might actually make more sense to wall those machines off from the net and keep using them instead of staying on that one-more-patch-tuesday-til-I'm-secure treadmill.
Some people actually need to use a web browser to access various websites, though, or use a vendor's web application on a remote website, to get their job done.
Actually, meaningful and readily understood labels are a considered a good thing, and beneficial to those who work in the field they apply to.
They want to do the equivalent of telling the C standards designers and programmers...
You need to stop using a function named main() or _start as the entry point to your programmers.
From henceforth.... main() should be renamed to Program()
Also, instead of returning an INT, it should return a string with text describing the exit condition, or NULL if the program exits with no error.
Also, the order of the arguments should be reversed, and instead of the entry point using an array of pointers to char*, it will be a pointer to an array with 256 elements, and instead of an integer argCount, argCount will be an array with the lengths of each element; the last program parameter will have length of zero, the new signature of the renamed main() function will be:
extern char * Program( char (*argumentData)[256] , int argumentLength[256]);
the mean *absolute* deviation, rather than the square root of the mean *squared* deviation (the standard deviation).
The mean absolute deviation is a simpler measure of variability.
However....
The algebraic manipulation of the standard deviation is simpler; the absolute deviation is more difficult to deal with.
Further, when drawing a number of samples from a large population --- the standard deviation of their mean deviations is substantially higher than the standard deviations of their individual standard deviations; that is to say, the standard deviation of a sample provides an estimate that is more in-line with the whole.
That is to say.... there are cases where the Standard Deviation may be better, AND, much of statistics is using standard deviation as its basis.
Fisher, R. 1920 Monthly Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society, 80, 758-770:
the quality of any statistic could be judged in terms of three characteristics. The statistic, and the population parameter that it represents, should be consistent , The statistic should be sufficient, and the statistic should be efficient -- e.g. the smallest probable error as an estimate of the population. Both the standard deviation and mean deviation met the first two criteria (to the same extent);
however, in meeting the third criterion -- the standard deviation proves superior.
So GP indeed may be jumping to conclusions on that account. As for the rest of your argumentation, yes, one punch from a strong guy could kill a 71-year-old
As a retired cop, who was being afforded a special right to carry a gun in a gun-free theatre, that the vast majority of 71 year olds would not be allowed to do, I would hold him to a much standard --- he knew, or should have known how to most safely handle the situation, and he clearly did not do the right thing.
Even if he won't be serving any jail time, he deserves the conviction, so he can have the felony on his record --- which will prevent him from ever legally carrying a gun again, for the rest of his life.
Here's where your argument falls flat. Without his gun, that 71-yo might be dead on the floor after being assaulted without provocation by a man 30 years younger.
No... the 71 year old was clearly acting carelessly; he started the argument apparently by harrassing the texter repeatedly, then taking actions to provoke them further, and with his gun -- placed a large number of innocent bystanders in apparent lethal danger, by shooting in a dark theatre.
Note that the shots he fired killed one person, and the wife was shot and injured as well.
Aside from the fact, the 71 year old's argument with the texter was more disruptive than the texting;
He had clearly been able to flee or escape the situation, as evidence by the fact, that he had left earlier,
which negates the argument of self-defense.
The 71 year old was being apparently stubborn, and reacting in an a manner not proper in a civilized society.
The fact is, there was an argument and it got physical. We'll have to wait for FACTS before we can judge the events, instead of making them up to justify our point of view.
To be clear... it seems that was not an argument. The old man was harassing the person who was texting, which resulted in loud rebukes and other defensive actions.
In that case, the argument of self-defense would be invalid.
Clearly; aggravated 2nd degree murder.
Well he's not texting anymore. And the guy with the gun isn't shooting people anymore. I think this is a win for movie-go'ers.
Except the ones present during the altercation, that got the shit scared out of them.
By the way loud argument and shooting are both way more disruptive than texting
I motion that guns be banned from theatres, and there should be signs hung up that say "Please check your weapons at the door," and
"No shooting during the movie.".
Does anyone know how many users we're talking about, and how much administrative time?
Can you imagine what kind of 'schemes' or 'shared goals' the trolls would be posting, without administrative monitoring?
I can already imagine the kiddies posting goals like "Go on a shooting spree," and every sort of criminal and racist objective in the book.
And of course spammers......
Without substantial resources spent on moderation, it would be likely to degenerate into an internet cesspool, that makes Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and Slashdot look like Utopia.
Unfortunately, that often doesn't work. Many places require specifying personal details in order to do a password reset. If they need a real name or postal code, or whatever, I'm screwed. Oftentimes you can't even unsubscribe from their fucking spam list without logging in first.
Many might, most do not. It depends on if you think you signed up for the service, or you are just getting annoying emails from the service and want them to stop.
You can expeditiously address the spam list issue by setting a mail filter to discard the sender, or you may write to them to communicate the issue and get support.
Also, contacting their abuse department and/or their ISPs abuse department generally works pretty well.
If you have to login or supply extra information in order to opt-out of regular emails, then their service is in criminal non-compliance with the CAN-SPAM act; a visible and operable unsubscribe option must be included for all e-mails, In addition: name, email, and postal address of the sender must be included, and requests to opt-out, must be honored within no more than 10 days, whether the request is through the unsubscribe option, or by writing to the sender.
I wonder what the legal implications of this is...
There's not any legal recourse you are going to be able to pursue against them for entering your email address by honest mistake.
They were negligent in making a typographic error, but they do not have a duty of care towards you in that regard.
You need evidence of intentional malice.
To make matters worse, I frequently find I can't use my email to create a new account at various sites because it's already been registered.
In that case, use an e-mail based password reset, set a new password, and done, as far as having registered for the site, or contact the site's support.
If two "practitioners skilled in the art" come up with the same idea independently, it SHOULD automatically invalidate the patent. That is part of the patent language, is it not?
Nope. It's first to file, buddy. The patent might be invalid, but not because two people came up with it independently.
To me that sounds entirely unreasonable. So could you explain your reasoning?
I agree that the patents going to the public domain is a more appropriate outcome.
The constitutional authorization is
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Note, that SECURING TO CLAIMANTS AGAINST AUHTORS, or Securing to people the Authors owe money to is not part of the authorization.
Not only, does the patent fail to promote progress, but it actually impedes it --- if the inventor who owns the patent (1) Cannot get their royalties, when the company they pitched the invention to decides to steal it and re-create it themselves, and (2) When the inventor/innovator arbitrarily gets bad treatment in the courts --- due to the large company they are fighting against, being able to hire a lavish uber-expensive legal team, and the inventor's comparatively small available resources to litigate their case.
You are clueless. Nobody upgrades computers. Nobody.
Enthusiast PC users, who are technically skilled: upgrade their components all the time.
Businesses with trained technicians or IT staff, also sometimes upgrade computer hardware, to save money on new equipment: sometimes an obsolete machine, with higher specced components: when the machine is finally being replaced, it may still be cannibalized, so the parts such as power supplies, graphics boards, memory, storage, etc, can be reused to perform upgrades or repairs of other PCs.
With a Mac; everything is nonstandard, so old machines cannot be cannibalized for spare parts.
Reusing components, is cheaper than buying an entirely new system.
With an old mac: you cannot upgrade or build a new system and reuse components.
The only thing you could do is reuse the hard drive, and perhaps memory, on a new PC build -- assuming compatible memory types.
Or scrap the system and build something custom that's neither a Mac nor a PC, nor a computer.
No it won't. It will become obsolete faster as it's completely unmaintainable. Anything that breaks will be harder to deal with. Obsolete components can't be swapped out.
The days of workstation hardware rapidly becoming obsolete seem to be over.
This explains the drop in PC sales growth. A new reasonbly high-specced desktop or laptop computer purchased in 2008 or 2009 is still pretty close to the specs of the currently available hardware, as far as specs that significantly benefit the average user are concerned..
Technical specifications have stagnated, and because of that fact Application developers are not bloating their applications to require better hardware, quickly enough.. For example, monitors are still sitting at 1920x1080 resolution; the vendors have still not gotten decent sized monitors above 100 pixels per inch of display. New workstations may have gone from 2GB to 4GB of RAM, from 4 cores to 6 cores, and from 80gb SSDs to 240gb SSDs, but for the average user, there is no tangible performance benefit in doing so, since people's systems weren't RAM-bound, CPU performance-bound or space-bound in the first place, and they still are not.
People are, and should be waiting for major improvements --- such as workstations with 32" displays at 7680x4800 resolution 60Hz, with full graphics card support; 256GB of RAM, 12-core 6-Ghz processors, 4000-core GPUs with 32GB of video RAM, etc.
Nowadays, for the average user: The PC doesn't need to be replaced until substantial components break.
Most PCs from 2009 will probably last 5 years or longer, before the owner needs to go buy a new one, because their current one is not being obsoleted by increased application demands, and their old one performs just as well as the new ones on the market, as far as the users' can tell.
Nice how the editors CHANGED the headline Without posting a proper retraction and apology,
like a reputable media organization or news source, should have.
The article is about text editing / web development it seems, if it was about 3d or video then I would agree.
Because there aren't any developers building applications that require 3D or Video, Or that have dev resources/tools that require or benefit from 3D or Video ?
If you size with a graphics adapter that can draw 300W in any case, then you should definitely buy an appropriate power supply that will not crash under the highest possible processing load.
Text editors won't benefit from 3D, but a developer may certainly be using other tools that need it.
Particularly, when developing applications that incorporate graphics or models.
You've got a yearly budget and can't spread purchases out.
This is inefficient wrongthinking. Instead of having a "yearly budget"; they should have an "allowance", that an amount is added to on a regular basis, based on business need, and resource allocation -- so that they can allocate allowance to purchases spread-out over multiple years, or spend less in one year and more the next year ---- delay the spend transaction when it makes sense to do so, or more in one year and less in the following year accelerate the spend transaction, when it makes sense to do so.
and you are angry about a $100/head/year expenditure?
There's a rule that the programmers' immediate boss or whoever gets to spend the money, needs to have the biggest and largest number of monitors, and the workstation with the best specs --- this is an important status symbol, that they need to have to lord over the developers. And it's no good, if the developers have decent equipment. Even if the manager rarely uses the workstation, and certainly don't run something so intensive as compile jobs.
Anyways, their uber-station is so expensive, probably a $5000 workstation, so, that they need to make sure to really skimp on the devs' workstations, and keep the costs really low --- otherwise they will appear to be wasting money on expensive workstations.
crashing the network every couple of weeks. Stopping the work of about 200 people for about 20 minutes, until the network could be restarted.
*Cough* what a pile of s****
In the unlikely event, an enterprise has a network that can be "crashed" by a single computer, requiring a restart, then there is clearly some defective network hardware, probably some crappy $30 linksis box instead of a decent managed switch, and it could likely be crashed accidentally even without unapproved gear being attached.
It's just a side effect of senior management not having a clue as to what we do
I would suggest writing some paper memos about substandard hardware, and developers having insufficient security access permissions to their own workstations frustrating development work, impeding productivity, progress, ability to meet desired development timelines, hurting the work product, etc.
accounting says we don't have that kind of money and down in the basement we have some old green screen apple ][ monitors. Programmers just look at text anyway right?
This is when you tell them, then the company needs to borrow some money, or else it will be wasting a ton of money paying developers to work under atrocious conditions in which it will be impossible to be productive.
Except that frequently, the project development team will have been terminated after 3.
They'll need those monitors for the successor then.
Software with any complexity at all takes at least 10 years of development and maintenance to reach reasonable maturity; in most cases, there's no way that things are close to done after 3 years.
Slashdot Mirror
What's so special about the invention date, that it should affect all future time travelers?
might actually make more sense to wall those machines off from the net and keep using them instead of staying on that one-more-patch-tuesday-til-I'm-secure treadmill.
Some people actually need to use a web browser to access various websites, though, or use a vendor's web application on a remote website, to get their job done.
Actually, meaningful and readily understood labels are a considered a good thing, and beneficial to those who work in the field they apply to.
They want to do the equivalent of telling the C standards designers and programmers... You need to stop using a function named main() or _start as the entry point to your programmers.
From henceforth.... main() should be renamed to Program()
Also, instead of returning an INT, it should return a string with text describing the exit condition, or NULL if the program exits with no error.
Also, the order of the arguments should be reversed, and instead of the entry point using an array of pointers to char*, it will be a pointer to an array with 256 elements, and instead of an integer argCount, argCount will be an array with the lengths of each element; the last program parameter will have length of zero, the new signature of the renamed main() function will be:
extern char * Program( char (*argumentData)[256] , int argumentLength[256]);
the mean *absolute* deviation, rather than the square root of the mean *squared* deviation (the standard deviation).
The mean absolute deviation is a simpler measure of variability. However....
The algebraic manipulation of the standard deviation is simpler; the absolute deviation is more difficult to deal with.
Further, when drawing a number of samples from a large population --- the standard deviation of their mean deviations is substantially higher than the standard deviations of their individual standard deviations; that is to say, the standard deviation of a sample provides an estimate that is more in-line with the whole.
That is to say.... there are cases where the Standard Deviation may be better, AND, much of statistics is using standard deviation as its basis.
Fisher, R. 1920 Monthly Notes of the Royal Astronomical Society, 80, 758-770:
the quality of any statistic could be judged in terms of three characteristics. The statistic, and the population parameter that it represents, should be consistent , The statistic should be sufficient, and the statistic should be efficient -- e.g. the smallest probable error as an estimate of the population. Both the standard deviation and mean deviation met the first two criteria (to the same extent); however, in meeting the third criterion -- the standard deviation proves superior.
So GP indeed may be jumping to conclusions on that account. As for the rest of your argumentation, yes, one punch from a strong guy could kill a 71-year-old
As a retired cop, who was being afforded a special right to carry a gun in a gun-free theatre, that the vast majority of 71 year olds would not be allowed to do, I would hold him to a much standard --- he knew, or should have known how to most safely handle the situation, and he clearly did not do the right thing.
Even if he won't be serving any jail time, he deserves the conviction, so he can have the felony on his record --- which will prevent him from ever legally carrying a gun again, for the rest of his life.
Here's where your argument falls flat. Without his gun, that 71-yo might be dead on the floor after being assaulted without provocation by a man 30 years younger.
No... the 71 year old was clearly acting carelessly; he started the argument apparently by harrassing the texter repeatedly, then taking actions to provoke them further, and with his gun -- placed a large number of innocent bystanders in apparent lethal danger, by shooting in a dark theatre.
Note that the shots he fired killed one person, and the wife was shot and injured as well.
Aside from the fact, the 71 year old's argument with the texter was more disruptive than the texting;
He had clearly been able to flee or escape the situation, as evidence by the fact, that he had left earlier, which negates the argument of self-defense. The 71 year old was being apparently stubborn, and reacting in an a manner not proper in a civilized society.
This was a retired COP. Even under the most fascist gun control regime, this is the kind of guy that's going to STILL be armed.
Not in England, he wouldn't be; the majority of cops aren't allowed to carry firearms either, only the firearms division.
The fact is, there was an argument and it got physical. We'll have to wait for FACTS before we can judge the events, instead of making them up to justify our point of view.
To be clear... it seems that was not an argument. The old man was harassing the person who was texting, which resulted in loud rebukes and other defensive actions.
In that case, the argument of self-defense would be invalid. Clearly; aggravated 2nd degree murder.
The shooter should be hanged.
Well he's not texting anymore. And the guy with the gun isn't shooting people anymore. I think this is a win for movie-go'ers.
Except the ones present during the altercation, that got the shit scared out of them.
By the way loud argument and shooting are both way more disruptive than texting
I motion that guns be banned from theatres, and there should be signs hung up that say "Please check your weapons at the door," and "No shooting during the movie.".
Does anyone know how many users we're talking about, and how much administrative time?
Can you imagine what kind of 'schemes' or 'shared goals' the trolls would be posting, without administrative monitoring?
I can already imagine the kiddies posting goals like "Go on a shooting spree," and every sort of criminal and racist objective in the book. And of course spammers......
Without substantial resources spent on moderation, it would be likely to degenerate into an internet cesspool, that makes Google+, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and Slashdot look like Utopia.
Unfortunately, that often doesn't work. Many places require specifying personal details in order to do a password reset. If they need a real name or postal code, or whatever, I'm screwed. Oftentimes you can't even unsubscribe from their fucking spam list without logging in first.
Many might, most do not. It depends on if you think you signed up for the service, or you are just getting annoying emails from the service and want them to stop.
You can expeditiously address the spam list issue by setting a mail filter to discard the sender, or you may write to them to communicate the issue and get support.
Also, contacting their abuse department and/or their ISPs abuse department generally works pretty well.
If you have to login or supply extra information in order to opt-out of regular emails, then their service is in criminal non-compliance with the CAN-SPAM act; a visible and operable unsubscribe option must be included for all e-mails, In addition: name, email, and postal address of the sender must be included, and requests to opt-out, must be honored within no more than 10 days, whether the request is through the unsubscribe option, or by writing to the sender.
I wonder what the legal implications of this is...
There's not any legal recourse you are going to be able to pursue against them for entering your email address by honest mistake.
They were negligent in making a typographic error, but they do not have a duty of care towards you in that regard. You need evidence of intentional malice.
Just ignore them, or block the sender.
To make matters worse, I frequently find I can't use my email to create a new account at various sites because it's already been registered.
In that case, use an e-mail based password reset, set a new password, and done, as far as having registered for the site, or contact the site's support.
If two "practitioners skilled in the art" come up with the same idea independently, it SHOULD automatically invalidate the patent. That is part of the patent language, is it not?
Nope. It's first to file, buddy. The patent might be invalid, but not because two people came up with it independently.
To me that sounds entirely unreasonable. So could you explain your reasoning?
I agree that the patents going to the public domain is a more appropriate outcome.
The constitutional authorization is
Note, that SECURING TO CLAIMANTS AGAINST AUHTORS, or Securing to people the Authors owe money to is not part of the authorization.
Not only, does the patent fail to promote progress, but it actually impedes it --- if the inventor who owns the patent (1) Cannot get their royalties, when the company they pitched the invention to decides to steal it and re-create it themselves, and (2) When the inventor/innovator arbitrarily gets bad treatment in the courts --- due to the large company they are fighting against, being able to hire a lavish uber-expensive legal team, and the inventor's comparatively small available resources to litigate their case.
You are clueless. Nobody upgrades computers. Nobody.
Enthusiast PC users, who are technically skilled: upgrade their components all the time.
Businesses with trained technicians or IT staff, also sometimes upgrade computer hardware, to save money on new equipment: sometimes an obsolete machine, with higher specced components: when the machine is finally being replaced, it may still be cannibalized, so the parts such as power supplies, graphics boards, memory, storage, etc, can be reused to perform upgrades or repairs of other PCs.
With a Mac; everything is nonstandard, so old machines cannot be cannibalized for spare parts.
Reusing components, is cheaper than buying an entirely new system.
With an old mac: you cannot upgrade or build a new system and reuse components.
The only thing you could do is reuse the hard drive, and perhaps memory, on a new PC build -- assuming compatible memory types.
Or scrap the system and build something custom that's neither a Mac nor a PC, nor a computer.
No it won't. It will become obsolete faster as it's completely unmaintainable. Anything that breaks will be harder to deal with. Obsolete components can't be swapped out.
The days of workstation hardware rapidly becoming obsolete seem to be over.
This explains the drop in PC sales growth. A new reasonbly high-specced desktop or laptop computer purchased in 2008 or 2009 is still pretty close to the specs of the currently available hardware, as far as specs that significantly benefit the average user are concerned..
Technical specifications have stagnated, and because of that fact Application developers are not bloating their applications to require better hardware, quickly enough.. For example, monitors are still sitting at 1920x1080 resolution; the vendors have still not gotten decent sized monitors above 100 pixels per inch of display. New workstations may have gone from 2GB to 4GB of RAM, from 4 cores to 6 cores, and from 80gb SSDs to 240gb SSDs, but for the average user, there is no tangible performance benefit in doing so, since people's systems weren't RAM-bound, CPU performance-bound or space-bound in the first place, and they still are not.
People are, and should be waiting for major improvements --- such as workstations with 32" displays at 7680x4800 resolution 60Hz, with full graphics card support; 256GB of RAM, 12-core 6-Ghz processors, 4000-core GPUs with 32GB of video RAM, etc.
Nowadays, for the average user: The PC doesn't need to be replaced until substantial components break. Most PCs from 2009 will probably last 5 years or longer, before the owner needs to go buy a new one, because their current one is not being obsoleted by increased application demands, and their old one performs just as well as the new ones on the market, as far as the users' can tell.
From the 1980s to 2007, that was not really true.
Nice how the editors CHANGED the headline Without posting a proper retraction and apology, like a reputable media organization or news source, should have.
The article is about text editing / web development it seems, if it was about 3d or video then I would agree.
Because there aren't any developers building applications that require 3D or Video, Or that have dev resources/tools that require or benefit from 3D or Video ?
If you size with a graphics adapter that can draw 300W in any case, then you should definitely buy an appropriate power supply that will not crash under the highest possible processing load.
Text editors won't benefit from 3D, but a developer may certainly be using other tools that need it.
Particularly, when developing applications that incorporate graphics or models.
You've got a yearly budget and can't spread purchases out.
This is inefficient wrongthinking. Instead of having a "yearly budget"; they should have an "allowance", that an amount is added to on a regular basis, based on business need, and resource allocation -- so that they can allocate allowance to purchases spread-out over multiple years, or spend less in one year and more the next year ---- delay the spend transaction when it makes sense to do so, or more in one year and less in the following year accelerate the spend transaction, when it makes sense to do so.
and you are angry about a $100/head/year expenditure?
There's a rule that the programmers' immediate boss or whoever gets to spend the money, needs to have the biggest and largest number of monitors, and the workstation with the best specs --- this is an important status symbol, that they need to have to lord over the developers. And it's no good, if the developers have decent equipment. Even if the manager rarely uses the workstation, and certainly don't run something so intensive as compile jobs.
Anyways, their uber-station is so expensive, probably a $5000 workstation, so, that they need to make sure to really skimp on the devs' workstations, and keep the costs really low --- otherwise they will appear to be wasting money on expensive workstations.
crashing the network every couple of weeks. Stopping the work of about 200 people for about 20 minutes, until the network could be restarted.
*Cough* what a pile of s****
In the unlikely event, an enterprise has a network that can be "crashed" by a single computer, requiring a restart, then there is clearly some defective network hardware, probably some crappy $30 linksis box instead of a decent managed switch, and it could likely be crashed accidentally even without unapproved gear being attached.
It's just a side effect of senior management not having a clue as to what we do
I would suggest writing some paper memos about substandard hardware, and developers having insufficient security access permissions to their own workstations frustrating development work, impeding productivity, progress, ability to meet desired development timelines, hurting the work product, etc .
accounting says we don't have that kind of money and down in the basement we have some old green screen apple ][ monitors. Programmers just look at text anyway right?
This is when you tell them, then the company needs to borrow some money, or else it will be wasting a ton of money paying developers to work under atrocious conditions in which it will be impossible to be productive.
Except that frequently, the project development team will have been terminated after 3.
They'll need those monitors for the successor then.
Software with any complexity at all takes at least 10 years of development and maintenance to reach reasonable maturity; in most cases, there's no way that things are close to done after 3 years.