Great thought...maybe the real fight is elsewhere
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DeCSS' Continuing Saga
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· Score: 3, Interesting
How can it be a trade secret if every DVD manufacturer knows it?? Isn't a trade secret is something makes one company more competetive than others in the same or similar field. Even www.dictionary.com (via American Heritage) defines a trade secret as:
trade secret n. A secret formula, method, or device that gives one an advantage over competitors
What is it about the DVD encryption algorithm that gives DVD manufacturers a competitive advantage over, say putting a movie on video tape? If I learn the secret formula for Pepsi, I can make all the Pepsi I want for my own use, and there isn't a damn thing Pepsico can do. But I probably couldn't market a similar brand without paying fees. Isn't using the DeCSS algorithm the same thing?
Now, if I found a secret to making a DVD with less costs or faster, that would be a trade secret. Or if I found a way to improve the quality of the image or put more data on the disk, that would be a trade secret. That is, until everyone found out about it. Then it becomes common knowlege.
Maybe we are fighting this, and other things like DCMA, the wrong way. Maybe it is time to bring unfair trade practice laws to bear and be the plaintiff for a change.
The disadvantage of being a monopoly is you have to play even fairer. Well, maybe in theory anyway.
I took the whole day off, but told my boss I was going to play golf (guess what he loves to do!). Started playing golf at 9am, and my buddy and I went to see AotC afterwards. If you're going to waste a vacation/sick day to do something, you might as well make a day out of it. Thursday was the only good day of the week to go play here in Maine, so it all worked out.
We got there just as the movie was starting. The ushers didn't have a flashlight, but I had my Photon red LED flashlight, and caught an aisle seat right away. I'm going to shoot the guy with the bladder condition that sat in the middle of my row. Jerk got up 5 times, which means he also came back 5 times.
The theater was only about half full, and the ticket guy said they had not been very busy all day.
Why do I have to look at the damn thing???
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USB Remote Control
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· Score: 1
Lots of buttons on remotes are handy for a very good reason... you don't have to look at the damn remote to do common things. I know where the buttons for guide, info, last, exit, volumne +/-, change +/- all are, which are the buttons used 99% of the time. Can't do that with this thing.
So, I can lay back in my couch potato fashion, in the dark, pick up the remote, and feel my way through all the channels.
My girlfriend, on the other hand, takes FREAKIN FOREVER, because she has to look at the remote to hit the guide button, look up to make sure it came on, look down again to press page down, look up to see what is on, keep pressing down until something neat is on, look at the remote to press channel down, look up.... you get the picture. It's a wonder she doesn't get RMS in her neck from lookin at the TV and back at the remote.
It's apparent from the site that people who are not very techy will be able to use it either, so where is the audience?
Why does the US govt. think that technology will reduce forgeries?? Several local BurgerKings and McDonalds (Portland, Maine) will only take fifty or hundred dollar bills with a drivers license because of all the counterfits showing up? I thought all those high tech gimmicks in the 50s and 100s were supposed to make counterfiting impossible?
Anti-forgery measures are only as good as the buffons that have to validate them. How many times has a clerk validated your signature against your credit card?? If it is anything like mine, the two rarely even match, yet they still accept the card.
Is every mom-and-pop store in country going to install retinal scanners? Doubtful.
So take comfort. When you go to the airport, they can verify who you are. But what about the other 99.9% of the places you go? Terrorists are very good at finding new ways to kill people.
I just finished teaching a Linux class to several high school teachers/tech people. The State of Maine is undergoing a program that would put Apple laptops into the hands of all 7th graders. The schools have a problem....how to interconnect all of this.
The answer, at least for these folks, is Linux, since Linux supports both CIFS (for now) and Appletalk.
So, donate all of your used PCs to schools in Maine. They need Linux servers!!!!
As several people pointed out, they do not get rid of old books. I am one of those people who keep all my books, paperbacks and all, because I sometimes reread them.
So, I guess this says that some people who really like a book, keep it. Some people who don't, want their money back for it being a waste of time. And some people would rather give/sell their old books rather than throw them away.
Where are numbers, people. Are these used books 1%, 5%, or 25% of sales. And of those sales, how many are from people who wouldn't have bought the hardcover in the first place because it was too jackin' expensive!!
Say, don't softcover books cut into the fees author's receive for hardcover book sales?? Maybe they should boycott paperback book sales while they are at it.
... for the Stallman's to strike back. "Oh no, I don't want anyone to know that I went into Kmart today".
Face it Richard, no one really cares about where you or I go, or what we did today, our lives just aren't that important. That placed on the fact that there is absolutly no law that currently prevents face recognition software from being used, either in public or private sectors, makes your little diatribe about it just an excercise in scaring people about the new laws.
And I seem to recall that President George Bush did not need Congress to OK his sending thousands of troops into Saudia Arabia. The President is the Commander-in-chief and not Congress in order to provide for swift deployment of forces when needed. So the Congress blank-check bit is also little weak for an argument.
So, this gets to the phone taps. The FBI want's to be able to tap any phone a specific person can use, instead of having to get one for each phone. I do have to agree that that sounds a little over-zealous, and could provide a carte-blance to tap the entire cellphone network. But just remember that any evidence recovered that does not pertain to the specific charges cannot be used. Yes, they could listen to your phone call just because you happend to let that guy who is under suspicion use your cell once three years ago. But if you confess you stole burritos from 7-11, they cannot use your phone call in court. And having worked for a mobile phone company and occasionally have to listen to phone calls to monitor the system, I can tell you that most phone calls are boring beyound belief.
Growing up in a rural community, almost every boy in my school carried a knife. We all knew knives were sharp tools, not weapons, and used them accordingly, by playing mumbly-peg (spelling??) with them. To this day, I always carry a short, sharp pocketknife with me that I can open with one hand. You never know when a bale of hay will attack you and you only have one free hand.
But I don't recall every having someone being stabbed by someone else.
Today, a cub scout who has just gone through a knife safety course and proudly takes a 2" pocketknife to school is suspended, which further confuses and ostracizes him.
Artists have always been identified as poor, disenfranchised people who struggle to eke out a living. I would question the thought processes of anyone who becomes an artist to make money.
I started writing because I enjoy it, and will continue to write even though the monetary compensation for it is meager at best, and non-existent and worst. I would be flattered at this point in my career of someone thought enough of one of my works to take the time and post them to the Internet. (Before everyone jumps in here, I have a web site under development for my work....) Until then, I will work for a living and write for my enjoyment and for those few that enjoy my work.
So, Harlan, go sit on your hat. From what I can tell from the site, the current lawsuits are frivolous and are only intended to further some grand ideal that you have. Maybe you and Garth Brooks should get together sometime and discuss copyright laws. (For those readers unaware, Garth has been waging a war against used-music stores.)
BTW -- I don't believe that I have ever purchased a book by Mr. Ellison. I only buy non-fiction books. I borrow fiction works from the library... for free. So the monetary impact of my reading one of Mr. Ellison's works on the Internet v/s a book is probably zero, unless libraries also stop buying his books. In fact, since I am almost always late returning books, the bigger monetary impact will be on my library and their reduced late-fee income.
Thank you for pointing out which groups Unions hurt. They hurt those that can take care of themselves, either because they don't have the personality traits or skill sets.
There are companies that have unions which are structured such in a way that it brings productivity to its knees. A previous position I held was at Bath Iron Works, where I couldn't even move my PC from one desk to another. Where it takes two people to install memory (an electrician and a PC technician). Where a network admin couldn't even use a screwdriver to tighten a loose network patch panel, but had to wait for an hour (of outage) for an electrician to show up. Where salaried employees were constantly threatened with grievances if they did something a certain way. Tell me again why I can trust my fellow workers? I couldn't wait to get out of there. (Although walking around on Aegis destroyers being built was way cool!!)
In my career, I have been an operator, DBA (Informix, Sybase, and Oracle), programmer, UNIX admin, and network admin. Tell me one union shop where I can maintain all of those skill sets. Instead, I can only exercise one of those skills, which will lower my value. I get paid what I get paid at my current job because I can move around and provide support in all of the above areas, sometimes even on the same day.
So, tell me again how a union would help me? Or is this one of those 'sacrifice the one for the good of the many'.
All unions do is replace one possibly corrupt bureaucracy that takes advantage of people with another. In the case of a union, it's the workers taking advantage of other workers.
If you go into the main entrance for John Bryan State Park in Yellow Springs and bear to the left, there was an access road that was gated off. It was about 3/4 mile down that road.
The Miami Valley Astonomical Club (MVAS) which used the Dayton Mueseum of Natural History (it may now be the Boonshoft Museum of Discovery, I'm not really sure) has its headquarters, was responsible for the site.
Back in the 70's, the government had a sattelite tracking station in Yellow Springs, Ohio right next to John Bryant (??) state park. Nothing quit as grandious as NSA site, just a squat concrete building with a dome, a roll-off roof, and a few other rooms, one of which looked like a dark room.
The astonomy club I belonged to got involved when they were going to level the place and was given access to the site. Again, the government was just going to bulldoze a building, rather than find a use for it. The dome was large enough, if I remember, for a good sized reflector telescope (we needed a fairly large ladder to use it). The room with the roll-off roof had a platform that could hold several more telescopes.
I wonder how many more of these are around???
Pluto, what a goofy name for a mickey-mouse planet
Tim said ---
I'm confused - are IDE debuggers good or bad? You seem to say that they are bad, and all you need is printf...but then hint that they are good by saying that people who use them have it easy?
There is a good reason for the confusion... the post didn't say if debuggers were either good or bad. Instead, I attempted to convey that printf can be a really good tool on UNIX systems, and to present a simple, non-intrusive concept (printf statements w/timestamps in each function that actually mean something) that can be easily turned off or on for debugging and other code analysis purposes, such as benchmarking.
Let me return the favor of quoting other people's ideas... here is a quote that might bring my feelings on this topic into perspective
When the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. - (Author unknown to me... I usually don't quote other people)
Is there really one perfect debugging tool? Debuggers are really great when you don't have a clue why a daemon is just dropping of the face of the Earth without a coredump or a message after running for a few hours. Set a few watch parameters and go home for the evening. (Just an example... don't everyone get all hot and bothered and supply a gazillion other good examples.)
Maybe the best debugging tool to use is your own brain and an open mind. How many times of each of us spent hours (days??) tracking down a bug only to realize that the clue to the problem was in front of us all the time, but we were so sure it was something else that the blinders never came off.
My preference will almost always be printf first, debuggers later. But, there is one really bad thing about printf I would like to mention... many programmers forget to take them out aftwards or don't but them in an IFDEF block. That makes for really messy log files.
I remember a C++ programmer asking me what debuggers were loaded on our HP system. I turned to him and said 'printf... just like on all systems' and he looked at me like I had three heads. Ah... kids these days have it soooo easy!
Debugging code is very easy... finding out where the problem is is very difficult. I include in all my programs, under IFDEF control of course, trace statements in each paragraphs that also include timestamps. It is amazing how using standard UNIX tool sets (grep, sort, etc) you can get tons of information from just this. In a multi-threaded program, I also dump out a thread-id I assign to each thread so individual threads can be analyzed.
To be fair, I do use debuggers from time to time, but usually only has a last resort. I find it is much easier to add extra printfs than it is to set up conditional breakpoints and then step through code for hours.
Using the above information, it is usually possible to narrow the issue down to a few lines of code. Time then to add some more printf's to dump values.
One very large advantage of using vi (or emacs) and printfs is they are available on all UNIX systems and all compilers. When changing jobs, the last thing I want to do is be neck deep in a bug while trying to learn a new debugger
This
Nasa site provides a multi-use java applet that not only shows predictions for ISS viewings based on either a location list or long/lat input, but also provides a really neat star map.
I haven't used it yet, living in Maine the elevations tend to be very low.
Ah yes... tap the unlimited energy available in the and we will be able to watch our TVs and get microwave popcorn for free for eternity.
I noticed there were not notices of:
Environmental impacts
Number of usable sites
Actual cost per usable unit of power
Things to consider before you run out and buy one:
Anytime you put something into the water, you change the water flow. This impacts the shape of the waves hitting the shore. There have been numerous problems with man-made changes to shorelines impacting shoreline up and down shore of the change...washing out homes, building new sand bards, etc.
Anytime you take energy out of a system, you change the dynamics of the system. If you remove x% of energy from the wave fronts in an area, what will be the impact? For instance, will additional sand bars build up because the waves do not have enough power to maintain the existing shoreline?
I don't want to sound all doom and gloom... I really hope that something like this can work. It sounds like it can provide great power potentials, at least for coastal areas and large lakefronts. But I remember reading stories of flocks of migrating birds getting killed in windmills.... you don't get something for nothing.
I hope that before someone goes out and builds entire islands of these things, we make sure the environmental impacts are known and acceptable to all, including tree huggers....
Instead of discussing public/not public, maybe a better discussion is public information set/private information set.
I have used the WHOIS information on several occasions:
Notify a company that I cannot connect to their server
Notify a company that their registration information has expired and I cannot connect to their server
Contact a company to see if I could purchase their domain name
On all of these instances, all I needed was the email address of a technical contact. I did not need phone numbers, names, or addresses.
So it appears that all that is really needed for public WHOIS is:
domain name
company/person holding the name
email contacts
Yes... I too have gotten spam when I ordered a new domain name, but it usually only lasts a couple of weeks and goes away. I am willing to live with that if it means a helpful internet admin someplace can take a couple of minutes to let me know that my server is not accessable, and keep my butt out of a sling....
Does anyone really know what internet time it is??/Does anyone really care??
the statement 'write once, test everywhere' is still much in vogue.
Now, I don't write much Java, being a Sun sys admin and all I tend to use Perl more because I need closer access to the OS. And the few I have written have not been GUI oriented and would probably run on all platforms. But it seems that if Sun really wants to get into the 'one language for all platforms' that Madhu Siddalingaiah says, then they still have a lot of work to do for anything but trivial programs.
For example, a current program our developers are working on uses the Sun plugin for IE. The same Java applet performs differently in Windows 98, Windows NT, and Windows 2000. And I don't even want to talk about the problems they had with the Netscape browser....
Come on Sun... clean up your own house before you start tearing down someone elses.
Microsoft, can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em....
I heard this part of the speech on NPR today. He was talking to an audience that I gathered was largely hispanic, and was saying the letter 'W' in Spanish, something phonetically like 'doobla vay'. He later said 'tres doobly vay' for 'www'.
I can think of better ways of endearing himself to the hispanic population of Florida, like maybe ending all embargos of Cuba. Oh wait, that would only endear him to me and a couple of million people who would love to be able to buy Cuban cigars in the US instead of having to drive to Canada!!
(Apololgies to the hispanic readers in the audience for the hideous buthering of a lovely language... I took French in school.)
Would someone please explain something to me. How can you decrypt something if you don't know what the message is?? How do you know when a file is succesfully decrypted?? I know many of the 'break my new RSA Giga-bit encryption and win 1 gazillion dollars' tell you what the first few words are. If you don't know them... how do you know the file was successfully encrypted??
And another thing, if I were to encrypt something twice, after the first decryption, wouldn't you get back something and have to decrypt that also??? I would think that if you encrypted a file several thousands times using different mehtods, wouldn't that make it pretty hard to break?? Or maybe I don't have the slightest idea how these things work and need a little education (URL's anyone)??
A recent company I was with was hit with an audit notice from the SPA. We knew exactly where they got their information, as the sys admin was fired several months earlier.
Our solution was simple and polite. We sent a letter back explaining that after our sys admin left the company, our new sys admin (me) conducted a software audit to verify software licensing compliancy, and at this time we are in compliance to the best of our knowledge.
We also asked them to specify the exact nature of the purported license issue so we could verify it. After all, it is awfully hard to defend yourself if you don't know what you are defending or to find something if you don't know what you are looking for.
As I recall, there was no response back and we did not have to perform another costly audit. My guess is that by placing the burden back on them to support their claim, the public record of the weak claim (i.e. disgruntled employee) was too much for them to go ahead with any further actions.
Anyone who gets an audit should contact their counsel, and then request a more detailed listing of any claims of non-compliance.
I participated in an evaluation of Cold Fusion a few years ago. It was decided not to use it because it generated really ugly HTML pages that were too difficult to debug. While Cold Fusion at the time had some featuers that made development easier, it was felt that all of the ease in development would be wasted when it came time to figure out why the pages didn't look t he way we wanted them to.
Any insight from users on the current product offering and whether or not this feature still exists??
Slashdot Mirror
How can it be a trade secret if every DVD manufacturer knows it?? Isn't a trade secret is something makes one company more competetive than others in the same or similar field. Even www.dictionary.com (via American Heritage) defines a trade secret as: What is it about the DVD encryption algorithm that gives DVD manufacturers a competitive advantage over, say putting a movie on video tape? If I learn the secret formula for Pepsi, I can make all the Pepsi I want for my own use, and there isn't a damn thing Pepsico can do. But I probably couldn't market a similar brand without paying fees. Isn't using the DeCSS algorithm the same thing?
Now, if I found a secret to making a DVD with less costs or faster, that would be a trade secret. Or if I found a way to improve the quality of the image or put more data on the disk, that would be a trade secret. That is, until everyone found out about it. Then it becomes common knowlege.
Maybe we are fighting this, and other things like DCMA, the wrong way. Maybe it is time to bring unfair trade practice laws to bear and be the plaintiff for a change.
The disadvantage of being a monopoly is you have to play even fairer. Well, maybe in theory anyway.
I took the whole day off, but told my boss I was going to play golf (guess what he loves to do!). Started playing golf at 9am, and my buddy and I went to see AotC afterwards. If you're going to waste a vacation/sick day to do something, you might as well make a day out of it. Thursday was the only good day of the week to go play here in Maine, so it all worked out.
We got there just as the movie was starting. The ushers didn't have a flashlight, but I had my Photon red LED flashlight, and caught an aisle seat right away. I'm going to shoot the guy with the bladder condition that sat in the middle of my row. Jerk got up 5 times, which means he also came back 5 times.
The theater was only about half full, and the ticket guy said they had not been very busy all day.
Lots of buttons on remotes are handy for a very good reason ... you don't have to look at the damn remote to do common things. I know where the buttons for guide, info, last, exit, volumne +/-, change +/- all are, which are the buttons used 99% of the time. Can't do that with this thing.
.... you get the picture. It's a wonder she doesn't get RMS in her neck from lookin at the TV and back at the remote.
So, I can lay back in my couch potato fashion, in the dark, pick up the remote, and feel my way through all the channels.
My girlfriend, on the other hand, takes FREAKIN FOREVER, because she has to look at the remote to hit the guide button, look up to make sure it came on, look down again to press page down, look up to see what is on, keep pressing down until something neat is on, look at the remote to press channel down, look up
It's apparent from the site that people who are not very techy will be able to use it either, so where is the audience?
Why does the US govt. think that technology will reduce forgeries?? Several local BurgerKings and McDonalds (Portland, Maine) will only take fifty or hundred dollar bills with a drivers license because of all the counterfits showing up? I thought all those high tech gimmicks in the 50s and 100s were supposed to make counterfiting impossible?
Anti-forgery measures are only as good as the buffons that have to validate them. How many times has a clerk validated your signature against your credit card?? If it is anything like mine, the two rarely even match, yet they still accept the card.
Is every mom-and-pop store in country going to install retinal scanners? Doubtful.
So take comfort. When you go to the airport, they can verify who you are. But what about the other 99.9% of the places you go? Terrorists are very good at finding new ways to kill people.
I just finished teaching a Linux class to several high school teachers/tech people. The State of Maine is undergoing a program that would put Apple laptops into the hands of all 7th graders. The schools have a problem....how to interconnect all of this.
The answer, at least for these folks, is Linux, since Linux supports both CIFS (for now) and Appletalk.
So, donate all of your used PCs to schools in Maine. They need Linux servers!!!!
As several people pointed out, they do not get rid of old books. I am one of those people who keep all my books, paperbacks and all, because I sometimes reread them.
So, I guess this says that some people who really like a book, keep it. Some people who don't, want their money back for it being a waste of time. And some people would rather give/sell their old books rather than throw them away.
Where are numbers, people. Are these used books 1%, 5%, or 25% of sales. And of those sales, how many are from people who wouldn't have bought the hardcover in the first place because it was too jackin' expensive!!
Say, don't softcover books cut into the fees author's receive for hardcover book sales?? Maybe they should boycott paperback book sales while they are at it.
... for the Stallman's to strike back. "Oh no, I don't want anyone to know that I went into Kmart today".
... I'm done ranting.
Face it Richard, no one really cares about where you or I go, or what we did today, our lives just aren't that important. That placed on the fact that there is absolutly no law that currently prevents face recognition software from being used, either in public or private sectors, makes your little diatribe about it just an excercise in scaring people about the new laws.
And I seem to recall that President George Bush did not need Congress to OK his sending thousands of troops into Saudia Arabia. The President is the Commander-in-chief and not Congress in order to provide for swift deployment of forces when needed. So the Congress blank-check bit is also little weak for an argument.
So, this gets to the phone taps. The FBI want's to be able to tap any phone a specific person can use, instead of having to get one for each phone. I do have to agree that that sounds a little over-zealous, and could provide a carte-blance to tap the entire cellphone network. But just remember that any evidence recovered that does not pertain to the specific charges cannot be used. Yes, they could listen to your phone call just because you happend to let that guy who is under suspicion use your cell once three years ago. But if you confess you stole burritos from 7-11, they cannot use your phone call in court. And having worked for a mobile phone company and occasionally have to listen to phone calls to monitor the system, I can tell you that most phone calls are boring beyound belief.
So what was your point again???
OK
Growing up in a rural community, almost every boy in my school carried a knife. We all knew knives were sharp tools, not weapons, and used them accordingly, by playing mumbly-peg (spelling??) with them. To this day, I always carry a short, sharp pocketknife with me that I can open with one hand. You never know when a bale of hay will attack you and you only have one free hand.
But I don't recall every having someone being stabbed by someone else.
Today, a cub scout who has just gone through a knife safety course and proudly takes a 2" pocketknife to school is suspended, which further confuses and ostracizes him.
Go figure....
that will solve everything.
... for free. So the monetary impact of my reading one of Mr. Ellison's works on the Internet v/s a book is probably zero, unless libraries also stop buying his books. In fact, since I am almost always late returning books, the bigger monetary impact will be on my library and their reduced late-fee income.
Artists have always been identified as poor, disenfranchised people who struggle to eke out a living. I would question the thought processes of anyone who becomes an artist to make money.
I started writing because I enjoy it, and will continue to write even though the monetary compensation for it is meager at best, and non-existent and worst. I would be flattered at this point in my career of someone thought enough of one of my works to take the time and post them to the Internet. (Before everyone jumps in here, I have a web site under development for my work....) Until then, I will work for a living and write for my enjoyment and for those few that enjoy my work.
So, Harlan, go sit on your hat. From what I can tell from the site, the current lawsuits are frivolous and are only intended to further some grand ideal that you have. Maybe you and Garth Brooks should get together sometime and discuss copyright laws. (For those readers unaware, Garth has been waging a war against used-music stores.)
BTW -- I don't believe that I have ever purchased a book by Mr. Ellison. I only buy non-fiction books. I borrow fiction works from the library
Thank you for pointing out which groups Unions hurt. They hurt those that can take care of themselves, either because they don't have the personality traits or skill sets.
There are companies that have unions which are structured such in a way that it brings productivity to its knees. A previous position I held was at Bath Iron Works, where I couldn't even move my PC from one desk to another. Where it takes two people to install memory (an electrician and a PC technician). Where a network admin couldn't even use a screwdriver to tighten a loose network patch panel, but had to wait for an hour (of outage) for an electrician to show up. Where salaried employees were constantly threatened with grievances if they did something a certain way. Tell me again why I can trust my fellow workers? I couldn't wait to get out of there. (Although walking around on Aegis destroyers being built was way cool!!)
In my career, I have been an operator, DBA (Informix, Sybase, and Oracle), programmer, UNIX admin, and network admin. Tell me one union shop where I can maintain all of those skill sets. Instead, I can only exercise one of those skills, which will lower my value. I get paid what I get paid at my current job because I can move around and provide support in all of the above areas, sometimes even on the same day.
So, tell me again how a union would help me? Or is this one of those 'sacrifice the one for the good of the many'.
All unions do is replace one possibly corrupt bureaucracy that takes advantage of people with another. In the case of a union, it's the workers taking advantage of other workers.
No thank you, I'll take care of myself.
Maybe they forget to register their DNS servers??
ZDnet has a story on this. Not very informative right now, but this has apparently been going on since last night.
If you go into the main entrance for John Bryan State Park in Yellow Springs and bear to the left, there was an access road that was gated off. It was about 3/4 mile down that road.
The Miami Valley Astonomical Club (MVAS) which used the Dayton Mueseum of Natural History (it may now be the Boonshoft Museum of Discovery, I'm not really sure) has its headquarters, was responsible for the site.
Keep in mind that was about 17 years ago......
Back in the 70's, the government had a sattelite tracking station in Yellow Springs, Ohio right next to John Bryant (??) state park. Nothing quit as grandious as NSA site, just a squat concrete building with a dome, a roll-off roof, and a few other rooms, one of which looked like a dark room.
The astonomy club I belonged to got involved when they were going to level the place and was given access to the site. Again, the government was just going to bulldoze a building, rather than find a use for it. The dome was large enough, if I remember, for a good sized reflector telescope (we needed a fairly large ladder to use it). The room with the roll-off roof had a platform that could hold several more telescopes.
I wonder how many more of these are around???
Pluto, what a goofy name for a mickey-mouse planet
It appears the whole article can be boiled down to these points of interest:
Tim said ---
... the post didn't say if debuggers were either good or bad. Instead, I attempted to convey that printf can be a really good tool on UNIX systems, and to present a simple, non-intrusive concept (printf statements w/timestamps in each function that actually mean something) that can be easily turned off or on for debugging and other code analysis purposes, such as benchmarking.
... here is a quote that might bring my feelings on this topic into perspective
... I usually don't quote other people)
... don't everyone get all hot and bothered and supply a gazillion other good examples.)
... many programmers forget to take them out aftwards or don't but them in an IFDEF block. That makes for really messy log files.
I'm confused - are IDE debuggers good or bad? You seem to say that they are bad, and all you need is printf...but then hint that they are good by saying that people who use them have it easy?
There is a good reason for the confusion
Let me return the favor of quoting other people's ideas
When the only tool you know how to use is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. - (Author unknown to me
Is there really one perfect debugging tool? Debuggers are really great when you don't have a clue why a daemon is just dropping of the face of the Earth without a coredump or a message after running for a few hours. Set a few watch parameters and go home for the evening. (Just an example
Maybe the best debugging tool to use is your own brain and an open mind. How many times of each of us spent hours (days??) tracking down a bug only to realize that the clue to the problem was in front of us all the time, but we were so sure it was something else that the blinders never came off.
My preference will almost always be printf first, debuggers later. But, there is one really bad thing about printf I would like to mention
Thar be bugs hear
YES!!! There are other programmers like me...
... just like on all systems' and he looked at me like I had three heads. Ah ... kids these days have it soooo easy!
... finding out where the problem is is very difficult. I include in all my programs, under IFDEF control of course, trace statements in each paragraphs that also include timestamps. It is amazing how using standard UNIX tool sets (grep, sort, etc) you can get tons of information from just this. In a multi-threaded program, I also dump out a thread-id I assign to each thread so individual threads can be analyzed.
I remember a C++ programmer asking me what debuggers were loaded on our HP system. I turned to him and said 'printf
Debugging code is very easy
To be fair, I do use debuggers from time to time, but usually only has a last resort. I find it is much easier to add extra printfs than it is to set up conditional breakpoints and then step through code for hours.
Using the above information, it is usually possible to narrow the issue down to a few lines of code. Time then to add some more printf's to dump values.
One very large advantage of using vi (or emacs) and printfs is they are available on all UNIX systems and all compilers. When changing jobs, the last thing I want to do is be neck deep in a bug while trying to learn a new debugger
I only use the 6 editor....
This Nasa site provides a multi-use java applet that not only shows predictions for ISS viewings based on either a location list or long/lat input, but also provides a really neat star map.
I haven't used it yet, living in Maine the elevations tend to be very low.
Ah yes
I noticed there were not notices of:
- Environmental impacts
- Number of usable sites
- Actual cost per usable unit of power
Things to consider before you run out and buy one:- Anytime you put something into the water, you change the water flow. This impacts the shape of the waves hitting the shore. There have been numerous problems with man-made changes to shorelines impacting shoreline up and down shore of the change...washing out homes, building new sand bards, etc.
- Anytime you take energy out of a system, you change the dynamics of the system. If you remove x% of energy from the wave fronts in an area, what will be the impact? For instance, will additional sand bars build up because the waves do not have enough power to maintain the existing shoreline?
I don't want to sound all doom and gloomI hope that before someone goes out and builds entire islands of these things, we make sure the environmental impacts are known and acceptable to all, including tree huggers....
Created using 100% man-made electrons...
I have used the WHOIS information on several occasions:
- Notify a company that I cannot connect to their server
- Notify a company that their registration information has expired and I cannot connect to their server
- Contact a company to see if I could purchase their domain name
On all of these instances, all I needed was the email address of a technical contact. I did not need phone numbers, names, or addresses.So it appears that all that is really needed for public WHOIS is:
- domain name
- company/person holding the name
- email contacts
YesDoes anyone really know what internet time it is??/Does anyone really care??
Tracking head movement is so low-expectations when Cybernet also offers a high-speed real-time optical tracking system designed for full body motion capture.
Now, if some enterprising programmer out there can figure out how to interface this to Quake or to a PS/2. Then add some force-feedback equipment!!!
Can you GNU???
the statement 'write once, test everywhere' is still much in vogue.
... clean up your own house before you start tearing down someone elses.
Now, I don't write much Java, being a Sun sys admin and all I tend to use Perl more because I need closer access to the OS. And the few I have written have not been GUI oriented and would probably run on all platforms. But it seems that if Sun really wants to get into the 'one language for all platforms' that Madhu Siddalingaiah says, then they still have a lot of work to do for anything but trivial programs.
For example, a current program our developers are working on uses the Sun plugin for IE. The same Java applet performs differently in Windows 98, Windows NT, and Windows 2000. And I don't even want to talk about the problems they had with the Netscape browser....
Come on Sun
Microsoft, can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em....
I heard this part of the speech on NPR today. He was talking to an audience that I gathered was largely hispanic, and was saying the letter 'W' in Spanish, something phonetically like 'doobla vay'. He later said 'tres doobly vay' for 'www'.
... I took French in school.)
I can think of better ways of endearing himself to the hispanic population of Florida, like maybe ending all embargos of Cuba. Oh wait, that would only endear him to me and a couple of million people who would love to be able to buy Cuban cigars in the US instead of having to drive to Canada!!
(Apololgies to the hispanic readers in the audience for the hideous buthering of a lovely language
Would someone please explain something to me. How can you decrypt something if you don't know what the message is?? How do you know when a file is succesfully decrypted?? I know many of the 'break my new RSA Giga-bit encryption and win 1 gazillion dollars' tell you what the first few words are. If you don't know them ... how do you know the file was successfully encrypted??
And another thing, if I were to encrypt something twice, after the first decryption, wouldn't you get back something and have to decrypt that also??? I would think that if you encrypted a file several thousands times using different mehtods, wouldn't that make it pretty hard to break?? Or maybe I don't have the slightest idea how these things work and need a little education (URL's anyone)??
Is the question mark overused in this post???
A recent company I was with was hit with an audit notice from the SPA. We knew exactly where they got their information, as the sys admin was fired several months earlier.
Our solution was simple and polite. We sent a letter back explaining that after our sys admin left the company, our new sys admin (me) conducted a software audit to verify software licensing compliancy, and at this time we are in compliance to the best of our knowledge.
We also asked them to specify the exact nature of the purported license issue so we could verify it. After all, it is awfully hard to defend yourself if you don't know what you are defending or to find something if you don't know what you are looking for.
As I recall, there was no response back and we did not have to perform another costly audit. My guess is that by placing the burden back on them to support their claim, the public record of the weak claim (i.e. disgruntled employee) was too much for them to go ahead with any further actions.
Anyone who gets an audit should contact their counsel, and then request a more detailed listing of any claims of non-compliance.
I participated in an evaluation of Cold Fusion a few years ago. It was decided not to use it because it generated really ugly HTML pages that were too difficult to debug. While Cold Fusion at the time had some featuers that made development easier, it was felt that all of the ease in development would be wasted when it came time to figure out why the pages didn't look t he way we wanted them to.
Any insight from users on the current product offering and whether or not this feature still exists??