Our campus telecom office doesn't seem to understand telephone pricing. Students could get a free dorm phone with free local calling but paid the AT&T undiscounted rate for long distance. That was based on mileage bands which worked out to about $0.35 a minute to New York. Campus offices are charged the same rate. All this despite the fact that they negotiated cheaper rates from the long distance providers. The unfairness of these rates in the dorms fell on deaf ears. Now they don't offer long distance service in the dorms and we lost a lot of money to buy computing and network equipment. Oh, and our campus provides free cable TV and 10/100 Ethernet in all the dorm rooms.
As renowned cryptography expert Bruce Schneier points out in his book
Applied Cryptograph, each letter of a pass phrase is should represent no more than one bit of an encryption key [page 145]. You can apply this concept to pass phrases. The sequence "3zeki31" is a decent password if nobody in your office skateboards. A random string of characters is not going to appear in a pass phrase and is not something the folks from Redmond would recommend using.
A 30-character pass phrase is not the same as a 30-character password. Pass phrases suffer from the problem of predictability and dictionary attacks. Users are lazy and not open to typing a long sentence every day to gain access to their systems. As passwords increase in length, the proabability of typing errors increases. Many users are not going to put up with retyping their long pass phrase. When using a word processor, users get on-screen feedback of their typing errors. When typing a passphrase, you get a bunch of stars or nothing. No positive feedback that you have been typing the right letters. That's okay for an eight-character password; it's a disaster for a 30-character pass phrase.
It's rather a poorly-written article with a lot of 1950's science fiction predictions about the future. The field of fuzzy algorithms has existed for ages. Fuzzy algorithms don't rely on random results. Rather, they use the "p-bits" to perform their calculations. P-bits are not the same as random bits. On the contrary, p-bits are "don't care" or "flexible" values that take into account multiple possibilities at the same time.
Random results are terrible because they are random. The
scientific method depends upon experiments that can be repeated by other researchers. You can't base a theory on results that don't correlate with the inputs. You can repeat the experiment to obtain a probablistic model but not certainty.
A computer chip that yields unpredictable results is not going to magically recognize the image of a chair, much less a face because a chip that can't execute a program is more akin to the movie Short Circuit where the appliances go whacky. To me the author confuses the concept of fuzzy algorithms with random trials.
Genetically-modified foods are extremely dangerous.
Traditional (1000s of years) farming practice is to
hold back part of a crop for planting in subsequent
seasons rather than to be eaten. The brilliant
folks at Aventis (now owned by Monsanto) invented a "killer gene" for their corn product so farmers
couldn't continue that practice. Rather, they would be obligated to purchase new seeds from the Aventis/Monsanto seed banks rather than using seeds from their crops. An unfortunate and untested side effect of this advancement to science was that Monarch butterflies died when they ate the pollen from these plants. Monsanto claims they perform untold numbers and types of tests to ensure the safety of their products. The Monarch butterfly example demonstrates their inability to forsee unknown consequences of their practice.
Example 2: A Canadian farmer refuses to purchase Roundup-Ready soybeans and plant the traditional seeds he always used. Some of the pollen from his neighbors blows onto his land. The next year, DNA from the Roundup Ready soybeans is discovered in his soybeans after they were sent to the grain silo. Monsanto successfully sues the farmer for failure to pay royalties despite the farmer's claim that he never planted Roundup Ready soybeans.
Animal and bug genes don't belong in food and no amount of selective breeding or cross-pollination will result in anything close to what Monsanto does.
I'm not a luddite. I purchase organic foods because the farmers growing those crops have an understanding of how life depends upon diversity and respect for the planet. It is short sighted to base decisions on what is most economically sound because Wall Street is only concerned with the next 90 days, not the long term. Organic crops don't contain pesticides and so I don't have to wash them in vats of soap or hot water to remove those toxins.
If you believe buying organic is a waste of money, I implore you to eat your produce without washing it. By the way, organic is not 3x the price of other foodstuffs. It carries a nominal 10-20% premium, primarily because marketing costs are higher. Organic food doesn't have that "pretty" appearance consumers have been brainwashed into looking for. Organic produce tastes far superior to the pretty looking oranges and tomatoes carried by supermarkets.
Slashdot has been taken over by the kiddies. I think the best way to overcome this is by reducing the number of moderator points handed out and select additional appointed moderators. I've set my preferences to -1 the score of anything marked funny because it's usually overrated.
Much of what gets up-modded is often juvenile rantings or people restating the obvious, not thought-provoking discussion or insight. Perhaps my posting is obvious too but I don't see much of anyone who notices or cares.
How about granting moderator points to those who post articles which were up-modded by Slashdot appointed moderators (not those granted moderator points). In other words, if the appointed moderators think you have something relative to say, you are more likely to be a good judge of others.
I also don't see the big deal with tagging body parts like this. It enforced accountability and I'm pretty sure dead people or someone who no longer has that arm attached to them doesn't much care what happens to it - tagged or not.
You haven't been following current news very well. UCLA medical school got in big trouble last fall when cadavers were sold against the wishes of the good people who donated them for medical students.
This is a very big deal because Gross Anatomy students depend on donated bodies to learn how the human body works. Donation of bodies is one of the greatest gifts a human being can offer. NPR aired part 2 of an ongoing series on Thursday regarding people who will their bodies to medical science. Part 1 was aired last September. Both available on-line at the NPR website.
Many NPR listeners have opted to donate their bodies to medical students after hearing one or both NPR stories. Next time you say it's not a big deal, ask someone who really cares.
The wicked old witch at last is dead! Hail to Dorothy! Carly brought nothing but trouble to the good name HP. HP used to mean top quality laboratory instruments and computers.
I first learned to program on HP-45 and HP-67 calculators which my father brought home from the university Mathematics Department. The HP-67 featured a card reader which could store programs on small 3-inch magnetic strips. HP was a true innovator in the pocket calculator world. HP also gave us the LaserJet II, the first reliable laser printer.
I expect to see new innovations from this company as employee morale improves.
Is this the guy who sends all those incredible toner cartdrige spams? Also, how does a DoS virus break in to your bank to forge a wire transfer. No explanation of how that virus did something of which it was incapable. Please explain.
Starbucks (tm) without question is the worst coffee house coffee I have ever drunk. It is overly bitter and not very flavorful. It is quite simple to make strong coffee without making it bitter. And I'm not talking about "flavored" coffees or Torani (tm) syrup. Starbucks is the McDonalds of coffee houses. It may be superior to mass-market commercial brands found in supermarkets, such as Maxwell House (tm), et al. However, that's not saying much.
I would tend to agree with others' observations that the Starbucks trend seems to be more about reasons other than the quality of their coffee. This is just a hunch to test that theory: see which posts are moderated down because the author speaks negatively about Starbucks. Surprise me.
This is not very practical for those running an existing domain, especially one with 40,000 users. Many coments like those of the posters state that they found effective methods. However, most lack any insight of how one might apply their methods to other users. It's easy to say, "this works for me."
Most of my spam, greater than 90%, comes from the zombied US DSL machines as proof of their addresses when trying to connect I believe a large portion of the spam that exists also links back to chinese websites, not delivered from chinese mail servers.
I don't understand why so many DSL users fail to provide a reverse DNS entry for their SMTP gateway. Is it ignorance or are they too stingy to pay the ISP fees for their creation and maintenance?
It's amazing how much spam and viruses we don't receive due to blocking DSL users:
Ahh, going the Evans and Sutherland route? We have about ten SGI Origin 200s that are quickly being replaced with Sun servers. SGI performance ran circles around anything from Sun that came out years later such as the 420 multi-CPU. IRIX was years ahead of Solaris on the sysadmin side. Unfortunately, the developer community never fully embraced SGI. Interesting that Apache versions came out for SGI before Sun. Rest in peace SGI.
I'm surprised that nobody mentioned the UK bestseller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation by Lynne Truss. The title is based on a joke about a panda who walks into a bar, orders a drink, shoots up the place, and then exits. Aparently, the panda was offended by a poorly puncuated travel brouchure and its description of pandas (read title sans punctuation). It's a very funny book about this thread topic.
In reading the posts here, I see a lot of misplaced punctuation. When using quotation marks, the punctuation goes inside the quotes as in "here." The following example is improperly punctuated and logically incorrect.
When using quotation marks, the punchtuation goes outside the quotes as in "here". [sic]
With the new flexible pricing plan from Sprint PCS, additional blockes of 100 anytime minutes are just 5 cents a minute. At $9.95 per month, that's 200 extra minutes from Sprint. How many people really need more than 200 additional peak minutes on their plans? And as others have mentioned, the call quality of these "free" minutes is gonna suck.
I appreciate the humor of the immediate parent posting regarding SUVs and realize it was a parody of other posts. However, when did people in the USA lose their moral compass? Regarding the dropping of exploding cell phones in Iraq, my fellow countrymen take such joy in the deaths of people from a different country. As the parent clearly states, Iraqi civilians are defending their lives the only way they can. Is that wrong? When was the last time an Iraqi threatedned YOU?
As your Fearless Leader, you've all been given a two-week holiday to commence next Monday. To make sure you get the most out of this holiday, please do not take any work home or respond to e-mail messages. Those that login to check their e-mail will be terminated.
If taxes were to go up (which I am guessing they would have under Kerry), I would have to go find a job since we do not depend on our little outside jobs to pay bills.
Really now? If the Bush II tax cuts for individuals (and married couples) were eliminated, your MARGINAL tax rate would increase by about 2-3%. Kerry had no plans to eliminate the new increased deductions/credits for children. So exactly where is this major tax increase going to impact your net income?
There's a great program in the UW Pico distribution to work around those funny file names. The "pilot" program gives a graphical (text) display of the directory and lets you hightlight a specific file and then delete it. No worry about the shell interpreting file names as command options. Just the perfect program for this situation
Any chance of Allerca offering hypoallergenic people? Eugenics sounds like an obvious next step. Would love to see elimination of the Bush family lineage, annoying cell phone users, SUV drivers, etc.
Mainframe and minicomputers have had excellent hardware memory management schemes for decades. Look at the PDP11 or CDC Cyber, both primitive by today's standards yet each provided protection to prevent applications from overwriting the memory space of other applications or of program segments labeled CODE. That protection was in the hardware and not left to poorly-written applications. What's wrong with the state of CS education or these large corporations that prevents software engineers from performing a bounds check on each and every piece of data. Heck, the professors at my school teach that in the basic CS-101 course.
Microsoft engineers assumed that users or applications wouldn't intentionally try to break the system. Proof: look at Win NT 3/4 which required the/WINNT/SYSTEM32 file and directory permissions to be write-all. Fundamental O/S concerns taught in any CS program assume that no user and no application can be trusted to behave properly. Why the "brilliant" architects at M/S failed to learn this is the real tragedy.
My old Samsung SCH-3500 had a similar problem but the folks at SprintPCS could never locate the problem nor would they offer a replacement.
One of the most serious software problems involved the Therac 25 computerized radiation therapy device. Several patients received exterme overdoses of X-rays due to a programming bug. It's a well-known case covered in some computer ethics classes. Unfortunately, most software is exempt from product liability claims.
For all those/. readers who complain about albums containing only one good track I pose this question: why are you buying/stealing music from no-talent artists who produce only one hit out of twelve? Most of the hundreds of albums in my collection contain tracks that are good all around. It appears to me that those who only want the one "good" track from an album have fallen pray to the music marketing machines that push that one hit on radio, music videos, or MPAA advertising (read movies). Either that, or they have very narrow tastes. I guess that's why Top-40 Radio is so popular.
Before you MOD me down, ask yourself this: are you mad because my opinions upset you with a different point of view or am I writing nonsense?
Slashdot Mirror
Our campus telecom office doesn't seem to understand telephone pricing. Students could get a free dorm phone with free local calling but paid the AT&T undiscounted rate for long distance. That was based on mileage bands which worked out to about $0.35 a minute to New York. Campus offices are charged the same rate. All this despite the fact that they negotiated cheaper rates from the long distance providers. The unfairness of these rates in the dorms fell on deaf ears. Now they don't offer long distance service in the dorms and we lost a lot of money to buy computing and network equipment. Oh, and our campus provides free cable TV and 10/100 Ethernet in all the dorm rooms.
A 30-character pass phrase is not the same as a 30-character password. Pass phrases suffer from the problem of predictability and dictionary attacks. Users are lazy and not open to typing a long sentence every day to gain access to their systems. As passwords increase in length, the proabability of typing errors increases. Many users are not going to put up with retyping their long pass phrase. When using a word processor, users get on-screen feedback of their typing errors. When typing a passphrase, you get a bunch of stars or nothing. No positive feedback that you have been typing the right letters. That's okay for an eight-character password; it's a disaster for a 30-character pass phrase.
Random results are terrible because they are random. The scientific method depends upon experiments that can be repeated by other researchers. You can't base a theory on results that don't correlate with the inputs. You can repeat the experiment to obtain a probablistic model but not certainty.
A computer chip that yields unpredictable results is not going to magically recognize the image of a chair, much less a face because a chip that can't execute a program is more akin to the movie Short Circuit where the appliances go whacky. To me the author confuses the concept of fuzzy algorithms with random trials.
Example 2: A Canadian farmer refuses to purchase Roundup-Ready soybeans and plant the traditional seeds he always used. Some of the pollen from his neighbors blows onto his land. The next year, DNA from the Roundup Ready soybeans is discovered in his soybeans after they were sent to the grain silo. Monsanto successfully sues the farmer for failure to pay royalties despite the farmer's claim that he never planted Roundup Ready soybeans.
Animal and bug genes don't belong in food and no amount of selective breeding or cross-pollination will result in anything close to what Monsanto does.
I'm not a luddite. I purchase organic foods because the farmers growing those crops have an understanding of how life depends upon diversity and respect for the planet. It is short sighted to base decisions on what is most economically sound because Wall Street is only concerned with the next 90 days, not the long term. Organic crops don't contain pesticides and so I don't have to wash them in vats of soap or hot water to remove those toxins.
If you believe buying organic is a waste of money, I implore you to eat your produce without washing it. By the way, organic is not 3x the price of other foodstuffs. It carries a nominal 10-20% premium, primarily because marketing costs are higher. Organic food doesn't have that "pretty" appearance consumers have been brainwashed into looking for. Organic produce tastes far superior to the pretty looking oranges and tomatoes carried by supermarkets.
Slashdot has been taken over by the kiddies. I think the best way to overcome this is by reducing the number of moderator points handed out and select additional appointed moderators. I've set my preferences to -1 the score of anything marked funny because it's usually overrated.
Much of what gets up-modded is often juvenile rantings or people restating the obvious, not thought-provoking discussion or insight. Perhaps my posting is obvious too but I don't see much of anyone who notices or cares.
How about granting moderator points to those who post articles which were up-modded by Slashdot appointed moderators (not those granted moderator points). In other words, if the appointed moderators think you have something relative to say, you are more likely to be a good judge of others.
You haven't been following current news very well. UCLA medical school got in big trouble last fall when cadavers were sold against the wishes of the good people who donated them for medical students.
This is a very big deal because Gross Anatomy students depend on donated bodies to learn how the human body works. Donation of bodies is one of the greatest gifts a human being can offer. NPR aired part 2 of an ongoing series on Thursday regarding people who will their bodies to medical science. Part 1 was aired last September. Both available on-line at the NPR website.
Many NPR listeners have opted to donate their bodies to medical students after hearing one or both NPR stories. Next time you say it's not a big deal, ask someone who really cares.
I first learned to program on HP-45 and HP-67 calculators which my father brought home from the university Mathematics Department. The HP-67 featured a card reader which could store programs on small 3-inch magnetic strips. HP was a true innovator in the pocket calculator world. HP also gave us the LaserJet II, the first reliable laser printer.
I expect to see new innovations from this company as employee morale improves.
Is this the guy who sends all those incredible toner cartdrige spams? Also, how does a DoS virus break in to your bank to forge a wire transfer. No explanation of how that virus did something of which it was incapable. Please explain.
I would tend to agree with others' observations that the Starbucks trend seems to be more about reasons other than the quality of their coffee. This is just a hunch to test that theory: see which posts are moderated down because the author speaks negatively about Starbucks. Surprise me.
This is not very practical for those running an existing domain, especially one with 40,000 users. Many coments like those of the posters state that they found effective methods. However, most lack any insight of how one might apply their methods to other users. It's easy to say, "this works for me."
I don't understand why so many DSL users fail to provide a reverse DNS entry for their SMTP gateway. Is it ignorance or are they too stingy to pay the ISP fees for their creation and maintenance?
It's amazing how much spam and viruses we don't receive due to blocking DSL users:
Ahh, going the Evans and Sutherland route? We have about ten SGI Origin 200s that are quickly being replaced with Sun servers. SGI performance ran circles around anything from Sun that came out years later such as the 420 multi-CPU. IRIX was years ahead of Solaris on the sysadmin side. Unfortunately, the developer community never fully embraced SGI. Interesting that Apache versions came out for SGI before Sun. Rest in peace SGI.
In reading the posts here, I see a lot of misplaced punctuation. When using quotation marks, the punctuation goes inside the quotes as in "here." The following example is improperly punctuated and logically incorrect.
Grammar Nanny #37
With the new flexible pricing plan from Sprint PCS, additional blockes of 100 anytime minutes are just 5 cents a minute. At $9.95 per month, that's 200 extra minutes from Sprint. How many people really need more than 200 additional peak minutes on their plans? And as others have mentioned, the call quality of these "free" minutes is gonna suck.
I appreciate the humor of the immediate parent posting regarding SUVs and realize it was a parody of other posts. However, when did people in the USA lose their moral compass? Regarding the dropping of exploding cell phones in Iraq, my fellow countrymen take such joy in the deaths of people from a different country. As the parent clearly states, Iraqi civilians are defending their lives the only way they can. Is that wrong? When was the last time an Iraqi threatedned YOU?
I submitted same story 25 hours earlier but was rejected. Guess the /. editors take an extra day to catch up on news.
Dear Microsoft Employees:
As your Fearless Leader, you've all been given a two-week holiday to commence next Monday. To make sure you get the most out of this holiday, please do not take any work home or respond to e-mail messages. Those that login to check their e-mail will be terminated.
signed,
Bill
Really now? If the Bush II tax cuts for individuals (and married couples) were eliminated, your MARGINAL tax rate would increase by about 2-3%. Kerry had no plans to eliminate the new increased deductions/credits for children. So exactly where is this major tax increase going to impact your net income?
There's a great program in the UW Pico distribution to work around those funny file names. The "pilot" program gives a graphical (text) display of the directory and lets you hightlight a specific file and then delete it. No worry about the shell interpreting file names as command options. Just the perfect program for this situation
Credit card companies and toll-free numbers use ANI (automatic number identification) which cannot be easily spoofed.
Any chance of Allerca offering hypoallergenic people? Eugenics sounds like an obvious next step. Would love to see elimination of the Bush family lineage, annoying cell phone users, SUV drivers, etc.
Microsoft engineers assumed that users or applications wouldn't intentionally try to break the system. Proof: look at Win NT 3/4 which required the /WINNT/SYSTEM32 file and directory permissions to be write-all. Fundamental O/S concerns taught in any CS program assume that no user and no application can be trusted to behave properly. Why the "brilliant" architects at M/S failed to learn this is the real tragedy.
One of the most serious software problems involved the Therac 25 computerized radiation therapy device. Several patients received exterme overdoses of X-rays due to a programming bug. It's a well-known case covered in some computer ethics classes. Unfortunately, most software is exempt from product liability claims.
Before you MOD me down, ask yourself this: are you mad because my opinions upset you with a different point of view or am I writing nonsense?