interesting blog for everyone to read.
It's a mathematical term. In 2 dimensions, a simplex is a triangle (3 points connected in all possible ways - ie. by 3 lines). In 3 dimensions, a simplex is a tetrahedron (4 points connected in all possible ways - ie. by 6 lines). In 10 dimensions, a simplex is 11 points connected in all possible ways - ie. by 11x10/2 lines.
According to the story the main (although not the only?) problem is with systems that have anti-virus software installed. I'm not surprised. Anti-virus software is written by people who don't fully understand MS's incomplete and incomprehensible documentation, who have often had to reverse-engineer something that MS might change at any moment... and the AV suppliers do not, themselves, bother to document the ways in which their product subtly buggers up a Windows system... so that we can't even tell whether a particular eccentric behaviour might be the fault of the AV.
Whenever a really mysterious bug in a Windows program appears, I always ask users to try running it on Windows (rather than Windows-as-modified-by-an-AV). More often than not, the bug goes away.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people are hired by someone who is himself an employee. That person is not going to hire anything outside the formula because he'll be in trouble if he does. Joelesque rants are luxuries that only the sort of people who run their own companies can indulge in.
The moral? If your USP is that you are unusual, interesting, or otherwise don't fit the standard mould, go for the firms where the decision maker isn't worried about his job. Preferably where he owns the business.
And - to second just about everyone's post - remember that you only suffer 1 first interview for a job. The poor employer suffers dozens: every one of them spent hoping that you're asking the right questions to do the candidate justice. That's why we're desperate to discard as many applications as we possibly can. Misplaced semicolon = discard the application = 1/2 hour less of agony.
No - most of these refused lower honours, not knighthoods.
There is no universal algorithm for case-matching or case conversion.
In most languages, the capital version of i-with-a-dot is I-without-a dot and the lowercase version of I-without-a-dot is i-with-a-dot.
In Turkish, the capital version of i-with-a-dot is I-with-a dot and the lowercase version of I-without-a-dot is i-without-a-dot. More logical.
So any program that enforces case matching and case conversion will not work the same on all computers.
Makes you wish the Turks had stuck to Arabic script and not changed to Latin in 1922. Except that Arabic was even more useless for the Turkish language than Latin is...
I'm about to change phones & It makes sense to go for one that I can develop Java applets on. If Nokia is so useless, what is the best phone to get for development? (preferably one that works as a phone as well).
There may have been an Ask Slashdot about this recently but I can't find it.
This is why the only secure way of dealing with contracts is preprinted boilerplate with space for hand-writing the variable details.
Assuming that end users are going to be writing things in this language, you have to use one that there are already books/courses about, that their friends already know how to program in, etc.
This pretty much forces things like Javascript or VBScript, which may not be pretty but have the mindshare. You could use something more elegant and exotic, but will anyone bother to learn it? Will you be willing to support them when they haven't?
Many of your plurals, but not all, use apostrophe-s: eg. "algorithm's" but "processors". I don't believe that this is random and I'm very interested to know if you can see the subconscious rule you're following to decide when to use s and when to use apostrophe-s.
This is really not a veiled criticism. I'm genuinely interested in linguistic phenomena, and I am convinced there must be a rule somewhere. I can't see it myself and I'm hoping that you can help.
My friend bought a second-hand laptop from me & used it to do German-to-English translations while sitting in mountaintop restaurants: at the end of his work session, he'd ski down with the laptop in his rucksack.
One day he fell, landed on it... the laptop (Compaq 386) was OK but he cracked two ribs. The whole event was coincidentally captured on video & was the highlight of the ski bums' film evenings for some time afterwards.
He didn't sue me (not sure why) or even Compaq. But be advised: athletic activity with laptops may lead to injury.
So - say I want a simple server computer I can run >4GB memory-mapped files on. Linux it has to be, obviously; and obviously not eMachines; ideas???
Whatever safeguards you build in, the fact is that once you use machines, you have no way of knowing who won an election, you have to take someone else's word for it. Only a traditional pencil-and-paper system can be understood in principle, and verified directly, by any voter or even any voter's child. See my The Dangers of Electronic Democracy for a fuller argument.
What I don't understand is why you need electronic/mechanical voting at all. I know the US is a poor country, but surely it can afford a few man-hours of bank tellers to count the paper votes? Or is it that the news media - who run politics as if it were a branch of entertainment - will boycott elections if the results take longer than 10 minutes to arrive?
If a manufacturer prevented you from knowing that your equipment was using FAT32, this would not change the fact that it was FAT32, and Microsoft could still order it to be seized and destroyed.
There's no need to put accents on things, you can spoof just as well without. For example: the Greek omicron, Russian lowercase o, and Latin lowercase o all look identical... but they are all different Unicode characters!
Unless the registries all implement some sort of canonicalization, owners of domain names containing the letter "o" are going to have a combinatorial explosion!
Proposals for delivering power to Earth by microwaves do not include an energy density big enough to fry anything: you'd still need a big antenna (1km2) at the receiving end. It's that you get more energy than you'd get from the the sun: the point is that it's easier energy, that can be captured using aerials plus rectifiers, rather than photovoltaics.
Directing the beam onto a city wouldn't make anyone feel warmer, though I suppose it could mess up overhead telephone lines.
"Need 4GB of physical memory before 64-bit is relevant"? Either he thinks he's telling the truth or he knows he isn't: either is pretty scary.
For the record: the major reason for wanting 64-bit addressing is that you can then map all your data files into memory space and let wonderful Windows deal with caching, paging, flushing, and all the rest of it. With 32-bit Windows you're effectively limited to small files (1GB) so you have to keep all your handrolled open/read/buffer/write/close code around in case a user makes a file that's bigger than that.
Not so relevant for Photoshop but pretty important for databases.
What we normally mean by "encryption" is "the transformation of readable stuff into stuff that can be seen by evil people without them able to understand anything". Encrypted data are a stream of bits just like anything else. Thus you can store your encrypted message on a disk, or write it down, or transmit it over a wire, or broadcast it.
In this sense "quantum encryption" isn't encryption at all. Quantum encryption is something that can only happen as part of the act of transmission. There is no such thing as "quantum-encrypted data" that can be recorded or written down or transmitted over conventional media. The act of doing any of those things collapses the wave packet and destroys communication just as effectively as interception would.
I'm not going to argue that we should start calling quantum encryption something else, the name is too snappy and too useful for getting research grants, but let's not get confused into comparing it with public-key or even private-key encryption: they're completely different animals.
When OLE2 was launched in 1994, Cairo was the Next Big Thing after NT. Compound files would be implemented natively, distributed everything, and so on. Cairo was due within two years.
Replace "Cairo" with "Longhorn" in the above paragraph (and "1994" by "2003") and you get the picture.
When we're discussing this in 2012, what will "Longhorn" (ready in two years) be called then?
Memory is a better candidate for base-N>2 than logic from the point of view of power consumption as well. If you have a picture of your mind of a typical CMOS arrangement with two transistors hanging between the power rails, one ON and one OFF, so that no current flows, it's true that a 3rd state would have to imply a flowing current. But most memory (from flash EPROM to DRAM) doesn't rely on the ON-ness or OFF-ness of transistors, it stores charge in a capacitor (DRAM) or on the other side of a tunnel barrier (EPROM). Stored charge just sits there, it doesn't flow, so no power gets wasted.
Of course, for arithmetic, the only natural base is base 1 anyway!
You should get your friend to copy each CDRW you give him onto his computer, so that you know that the backup really is a backup and not a decorative ornament.
What I do is live in two places and every time I go from A to B or B to A, my entire life is burned onto CDR and CDRW (ie two backups) and reloaded at the other place. That way I'll know at once if a backup is unreadable.
And the more reliable the software is, the lower the premiums will be and the lower the price of the software itself can be.
After all, in human terms, which virus is more dangerous? Lassa fever, or HIV?
40 bits = 2^40 = 10^12, which isn't many keys to check through at all. At a million keys a second it would take an average of 5.8 days to find the correct key. For slower cracking computers, scale up the time accordingly or use a small cluster.
Promoting insecure encryption with high-sounding phrases has a long history. I remember a rash of "even the spooks can't break it" encryption packages that were so weak you could practically break by hand: that was back in the 1980s but obviously the problem hasn't gone away!
Still, horses for courses: it's actually quite good not to use encryption that's stronger than you need, because if you do lose the key, you have some chance of paying someone to break it for you.
In civilized countries you are not only not allowed to set traps for burglars, it has now been established that you owe a duty of care to anyone who breaks into your premises and trespasses on your land. If you know that kids might climb through your fence to hide in the long grass and get stoned, then KEEP OUT notices are not enough and if you have any hazards (deep wells, wires hidden in the grass) they must be made safe.
The logical correlative of this is that if you provide files with the intention that they should be downloaded by people who break into your system, and those files are engineered to cause damage, you will be (possibly criminally) liable for any damage you cause. "I didn't expect anyone to come this way" would be no defence when the only conceivable purpose of these files is to cause harm.
First, remember that the proposal doesn't oblige you to post a reply to your expressions of opinion. Only purported statements of fact. Anyone who's ever been libelled by a large and powerful organization knows how hard it is to get redress: this is a step towards liberating the individual from arbitrary slander and vilification. (When a Sunday newspaper called a friend of mine "A NUTTER" in banner headlines, it took him a year of full-time work to fight the newspaper's lawyers and get compensation).
Second, the proposal doesn't oblige you to post a reply, anyway. It obliges you to post a link to a reply, and that link can be to the complainant's web site. In fact, it generally ought to be. That's hardly too onerous.
Now imagine a Web where these things happen as a matter of course. The innocent reader, stumbling on a statement that Coca-Cola have started to put the cocaine back into Coke, or that Hemos is still beating his boyfriend's wives, will see a link to Coca-Cola's or Hemos's rebuttal. And if the rebuttal says something untrue (as opposed to offensive) about the poster, then the poster can demand a link back to his own rebuttal. The lucky Web surfer gets to read a free and interesting debate, all for the price of a few hyperlinks.
Assuming that we can find a way of authenticating the source of a reply (eg. by registration and digital signatures), I'd like to see this as a standard feature of blogging software. Offended by something untrue in this entry? Click here, enter a URL, and the entry will acquire a SED CONTRA item that points to that URL. No real cost to the blogger, and a richer and more interesting blog for everyone to read.
It's a mathematical term. In 2 dimensions, a simplex is a triangle (3 points connected in all possible ways - ie. by 3 lines). In 3 dimensions, a simplex is a tetrahedron (4 points connected in all possible ways - ie. by 6 lines). In 10 dimensions, a simplex is 11 points connected in all possible ways - ie. by 11x10/2 lines.
According to the story the main (although not the only?) problem is with systems that have anti-virus software installed. I'm not surprised. Anti-virus software is written by people who don't fully understand MS's incomplete and incomprehensible documentation, who have often had to reverse-engineer something that MS might change at any moment... and the AV suppliers do not, themselves, bother to document the ways in which their product subtly buggers up a Windows system... so that we can't even tell whether a particular eccentric behaviour might be the fault of the AV.
Whenever a really mysterious bug in a Windows program appears, I always ask users to try running it on Windows (rather than Windows-as-modified-by-an-AV). More often than not, the bug goes away.